939. A Tiny Pacific Island That Does Not Smell Like the Paradise

Homes are built on pitts. photo credit: Andrew Quilty

By Matt Siegel, The New York Times, October 16, 2012 

FUNAFUTI, Tuvalu — The sun is setting over the Pacific islet, casting the isolated lagoon in brilliant shades of red, orange and topaz. Towering palm trees sway slowly in the warm tropical breeze. Out in the distance, fishermen in a small boat slowly troll the coral atolls for reef fish, much as the people of Tuvalu have done for hundreds of years or more.

But none of these things are what hit you first about this setting, on the edge of the water. What hits you first is the smell. Household garbage mingles with wastes both human and animal in open pits that, when filled with seawater during high tide, turn into a fetid soup under the blistering sun. It is in one of the dozens of precariously balanced stilt houses over those pits that Kalalisa Uilese lives with her husband and three children.

“There’s not enough land,” Ms. Uilese, 47, said matter-of-factly inside her dark, makeshift living room. “That’s why we build our houses on them.”

Tuvalu, a tiny cluster of nine coral atolls and islands about halfway between Australia and Hawaii in the South Pacific, is one of the smallest countries on the planet, and many scientists say it is getting smaller. Its population of fewer than 12,000 people inhabits a landmass of 26 square kilometers, or 10 square miles, about a third the size of Manhattan. On Funafuti, the main atoll and Tuvalu’s capital, the widest point between the lagoon around which the town spreads and the ocean beyond is just half a kilometer.

The lowest point is just above sea level, a spot from which you can be tricked into thinking that you are somehow standing below the vast Pacific, looking up rather than out into it.

Data from the National Research Council in the United States predict that global sea levels could rise by as much as 55 inches by 2100 as a result of climate change, which, when combined with damage to the coral roots of Tuvalu by rising acidity in seawater, could threaten the country’s very existence. Then there is coastal erosion, a result of rising water and harsh weather but also human activities like excavation for construction and other development projects.

During World War II, as fighting between the United States and Japan raged across the Pacific, the British government granted the United States military the use of its colony on what is now Tuvalu but was then known as the Ellice Islands. Massive antiaircraft guns, the concrete base of at least one of which still stands a lonely vigil in the surf, were quickly erected. But for the islands to reach their full wartime potential, they needed an airstrip. Large quantities of coral were dug up and carted off to be crushed and mixed for the tarmac. The gaping pits that were left behind across Funafuti, called “borrow pits,” were never filled and eventually began to be used for refuse. Add to this the doubling of Tuvalu’s population since 1980, and it is easy to understand why, as usable land dwindled, homes like Ms. Uilese’s started to stretch across the pits.

For Betty Vuva, 49, the head teacher at Nauri Primary School, the borrow pits and their attendant health problems are a constant source of anxiety. As the changing tides have steadily encroached on the island from without, she says, the land around the pits has become more crowded.

“Well, so far no houses have collapsed,” she said with a wry laugh.

The government of Tuvalu, which survives on a combination of foreign aid and dividends from the sale in 1998 of the .tv Internet domain name, has repeatedly asked the United States government for assistance in refilling the borrow pits. In 2003, the United States Army Corps of Engineers carried out a site assessment and cost study at the behest of the State Department. The 152-page report acknowledged the provenance of the pits and starkly identified their cost to the island.

“Solid waste disposal sites surrounding residential homes and animals have developed into a health hazard for nearby residents,” the report said. “An engineered solid waste landfill site and management plan needs to be implemented for the safety of the people and longevity of the island.”

Three options for refilling the pits were considered in the document, ranging in cost from $14,950 to $28.5 million, but the issue has gone no further. Tuvalu, which has an annual gross domestic product of about $35 million, says it is ill-equipped to act on the report by itself.

“The government has never had the financial resources needed to fill in the borrow pits,” Prime Minister Willy Telavi said in an e-mailed response to questions. “We just don’t have the money. Not even close.”

