Are strange, illicit sinkings making the Mediterranean toxic? BY MADHUSREE MUKERJEE
In October 2009 the government of Italy announced that a wreck discovered off the southwestern tip of the country is the Catania, a passenger vessel sunk during
World War I—and not the Cunski, a cargo ship loaded with radioactive waste, as alleged by district authorities from nearby Calabria. Few locals are reassured, says Michael Leonardi of the University of Calabria. He and others maintain that the putative Cunski is still out there and is just one of numerous ships full of poisonous garbage that a crime syndicate has scuttled in the Mediterranean Sea. Such a startling allegation, if true, would not only damage the tourism and fishing industries along this idyllic coast but also compromise the health of Mediterranean residents.
Processing and safely storing waste from the chemical, pharmaceutical and other industries can cost hundreds, even thousands, of dollars per ton—which makes illegal disposal highly profitable. According to the Italian environmental organization Legambiente, some waste shippers that have operational bases in southern Italy have been using the Mediterranean as a dump. While acknowledging that “no wreck has yet been found that contains toxic or radioactive waste,” physicist Massimo Scalia of the University of Rome, La Sapienza, who has chaired two parliamentary commissions on illegal waste disposal, argues that other evidence makes their existence “beyond reasonable doubt.”
Scalia contends that 39 ships were wrecked under questionable circumstances between 1979 and 1995 alone; in every case, he adds, the crew abandoned the ship long before it sank. An average of two ships per year suspiciously disappeared in the Mediterranean during the 1980s and early 1990s, according to Legambiente— and the number has increased to nine wrecks per year since 1995. Paolo Gerbaudo of the Italian daily il Manifesto, who is assisting investigations, has identified 74 suspect wrecks of which he regards 20 as being extremely suspicious. (The record extends until 2001.)
One notable example of a dubious wrecking is the Jolly Rosso, which washed up in December 1990 near the town of Amantea, after what investigators believe was a botched attempt to scuttle it. The cargo was offloaded and allegedly buried on land. In October 2009 an environmental ministry report noted that district authorities detected dangerous substances in a nearby river valley, including a buried concrete block containing mercury, cobalt, selenium and thallium at very high concentrations—and displaying substantial radioactivity indicative of synthetic radionuclides. Authorities also found marble granules mixed in with thousands of cubic meters of earth, which was contaminated with heavy metals and cesium 137, typically a waste product of nuclear reactors. The assemblage suggests that the Jolly Rosso’s cargo included radioactive waste, sealed in concrete and shielded from detection by marble dust (which absorbs radioactivity).
Significantly, the increase in the frequency of wrecking correlates with the progressive tightening of international dumping regulations. The first suspect sinking, in 1979, occurred the year after the Barcelona Convention, which restricts the disposal of pollutants in the Mediterranean Sea, came into force. Over the following decades other treaties expanded the regulations, culminating in a 1993 amendment to the London Dumping Convention that halted the ocean disposal of all radioactive waste and in a 1995 amendment to the Basel Convention that banned the deposition of the industrial world’s lethal excreta in developing countries. The laws ruined the ambitious plans of one firm, Oceanic Disposal Management, incorporated in the British Virgin Islands, to drop tens of thousands of cubic meters of radioactive waste into the seabed off the African coast. Andreas Bernstorff, who formerly headed a Greenpeace campaign against the trade in toxic waste, reports that the number of schemes to ship such garbage to Africa fell steeply at this time, to at most one attempt per year. The drop coincides with a sudden and ominous rise in the frequency with which ships in the Mediterranean perished.
Despite profound concern in southern Italy, efforts to find the wrecks and identify their cargo have been slow. The endeavor is expensive, Scalia notes, and requires “serious engagement by magistrates and politicians”—which, but for “a few honorable exceptions,” has been lacking. Fear of violence may also have hindered investigation. In 1994 Italian television journalist Ilaria Alpi and cameraman Miran Hrovatin were shot dead near Mogadishu, after they picked up the hazardous waste trail in Somalia, where political upheaval has kept the country from enforcing controls.
