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The number of birds in the United States and Canada has declined by 3 billion, or 29 percent, over the past half-century, scientists find.

Sanderlings. Video by Washington State, Cornell Lab of Ornithology

The skies are emptying out.

The number of birds in the United States and Canada has fallen by 29 percent since 1970, scientists reported on Thursday. There are 2.9 billion fewer birds taking wing now than there were 50 years ago.

The analysis, published in the journal Science, is the most exhaustive and ambitious attempt yet to learn what is happening to avian populations. The results have shocked researchers and conservation organizations.

In a statement on Thursday, David Yarnold, president and chief executive of the National Audubon Society, called the findings "a full-blown crisis."

Experts have long known that some bird species have become vulnerable to extinction. But the new study, based on a broad survey of more than 500 species, reveals steep losses even among such traditionally abundant birds as robins and sparrows.

There are likely many causes, the most important of which include habitat loss and wider use of pesticides. "Silent Spring," Rachel Carson's prophetic book in 1962 about the harms caused by pesticides, takes its title from the unnatural quiet settling on a world that has lost its birds:

"On the mornings that had once throbbed with the dawn chorus of robins, catbirds, doves, jays, wrens, and scores of other bird voices, there was now no sound."

Kevin Gaston, a conservation biologist at the University of Exeter, said that new findings signal something larger at work: "This is the loss of nature."
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Common bird species are vital to ecosystems, controlling pests, pollinating flowers, spreading seeds and regenerating forests. When these birds disappear, their former habitats often are not the same.

"Declines in your common sparrow or other little brown bird may not receive the same attention as historic losses of bald eagles or sandhill cranes, but they are going to have much more of an impact," said Hillary Young, a conservation biologist at the University of California, Santa Barbara, who was not involved in the new research.

A team of researchers from universities, government agencies and nonprofit organizations collaborated on the new study, which combined old and new methods for counting birds.

For decades, professional ornithologists have been assisted by an army of devoted amateur bird-watchers who submit their observations to databases and help carry out surveys of bird populations each year.

In the new study, the researchers turned to those surveys to estimate the populations of 529 species between 2006 and 2015.

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"It's not just these highly threatened birds that we're afraid are going to go on the endangered species list," said Kenneth V. Rosenberg, a conservation scientist. "It's across the board." Credit David Goldman/Associated Press

Those estimates include 76 percent of all bird species in the United States and Canada, but represent almost the entire population of birds. (The species for which there weren't enough data to make firm estimates occur only in small numbers.)

The researchers then used bird-watching records to estimate the population of each species since 1970, the earliest year for which there is solid data.

"This approach of combining population abundance estimates across all species and looking for an overall trend is really unprecedented," said Scott Loss, a conservation biologist at Oklahoma State University who was part of the new study.

While some species grew, the researchers found, the majority declined - often by huge numbers.

"We were stunned by the result - it's just staggering," said Kenneth V. Rosenberg, a conservation scientist at Cornell University and the American Bird Conservancy, and the lead author of the new study.

"It's not just these highly threatened birds that we're afraid are going to go on the endangered species list," he said. "It's across the board."

Weather radar offered another way to track bird populations. Dr. Rosenberg and his colleagues counted birds recorded on radar at 143 stations across the United States from 2007 to 2018. They focused on springtime scans, when birds were migrating in great numbers.

The team measured a 14 percent decline during that period, consistent with the drop recorded in the bird-watching records.

"If we have two data sets showing the same thing, it's a home run," said Nicole Michel, a senior quantitative ecologist at the Audubon Society who was not involved in the study.

Among the worst-hit groups were warblers, with a population that dropped by 617 million. There are 440 million fewer blackbirds than there once were.

Net loss of

600 million birds

Net loss of

600 million birds

Net loss of

600 million birds

Dr. Rosenberg said he was surprised by how widespread the population drop was. Even starlings - a species that became a fast-breeding pest after its introduction to the United States in 1890 - have dwindled by 83 million birds, a 49 percent decline.

Europe is experiencing a similar loss of birds, also among common species, said Dr. Gaston, of the University of Exeter. "The numbers are broadly comparable," he said.

The new study was not designed to determine why birds are disappearing, but the results - as well as earlier research - point to some likely culprits, Dr. Rosenberg said.

Grassland species have suffered the biggest declines by far, having lost 717 million birds. These birds have probably been decimated by modern agriculture and development.

"Every field that's plowed under, and every wetland area that's drained, you lose the birds in that area," Dr. Rosenberg said.

In addition to habitat loss, pesticides may have taken a toll. A study published last week, for example, found that pesticides called neonicotinoids make it harder for birds to put on weight needed for migration, delaying their travel.

Wintering snow geese in the Sacramento Valley. Credit Aerial Archives/Alamy

The researchers found some positive signs. Bald eagles are thriving, for example, and falcon populations have grown by 33 percent. Waterfowl are on the upswing.

For the most part, there's little mystery about how these happy exceptions came to be. Many recovering bird species were nearly wiped out in the last century by pesticides, hunting and other pressures. Conservation measures allowed them to bounce back.

"In those cases, we knew what the causes were and we acted on that," Dr. Rosenberg said. "They're models of success."

But some thriving populations are harder to explain.

Tiny warbler-like birds called vireos are booming, with 89 million more birds than in 1970 - a jump of 53 percent. Yet warblers, which share the same habitats as vireos, have suffered a 37 percent decline.

"I have no idea why vireos are doing well," Dr. Rosenberg said. "I'd love to do a study of vireos and discover what their secret is."

The sheer scale of the bird decline meant that stopping it would require immense effort, said Dr. Young, of the University of California, Santa Barbara. Habitats must be defended, chemicals restricted, buildings redesigned. "We're overusing the world, so it's affecting everything," she said.

The Audubon Society is calling for protection of bird-rich habitats, such as the Great Lakes and the Colorado River Basin, as well as for upholding the Migratory Bird Treaty Act, which the Trump Administration is trying to roll back.

The society and other bird advocacy groups also suggest things that individuals can do. They urge keeping cats inside, so they don't kill smaller birds. Vast numbers of birds die each year after flying into windows; there are ways to make the glass more visible to them.

To some birders, the study's findings confirmed a dreaded hunch.

Beverly Gyllenhaal, 62, a retired cookbook author, and her husband, Anders, have spotted 256 species in parks in the eastern United States. But when she visited her mother in North Carolina in recent years, it seemed there weren't as many birds as she recalled from her childhood there.

And when she talks to people around the United States on her birding travels, many say the same thing. "Oftentimes people will tell you, 'It's nothing like it used to be,'" she said.

The estimated losses have left her appalled. "If the cardinals and the blue jays and the sparrows aren't doing well," she said, "that's really scary."

Burrowing owls. Video by Cornell Lab of Ornithology

More articles about birds

Carl Zimmer writes the "Matter" column. He is the author of thirteen books, including "She Has Her Mother's Laugh: The Powers, Perversions, and Potential of Heredity." @carlzimmer * Facebook

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The number of birds in the United States and Canada has declined by 3 billion, or 29 percent, over the past half-century, scientists find. The skies are emptying out. The number of birds in the United States and Canada has fallen by 29 percent since 1970, scientists reported on Thursday.

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The proliferation of fires in the Amazon rainforest drew international attention in August, especially when French President Emmanuel Macron called for urgent action.

Since then, the eyes of the world have shifted elsewhere as House Democrats launched an impeachment inquiry against President Donald Trump, Hurricane Dorian leveled large swaths of the Bahamas, a Brexit deal was left for dead and revived, and U.S. troops pulled out of northern Syria.

Meanwhile, the Amazon continued to burn.

The number of fires decreased by 35% in September, but experts say this is merely a slowdown in a crisis with global repercussions.

There were still 19,925 fire outbreaks in September on the Brazilian part of the rainforest, which accounts for nearly 65% of the Amazon basin. Moreover, through the first nine months of the year, the number of fires soared by 41% compared to the same period in 2018, Brazil's National Institute for Space Research (INPE) reported.
Opinion: I've seen the Amazon rainforest fires. They're a warning from the Ghost of Climate Future.
"The factors that led to such widespread fires in the first place - decreased enforcement of forest law, illegal deforestation for agriculture and invasion of indigenous territories - remain in place,'' said Nigel Sizer, chief program officer for the advocacy organization Rainforest Alliance. "It is good news that there are fewer fires in the Amazon right now, but this is a short-term respite from the larger problem.''

That problem centers on deforestation through the systematic chopping down of trees, which are either logged or burned, mostly to convert the land for raising cattle and growing crops. The practice has expanded from a small scale to an industrial production, leading to about 20% of the Brazilian Amazon being cleared since 1970.
Burning: Why is Brazil's Amazon rainforest engulfed in flames?
Deforestation had diminished for nearly a decade as a result of enhanced law enforcement, an increase in protected areas and environmental activism, but the trend in Brazil has reversed course. There has already been more deforestation in 2019 - upwards of 8,000 square kilometers, according to INPE - than at any point since 2008.

