831. Global Warming: Growing Demand for Air-Conditioning in Developing Countries

By Elisabeth Rosenthal and Andrew W. Lehren, The New York Times, June 20, 2012

Demand for window air-conditioning is high in Mumbia, India

In the ramshackle apartment blocks and sooty concrete homes that line the dusty roads of urban India, there is a new status symbol on proud display. An air-conditioner has become a sign of middle-class status in developing nations, a must-have dowry item.

It is cheaper than a car, and arguably more life-changing in steamy regions, where cooling can make it easier for a child to study or a worker to sleep.

But as air-conditioners sprout from windows and storefronts across the world, scientists are becoming increasingly alarmed about the impact of the gases on which they run. All are potent agents of global warming.

Air-conditioning sales are growing 20 percent a year in China and India, as middle classes grow, units become more affordable and temperatures rise with climate change. The potential cooling demands of upwardly mobile Mumbai, India, alone have been estimated to be a quarter of those of the United States.

Air-conditioning gases are regulated primarily though a 1987 treaty called the Montreal Protocol, created to protect the ozone layer. It has reduced damage to that vital shield, which blocks cancer-causing ultraviolet rays, by mandating the use of progressively more benign gases. The oldest CFC coolants, which are highly damaging to the ozone layer, have been largely eliminated from use; and the newest ones, used widely in industrialized nations, have little or no effect on it.

But these gases have an impact the ozone treaty largely ignores. Pound for pound, they contribute to global warming thousands of times more than does carbon dioxide, the standard greenhouse gas.

The leading scientists in the field have just calculated that if all the equipment entering the world market uses the newest gases currently employed in air-conditioners, up to 27 percent of all global warming will be attributable to those gases by 2050.

So the therapy to cure one global environmental disaster is now seeding another. “There is precious little time to do something, to act,” said Stephen O. Andersen, the co-chairman of the treaty’s technical and economic advisory panel.

The numbers are all moving in the wrong direction.

Atmospheric concentrations of the gases that replaced CFCs, known as HCFCs, which are mildly damaging to the ozone, are still rising rapidly at a time when many scientists anticipated they should have been falling as the treaty is phasing them out. The levels of these gases, the mainstay of booming air-conditioning sectors in the developing world, have more than doubled in the past two decades to record highs, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

And concentrations of the newer, ozone-friendly gases are also rising meteorically, because industrialized countries began switching to them a decade ago. New room air-conditioners in the United States now use an HFC coolant called 410a, labeled “environmentally friendly” because it spares the ozone. But its warming effect is 2,100 times that of carbon dioxide. And the treaty cannot control the rise of these coolants because it regulates only ozone-depleting gases.

The treaty timetable requires dozens of developing countries, including China and India, to also begin switching next year from HCFCs to gases with less impact on the ozone. But the United States and other wealthy nations are prodding them to choose ones that do not warm the planet. This week in Rio de Janeiro, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton is attending the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development, also known as Rio+20, where proposals to gradually eliminate HFCs for their warming effect are on the provisional agenda.

But she faces resistance because the United States is essentially telling the other nations to do what it has not: to leapfrog this generation of coolants. The trouble is, there are currently no readily available commercial ozone-friendly alternatives for air-conditioners that do not also have a strong warming effect — though there are many on the horizon.

Nearly all chemical and air-conditioning companies — including DuPont, the American chemical giant, and Daiken, one of Japan’s leading appliance manufacturers — have developed air-conditioning appliances and gases that do not contribute to global warming. Companies have even erected factories to produce them.

But these products require regulatory approvals before they can be sold, and the development of new safety standards, because the gases in them are often flammable or toxic. And with profits booming from current cooling systems and no effective regulation of HFCs, there is little incentive for countries or companies to move the new designs to market.

“There are no good solutions right now — that’s why countries are grappling, tapping in the dark,” said Rajendra Shende, the recently retired head of the Paris-based United Nations ozone program, who now runs the Terre Policy Center in Pune, India.

An Unanticipated Problem

The 25-year-old Montreal Protocol is widely regarded as the most successful environmental treaty ever, essentially eliminating the use of CFC coolants, which are highly damaging to the ozone layer. Under its terms, wealthier countries shift away from each harmful gas first, and developing countries follow a decade or more later so that replacement technologies can be perfected and fall in price.

Concentrations of CFC-12, which had been growing rapidly since the 1960s, have tapered off since 2003, thanks to the treaty’s strict phaseout schedule. In 2006, NASA scientists concluded that the ozone layer was on the mend.

Shopping at a home appliance store in Mumbai, India. As one type of environment-damaging gas is being phased out in the developed world, use of others is on the rise in places like India and China, where air-conditioner use is up.