That African nation possibly holds clues to the kinds of health hazards Italians might face. “My committee heard from Somalians who said many people in that area had symptoms of poisoning and some died,” Scalia attests, referring to a stretch of highway along which Alpi and Hrovatin may have witnessed the offloading of toxic substances. The tsunami of December 2004 dredged up giant metal containers from the seabed and placed them on Somali beaches—proving that the country’s coastal waters had also received questionable trash. A United Nations report blamed fumes from these unidentified objects for internal hemorrhages and deaths of local people.
In April 2007 Calabrian authorities had temporarily halted fishing in waters off Cetraro (where the Cunski lies, according to a turncoat from the ’Ndrangheta mafia) because of dangerous levels of heavy metals in marine sediment. In the region around Amantea, mortality from cancer between 1992 and 2001 exceeded that in neighboring areas, a study found; just as worrisome, hospitalizations for certain malignancies have risen in recent years.
“Almost all the coastal regions of our country may be compromised,” warned 28 Italian legislators from opposition parties on October 1, in a parliamentary motion demanding that the sunken ships be located and their contents secured. Until investigators can salvage the truth about the shipwrecks, suspicion and anxiety will plague the Mediterranean shores.
Source of Information : Scientific American Magazine February 2010
Showing posts with label Energy Environment. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Energy Environment. Show all posts
Friday, February 4, 2011
Wednesday, June 23, 2010
The Way the Wind Blows
The wind power industry requires stiff gusts. Global warming may not deliver
BY MICHAEL MOYER
This summer scientists published the first study that comprehensively explored the effect of climate change on wind speeds in the U.S. The report was not encouraging. Three decades’ worth of data seemed to point to a future where global warming lowers wind speeds enough to handicap the nascent wind industry. But the real story, like so much in climate science, is far more complex.
The study of decreased wind speeds came from a team led by Sara Pryor, professor and chair of the atmospheric science program at Indiana University. It examined wind speed data from hundreds of locations across the U.S. The team attempted to correct for any change in instrument position (such as what would happen if an airport places its anemometer atop a new control tower) and calculated for each site the average annual wind speed. Pryor and her colleagues found that in most of the U.S. wind speeds appear to be waning, in many locations by more than 1 percent a year.
The decline has the potential to be especially pernicious because turbines are exponentially sensitive to changes in wind speed. If the wind blows just 15 percent faster, a turbine will produce 50 percent more power. Conversely, a drop in average wind speed will significantly reduce the power output. Most of the locations that showed the most prominent decreases in wind speeds are strung along a corridor stretching from Texas to the Great Lakes that is home to 60 percent of the nation’s installed wind power.
Yet the situation may not be as dire as the data imply. Direct observations of wind speeds are inherently problematic. Anemometers are far less accurate and consistent than thermometers, Pryor says. In addition, almost all the locations used in the study are close to fast-growing urban areas that can alter wind patterns in unpredictable ways. And unlike temperature measurements, which in some locations stretch back 150 years, relatively accurate and widespread wind measurements began only in the 1970s—hardly enough time to pluck a subtle trend out of noisy data.
Because direct measurements of wind speeds are so unruly, Pryor’s team also tracked indirect measurements. These come from surface temperature and pressure records as well as balloon and satellite surveys. Computers crunch the data to produce a rich series of atmospheric portraits— a way to measure wind speeds without measuring the wind. This “reanalysis” data showed no change. Says Pryor: “If you have a mechanism causing your wind speeds to change”—global warming, for instance—“it should be evident in both the observations and in the reanalysis data.” If only one out of the two shows an effect, no one can say for sure what is going on.
For the wind industry, the most important change would be to peak wind speeds, because a turbine delivers most of its power only once the wind blows faster than about 25 miles per hour. Although the conclusions are preliminary, global climate models suggest that in the Northern Hemisphere, storm tracks should migrate northward, bringing more gusty storms to higher latitudes. “The northern part of the U.S. into Canada may see an increase” in peak wind speeds, Pryor says, “whereas the southern regions may see a decline.”
Yet any decline should still leave wind farms with plenty to work with. A recent study by Xi Lu of Harvard University calculates that wind power in the U.S. could potentially generate 16 times the nation’s current electricity production. The study limits potential wind farm locations to rural, nonforested sites (both on land and offshore) with high wind speeds. Worldwide, wind energy under the same constraints could supply at least 40 times the current electricity consumption.