He added: “Over the years we have approached many donor countries, including the United States, about filling in the borrow pits but without success. If the U.S., which to us has always been the likely donor to fix the problem, was willing to revisit the issue of filling in the borrow pits we would welcome their efforts with open arms.”

That, however, seems unlikely, at least in the short term, according to a senior United States administration official who cited the costs of carrying out the project using environmentally sound methods.

“In order not to cause further environmental damage to the land or surrounding seas, material may have to be imported, which would increase the cost considerably,” the official said in an e-mail on the condition of anonymity because she was not authorized to comment publicly. “We continue to work on this with the government of Tuvalu and we look forward to finding a mutually acceptable, affordable and environmentally responsible solution.”

For James Conway, 53, an adviser on energy policy to the Ministry of Economic Planning and Foreign Affairs, that kind of solution has already been too long in coming. Mr. Conway, an American who moved to Tuvalu as a United States Peace Corps volunteer more than 20 years ago, is now married to a Tuvaluan woman with whom he has a teenage daughter, and he worries about the health effects of the borrow pits.

“People in greater numbers are starting to build next to them, over them and in them with houses on stilts,” he said in an interview inside his sweltering office in the island’s main government building. However, Mr. Conway dismissed the idea that Washington somehow owes it to Tuvalu to fill in the pits, pointing out that the runway has brought enormous economic benefits to the country.

The idea of the Americans “filling in the borrow pits as some kind of war reparations is probably stretching it a little bit,” he said. Still, he added, “it is valuable land. If the borrow pits could be filled in, there would be economic value associated with it. It would dramatically improve public health by decreasing water-borne illnesses.”

For Ravina Falemi, 27, and her three small daughters, that would be a blessing. On a recent afternoon she stood holding her youngest daughter, Emma, as about a dozen half-naked children splashed around in the acrid water. One small boy stood on the narrow dirt path leading to the cluster of homes where Ms. Falemi lives, fishing in the muck with a homemade rod.

“The common sickness is diarrhea,” she said. “We always advise the children not to come here because of that, but sometimes small kids wash their hands in it and then come home and take a biscuit or something.”

Should the United States help with the pits? Yes, she said. But will anyone ever actually do anything about them?

“Who knows?” she said. “Maybe we’ll just migrate for good.”

938. Obama and Romney Agree Not to Discuss Global Warming

By John M. Broder, The New York Times, October 25, 2012

WASHINGTON — For all their disputes, President Obama and Mitt Romney agree that the world is warming and that humans are at least partly to blame. It remains wholly unclear what either of them plans to do about it.

Even after a year of record-smashing temperatures, drought and Arctic ice melt, none of the moderators of the four general-election debates asked about climate change, nor did any of the candidates broach the topic.

Throughout the campaign, Mr. Obama and Mr. Romney have seemed most intent on trying to outdo each other as lovers of coal, oil and natural gas — the very fuels most responsible for rising levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

Mr. Obama has supported broad climate change legislation, financed extensive clean energy projects and pushed new regulations to reduce global warming emissions from cars and power plants. But neither he nor Mr. Romney has laid out during the campaign a legislative or regulatory program to address the fundamental questions arising from one of the most vexing economic, environmental, political and humanitarian issues to face the planet. Should the United States cut its greenhouse gas emissions, and, if so, how far and how fast? Should fossil fuels be more heavily taxed? Should any form of clean energy be subsidized, and for how long? Should the United States lead international mitigation efforts? Should the nation pour billions of new dollars into basic energy research? Is the climate system so fraught with uncertainty that the rational response is to do nothing?

Many scientists and policy experts say the lack of a serious discussion of climate change in the presidential contest represents a lost opportunity to engage the public and to signal to the rest of the world American intentions for dealing with what is, by definition, a global problem that requires global cooperation.

“On climate change, the political discourse here is massively out of step with the rest of the world, but also with the citizens of this country,” said Andrew Steer, the president of the World Resources Institute and a former special envoy for climate change at the World Bank. “Polls show very clearly that two-thirds of Americans think this is a real problem and needs to be addressed.”