But that sense of victory has been eclipsed by the potentially disastrous growth in emissions from the newer air-conditioning gases. While a healthier ozone layer itself leads to some warming, far more warming results from the tendency of these coolant gases to reflect back heat radiating off the Earth.

When the treaty set its rules in the mid-1980s, global warming was poorly understood, the cooling industry was anchored in the West, and demand for cooling was minuscule in developing nations.

That has clearly changed.

Jayshree Punjabi, a 40-year-old from Surat, was shopping for an air-conditioner at Vijay Sales in Mumbai on a recent afternoon. She bought her first one 10 years ago and now has three. “Now almost every home in Surat has more than one,” she said. “The children see them on television and demand them.”

Refrigeration is also essential for these countries’ shifting food supplies. “When I was a kid in Delhi, veggies came from vendors on the street; now they all come from the supermarket,” said Atul Bagai, an Indian citizen who is the United Nations ozone program’s coordinator for South Asia.

In 2011, 55 percent of new air-conditioning units were sold in the Asia Pacific region, and the industry’s production has moved there. Last year, China built more than 70 percent of the world’s household air-conditioners, for domestic use and export. The most common coolant gas is HCFC-22. In 2010, China produced about seven times the amount of that gas as the United States.

With inexpensive HCFC-22 from Asia flooding the market, efforts to curb or eliminate its use have been undercut, even in the United States. For example, although American law now forbids the sale of new air-conditioners containing HCFC, stores have started selling empty components that can be filled with the cheap gas after installation, enabling its continued use.

Trying to Adapt the Treaty

During a four-day meeting in Montreal in April, about 200 representatives attending the protocol’s executive committee meeting clashed over how to adapt to the changing circumstances. Should they be concerned with ozone protection, climate change or both?

As developing countries submitted plans to reduce reliance on HCFCs in order to win United Nations financing for the transition, delegations from richer nations rejected proposals that relied on HFCs, because of their warming effect. Canada raised a proposal that countries should use only compounds with low impact on global warming.

Phasing out HFCs by incorporating them into the treaty is one of the most cost-effective ways to reduce global warming, said Durwood Zaelke, president of the Institute for Governance and Sustainable Development.

But India, China and Brazil object that this could slow development and cost too much. All the acceptable substitutes under development for air-conditioners are either under patent, demand new equipment or require extensive new regulation and testing procedures. “This appears simple, but it’s not standard, and it imposes a new burden,” said Wang Yong, of the Chinese delegation.

Said Suely Carvalho, the Brazilian-born chief of the United Nations Development Program’s Montreal Protocol and Chemicals Unit: “The developing countries are already struggling to phase out, and now you tell them, ‘Don’t do what we did.’ You can see why they’re upset.”

Commercial interests foster the stalemate. Though the protocol aggressively reduces the use of HCFC-22 for cooling, it restricts production on a slower, more lenient timetable, and as a result, output has grown more than 60 percent in the past decade. Even in the United States, HCFC-22 is still profitably manufactured for use in older appliances, export and a few other industrial purposes that do not create significant emissions, like making Teflon.

Politically influential manufacturers like Gujarat Fluorochemicals in India, Zhejiang Dongyang Chemical Company in China and Quimbasicos in Mexico (of which Honeywell owns 49 percent) have prospered by producing the coolant. They even receive lucrative subsidies from the United Nations for making it.

For their part, manufacturers are reluctant to hurry to market new technologies that are better for the climate, until they get a stronger signal of which ones countries will adopt, said Mack McFarland, an atmospheric scientist with DuPont.

Othmar Schwank, a Swiss environmental consultant who has advised the United Nations, said: “In many countries, these targets will be very difficult to achieve. With appliances growing in India and China, everyone is making money, so they want to delay this as much as possible.”

Technologies Stalled

The Montreal Protocol originally gave the developing countries until 2040 to get rid of HCFCs, but its governing board accelerated that timetable in 2007. “We saw consumption going through the roof,” said Markus Wypior, of the German government agency GIZ Proklima. The new schedule says developing countries must “stabilize” consumption of HCFCs by Jan. 1, and reduce it by 10 percent by 2015.

But the industry is growing so fast that meeting the targets, which were based on consumption in 2009-10, would now require a 40 percent reduction from current use in India. Many countries, including India, are trying to satisfy their 2013 mandate with one-time fixes that do not involve the cooling sector — for example, replacing HCFC-22 with another gas in making foam. Meeting the next reduction target, in 2015, is expected to be much harder.

In the meantime, the Montreal Protocol has started using its limited tools to prod developing countries moving from HCFCs toward climate-friendly solutions, offering a 25 percent bonus payment for plans that create less warming. Experts say that is not sufficient incentive for the drastic changes needed in machine design, servicing, manufacturing and regulation.

