Author: Arielle.conti

Greenwire: The attack came swiftly and silently in the night.The lioness bounded over the thatch of acacia thorns that surrounds the Maasai village and headed for the donkey pen.

The predator was clawing at a donkey’s haunches by the time men stirred in their dung-covered huts. A warrior confronted the dusty tangle of teeth and fur, and sunk a spear through the big cat’s right rear leg.

Then, as swiftly as she had appeared, the lioness scrambled over a rooftop and vanished in the darkness.

The donkey survived, but the lioness died of its wound. Villagers blame hunger and parched conditions for the late-March attack.

“This wasn’t the first time,” said Wilson Koite, chief of this encampment of more than 300 people in southern Kenya, near the Tanzania border. “There’s no wildlife inside of the park, so [lions] just come into the villages.”

When the rains failed for the second straight year in 2009, plants withered to their roots in this critical dry-season refuge. Marshes and the shallow bed of Lake Amboseli, usually fed by seasonal rains and runoff from snow-capped Mount Kilimanjaro, cracked in equatorial sun. With little to eat or drink, more than 70 percent of Amboseli’s zebra and wildebeest died of starvation, predation or opportunistic infections.

The onset of long rains in recent weeks has begun to rehydrate Amboseli’s landscape. But with their traditional prey diminished in numbers, the park’s top predators are targeting livestock and risking death. At least nine Amboseli-area lions have been speared or poisoned to death during the past six months, say wildlife managers and conservationists.

“We suspect that there are many more happening,” said Paula Kahumbu, executive director of WildlifeDirect, a Nairobi-based organization founded by conservationist Richard Leakey. “[Predator] attacks have been going on for years, but things are really escalating.”

Killing lions and other wildlife is illegal but often goes unpunished in Kenya. If goats or cattle are slain by predators, the government or a handful of nonprofit organizations may compensate herdsmen for the loss. But cash is often not enough to cool tempers.

Violence escalates

In late March, Maasai warriors stalked a lioness into the bush and speared her after she slaughtered cattle south of the park, Amboseli warden Joseph Nyongesa said. In ensuing weeks, conservationists confirmed the poisoning deaths of five Amboseli-area lions and three more near the Maasai Mara National Reserve, 175 miles to the northwest.

At the height of the drought some southern villages were suffering lion attacks several times a week, Kahumbu said. Young lions, apparently unfamiliar with how to hunt natural prey, were also stalking permanent settlements for livestock.

“The rate has declined, but lion attacks continue because their natural prey is still diminished,” she added. “It will take a while for wildlife to recover.”

A March 2010 aerial census recorded three lions in a 24,000-square-kilometer area encompassing Amboseli and parts of northern Tanzania. A May 2007 census recorded 10 lions.

The population is likely higher, the latest census underscored, as lions are difficult to spot from the air and are most active at night. Kenya Wildlife Service (KWS) officials and conservationists who study Amboseli estimate that the area had about 30-40 resident lions prior to the recent killings.

What’s certain, wildlife managers say, is some Amboseli lions are roaming unexpectedly long distances in search of wildebeest, zebra and other wild prey. Six lions fitted with KWS satellite collars have been tracked far into northern Tanzania, said park warden Nyongesa.

“We have heard there are quite a number of lions killed on that side, but most of them are the lions of Amboseli,” he said.

Wildebeest and zebra constitute the greatest biomass in Amboseli but suffered the greatest losses during the drought.

The wildebeest population fell by about 83 percent, from 18,538 in 2007 to 3,098 in 2010, according to the aerial counts. Zebra declined by around 71 percent, from 15,328 to 4,432.

The prolonged dry spell also took a heavy toll on livestock.

The area’s cattle population is less than half of what it was three years ago, the counts show. Livestock are critical to the Maasai, who build their homes with dung, cover their blades with leather, and fill their bellies with meat, milk and blood.

Maasai elder Kayian Olekiraku said the drought killed all but 20 of his 200 cattle. The same night of the attack in Koite’s village another lion broke the leg of one of Olekiraku’s bulls before being chased off.

“When I was young, we just killed the lion,” he recalled at the edge of his hardscrabble village. “Now we don’t. We fear the government will take us to jail.”

‘Predator proof’ fences

Wildlife service officials say they have been meeting with southern Kenya residents over the past few months to discuss better animal husbandry practices and changes to the ecosystem.