According to Ryan Wiser, a staff scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and author of an upcoming special report on renewable energy and climate change by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Lu’s study simply confirms that “there is absolutely no resource constraint for wind in the U.S.” Or, as Pryor puts it, “there may be regional winners and losers, but the winds are going to continue to blow.”
Source of Information : Scientific American October 2009
BY MICHAEL MOYER
This summer scientists published the first study that comprehensively explored the effect of climate change on wind speeds in the U.S. The report was not encouraging. Three decades’ worth of data seemed to point to a future where global warming lowers wind speeds enough to handicap the nascent wind industry. But the real story, like so much in climate science, is far more complex.
The study of decreased wind speeds came from a team led by Sara Pryor, professor and chair of the atmospheric science program at Indiana University. It examined wind speed data from hundreds of locations across the U.S. The team attempted to correct for any change in instrument position (such as what would happen if an airport places its anemometer atop a new control tower) and calculated for each site the average annual wind speed. Pryor and her colleagues found that in most of the U.S. wind speeds appear to be waning, in many locations by more than 1 percent a year.
The decline has the potential to be especially pernicious because turbines are exponentially sensitive to changes in wind speed. If the wind blows just 15 percent faster, a turbine will produce 50 percent more power. Conversely, a drop in average wind speed will significantly reduce the power output. Most of the locations that showed the most prominent decreases in wind speeds are strung along a corridor stretching from Texas to the Great Lakes that is home to 60 percent of the nation’s installed wind power.
Yet the situation may not be as dire as the data imply. Direct observations of wind speeds are inherently problematic. Anemometers are far less accurate and consistent than thermometers, Pryor says. In addition, almost all the locations used in the study are close to fast-growing urban areas that can alter wind patterns in unpredictable ways. And unlike temperature measurements, which in some locations stretch back 150 years, relatively accurate and widespread wind measurements began only in the 1970s—hardly enough time to pluck a subtle trend out of noisy data.
Because direct measurements of wind speeds are so unruly, Pryor’s team also tracked indirect measurements. These come from surface temperature and pressure records as well as balloon and satellite surveys. Computers crunch the data to produce a rich series of atmospheric portraits— a way to measure wind speeds without measuring the wind. This “reanalysis” data showed no change. Says Pryor: “If you have a mechanism causing your wind speeds to change”—global warming, for instance—“it should be evident in both the observations and in the reanalysis data.” If only one out of the two shows an effect, no one can say for sure what is going on.
For the wind industry, the most important change would be to peak wind speeds, because a turbine delivers most of its power only once the wind blows faster than about 25 miles per hour. Although the conclusions are preliminary, global climate models suggest that in the Northern Hemisphere, storm tracks should migrate northward, bringing more gusty storms to higher latitudes. “The northern part of the U.S. into Canada may see an increase” in peak wind speeds, Pryor says, “whereas the southern regions may see a decline.”
Yet any decline should still leave wind farms with plenty to work with. A recent study by Xi Lu of Harvard University calculates that wind power in the U.S. could potentially generate 16 times the nation’s current electricity production. The study limits potential wind farm locations to rural, nonforested sites (both on land and offshore) with high wind speeds. Worldwide, wind energy under the same constraints could supply at least 40 times the current electricity consumption.
According to Ryan Wiser, a staff scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and author of an upcoming special report on renewable energy and climate change by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Lu’s study simply confirms that “there is absolutely no resource constraint for wind in the U.S.” Or, as Pryor puts it, “there may be regional winners and losers, but the winds are going to continue to blow.”
Source of Information : Scientific American October 2009
Thursday, February 25, 2010
Climate Numerology
Trying to find a “safe” level for atmospheric carbon dioxide
Last December world leaders met in Copenhagen to add more hot air to the climate debate. That is because although the impacts humanity would like to avoid—fire, flood and drought, for starters—are pretty clear, the right strategy to halt global warming is not. Despite decades of effort, scientists do not know what “number”—in terms of temperature or concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere—constitutes a danger.
