Everyone understands the top issues for public health are ----safe and accessible food and water and we have discussed often how MOVING FORWARD global Wall Street pols are using that dastardly Henry Kissinger policy of capturing and controlling food, water, and energy to control nations and its people and WE THE PEOPLE are well on our way to being that captured colonial entity.
When we speak of the AIR THAT WE BREATHE it is usually in the context of POLLUTED AIR----we rarely here any talk of the depletion of OXYGEN IN THE AIR. Know what? People cannot live without OXYGEN. This is a PUBLIC HEALTH CERTAINTY. Let's talk the science of oxygen to understand how the STEM OF MOVING FORWARD will deplete earth's oxygen not too far in the future if we continue to allow MOVING FORWARD.
The last post introduced the vital oxygen-producing PHYTOPLANKTON in our oceans--we see they are a larger source of oxygen then our trees and our land plants. When CLINTON/BUSH/OBAMA just arbitrarily decide they are going to appoint people to THE INTERNATIONAL NUCLEAR AGENCIES tasked with regulating and enforcing nuclear safety that COULD CARE LESS ABOUT REGULATING NUCLEAR SAFETY AND COULD CARE LESS ABOUT DAMAGES FROM RADIOACTIVE POLLUTION----we get nuclear accidents like Japan's reactor meltdown and we get massive oil rig disasters globally both of which WIPE OUT PHYTOPLANKTON living on the ocean's surface. When global oil executives say with disdain---OH, THAT DISASTER WILL CLEAR UP IN SEVERAL DECADES----they are not telling WE THE PEOPLE how serious the decline of PHYTOPLANKTON is worldwide.
We talked about how the NEW TECHNOLOGY of floating massive solar platforms-----massive industrial fish farming structures----expanding oil drilling on EAST and WEST COAST and Alaska all heighten the killing of phytoplankton. This very, very, very small plant life is top food chain source for all marine animals and existed in abundance along our coastlines UNTIL ALL OF THE ABOVE INDUSTRIES killed THAT ENVIRONMENT. Now global Wall Street is killing even those PHYTOPLANKTON in mid-ocean.
'Scientists agree that there’s oxygen from ocean plants in every breath we take. Most of this oxygen comes from tiny ocean plants – called phytoplankton – that live near the water’s surface and drift with the currents. Like all plants, they photosynthesize – that is, they use sunlight and carbon dioxide to make food. A byproduct of photosynthesis is oxygen.
Scientists believe that phytoplankton contribute between 50 to 85 percent of the oxygen in Earth’s atmosphere'.
Phytoplankton Vanishing from Warming Oceans- World’s Oxygen Supply Threatened
The scientific headlines scream looming disaster as the ocean’s phytoplankton steadily populations drop. The public yawns, who cares if phytoplankton, the microscopic plants that live in the ocean, are disappearing? You can’t eat them.
We better care; these tiny organisms gobble up carbon dioxide and produce half the world’s oxygen—equaling that of trees and plants on land. They are the basis for life in the world’s oceans.
According to recent studies led by Dalhousie University, phytoplankton populations are in significant decline, and the implications for both marine life and life on Earth could be immense.
According to the study, published on July 29th in Nature, the world is losing an average of one per cent of its phytoplankton each year, and the northern hemisphere has lost roughly 40 per cent since 1950.[1]
The study, which took three years to complete, is the first comprehensive survey of for the global populations of these microscopic organisms and the results are disturbing, that is if you care about life.
In order to understand the significance of this decline, we must first understand the significance of phytoplankton.
Phytoplankton is the staple upon which the entire marine food chain is built. Phytoplankton is the main source of food for zooplankton, which in turn is the staple for many small fish and other sea creatures, which are then eaten by the bigger fish and large mammals such as seals and whales. A decline of phytoplankton harms the entire food chain, and is contributing mightily to the decline of all life in the ocean.
But the consequences of losing these microscopic beings are far greater!
The role of phytoplankton goes well beyond the marine environment. Like terrestrial vegetation, phytoplankton photosynthesizes and in doing so consumes carbon dioxide and produces about half of the world’s oxygen supply.
The phytoplankton of the seas provide an enormous carbon sink, one essential for absorbing the huge volumes of carbon we have and increasingly release through fossil fuel consumption. As such Phytoplankton plays an enormous role in the world’s carbon cycle and therefore the stability of the global climate.
What has caused this dramatic decline?
While the exact causes are unclear, researchers of the recent study suspect that there is likely a strong correlation between the decline and rising sea temperatures. As surface water warms, it tends to form a distinct layer that does not mix well with cooler, nutrient-rich water below, depriving phytoplankton of some of the materials they need to turn CO2 and sunlight into energy.
The loss of phytoplankton therefore, seems to be part of a very troublesome feedback loop. Rising ocean temperatures are driving a decline the Earth’s natural ability to absorb carbon dioxide, which is in turn leading to a greater abundance of greenhouse gasses, which leads to warmer oceans.
More than a wake- up call this study should set off alarm bells. Urgently we need it more research and analysis. We can’t even begin to address this problem, this broken natural cycle, without a fuller understanding of all the factors that are driving this population decline.
As the CBC reports there have already been calls for drastic intervention and bioengineering schemes to add more nutrients to ocean water to boost phytoplankton growth.[2]
Clearly action is needed, but we should also be wary of the laws of unintended consequences— a law that when combined with hubris and human arrogance is perhaps largely responsible for getting us into this mess in the first place.
In the meantime, on our regularly scheduled program, “The small fish eat the little ones, the big fish eat the small ones, not my problem, give me some! * Well, it is our problem and I encourage you to think about it.
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National media will often tell citizens of the threat of phytoplankton decline in ocean food chain----DON'T WORRY global Wall Street says we are building INDUSTRIAL FISH FARMS that will further kill phytoplankton. It is the same mentality of GREEN REVOLUTION CORPORATIONS telling US farmers to use more and more and more fertilizer which was killing the natural soil animals creating natural food plant fertilizers. These 5% are very crazy dudes and sadly DUDETTES.
MOVING FORWARD 4th industrial revolution will indeed make temperatures rise----the killing of PHYTOPLANKTON comes from multiple sources of industrial pollution=====
The rising temperatures created by industrial CLIMATE CHANGE GASES, not only CO2---
The melting glaciers and north and south polar ices are killing ocean water chemical balance-----too much acidity---too much fresh water changing salt concentrations and VOILA---these tiny plants cannot live. If we were not spending trillions of dollars to built GLOBAL ONLINE CORPORATION ONE GRID-----we would be spending funds on capturing all that fresh water from melting ice.
So, phytoplankton in decline these several decades-----the decline has grown during CLINTON/BUSH/OBAMA -----and now with expanding FOREIGN ECONOMIC ZONES IN AFRICA AND US----that decline will soar---but global Wall Street pols are PRETENDING they are addressing all these environmental problems with GLOBAL GREEN CORPORATIONS.
Industrial fish farming global Wall Street says will replace this dying marine food source-----as industrial fish farming further KILLS THAT SAME MARINE ENVIRONMENT making sure it never recovers.
Earth's Oxygen Engine: Is the Invisible Ocean Virus Ecosystem Threatened?
May 24, 2015
When you mention rich ecosystems that are vital for life on Earth, people tend to think of rainforests, but ocean plankton are actually just as crucial. The microscopic beings that drift on the upper layer of the oceans are globally referred to as "plankton"; together they produce half of our oxygen, act as carbon sinks, influence our weather, and serve as the base of the ocean food web that sustains the larger fish and marine mammals that we depend upon or draw delight from.
"Beyond the cutting-edge science that was developed thanks to our collaborative work with the Tara Expéditions Foundation, this adventure is also about showing people all over the world how important the ocean is for our own well-being," says Eric Karsenti, director of Tara Oceans, from EMBL and CNRS.The scientists captured viruses, microbes and microscopic eukaryotes -- organisms with complex cells, from single-cell algae to fish larvae -- from major oceanic regions. They compiled their genetic material into comprehensive resources that are now available to the scientific community for further studies.
"This is the largest DNA sequencing effort ever done for ocean science: analyses revealed around 40 million genes, the vast majority of which are new to science, thus hinting towards a much broader biodiversity of plankton than previously known," explains Patrick Wincker, from Genoscope, CEA.
EMBL's high performance computing was essential in compiling this comprehensive catalogue, which is estimated to be derived from more than 35 000 different species whose genomic content had been mostly unknown to mankind until now.
"In terms of eukaryotes, we sequenced nearly a billion genetic barcodes, and found that there is a greater variety of single-cell eukaryotes in plankton than was thought," says Colomban de Vargas, from CNRS. "They appear to be much more diverse than bacteria or animals, and most belong to little-known groups."
Thanks to novel computer models, the researchers were able to predict how these diverse planktonic organisms interact. Predictions were confirmed via selective microscopy observations.
"When we mapped how planktonic organisms -- from viruses to small animal larvae -- interact with each other, we discovered that most of those interactions are parasitic, recycling nutrients back down the food chain," says Jeroen Raes from VIB, KU Leuven, and Vrije Universiteit Brussel. This map is a first step towards a better understanding of the dynamics and structure of the global marine ecosystem.
In addition to biotic interactions, the scientists studied how environmental factors -- such as temperature, pH, and nutrients (amongst others) -- influence the microscopic organisms floating in the ocean.
"We found that, at depths still reached by sunlight, temperature was the main factor that influences the composition of prokaryotes (bacteria and archaea) communities," says Peer Bork from EMBL. "Different sets of organisms come together depending on the water temperature."
The scientists also showed that the Agulhas "rings" -- a natural barrier that draws the line between the Indian Ocean and the South Atlantic -- separate plankton communities. "It's like plankton goes through a cold wash cycle at the tip of South Africa," says Daniele Iudicone from the Stazione Zoologica Anton Dohrn. "The current forms huge swirls that drastically mix and cool the plankton riding it, thus limiting the number of species that manage to cross."
"In addition, we now also have a global picture of marine virus communities, which allows us to confirm an idea that had been proposed a decade ago, but never proven," explains Matthew Sullivan from the University of Arizona. "Viruses are produced in local 'seed banks' and then ride the ocean currents, so you end up with different cocktails of viruses in different places, even though the overall diversity of viruses in the oceans appears quite limited."
Understanding the distribution and the interactions of the plankton across the oceans will be very useful for predictive models necessary to study climate change.
The uniqueness of the Tara Oceans 'eco-systems biology' approach is to have sampled the world's oceans systematically across all domains of life, from viruses to animals, and including a rich variety of environmental data. The data generated sets a baseline, on a global scale, to evaluate the impact of climate changes on oceanic ecosystems in the future.
"The finding that temperature shapes which species are present, for instance, is especially relevant in the context of climate change, but to some extent this is just the beginning," says Chris Bowler, from CNRS. "The resources we've generated will allow us and others to delve even deeper, and finally begin to really understand the workings of this invisible world."