“We had to calm down the situation by talking to them,” said KWS senior scientist Charles Musyoki. “We know they are incurring losses, but we needed to talk to them so that they don’t retaliate by killing the animals.”

In February, the wildlife service launched nationwide strategies for managing lions, cheetahs, hyenas and wild dogs. The plans are intended to preserve ecologically viable predator and prey populations inside of reserves, create carnivore conservation zones outside of government-protected areas and cull animals that attack livestock repeatedly.

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The Wall Street Journal: A huge jolt convulsed an oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico. The pipe down to the well on the ocean floor, more than a mile below, snapped in two. Workers battled a toxic spill.

That was 2003—seven years before last month’s Deepwater Horizon disaster, which killed 11 people and sent crude spewing into the sea. And in 2004, managers of BP PLC, the oil giant involved in both incidents, warned in a trade journal that the company wasn’t prepared for the long-term, round-the-clock task of dealing with a deep-sea spill.

It still isn’t, as Deepwater Horizon demonstrates and as BP’s chief executive, Tony Hayward said recently. It’s “probably true” that BP didn’t do enough planning in advance of the disaster, Mr. Hayward said. There are some capabilities, he said, “that we could have available to deploy instantly, rather than creating as we go.”

It’s a problem that spans the industry, whose major players include Chevron Corp., Royal Dutch Shell and Petróleo Brasileiro SA. Without adequately planning for trouble, the oil business has focused on developing experimental equipment and techniques to drill in ever deeper waters, according to a Wall Street Journal examination of previous deepwater accidents. As drillers pushed the boundaries, regulators didn’t always mandate preparation for disaster recovery or perform independent monitoring.

The brief, roughly two-decade history of deepwater drilling has seen serious problems: fires, equipment failures, wells that collapsed, platforms that nearly sank. Since last July, one brand-new deepwater rig—among the 40 or so operating in at least 1,000 feet of water in the Gulf—was swept by fire. Another lost power and started to drift, threatening to detach from the wellhead. Poor maintenance at a third deepwater well led to a serious gas leak, according to regulatory records.

By some measures, offshore drilling has become safer in recent years. Industry backers argue that major accidents are rare. The rate of serious injuries in U.S. waters fell 71% between 1998 and 2008, and the number of serious oil spills has also been falling once hurricanes are taken into account. Moreover, deepwater drilling is by some measures safer than drilling in shallower waters, where rigs are often older and operated by smaller companies.

Still, drilling for oil at depths no human could survive presents special risks when something does go wrong. The water pressure is crushing, the seabed temperature is almost freezing, the underground conditions explosive. The rapid push into deeper water means that some projects rely on technology that hasn’t been used before.

“It’s like outer space, in terms of the complexity of the operating environment,” said Robin West, who helped oversee offshore-drilling policy under President Ronald Reagan and is now chairman of PFC Energy, a consulting firm.

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The Times-Picayune: BP admitted Thursday that a figure it has been citing for weeks as its best estimate of the total amount of oil flowing into the Gulf of Mexico — 5,000 barrels a day – is too low. A tube inserted into a hole in a broken riser pipe is now capturing 5,000 barrels of oil per day, but oil is still gushing from that hole as well as from another leak nearby, BP spokesman Mark Proegler said.

BP is measuring the oil as it is siphoned onto a drill ship on the water’s surface, Proegler said.

“Five thousand was always understood to be a very rough estimate. That number was useful and sort of the best estimate at the time,” said Jane Lubchenco, administrator of the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration, the federal agency that came up with the 5,000-barrel, or 210,000-gallon, per day estimate.

NOAA has no immediate plans to revise its estimate and will wait until a recently assembled team of scientists concludes a study of the oil flow and releases its findings.

Oil has been escaping the well since the Deepwater Horizon rig exploded and sank in the Gulf of Mexico a month ago.

Lubchenco said the spill amount does not impact response efforts, which are focused primarily on stopping the flow of oil and preventing it from washing ashore. Thick, dark oil was spotted this week in a Louisiana marsh near the mouth of the Mississippi River.

“The response to the spill has never been pegged to that estimate of 5,000 or any other estimate,” Lubchenco said. “We’ve always pegged our response to the worst-case scenario and had much more significant effort than would have been required if it would have been 5,000.”