Mr. Steer noted that climate change was no longer a partisan issue in Europe and that China, Japan, Australia and South Korea had recently taken significant steps to reduce emissions and invest heavily in clean energy technology.

“The real question in this country,” said Mr. Steer, a British citizen, “is why politicians don’t see it as in their interest to discuss it.”

The list of reasons is long.

Any serious effort to address climate change will require a transformation of the nation’s system for producing and consuming energy and will, at least in the medium term, mean higher prices for fuel and electricity. Powerful incumbent industries — coal, oil, utilities — are threatened by such changes and have mounted a well-financed long-term campaign to sow doubt about climate change. The Koch brothers and others in the oil industry have underwritten advertising campaigns and grass-roots efforts to support like-minded candidates. And the Republican Party has essentially declared climate change a nonproblem.

The two most effective ways of reducing global warming pollution — taxing it or regulating it — are politically toxic in a year when economic problems are paramount. After a bill died in the Senate in 2010, Mr. Obama abandoned his support for cap and trade, a market-based method to limit greenhouse gas emissions, and he has given little hint of what regulatory policies he intends to pursue if he wins a second term. Aides said that he would not propose a carbon tax or other energy tax, but that he would consider supporting one as part of a larger budget and spending deal.

As governor of Massachusetts, Mr. Romney considered joining a regional cap-and-trade system, then abandoned it because of uncertainty over costs. He has opposed Mr. Obama’s steps to regulate emissions from power plants and vehicles. He has said he would reverse Mr. Obama’s air quality regulations and would renegotiate the auto efficiency standard of 54.5 miles per gallon by 2025 that automakers agreed to this year.

The struggling economy has made it difficult for emerging clean energy companies to get the capital they need to reach commercial scale and compete with producers of traditional energy sources. Government programs to provide that seed money are highly controversial, as the fight over tax breaks for wind power companies and the recent failures of the solar panel maker Solyndra and the advanced battery manufacturer A123 Systems showed.

The Obama administration provided $90 billion in new financing from the 2009 stimulus package for clean energy projects, but most of that money is gone.

Though there is little doubt that the burning of fossil fuels and deforestation have altered the earth’s climate, some uncertainty remains about whether and when such changes will become unmanageable. Huge technological challenges persist in transforming the energy generation system. Both Mr. Obama and Mr. Romney refer to “clean coal,” shorthand for capturing the carbon dioxide emissions from coal-burning power plants, but the technology is still in its infancy.

International efforts to address climate change, which showed great promise when Mr. Obama took office, have sputtered in recent years because of fears that limiting carbon emissions means limiting economic growth. There is also considerable resistance to any plan that would require the United States and other wealthy countries to take stronger measures than those demanded of China, India and other fast-growing economies that are responsible for the bulk of the growth in global emissions.

Mr. Romney’s chief domestic policy adviser, Oren Cass, said that the United States should not take unilateral steps. “What it is going to do is hurt our economy very seriously, and it’s going to drive a lot of industrial activity from the United States to countries that are, frankly, much less efficient in their use of energy,” he said at an energy debate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology this month.

Mr. Cass said that Mr. Romney’s answer to the climate challenge was not to tax emissions or impose new regulations or subsidize clean energy ventures. His answer is technological innovation by private industry, without the thumb of government on the scale.

 “Governor Romney’s view is that the private sector can do the best job, that basic research funding is the appropriate role for government and that more aggressive subsidization and investment by the government can, in fact, have a counterproductive effect on innovation in the private sector,” Mr. Cass said.

Mr. Obama occasionally mentions climate change on the campaign trail, but he generally raises the issue to present a contrast with Mr. Romney.

Last week in Iowa, for example, Mr. Obama expressed support for wind power projects and federal tax breaks that help build them, which Mr. Romney opposes. He then reprised an applause line from his convention speech.