Promising technologies wait, stalled in the wings. In China and a few other countries, room air-conditioners using hydrocarbons — which cause little warming or ozone depletion — are already coming off assembly lines in small numbers but have not yet been approved for sale, in part because the chemicals are flammable.

Yet in Europe, refrigerators that cool with hydrocarbons have been in use for years, and some companies in the United States, like Pepsi and Ben and Jerry’s, have recently converted in-store coolers from HFCs to hydrocarbons as part of sustainability plans.

In a statement, the United States Environmental Protection Agency said it had recently approved some of the new climate-friendly gases for car air-conditioning and refrigerators and is “evaluating additional alternatives for other air-conditioning applications,” most notably a newer HFC variant called R32.

But when will they be on the market? Even small steps forward have been frustrated.

Last year the European Union began requiring automakers to use climate-friendly coolants in cars, considered a relatively simple transition. A chemical called 1234yf was deemed suitable, and the tiny amounts of coolant in car air-conditioners make flammability and high cost less of a deterrent.

But this year, the European Union postponed the plan: Chinese factories that make the compound are still in the process of obtaining government registration. The patent, owned by Honeywell, is being disputed. And the German government has still not finished safety testing.

Said Mr. Wypior, whose agency is trying to promote climate-friendly air-conditioning industries in India and China: “The technologies are available. They’re well known. They’re proven — though not at scale. So why aren’t we moving?”

830. Tending the Body’s Microbial Garden

By Carl Zimmer, The New York Times, June 18, 2012

For a century, doctors have waged war against bacteria, using antibiotics as their weapons. But that relationship is changing as scientists become more familiar with the 100 trillion microbes that call us home — collectively known as the microbiome.

 “I would like to lose the language of warfare,” said Julie Segre, a senior investigator at the National Human Genome Research Institute. “It does a disservice to all the bacteria that have co-evolved with us and are maintaining the health of our bodies.”

This new approach to health is known as medical ecology. Rather than conducting indiscriminate slaughter, Dr. Segre and like-minded scientists want to be microbial wildlife managers.

No one wants to abandon antibiotics outright. But by nurturing the invisible ecosystem in and on our bodies, doctors may be able to find other ways to fight infectious diseases, and with less harmful side effects. Tending the microbiome may also help in the treatment of disorders that may not seem to have anything to do with bacteria, including obesity and diabetes.

“I cannot wait for this to become a big area of science,” said Michael A. Fischbach, a microbiologist at the University of California, San Francisco, and an author of a medical ecology manifesto published this month in the journal Science Translational Medicine.

Judging from a flood of recent findings about our inner ecosystem, that appears to be happening. Last week, Dr. Segre and about 200 other scientists published the most ambitious survey of the human microbiome yet. Known as the Human Microbiome Project, it is based on examinations of 242 healthy people tracked over two years. The scientists sequenced the genetic material of bacteria recovered from 15 or more sites on their subjects’ bodies, recovering more than five million genes.

The project and other studies like it are revealing some of the ways in which our invisible residents shape our lives, from birth to death.

A number of recent reports shed light on how mothers promote the health of their children by shaping their microbiomes. In a study published last week in the journal PLoS One, Dr. Kjersti Aagaard-Tillery, an obstetrician at Baylor College of Medicine, and her colleagues described the vaginal microbiome in pregnant women. Before she started the study, Dr. Aagaard-Tillery expected this microbiome to be no different from that of women who weren’t pregnant.

“In fact, what we found is the exact opposite,” she said.

Early in the first trimester of pregnancy, she found, the diversity of vaginal bacteria changes significantly. Abundant species become rare, and vice versa.

One of the dominant species in the vagina of a pregnant woman, it turns out, is Lactobacillus johnsonii. It is usually found in the gut, where it produces enzymes that digest milk. It’s an odd species to find proliferating in the vagina, to say the least. Dr. Aagaard-Tillery speculates that changing conditions in the vagina encourage the bacteria to grow. During delivery, a baby will be coated by Lactobacillus johnsonii and ingest some of it. Dr. Aagaard-Tillery suggests that this inoculation prepares the infant to digest breast milk.

The baby’s microbiome continues to grow during breast-feeding. In a study of 16 lactating women published last year, Katherine M. Hunt of the University of Idaho and her colleagues reported that the women’s milk had up to 600 species of bacteria, as well as sugars called oligosaccharides that babies cannot digest. The sugars serve to nourish certain beneficial gut bacteria in the infants, the scientists said. The more the good bacteria thrive, the harder it is for harmful species to gain a foothold.

As the child grows and the microbiome becomes more ecologically complex, it also tutors the immune system. Ecological disruptions can halt this education. In March, Dr. Richard S. Blumberg of Harvard and his colleagues reported an experiment that demonstrates how important this education is.

