Nearly 97 percent of Texas is in either exceptional or extreme drought.

From June through August, Texas suffered the hottest three months ever recorded in the United States, according to the National Weather Service. And the 12 months ending on Aug. 31 were the driest 12 months in Texas history, with most of the state receiving just 21 percent of its annual average rainfall.

Record heat has extended to other states: Arizona, Colorado, Louisiana, New Mexico and Oklahoma joined Texas in posting their warmest August on record.

In Texas alone, agricultural losses have topped $5 billion.

via Texas drought worsens from ‘abysmal’ – Weather – msnbc.com.

Scott Thill: We’ve got heat domes in the Midwest and the East, and cool marine layers chilling summers in the West. In related news, up is down and down is up.

Peter Ward: Well, right now Seattle is 64 degrees. We’ve had the wettest, coldest summer in history. We’re freezing. It’s insane, but so is global warming.

…

ST: So how do you see climate change unfolding in the next 50 years?

PW: Unless we do something about human population, I doubt we will be able to do anything. The thing is, we’re good enough at fixing diseases and feeding ourselves that we’re not going to lose 20 to 40 percent of the human population. But if we could drop human population back down to four billion, we’d have a fighting chance. But we can’t. I truly believe that we’re heading to 10 or 11 billion by the end of this century, at the latest. We’re increasing longevity with wonderful medical advances. But people don’t realize that by increasing lifespans a decade or more around the world, we’re decreasing the death rate as the birth rate keeps rising. So we’re in a runaway human population situation and have been since the ’80s and ’90s. The scary thing is that we’ve got an intersection of declining freshwater and too many people.

And the freshwater decline is due to global warming, which is raising the snow levels in the mountains. California is a prime example. When it gets to the point that it rains all winter in the Sierra Nevada, what do you have when the hot summer arrives and you need that water for irrigation? When there’s nothing to melt anymore by March or April, you’ve got a desert. So the agriculture of the San Joaquin Valley is in deep trouble from decreased freshwater and soil that is turning salty because of sea-level rise. This is the case all over the planet. The lowest lying lands have the richest soil, and these are the lands that rising sea level is going to salinize.

…

ST: Although extreme weather variation is a climate change no-brainer, the party line for the Republican base is that snow of any kind is evidence that global warming is a hoax.

PW: It just drives me crazy. Why do they think we’re getting more snow? Because there is more water in the atmosphere! And why is that? Oh yeah, it’s warmer. If we could teach science in school, these guys would get a clue. These are enormous wet-air masses that are anomalously produced in winter, and work their way across North America and push up against the Arctic cold. Of course it turns to snow! It’s more water than has been in that area than ever before.

via We’ve Entered the Age of Mass Extinction: Goodbye Fish and a Whole Lot More | | AlterNet.

Nearly 50,000 tons of sludge at water treatment facilities has been found to contain radioactive cesium as the result of the accident at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant. Over 1,500 tons is so contaminated that it cannot be buried for disposal.

Water treatment facilities in eastern and northeastern Japan have been discovering sludge containing cesium.

The health ministry says there is 49,250 tons of such sludge in 14 prefectures in eastern and northeastern Japan.

A total of 1,557 tons in 5 prefectures, including Fukushima and Miyagi, was found to contain 8,000 or more becquerels per kilogram. This sludge is too radioactive to be buried for disposal.

The most contaminated sludge, with 89,697 becquerels per kilogram, was discovered at a water treatment facility in Koriyama City, Fukushima.

The ministry says 76 percent of the roughly 50,000 tons of radioactive sludge is being stored at water treatment plants and they have no ways to dispose of most of it.

It says more than 54,000 tons of additional sludge has not been checked for radioactive materials.

The ministry plans to study how to dispose of the radioactive sludge.

via NHK WORLD English.

Another Inconvenient Truth: The World’s Growing Population Poses a Malthusian Dilemma.

Solving climate change, the Sixth Great Extinction and population growth… at the same time.

By 2050, the world will host nine billion people—and that’s if population growth slows in much of the developing world. Today, at least one billion people are chronically malnourished or starving. Simply to maintain that sad state of affairs would require the clearing (read: deforestation) of 900 million additional hectares of land, according to Pedro Sanchez, director of the Tropical Agriculture and Rural Environment Program at The Earth Institute at Columbia University.

The bad news beyond the impacts on people, plants and animals of that kind of deforestation: There isn’t that much land available. At most, we might be able to add 100 million hectares to the 4.3 billion already under cultivation worldwide.

“Agriculture is the main driver of most ecological problems on the planet,” said economist Jeffrey Sachs​, Scientific American columnist and Earth Institute director. “We are literally eating away the other species on the planet.”

extract from: Another Inconvenient Truth: The World’s Growing Population Poses a Malthusian Dilemma: Scientific American.