When it comes to defining the climate’s sensitivity to forcings such as rising atmospheric carbon dioxide levels, “we don’t know much more than we did in 1975,” says climatologist Stephen Schneider of Stanford University, who first defined the term “cli-mate sensitivity” in the 1970s. “What we know is if you add watts per square meter to the system, it’s going to warm up.”
Greenhouse gases add those watts by acting as a blanket, trap¬ping the sun’s heat. They have warmed the earth by roughly 0.75 degree Celsius over the past century. Scientists can measure how much energy greenhouse gases now add (roughly three watts per square meter), but what eludes precise definition is how much oth¬er factors play a role—the response of clouds to warming, the cooling role of aerosols, the heat and gas absorbed by oceans, hu¬man transformation of the landscape, even the natural variability of solar strength. “We may have to wait 20 or 30 years before the data set in the 21st century is good enough to pin down sensitiv¬ity,” says climate modeler Gavin Schmidt of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies.
Despite all these variables, scientists have noted for more than a century that doubling preindustrial concentrations of CO2 in the atmosphere from 280 parts per million (ppm) would likely result in global average temperatures roughly three degrees C warmer.
But how much heating and added CO2 are safe for human civilization remains a judg ment call. European politicians have agreed that global average temperatures should not rise more than two degrees C above preindustrial levels by 2100, which equals a greenhouse gas concentration of roughly 450 ppm. “We’re at 387 now, and we’re going up at 2 ppm per year,” says geochemist Wallace Broecker of Columbia Univer¬sity. “That means 450 is only 30 years away. We’d be lucky if we could stop at 550.”Goddard’s James Hansen argues that atmospheric concentra¬tions must be brought back to 350 ppm or lower—quickly. “Two degrees Celsius [of warming] is a guaranteed disaster,” he says, noting the accelerating impacts that have manifested in recent years. “If you want some of these things to stop changing—for ex¬ample, the melting of Arctic sea ice—what you would need to do is restore the planet’s energy balance.” Other scientists, such as physicist Myles Allen of the University of Oxford, examine the problem from the opposite side: How much more CO2 can the atmosphere safely hold? To keep warm¬ing below two degrees C, humanity can afford to put one trillion metric tons of CO2 in the atmosphere by 2050, according to Allen and his team—and humans have already emitted half that. Put an¬other way, only one quarter of remaining known coal, oil and nat¬ural gas deposits can be burned. “To solve the problem, we need to eliminate net emissions of CO2 entirely,” Allen says. “Emissions need to fall by 2 to 2.5 percent per year from now on.”
Climate scientist Jon Foley of the University of Minnesota, who is part of a team that defined safe limits for 10 planetary systems, including climate, argues for erring on the side of cau¬tion. He observes that “conservation of mass tells us if we only want the bathtub so high either we turn down the faucet a lot or make sure the drain is bigger. An 80 percent reduction [in CO2 by 2050] is about the only path we go down to achieve that kind of stabilization.”
The National Academy of Sciences, for its part, has convened an expert panel to deliver a verdict on the appropriate “stabiliza¬tion targets” for the nation, a report expected to be delivered lat¬er this year. Of course, perspectives on what constitutes a danger may vary depending on wheth¬er one resides in Florida or Minnesota, let alone the U.S. or the Maldives.
Keeping atmospheric con¬centrations of greenhouse gases below 550 ppm, let alone going back to 350 ppm or less, will re¬quire not only a massive shift in society—from industry to di¬et—but, most likely, new tech¬nologies, such as capturing CO2 directly from the air. “Air cap¬ture can close the gap,” argues physicist Klaus Lackner, also at Columbia, who is looking for funds to build such a device.
Closing that gap is crucial because the best data—observations over the past century or so—show that the climate is sensitive to human activity. “Thresholds of irreversible change are out there—we don’t know where,” Schneider notes. “What we do know is the more warming that’s out there, the more dangerous it gets.”