The scientists reared mice that lacked any microbiome. In their guts and lungs, the germ-free mice developed abnormally high levels of immune cells called invariant natural killer T cells. Normally, these cells trigger a swift response from the immune system against viruses and other pathogens. In Dr. Blumberg’s microbe-free mice, however, they caused harmful inflammation. As adults, the mice were more likely to suffer from asthma and inflammatory bowel disease.

This experiment parallels studies of children in recent years. Children who take high levels of antibiotics may be at greater risk of developing allergies and asthma later on, many researchers have suggested.

Dr. Blumberg and his colleagues found that they could prevent the mice from becoming ill by giving them bacteria while they were still young. Acquiring a microbiome as an adult did not help the rodents.

The Good With the Bad

The diversity of species that make up the microbiome is hard to fathom. But it is even more difficult to understand how the immune system copes with this onslaught. In any one person’s mouth, for example, the scientists of the Human Microbiome Project found about 75 to 100 species. Some that predominate in one person’s mouth may be rare in another person’s. Still, the rate at which they are being discovered indicates that there may be as many as 5,000 species of bacteria that live in the human mouth.

“The closer you look, the more you find,” said Susan M. Huse of the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Mass., a contributor to the microbiome project.

Although the project has focused largely on bacteria, the microbiome’s diversity is wider. For example, our bodies also host viruses.

Many species in the human “virome” specialize in infecting our resident bacteria. But in the DNA samples stored in the Human Microbiome Project’s database, Kristine Wylie of Washington University and her colleagues are finding a wealth of viruses that target human cells. It is normal, it seems, for people to have a variety of viruses busily infecting their human hosts. “It’s really pretty striking that even in these healthy people, there really is a virome,” Dr. Wylie said.

The microbiome also includes fungi. In the June 8 issue of the journal Science, David Underhill, a research scientist at Cedars-Sinai hospital in Los Angeles, and his colleagues reported on a wealth of fungal species in the guts of humans and other mammals. In mice, for example, they cataloged 100 species of fungi that are new to science, along with 100 already known. This diversity is all the more remarkable when you consider that it is tolerated by an immune system that has evolved to fight off microbes. Scientists have only a dim understanding of how the system decides which to kill and which to tolerate.

Immune cells fight fungal infections, for example, with a protein called dectin-1, which attaches only to fungi. But Dr. Underhill and his colleagues found that dectin-1 is also essential for tolerating harmless fungi. When they engineered mice that couldn’t produce dectin-1, the mice responded to harmless fungi by producing so much inflammation that their own tissues were damaged.

It’s a good thing that the immune system can rein itself in, because the microbiome carries out many services for us. In the gut, microbes synthesize vitamins and break down tough plant compounds into digestible bits.

Skin bacteria are also essential, Dr. Segre said. “One of the most important functions of the skin is to serve as a barrier,” she said. Bacteria feed on the waxy secretions of skin cells, and then produce a moisturizing film that keeps our skin supple and prevents cracks — thus keeping out invading pathogens.

Restoring Order to the System

Antibiotics kill off harmful bacteria, but broad-spectrum forms can kill off many desirable species, too. Dr. Fischbach likens antibiotics to herbicides sprayed on a garden. The herbicide kills the unwanted plants, but also kills off the tomatoes and the roses. The gardener assumes that the tomatoes and roses will grow back on their own.

In fact, there’s no guarantee the microbial ecosystem will automatically return to normal. “It’s one of those assumptions we make today that will seem silly in retrospect,” Dr. Fischbach said. Indeed, some bacteria are adapted for invading and establishing themselves in disrupted ecosystems. A species called Clostridium difficile will sometimes invade a person’s gut after a course of antibiotics. From 2000 to 2009, the number of hospitalized patients in the United States found to have C. difficile more than doubled, to 336,600 from 139,000. Once established, the antibiotic-resistant C. difficile can be hard to eradicate.

Now that scientists are gaining a picture of healthy microbiomes, they are optimistic about restoring devastated ones. “I don’t know that we’re quite on the cusp of being able to do that well at this point. But I think at least the data is starting to argue that these might be possibilities,” said Barbara Methé of the J. Craig Venter Institute, a principal investigator on the microbiome project.

One way to restore microbiomes may be to selectively foster beneficial bacteria. To ward off dangerous skin pathogens like Staphylococcus aureus, for instance, Dr. Segre envisions applying a cream infused with nutrients for harmless skin bacteria to feed on. “It’s promoting the growth of the healthy bacteria that can then overtake the staph,” she said.