The Amazon still generates the rain that sustains it, but the removal of trees prompts precipitation to decline and, combined with warmer temperatures that make the ground dryer, may trigger parts of the forest to start dying off.

Scientists have warned that the world's largest rainforest - whose ability to absorb more than 20% of earth's carbon dioxide and release oxygen is a critical element of the fight against climate change - may be approaching a tipping point in which much of it turns to savanna. At that stage, it could start contributing to global warming by emitting instead of sucking in greenhouse gases.

Higher rainfall totals than usual since the beginning of September and measures taken under mounting pressure by Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro - who deployed the military to the Amazon and imposed a two-month ban on clearing land through fires - contributed to the burning decline.
'Trump of the Tropics':'Five things you should know about the Brazilian president's visit with Trump
Bolsonaro argued in August that the fires were merely part of the yearly queimada, the farmers' practice of burning old vegetation to prepare the land for the next planting. However, aerial photos demonstrated the fires were linked to deforestation.

Observers expect them to resume, pointing out it took an international outcry for Bolsonaro to intervene. The far-right politician came into power in January with the expressed intent of boosting the economy any way possible.

"There was an explicit message that started during the campaign and has carried through to the present day that the Amazon was open for business,'' said Emilio Bruna, professor of tropical ecology at the University of Florida. "The government was looking to promote mining and ranching in the Amazon.''

Those efforts have included putting a stop to new demarcations of indigenous territory, which would make that land available for commercial purposes. Indigenous reserves make up about 25 percent of the Brazilian Amazon, acting as a de facto environmental protection.

Bruna said attempts at taking away land rights held by indigenous communities have involved intimidation and acts of violence. He and Sizer fear that without constant vigilance and pressure from the international community, the assault on the Amazon will continue.

"What we're going to see next year is more deforestation and more fires,'' Bruna said, "and continued government policies, either through omission or direct action, to promote deforestation and create a culture of impunity for those who do deforest or take other kinds of actions that are detrimental for the Amazon.''

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The Amazon hasn't stopped burning. There were 19,925 fire outbreaks last month, and 'more fires' are in the future

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The proliferation of fires in the Amazon rainforest drew international attention in August, especially when French President Emmanuel Macron called for urgent action. Since then, the eyes of the world have shifted elsewhere as House Democrats launched an impeachment inquiry against President Donald Trump, Hurricane Dorian leveled large swaths of the Bahamas, a Brexit deal was left for dead and revived, and U.S.

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Eleven thousand scientists in 153 countries have declared a climate emergency and warned that "untold human suffering" is unavoidable without huge shifts in the way we live.

The letter is based on climate science that was first established in 1979 at the first World Climate Conference held in Geneva. For decades multiple global bodies have agreed urgent action is needed but greenhouse gas emissions continue to rise.

"Despite 40 years of major global negotiations, we have continued to conduct business as usual and have failed to address this crisis," said William Ripple, professor of ecology at Oregon State University, who spearheaded the letter.

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"Climate change has arrived and is accelerating faster than many scientists expected," according to the letter published in BioScience.

Researchers say they have a moral obligation to "clearly warn humanity of any catastrophic threat" and "tell it like it is". "Clearly and unequivocally planet Earth is facing a climate emergency," they state.

Although there are some positive indicators - such as declining birth rates and a rise in renewable energy use - most indicators suggest humans are rapidly heading in the wrong direction, they say.

Backward steps include rising meat consumption, more air travel, chopping down forests faster than ever and increase in global carbon dioxide emissions. Scientists say they want the public to "understand the magnitude of this crisis, track progress, and realign priorities for alleviating climate change".

To do so will require major transformations in the ways our global society functions and interacts with natural ecosystems, they say.

The letter focuses on six key objectives: replacing fossil fuels; cutting pollutants like methane and soot; restoring and protecting ecosystems; eating less meat; converting the economy to one that is carbon-free and stabilising population growth.

"Global surface temperature, ocean heat content, extreme weather and its costs, sea level, ocean acidity and land area are all rising," Professor Ripple said.

"Ice is rapidly disappearing as shown by declining trends in minimum summer Arctic sea ice, Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets, and glacier thickness. All of these rapid changes highlight the urgent need for action."

Lead author, Dr Thomas Newsome from the University of Sydney, said measuring global surface temperatures remained important but that a broader set of indicators should be monitored.

This includes "human population growth, meat consumption, tree-cover loss, energy consumption, fossil-fuel subsidies and annual economic losses to extreme weather events", he said.

"While things are bad, all is not hopeless. We can take steps to address the climate emergency," he said.

The authors say that despite the gloomy outlook there is room for optimism.

"We are encouraged by a recent surge of concern. Governmental bodies are making climate emergency declarations," they write.

"Schoolchildren are striking. Ecocide lawsuits are proceeding in the courts. Grassroots citizen movements are demanding change, and many countries, states and provinces, cities, and businesses are responding.

"Such swift action is our best hope to sustain life on planet Earth, our only home."

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11,000 scientists declare global climate emergency and warn of 'untold human suffering'

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Eleven thousand scientists in 153 countries have declared a climate emergency and warned that "untold human suffering" is unavoidable without huge shifts in the way we live. The letter is based on climate science that was first established in 1979 at the first World Climate Conference held in Geneva.

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On August 18, 1868, astronomers turned their telescopes toward a solar eclipse, not knowing they were about to expand the periodic table.

Their goal was to discern the ingredients of solar prominences, the giant loops of glowing, electrified gas the sun occasionally belted out. When astronomers split the prominences' light into its components, they detected some colors they'd never seen before-the sign of an undiscovered element.

This mysterious gas was helium, a substance so inert and whisper-light that it'd take scientists another 27 years to isolate it on terra firma. You may think of helium as the stuff in party balloons, or the gas that can make your voice squeaky. But helium has revealed itself to have an array of more practical uses, from essential equipment in science labs to common medical scanners and even scuba tanks.

"All kinds of scientific breakthroughs, from the discovery of the Higgs boson to the creation of new pharmaceutical materials, are dependent on helium," says Mark Elsesser, manager of science policy at the American Physical Society.

While this wonder gas is the second most abundant element in the universe, it's a slippery thing to grab ahold of on Earth. Combine that with a meager supply chain, and you end up with a global helium market that's shockingly fragile. From 2011 to 2013, the helium industry faced shortfalls of 20 percent, leading to crippling shortages.

Now, 150 years after we found out that helium exists, our supply of this precious gas is in turmoil. How can we ensure a sustainable future for helium, a gas so light it can simply drift off into space?

Flea on the Tail

With a boiling point at -452 degrees Fahrenheit, helium's liquid state is the coldest of any element, and it doesn't freeze at everyday pressures, making it the world's best coolant. Superconducting magnets, such as the ones in MRI scanners or crucial pieces of chemistry lab equipment, don't work unless they're bathed in liquid helium. ( Here's how scientists are using MRI scans to try and see our dreams.)

And like the other noble gases, helium is inert, making it a valuable addition to manufacturing. Semiconductor makers use helium to help circulate chemical vapors and heat while computer chips get etched. Deep-sea divers breath a mixture of helium and oxygen, which helps them avoid the dangers of "the bends."

For hundreds of millions of years, the decay of radioactive elements deep inside the planet spawned helium, which meandered its way upward until getting caught in geological formations. The gas is constantly bubbling up; for every 191,000 particles of air swirling around you, one is helium. But the gas is so light, it's one of the few parts of our atmosphere that can easily escape Earth's gravitational pull.

At present, it's unfeasibly expensive to pull it from the air itself, so the helium industry rides fossil fuels' coattails. Practically all of the helium sold today is a byproduct of the natural gas industry, since some of the rock formations that catch hydrocarbons also can stop helium in its tracks. Each year, the world goes through about 6.2 billion cubic feet of helium: enough to fill more than 10,000 giant balloons like the ones you'd see at the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade.

Not every deposit of natural gas bears helium, though, and it doesn't always make financial sense for companies to refine their byproduct helium, so we end up with a surprisingly tiny group of key suppliers. Phil Kornbluth, a longtime helium industry consultant, says that only 14 plants on Earth refine helium into liquid form, and they're found in just six countries: Seven of the plants are in the U.S., and the rest are spread across Qatar, Algeria, Russia, Poland, and Australia.