The Daily Galaxy via European Molecular Biology Labratory
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We see below the universities tied to the worst of MOVING FORWARD 4TH INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION have those few scientists writing articles telling us how bad things will get. PENN STATE and GLOBAL JOHNS HOPKINS lead in pushing the worst of economic policies not caring that they are leading the way to 5 DEGREE CLIMATE CHANGE.
When temperatures rise AND when fracking goes global ---know where fracking and natural gas is found in high abundance? SIBERIAN PEAT BOGS now under PERMA-FROST. Know who had satellites map where that natural gas is abundant? Good old global Wall Street Ivy League universities. Obama and Hillary made fracking go global and they are fighting to get at that Siberian and a lesser CANADIAN NORTHWEST peat zone under PERMA-FROST. Global Wall Street 5% are cheerleading melting polar ice because that makes fracking and oil drilling easier.
WE ARE WINNERS SHOUT GLOBAL FRACKING AND GLOBAL OIL CORPORATIONS AND THEIR GLOBAL WALL STREET 5% CLINTON/BUSH/OBAMA.
As Foreign Economic Zones expand with more global factories the polar PERMA-FROST covering the very cold northern lands is melting and with that RELEASING OF GREAT AMOUNTS OF METHANE. METHANE is concentrated CO2----it is worse as a CLIMATE CHANGE GAS----but what we do not hear is how higher METHANE CONCENTRATIONS in air KILL OUR OXYGEN.
Methane drives chemical reactions forcing oxygen molecules to join in making more METHANE. BYE-BYE OXYGEN HELLO SUPER-SIZED METHANE IN OUR AIR.
'Washington, D.C. -– Volcanic eruptions in Siberia 251 million years ago may have started a cascade of events leading to high hydrogen sulfide levels in the oceans and atmosphere and precipitating the largest mass extinction in Earth’s history, according to a Penn State geoscientist'.
This article talks of hundreds of millions of years ago when NATURAL ACTIONS created these same atmosphere conditions AS OUR MOVING FORWARD GLOBAL WALL STREET CLINTON/BUSH/OBAMA----instead of volcanoes erupting we have MAD HATTERS building more and more and more GLOBAL INDUSTRY.
Global Warming Led To Atmospheric Hydrogen Sulfide And Permian Extinction
Date:
March 1, 2005
Source:
Penn State
Summary:
Volcanic eruptions in Siberia 251 million years ago may have started a cascade of events leading to high hydrogen sulfide levels in the oceans and atmosphere and precipitating the largest mass extinction in Earth’s history, according to a Penn State geoscientist.
Washington, D.C. -– Volcanic eruptions in Siberia 251 million years ago may have started a cascade of events leading to high hydrogen sulfide levels in the oceans and atmosphere and precipitating the largest mass extinction in Earth’s history, according to a Penn State geoscientist.
"The recent dating of the Siberian trap volcanoes to be contemporaneous with the end-Permian extinction suggests that they were the trigger for the environmental events that caused the extinctions," says Lee R. Kump, professor of geosciences. "But the warming caused by these volcanoes through carbon dioxide emissions would not be large enough to cause mass extinctions by itself."
That warming, however, could set off a series of events that led to mass extinction. During the end-Permian extinction 95 percent of all species on Earth became extinct, compared to only 75 percent during the K-T when a large asteroid apparently caused the dinosaurs to disappear.
Volcanic carbon dioxide would cause atmospheric warming that would, in turn, warm surface ocean water. Normally, the deep ocean gets its oxygen from the atmosphere at the poles. Cold water there soaks up oxygen from the air and because cold water is dense, it sinks and slowly moves equator-ward, taking oxygen with it. The warmer the water, the less oxygen can dissolve and the slower the water sinks and moves toward the equator.
“Warmer water slows the conveyer belt and brings less oxygen to the deep oceans,” says Kump.
The constant rain of organic debris produced by marine plants and animals, needs oxygen to decompose. With less oxygen, fewer organics are aerobically consumed.
"Today, there are not enough organics in the oceans to go anoxic," says Kump. "But in the Permian, if the warming from the volcanic carbon dioxide decreased oceanic oxygen, especially if atmospheric oxygen levels were lower, the oceans would be depleted of oxygen."
Once the oxygen is gone, the oceans become the realm of bacteria that obtain their oxygen from sulfur oxide compounds. These bacteria strip oxygen from the compounds and produce hydrogen sulfide. Hydrogen sulfide kills aerobic organisms.
Humans can smell hydrogen sulfide gas, the smell of rotten cabbage, in the parts per trillion range. In the deeps of the Black Sea today, hydrogen sulfide exists at about 200 parts per million. This is a toxic brew in which any aerobic, oxygen-needing organism would die. For the Black Sea, the hydrogen sulfide stays in the depths because our rich oxygen atmosphere mixes in the top layer of water and controls the diffusion of hydrogen sulfide upwards.
In the end-Permian, as the levels of atmospheric oxygen fell and the levels of hydrogen sulfide and carbon dioxide rose, the upper levels of the oceans could have become rich in hydrogen sulfide catastrophically. This would kill most the oceanic plants and animals. The hydrogen sulfide dispersing in the atmosphere would kill most terrestrial life.
"A hydrogen sulfide atmosphere fits the extinction better than one enriched in carbon dioxide," says Kump. "Carbon dioxide would have a profound effect on marine life, but terrestrial plants thrive on carbon dioxide, yet they are included in the extinction."
Another piece in the puzzle surrounding this extinction is that hydrogen sulfide gas destroys the ozone layer. Recently, Dr. Henk Visscher of Utrecht University and his colleagues suggested that there are fossil spores from the end-Permian that show deformities that researchers suspect were caused by ultra violet light.
"These deformities fit the idea that the ozone layer was damaged, letting in more ultra violet," says Kump.
Once this process is underway, methane produced in the ample swamps of this time period has little in the atmosphere to destroy it. The atmosphere becomes one of hydrogen sulfide, methane and ultra violet radiation.
The Penn State researcher and his colleagues are looking for biomarkers, indications of photosynthetic sulfur bacteria in deep-sea sediments to complement such biomarkers recently reported in shallow water sediments of this age by Kliti Grice, Curtin University of Technology, Australia, and colleagues in the Feb. 4 issue of the journal, Science. These bacteria live in places where no oxygen exists, but there is some sunlight. They would have been in their heyday in the end-Permian. Finding evidence of green sulfur bacteria would provide evidence for hydrogen sulfide as the cause of the mass extinctions.
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Basic science in high school teaches just what is happening today with methane in our air rising as water levels in ocean rises----that methane is driven to bind with oxygen ---this is a force of nature ---it does not pick and choose. The more methane concentration in air---the more our oxygen will be captured in atmosphere and made into WATER. Lot's of RAIN----NO OXYGEN----that is MOVING FORWARD 4TH INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION BY GLOBAL WALL STREET 5% TO THE 1%. When we are told temperatures in our middle America are going to rise similar to equator----they tell us as well we will see the same high levels of RAIN-----that is because all our OXYGEN IN AIR is being captured by METHANE and turned into water.
A molecule of methane consists of 4 hydrogen atoms and one carbon atom: C H4. Oxygen molecules are O2. To burn (combine) you need two O2 molecules. Then the burning (combination) looks like this:
C H4 + 2 O2 --> CO2 + 2 H2O.
The process gives off energy (that means that the outgoing molecules of carbon dioxide (CO2) and water (H2O) have high velocity and heat up the surroundings, perhaps triggering other methane and oxygen molecules to combine (that is, to burn).
WE THE PEOPLE will suffer the effects of no oxygen long before that rain replenishes our polluted and exhausted fresh water supply----the lost oxygen will happen in decades and a few centuries---the replenishment of METHANE RAIN FRESH WATER will be millions of years.
INTRODUCTION
Natural gas, composed primarily of methane, is an energy-
intensive fuel source that has a high molar energy density,
exhibits cleaner combustion when compared to diesel or
petroleum, 1,2 and requires low utilization costs.
Sunday, April 26, 2015
Methane levels as high as 2845ppb Methane levels as high as 2845 parts per billion (ppb) were recorded on April 25, 2015, as illustrated by the image below.
This is an extremely high peak. The average daily peak in 2015 until May 1 was 2371 ppb, while the highest daily mean ranged from 1807 ppb (January 10) to 1829 ppb (April 22). Daily peaks and daily highest mean levels in 2015 are shown on the image below.
These peaks are much higher than they were in previous years, as illustrated by the image below, from an earlier post and showing the average highest peak readings in 2013 and 2014 at selected altitudes..
Peak readings in above image are averages over April 2013 and April 2014. On specific days, peak readings could be much higher, e.g. on April 28, 2014, methane levels were recorded as high as 2551 ppb at 469 mb. As said, methane levels as high as 2845 ppb were recorded on April 25, 2015, while the average peak for the first four months of 2015 was 2371 ppb, and this average was calculated from peaks across altitudes.
Peak levels in April appear to be rising strongly each year, following higher peak readings during previous months, especially at higher altitudes, i.e. especially the Arctic Ocean. It appears that much of the additional methane originating from the higher latitudes of the Northern Hemisphere has moved closer to the equator over the past few months, and is now accumulating at higher altitudes over the continents on the Northern Hemisphere, i.e. Asia, Europe, North America and north Africa.
Further analysis of the rise in global mean methane levels appears to confirm the above. The image below shows methane levels on April 22, over three years. While there appears to be little or no rise in mean methane levels at low altitudes, the rise is quite profound at higher altitudes.
Things look set to get worse. As shown by the image below, from an earlier post, global methane levels have risen sharply from a low of 723 ppb in 1755. Mean methane levels were as high as 1839 ppb in 2014. That's a rise of more than 254%.
As that post concluded a year ago, it appears that the rise of methane in the atmosphere is accelerating. What can we expect? As temperatures can be expected to continue to rise and as feedbacks start to kick in, this may well constitute a non-linear trend. The image below shows a polynomial trend that is contained in IPCC AR5 data from 1955 to 2011, pointing at methane reaching mean global levels higher than 3000 ppb by the year 2030. If methane starts to erupt in large quantities from clathrates underneath the seafloor of the Arctic Ocean, this may well be where we are heading.
The situation is dire and calls for comprehensive and effective action, as discussed at the Climate Plan.
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First Water Tests Show Worrying Signs From Cook Inlet Gas Leak
Low oxygen and high methane levels were found near the leaking gas pipeline in Alaska, although the true danger to marine life is yet to be measured.
Sabrina Shankman
By Sabrina Shankman
Mar 24, 2017
Here we see 2008 global Wall Street media telling us global green corporations are going to save the day. This is right as the economic crash started the next phase of MOVING FORWARD. All state and Federal funding went to grow global corporations into global green corporations and now all research data tell us these green corporations are helping the world control CLIMATE CHANGE. At the same time we have corporate universities like PENN STATE and GLOBAL IVY LEAGUE JOHNS HOPKINS writing articles saying how bad things are getting. Both of these universities are of course owned and operated by global fracking corporations ----so the next phase of PROPAGANDA directed at 99% of WE THE PEOPLE----is this----the global 99% now NEEDS global Wall Street and their green corporations to save us from CATASTROPHE. Please don't believe this---the only ones global Wall Street are working to save are that same global 1% minus WE THE PEOPLE THE 99%.