The persistent inability of the United Nations to forge international consensus on climate change issues was on display Wednesday, as Security Council members disagreed over whether they should address possible instability provoked by problems like rising sea levels or competition over water resources.

Western powers like the United States argued that the potential effects of climate change, including the mass migrations of populations, made it a crucial issue in terms of global peace and security. Russia and China, backed by much of the developing world, rejected the notion that the issue even belonged on the Security Council agenda.

With the major powers again at loggerheads, President Marcus Stephen of Nauru traveled the nearly 8,000 miles from his tiny Pacific island state to plead for action.

Speaking on behalf of some 14 island states vulnerable to disappearing or at least losing significant territory to rising sea levels, Mr. Stephen mused aloud about how the debate might differ if larger countries were affected.

“What if the pollution coming from our island nations was threatening the very existence of the major emitters?” he said. “What would be the nature of today’s debate under those circumstances?”

Countries threatened with extinction — already some residents have experimented with emigrating as higher and higher tides endanger their livelihoods — are tired of merely hearing sympathy for their plight, the president said.

“Demonstrate it by formally recognizing that climate change is a threat to international peace and security,” Mr. Stephen said, comparing it to nuclear proliferation or terrorism given its potential to destabilize governments and create conflict. “Neither has ever led to the disappearance of an entire nation, though that is what we are confronted with today.”

via Climate Change Security Council Talks Deadlock – NYTimes.com.

In Texas, where the drought is the worst, virtually no part of the state has been untouched. City dwellers and ranchers have been tormented by excessive heat and high winds. In the Southwest, wildfires are chewing through millions of acres.

Last month, the United States Department of Agriculture designated all 254 counties in Texas natural disaster areas, qualifying them for varying levels of federal relief. More than 30 percent of the state’s wheat fields might be lost, adding pressure to a crop in short supply globally.

Even if weather patterns shift and relief-giving rain comes, losses will surely head past $3 billion in Texas alone, state agricultural officials said.

Most troubling is that the drought, which could go down as one of the nation’s worst, has come on extra hot and extra early. It has its roots in 2010 and continued through the winter. The five months from this February to June, for example, were so dry that they shattered a Texas record set in 1917, said Don Conlee, the acting state climatologist.

Oklahoma has had only 28 percent of its normal summer rainfall, and the heat has blasted past 90 degrees for a month.

“We’ve had a two- or three-week start on what is likely to be a disastrous summer,” said Kevin Kloesel, director of the Oklahoma Climatological Survey.

The question, of course, becomes why. In a spring and summer in which weather news has been dominated by epic floods and tornadoes, it is hard to imagine that more than a quarter of the country is facing an equally daunting but very different kind of natural disaster.

via 14 States Suffering Under Drought – NYTimes.com.

Nuclear fuel has melted through base of Fukushima plant

The nuclear fuel in three of the reactors at the Fukushima Dai-Ichi nuclear plant has melted through the base of the pressure vessels and is pooling in the outer containment vessels, according to a report by the Japanese government.

The findings of the report, which has been given to the International Atomic Energy Agency, were revealed by the Yomiuri newspaper, which described a “melt-through” as being “far worse than a core meltdown” and “the worst possibility in a nuclear accident.”

A spokesman for Tokyo Electric Power Co. said the company is presently revising the road-map for bringing the plant under control, including the time required to achieve cold shutdown of the reactors.

In a best-case scenario, the company says it will be able to achieve that by October, although that may have to be revised in light of the report.

Water that was pumped into the pressure vessels to cool the fuel rods, becoming highly radioactive in the process, has been confirmed to have leaked out of the containment vessels and outside the buildings that house the reactors.

Tepco said it is trying to contain the contaminated water and prevent it from leaking into the sea, but elevated levels of radiation have been confirmed in the ocean off the plant.

The radiation will also have contaminated the soil and plant and animal life around the facility, making the task of cleaning up more difficult and expensive, as well as taking longer.

The experts have also yet to come up with a plan for decommissioning the ruined plant. Studies have estimated that the cost of the accident at Fukushima may rise as high as $250 billion over the next 10 years.

via Nuclear fuel has melted through base of Fukushima plant – Telegraph.

A chronic drought is ravaging farmland. The Gobi Desert is inching south. The Yellow River, the so-called birthplace of Chinese civilization, is so polluted it can no longer supply drinking water. The rapid growth of megacities — 22 million people in Beijing and 12 million in Tianjin alone — has drained underground aquifers that took millenniums to fill.

Not atypically, the Chinese government has a grand and expensive solution: Divert at least six trillion gallons of water each year hundreds of miles from the other great Chinese river, the Yangtze, to slake the thirst of the north China plain and its 440 million people.