“His plan would end tax credits for wind energy producers,” Mr. Obama said. “My plan will keep these investments, and we’ll keep reducing the carbon pollution that’s also heating the planet, because climate change isn’t a hoax. The droughts we’ve seen, the floods, the wildfires, those aren’t a joke. They’re a threat to our children’s future. And we can do something about it.”

Joseph E. Aldy, a former top Obama adviser on climate and energy who is now at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, said that a centerpiece of Mr. Obama’s approach to climate change was his clean energy standard, a proposal to produce as much as 80 percent of the nation’s electricity using clean sources by 2035. About 30 states now have such a standard — Texas under Gov. George W. Bush was among the first to adopt one — requiring varying amounts of power to come from wind, solar, nuclear, hydro and other nonpolluting sources.

Mr. Aldy said these plans would spur innovation and provide a consistent market for renewable energy, which today is not competitive with fossil fuels in most parts of the country. They also would avoid taxes and direct regulation, he said, although they would be easy to abandon if energy prices rose as a result and voters became disenchanted.

Christiana Figueres, the United Nations’ top climate change diplomat, expressed dismay and frustration with the political conversation in the United States.

“No matter who is elected on Nov. 6, whether they agree on climate or not, it doesn’t change the science,” she said at a forum in New York in September. “The challenge for any administration that comes in is to take a serious look not only at the cost of climate change for everyone else on the planet, but the cost to this country. And they have to ask themselves, ‘What is the cost of not doing enough?’ ”

937. The Weak Link in the Chain: Intelligence

Dan Falk

By Dan Falk, PLOS Blogs,  March 28, 2012 

In my previous blog post, I talked about the likelihood – or unlikelihood – of your existence.  The fact that you’re here, and I’m here, is contingent on a vast array of happenings that all had to come about first.

To narrow things down a bit, let’s say that the first few hurdles have already been met: Suppose we already have a universe with the sorts of physical parameters and physical laws that we now observe.  And let’s say that universe is filled with an enormous number of stars with an enormous number of planets.  Given all of that, what are the odds that you’d end up with (a) living things and (b) intelligence?

Over the last decade or so, astronomers have found more than 500 planets orbiting stars beyond our own sun.  Recently, the first “potentially habitable” planet was announced, based on data from the orbiting Kepler telescope.  NASA already sponsors research on “astrobiology” – roughly, the science of figuring out what kind of life might be “out there.”  And most scientists, I suspect, wouldn’t be shocked if some sort of definitive sign of extraterrestrial life were discovered within the next couple of decades.  Thrilled, but not shocked.  We don’t have any numbers yet, of course, but it’s worth noting that simple one-celled creatures sprung up on our planet within 1.7 billion years or so of its formation (which doesn’t mean life sprang up overnight; but still, that’s sort of fast in terms of the planet’s 4.5-billion-year history).

But intelligent life is another matter.  On our planet, intelligence is the new kid on the block.  Our own species, Homo sapiens, have been around for about 200,000 years – a mere speck in terms of Earth’s history.  And we’ve only been using the tools of science for about 400 years.

Now, it’s hard to draw conclusions based on one data point, but we can always engage in a bit of educated speculation.  This is where things get messy, but, they get messy in an interesting way.  A good starting point is the late 20^th-century debate between two great evolutionary biologists, Stephen J. Gould and Simon Conway Morris.

Stephen Jay Gould argued, in a nutshell, that the appearance of human beings was highly contingent, that is, it was dependent on a whole series of earlier evolutionary happenings, and therefore very “unlikely.”  As Gould explained in his book, Wonderful Life:  Life as we know it would have been profoundly different if conditions at the start of the evolutionary process, and along the way, had been only slightly different.  The very features that make human beings human – intelligence and language in particular – are radically contingent.  In Gould’s words:  “Replay the tape a million times from the beginning, and I doubt that anything like Homo sapiens would ever evolve again.”

Note, Gould fought tirelessly against the Creationist movement, but religious opponents of Darwinism, whether creationists or proponents of “intelligent design,” just loved hearing about how unlikely it was for humans to appear on this planet: after all, they argued, what better proof that a loving God had engineered it all.