Bacterial Transplants

Adding the bacteria directly may also help. Unfortunately, the science of so-called probiotics lags far behind their growth in sales. In 2011, people bought $28 billion of probiotic foods and supplements, according to the research firm EuroMonitor International. But few of them have been tested as rigorously as conventional drugs.

“I think the science has been shoddy and flimsy,” said Dr. Fischbach (who is on the scientific advisory board of Schiff Nutrition International).

Nonetheless, he sees a few promising probiotic treatments. A growing number of doctors are treating C. difficile with fecal transplants: Stool from a healthy donor is delivered like a suppository to an infected patient. The idea is that the good bacteria in the stool establish themselves in the gut and begin to compete with C. difficile. This year, researchers at the University of Alberta reviewed 124 fecal transplants and concluded that the procedure is safe and effective, with 83 percent of patients experiencing immediate improvement as their internal ecosystems were restored.

Dr. Alexander Khoruts of the University of Minnesota and his colleagues want to make fecal transplants standard practice. They can now extract bacteria from stool, “removing the ‘ick’ factor,” as he puts it.

Dr. Khoruts and his colleagues have federal approval to start formal clinical trials on fecal transplants. Eventually, he would like to develop probiotic pills that contain just a few key species required to build the intestinal ecosystem.

“People are starting to take this seriously,” Dr. Fischbach said. “This is a therapy that’s going to help a lot of people.”

Other conditions potentially could be treated by manipulating the microbiome. Scientists have linked obesity, for example, to changes to the gut’s ecosystem. When scientists transfer bacteria from obese mice to lean ones, the lean mice put on weight.

How this happens is still unclear, but some studies suggest that an “obese” microbiome sends signals to the body, changing how cells use sugar for energy and leading the body to store extra fat.

Researchers at the Academic Medical Center in Amsterdam are running a clinical trial to see if fecal transplants can help treat obesity. They have recruited 45 obese men; some are getting transplants from their own stool, while others get transplants from lean donors. The scientists are finding that the transplants from lean donors are changing how the obese subjects metabolize sugar.

While these initial results are promising, there is no evidence yet that the obese subjects are losing weight. Dr. Fischbach cautions that it may take a while to figure out how to manipulate the microbiome to make people healthy.

And it may take even longer to persuade doctors to think like ecologists.

“The physicians I know really like things that are clear and crisp,” Dr. Fischbach said. “But like any ecosystem, the microbiome is not the kind of place to find simple answers.”

829. The Sorrow Beneath the Sea

Ocean species on the brink

By Callum Roberts, Newsweek, May 14, 2012

Like children the world over, my daughters love turtles. At once incongruous and graceful, they connect us to the world of 15 million years ago, when very similar turtles swam alongside megatooth sharks, or 75 million years ago, when they rubbed shoulders with dinosaurs. Only eight species of marine turtle remain from a lineage that stretches back little changed deep into the age of dinosaurs. The largest living reptile is the leatherback turtle, a barnacle-encrusted eminence that can reach 10 feet long and weigh two tons. Today we confront the stark possibility that people will drive the leatherback turtle to extinction within the next human generation. Already there is just one leatherback left in the Pacific for every 20 in 1962, the year I was born.

Human dominion over nature has finally reached the sea.

With an ever-accelerating tide of human impact, the oceans have changed more in the last 30 years than in all of human history before. In most places, the seas have lost upwards of 75 percent of their megafauna—large animals such as whales, dolphins, sharks, rays, and turtles—as fishing and hunting spread in waves across the face of the planet. For some species, like whitetip sharks, American sawfish, or the once “common” skate, numbers are down as much as 99 percent. By the end of the 20th century, almost nowhere shallower than 3,000 feet remained untouched by commercial fishing. Some places are now fished down to 10,000 feet.

Why, in the face of widespread evidence of human impact, do so many people persist in thinking that the oceans remain wild and beyond our influence? The answer lies in part in the creeping rate of change. Younger generations are often dismissive of the tales of old-timers, rejecting their stories in favor of things they’ve experienced themselves. The result is a phenomenon known as “shifting baseline syndrome,” as we take for granted things that would have seemed inconceivable two generations ago.

Loren McClenachan, a graduate at Scripps Institution of Oceanography, unearthed a telling example of shifting baselines in the archives of the Monroe County Library in Florida. She found a series of photographs of fish landed into Key West by one recreational fishing charter company between the 1950s and 1980s, and extended it by taking her own pictures at the same dock. In the 1950s, huge Goliath groupers and sharks dominated catches, many of them bigger and fatter than the anglers. Over the years, the fish shrink and groupers and sharks give way to smaller snappers and grunts, but the grins on the anglers’ faces are just as broad today as they were in the 1950s. Modern-day tourists have no idea

With the sole exception of Alaskan salmon, which have been well managed, and rockfish or striped bass, which have experienced a resurgence thanks to the careful shepherding of their fisheries, most of the species we like to eat have plummeted since their historic highs. Puget Sound’s salmon runs have dwindled to a trickle. Red snapper, bluefish, and menhaden are all overfished in U.S. waters today, while grouper and capelin are far below their 19th-century numbers. In 2010, a quarter of commercial fish stocks assessed in the U.S. were considered overfished, meaning that they lie below target levels, themselves far below historic highs. But this misses the real scale of the problem. Overfishing is only one small piece in a much larger puzzle of interacting impacts.