BP has been working for about a month to contain two oil leaks on a pipe attached to the sunken Deepwater Horizon rig. The rig, which BP leased from Transocean, exploded about 50 miles off the Louisiana coast on April 20 and subsequently sank. Eleven people on the rig were killed.

Although BP and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration had estimated up until Thursday that 5,000 barrels of oil are gushing into the sea each day from the leaks, some outside experts have put the amount at five times that much.

Steve Wereley, a researcher at Purdue University, told the House Energy committee Wednesday that he believed about 70,000 barrels of oil are leaking each day from the larger leak, based on an analysis of video of the spill.

A live video stream of the leak released by BP Thursday shows oil and natural gas continuing to pour from the pipe despite the insertion tube, which is surrounded by a rubber flap to prevent oil from escaping.

Oil spewing from the hole in the riser pipe accounts for about 85 percent of what is pouring into the sea. The remainder is coming from a hole hundreds of feet away near an apparatus called a blowout preventer.

A task force has been assembled to determine exactly how much oil is leaking every day, Lubchenco said. It is not known when that team will have a new estimate available.

“They don’t have a precise timeline, but everyone understands the importance of having a good number and one that is scientifically credible,” Lubchenco said.

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The New York Times: The “probable extent” of the oil slick is an estimate by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration of where oil is mostly likely to go based on wind and ocean current forecasts, as well as analysis of aerial photography and satellite imagery. The “observed extent” show areas where oil was visible on the surface of the water during aerial surveys of the Gulf. The observed extents are not available every day. The extents may vary widely from day to day because of changes in wind patterns and ocean currents.

The loop currents are from NOAA and from Roffer’s Ocean Fishing Forecasting Service.

About the Estimates Used in the Chart

The totals for the amount of oil spilled are calculated beginning from the initial explosion at 10 p.m. on April 20. While both oil and gas are leaking from the well, the estimates here are only for the amount of oil. This was done so that all the estimates can be compared equally, since some of the methods have no way to account for the amount of gas. BP announced on May 21 that the fluid leaking was roughly half oil, half natural gas.

Totals are adjusted, beginning May 17, for oil diverted through a narrow tube that was inserted into the well’s damaged pipe. BP has made daily announcements of how much oil has been captured, which had been an average of 2,100 barrels per day, or a total of 8,400 barrels (352,000 gallons) through May 20.

The “NOAA” estimate is based on a figure released by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration on April 28 when the government agency raised its estimate of the flow rate to 5,000 barrels (210,000 gallons) per day from its initial estimate of 1,000 barrels per day, over public objections by BP.

The “MacDonald minimum” is based on an analysis by Ian R. MacDonald, an oceanographer at Florida State University that was published by SkyTruth on May 1. By studying the amount of the oil visible in aerial imagery, Dr. MacDonald calculated the flow rate to be at least 26,500 barrels (1.1 million gallons) per day. He called this a “minimum estimate” since his calculations could only account for oil that was visible on the surface and did not include oil that had evaporated, mixed in with sea water, sunk to the bottom or been collected by response crews.

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Science Daily: Hunting and fishing quotas limit the number of game animals or fish an individual may take based on harvests from the previous year. But according to a new study co-authored by University of Minnesota ecologist Craig Packer, this strategy may jeopardize wildlife populations.

The authors recommend that wildlife managers rethink policies for sustainable utilization. Setting limits on the number of days allowed for hunting and fishing rather than the number of trophies would be a more effective way to ensure continued supply and to prevent extinction.

Results of the study are published in the May 13 issue of Science.

“Quotas don’t consider population fluctuations caused by disease outbreaks, harsh weather and other variables that affect animal abundance from year to year,” Packer explains. “Hunters and fishermen can work harder to make their quotas when desirable species are scarce. The extra pressure can cause populations to collapse.” Setting limits on the amount of time spent hunting could better protect fragile populations.

John Fryxell and Kevin McCann, from the University of Guelph in Ontario, Canada, along with colleagues in Norway and the United States, developed a model based on mass action assumptions about human behavior and current hunting and fishing regulations. They tested the model using data from three populations of deer and moose from Canada and Norway over a 20- year period. Packer’s work on the impact of trophy hunting on lion populations in Africa and cougars in the United States, helped to inspire the current study.

