Peak Oil News

Every other year, the World Wildlife Fund publishes the Living Planet Report, which charts trends in the world's ecosystem biodiversity and the human ecological footprint. The most recent report update released Oct 24th, 2006 warns of a worldwide ecosystem collapse within 50 years. The WWF report urges that we must reduce global consumption by at least half of current trends in order to avoid a serious global catastrophe. The world's natural resource depletion is currently escalating "at a rate unprecedented in human history". Growth in demand for raw materials, food and energy is having a devastating impact on the earth's ability to sustain natural biodiversity and clean air. The ...

The first direct evidence linking human activity to the collapse of Antarctic ice shelves is published this week in the Journal of Climate. Scientists from the British Antarctic Survey (BAS), the Centre for Polar Observation and Modelling, University College London, and the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, (Belgium) reveal that stronger westerly winds in the northern Antarctic Peninsula, driven principally by human-induced climate change, are responsible for the marked regional summer warming that led to the retreat and collapse of the northern Larsen Ice Shelf. » Source: Science Daily The Larsen ice shelf at the ...

Satellite images of the Arctic show large openings in the perennial ice cover, yet another consequence of greenhouse warming, scientists announced this week. The Arctic's thick perennial sea ice typically survives the warmth of the summer and lasts through the year. But satellite images taken in late August show that up to 10 percent of the perennial sea ice has been fractured by summer storms. The surprising change involves an area larger than the size of the British Isles. » Source: LiveScience.com The striking openings in the pack ice were found north of Svalbard, Norway and extend to the Russian Arctic all the way to the North Pole. This condition is likely due to the thinning and extra mobility in the European section of the central Arctic ice pack seen in recent years. "This situation is unlike anything observed in previous record ...

The global sea level rise caused by climate change, severely threatening many of the world's coastal and low-lying areas from Bangladesh to East Anglia, is proceeding faster than UN scientists predicted only five years ago, Professor Chris Rapley, director of the British Antarctic Survey, said yesterday. Climate change is causing sea levels to rise around the world because water expands in volume as it warms, and because land-based ice, such as that contained in the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets, adds to the volume when it melts and slips into the sea. » Source: The Independent The present prediction of the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, from its third assessment report in 2001, is that global sea levels will rise by between 9cm and 88cm by 2100, depending on a number of factors including how far emissions are controlled, with a best guess of about 50cm over the century. Rises ...

We tend to see urban pollution as a modern problem. But did you know that urban pollution was a serious problem for Western world cities as far back as 200 years ago? The greatest source of pollution for 19th-century cities was, believe it or not, the horse. Horses were ubiquitous back then. They drew pretty much anything that was heavy and had to move. Horse-drawn carriages, trains, wagons, supply carts...you name it. Of course, there were no horse toilets, so these animals had to relieve themselves in the streets. This might seem like a quaint issue until one realises that the average city horse could produce up to 35 pounds of manure and 2 pints of urine a day. Yuck! » Source: Daily Reckoning Today, we have to deal with global warming and Peak Oil – back then, they were dealing with global stench ...

Syntroleum announced that its Fischer-Tropsch (FT) jet fuel has been successfully tested in a United States Air Force B-52 Stratofortress Bomber aircraft. The plane lifted off from Edwards Air Force Base, Calif., with a 50/50 blend of FT and traditional JP-8 jet fuel which was burned in two of the eight engines on the plane. This marks the first time that FT jet fuel has been tested in a military flight demo, and is the first of several planned test flights. The test is a result of more than four years of successful research and development efforts with the U.S. Department of Defense (DOD), focused on producing a high-performance alternative fuel for military applications. » Source: Green Car Congress The program culminating in the test flight today is the first step in opening up new horizons for sourcing fuel for ...

The Bush administration said a Sept. 27 sale of oil drilling leases in Alaska should go forward and rejected a court's objections that environmental effects have not been properly addressed. The U.S. Interior Department said in a court filing yesterday that the impact of expanded drilling on air, water, wetlands and wildlife had been properly considered in the plan to expand drilling in the National Petroleum Reserve. Earlier this month, U.S. District Judge James Singleton in Anchorage ruled that an environmental impact statement prepared by the agency failed "to adequately address the cumulative effects" of drilling. » Source: Bloomberg.com "Depending on the resource or activity, the cumulative impacts throughout the entire North Slope are discussed," the Interior Department said in the filing. The agency "conducted the required 'hard look' at those impacts given the limited nature of information ...

Ice defines the Arctic. It determines what exists, and how. It shapes the region's culture and history. It's highway, birthing ground and hunting platform. It's what tourists clamour for, and artists strive to paint. It has helped to forge Canada's identity as a cold, northern nation of strong, resourceful survivors. It is disappearing. In Iqaluit, the capital of Nunavut territory, locals report the harbour was clear nearly a month early this year. At the wharf, an Inuit family, tying up after a four-day hunting trip, say they'd seen no seal. The animal needs ice, and the ice was long gone. » Source: TheStar.com Northern temperatures were 2.5C above normal this summer. The ice cap that floats on the polar ocean is now 14 per cent smaller than in 1978, and 20 per cent thinner than the four-decade average. The Arctic will continue to deep freeze ...

The melting of the sea ice in the Arctic, the clearest sign so far of global warming, has taken a sudden and enormous leap forward, in one of the most ominous developments yet in the onset of climate change. Two separate studies by Nasa, using different satellite monitoring technologies, both show a great surge in the disappearance of Arctic ice cover in the last two years. One, from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California, shows that Arctic perennial sea ice, which normally survives the summer melt season and remains year-round, shrank by 14 per cent in just 12 months between 2004 and 2005. » Source: Independent Online The overall decrease in the ice cover was 720,000 sq km (280,000 sq miles) - an area almost the size of Turkey, gone in a single year. The other study, from the Goddard Space Flight Centre, in Maryland, shows that the perennial ice melting rate, which has averaged ...

Polar bears are drowning and receding Arctic glaciers have uncovered previously unknown islands in a drastic 2006 summer thaw widely blamed on global warming. Signs of wrenching changes are apparent around the Arctic region due to unusual warmth -- the summer minimum for ice is usually reached between mid-September and early October before the Arctic freeze extends its grip. "We know about three new islands this year that have been uncovered because the glaciers have retreated," said Rune Bergstrom, environmental adviser to the governor of Svalbard, a Norwegian archipelago about 1,000 km (600 miles) from the North Pole. Source: Yahoo News The largest is about 300 by 100 meters, he told Reuters. On a trip this summer "We saw a couple of polar bears in the sea east of Svalbard -- one of them looked to be dead and the other one looked to be exhausted," said Julian Dowdeswell, head of the ...