We pump chemical and industrial pollutants into our rivers and oceans, heedless of consequences, and our unplanned experiment with greenhouse gases is gradually infiltrating the deep sea, changing ocean chemistry, impacting temperatures and oxygen levels, and shifting patterns of underwater currents with dramatic consequences. The path we are on today is pushing ocean ecosystems to the edge of their viability. Few people yet grasp the gravity of the predicament.

I began my career studying coral-reef fish. Thirty years on, fish are still at the heart of my research, but my outlook has expanded to a much wider interest in the relationship between people and the sea. Scientists are specialists and devote their lives to research within narrow fields that become further constricted as time passes. Management of pollution is segregated from that of fisheries, which in turn are rarely considered in the same place as shipping, or climate change. This means that impacts are discussed in isolation and by different people. But a view of the whole is far more alarming than the sum of its parts.

What will the future look like? It is hard to grasp the prospect of seas so compromised that they no longer sustain the ecological processes which we take for granted, and upon which our comfort, pleasure, and perhaps even our very existence depends. In the early days of European seafaring, unexplored areas of ocean were marked on charts as “Mare Incognitum,” or “Unknown Seas,” and the

The oceans have absorbed around 30 percent of the carbon dioxide released by human activity since pre-industrial times, mainly from fossil-fuel burning, conversion of forests and swamp to cities and agriculture, and cement production. If carbon-dioxide emissions are not curtailed, ocean acidity is expected to rise 150 percent by 2050, the fastest rate of increase at any time in at least the last 20 million years and probably as long as 65 million years, which takes us back to the age of dinosaurs. As Carol Turley, an expert on ocean acidification from Plymouth Marine Laboratory put it, “the present increase in ocean acidity is not just unprecedented in our lifetimes, it is a rare event in the history of the planet.”

The effects of acidification are hard to predict. At the very least life is likely to get much more difficult for species with carbonate shells, which includes some of the most important primary producers in the sea, the phytoplankton that sustain food webs and release life-giving oxygen. Any fall in the rate of plankton production would reduce the snow of organic debris that sinks from sunlit surface layers to the deep sea. Deep-sea communities survive on meager handouts from above, and failure in supply would shrink their numbers.

Acidification is only one part of the problem. The runoff of nutrients from land, in the form of fertilizers and sewage, coupled with rising temperatures, have triggered in recent years an explosion of dead zones, low-oxygen areas where few species can survive. Dead zones are often found at the mouth of mighty rivers like the Mississippi or in populated coastal areas and inland seas. And yet despite their proliferation, future seas will not be lifeless. We are creating winners as well as losers.

Jellyfish, for example, are great opportunists, and some scientists fear that large parts of our most productive seas will transform into jellyfish empires. Jellyfish positively thrive in pollution-enriched seas. Given unlimited food, they can reach adult size fast. With their stinging tentacles, they are formidable predators. Here one of the quirks of ocean food webs comes into play to seal their dominance. Most animals that might eat jellyfish go through tiny egg, larval, or juvenile stages when the tables turn and they are themselves jellyfish prey. Such role reversals of predator and prey are rare on land. In the sea, however, they are prevalent, with surprising effects. The American oceanographer Andrew Bakun invites us to imagine a world in which zebras and antelopes are voracious predators of young of lions or cheetahs. What would the Serengeti look like if this were so?

The jellyfish joyride begins when high nutrients combine with a fall in abundance of their predators. When plentiful, jellyfish suppress their predators further by eating more of their young and so pave the way for a full-blown population explosion. Mediterranean resorts have been plagued by jellyfish outbreaks in the last 20 years. The main problem species there is the mauve stinger, whose tentacles inflict slashing welts on the tender bodies of bathers. In the summer of 2004, an estimated 45,000 swimmers were treated for stings in Monaco alone. In 2007, Irish salmon farms were overwhelmed by hordes of mauve stingers which slaughtered tens of thousands of salmon in their deathly embrace. Similar mass killings have been reported in Japan, India, and Maryland.