Source of Information : Scientific American January 2010
Last December world leaders met in Copenhagen to add more hot air to the climate debate. That is because although the impacts humanity would like to avoid—fire, flood and drought, for starters—are pretty clear, the right strategy to halt global warming is not. Despite decades of effort, scientists do not know what “number”—in terms of temperature or concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere—constitutes a danger.
When it comes to defining the climate’s sensitivity to forcings such as rising atmospheric carbon dioxide levels, “we don’t know much more than we did in 1975,” says climatologist Stephen Schneider of Stanford University, who first defined the term “cli-mate sensitivity” in the 1970s. “What we know is if you add watts per square meter to the system, it’s going to warm up.”
Greenhouse gases add those watts by acting as a blanket, trap¬ping the sun’s heat. They have warmed the earth by roughly 0.75 degree Celsius over the past century. Scientists can measure how much energy greenhouse gases now add (roughly three watts per square meter), but what eludes precise definition is how much oth¬er factors play a role—the response of clouds to warming, the cooling role of aerosols, the heat and gas absorbed by oceans, hu¬man transformation of the landscape, even the natural variability of solar strength. “We may have to wait 20 or 30 years before the data set in the 21st century is good enough to pin down sensitiv¬ity,” says climate modeler Gavin Schmidt of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies.
Despite all these variables, scientists have noted for more than a century that doubling preindustrial concentrations of CO2 in the atmosphere from 280 parts per million (ppm) would likely result in global average temperatures roughly three degrees C warmer.
But how much heating and added CO2 are safe for human civilization remains a judg ment call. European politicians have agreed that global average temperatures should not rise more than two degrees C above preindustrial levels by 2100, which equals a greenhouse gas concentration of roughly 450 ppm. “We’re at 387 now, and we’re going up at 2 ppm per year,” says geochemist Wallace Broecker of Columbia Univer¬sity. “That means 450 is only 30 years away. We’d be lucky if we could stop at 550.”Goddard’s James Hansen argues that atmospheric concentra¬tions must be brought back to 350 ppm or lower—quickly. “Two degrees Celsius [of warming] is a guaranteed disaster,” he says, noting the accelerating impacts that have manifested in recent years. “If you want some of these things to stop changing—for ex¬ample, the melting of Arctic sea ice—what you would need to do is restore the planet’s energy balance.” Other scientists, such as physicist Myles Allen of the University of Oxford, examine the problem from the opposite side: How much more CO2 can the atmosphere safely hold? To keep warm¬ing below two degrees C, humanity can afford to put one trillion metric tons of CO2 in the atmosphere by 2050, according to Allen and his team—and humans have already emitted half that. Put an¬other way, only one quarter of remaining known coal, oil and nat¬ural gas deposits can be burned. “To solve the problem, we need to eliminate net emissions of CO2 entirely,” Allen says. “Emissions need to fall by 2 to 2.5 percent per year from now on.”
Climate scientist Jon Foley of the University of Minnesota, who is part of a team that defined safe limits for 10 planetary systems, including climate, argues for erring on the side of cau¬tion. He observes that “conservation of mass tells us if we only want the bathtub so high either we turn down the faucet a lot or make sure the drain is bigger. An 80 percent reduction [in CO2 by 2050] is about the only path we go down to achieve that kind of stabilization.”
The National Academy of Sciences, for its part, has convened an expert panel to deliver a verdict on the appropriate “stabiliza¬tion targets” for the nation, a report expected to be delivered lat¬er this year. Of course, perspectives on what constitutes a danger may vary depending on wheth¬er one resides in Florida or Minnesota, let alone the U.S. or the Maldives.
Keeping atmospheric con¬centrations of greenhouse gases below 550 ppm, let alone going back to 350 ppm or less, will re¬quire not only a massive shift in society—from industry to di¬et—but, most likely, new tech¬nologies, such as capturing CO2 directly from the air. “Air cap¬ture can close the gap,” argues physicist Klaus Lackner, also at Columbia, who is looking for funds to build such a device.
Closing that gap is crucial because the best data—observations over the past century or so—show that the climate is sensitive to human activity. “Thresholds of irreversible change are out there—we don’t know where,” Schneider notes. “What we do know is the more warming that’s out there, the more dangerous it gets.”
Source of Information : Scientific American January 2010
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