At any rate, Gould’s view wasn’t the only game in town, even among evolutionists.  Simon Conway Morris takes quite a different view, hinted at in the title of his book, Life’s Solution – Inevitable Humans in a Lonely Universe.  Replay the tape, he says, and the same broad patterns will emerge.  The reason is something called “convergence”: roughly, if similar environments appear, then similar adaptations will appear also.  For example, the eye has evolved as many as 40 times, in various lineages, over millions of years.

On the other hand, the very things that seem to make humans human – such as the use of complex symbolic language – appear to have arisen only once.  Moreover, full-blown language seems to have appeared only after Homo sapienshad already lived on this planet for tens of thousands of years.  In other words, while language may have arisen as an adaptation, it isn’t just a matter of biology.  As Ian Tattersall of the American Museum of Natural History puts it:  “Human symbolic consciousness, which is the underpinning of our cognitive singularity, is a very recent acquisition in the human lineage.  And, even more importantly, it’s not a simple extrapolation of the trends that preceded it.”

Which means that even if life itself is common in the universe, linguistic, symbol-using creatures like ourselves may be quite rare indeed.  This may be the reason that all of our SETI efforts – the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, primarily via searches for radio signal – have turned up nothing, after a half-century of scanning the heavens.

In Part One of this blog post, I mentioned one of the works of literature that re-kindled my interest in this subject – Italo Calvino’s Cosmicomics.  I focused in particular on the short story “How Much Shall We Bet,” in which two characters make an endless series of bets regarding what sorts of things will happen in their universe.  They’d don’t specifically bet on the appearance of intelligent life, but they may as well have; it underlies all the other developments that come after.

In Calvino’s story, the character named Dean is the skeptic; he always bets no.  And in this case, I’d have to side with him.  Worlds may be likely, oceans and continents may be likely, even life may be likely.  But the stuff that makes us human – from ploughs to pyramids, from fettucini to Facebook – may be unique to our world, the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, never to be repeated.

936. Life, the Universe, and Everything: What are the Odds?

Dan Falk

By Dan Falk, PLOS Blogs, December 31, 2011

Have you ever wondered how likely – or unlikely – it is that you exist?  Although it may sound pie-in-the-sky, it’s really a scientific problem, though you don’t have to be a scientist to be captivated by it.

Take, for example, the wonderfully-named Cosmicomics of 20th-century Italian writer Italo Calvino – a collection of whimsical, science-fiction-flavoured short stories.  One of the stories, called “How Much Shall We Bet,” involves two characters, the narrator (with the unpronounceable name “Qfwfq”) and someone named “Dean (k)yK.”  The two men seem to have existed since the before the beginning of the universe – somehow separate from the universe, whatever that could mean – and they seem to be immortal.  All they do is make an endless series of bets regarding what sorts of things will happen in their cosmos.

As you might imagine, the series of events that they bet on, and the series of events that actually unfold, are rather familiar:  They seem to resemble the actual events that have unfolded in the history of our own universe.  Their first bet is on the formation of atoms; the narrator bets for it, while Dean bets against it.  They go on betting on the formation of various chemical elements, and, looking billions of years ahead, they bet as to whether the Assyrians will invade Mesopotamia. We’re told that Dean always bets no, “not because he believed the Assyrians wouldn’t do it, but because he refused to think there would ever be Assyrians and Mesopotamia and the Earth and a human race.”

Let’s begin with the big philosophical questions:  First there’s the issue of determinism – roughly, whether the “stuff that happens” in the universe is largely, or perhaps completely, determined by what came before.  This is something that thinkers have wrestled with for 2,500 years, and I won’t attempt to add to that discussion here; but it is worth mentioning that most versions of determinism seem to place free will in jeopardy, making them rather unappetizing (though not necessarily wrong).  (But I would say that, wouldn’t, if I were destined to say it?)

Secondly, assuming that the future is not fully determined by the present, there’s the string of probabilities associated with each development along the way to “us.” Thinking again of Calvino’s story:  Before you can have Assyrians, you have to have human beings, and before you can have human beings you have to have life, and before you can have life you have to have a habitable planet orbiting a star at just the right distance… it does sound like a leaning tower of improbabilities, doesn’t it?

In my next blog post, I’ll explore what I think is the weakest link in that chain – the appearance of intelligent life.  But first, let’s have some more fun with the ideas and the numbers.

Certainly, the more specific the outcome, more improbable it seems.  If you consider some particular state of affairs, and then ask what the odds are, starting from today and going back even a short time (let alone the 3.8 billion years to when life first appeared on this planet), that particular state will seem extraordinarily unlikely.  For example, imagine turning the clock back five years.  From that perspective, what were the odds that, on this particular day, you would be sitting in this particular room, in this city, reading this particular sentence?

And what something even more basic – say, your own existence?  A couple of months ago, a “probability chart” produced by Harvard Law School blogger Ali Binazir went somewhat viral, encouraging people to contemplate this very question.  In the chart, Binazir calculates just how improbable it was that the right sperm from your father hooked up with the right egg produced by your mother – by his estimate, it’s about one chance in 400 quadrillion (that number seems only slightly more tame in scientific notation: 4 x 10^17).  And that’s hardly the whole battle:  To even get to that stage, all of your ancestors, going all the way back to the beginning of life on Earth, had to survive to reproductive age.  Multiplying the string of probabilities together, he concludes that the odds of your existence are an astronomical one in 10^2,685.000.  (As you can imagine, not everyone in the blogosphere was kind to Binazir; one asked if it was painful to pull those numbers out of you-know-where.)

To be sure, we can quibble about the precise figures.  But I’m sure we can agree that the chances of anything specific happening, viewed from a remote enough point in the past, seem absurdly low.  And yet, for some reason, we often weave stories in which historical events have a flavour of inevitability to them.  Think how many science fiction stories you’ve read on the theme of time travel, in which the time traveller attempts to “change history,” only to find that what was going to happen, happens anyway.  Push history, and it pushes back.

If you’re a Stephen King fan, you’ll know that his latest book, 11-22-63, involves a time traveller who attempts to prevent the Kennedy assassination (which of course took place on the date that gives the book its title).  As you might guess, even with several years lead-time, preventing the fatal shot from being fired from the Dallas book depository is no simple task.  As filmmaker Errol Morris puts it in his review of King’s book:  “What if history is too forceful to redirect?  What if jiggering the engine produces no favourable outcome – merely a postponement of the inevitable?  If he had lived, Kennedy might not have escalated the war in Vietnam, and might have kept America out of a bloody mire.  But we don’t know.  What if we were headed there anyway?  Then our tampering might only make things worse.  It is not historical inevitability, but something close.”

These kinds of questions, about the inevitability (or otherwise) of history, have made their way into our popular culture, so I’m happy to give the last word to Lisa Simpson.  I’m thinking of a Halloween episode in which Lisa had lost a tooth; as part of an experiment for a science fair project, she leaves the tooth in a glass of cola overnight.  Sure enough, the next morning she sees a peculiar mould growing on it; and looking through her microscope, she sees that she’s crated little cave men.  Some hours later she looks again, and the little people are undergoing what appears to be the Renaissance; soon, one of the little people is seen nailing something to the cathedral door. She gasps:  “I’ve created Lutherans!”

More on likelihood of life – and intelligent life in particular – next time.

935. It Is an Urban Jungle Out There

By Pop X, Center for Biological Diversity, October 19, 2012

As the world's population grows, so does the human footprint. A new study predicts that in less than 20 years, urbanized areas on the planet will expand by 463,000 square miles -- that's nearly three times the size of California. Or, imagined another way, that's like adding 20,000 football fields of paved-over urban jungle every day.