The problem is exacerbated by the traditional practice of open access, Fryxell noted. Hunters and fishermen tend to choose spots based on word of mouth, which travels slowly. By the time they are well known, popular sites may already have shrinking populations and visitors may need to work harder and longer to reach quotas, which further endanger the species. Once populations are depleted, restoring them is a challenge.

“It can take decades for large animal populations to recover from collapses, as we know from our disastrous experience with cod stocks off the coast of Newfoundland, Fryxell said. “We need to make strategic long-term changes to make a difference.”

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Climate Wire: The Atlantic Ocean hurricane season begins June 1, and scientists tracking the Gulf of Mexico oil spill are beginning to think about what would happen if a storm hit the growing slick.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration won’t release its initial hurricane season forecast until Thursday, but experts said it would only take one storm in the Gulf to complicate the ongoing effort to stanch the gushing oil and limit its environmental impact.

NOAA talking points list a number of open questions, such as whether the oil plume could affect storm formation by suppressing evaporation of Gulf water and how a hurricane could change the size and location of the oil slick. There’s no record of a hurricane hitting a major oil spill, experts said.

Still, several scientists are worried that a hurricane could drive oil inland, soiling beaches and wetlands and pushing polluted water up river estuaries.

“My ‘oh, no’ thought is that a hurricane would pick up that oil and move it, along with salt, up into interior regions of the state that I am convinced the oil will not reach otherwise,” said Robert Twilley, an oceanographer at Louisiana State University.

“The bottom line is, how much oil are we going to get into our wetlands? We don’t know,” he said. “This thing is gushing out in these huge numbers.”

That’s a question that Florida State University researchers Steven Morey and Dmitry Dukhovskoy are trying to answer with computer models of storm surge and ocean currents.

A somewhat mixed picture

“The storm could potentially transport the oil over some distance, we’re not sure how far,” said Morey, a physical oceanographer. “It could maybe break up the masses of the oil, through mixing. And it could also cause oil to wash over the land in a storm surge.”

He and Dukhovskoy hope to have initial results by the time the storm season begins in roughly two weeks. But first they must tweak their computer models to take oil’s physical properties into account.

“Oil on water changes the stress on the water from the winds,” Morey said. “Oil will essentially slide over the water and change the roughness of the water. That’s why we call it an oil slick. … The waves present a technical challenge, as well.”

But Dukhovskoy said he believes the hardest problem might be predicting the size and location of the slick at the beginning of hurricane season, so the scientists can feed it into their computer models.

While the government hasn’t released its initial predictions for this year’s hurricane season, other experts expect an active year.

Last month, Colorado State University forecasters Bill Gray and Phil Klotzbach said they “continue to see above-average activity for the 2010 Atlantic hurricane season.” The pair are betting that warm ocean temperatures and a weakening El Niño will produce 15 named storms, including eight hurricanes. Half of those, they say, will be major hurricanes — classified as Category 4 or 5.

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BBC News: Remember the unseemly rush to biofuels? The sudden impetus from all kinds of bodies including UN institutions, the EU, and governments such as the UK that began about four years ago to ramp up the growing of fuel crops and to adopt liquids made from them as the low-carbon transport panacea?

While the enthusiasm was understandable given the absence at the time of other low-carbon transport “solutions”, the thinking was also full of holes.

Some biofuel systems would actually increase emissions, peoples’ rights (particularly in rural areas of developing countries) were potentially compromised, and the impacts on biodiversity of coating the surface of the planet in monocrop plantations were also potentially horrible.

You can argue that this state of affairs would never have come about if “the environment” had not been chopped up and partitioned into segments called “climate change”, “forests”, “biodiversity” and so on.

More holistic thinking – more integrated thinking structures at national and international level – would perhaps have ensured that the downsides were seen earlier in the day, and there would have been no over-eager policy-making and subsequent retrenchment.

Something potentially analogous has been happening with the international agreements that are supposed to deal with climate change and ozone depletion – the UN climate convention (UNFCCC) and the Montreal Protocol.

The latter has met with some success at progressively phasing out ozone-destroying chemicals such as cholorofluorocarbons (CFCs) and methyl bromide.

The job isn’t done yet – not least because developing countries have needed more time to make changes than industrialised nations – but it’s been going in the right direction, with CFCs themselves due to be eliminated this year apart from a few uses where there’s no alternative.

However, there’s been a problem. The replacement chemicals, HCFCs, are – like CFCs themselves – potent greenhouse gases; molecule for molecule they are thousands of times more potent than carbon dioxide. They also cause some ozone depletion, though far less than CFCs.