The engineering feat, called the South-North Water Diversion Project, is China’s most ambitious attempt to subjugate nature. It would be like channeling water from the Mississippi River to meet the drinking needs of Boston, New York and Washington. Its $62 billion price tag is twice that of the Three Gorges Dam, which is the world’s largest hydroelectric project. And not unlike that project, which Chinese officials last month admitted had “urgent problems,” the water diversion scheme is increasingly mired in concerns about its cost, its environmental impact and the sacrifices poor people in the provinces are told to make for those in richer cities.

Three artificial channels from the Yangtze would transport precious water from the south, which itself is increasingly afflicted by droughts; the region is suffering its worst one in 50 years. The project’s human cost is staggering — along the middle route, which starts here in Hubei Province at a gigantic reservoir and snakes 800 miles to Beijing, about 350,000 villagers are being relocated to make way for the canal. Many are being resettled far from their homes and given low-grade farmland; in Hubei, thousands of people have been moved to the grounds of a former prison.

“Look at this dead yellow earth,” said Li Jiaying, 67, a hunched woman hobbling to her new concrete home clutching a sickle and a bundle of dry sticks for firewood. “Our old home wasn’t even being flooded for the project and we were asked to leave. No one wanted to leave.”

via Plan for China’s Water Crisis Spurs Concern – NYTimes.com.

The International Union for the Conservation of Nature’s Red List of at-risk wildlife species considers 36 of the world’s 40 dolphin species to be in trouble

Dolphins are probably the most iconic and best loved species of the marine world. Their playful nature and high intelligence have endeared them to people for eons. But our love of dolphins might not be enough to save them from extinction brought on by overfishing, pollution, climate change and other environmental affronts perpetrated by humans.

The nonprofit International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN), which maintains a worldwide “Red List” of at-risk wildlife species, considers 36 of the world’s 40 different dolphin species to be in trouble. Yes, specific events can cause problems for dolphins—researchers believe that the deaths of 300 dolphins in the Gulf of Mexico over the last year can be blamed on the BP oil spill there. But more widespread and constant forms of pollution—such as run-off of agricultural and industrial chemicals into rivers that drain into coastal areas of the ocean where dolphins spend much of their time—are having a more lasting negative effect on dolphins by poisoning them and causing reproductive problems.

Also, dolphins have long been the unwitting victims of fishermen targeting large prey, such as tuna. According to Defenders of Wildlife, fishermen started to notice a half century ago that schools of yellow fin tuna seemed to follow dolphins that swim higher in the water column, especially in the Eastern Tropical Pacific. “Fishermen there have consequently found that setting nets on dolphins to catch the tuna swimming underneath is a lucrative technique for tuna fishing, despite the fact that the practice is extremely injurious to dolphins,” reports the group, adding that some seven million dolphins have since been killed as a result of the practice.

Also, our unrelenting demand for seafood—which has caused rampant overfishing throughout the world’s oceans—means that dolphins, which feed on smaller fish such as mackerel, cod and herring as well as squid, are having a harder and harder time finding food. And in Turkey, Peru, Sri Lanka, Japan and elsewhere, dolphins are hunted as a delicacy and also to decrease competition for fish resources.

via Flipped Off: Pollution and Overfishing Spell Trouble for Dolphins Worldwide: Scientific American.

A major new leak of highly radioactive water into the ocean near the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant was discovered May 11.

Local authorities and the embassies of the United States and other countries, including neighboring nations, were notified of the latest setback at the stricken plant, which has been out of control since the March 11 Great East Japan Earthquake.

The plant’s operator, Tokyo Electric Power Co., said cesium-134 at levels about 18,000 times above government standards for wastewater discharge into the ocean was detected in the sea near the No. 3 reactor.

Workers discovered highly radioactive water in a pit connected to a trench of the No. 3 reactor around 10:30 a.m. May 11.

The water leaked into the sea through cracks on the side of the pit facing the ocean.

TEPCO stopped the leak at 6:45 p.m. by plugging the crack with concrete.

Checks on seawater outside a silt fence installed by TEPCO last month at an intake of the No. 3 reactor to stop contamination from spreading out to sea found 96 becquerels of iodine-131 per cubic centimeter, 2,400 times above safety standards, according to the utility. The silt fence is a plastic curtain hanging from floats and reaching near the sea bottom.

Inside the pit, the iodine-131 level was 3,400 becquerels per cubic centimeter, 85,000 times the permissible level.

Cesium-134 was measured at 37,000 becquerels per cubic centimeter, 620,000 times the safety limit.

TEPCO said the contaminated water was believed to be from the basement of the turbine building of the No. 3 reactor, where highly radioactive water was discovered earlier.

It is the first major leak of highly contaminated water into the sea since a leak near the No. 2 reactor last month.

via asahi.com（朝日新聞社）：More radioactive water leaks into sea near stricken plant – English.