It doesn't take much to send the helium market into a tailspin. Last summer, a coalition of Arab countries blockaded Qatar, ratcheting up diplomatic tensions in the Middle East. It turns out that thanks to its massive liquefied natural gas industry, Qatar has a lot of byproduct helium-so it's now one of the world's biggest helium suppliers. The blockade temporarily knocked out a full 30 percent of the world's helium supply.

"Some people talk about the tail wagging the dog," says Kornbluth. "We call helium the flea on the tip of the tail of the dog."

Reserves at Risk

The helium market's core currently lurks underneath Amarillo, Texas. Since the 1920s, the town has been home to the Federal Helium Reserve, a massive underground geological formation that acts as the U.S. strategic supply. Amarillo calls itself the Helium Capital of the World; there's a monument to the element in town, a six-story steel spire with a model of a helium atom at its center.

At its height, the U.S. Bureau of Land Management facility held 30 billion cubic feet of helium, enough to meet 15 years of global demand at the time. But now, the reserve is winding down, after Congress passed laws that will eventually take the U.S. government out of the helium business. In 1996, Congress required the BLM to sell off its helium stores at a fixed rate and then abruptly close in 2013. But instead of closing the reserve, Congress smoothed out its descent in 2013, giving it until September 30, 2021, to sell its helium stores in a series of auctions.

Even now, the helium reserve remains a major player. About 40 percent of the U.S. helium supply still flows through Amarillo, as the reserve sends crude helium to private refineries along a pipeline snaking from Texas to Kansas.

"In the past, we were considered a flywheel-whenever there were impacts in the delivery system, we could ramp up and produce and keep enough helium in the system, where the shortages were short-term, " says Samuel Burton, the field manager at the BLM field office in Amarillo. "Now, as we wind down our program, there really needs to be more helium found, more production created, and more secure delivery systems in place."

The move to close the reserve worries U.S. scientists. In the last decade, the price of helium has gone up more than 250 percent, dealing a blow to some research budgets. In a 2016 report assembled by three scientific societies, some researchers described forfeiting their summer salaries just so they could afford the helium to do their experiments.

Through a reimbursement system, the Federal Helium Reserve currently lets federal agencies and some large federally funded research labs get subsidized helium from private refiners. William Halperin, a physicist at Northwestern University, gets his helium under the program, and he says that the reserve's closure would be deeply disruptive.

"We're bordering on a non-availability crisis," he says.

Sustainable Helium?

The U.S. government is aware of the pending problem, and some agencies are working to fix it. The National Science Foundation, for instance, is running a small-scale program to outfit labs with systems that recycle and re-liquify helium.

"This initiative gets people to be aware of [helium] as a true nonrenewable resource," says Sophia Hayes, a chemist at Washington University in St. Louis who coauthored the 2016 report.

APS's Elsesser thinks that more could be done. He'd personally prefer that the reserve stay open, but regardless, he advocates for royalties on helium sales that could fund recycling technology and research for alternatives to the gas.

New helium plants in Russia and Qatar are coming online in the next few years, but Elsesser and other expertsalso note that helium is, in some applications, irreplaceable-which makes the need to use it wisely all the more important.

"Industry and scientists are going to be really creative," says Kornbluth, the industry consultant. "If we get to the point where we just can't keep up with demand, either prices will go up to create new incentives to find more, or we're going to develop substitute technologies that don't rely on helium."

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We Discovered Helium 150 Years Ago. Are We Running Out?

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On August 18, 1868, astronomers turned their telescopes toward a solar eclipse, not knowing they were about to expand the periodic table. Their goal was to discern the ingredients of solar prominences, the giant loops of glowing, electrified gas the sun occasionally belted out.

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By Jennifer Skene and Shelley Vinyard

For most people, toilet paper only becomes an issue when it unexpectedly runs out. Otherwise, it's cheap and it's convenient, something we don't need to think twice about. But toilet paper's ubiquity and low sticker price belie a much, much higher cost: it is taking a dramatic and irreversible toll on the Canadian boreal forest, and our global climate. As a new report from NRDC and Stand.earth outlines, when you flush that toilet paper, chances are you are flushing away part of a majestic, old-growth tree ripped from the ground, and destined for the drain. This is why NRDC is calling on Procter & Gamble, the manufacturer of Charmin, to end this wasteful and destructive practice by changing the way it makes its toilet paper through solutions that other companies have already embraced.

The Canadian boreal forest is the largest intact forest in the world, holding immense value for Indigenous Peoples, species and the climate. It is home to over 600 Indigenous communities whose cultures have remained inextricably linked to the forest for millennia, and is habitat for iconic species like the boreal caribou, Canada lynx and American marten. In addition, the forest is critical in the fight against climate change, storing the carbon equivalent of nearly twice the world's recoverable oil reserves in its soil.

Yet, this forest is under severe threat from industrial logging operations that push further into intact boreal forests each day. Between 1996 and 2015, more than 28 million acres of boreal forest were logged, an area roughly the size of Ohio. Each year, boreal logging emits hundreds of millions of tons of carbon into the atmosphere, dramatically accelerating the pace of climate change.

Much of this logging goes to feed global demand for tissue pulp-especially in the U.S. The Canadian boreal is a major source of northern bleached softwood kraft (NBSK) pulp, the U.S.'s most favored grade of virgin softwood pulp for tissue products. The U.S. is a particularly voracious consumer of tissue. Over the last 150 years, since toilet paper was first invented, Americans have developed an insatiable demand for these coiled white rolls. The average four-person household in the U.S. uses over 100 pounds of toilet paper a year, far outpacing the rest of the world and driving a dangerous "tree-to-toilet pipeline" whereby trees are converted into pulp, turned into toilet paper, and flushed away.

Fortunately, alternatives to the "tree-to-toilet" pipeline already exist. Tissue products made from recycled materials are far more sustainable because they do not rely on clearcutting forests and they emit one-third the greenhouse gases as tissue products made from virgin fiber.

NRDC and Stand.earth have developed the scorecard below to inform consumers of which brands lead on sustainability, and which lag behind. Companies like Seventh Generation and Natural Value have brands that perform well because they use a high percentage of recycled material. The biggest tissue producers-Procter & Gamble, Kimberly-Clark and Georgia-Pacific-perform poorly because their brands like Charmin contain zero recycled content, irresponsibly relying exclusively on virgin pulp even as threats to our forests mount.

Consumers have power in their pocketbooks and can make a big difference through their toilet paper purchasing decisions. By following this scorecard, you can minimize the environmental toll your everyday toilet paper use is having on the planet. In addition, you can urge Procter & Gamble, which produces Charmin, to transition to a more responsible alternative by embracing tissue made from recycled content and sustainable alternative fibers for their at-home toilet paper.

Now, more than ever, we need to protect our remaining forests. Given toilet paper's extreme cost to Indigenous Peoples, the global climate, species and forests like the boreal, tissue companies need to act as global citizens and usher the world into a more sustainable, sensible paradigm that does not rely on trees for creating their products. Just as we need to abandon coal, plastic straws and other devastating practices, the tree-to-toilet pipeline must end. For the good of communities, species, and the climate, we cannot afford to keep flushing our vital forest ecosystems away.

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The Issue With Tissue and Toilet Paper: How the U.S. Is Flushing Forests Away

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The average four-person household in the U.S. uses over 100 pounds of toilet paper a year, far outpacing the rest of the world and driving a dangerous "tree-to-toilet pipeline" whereby trees are converted into pulp, turned into toilet paper, and flushed away. Now, more than ever, we need to protect our forests and embrace sustainable alternatives.

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OSLO (Reuters) - Evidence for man-made global warming has reached a "gold standard" level of certainty, adding pressure for cuts in greenhouse gases to limit rising temperatures, scientists said on Monday.

"Humanity cannot afford to ignore such clear signals," the U.S.-led team wrote in the journal Nature Climate Change of satellite measurements of rising temperatures over the past 40 years.

They said confidence that human activities were raising the heat at the Earth's surface had reached a "five-sigma" level, a statistical gauge meaning there is only a one-in-a-million chance that the signal would appear if there was no warming.

Such a "gold standard" was applied in 2012, for instance, to confirm the discovery of the Higgs boson subatomic particle, a basic building block of the universe.

Benjamin Santer, lead author of Monday's study at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, said he hoped the findings would win over skeptics and spur action.

"The narrative out there that scientists don't know the cause of climate change is wrong," he told Reuters. "We do."

Mainstream scientists say the burning of fossil fuels is causing more floods, droughts, heat waves and rising sea levels.

U.S. President Donald Trump has often cast doubt on global warming and plans to pull out of the 197-nation Paris climate agreement which seeks to end the fossil fuel era this century by shifting to cleaner energies such as wind and solar power.

Sixty-two percent of Americans polled in 2018 believed that climate change has a human cause, up from 47 percent in 2013, according to the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication.