Three years ago, governments decided to accelerate the phase-out of HCFCs too, with target dates of 2020 for industrialised countries and 2030 for the developing world.

But the most likely replacements for HCFCs – HFCs – would still contribute substantially to the man-made greenhouse.

One study published last year concluded that if there were to be a meaningful global agreement to tackle greenhouse gases such as CO2, then by 2050, HFCs could be contributing anywhere between 9% and 45% to the man-made greenhouse effect.

A companion study concluded that by reducing CFC emissions to the atmosphere, the Montreal Protocol had done more by accident to curb global warming than the Kyoto Protocol had achieved intentionally.

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Slate: It’s still a problem. As of a few weeks ago, the “hole”—which isn’t so much a gap in the ozone layer as an area of seasonal thinning—is even bigger than it was at the height of the ozone panic in the 1980s. (At the moment, it spans a patch of sky almost the size of North America.) That said, the ozone layer is in much better shape today than it would have been had the world not taken decisive action 20 years ago. It’s just that the damage we did in the old days is going to take a long time to heal.

It’s still a problem. As of a few weeks ago, the “hole”—which isn’t so much a gap in the ozone layer as an area of seasonal thinning—is even bigger than it was at the height of the ozone panic in the 1980s. (At the moment, it spans a patch of sky almost the size of North America.) That said, the ozone layer is in much better shape today than it would have been had the world not taken decisive action 20 years ago. It’s just that the damage we did in the old days is going to take a long time to heal.

You might remember that ozone gas—made from triplets of oxygen atoms—helps shield us from the sun’s harmful UV-B rays. Most of it is in the lower stratosphere, roughly six to 30 miles above the Earth’s surface, where it’s created naturally by the interaction of sunlight and regular oxygen. Other gases, particularly those containing chlorine or bromine, can make ozone molecules break apart. Starting in the 1970s, scientists suspected that the widespread use of industrial chemicals might be putting additional chlorine and bromine into the stratosphere. In particular, researchers worried about the chlorofluorocarbons used in fridges, air conditioners, and aerosol spray cans and the halon gases used in fire extinguishers. (Human technology also creates some ozone, but that stuff tends to stay close to the ground, where it causes a range of health issues.)

By the mid-1980s, researchers knew that ozone concentrations were decreasing around the world, threatening humans with an increased incidence of skin cancer and eye cataracts and endangering plants and other kinds of animals. In 1985, following several years of U.N.-sponsored meetings, 21 nations formally agreed to cooperate on researching and monitoring the issue. It came to a head two months later, however, when a team of British researchers showed that a huge “hole” had appeared in the ozone layer above the Antarctic. What had been a predicament now started to seem like an emergency.

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Science Daily: Nitrous oxide has now become the largest ozone-depleting substance emitted through human activities, and is expected to remain the largest throughout the 21st century, NOAA scientists say in a new study.

For the first time, this study has evaluated nitrous oxide emissions from human activities in terms of their potential impact on Earth’s ozone layer. As chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), which have been phased out by international agreement, ebb in the atmosphere, nitrous oxide will remain a significant ozone-destroyer, the study found. Today, nitrous oxide emissions from human activities are more than twice as high as the next leading ozone-depleting gas.

Nitrous oxide is emitted from natural sources and as a byproduct of agricultural fertilization and other industrial processes. Calculating the effect on the ozone layer now and in the future, NOAA researchers found that emissions of nitrous oxide from human activities erode the ozone layer and will continue to do so for many decades.

The study, authored by A.R. Ravishankara, J.S. Daniel and Robert W. Portmann of the NOAA Earth System Research Laboratory (ESRL) chemical sciences division, appears online today in the journal Science. ESRL tracks the thickness of the ozone layer, as well as the burden of ozone-depleting compounds in the atmosphere. It maintains a large portion of the world air sampling and measurement network. NOAA scientists also conduct fundamental studies of the atmosphere and atmospheric processes to improve understanding of ozone depletion and of the potential for recovery the ozone layer.

“The dramatic reduction in CFCs over the last 20 years is an environmental success story. But manmade nitrous oxide is now the elephant in the room among ozone-depleting substances,” said Ravishankara, lead author of the study and director of the ESRL Chemical Sciences Division in Boulder, Colo.

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