If food runs short, jellyfish don’t just die; instead they shrink and wait until conditions improve (although if nutrient levels fall far enough and for long enough, jellyfish blooms can snuff out). In a future with more acidified seas, jellies won’t have troublesome carbonate skeletons to handicap their chances. The altered oceans that haunt our possible future could offer jellyfish worlds of opportunity. They have been here before. Enigmatic traces in rocks from the earliest Cambrian Period, some 550 million years ago, tell of an age of jellyfish that preceded the great radiation of life that established most of the animal groups alive today. Collectively, the modern reappearance of seas dominated by gelatinous animals, microbes, and algae has been dubbed “the rise of slime.” It signals a reversion toward conditions that prevailed in the earliest days of multicellular life.

We are living on borrowed time. We can’t cheat nature by taking more than is produced indefinitely, no matter how fervently politicians or captains of industry might wish it. In essence, what we have done in the last few decades is to mine fish, bringing them in at rates faster than they can replace themselves. Sharks, bluefin tuna, cod, Chilean sea bass, all have declined steeply as a result of excessive fishing. The price that must be paid for today’s rapaciousness will be tomorrow’s scarcity, or in some places, seas without fish. If we follow our current trajectory, that point may be only 40 or 50 years away.

Most people are unaware that some of the species that show up on the fishmonger’s slab simply cannot sustain productive fisheries in the long run. They grow and reproduce too slowly. Most sharks and the bigger skates and rays fall into this category. So does almost everything caught more than 1,600 feet down—deep sea beasts like Chilean sea bass, orange roughy, or roundnose grenadier. They are caught because they are there, and when they are gone, they disappear from markets. There are good reasons why we farm animals that are highly productive and feed low in the food web, like chickens and cows, rather than bears or cougars. But it is the bears and cougars of the sea that we have grown used to eating.

I often come across people who think that we can’t afford to cut back fishing when every day there are more mouths to feed. But simple math tells you that restocking our seas makes economic sense. Think of it this way: if you have a million fish in the sea and can catch 20 percent of them every year without depleting the stock, that stock would give you 200,000 fish a year. Now imagine that you nurtured your fish and gave them a chance to grow so that you had 5 million. Your 20 percent would come to 1 million a year. The interest rate on your capital is the same, but the yield is much bigger. And with fish more abundant, they would be easier to catch, so you would need fewer boats and each would cost less to run.

Wishful thinking? Not really. A World Bank report aptly titled “The Sunken Billions” highlighted the madness of overfishing when it calculated that major fish stocks of the world would produce 40 percent more if we fished them less. It sounds paradoxical—fish less to catch more—but that is the simple message.

People often ask me, “What can I do to help?” One place to start is to avoid eating fish that are overexploited in the wild or taken using methods that harm other wildlife. Try to avoid prawns or scallops and other bottom feeders fished up by dredgers and trawlers, such as plaice, cod, and hake. Eat low in the food web, so favor smaller fish like anchovies, herring, and sardines over big predators like Chilean sea bass, swordfish, and large tunas (you will be doing yourself a favor, as these predators also concentrate more toxins). If you can’t give up tuna, choose pole- and line-caught animals, which have virtually zero bycatch. (“Dolphin friendly” versions alone may not be very dolphin friendly, since tuna are often caught with purse seines, walls of net that surround and stress dolphins and snare sharks, turtles, and other wildlife.) Farm-raised fish and prawns often come at a high environmental cost in destroyed habitat and wild fish turned into feed. Vegetarian fish like tilapia and carp are better than predators like salmon and sea bass. Organic is better too, since your fish will have been dosed with fewer chemicals.

If we carry on with business as usual, humanity has a bleak and uncertain future. More fertilizer and sewage input into the oceans would increase the frequency of harmful algal blooms, intensify oxygen depletion, create more dead zones, and set the stage for the jellyfish ascendancy. The spread of aquaculture will eat away at natural habitats and aggravate problems of nutrient enrichment. More intense agriculture on degrading soils will flush extra mud into coastal waters, which would destroy sensitive habitats constructed by invertebrates like corals. Sea-level rises will lead to more sea walls and other defenses in a process of coastal hardening that will squeeze out productive habitats like mud flat and marsh. With the disappearance of these vital nurseries, wild fisheries will suffer, and there will be fewer feeding grounds for migratory birds. And if we remain wedded to all the comforts that modern technology can give us, and remain as wasteful as we are today, the oceans will continue to accumulate toxic contaminants.

There is an old adage, much loved of self-help books, that says “today is the first day of the rest of your life.” If we change course by a few degrees now, it will take us to a very different place in 50 years’ time from where we are headed now.

Callum Roberts is a marine biologist and conservationist at the University of York, England He won the Rachel Carson Environmental Book Award for 2007's The Unnatural History of the Sea. His new book is The Ocean of Life.