The gloom and doom of today's data is NOT ACCURATE----CORPORATE UNIVERSITIES WILL NOW TRY TO SCARE PEOPLE into keeping those global CLINTON/BUSH/OBAMA ----now TRUMP in charge to SAVE US. It is EASY PEASY to stop and slow down CLIMATE CHANGE---we simply need to stop global corporate campuses and global factories in US cities deemed Foreign Economic Zones and rebuild our US economies with small and regional businesses and small, local manufacturing. JUST GET RID OF THESE GLOBAL WALL STREET PLAYERS.
Oh NO! We must have global green corporations to build all those NEW PRODUCTS----those PLASTIC TREES with CO2 SCRUBBERS now needing ATTACHED OXYGEN GENERATORS but not to forget those man-made BEEHIVES filled with ROBOBEES-----well, it looks like the 99% won't be able to afford ANY OF THOSE NEW PRODUCTS.
THOSE 5% 'WINNERS' PUTTING MONEY IN THEIR POCKETS FROM STOCK OPTIONS KILLING THE FUTURE OF THEIR CHILDREN AND GRANDCHILDREN.
Only global Wall Street 5% FOLLOWERS SHOW ME THE MONEY LIVING FOR TODAY 5% would follow these global 1% mad hatters. We need 99% REAL social progressive LEADERS to take back our Democratic Party!
Beyond The Green Corporation
Imagine a world in which eco-friendly and socially responsible practices actually help a company's bottom line. It's closer than you think
January 29, 2007, 12:00 AM EST
COVER STORY PODCAST
Under conventional notions of how to run a conglomerate like Unilever, CEO Patrick Cescau should wake up each morning with a laserlike focus: how to sell more soap and shampoo than Procter & Gamble Co. (PG ) But ask Cescau about the $52 billion Dutch-British giant's biggest strategic challenges for the 21st century, and the conversation roams from water-deprived villages in Africa to the planet's warming climate.
The world is Unilever's laboratory. In Brazil, the company operates a free community laundry in a São Paulo slum, provides financing to help tomato growers convert to eco-friendly "drip" irrigation, and recycles 17 tons of waste annually at a toothpaste factory. Unilever funds a floating hospital that offers free medical care in Bangladesh, a nation with just 20 doctors for every 10,000 people. In Ghana, it teaches palm oil producers to reuse plant waste while providing potable water to deprived communities. In India, Unilever staff help thousands of women in remote villages start micro-enterprises. And responding to green activists, the company discloses how much carbon dioxide and hazardous waste its factories spew out around the world.
As Cescau sees it, helping such nations wrestle with poverty, water scarcity, and the effects of climate change is vital to staying competitive in coming decades. Some 40% of the company's sales and most of its growth now take place in developing nations. Unilever food products account for roughly 10% of the world's crops of tea and 30% of all spinach. It is also one of the world's biggest buyers of fish. As environmental regulations grow tighter around the world, Unilever must invest in green technologies or its leadership in packaged foods, soaps, and other goods could be imperiled. "You can't ignore the impact your company has on the community and environment," Cescau says. CEOs used to frame thoughts like these in the context of moral responsibility, he adds. But now, "it's also about growth and innovation. In the future, it will be the only way to do business."
A remarkable number of CEOs have begun to commit themselves to the same kind of sustainability goals Cescau has pinpointed, even in profit- obsessed America. For years, the term "sustainability" has carried a lot of baggage. Put simply, it's about meeting humanity's needs without harming future generations. It was a favorite cause among economic development experts, human rights activists, and conservationists. But to many U.S. business leaders, sustainability just meant higher costs and smacked of earnest U.N. corporate- responsibility conferences and the utopian idealism of Western Europe. Now, sustainability is "right at the top of the agendas" of more U.S. CEOs, especially young ones, says McKinsey Global Institute Chairman Lenny Mendonca.
You can tell something is up just wading through the voluminous sustainability reports most big corporations post on their Web sites. These lay out efforts to cut toxic emissions, create eco-friendly products, help the poor, and cooperate with nonprofit groups. As recently as five years ago, such reports—if they appeared at all—were usually transparent efforts to polish the corporate image. Now there's a more sophisticated understanding that environmental and social practices can yield strategic advantages in an interconnected world of shifting customer loyalties and regulatory regimes.
Embracing sustainability can help avert costly setbacks from environmental disasters, political protests, and human rights or workplace abuses—the kinds of debacles suffered by Royal Dutch Shell PLC (RDS ) in Nigeria and Unocal in Burma. "Nobody has an idea when such events can hit a balance sheet, so companies must stay ahead of the curve," says Matthew J. Kiernan, CEO of Innovest Strategic Value Advisors. Innovest is an international research and advisory firm whose clients include large institutional investors. It supplied the data for this BusinessWeek Special Report and prepared a list of the world's 100 most sustainable corporations, to be presented at the Jan. 24-28 World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.
THOSE GLOBAL 1% AT DAVOS SWITZERLAND WORLD ECONOMIC FORUM---ALWAYS WORRIED ABOUT THE WELFARE OF THE GLOBAL 99%!
The roster of advocates includes Jeffrey Immelt, CEO of General Electric Co. (GE ), who is betting billions to position GE as a leading innovator in everything from wind power to hybrid engines. Wal-Mart Stores Inc. (WMT ), long assailed for its labor and global sourcing practices, has made a series of high-profile promises to slash energy use overall, from its stores to its vast trucking fleets, and purchase more electricity derived from renewable sources. GlaxoSmithKline (GSK ) discovered that, by investing to develop drugs for poor nations, it can work more effectively with those governments to make sure its patents are protected. Dow Chemical Co. (DOW ) is increasing R&D in products such as roof tiles that deliver solar power to buildings and water treatment technologies for regions short of clean water. "There is 100% overlap between our business drivers and social and environmental interests," says Dow CEO Andrew N. Liveris.
Striking that balance is not easy. Many noble efforts fail because they are poorly executed or never made sense to begin with. "If there's no connection to a company's business, it doesn't have much leverage to make an impact," says Harvard University business guru Michael Porter. Sustainability can be a hard proposition for investors, too. Decades of experience show that it's risky to pick stocks based mainly on a company's long-term environmental or social-responsibility targets.
Nevertheless, new sets of metrics, which Innovest and others designed to measure sustainability efforts, have helped convince CEOs and boards that they pay off. Few Wall Street analysts, for example, have tried to assess how much damage Wal-Mart's reputation for poor labor and environmental practices did to the stock price. But New York's Communications Consulting Worldwide (CCW), which studies issues such as reputation, puts it in stark dollars and cents. CCW calculates that if Wal-Mart had a reputation like that of rival Target Corp. (TGT ), its stock would be worth 8.4% more, adding $16 billion in market capitalization.
Serious money is lining up behind the sustainability agenda. Assets of mutual funds that are designed to invest in companies meeting social responsibility criteria have swelled from $12 billion in 1995 to $178 billion in 2005, estimates trade association Social Investment Forum. Boston's State Street Global Advisors alone handles $77 billion in such funds. And institutions with $4 trillion in assets, including charitable trusts and government pension funds in Europe and states such as California, pledge to weigh sustainability factors in investment decisions.
Why the sudden urgency? The growing clout of watchdog groups making savvy use of the Internet is one factor. New environmental regulations also play a powerful role. Electronics manufacturers slow to wean their factories and products off toxic materials, for example, could be at a serious disadvantage as Europe adopts additional, stringent restrictions. American energy and utility companies that don't cut fossil fuel reliance could lose if Washington joins the rest of the industrialized world in ordering curbs on greenhouse gas emissions. Such developments help explain why Exxon Mobil Corp. (XOM ), long opposed to linking government policies with global warming theories, is now taking part in meetings to figure out what the U.S. should do to cut emissions.
Investors who think about these issues obviously have long time horizons. But they encounter knotty problems when trying to peer beyond the next quarter's results to a future years down the road. Corporations disclose the value of physical assets and investments in equipment and property. But U.S. regulators don't require them to quantify environmental, social, or labor practices. Accountants call such squishy factors "intangibles." These items aren't found on a corporate balance sheet, yet can be powerful indicators of future performance.
If a company is at the leading edge of understanding and preparing for megatrends taking shape in key markets, this could constitute a valuable intangible asset. By being the first fast-food chain to stop using unhealthy trans fats, Wendy's International Inc. (WEN ) may have a competitive edge now that New York City has banned the additives in restaurants. McDonald's Corp. (MCD ), which failed to do so, could have a future problem.
Rising investor demand for information on sustainability has spurred a flood of new research. Goldman Sachs, Deutsche Bank Securities (DB ), ubs (UBS ), Citigroup (C ), Morgan Stanley, and other brokerages have formed dedicated teams assessing how companies are affected by everything from climate change and social pressures in emerging markets to governance records. "The difference in interest between three years ago and now is extraordinary," says former Goldman Sachs (GS ) Asset Management CEO David Blood, who heads the Enhanced Analytics Initiative, a research effort on intangibles by 22 brokerages. He also leads Generation Investment Management, co-founded in 2004 with former Vice-President Al Gore, which uses sustainability as an investment criterion.
Perhaps the most ambitious effort is by Innovest, founded in 1995 by Kiernan, a former KPMG senior partner. Besides conventional financial performance metrics, Innovest studies 120 different factors, such as energy use, health and safety records, litigation, employee practices, regulatory history, and management systems for dealing with supplier problems. It uses these measures to assign grades ranging from AAA to CCC, much like a bond rating, to 2,200 listed companies. Companies on the Global 100 list on BusinessWeek's Web site include Nokia Corp. (NOK ) and Ericsson (ERICY ), which excel at tailoring products for developing nations, and banks such as hsbc Holdings (HBC ) and abn-Amro (ABN ) that study the environmental impact of projects they help finance.
Some of Innovest's conclusions are counterintuitive. Hewlett-Packard (HPQ ) and Dell (DELL ) both rate AAA, for example; market darling Apple (AAPL ) gets a middling BBB on the grounds of weaker oversight of offshore factories and lack of a "clear environmental business strategy." An Apple spokesman contests that it is a laggard, citing the company's leadership in energy-efficient products and in cutting toxic substances. Then there's Sony Corp. (SNE ) vs. Nintendo. Wall Street loves the latter for a host of reasons, not least that its Wii video game system, the first to let users simulate actions such as swinging a sword or tennis racket, was a Christmas blockbuster. Sony, meanwhile, has a famously dysfunctional home electronics arm, and was embarrassed by exploding laptop batteries and long delays in bringing out its PlayStation 3 game console. Nintendo's stock has more than tripled in three years; Sony's has languished.