It will be, as one researcher calls it, "an unprecedented era of urban expansion and city-building." Much of that's going to happen in Asia, especially China, but not all. The researchers at Yale, Texas A&M and Boston University tell us that in North America, where nearly 8 out of 10 people live in a cityscape, urban land will nearly double — to 96,000 square miles -- by 2030. All of that comes with the construction of roads, buildings, power plants, parking lots and housing subdivisions. It's a daunting image of nature paved over, but, the researchers say, it can be -- and should be -- seen as an opportunity to do development with minimal harm.

"Given the long life and near irreversibility of infrastructure investments, it will be critical for current urbanization-related policies to consider their long impacts," said Karen Seto, lead author of the study and an assistant professor at Yale. "We have a huge opportunity to shape how cities develop and their environmental impacts."

There's another important point in that same study: The more homes we build for ourselves, the more homes we destroy for wildlife. The researchers project that the urban growth expected by 2030 will "encroach on or destroy" habitat for 139 amphibians, 41 mammals and 25 birds considered endangered by the International Union for Conservation of Nature. That estimate seems perilously low to us, but every species we lose forever amounts to a collective tragedy.

"It's not all about carbon footprint, which is what mayors and planners typically think about now, but we need to consider how urban expansion will have implications for other, nonhuman species and the value of these species for present and future generations," said Burak Guneralp, one of the researchers at Texas A&M.

That's been a driving factor in our work here at the Center for Biological Diversity. Just this week, a California judge on one of our lawsuits confirmed that the proposed Newhall Ranch project in Los Angeles County, which would create a new town of 60,000 people on the banks for the struggling Santa Clara River, violated laws that protect endangered species. And earlier this year, we petitioned to protect 53 amphibians and reptiles around the country, many of which are threatened by urban expansion driven by the growth of our human population. One of the most important steps that can be taken is securing protected "critical habitat" for these species, a designation helps stem the replacement, by strip malls and subdivisions, of the few remaining homes these vanishing plants and animals have. A good example: More than 838,000 acres of critical habitat were recently proposed for the jaguar in the Southwest, a result we've been fighting to achieve for more than a decade.

934. A Rogue Climate Experiment Outrages Scientists

By Henry Fountain, The New York Times, October 18, 2012

A California businessman chartered a fishing boat in July, loaded it with 100 tons of iron dust and cruised through Pacific waters off western Canada, spewing his cargo into the sea in an ecological experiment that has outraged scientists and government officials.

The entrepreneur, whose foray came to light only this week, even duped the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in the United States into lending him ocean-monitoring buoys for the project.

Canada’s environment ministry says it is investigating the experiment, which was carried out with no government or scientific oversight. A spokesman said the ministry had warned the venture in advance that its plan would violate international agreements.

Marine scientists and other experts have assailed the experiment as unscientific, irresponsible and probably in violation of those agreements, which are intended to prevent tampering with ocean ecosystems under the guise of trying to fight the effects of climate change.

Though the environmental impact of the foray could well prove minimal, scientists said, it raises the specter of what they have long feared: rogue field experiments that might unintentionally put the environment at risk.

The entrepreneur, Russ George, calling it a “state-of-the-art study,” said his team scattered iron dust several hundred miles west of the islands of Haida Gwaii, in northern British Columbia, in exchange for $2.5 million from a native Canadian group.

The iron spawned the growth of enormous amounts of plankton, which Mr. George, a former fisheries and forestry worker, said might allow the project to meet one of its goals: aiding the recovery of the local salmon fishery for the native Haida.

Plankton absorbs carbon dioxide, the predominant greenhouse gas, and settles deep in the ocean when it dies, sequestering carbon. The Haida had hoped that by burying carbon, they could also sell so-called carbon offset credits to companies and make money.

Iron fertilization is contentious because it is associated with geoengineering, a set of proposed strategies for counteracting global warming through the deliberate manipulation of the environment. Many experts have argued that scientists should be researching such geoengineering techniques — like spewing compounds into the atmosphere to reflect more sunlight or using sophisticated machines to remove carbon dioxide from the air.