828. Air Pollution Increasing in Cuba

By Cuba Central News Blast, Center for Democracy in the Americas, June 15, 2012

Cuba experienced an increase in air pollutants from November 2008 to April 2010, according to data collected by Cuba's national surveillance network, state newspaper Granma reports. Increased levels of sulfate and nitrate emissions from local industries in Cuba caused the air quality to deteriorate, leading to higher incidences of acid rain in the eastern provinces of Holguín, Camagüey and Santiago de Cuba. According to the article, the Center for Pollution and Atmospheric Chemistry (CECONT) in Cuba is in the process of determining the maximum amount of emissions for sectors that are most responsible for the deterioration in air quality in an effort to decrease air pollution. 

827. Ten Percent of Cuba's Population Is Suffering from Water-Supply Problems

Water shortage is most acute in Old Havana

By EFE, June 9, 2012

More than 1,159,000 Cubans are currently suffering the effects of water-supply problems on the island, a state television news report said.

Havana, the nation's capital and a city of more than 2 million, has been the hardest hit, accounting for more than 808,000 of those affected, Friday's report said.

It said work to repair pipes to prevent leaks and improve service quality is concentrated in 11 cities on the Communist-ruled island.

The task is "very complex" because "difficulties have accumulated for years," the report said, citing water sector officials.

It noted that between 50-58 percent of the water distributed nationwide via pipes does not reach its destination and that that system accounts for 90 percent of water distribution on the island.

The report also urged "rational use" of water supplies by consumers as the island copes with the effects of climate change and and frequent droughts in recent years.

826. Confronting the Rio+20 “Greed Economy:” Calls for Rights for Mother Earth

By Global Justice Ecology Project, Climate Connections, June 16, 2012

Green economy is about cheating nature while making profit out of it.” – Pablo Solón, Former Bolivian Ambassador to UN, Director Focus on the Global South

With over 50,000 accredited participants registered, Rio+20 is expected to be the largest gathering in the history of the UN. The Green Economy put forward by the United Nations Environment Program (nicknamed the “Greed Economy” by many) is about promoting the idea that we can only “save” nature by putting a price tag on what nature “does” for us. Proponents call it “ecosystem services” and from forests generating the air we breathe to the decomposition process resulting in the ground we walk upon, everything has its price, and corporate executives are wringing their hands with anticipation of what the Greed Economy could do for profit margins.

The Peoples Summit – hosted by Civil Society Organizations challenging the direction of the UN and its members – will run in parallel in Flamengo Park with the aim of not simply protesting the so-called Green Economy, but presenting viable alternative, sustainable solutions, including recognizing legal rights for nature. “In 2008, Ecuador led the world by becoming the first country to recognize legal Rights of Nature in its constitution – the right to exist, maintain and restore its vital cycles, and regenerate integrally. Recognizing Rights of Nature allows us to truly protect ecosystems and sets the stage for a sustainable future. Rights of Nature gives social movements the opportunity to reunite on what brings us together – Mother Earth.” says Natalia Greene, President CEDENMA, Ecuador.

Rights of Nature as the Foundation for Sustainability Panel Dialogue & Universal Declaration for Rights of Mother Earth Signing Event

The Global Alliance for the Rights of Nature has mobilized to be an active voice for a new world view that recognizes our interrelatedness with the ecosystems that sustain us and develops a new framework of governance aligned with the laws of nature. The Alliance and its members are hosting and participating in strategic events both “inside” RioCentro and “outside” at the Peoples Summit and elsewhere. These events including the Universal Declaration for Rights of Mother Earth Signing Ceremonies will demonstrate the prominent, global support for Rights of Nature and Rights of Mother Earth. People from 110 countries have already signed and more are expected to sign in Rio. In addition to prominent Rights of Nature advocates in attendance at Rio, distinguished signatories include Leonardo Boff, Eduardo Galeano, Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu, Paul Hawken, Joanna Macy, David Suzuki, Annie Leonard, Miguel d’Escoto Brockmann, Atossa Soltani, Jack Canfield, Rabbi Michael Lerner, Daniel Wildcat, Mary Evelyn Tucker, and numerous orders of Catholic Orders of Sisters.

Rights of Nature: Planting Seeds of Real Change

Alliance member Global Exchange is publishing Rights of Nature: Planting Seeds of Real Change, a report for Rio that not only challenges the “Greed” Economy but also seeks to examine how Rights of Nature offers new ways to advance the well-being of people and planet. Contributions from Pablo Solon, Tom Goldtooth , Vandana Shiva, Natalia Greene, Alberto Acosta, Anne Petermann, Jeff Conant, Maude Barlow, Osprey Orielle Lake, and others. The report will be launched at the signing of the Universal Declaration on the Rights of Mother Earth on June 17th. Click here to read report articles by Pablo Solon and Tom Goldtooth: