Global Warming Issues

With hookah parlours under control, anti-smoking regulations in Vancouver are being taken to the great outdoors, where future bans could curtail smoking on beaches, in ticket lineups and at outdoor festivals.

Such regulations would be a natural progression from existing rules that restrict smoking indoors and at some outdoor locations such as patios and bus shelters, Richard Taki, director of health protection with Vancouver Coastal Health, said yesterday.

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An evacuation order for up to 300 people was lifted Wednesday as more firefighters were put to work on a wind-driven wildfire fueled by sagebrush in central Washington, officials said.

A survey Wednesday morning showed the blaze had covered more than 2.3 square miles — not the nearly 8 miles officials had feared on Tuesday — and was about 20 percent contained, said Lt. Bob Schwiesow of Douglas County Fire District 2.

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Residents choking under an almost constant blanket of smoke in eastern Humboldt County moved the Board of Supervisors to declare an emergency Tuesday.

The emergency, only the third ever to be declared in the county for medical reasons, will free up more funding for tribal governments and nonprofits, such as the Red Cross, to utilize in combating the smoky conditions.

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The warning, “Be careful what you wish for,” is beginning to have ironic resonance in the energy economy. The more utopian environmentalists, for example, seem to be between the proverbial rock and a hard place, even if they don’t know it or won’t admit it.

For years Americans were lectured by conservationist types who preached that U.S. consumers should be paying much higher prices for energy, specifically gasoline. They often used high European gas prices as the model. One happy result, the conservation lobby said, will be slowing the flow of crude oil, thus lessening damage to the environment from oil development; air pollution will be reduced because motorists will buy more efficient alternative fuel cars and drive less.

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Michael Otterstatter and James Thomson of the University of Toronto have presented compelling evidence in a new study that commercially produced bumble bees used in greenhouses are infecting their wild cousins, and that this is likely contributing to reductions in the natural pollinating bee population.

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Scientists at Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego, writing in the new online edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, show that Mexican mangroves, trees that form forest ecosystems at the land-sea interface, demonstrably boost fishery yields in the Gulf of California. The more mangroves, the more landings, the study showed.

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The polluted air of Beijing is not just a concern for Olympic athletes — the air may trigger cardiovascular events in some spectators, a U.S. researcher says.

Dr. Gokhan Mutlu of Northwestern’s Feinberg School and Northwestern Memorial Hospital said that for people in certain risk groups, breathing high levels of pollution can cause heart attacks and strokes within 24 hours of exposure.

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The World Bank and its partners need to do a far better job of considering the environmental effects of projects they finance in poor countries, its internal review group concludes in a new report.

The review, released on Tuesday, examined some of the $400 billion in investments in nearly 7,000 projects from 1990 to 2007. It found that recent commitments to environmental sustainability by the bank and sister institutions, including the International Finance Corporation, were often not matched by changes within the lenders’ bureaucracies or on the ground where dollars were turned into dams, pipelines, palm plantations and the like.

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The first study of breeding habits of this endangered, aquatic grass (Zizania texana) found that the pollen of Texas wild-rice can only travel about 30 inches away from a parent plant. If pollen doesn’t land on a receptive female flower within that distance, no seeds will be produced. No seeds means no new plants to replenish a population that faces other survival threats.

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Scientists made a new fossil discovery in the Dry Valleys of the East Antarctic region. The fossils (ostracods) come from an ancient lake - 14 million years old - and are exceptionally well preserved, with all of their soft anatomy in 3-dimensions.

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