Robotic Fish to Monitor Pollution in Spanish Harbor
CBS News reports that a school of battery-powered robotic fish will monitor pollution in the Spanish harbor of Gijon. The robotic fish contain special sensors to help them avoid rocks, ships and other objects so they won't need to be remotely monitored or remote controlled.
The robotic fish will patrol the harbor of Gijon, in northern Spain under a $3.6 million grant from the European Union. Hu said Gijon was chosen because port authorities there had expressed an interest in the technology.
The plan might seem "like something straight out of science fiction," said Rory Doyle, a researcher working on the project, but he explained that there was a very simple reason for choosing fishlike machines to monitor the harbor's environmental health.
"The design of fish which nature has produced is a very energy-efficient one," Doyle said. "The fish's efficiency is created by hundreds of millions of years' of evolution. Submarines come nowhere near it."
Information gathered from the robo-fish would be transmitted to the port's control center using a wireless Internet signal when the devices surfaced. The data gathered would be used to create a three-dimensional pollution map of the harbor's area.
Here's a video (no sound) that shows the robotic fish in action. (via Daily Mail, Ecofriend.org)
Niall Ferguson has written an opinion piece for the Telegraph that highlights recent information that should be of grave concern to everyone. Plastic refuge is on the rise and according to the United Nations Environment Programme there are "46,000 pieces of plastic floating on every square mile of the world's oceans."
According to the Marine Conservation Society's latest annual survey, which covers more than a hundred miles of British coastline, there has been a 90 per cent increase in the density of litter over the past decade. More than a third of the rubbish found in the latest survey consisted of fragments of plastic, food wrappers, bottle lids and cotton buds.
And it's not just Britain. The plastic plague is a global epidemic. According to the United Nations Environment Programme, there are approximately 46,000 pieces of plastic floating on every square mile of the world's oceans.
The problem is more than merely aesthetic. Last week the Los Angeles Times carried a shocking report from Midway Atoll, which is about as isolated a spot as the world has to offer, 2,800 miles west of California and 2,200 miles east of Japan.
Hardly anyone lives there, so the number of crisp packets chucked in the sea can't be large. And yet birdlife on Midway is being devastated as albatrosses inadvertently feed their chicks lethal fragments of plastic picked up from what's known as the Eastern Garbage Patch, a virtual island of trash formed by the currents of the North Pacific subtropical gyre.
The Patch is not so much a city in the sea as a municipal dump on the sea.
The island of garbage and ocean full of plastic are not pleasant things to think about. Just because the ocean currents sometimes take garbage away where we can't see it doesn't mean we shouldn't be very concerned by these alarming statistics. Pollution is also a big concern for Earth's future. It isn't just global warming gases we have to worry about.
Chris Rapley has an article about whether the Earth has an optimum human population level and what this number might be. Clearly the Earth cannot handle the 6.5+ billion people on Earth today -- at least not the way these people are currently using up resources and emitting pollutants.
So if we believe that the size of the human "footprint" is a serious problem (and there is much evidence for this) then a rational view would be that along with a raft of measures to reduce the footprint per person, the issue of population management must be addressed.
Let us assume (reasonably) that an optimum human population level exists, which would provide the physical and intellectual capacity to ensure a rich and fulfilling life for all, but would represent a call upon the services of the planet which would be benign and hence sustainable over the long term.
A scientific analysis can tell us what that optimum number is (perhaps 2-3 billion?).
With that number and a timescale as targets, a path to reach "Utopia" from where we are now is, in principle, a straightforward matter of identifying options, choosing the approach and then planning and navigating the route from source to destination.
Nearly all of the growth comes from the less developed countries according to a press release from UN's population division from February.
World population is expected to increase by 2.6 billion over the next 45 years, from 6.5 billion today to 9.1 billion in 2050. Almost all growth will take place in the less developed regions, where today's 5.3 billion population is expected to swell to 7.8 billion in 2050. By contrast, the population of the more developed regions will remain mostly unchanged, at 1.2 billion.
Find a way to stabilize populations in third-world countries and maybe the population growth will slow to a crawl or even fall. However, this may not help the pollution problem if a significant amount of it is coming from the more developed nations -- or if the more developed nations create the worst types of pollution.
Depressing news in this BBC news story that says Norwegian scientists have measured the toxicity in kiler whales and found that they now move to the top of the most toxic mammal list passing polar bears.
Norwegian scientists have found that killer whales - or orcas, as they are sometimes known - have overtaken polar bears at the head of the toxic table.
No other arctic mammals have ingested such a high concentration of hazardous man-made chemicals.
The Norwegian Polar Institute tested blubber samples taken from creatures in Tysfjord in the Norwegian Arctic.
The chemicals they found included pesticides, flame retardants and PCBs - which used to be used in many industrial processes.
Chemicals are turning the oceans into a chemical soup. The WWF called it a "chemical sink." The WWF provides a list of toxins here on its website.
Former U.S. Secretary of State James Baker has argued for a serious look into alternative energies. Reuters (via MSNBC.com) reports that while speaking to the Houston Forum Club, Baker said, "It may surprise you a little bit, but maybe it’s because I’m a hunter and a fisherman, but I think we need to a pay a little more attention to what we need to do to protect our environment. When you have energy companies like Shell and British Petroleum, both of which are perhaps represented in this room, saying there
is a problem with excess carbon dioxide emission, I think we ought
to listen." Reuters reports that Baker said it is time to start an "orderly" move towards alternative energy sources. Baker served in the
cabinet of George Bush Senior and represented George W. Bush in
the controversial 2000 elections. The Bush Administration has
refused to acknowledege that global warming is a threat -- often ignoring evidence and warnings from organizations like NASA, the Woods Hole Research Center and even the Pentagon. The Bush Administration has also pursued plans, like the Clear Skies Initiative, that environmental groups say greatly weaken the existing Clean Air Act. The Sierra Club calls the Clear Skies plan a Bush smokescreen to weaken the Clean Air Act and allow more pollution.