WEIGHING THE EFFORTS
Viewed through the lens of sustainability, however, Sony looks like the better bet. It is an industry leader in developing energy-efficient appliances. It also learned from a 2001 fiasco, when illegal cadmium was found in PlayStation cables bought from outside suppliers. That cost Sony $85 million, says Hidemi Tomita, Sony's corporate responsibility general manager. Now, Sony has a whole corporate infrastructure for controlling its vast supplier network, helping it avert or quickly fix problems. Nintendo, a smaller Kyoto-based company focused on games, shows less evidence of the global management systems needed to cope with sudden regulatory shifts or supplier problems, says Innovest. A Nintendo spokesman says it meets all environmental rules and is "always reviewing and considering" the merits of new global sustainability guidelines.
BP seems to disprove the sustainability thesis altogether. CEO John Browne has preached environmentalism for a decade, and BP consistently ranked atop most sustainability indexes. Yet in the past two years it has been hit with a refinery explosion that killed 15 in Texas, a fine for safety violations at a refinery in Ohio, a major oil pipeline leak in Alaska, and a U.S. Justice Dept. probe into suspected manipulation of oil prices.Browne has recently announced his retirement. BP's shares have slid 10% since late April. Exxon's are up around 12%.
Innovest still rates BP a solid AA, while labeling Exxon a riskier BB. And PetroChina? Innovest gives it a CCC. Here's why: BP wins points for plowing $8 billion into alternative energies to diversify away from oil and engages community and environmental groups. Exxon has done less to curb greenhouse gas emissions and promote renewables and has big projects in trouble spots like Chad. "I would still say Exxon is a bigger long-term risk," says Innovest's Kiernan. Petro- China is easier to justify. Begin with its safety record: A gas well explosion killed 243 people in 2003; another fatal explosion in 2005 spewed toxic benzene into a river, leaving millions temporarily without water. PetroChina has been slow to invest in alternative energy, Innovest says, and its parent company has big bets in the Sudan.
Do Innovest's metrics make a reliable guide for picking stocks? Dozens of studies have looked for direct relationships between a company's social and environmental practices and its financial performance. So far the results are mixed, and Kiernan admits Innovest can't prove a causal link. That's little help to portfolio managers who must post good numbers by yearend. "The crux of the problem is that we are looking at things from the long term, but we're still under short-term review from our clients," says William H. Page, who oversees socially responsible investing for State Street Global Advisors.
TALKING A GOOD FIGHT
Yet Kiernan and many other experts maintain sustainability factors are good proxies of management quality. "They show that companies tend to be more strategic, nimble, and better equipped to compete in the complex, high-velocity global environment," Kiernan explains. That also is the logic behind Goldman Sachs's intangibles research. In its thick annual assessments of global energy and mining companies, for example, it ranks companies on the basis of sustainability factors, financial returns, and access to new resource reserves. Top-ranking companies, such as British Gas, Shell, and Brazil's Petrobras (PBR ), are leaders in all three categories. For the past two years, the stocks of elite companies on its list bested their industry peers by more than 5%—while laggards underperformed, Goldman says.
Still, BP's (BP ) woeful performance highlights a serious caveat to the corporate responsibility crusade. Companies that talk the most about sustainability aren't always the best at executing. Ford Motor Co. (F ) is another case in point. Former CEO William C. Ford Jr. has championed green causes for years. He famously spent $2 billion overhauling the sprawling River Rouge (Mich.) complex, putting on a 10-acre grass roof to capture rainwater. Ford also donated $25 million to Conservation International for an environmental center.
But Ford was flat-footed in the area most important to its business: It kept churning out gas-guzzling SUVs and pickups. "Having a green factory was not Ford's core issue. It was fuel economy," says Andrew S. Winston, director of a Yale University corporate environmental strategy project and co-author of the book Green to Gold.
The corporate responsibility field is littered with lofty intentions that don't pay off. As a result, many CEOs are unsure what to do exactly. In a recent McKinsey & Co. study of 1,144 top global executives, 79% predicted at least some responsibility for dealing with future social and political issues would fall on corporations. Three of four said such issues should be addressed by the CEO. But only 3% said they do a good job dealing with social pressures. "This is uncomfortable territory because most CEOs have not been trained to sense or react to the broader landscape," says McKinsey's Mendonca. "For the first time, they are expected to be statesmen as much as they are functional business leaders." Adding to the complexity, says Harvard's Porter, each company must custom-design initiatives that fit its own objectives.
Dow Chemical is looking at the big picture. It sees a market in the need for low-cost housing and is developing technologies such as eco-friendly Styrofoam used for walls. CEO Liveris also cites global water scarcity as a field in which Dow can "marry planetary issues with market opportunity." The U.N. figures 1.2 billion people lack access to clean water. Dow says financial solutions could help 300 million of them. That could translate into up to $3 billion in sales for Dow, which has a portfolio of cutting-edge systems for filtering minute contaminants from water. To reach the poor, Dow is working with foundations and the U.N. to raise funds for projects.
The most important business stories of the day.
Get Bloomberg's daily newsletter.Philips Electronics (PHG ) also is building strategies around global megatrends. By 2050, the U.N. predicts, 85% of people will live in developing nations. But shortages of health care are acute. Among Philips' many projects are medical vans that reach remote villages, allowing urban doctors to diagnose and treat patients via satellite. Philips has also developed low-cost water-purification technology and a smokeless wood-burning stove that could reduce the 1.6 million deaths annually worldwide from pulmonary diseases linked to cooking smoke. "For us, sustainability is a business imperative," says Philips Chief Procurement Officer Barbara Kux, who chairs a sustainability board that includes managers from all business units.
Such laudable efforts, even if successful, may not help managers make their numbers next quarter. But amid turbulent global challenges, they could help investors sort long-term survivors from the dinosaurs.
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This is NOT a shocker. REAL left social progressives KNOW how to stop and reverse Climate Change. What THE 99% OF citizens need to consider now---is how to not fall for all the PROPAGANDA.
Depletion of atmospheric O2 will of course not happen over night. Humans need a certain concentration of O2 to function normally and that will be the first sign of depleted O2--we will breathe deeply seeking O2 but not get the amounts needed to be active. So, we will become less active and feeling tired and fatigued. This will occur in simply decades. It will take a few hundreds of years for methane levels to claim more and more O2 to create devastating effects.
If we ignore actions NOW----global Wall Street will heighten all that fear-mongering over just who is going to get access to ONE WORLD ONE ECO-DOME protection. IT'S NO SECRET----ONLY THE GLOBAL 1% WILL HAVE THAT ACCESS.
Browse: Home / 2016 / June / 17 /
Plankton Will Stop Making Oxygen By End Of Century
plankton make our oxygen
Plankton Will Stop Making Oxygen By End Of Century
Russ George / June 17, 2016 / Leave a comment / Bad News For The Planet
Researchers reveal how Earth’s oxygen could collapse with ocean warming of just 6 degrees
The collapse of ocean oxygen production is far worse than the threat of sea level rise and flooding.
Shocker: Top Google Engineers Say Renewable Energy ‘Simply won’t work’
Anthony Watts / November 22, 2014
Guest essay by Eric Worrall
A research effort by Google corporation to make renewable energy viable has been a complete failure, according to the scientists who led the programme. After 4 years of effort, their conclusion is that renewable energy “simply won’t work”.
According to an interview with the engineers, published in IEEE;
“At the start of RE<C, we had shared the attitude of many stalwart environmentalists: We felt that with steady improvements to today’s renewable energy technologies, our society could stave off catastrophic climate change. We now know that to be a false hope …
Renewable energy technologies simply won’t work; we need a fundamentally different approach.”
There is simply no getout clause for renewables supporters. The people who ran the study are very much committed to the belief that CO2 is dangerous – they are supporters of James Hansen. Their sincere goal was not to simply install a few solar cells, but to find a way to fundamentally transform the economics of energy production – to make renewable energy cheaper than coal. To this end, the study considered exotic innovations barely on the drawing board, such as self erecting wind turbines, using robotic technology to create new wind farms without human intervention. The result however was total failure – even these exotic possibilities couldn’t deliver the necessary economic model.
The key problem appears to be that the cost of manufacturing the components of the renewable power facilities is far too close to the total recoverable energy – the facilities never, or just barely, produce enough energy to balance the budget of what was consumed in their construction. This leads to a runaway cycle of constructing more and more renewable plants simply to produce the energy required to manufacture and maintain renewable energy plants – an obvious practical absurdity.
As a review by The Register of the IEEE article states.
“Even if one were to electrify all of transport, industry, heating and so on, so much renewable generation and balancing/storage equipment would be needed to power it that astronomical new requirements for steel, concrete, copper, glass, carbon fibre, neodymium, shipping and haulage etc etc would appear. All these things are made using mammoth amounts of energy: far from achieving massive energy savings, which most plans for a renewables future rely on implicitly, we would wind up needing far more energy, which would mean even more vast renewables farms – and even more materials and energy to make and maintain them and so on. The scale of the building would be like nothing ever attempted by the human race.”
I must say I’m personally surprised at the conclusion of this study. I genuinely thought that we were maybe a few solar innovations and battery technology breakthroughs away from truly viable solar power. But if this study is to be believed, solar and other renewables will never in the foreseeable future deliver meaningful amounts of energy.
[Post updated at Eric’s request to correct the source of the second quote – Anthony]
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Today contained OXYGEN is not too expensive but as with all medical products that price is climbing. Imagine throughout this 21st century as atmospheric O2 falls----these kinds of symptoms will occur----imagine what a global Wall Street predatory and profiteering health system will do with contained oxygen prices----
WOW----THERE IS A CAPTURED MARKET FOR GLOBAL WALL STREET!
Oxygen | November 3, 2008
| by Carrie Tucker
What Does Low Oxygen Level Feel Like?
Low oxygen levels rob you of your health and can kill you.
Will you feel it if you have low oxygen level?
Many people who have dangerously low oxygen levels report “feeling just fine” despite their pale color and confusion.
Watch for the following symptoms of low oxygen level:
If you ignore your low oxygen level
If you think you MIGHT have low oxygen levels, you’d be better off taking action to address your needs than to “wait and see”.
It does NOT matter whether you suffer with low oxygen levels, or you “feel fine” with low oxygen levels, YOUR HEALTH WILL BE LOST!
Everything from your ability to burn fat to to the normal rhythm of your heart requires oxygen!
Unfortunately, you are not likely to have this discussion with your doctor. Maybe you’ll get lucky and find a doctor that really values oxygen therapy but it is not the norm.
In fact, your doctor is likely to discourage home oxygen use.
Why so much resistance to oxygen therapy?
We may see much more wide spread acceptance of oxygen therapy very soon because it KEEPS heart failure patients OUT of emergency rooms and hospitals much longer!
A few cardiologists I’ve worked with over the years knew this valuable information, but for the most part, doctors do not value oxygen therapy and misinform their patients about it.
Supplemental Oxygen Will:
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When we speak of the AIR THAT WE BREATHE it is usually in the context of POLLUTED AIR----we rarely here any talk of the depletion of OXYGEN IN THE AIR. Know what? People cannot live without OXYGEN. This is a PUBLIC HEALTH CERTAINTY. Let's talk the science of oxygen to understand how the STEM OF MOVING FORWARD will deplete earth's oxygen not too far in the future if we continue to allow MOVING FORWARD.