But tampering with the environment is risky, they say, so any experiments must be carried out responsibly and transparently, with the involvement of the scientific community and proper governance.

“Geoengineering is extremely controversial,” said Andrew Parker, a fellow at the Belfer Center at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard. “There is a need to protect the environment while making sure safe and legitimate research can go ahead.”

Mark L. Wells, a marine scientist at the University of Maine, said that what Mr. George did “could be described as ocean dumping.”

Dr. Wells said it would be difficult for Mr. George to demonstrate what impact the iron had on the plankton and called it “extraordinarily unlikely” that Mr. George could prove that the experiment met the goal of permanently removing some carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.

NOAA acknowledged that it had provided the project with 20 instrument-laden buoys that drift in the ocean for a year or more and measure water temperature, salinity and other characteristics. Such buoys are often sent out on what the agency calls “vessels of opportunity,” and the data they provide, uploaded to satellites, is publicly available.

But a spokesman said the agency had been “misled” by the group, which “did not disclose that it was going to discharge material into the ocean.”

The nature of Mr. George’s project was first reported this week in an article in The Guardian, a British newspaper, after it was revealed by the ETC Group, a watchdog group in Montreal that opposes geoengineering.

Mr. Parker, of Harvard’s Kennedy School, said it appeared that the project had contravened two international agreements on geoengineering, the London Convention on the dumping of wastes at sea and a moratorium declared by the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity — as well as a set of principles developed at Oxford University on transparency, regulation and the need for public participation.

Mr. George, said that his experiment was not related to geoengineering, and that 100 tons was a negligible amount of iron compared to what naturally enters the oceans. “This is a community trying to maintain its livelihood,” he said of the Haida.

He said his team had collected a “golden mountain” of data on the plankton bloom. Mr. George, who described himself as chief scientist on the project and said he has training as a plant ecologist, refused to name any of the other scientists on the team.

Scientists who have been involved with sanctioned iron fertilization experiments strongly disputed Mr. George’s assertion about the quality of his experiment, saying that it was roughly 10 times bigger than any other but that the fishing boat used and the science team were clearly insufficient.

Victor Smetacek, an oceanographer with the Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research in Germany who recently published an analysis of sanctioned fertilization research conducted in 2004 in the Southern Ocean, said Mr. George’s project would give a black eye to legitimate research.

“This kind of behavior is disastrous,” he said, describing Mr. George, with whom he had brief contact more than five years ago, as a “messing around, bumbling guy.”

Mr. George, 62, of Northern California, was previously in the public eye when, as chief executive of a company called Planktos, he proposed a similar iron-fertilization project, in the equatorial Pacific west of the Galápagos Islands, whose purpose was the sale of carbon offsets. Under cap-and-trade programs in various countries, polluters can offset their emissions of greenhouse gases by buying credits from projects that store carbon or otherwise mitigate global warming.

The project was canceled in 2008 after what his company called a “disinformation campaign” by environmentalists and others made it impossible to attract investors.

Mr. George said that during that period he was contacted by the Old Massett Village Council, one of two Haida groups on Haida Gwaii, about “wanting to do something about their fish,” which had suffered population declines.

But John Disney, the council’s economic development director, said he had worked with Mr. George on other projects before, including one to generate carbon credits by replacing alder forests on the islands with conifers. That project never came to fruition.

Mr. Disney defended the iron sprinkling project, saying that it had been approved by Old Massett’s villagers and cleared by the council’s lawyers.

He said at least seven Canadian government agencies were aware of the project. But a spokesman for Canada’s environment minister said Thursday that the salmon group was twice warned in advance that its plan violated international agreements Canada had signed that would prohibit an iron-seeding project with a commercial element, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation reported.

Mr. Disney also said that the marine science community, including researchers at the Wegener Institute in Germany, had known about the project.

But Mr. Smetacek disputed that as well. “I’ve had no contact with this guy on this,” he said, referring to Mr. George.