SATELLITE DATA

Monday's findings, by researchers in the United States, Canada and Scotland, said evidence for global warming reached the five sigma level by 2005 in two of three sets of satellite data widely used by researchers, and in 2016 in the third.

Professor John Christy, of the University of Alabama in Huntsville which runs the third set of data, said there were still many gaps in understanding climate change. His data show a slower pace of warming than the other two sets.

"You may see a certain fingerprint that indicates human influence, but that the actual intensity of the influence is minor (as our satellite data indicate)," he told Reuters.

Separately in 2013, the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) concluded that it is "extremely likely", or at least 95 percent probable, that human activities have been the main cause of climate change since the 1950s.

Peter Stott of the British Met Office, who was among the scientists drawing that conclusion and was not involved in Monday's study, said he would favor raising the probability one notch to "virtually certain", or 99-100 percent.

"The alternative explanation of natural factors dominating has got even less likely," he told Reuters.

The last four years have been the hottest since records began in the 19th century.

The IPCC will next publish a formal assessment of the probabilities in 2021.

"I would be reluctant to raise to 99-100 percent, but there is no doubt there is more evidence of change in the global signals over a wider suite of ocean indices and atmospheric indices," said Professor Nathan Bindoff, a climate scientist at the University of Tasmania.

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Evidence for man-made global warming hits 'gold standard': scientists

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OSLO (Reuters) - Evidence for man-made global warming has reached a "gold standard" level of certainty, adding pressure for cuts in greenhouse gases to limit rising temperatures, scientists said on Monday. "Humanity cannot afford to ignore such clear signals," the U.S.-led team wrote in the journal Nature Climate Change of satellite measurements of rising temperatures over the past 40 years.

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CLOSE

Documentary filmmaker Ken Burns, whose projects include the national parks, urges President Trump to reject any proposal to scale back federal park land, which Burns calls "America's best idea."

"The president donated his first paycheck to the national parks," Burns told USA TODAY. "I would just ask him to go out into those parks and see their transforming force ... to understand that they are these important economic engines in every local economy. And as a businessman, it is going to make sense to save them."

Trump called in April for a review of the use of the 1906 Antiquities Act over the past two decades to place land and water under federal protection from economic development, such as mining. Many businesses have complained that the restrictions should be rolled back, and Trump said designating federal land as national monuments to prevent development is an "egregious abuse of federal power."

Burns and Dayton Duncan are creators of the PBS documentary The National Parks: America's Best Idea, and were named honorary park rangers by the National Park Service in 2009.

DVD cover of "The National Parks America's Best Idea' by Dayton Duncan and Ken Burns (Photo: Ken Burns and Dayton Duncan)

Duncan said Trump "should follow the lead of two other presidents who also came from New York City." He noted that President Theodore Roosevelt signed the Antiquities Act that led to the creation of the Grand Canyon in Arizona. Forty years later, President Franklin Roosevelt used the act to expand Grand Teton National Park in Wyoming. Local politicians were outraged at the time but now see the environmental and economic necessity for preserving both iconic parks, among the biggest tourist draws in the country, Duncan said.

If Trump decides to revoke recent moves to protect federal land, "that's his right," Duncan said. "But I think he'll find legal problems (and) ... a lot of political resistance across the nation and in those places those monuments were created if he tries to do away with them."

Burns said national parks should not be "hijacked by mere ideologues who are at the extreme fringe of things."

USA TODAY's 2017 Special Edition on the National Parks is available at onlinestore.usatoday.com. (Photo: USA TODAY)

"An overwhelming majority of American citizens appreciate the national parks and the protection of park land throughout the United States," he said, adding that protecting them from business development does not impede the domestic economy.

"We want to make sure that Half Dome at Yosemite and Old Faithful at Yellowstone and Denali are able to be accessed by all of our citizens," he said. "When we are in the national parks together, the distinctions we make between each other outside the parks of rich and poor, of black and white, of young and old all disappear and we are ... just Americans."

Read or Share this story: https://usat.ly/2sU4omW

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Ken Burns to Trump: Don't scale back our national parks

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CLOSE Documentary filmmaker Ken Burns, whose projects include the national parks, urges President Trump to reject any proposal to scale back federal park land, which Burns calls "America's best idea." "The president donated his first paycheck to the national parks," Burns told USA TODAY.

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Then he asked if anyone could get a text message out yet. My phone worked intermittently, but I couldn't make calls; only the occasional text message would go through. He dictated a message to his family, and I punched it in. No luck.

After a long day of preparing to receive an airlift of medical aid to the island, I found Doug waiting for me later back at the hotel. He wanted to know if the message had reached his family on the mainland. I checked my phone again. It had not gone through. I tried again. Still no response.

Late that night, on the fourth try, I received a response almost immediately. "Who is this? And is Doug really OK? We didn't know if he was alive or dead," his brother Drew responded. Before this disaster, it never occurred to me that two places in the United States could be completely cut off from one another for more than a week. In the midst of the chaos caused by Hurricane Maria, it was a joy to alleviate the anxieties of one family.

The challenges of sending a single text message illustrate just how trying life has become in post-Maria Puerto Rico, with cell towers down and electricity still scarce a month after the storm. The few cell towers left standing require expensive generators to power them.

Stores without electricity only accept cash, and the only way to get cash is to wait in ATM lines for hours. During my time in Puerto Rico -- I arrived three days after the storm and was there for more than two weeks -- I saw people standing outside, waiting to use ATMs long after the 7 p.m. curfew (which has now been extended to midnight), when the risk of carrying cash is high. The next day, they had to wait in line for many more hours to buy gas and then in another line to buy food or ice.

But the hospitals are faring a little better. They had priority on fuel in the first few days, including diesel for their generators. Most had enough power to run the lights and fans but not air conditioning in the muggy, 90-plus degree weather, making it difficult to maintain sanitary standards. In Ponce, only half of the operating rooms were functioning in the immediate aftermath. By the time I left, FEMA was reporting 41 of the island's hospitals were back on the electrical grid, while 23 remained on generator power.

Some health facilities lack refrigeration space for temperature-sensitive blood products, insulin and vaccines. Many diabetic patients desperately need a fresh supply of insulin. Americares is delivering medicine and supplies, including insulin, to hospitals and primary care clinics. But they can't arrive fast enough.

As a public health expert, I see an impending wave of health issues that demand attention now. In areas without safe drinking water, waterborne diseases are going to increase, compromising people's health, especially children and the elderly. Already we are hearing alarming reports of desperate survivors collecting water from potentially contaminated water sources. Americares is working to supply containers that can filter out bacteria, viruses and parasites. We also plan to distribute water purification supplies that remove debris and environmental contaminants.

Meanwhile, patients with chronic diseases can tolerate going without medication for a few days -- not weeks -- before their conditions turn critical. And mosquito-borne diseases like dengue, chikungunya and Zika are likely to explode, with hurricane debris and rain puddles forming a perfect breeding ground, and homes open to the burgeoning mosquito population.

There is an ongoing debate about how long FEMA, the US military and first responders will stay in Puerto Rico. From a health perspective, it is far too early to put a timeline on how long the federal response will be needed. It is clear that this is an active emergency requiring ongoing assistance and response and we need them now. Nongovernmental organizations and the everyday heroes in Puerto Rico who are responding to others need the help of federal agencies to do their work effectively.

I went out with the US National Guard to hard-to-reach communities that were cut off by mudslides and impassable roads after the storm. There are remote health facilities that Americares teams would not have reached without a military escort. We are prioritizing mobile medical teams in remote communities, in part, because the US Department of Health and Human Services is already providing surge support at the hospitals and care for fragile patients in field medical shelters.

My organization has flown multiple airlifts of medicine and supplies into Puerto Rico, plus a planeload for battered Dominica in recent weeks. We have delivered $20 million in medicine and supplies for Maria survivors, we are providing training in disaster medicine and we are deploying mental health experts to address expected health consequences.

And while there are other organizations working in Puerto Rico, there are not nearly enough -- particularly the farther outside of San Juan I went. In fact, when I first arrived, I was the only NGO representative from outside the island participating in coordination meetings with the Department of Health in Ponce.

Though many are tired, the Puerto Rican people are remarkably resilient and patient. They are helping one another and collaborating in ways I haven't seen in other disasters. They -- like the aid workers assisting them -- are fiercely determined to rebuild Puerto Rico as quickly and efficiently as possible.

Louisiana took more than a decade to heal from Katrina; the recovery in Puerto Rico will be at least as long. Even when the trees grow back, looking fresh and green, the Puerto Rican economy and people will still be healing from deep wounds.

Having watched their power grid disintegrate as the storm swept through, Puerto Ricans are working to turn this disaster into an opportunity to build stronger, more stable infrastructure. We need to step up our response to help them and reaffirm to our fellow Americans that they are not abandoned. They deserve to have access to the same necessities that we would expect. We can and should provide quality health services, including mental health care, to ensure dignity and prosperity, not just stability.

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puerto rico still needs your help (opinion) - cnn

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America, Puerto Rico still needs your help

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Then he asked if anyone could get a text message out yet. My phone worked intermittently, but I couldn't make calls; only the occasional text message would go through. He dictated a message to his family, and I punched it in. No luck.

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In the seven-minute video after the jump, QuantumShift.tv turns its lens to the carbon emissions caused by large-scale farming practices used in growing much of the food in the United States, Canada and the UK. According to the video Soil: The Secret Solution to Global Warming, land farmed organically, using such methods as "no-till" and the planting of winter cover crops, absorbs and holds up to 30% more carbon than conventional agriculture. Converting all US farmland to organic would reduce CO2 emissions by 10%. The UK version of the video states that such a conversion would result in a 20% per year reduction in CO2 emissions (although the on-screen graphic still reads 10%, ostensibly because only the voice-over has been changed from the US version). The extra carbon in the soil also increases food nutrients, which could greatly reduce health care costs. Dig a little deeper after the jump.

Please enable JavaScript to view the comments.

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Shhhh, We've Got a Secret: Soil Solves Global Warming, Part 1

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In the seven-minute video after the jump, QuantumShift.tv turns its lens to the carbon emissions caused by large-scale farming practices used in growing much of the food in the United States, Canada and the UK. According to the video Soil: The Secret

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Pipeline Nation: America’s Broken Industry

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A pipeline network more than 2.5 million miles long transports oil and natural gas throughout the United States - but a top official in the federal government's pipeline safety oversight agency admits that the regulatory process is overstretched and "kind of dying."

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It's easy to see why online shopping is so popular. Just a couple of clicks and that new pair of socks is winging its way to you at breakneck speed. And they can get it to you in two days for free? Click.

But we care about the planet, so should we really be shipping individual pairs of socks? Or should we just drive to the closest store?

There are lots of good arguments for buying local, but if you're trying to reduce your impact on the climate, local isn't always best. If you compare online shopping with driving to the store, in many cases online shopping can have a smaller carbon footprint: Trucks have to deliver goods to stores, just like they do to your house.

Problems start when we opt for speed: We don't just want things delivered to our door, we want them delivered to our door right now. If we can get a pair of socks delivered in two days instead of five, we're going to choose the faster option, especially if it's free.

"Before, companies were able to consolidate, to optimize their distribution. Now, because some of them are offering really fast and rushed deliveries, that disintegrates the consolidation," said Miguel Jaller, from the Institute for Transportation Studies at the University of California Davis. "Every individual is buying more and wanting those goods to be at their home really fast. That creates more vehicles, more traffic, and potentially more emissions."

From a logistical perspective, the ability to get a pair of socks delivered to your door in less than a day is something of a triumph. But from a climate perspective, that speedy pair of socks takes us in completely the wrong direction, putting more of the most polluting vehicles on the road.

"If you look at passenger vehicles, they're pretty darn clean at this point," said Matt Barth, director of the Center for Environmental Research and Technology and a professor at UC Riverside. "Trucks are a different animal."

Unlike passenger vehicles in the US, the focus of the bulk of emissions regulations to date, most trucks still run on diesel fuel, which produces larger amounts of air pollutants. Swapping clean car traffic for dirty truck traffic is a big step backward.

This doesn't mean you have to throw out your holiday shopping list from climate guilt: There are things we can do right now to make online shopping cleaner. On the consumer side, we can opt for slower shipping times and try to consolidate our orders. From the company side, they could be doing a lot more to nudge us in that direction by providing incentives and simply alerting us to the fact that slower is greener - and it saves companies money, on top.

Delivery companies have been working on efficiency for decades, mostly to reduce costs. Since the 1970s, UPS has worked on ways to encourage drivers to take fewer left turns, reducing their emissions by around 100,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide every year. New technologies, from smart traffic lights that communicate with delivery vehicles to trucks that can drive in tight platoons to reduce wind drag and save on fuel, are also speeding our way in the coming years to help solve this problem.

Watch the video above with Jaller, Barth, and others working on new ways to get your socks to you quickly and guilt-free.
Learn more about groundbreaking work to solve the impact of transportation on climate change at climate.universityofcalifornia.edu.
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The environmental cost of free 2-day shipping

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It's easy to see why online shopping is so popular. Just a couple of clicks and that new pair of socks is winging its way to you at breakneck speed. And they can get it to you in two days for free? Click.

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Transcript

NARRATOR:

We've all heard that hurricanes are one of the most powerful and destructive forces on Earth. But did you ever wonder where they get their strength?

The formation of a hurricane is complicated, but basically, it depends on 3 factors:

First, you need warm water, at least 80 degrees.
The second ingredient is moist air.
And finally, there needs to be converging winds for a hurricane to form.

The actual process begins with a cluster of thunderstorms moving across the surface of the ocean. When the surface water is warm, the storm sucks up heat energy from the water, just like a straw sucks up a liquid. This creates moisture in the air. If wind conditions are right, the storm becomes a hurricane.

This heat energy is the fuel for the storm. And the warmer the water, the more moisture is in the air. And that could mean bigger and stronger hurricanes. Satellite data shows the heat and energy transfer in action. Notice how this hurricane leaves a trail of cooler water behind.

Scientists use sea surface temperature data from satellites to help forecast the intensity of storms. Hurricane Katrina, which was the third largest to make landfall in the U.S., crossed over Gulf waters that had temperatures between two and three degrees higher than normal. This spawned sustained winds of over 140mph, extending 100 miles from the eye of the storm. And with greater intensity, there's a higher chance for death and destruction.

This is why warming ocean temperatures matter; it's like adding fuel to a fire and taking the world, literally, by storm.

Transcripción

NARRADOR:

Todos hemos escuchado que los huracanes son una de las fuerzas más poderosas y destructivas en la Tierra. Pero, ¿te has preguntado alguna vez de dónde sacan su fuerza?

La formación de un huracán es complicado, pero básicamente, depende de 3 factores: En primer lugar, necesita agua caliente, por lo menos de 26 °C. El segundo ingrediente es aire húmedo. Y por último, es necesario que haya vientos convergentes para que se forme.

El proceso real comienza con un grupo de tormentas moviéndose a través de la superficie del océano. Cuando el agua superficial es cálida, la tormenta absorbe la energía térmica del agua, al igual que un popote absorbe un líquido. Esto crea humedad en el aire. Si las condiciones del viento son adecuadas, la tormenta se convierte en huracán.

Esta energía térmica es el combustible para la tormenta. Y mientras más caliente sea el agua, mayor humedad habrá en el aire. Y eso podría significar huracanes más grandes y más fuertes.

Los datos de satélite muestran la transferencia de calor y energía en acción. Observe cómo este huracán deja detrás una estela de agua más fría.

Los científicos usan datos satelitales de temperaturas marinas superficiales para ayudar a pronosticar la intensidad de las tormentas. El huracán Katrina, que fue el tercero más grande en tocar tierra en los EE.UU., cruzó las aguas del Golfo que tenían temperaturas de entre dos y tres grados más altos de lo normal.

Esto dio lugar a vientos sostenidos mayores a los 225 km/h, que se extendieron a 161 kilómetros desde el ojo de la tormenta. Y con mayor intensidad, mayor probabilidad de muerte y destrucción.

Es por esto que el calentamiento de las temperaturas del océano es importante, es como echar más combustible al fuego y tomar al mundo, literalmente, de golpe.

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NARRATOR: We've all heard that hurricanes are one of the most powerful and destructive forces on Earth. But did you ever wonder where they get their strength? The formation of a hurricane is complicated, but basically, it depends on 3 factors: First, you need warm water, at least 80 degrees.

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Severe land degradation is now affecting 168 countries across the world, according to new research released by the UN Desertification Convention (UNCCD).

The figure, based on submissions from countries to the UN, is a marked increase on the last analysis in the mid-1990s, which estimated 110 states were at risk.

In an economic analysis published last week the Convention also warns land degradation is now costing US$490 billion per year and wiping out an area three times the size of Switzerland on an annual basis.

"Land degradation and drought are impeding the development of all nations in the world," UNCCD Executive Secretary Luc Gnacadja told RTCC.

"This is a challenge that is causing governments to take this issue seriously, but how do you get them to take it seriously? By showing them the rate of return on restoring degraded land is one of the smartest investments of our time.

He added: "Desertification, land degradation and drought is an issue of market failure. The lack of economic market valuation has led to land being perceived as a cheap resource."

This week experts from around the world are gathering in Bonn to assess how best to encourage governments and regional leaders to conserve water and protect their farmlands.

The causes of land degradation are varied, but are widely attributed to drought, climate change, intensive farming practices and poor water management.

Desertification is low on many countries' radar - illustrated by Canada's recent withdrawal from the UNCCD - but its links to climate change and food security are starting to resonate with governments and business, particularly given fears over the world's ability to feed a soaring population.

The UN's Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) predicts demand for food will increase 60% by 2050. Experts say the world will need an additional 120 million hectares of agricultural land to support the required food production - that is a new farm the size of South Africa.

Meanwhile recent studies by the UK Met Office and USAID have linked the severe drought that hit East Africa in 2011 and falling rice yields in South East Asia to man-made climate change.

Since 2000, the prices of staples such as of meat, dairy, cereals and sugar have doubled, reflecting a lack of elasticity in the food market's supply chain.
Vicious circle
Efforts to boost agricultural production often lead to deforestation, a major contributor to global greenhouse gas emissions.

This has a knock on effect in terms of reducing the planet's store of natural carbon sinks and destroying the 'ecosystem services' trees provide such as water storage, exacerbating the problem.

The UNCCD hopes to adopt a 'Zero Net Land Degradation by 2030′ resolution at its 2013 Conference of the Parties in Namibia later this year, and there are signs sustainable land management could form one of the Sustainable Development Goals set to be announced in 2015.

Last week former Finland President Tarja Halonen, now Chairman of the UN Global Sustainability Panel, indicated that the links between rural poverty, famine and land management should "guide the work" on those new set of targets.

"Sustainable land management, prevention of land degradation and rehabilitation of land is the most cost effective and cost beneficial ways to eradicate rural poverty," she added.

In Africa alone a UNCCD expert panel estimates 4-12% of agricultural GDP is lost due to deteriorating environmental conditions, contributing to the high levels of chronic hunger and conflict on the continent.

This situation is acute in Somalia, Ethiopia, Djibouti and Kenya, where the combination of weak governments and a lack of annual rains linked to climate change are driving desertification levels.

In China over 400 million people are affected by soil erosion, causing annual economic losses of US$10 billion, while the UNCCD says Indian reports of degradation have increased "by a factor of six".

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Ed King for RTCC, part of the Guardian Environment Network

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Desertification crisis affecting 168 countries worldwide, study shows

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Severe land degradation is now affecting 168 countries across the world, according to new research released by the UN Desertification Convention (UNCCD). The figure, based on submissions from countries to the UN, is a marked increase on the last analysis in the mid-1990s, which estimated 110 states were at risk.

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The fight to save coral reefs just got more complicated. New research found that even if humans succeed in protecting reefs from pollution and overfishing, global warming will still pose a deadly threat.

Researchers behind the study, published in the journal Nature, evaluated data from several previous bleaching events - a phenomenon that causes corals to lose their color and often die - in the Great Barrier Reef. The bleaching events examined in the study were largely driven by increases in water temperature, and the research found that local efforts to support the reefs by improving water quality and stopping overfishing failed to improve the reefs' chances of survival. The results underscore the importance of fighting global climate change to protect coral reefs, researchers say. Indeed, coral reefs could be doomed if temperature rise continues on its current trajectory.

"Bleaching is now the new normal," says study author Terry Hughes, director of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies. "We absolutely have to address rising sea temperatures. Just doing things locally is not going to work."
Read More: Dying Coral Reefs Impact Environment and Economy
A number of factors - including high temperatures, water pollution and overfishing - can cause corals to bleach and, eventually, die. Three global mass bleaching events have occurred in the last two decades, the most recent and devastating beginning in 2014 and lasting more than two years. Scientists have attributed all of those events to high temperatures tied to man-made climate change and say they expect such events to increase in frequency and severity.
Read More: The Great Barrier Coral Reef Is Dying Faster Than Ever
Protecting reefs in the face of global warming has flummoxed scientists and policymakers, with many concluding that a significant share of the world's reefs will inevitably disappear. Research published earlier this year found that more than 75% of reefs will experience annual severe bleaching by 2070 even if countries meet their pledges to reduce greenhouse emissions made under the Paris Agreement on climate change.

Researchers behind the study say local reef protection measures still play an important role in saving corals, even if those programs do not protect against climate change. Destruction of the ocean ecosystem from pollution or overfishing can kill corals as effectively as warm temperatures.

The dire reality has led a group of scientists unaffiliated with the new study to focus on conserving a select few reefs that research shows can most easily be saved - a form of insurance policy against worst-case-scenario climate change. Researchers behind the project, known as 50 Reefs, will identify the reefs most resilient to climate change and work with local officials to develop plans to protect them.

"We can no longer hide away from the grave reality of this situation," says Ove Hoegh-Guldberg, a marine science professor at the University of Queensland. "We are going to lose another 90% of coral reefs. That remaining 10% becomes hugely important for recovery."

But identifying a few reefs to target troubles Hughes and some others who say it's too soon to give up hope on stemming warming. "If temperatures keep rising through business as usual emissions, we'll see bleaching on most reefs around the world," he says. But "we still have a narrowing window of opportunity to save all of the coral reefs."

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The fight to save coral reefs just got more complicated. New research found that even if humans succeed in protecting reefs from pollution and overfishing, global warming will still pose a deadly threat.

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But, the news is not all bad. Scientists are finding that protection and restoration are making a difference. At a time when people are losing their jobs and our economy is troubled, should restoring wetlands be a priority?

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These Young Bison Could Save America's Prairie | National Geographic

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Sean Gerrity, president of the American Prairie Reserve, is working to build a bison herd of at least at least 10,000, which would make it the largest in the world. Bison help sustain a prairie's ecology, and the herd will be a key part of what Gerrity hopes will be the biggest wildlife reserve in the lower 48.

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boundary waters canoe area wilderness (protected site)

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Effects of Sulfide Mining  on the BWCA, Boundary Waters Canoe Area

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This second video (also 55 min. long, although YouTube shows it as longer) is as important and Lee's talk earlier in the day on Climate Change and Invasive species but concentrates on the effects of sulfide mining on the Boundary Waters.

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Nuclear Waste Disposal Documentary: A new documentary that examines the nuclear waste disposal problem in just one location. We have these sites across

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Climate Change 101 with Bill Nye | National Geographic

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On a cold March night in 1989, the tanker Exxon Valdez ran aground off the coast of Southern Alaska, spilling 11 million gallons of crude oil into the waters of Prince William Sound and creating one of the worst oil spills in American history.

Exxon Valdez: In the Wake of Disaster

This week's Retro Report examines how the spill happened and follows its impact. Using archival footage and interviews with those involved, including former Alaska Attorney General John Havelock and Riki Ott, a fisherman who became an environmental activist in the wake of the spill, the video explains how the focus on a reportedly intoxicated tanker captain obscured a far more complex set of safety failures that led to the spill.

Nearly 25 years later, the jury is still out on just what we have learned from the Exxon Valdez, especially in the wake of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010. Former Senator Bob Graham, co-chairman of the presidential commission that investigated that spill says, "If you come back in the year 2020 and ask what have we learned? Are we safer? I think we'll know whether we really learned the lesson of Exxon Valdez."

Transcript

More on the Story for Exxon Valdez: In the Wake of Disaster

Governors, DOJ cheer $18 billion BP oil spill settlement CNN

Watch the Documentary

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On a cold March night in 1989, the tanker Exxon Valdez ran aground off the coast of Southern Alaska, spilling 11 million gallons of crude oil into the waters of Prince William Sound and creating one of the worst oil spills in American history.

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Toxic Waste in the US: Coal Ash (Full Length)

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Gold Fever (2013, Trailer): A frightening vision of the world's insatiable hunger for gold Available on iTunes: https://geo.itunes.apple.com/gb/movie/gold-fever/id806841388?mt=6 Get it now on Google Play: https://play.google.com/store/movies/details/Gold_Fever?id=PvMXdOHudWo Watch in full on jman.tv: https://jman.tv/film/5090/Gold+Fever+-+Broadcast For downloads and more information visit http://www.journeyman.tv/?lid=65708&bid=5 Goldcorp Inc arrives in a remote village in Guatemala.

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The use of the defoliant Agent Orange during the Vietnam War continues to cast a dark shadow over both American veterans and Vietnamese citizens.

Agent Orange: Last Chapter of the Vietnam War

During the war, the U.S. military sprayed Agent Orange over millions of acres to defoliate jungles, deprive its enemy defensive cover, and save the lives of American soldiers.

But dioxin, a contaminant in Agent Orange, has since been blamed for creating a range of crippling health problems - from cancers to birth defects - among American vets and the Vietnamese.

Now, more than forty years after the end of the Vietnam War, Agent Orange is back in the headlines as the United States and Vietnam partner to clean up sites in Vietnam still contaminated with dioxin. At the Danang Airport, where Agent Orange was once stored, contractors have built a "concrete oven" the size of a football field. The dioxin-laced soil, which over the decades has seeped into the water, and continued to afflict the Vietnamese, will be "cooked" under immense heat for several months. Scientists say the process will finally render the dioxin harmless. The containment was switched on April 19, 2014.

The question is how well it will work?

Transcript

More on the Story for Agent Orange: Last Chapter of the Vietnam War

Once Again, the VA Turns Down Navy Vets for Agent Orange Benefits Pro Publica

40 Years After Vietnam, Blue Water Navy Vets Still Fighting for Agent Orange Compensation Pro Publica

Watch the Documentary

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Agent Orange: Last Chapter of the Vietnam War

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The use of the defoliant Agent Orange during the Vietnam War continues to cast a dark shadow over both American veterans and Vietnamese citizens. During the war, the U.S. military sprayed Agent Orange over millions of acres to defoliate jungles, deprive its enemy defensive cover, and save the lives of American soldiers.

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This story was first published on Nov. 9, 2008. It was updated on Aug. 27, 2009.

60 Minutes is going to take you to one of the most toxic places on Earth -- a place that government officials and gangsters don't want you to see. It's a town in China where you can't breathe the air or drink the water, a town where the blood of the children is laced with lead. It's worth risking a visit because, as correspondent Scott Pelley first reported last November, much of the poison is coming out of the homes, schools and offices of America.

This is a story about recycling - about how your best intentions to be green can be channeled into an underground sewer that flows from the United States and into the wasteland.

That wasteland is piled with the burning remains of some of the most expensive, sophisticated stuff that consumers crave. And 60 Minutes and correspondent Scott Pelley discovered that the gangs who run this place wanted to keep it a secret.

What are they hiding? The answer lies in the first law of the digital age: newer is better. In with the next thing, and out with the old TV, phone or computer. All of this becomes obsolete, electronic garbage called "e-waste."

Computers may seem like sleek, high-tech marvels. But what's inside them?

"Lead, cadmium, mercury, chromium, polyvinyl chlorides. All of these materials have known toxicological effects that range from brain damage to kidney disease to mutations, cancers," Allen Hershkowitz, a senior scientist and authority on waste management at the Natural Resources Defense Council, explained.

"The problem with e-waste is that it is the fastest-growing component of the municipal waste stream worldwide," he said.

Asked what he meant by "fastest-growing," Hershkowitz said. "Well, we throw out about 130,000 computers every day in the United States."

And he said over 100 million cell phones are thrown out annually.

At a recycling event in Denver, 60 Minutes found cars bumper-to-bumper for blocks, in a line that lasted for hours. They were there to drop off their computers, PDAs, TVs and other electronic waste.

Asked what he thought happens once his e-waste goes into recycling, one man told Pelley, "Well my assumption is they break it apart and take all the heavy metals and out and then try to recycle some of the stuff that's bad."

Most folks in line were hoping to do the right thing, expecting that their waste would be recycled in state-of-the-art facilities that exist here in America. But really, there's no way for them to know where all of this is going. The recycling industry is exploding and, as it turns out, some so-called recyclers are shipping the waste overseas, where it's broken down for the precious metals inside.

Executive Recycling, of Englewood, Colo., which ran the Denver event, promised the public on its Web site: "Your e-waste is recycled properly, right here in the U.S. - not simply dumped on somebody else."

That policy helped Brandon Richter, the CEO of Executive Recycling, win a contract with the city of Denver and expand operations into three western states.

Asked what the problem is with shipping this waste overseas, Richter told Pelley, "Well, you know, they've got low-income labor over there. So obviously they don't have all of the right materials, the safety equipment to handle some of this material."

Executive does recycling in-house, but 60 Minutes was curious about shipping containers that were leaving its Colorado yard. 60 Minutes found one container filled with monitors. They're especially hazardous because each picture tube, called a cathode ray tube or CRT, contains several pounds of lead. It's against U.S. law to ship them overseas without special permission. 60 Minutes took down the container's number and followed it to Tacoma, Wash., where it was loaded on a ship.

When the container left Tacoma, 60 Minutes followed it for 7,459 miles to Victoria Harbor, Hong Kong.

It turns out the container that started in Denver was just one of thousands of containers on an underground, often illegal smuggling route, taking America's electronic trash to the Far East.

Our guide to that route was Jim Puckett, founder of the Basel Action Network, a watchdog group named for the treaty that is supposed to stop rich countries from dumping toxic waste on poor ones. Puckett runs a program to certify ethical recyclers. And he showed 60 Minutes what's piling up in Hong Kong.

"It's literally acres of computer monitors," Pelley commented. "Is it legal to import all of these computer monitors into Hong Kong?"

"No way. It is absolutely illegal, both from the standpoint of Hong Kong law but also U.S. law and Chinese law. But it's happening," Puckett said.

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This story was first published on Nov. 9, 2008. It was updated on Aug. 27, 2009. 60 Minutes is going to take you to one of the most toxic places on Earth -- a place that government officials and gangsters don't want you to see.

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TRASHED trailer (2012) - Environmental documentary with Jeremy Irons

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"GasHole" is a new documentary film about the history of Oil prices and the future of alternative fuels. The film takes a wide, yet detailed examination of our dependence on foreign supplies of Oil. What are the causes that led from America turning from a leading exporter of oil to the world's largest importer?

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more signs california is sinking - cnn video

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More signs California is sinking - CNN Video

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As California residents pull groundwater up to help during the drought, CNN's Stephanie Elam finds it's easy to see the land around those wells is sinking.

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The Last Descent - Full Length Documentary

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Winner of the People's Choice Award - Wild and Scenic Environmental Film Festival 2009 Winner of the Activism through Adventure Award - Boulder Adventure Film Festival 2009 The World's rivers are being dammed now faster than ever. In response to this a group of whitewater paddlers set out on a one year adventure to document what could be the last descent.

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Watch more videos at http://www.subtletv.com The trailer for the movie FUEL. "Fuel" is a vital, superbly assembled documentary that presents an insightful overview of America's troubled relationship with oil and how alternative and sustainable energies can reduce our country's and the world's addictive dependence on fossil fuels. IMDB Page http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1294164/

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GROWING up in Australia, most of us probably didn't think twice about where our seemingly endless supply of water came from. In our young minds, the tap never ran dry.

But the world certainly doesn't have the luxury to think like that.

Water is absolutely fundamental to life, which makes the increasingly loud warnings about water scarcity and an impending global water crisis so concerning for world leaders.

If current patterns of consumption continue unabated, two-thirds of the world's population will be facing water shortages as a daily reality by 2025 and global policy makers are scrambling to avoid catastrophe.

"What's happening bit by bit is that water scarcity is becoming increasingly common all around the world, no matter where you look as country after country hits the limit of what it can use," says Professor Mike Young.

"Whether that's in Australia, California, China, India, Pakistan, or right throughout Africa."

Cities across the world are becoming increasingly thirsty as the demand for water grows and supply dwindles. From Bangalore to California scientists are offering up grim predictions.

Groundwater is being pumped so aggressively that land is sinking. Some neighbourhoods in Beijing (the world's fifth most water-stressed city) are sinking at as much as 10 centimetres a year.

The World Bank forecasts that water availability in cities could decline by as much as two thirds by 2050, according to the World Economic Forum's 2017 Global Risks Report.

Prof Young is a specialist in water policy reform and holds a Research Chair in Water and Environmental Policy at the University of Adelaide. He regularly consults with governments about how to best manage their water resources and believes time is of the essence for countries around the world to transition to a new system of water sharing agreements.

"That's a big transition that has to happen everywhere," he said.
HOW DID WE GET HERE?
While Earth may be covered in water, freshwater - the kind we care about - actually only represents 2.5 per cent of that. And almost 99 per cent of fresh water it is trapped in hard to reach places like glaciers and snowfields. In the end, less than one per cent of the planet's water is actually available to fuel and feed the world's 7.5 billion people.

Scarcity has largely been driven by an ever growing population and a greater demand for water as the world has become more affluent. To put that another way, a bottle of wine takes over 400 bottles of water to produce.

A secret report leaked by Wikileaks last year highlighted the fears of executives at food manufacturer Nestle about the world "running our of fresh water" in part due to a growth in meat consumption.

The report pointed out that a calorie of meat requires 10 times as much water to produce as a calorie of food crops. "As the world's growing middle classes eat more meat, the earth's water resources will be dangerously squeezed," it said.

There's also the added complication of increasingly extreme weather events brought about by climate change.

"Climate change is talked about a lot in terms of shifting where the water is going be abundant and where it's going to be scarce, but that's just one of the many things that is going to have to be managed," Prof Young told news.com.au.

The real challenge, he says, is a political one: to establish robust sharing systems to manage and share regional water resources fairly, intelligently and carefully.
A THREAT TO PEACE AND STABILITY
This month the United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres warned that by 2050 global demand for fresh water is projected to grow by more than 40 per cent and at least a quarter of the world's population will live in countries with a "chronic or recurrent" lack of clean water.

He told the UN Security Council that "strains on water access are already rising in all regions" and it was causing tension between nations.

Bolivian President Evo Morales, whose country currently holds the council presidency, noted that since 1947, some 37 conflicts have taken place between countries over water.

"Our planet, the human family and life in all its myriad forms on Earth are in the throes of a water crisis that will only get worse over the coming decades," he said.

"If current patterns of consumption continue unabated, two-thirds of the world's population will be facing water shortages as a daily reality by 2025."

It's an assessment Prof Young wholeheartedly agrees with. He says it's a scenario that if not managed properly will lead to food shortages that will drive up prices.

Meanwhile there's certainly no shortage of people heralding the potential stress and turmoil to be caused by water scarcity - and some of them are placing bets on the increasing importance of the commodity in the immediate future.

The resource has become a popular commodity for investors who are looking to profit from the growing value of water.

Most famously, Michael Burry - one of the first people to predicted the US subprime mortgage bond market would inflict the global financial crisis on the world, and made famous by Michael Lewis' The Big Short - has been focusing his investment strategy solely on the importance of water. And he's far from the only one.
AUSTRALIA LEADING IN THE TRANSITION THAT NEEDS TO HAPPEN
Despite all the doom and gloom, Professor Young is "extremely optimistic" that the catastrophe of a true water crisis can be avoided.

"The theoretical modelling that's been done suggests there is no problem if water resources are well managed ... if we are prepared to adjust where people live and how they live," he said.

And in many cases around the world it's often farmers who are leading the charge.

"Increasingly to my surprise it's becoming more and more the farming communities who are becoming aware of the fact," he said. "There's a change in attitude as farmers start to realise these problems have to be resolved."

According to him an appropriate management system for countries sharing access to water would mean "water rights are defined as shares not guaranteed entitlements, and every person is given a water account that looks just like a bank account. As water becomes available it's credited to the account and when it's used it's debited," he said. If you want to transfer you just log onto your account and transfer the water credits.

During his time consulting with government he says they've shown a growing interest to adopt such systems but it "requires a lot of political will".

It's an area where Australia is far ahead of much of the world.

"Australia has one of the best water sharing systems in the world, particularly as a result of the reforms made in the last 20 years in Australia where we've redefined our water rights as shares," Prof Young said.

Good accounting systems, robust catchment infrastructure and the establishment of water markets in recent decades has made it much easier to allocate and trade water effectively.

"A market now boasting an annual turnover of between $1 billion and $3 billion is allowing water to move to its most economically productive uses," the Department of Agriculture website says. "Trading generates economic benefits valued in hundreds of millions of dollars annually."
THE ROLE OF TECH
Desalination and recycled water are playing an increased role in meeting our water needs in Australia however at this point, due to the financial cost of desalination it does have its limitations.

"As a general rule, growing crops using desalination, it doesn't pay," Prof Young said.

But innovation and new tech are providing hope for improved water management. In particular, the harnessing of big data provides opportunity according to IT expert Sharryn Napier, who is the VP and regional director for Qlik Australia and New Zealand.

"The current era of mass data streaming and unprecedented data flow has no doubt brought about vast untapped potential in the management of global and Australian water resources," she wrote in The Australian in 2015.

"By making the shift away from static documents or siloed collections, data analysis can potentially play a significant role in resolving the world's water scarcity issues."

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Our planet, the human family and life in all its myriad forms on Earth are in the throes of a water crisis

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GROWING up in Australia, most of us probably didn't think twice about where our seemingly endless supply of water came from. In our young minds, the tap never ran dry. But the world certainly doesn't have the luxury to think like that.

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There are images from the US war against Vietnam that have been indelibly imprinted on the minds of Americans who lived through it. One is the naked napalm-burned girl running from her village with flesh hanging off her body. Another is a photo of the piles of bodies from the My Lai massacre, where US troops executed 504 civilians in a small village. Then, there is the photograph of the silent scream of a woman student leaning over the body of her dead friend at Kent State University, whose only crime was protesting the bombing of Cambodia in 1970. Finally, there is the memory of decorated members of Vietnam Veterans Against the War testifying at the Winter Soldier Hearings, often in tears, to atrocities in which they had participated during the war.

These pictures are heartbreaking. They expose the horrors of war. The US war against Vietnam was televised, while images of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have intentionally been hidden from us. But what was not televised was the relentless ten years (1961-1971) of spraying millions of gallons of toxic herbicides over vast areas of South Vietnam. These chemicals exposed almost five million people, mostly civilians, to deadly consequences. The toxic herbicides, most notably Agent Orange, contained dioxin, one of the most dangerous chemicals known to man. It has been recognized by the World Health Organization as a carcinogen (causes cancer) and by the American Academy of Medicine as a teratogen (causes birth defects).

From the beginning of the spraying 51 years ago, and even today, millions of Vietnamese have died from, or been completely incapacitated by, diseases which the US government recognizes are related to Agent Orange for purposes of granting compensation to Vietnam veterans in the United States. The Vietnamese, who were the intended victims of this spraying, experienced the most intense, horrible impact on human health and environmental devastation. Second and third generations of children, born to parents exposed during the war and in areas of heavy spraying hot spots, suffer unspeakable deformities that medical authorities attribute to the dioxin in Agent Orange.

The Vietnamese exposed to the chemical suffer from cancer, liver damage, pulmonary and heart diseases, defects to reproductive capacity and skin and nervous disorders. Their children and grandchildren have severe physical deformities, mental and physical disabilities, diseases and shortened life spans. The forests and jungles in large parts of southern Vietnam were devastated and denuded. Centuries-old habitat was destroyed and will not regenerate with the same diversity for hundreds of years. Animals that inhabited the forests and jungles are threatened with extinction, disrupting the communities that depended on them. The rivers and underground water in some areas have also been contaminated. Erosion and desertification will change the environment, causing dislocation of crop and animal life.

For the past 51 years, the Vietnamese people have been attempting to address this legacy of war by trying to get the United States and the chemical companies to accept responsibility for this ongoing nightmare. An unsuccessful legal action by Vietnamese victims of Agent Orange against the chemical companies in US federal court, begun in 2004, has nonetheless spawned a movement to hold the United States accountable for using such dangerous chemicals on civilian populations. The movement has resulted in pending legislation HR 2634 hot spots, lawsuit to compensate them, as the unintended victims, for their Agent-Orange-related illnesses. But the Vietnamese continue to suffer from these violations with almost no recognition, as do the offspring of Agent-Orange-exposed US veterans and Vietnamese-Americans.

What is the difference between super powers like the United States violating the laws of war with impunity and the reports of killing of Syrian civilians by both sides in the current civil war? Does the United States have any credibility to demand governments and non-state actors end the killings of civilians, when through wars and drones and its refusal to acknowledge responsibility for the use of Agent Orange, the United States has and is engaging in the very conduct it publicly deplores?

In 1945, at the founding conference of the United Nations, the countries of the world determined:

to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war, which twice in our lifetime has brought untold sorrow to mankind and

to reaffirm faith in fundamental human rights, in the dignity and worth of the human person, in the equal rights of men and women and of nations large and small and

to establish conditions under which justice and respect for the obligations arising from treaties and other sources of international law can be maintained and

to promote social progress and better standards of life in larger freedom.

If we are to avoid sinking once again into the scourge of war, we must reaffirm the principles of the charter and establish conditions under which countries take actions that promote rather than undermine justice and respect for our international legal obligations. The alternative is the law of the jungle, where only might makes right. It is time that right makes might.

August 10 marks 51 years since the beginning of the spraying of Agent Orange in Vietnam. In commemoration, the Vietnam Agent Orange Relief and Responsibility Campaign is urging an observation of 51 seconds of silence at 12 noon, to think about the horrors of wars which have occurred. No one wants to see future images of naked children running from napalm; or young soldiers wiping out the population of an entire village; or other atrocities associated with war, poverty and violence around the world. In the United States, you can sign an orange post card to the US Congress asking it to pass HR 2634, the Victims of Agent Orange Relief Act of 2001.

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The Toxic Effects of Agent Orange Persist 51 Years After the Vietnam War

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There are images from the US war against Vietnam that have been indelibly imprinted on the minds of Americans who lived through it. One is the naked napalm-burned girl running from her village with flesh hanging off her body.