The last post introduced the vital oxygen-producing PHYTOPLANKTON in our oceans--we see they are a larger source of oxygen then our trees and our land plants. When CLINTON/BUSH/OBAMA just arbitrarily decide they are going to appoint people to THE INTERNATIONAL NUCLEAR AGENCIES tasked with regulating and enforcing nuclear safety that COULD CARE LESS ABOUT REGULATING NUCLEAR SAFETY AND COULD CARE LESS ABOUT DAMAGES FROM RADIOACTIVE POLLUTION----we get nuclear accidents like Japan's reactor meltdown and we get massive oil rig disasters globally both of which WIPE OUT PHYTOPLANKTON living on the ocean's surface. When global oil executives say with disdain---OH, THAT DISASTER WILL CLEAR UP IN SEVERAL DECADES----they are not telling WE THE PEOPLE how serious the decline of PHYTOPLANKTON is worldwide.
We talked about how the NEW TECHNOLOGY of floating massive solar platforms-----massive industrial fish farming structures----expanding oil drilling on EAST and WEST COAST and Alaska all heighten the killing of phytoplankton. This very, very, very small plant life is top food chain source for all marine animals and existed in abundance along our coastlines UNTIL ALL OF THE ABOVE INDUSTRIES killed THAT ENVIRONMENT. Now global Wall Street is killing even those PHYTOPLANKTON in mid-ocean.
'Scientists agree that there’s oxygen from ocean plants in every breath we take. Most of this oxygen comes from tiny ocean plants – called phytoplankton – that live near the water’s surface and drift with the currents. Like all plants, they photosynthesize – that is, they use sunlight and carbon dioxide to make food. A byproduct of photosynthesis is oxygen.
Scientists believe that phytoplankton contribute between 50 to 85 percent of the oxygen in Earth’s atmosphere'.
Phytoplankton Vanishing from Warming Oceans- World’s Oxygen Supply Threatened
The scientific headlines scream looming disaster as the ocean’s phytoplankton steadily populations drop. The public yawns, who cares if phytoplankton, the microscopic plants that live in the ocean, are disappearing? You can’t eat them.
We better care; these tiny organisms gobble up carbon dioxide and produce half the world’s oxygen—equaling that of trees and plants on land. They are the basis for life in the world’s oceans.
According to recent studies led by Dalhousie University, phytoplankton populations are in significant decline, and the implications for both marine life and life on Earth could be immense.
According to the study, published on July 29th in Nature, the world is losing an average of one per cent of its phytoplankton each year, and the northern hemisphere has lost roughly 40 per cent since 1950.[1]
The study, which took three years to complete, is the first comprehensive survey of for the global populations of these microscopic organisms and the results are disturbing, that is if you care about life.
In order to understand the significance of this decline, we must first understand the significance of phytoplankton.
Phytoplankton is the staple upon which the entire marine food chain is built. Phytoplankton is the main source of food for zooplankton, which in turn is the staple for many small fish and other sea creatures, which are then eaten by the bigger fish and large mammals such as seals and whales. A decline of phytoplankton harms the entire food chain, and is contributing mightily to the decline of all life in the ocean.
But the consequences of losing these microscopic beings are far greater!
The role of phytoplankton goes well beyond the marine environment. Like terrestrial vegetation, phytoplankton photosynthesizes and in doing so consumes carbon dioxide and produces about half of the world’s oxygen supply.
The phytoplankton of the seas provide an enormous carbon sink, one essential for absorbing the huge volumes of carbon we have and increasingly release through fossil fuel consumption. As such Phytoplankton plays an enormous role in the world’s carbon cycle and therefore the stability of the global climate.
What has caused this dramatic decline?
While the exact causes are unclear, researchers of the recent study suspect that there is likely a strong correlation between the decline and rising sea temperatures. As surface water warms, it tends to form a distinct layer that does not mix well with cooler, nutrient-rich water below, depriving phytoplankton of some of the materials they need to turn CO2 and sunlight into energy.
The loss of phytoplankton therefore, seems to be part of a very troublesome feedback loop. Rising ocean temperatures are driving a decline the Earth’s natural ability to absorb carbon dioxide, which is in turn leading to a greater abundance of greenhouse gasses, which leads to warmer oceans.
More than a wake- up call this study should set off alarm bells. Urgently we need it more research and analysis. We can’t even begin to address this problem, this broken natural cycle, without a fuller understanding of all the factors that are driving this population decline.
As the CBC reports there have already been calls for drastic intervention and bioengineering schemes to add more nutrients to ocean water to boost phytoplankton growth.[2]
Clearly action is needed, but we should also be wary of the laws of unintended consequences— a law that when combined with hubris and human arrogance is perhaps largely responsible for getting us into this mess in the first place.
In the meantime, on our regularly scheduled program, “The small fish eat the little ones, the big fish eat the small ones, not my problem, give me some! * Well, it is our problem and I encourage you to think about it.
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National media will often tell citizens of the threat of phytoplankton decline in ocean food chain----DON'T WORRY global Wall Street says we are building INDUSTRIAL FISH FARMS that will further kill phytoplankton. It is the same mentality of GREEN REVOLUTION CORPORATIONS telling US farmers to use more and more and more fertilizer which was killing the natural soil animals creating natural food plant fertilizers. These 5% are very crazy dudes and sadly DUDETTES.
MOVING FORWARD 4th industrial revolution will indeed make temperatures rise----the killing of PHYTOPLANKTON comes from multiple sources of industrial pollution=====
The rising temperatures created by industrial CLIMATE CHANGE GASES, not only CO2---
The melting glaciers and north and south polar ices are killing ocean water chemical balance-----too much acidity---too much fresh water changing salt concentrations and VOILA---these tiny plants cannot live. If we were not spending trillions of dollars to built GLOBAL ONLINE CORPORATION ONE GRID-----we would be spending funds on capturing all that fresh water from melting ice.
So, phytoplankton in decline these several decades-----the decline has grown during CLINTON/BUSH/OBAMA -----and now with expanding FOREIGN ECONOMIC ZONES IN AFRICA AND US----that decline will soar---but global Wall Street pols are PRETENDING they are addressing all these environmental problems with GLOBAL GREEN CORPORATIONS.
Industrial fish farming global Wall Street says will replace this dying marine food source-----as industrial fish farming further KILLS THAT SAME MARINE ENVIRONMENT making sure it never recovers.
Earth's Oxygen Engine: Is the Invisible Ocean Virus Ecosystem Threatened?
May 24, 2015
When you mention rich ecosystems that are vital for life on Earth, people tend to think of rainforests, but ocean plankton are actually just as crucial. The microscopic beings that drift on the upper layer of the oceans are globally referred to as "plankton"; together they produce half of our oxygen, act as carbon sinks, influence our weather, and serve as the base of the ocean food web that sustains the larger fish and marine mammals that we depend upon or draw delight from.
"Beyond the cutting-edge science that was developed thanks to our collaborative work with the Tara Expéditions Foundation, this adventure is also about showing people all over the world how important the ocean is for our own well-being," says Eric Karsenti, director of Tara Oceans, from EMBL and CNRS.The scientists captured viruses, microbes and microscopic eukaryotes -- organisms with complex cells, from single-cell algae to fish larvae -- from major oceanic regions. They compiled their genetic material into comprehensive resources that are now available to the scientific community for further studies.
"This is the largest DNA sequencing effort ever done for ocean science: analyses revealed around 40 million genes, the vast majority of which are new to science, thus hinting towards a much broader biodiversity of plankton than previously known," explains Patrick Wincker, from Genoscope, CEA.
EMBL's high performance computing was essential in compiling this comprehensive catalogue, which is estimated to be derived from more than 35 000 different species whose genomic content had been mostly unknown to mankind until now.
"In terms of eukaryotes, we sequenced nearly a billion genetic barcodes, and found that there is a greater variety of single-cell eukaryotes in plankton than was thought," says Colomban de Vargas, from CNRS. "They appear to be much more diverse than bacteria or animals, and most belong to little-known groups."
Thanks to novel computer models, the researchers were able to predict how these diverse planktonic organisms interact. Predictions were confirmed via selective microscopy observations.
"When we mapped how planktonic organisms -- from viruses to small animal larvae -- interact with each other, we discovered that most of those interactions are parasitic, recycling nutrients back down the food chain," says Jeroen Raes from VIB, KU Leuven, and Vrije Universiteit Brussel. This map is a first step towards a better understanding of the dynamics and structure of the global marine ecosystem.
In addition to biotic interactions, the scientists studied how environmental factors -- such as temperature, pH, and nutrients (amongst others) -- influence the microscopic organisms floating in the ocean.
"We found that, at depths still reached by sunlight, temperature was the main factor that influences the composition of prokaryotes (bacteria and archaea) communities," says Peer Bork from EMBL. "Different sets of organisms come together depending on the water temperature."
The scientists also showed that the Agulhas "rings" -- a natural barrier that draws the line between the Indian Ocean and the South Atlantic -- separate plankton communities. "It's like plankton goes through a cold wash cycle at the tip of South Africa," says Daniele Iudicone from the Stazione Zoologica Anton Dohrn. "The current forms huge swirls that drastically mix and cool the plankton riding it, thus limiting the number of species that manage to cross."
"In addition, we now also have a global picture of marine virus communities, which allows us to confirm an idea that had been proposed a decade ago, but never proven," explains Matthew Sullivan from the University of Arizona. "Viruses are produced in local 'seed banks' and then ride the ocean currents, so you end up with different cocktails of viruses in different places, even though the overall diversity of viruses in the oceans appears quite limited."
Understanding the distribution and the interactions of the plankton across the oceans will be very useful for predictive models necessary to study climate change.
The uniqueness of the Tara Oceans 'eco-systems biology' approach is to have sampled the world's oceans systematically across all domains of life, from viruses to animals, and including a rich variety of environmental data. The data generated sets a baseline, on a global scale, to evaluate the impact of climate changes on oceanic ecosystems in the future.
"The finding that temperature shapes which species are present, for instance, is especially relevant in the context of climate change, but to some extent this is just the beginning," says Chris Bowler, from CNRS. "The resources we've generated will allow us and others to delve even deeper, and finally begin to really understand the workings of this invisible world."
The Daily Galaxy via European Molecular Biology Labratory
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We see below the universities tied to the worst of MOVING FORWARD 4TH INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION have those few scientists writing articles telling us how bad things will get. PENN STATE and GLOBAL JOHNS HOPKINS lead in pushing the worst of economic policies not caring that they are leading the way to 5 DEGREE CLIMATE CHANGE.
When temperatures rise AND when fracking goes global ---know where fracking and natural gas is found in high abundance? SIBERIAN PEAT BOGS now under PERMA-FROST. Know who had satellites map where that natural gas is abundant? Good old global Wall Street Ivy League universities. Obama and Hillary made fracking go global and they are fighting to get at that Siberian and a lesser CANADIAN NORTHWEST peat zone under PERMA-FROST. Global Wall Street 5% are cheerleading melting polar ice because that makes fracking and oil drilling easier.
WE ARE WINNERS SHOUT GLOBAL FRACKING AND GLOBAL OIL CORPORATIONS AND THEIR GLOBAL WALL STREET 5% CLINTON/BUSH/OBAMA.
As Foreign Economic Zones expand with more global factories the polar PERMA-FROST covering the very cold northern lands is melting and with that RELEASING OF GREAT AMOUNTS OF METHANE. METHANE is concentrated CO2----it is worse as a CLIMATE CHANGE GAS----but what we do not hear is how higher METHANE CONCENTRATIONS in air KILL OUR OXYGEN.
Methane drives chemical reactions forcing oxygen molecules to join in making more METHANE. BYE-BYE OXYGEN HELLO SUPER-SIZED METHANE IN OUR AIR.
'Washington, D.C. -– Volcanic eruptions in Siberia 251 million years ago may have started a cascade of events leading to high hydrogen sulfide levels in the oceans and atmosphere and precipitating the largest mass extinction in Earth’s history, according to a Penn State geoscientist'.
This article talks of hundreds of millions of years ago when NATURAL ACTIONS created these same atmosphere conditions AS OUR MOVING FORWARD GLOBAL WALL STREET CLINTON/BUSH/OBAMA----instead of volcanoes erupting we have MAD HATTERS building more and more and more GLOBAL INDUSTRY.
Global Warming Led To Atmospheric Hydrogen Sulfide And Permian Extinction
Date:
March 1, 2005
Source:
Penn State
Summary:
Volcanic eruptions in Siberia 251 million years ago may have started a cascade of events leading to high hydrogen sulfide levels in the oceans and atmosphere and precipitating the largest mass extinction in Earth’s history, according to a Penn State geoscientist.
Washington, D.C. -– Volcanic eruptions in Siberia 251 million years ago may have started a cascade of events leading to high hydrogen sulfide levels in the oceans and atmosphere and precipitating the largest mass extinction in Earth’s history, according to a Penn State geoscientist.
"The recent dating of the Siberian trap volcanoes to be contemporaneous with the end-Permian extinction suggests that they were the trigger for the environmental events that caused the extinctions," says Lee R. Kump, professor of geosciences. "But the warming caused by these volcanoes through carbon dioxide emissions would not be large enough to cause mass extinctions by itself."
That warming, however, could set off a series of events that led to mass extinction. During the end-Permian extinction 95 percent of all species on Earth became extinct, compared to only 75 percent during the K-T when a large asteroid apparently caused the dinosaurs to disappear.
Volcanic carbon dioxide would cause atmospheric warming that would, in turn, warm surface ocean water. Normally, the deep ocean gets its oxygen from the atmosphere at the poles. Cold water there soaks up oxygen from the air and because cold water is dense, it sinks and slowly moves equator-ward, taking oxygen with it. The warmer the water, the less oxygen can dissolve and the slower the water sinks and moves toward the equator.
“Warmer water slows the conveyer belt and brings less oxygen to the deep oceans,” says Kump.
The constant rain of organic debris produced by marine plants and animals, needs oxygen to decompose. With less oxygen, fewer organics are aerobically consumed.
"Today, there are not enough organics in the oceans to go anoxic," says Kump. "But in the Permian, if the warming from the volcanic carbon dioxide decreased oceanic oxygen, especially if atmospheric oxygen levels were lower, the oceans would be depleted of oxygen."
Once the oxygen is gone, the oceans become the realm of bacteria that obtain their oxygen from sulfur oxide compounds. These bacteria strip oxygen from the compounds and produce hydrogen sulfide. Hydrogen sulfide kills aerobic organisms.
Humans can smell hydrogen sulfide gas, the smell of rotten cabbage, in the parts per trillion range. In the deeps of the Black Sea today, hydrogen sulfide exists at about 200 parts per million. This is a toxic brew in which any aerobic, oxygen-needing organism would die. For the Black Sea, the hydrogen sulfide stays in the depths because our rich oxygen atmosphere mixes in the top layer of water and controls the diffusion of hydrogen sulfide upwards.
In the end-Permian, as the levels of atmospheric oxygen fell and the levels of hydrogen sulfide and carbon dioxide rose, the upper levels of the oceans could have become rich in hydrogen sulfide catastrophically. This would kill most the oceanic plants and animals. The hydrogen sulfide dispersing in the atmosphere would kill most terrestrial life.
"A hydrogen sulfide atmosphere fits the extinction better than one enriched in carbon dioxide," says Kump. "Carbon dioxide would have a profound effect on marine life, but terrestrial plants thrive on carbon dioxide, yet they are included in the extinction."
Another piece in the puzzle surrounding this extinction is that hydrogen sulfide gas destroys the ozone layer. Recently, Dr. Henk Visscher of Utrecht University and his colleagues suggested that there are fossil spores from the end-Permian that show deformities that researchers suspect were caused by ultra violet light.
"These deformities fit the idea that the ozone layer was damaged, letting in more ultra violet," says Kump.
Once this process is underway, methane produced in the ample swamps of this time period has little in the atmosphere to destroy it. The atmosphere becomes one of hydrogen sulfide, methane and ultra violet radiation.
The Penn State researcher and his colleagues are looking for biomarkers, indications of photosynthetic sulfur bacteria in deep-sea sediments to complement such biomarkers recently reported in shallow water sediments of this age by Kliti Grice, Curtin University of Technology, Australia, and colleagues in the Feb. 4 issue of the journal, Science. These bacteria live in places where no oxygen exists, but there is some sunlight. They would have been in their heyday in the end-Permian. Finding evidence of green sulfur bacteria would provide evidence for hydrogen sulfide as the cause of the mass extinctions.
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Basic science in high school teaches just what is happening today with methane in our air rising as water levels in ocean rises----that methane is driven to bind with oxygen ---this is a force of nature ---it does not pick and choose. The more methane concentration in air---the more our oxygen will be captured in atmosphere and made into WATER. Lot's of RAIN----NO OXYGEN----that is MOVING FORWARD 4TH INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION BY GLOBAL WALL STREET 5% TO THE 1%. When we are told temperatures in our middle America are going to rise similar to equator----they tell us as well we will see the same high levels of RAIN-----that is because all our OXYGEN IN AIR is being captured by METHANE and turned into water.
A molecule of methane consists of 4 hydrogen atoms and one carbon atom: C H4. Oxygen molecules are O2. To burn (combine) you need two O2 molecules. Then the burning (combination) looks like this:
C H4 + 2 O2 --> CO2 + 2 H2O.
The process gives off energy (that means that the outgoing molecules of carbon dioxide (CO2) and water (H2O) have high velocity and heat up the surroundings, perhaps triggering other methane and oxygen molecules to combine (that is, to burn).
WE THE PEOPLE will suffer the effects of no oxygen long before that rain replenishes our polluted and exhausted fresh water supply----the lost oxygen will happen in decades and a few centuries---the replenishment of METHANE RAIN FRESH WATER will be millions of years.
INTRODUCTION
Natural gas, composed primarily of methane, is an energy-
intensive fuel source that has a high molar energy density,
exhibits cleaner combustion when compared to diesel or
petroleum, 1,2 and requires low utilization costs.
Sunday, April 26, 2015
Methane levels as high as 2845ppb Methane levels as high as 2845 parts per billion (ppb) were recorded on April 25, 2015, as illustrated by the image below.
This is an extremely high peak. The average daily peak in 2015 until May 1 was 2371 ppb, while the highest daily mean ranged from 1807 ppb (January 10) to 1829 ppb (April 22). Daily peaks and daily highest mean levels in 2015 are shown on the image below.
These peaks are much higher than they were in previous years, as illustrated by the image below, from an earlier post and showing the average highest peak readings in 2013 and 2014 at selected altitudes..
Peak readings in above image are averages over April 2013 and April 2014. On specific days, peak readings could be much higher, e.g. on April 28, 2014, methane levels were recorded as high as 2551 ppb at 469 mb. As said, methane levels as high as 2845 ppb were recorded on April 25, 2015, while the average peak for the first four months of 2015 was 2371 ppb, and this average was calculated from peaks across altitudes.
Peak levels in April appear to be rising strongly each year, following higher peak readings during previous months, especially at higher altitudes, i.e. especially the Arctic Ocean. It appears that much of the additional methane originating from the higher latitudes of the Northern Hemisphere has moved closer to the equator over the past few months, and is now accumulating at higher altitudes over the continents on the Northern Hemisphere, i.e. Asia, Europe, North America and north Africa.
Further analysis of the rise in global mean methane levels appears to confirm the above. The image below shows methane levels on April 22, over three years. While there appears to be little or no rise in mean methane levels at low altitudes, the rise is quite profound at higher altitudes.
Things look set to get worse. As shown by the image below, from an earlier post, global methane levels have risen sharply from a low of 723 ppb in 1755. Mean methane levels were as high as 1839 ppb in 2014. That's a rise of more than 254%.
As that post concluded a year ago, it appears that the rise of methane in the atmosphere is accelerating. What can we expect? As temperatures can be expected to continue to rise and as feedbacks start to kick in, this may well constitute a non-linear trend. The image below shows a polynomial trend that is contained in IPCC AR5 data from 1955 to 2011, pointing at methane reaching mean global levels higher than 3000 ppb by the year 2030. If methane starts to erupt in large quantities from clathrates underneath the seafloor of the Arctic Ocean, this may well be where we are heading.
The situation is dire and calls for comprehensive and effective action, as discussed at the Climate Plan.
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First Water Tests Show Worrying Signs From Cook Inlet Gas Leak
Low oxygen and high methane levels were found near the leaking gas pipeline in Alaska, although the true danger to marine life is yet to be measured.
Sabrina Shankman
By Sabrina Shankman
Mar 24, 2017
Here we see 2008 global Wall Street media telling us global green corporations are going to save the day. This is right as the economic crash started the next phase of MOVING FORWARD. All state and Federal funding went to grow global corporations into global green corporations and now all research data tell us these green corporations are helping the world control CLIMATE CHANGE. At the same time we have corporate universities like PENN STATE and GLOBAL IVY LEAGUE JOHNS HOPKINS writing articles saying how bad things are getting. Both of these universities are of course owned and operated by global fracking corporations ----so the next phase of PROPAGANDA directed at 99% of WE THE PEOPLE----is this----the global 99% now NEEDS global Wall Street and their green corporations to save us from CATASTROPHE. Please don't believe this---the only ones global Wall Street are working to save are that same global 1% minus WE THE PEOPLE THE 99%.
The gloom and doom of today's data is NOT ACCURATE----CORPORATE UNIVERSITIES WILL NOW TRY TO SCARE PEOPLE into keeping those global CLINTON/BUSH/OBAMA ----now TRUMP in charge to SAVE US. It is EASY PEASY to stop and slow down CLIMATE CHANGE---we simply need to stop global corporate campuses and global factories in US cities deemed Foreign Economic Zones and rebuild our US economies with small and regional businesses and small, local manufacturing. JUST GET RID OF THESE GLOBAL WALL STREET PLAYERS.
Oh NO! We must have global green corporations to build all those NEW PRODUCTS----those PLASTIC TREES with CO2 SCRUBBERS now needing ATTACHED OXYGEN GENERATORS but not to forget those man-made BEEHIVES filled with ROBOBEES-----well, it looks like the 99% won't be able to afford ANY OF THOSE NEW PRODUCTS.
THOSE 5% 'WINNERS' PUTTING MONEY IN THEIR POCKETS FROM STOCK OPTIONS KILLING THE FUTURE OF THEIR CHILDREN AND GRANDCHILDREN.
Only global Wall Street 5% FOLLOWERS SHOW ME THE MONEY LIVING FOR TODAY 5% would follow these global 1% mad hatters. We need 99% REAL social progressive LEADERS to take back our Democratic Party!
Beyond The Green Corporation
Imagine a world in which eco-friendly and socially responsible practices actually help a company's bottom line. It's closer than you think
January 29, 2007, 12:00 AM EST
COVER STORY PODCAST
Under conventional notions of how to run a conglomerate like Unilever, CEO Patrick Cescau should wake up each morning with a laserlike focus: how to sell more soap and shampoo than Procter & Gamble Co. (PG ) But ask Cescau about the $52 billion Dutch-British giant's biggest strategic challenges for the 21st century, and the conversation roams from water-deprived villages in Africa to the planet's warming climate.
The world is Unilever's laboratory. In Brazil, the company operates a free community laundry in a São Paulo slum, provides financing to help tomato growers convert to eco-friendly "drip" irrigation, and recycles 17 tons of waste annually at a toothpaste factory. Unilever funds a floating hospital that offers free medical care in Bangladesh, a nation with just 20 doctors for every 10,000 people. In Ghana, it teaches palm oil producers to reuse plant waste while providing potable water to deprived communities. In India, Unilever staff help thousands of women in remote villages start micro-enterprises. And responding to green activists, the company discloses how much carbon dioxide and hazardous waste its factories spew out around the world.
As Cescau sees it, helping such nations wrestle with poverty, water scarcity, and the effects of climate change is vital to staying competitive in coming decades. Some 40% of the company's sales and most of its growth now take place in developing nations. Unilever food products account for roughly 10% of the world's crops of tea and 30% of all spinach. It is also one of the world's biggest buyers of fish. As environmental regulations grow tighter around the world, Unilever must invest in green technologies or its leadership in packaged foods, soaps, and other goods could be imperiled. "You can't ignore the impact your company has on the community and environment," Cescau says. CEOs used to frame thoughts like these in the context of moral responsibility, he adds. But now, "it's also about growth and innovation. In the future, it will be the only way to do business."
A remarkable number of CEOs have begun to commit themselves to the same kind of sustainability goals Cescau has pinpointed, even in profit- obsessed America. For years, the term "sustainability" has carried a lot of baggage. Put simply, it's about meeting humanity's needs without harming future generations. It was a favorite cause among economic development experts, human rights activists, and conservationists. But to many U.S. business leaders, sustainability just meant higher costs and smacked of earnest U.N. corporate- responsibility conferences and the utopian idealism of Western Europe. Now, sustainability is "right at the top of the agendas" of more U.S. CEOs, especially young ones, says McKinsey Global Institute Chairman Lenny Mendonca.
You can tell something is up just wading through the voluminous sustainability reports most big corporations post on their Web sites. These lay out efforts to cut toxic emissions, create eco-friendly products, help the poor, and cooperate with nonprofit groups. As recently as five years ago, such reports—if they appeared at all—were usually transparent efforts to polish the corporate image. Now there's a more sophisticated understanding that environmental and social practices can yield strategic advantages in an interconnected world of shifting customer loyalties and regulatory regimes.
Embracing sustainability can help avert costly setbacks from environmental disasters, political protests, and human rights or workplace abuses—the kinds of debacles suffered by Royal Dutch Shell PLC (RDS ) in Nigeria and Unocal in Burma. "Nobody has an idea when such events can hit a balance sheet, so companies must stay ahead of the curve," says Matthew J. Kiernan, CEO of Innovest Strategic Value Advisors. Innovest is an international research and advisory firm whose clients include large institutional investors. It supplied the data for this BusinessWeek Special Report and prepared a list of the world's 100 most sustainable corporations, to be presented at the Jan. 24-28 World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.
THOSE GLOBAL 1% AT DAVOS SWITZERLAND WORLD ECONOMIC FORUM---ALWAYS WORRIED ABOUT THE WELFARE OF THE GLOBAL 99%!
The roster of advocates includes Jeffrey Immelt, CEO of General Electric Co. (GE ), who is betting billions to position GE as a leading innovator in everything from wind power to hybrid engines. Wal-Mart Stores Inc. (WMT ), long assailed for its labor and global sourcing practices, has made a series of high-profile promises to slash energy use overall, from its stores to its vast trucking fleets, and purchase more electricity derived from renewable sources. GlaxoSmithKline (GSK ) discovered that, by investing to develop drugs for poor nations, it can work more effectively with those governments to make sure its patents are protected. Dow Chemical Co. (DOW ) is increasing R&D in products such as roof tiles that deliver solar power to buildings and water treatment technologies for regions short of clean water. "There is 100% overlap between our business drivers and social and environmental interests," says Dow CEO Andrew N. Liveris.
Striking that balance is not easy. Many noble efforts fail because they are poorly executed or never made sense to begin with. "If there's no connection to a company's business, it doesn't have much leverage to make an impact," says Harvard University business guru Michael Porter. Sustainability can be a hard proposition for investors, too. Decades of experience show that it's risky to pick stocks based mainly on a company's long-term environmental or social-responsibility targets.
Nevertheless, new sets of metrics, which Innovest and others designed to measure sustainability efforts, have helped convince CEOs and boards that they pay off. Few Wall Street analysts, for example, have tried to assess how much damage Wal-Mart's reputation for poor labor and environmental practices did to the stock price. But New York's Communications Consulting Worldwide (CCW), which studies issues such as reputation, puts it in stark dollars and cents. CCW calculates that if Wal-Mart had a reputation like that of rival Target Corp. (TGT ), its stock would be worth 8.4% more, adding $16 billion in market capitalization.
Serious money is lining up behind the sustainability agenda. Assets of mutual funds that are designed to invest in companies meeting social responsibility criteria have swelled from $12 billion in 1995 to $178 billion in 2005, estimates trade association Social Investment Forum. Boston's State Street Global Advisors alone handles $77 billion in such funds. And institutions with $4 trillion in assets, including charitable trusts and government pension funds in Europe and states such as California, pledge to weigh sustainability factors in investment decisions.
Why the sudden urgency? The growing clout of watchdog groups making savvy use of the Internet is one factor. New environmental regulations also play a powerful role. Electronics manufacturers slow to wean their factories and products off toxic materials, for example, could be at a serious disadvantage as Europe adopts additional, stringent restrictions. American energy and utility companies that don't cut fossil fuel reliance could lose if Washington joins the rest of the industrialized world in ordering curbs on greenhouse gas emissions. Such developments help explain why Exxon Mobil Corp. (XOM ), long opposed to linking government policies with global warming theories, is now taking part in meetings to figure out what the U.S. should do to cut emissions.
Investors who think about these issues obviously have long time horizons. But they encounter knotty problems when trying to peer beyond the next quarter's results to a future years down the road. Corporations disclose the value of physical assets and investments in equipment and property. But U.S. regulators don't require them to quantify environmental, social, or labor practices. Accountants call such squishy factors "intangibles." These items aren't found on a corporate balance sheet, yet can be powerful indicators of future performance.
If a company is at the leading edge of understanding and preparing for megatrends taking shape in key markets, this could constitute a valuable intangible asset. By being the first fast-food chain to stop using unhealthy trans fats, Wendy's International Inc. (WEN ) may have a competitive edge now that New York City has banned the additives in restaurants. McDonald's Corp. (MCD ), which failed to do so, could have a future problem.
Rising investor demand for information on sustainability has spurred a flood of new research. Goldman Sachs, Deutsche Bank Securities (DB ), ubs (UBS ), Citigroup (C ), Morgan Stanley, and other brokerages have formed dedicated teams assessing how companies are affected by everything from climate change and social pressures in emerging markets to governance records. "The difference in interest between three years ago and now is extraordinary," says former Goldman Sachs (GS ) Asset Management CEO David Blood, who heads the Enhanced Analytics Initiative, a research effort on intangibles by 22 brokerages. He also leads Generation Investment Management, co-founded in 2004 with former Vice-President Al Gore, which uses sustainability as an investment criterion.
Perhaps the most ambitious effort is by Innovest, founded in 1995 by Kiernan, a former KPMG senior partner. Besides conventional financial performance metrics, Innovest studies 120 different factors, such as energy use, health and safety records, litigation, employee practices, regulatory history, and management systems for dealing with supplier problems. It uses these measures to assign grades ranging from AAA to CCC, much like a bond rating, to 2,200 listed companies. Companies on the Global 100 list on BusinessWeek's Web site include Nokia Corp. (NOK ) and Ericsson (ERICY ), which excel at tailoring products for developing nations, and banks such as hsbc Holdings (HBC ) and abn-Amro (ABN ) that study the environmental impact of projects they help finance.
Some of Innovest's conclusions are counterintuitive. Hewlett-Packard (HPQ ) and Dell (DELL ) both rate AAA, for example; market darling Apple (AAPL ) gets a middling BBB on the grounds of weaker oversight of offshore factories and lack of a "clear environmental business strategy." An Apple spokesman contests that it is a laggard, citing the company's leadership in energy-efficient products and in cutting toxic substances. Then there's Sony Corp. (SNE ) vs. Nintendo. Wall Street loves the latter for a host of reasons, not least that its Wii video game system, the first to let users simulate actions such as swinging a sword or tennis racket, was a Christmas blockbuster. Sony, meanwhile, has a famously dysfunctional home electronics arm, and was embarrassed by exploding laptop batteries and long delays in bringing out its PlayStation 3 game console. Nintendo's stock has more than tripled in three years; Sony's has languished.
WEIGHING THE EFFORTS
Viewed through the lens of sustainability, however, Sony looks like the better bet. It is an industry leader in developing energy-efficient appliances. It also learned from a 2001 fiasco, when illegal cadmium was found in PlayStation cables bought from outside suppliers. That cost Sony $85 million, says Hidemi Tomita, Sony's corporate responsibility general manager. Now, Sony has a whole corporate infrastructure for controlling its vast supplier network, helping it avert or quickly fix problems. Nintendo, a smaller Kyoto-based company focused on games, shows less evidence of the global management systems needed to cope with sudden regulatory shifts or supplier problems, says Innovest. A Nintendo spokesman says it meets all environmental rules and is "always reviewing and considering" the merits of new global sustainability guidelines.
BP seems to disprove the sustainability thesis altogether. CEO John Browne has preached environmentalism for a decade, and BP consistently ranked atop most sustainability indexes. Yet in the past two years it has been hit with a refinery explosion that killed 15 in Texas, a fine for safety violations at a refinery in Ohio, a major oil pipeline leak in Alaska, and a U.S. Justice Dept. probe into suspected manipulation of oil prices.Browne has recently announced his retirement. BP's shares have slid 10% since late April. Exxon's are up around 12%.
Innovest still rates BP a solid AA, while labeling Exxon a riskier BB. And PetroChina? Innovest gives it a CCC. Here's why: BP wins points for plowing $8 billion into alternative energies to diversify away from oil and engages community and environmental groups. Exxon has done less to curb greenhouse gas emissions and promote renewables and has big projects in trouble spots like Chad. "I would still say Exxon is a bigger long-term risk," says Innovest's Kiernan. Petro- China is easier to justify. Begin with its safety record: A gas well explosion killed 243 people in 2003; another fatal explosion in 2005 spewed toxic benzene into a river, leaving millions temporarily without water. PetroChina has been slow to invest in alternative energy, Innovest says, and its parent company has big bets in the Sudan.
Do Innovest's metrics make a reliable guide for picking stocks? Dozens of studies have looked for direct relationships between a company's social and environmental practices and its financial performance. So far the results are mixed, and Kiernan admits Innovest can't prove a causal link. That's little help to portfolio managers who must post good numbers by yearend. "The crux of the problem is that we are looking at things from the long term, but we're still under short-term review from our clients," says William H. Page, who oversees socially responsible investing for State Street Global Advisors.
TALKING A GOOD FIGHT
Yet Kiernan and many other experts maintain sustainability factors are good proxies of management quality. "They show that companies tend to be more strategic, nimble, and better equipped to compete in the complex, high-velocity global environment," Kiernan explains. That also is the logic behind Goldman Sachs's intangibles research. In its thick annual assessments of global energy and mining companies, for example, it ranks companies on the basis of sustainability factors, financial returns, and access to new resource reserves. Top-ranking companies, such as British Gas, Shell, and Brazil's Petrobras (PBR ), are leaders in all three categories. For the past two years, the stocks of elite companies on its list bested their industry peers by more than 5%—while laggards underperformed, Goldman says.
Still, BP's (BP ) woeful performance highlights a serious caveat to the corporate responsibility crusade. Companies that talk the most about sustainability aren't always the best at executing. Ford Motor Co. (F ) is another case in point. Former CEO William C. Ford Jr. has championed green causes for years. He famously spent $2 billion overhauling the sprawling River Rouge (Mich.) complex, putting on a 10-acre grass roof to capture rainwater. Ford also donated $25 million to Conservation International for an environmental center.
But Ford was flat-footed in the area most important to its business: It kept churning out gas-guzzling SUVs and pickups. "Having a green factory was not Ford's core issue. It was fuel economy," says Andrew S. Winston, director of a Yale University corporate environmental strategy project and co-author of the book Green to Gold.
The corporate responsibility field is littered with lofty intentions that don't pay off. As a result, many CEOs are unsure what to do exactly. In a recent McKinsey & Co. study of 1,144 top global executives, 79% predicted at least some responsibility for dealing with future social and political issues would fall on corporations. Three of four said such issues should be addressed by the CEO. But only 3% said they do a good job dealing with social pressures. "This is uncomfortable territory because most CEOs have not been trained to sense or react to the broader landscape," says McKinsey's Mendonca. "For the first time, they are expected to be statesmen as much as they are functional business leaders." Adding to the complexity, says Harvard's Porter, each company must custom-design initiatives that fit its own objectives.
Dow Chemical is looking at the big picture. It sees a market in the need for low-cost housing and is developing technologies such as eco-friendly Styrofoam used for walls. CEO Liveris also cites global water scarcity as a field in which Dow can "marry planetary issues with market opportunity." The U.N. figures 1.2 billion people lack access to clean water. Dow says financial solutions could help 300 million of them. That could translate into up to $3 billion in sales for Dow, which has a portfolio of cutting-edge systems for filtering minute contaminants from water. To reach the poor, Dow is working with foundations and the U.N. to raise funds for projects.
The most important business stories of the day.
Get Bloomberg's daily newsletter.Philips Electronics (PHG ) also is building strategies around global megatrends. By 2050, the U.N. predicts, 85% of people will live in developing nations. But shortages of health care are acute. Among Philips' many projects are medical vans that reach remote villages, allowing urban doctors to diagnose and treat patients via satellite. Philips has also developed low-cost water-purification technology and a smokeless wood-burning stove that could reduce the 1.6 million deaths annually worldwide from pulmonary diseases linked to cooking smoke. "For us, sustainability is a business imperative," says Philips Chief Procurement Officer Barbara Kux, who chairs a sustainability board that includes managers from all business units.
Such laudable efforts, even if successful, may not help managers make their numbers next quarter. But amid turbulent global challenges, they could help investors sort long-term survivors from the dinosaurs.
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This is NOT a shocker. REAL left social progressives KNOW how to stop and reverse Climate Change. What THE 99% OF citizens need to consider now---is how to not fall for all the PROPAGANDA.
Depletion of atmospheric O2 will of course not happen over night. Humans need a certain concentration of O2 to function normally and that will be the first sign of depleted O2--we will breathe deeply seeking O2 but not get the amounts needed to be active. So, we will become less active and feeling tired and fatigued. This will occur in simply decades. It will take a few hundreds of years for methane levels to claim more and more O2 to create devastating effects.
If we ignore actions NOW----global Wall Street will heighten all that fear-mongering over just who is going to get access to ONE WORLD ONE ECO-DOME protection. IT'S NO SECRET----ONLY THE GLOBAL 1% WILL HAVE THAT ACCESS.
Browse: Home / 2016 / June / 17 /
Plankton Will Stop Making Oxygen By End Of Century
plankton make our oxygen
Plankton Will Stop Making Oxygen By End Of Century
Russ George / June 17, 2016 / Leave a comment / Bad News For The Planet
Researchers reveal how Earth’s oxygen could collapse with ocean warming of just 6 degrees
The collapse of ocean oxygen production is far worse than the threat of sea level rise and flooding.
Shocker: Top Google Engineers Say Renewable Energy ‘Simply won’t work’
Anthony Watts / November 22, 2014
Guest essay by Eric Worrall
A research effort by Google corporation to make renewable energy viable has been a complete failure, according to the scientists who led the programme. After 4 years of effort, their conclusion is that renewable energy “simply won’t work”.
According to an interview with the engineers, published in IEEE;
“At the start of RE<C, we had shared the attitude of many stalwart environmentalists: We felt that with steady improvements to today’s renewable energy technologies, our society could stave off catastrophic climate change. We now know that to be a false hope …
Renewable energy technologies simply won’t work; we need a fundamentally different approach.”
There is simply no getout clause for renewables supporters. The people who ran the study are very much committed to the belief that CO2 is dangerous – they are supporters of James Hansen. Their sincere goal was not to simply install a few solar cells, but to find a way to fundamentally transform the economics of energy production – to make renewable energy cheaper than coal. To this end, the study considered exotic innovations barely on the drawing board, such as self erecting wind turbines, using robotic technology to create new wind farms without human intervention. The result however was total failure – even these exotic possibilities couldn’t deliver the necessary economic model.
The key problem appears to be that the cost of manufacturing the components of the renewable power facilities is far too close to the total recoverable energy – the facilities never, or just barely, produce enough energy to balance the budget of what was consumed in their construction. This leads to a runaway cycle of constructing more and more renewable plants simply to produce the energy required to manufacture and maintain renewable energy plants – an obvious practical absurdity.
As a review by The Register of the IEEE article states.
“Even if one were to electrify all of transport, industry, heating and so on, so much renewable generation and balancing/storage equipment would be needed to power it that astronomical new requirements for steel, concrete, copper, glass, carbon fibre, neodymium, shipping and haulage etc etc would appear. All these things are made using mammoth amounts of energy: far from achieving massive energy savings, which most plans for a renewables future rely on implicitly, we would wind up needing far more energy, which would mean even more vast renewables farms – and even more materials and energy to make and maintain them and so on. The scale of the building would be like nothing ever attempted by the human race.”
I must say I’m personally surprised at the conclusion of this study. I genuinely thought that we were maybe a few solar innovations and battery technology breakthroughs away from truly viable solar power. But if this study is to be believed, solar and other renewables will never in the foreseeable future deliver meaningful amounts of energy.
[Post updated at Eric’s request to correct the source of the second quote – Anthony]
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Today contained OXYGEN is not too expensive but as with all medical products that price is climbing. Imagine throughout this 21st century as atmospheric O2 falls----these kinds of symptoms will occur----imagine what a global Wall Street predatory and profiteering health system will do with contained oxygen prices----
WOW----THERE IS A CAPTURED MARKET FOR GLOBAL WALL STREET!
Oxygen | November 3, 2008
| by Carrie Tucker
What Does Low Oxygen Level Feel Like?
Low oxygen levels rob you of your health and can kill you.
Will you feel it if you have low oxygen level?
Many people who have dangerously low oxygen levels report “feeling just fine” despite their pale color and confusion.
Watch for the following symptoms of low oxygen level:
- water retention (especially feet/ ankles/belly)
- shortness of breath/ difficulty breathing
- extreme fatigue
- chest tightness
- mental confusion/ short-term-memory loss
- tingling fingers
- chronic cough
- blue coloring around lips
- waking at night gasping for breath
- frequent bacterial and viral infections
If you ignore your low oxygen level
- you will lose your eye sight
- your short term memory will be lost
- your strength and stamina will be drained
- your immune system will struggle
- heart failure is an inevitable consequence
If you think you MIGHT have low oxygen levels, you’d be better off taking action to address your needs than to “wait and see”.
It does NOT matter whether you suffer with low oxygen levels, or you “feel fine” with low oxygen levels, YOUR HEALTH WILL BE LOST!
Everything from your ability to burn fat to to the normal rhythm of your heart requires oxygen!
Unfortunately, you are not likely to have this discussion with your doctor. Maybe you’ll get lucky and find a doctor that really values oxygen therapy but it is not the norm.
In fact, your doctor is likely to discourage home oxygen use.
Why so much resistance to oxygen therapy?
- Home oxygen is very safe, but your doctor is likely to feel uncomfortable with the idea that he/she may be “liable”.
- There is a very prevalent fear of contained gas. People tend to worry about fire, even though home oxygen is very safe.
- Most who suffer from low oxygen levels are unaware of it.
- Home oxygen feels like a weakness and may cause unwelcome attention.
- Oxygen is a drug, but not a profitable drug.
We may see much more wide spread acceptance of oxygen therapy very soon because it KEEPS heart failure patients OUT of emergency rooms and hospitals much longer!
A few cardiologists I’ve worked with over the years knew this valuable information, but for the most part, doctors do not value oxygen therapy and misinform their patients about it.
Supplemental Oxygen Will:
- stop recurring hospitalization for heart failure
- reduce edema (fluid retention)
- improve strength, stamina, comfort and sleep
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