How the New Digital Age Will Affect Us in the Future: e.g., Farming

Posted on May 27, 2014 by Bruce

A good example from the Schumpeter Blog in the Economist, May 14th <http://www.economist.com/news/business/21602757-managers-most-traditional-industries-distrust-promising-new-technology-digital>-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-

Schumpeter

Digital disruption on the farm

Managers in the most traditional of industries distrust a promising new technology

May 24th 2014 | From the print edition

INNOVATION is a word that brings to mind small, nimble startups doing clever things with cutting-edge technology. But it is also vital in large, long-established industries—and they do not come much larger or older than agriculture. Farmers can be among the most hidebound of managers, so it is no surprise that they are nervous about a new idea called prescriptive planting, which is set to disrupt their business. In essence, it is a system that tells them with great precision which seeds to plant and how to cultivate them in each patch of land. It could be the biggest change to agriculture in rich countries since genetically modified crops. And it is proving nearly as controversial, since it raises profound questions about who owns the information on which the service is based. It also plunges stick-in-the-mud farmers into an unfamiliar world of “big data” and privacy battles.

Monsanto’s prescriptive-planting system, FieldScripts, had its first trials last year and is now on sale in four American states. Its story begins in 2006 with a Silicon Valley startup, the Climate Corporation. Set up by two former Google employees, it used remote sensing and other cartographic techniques to map every field in America (all 25m of them) and superimpose on that all the climate information that it could find. By 2010 its database contained 150 billion soil observations and 10 trillion weather-simulation points.

FieldScripts uses all these data to run machines made by Precision Planting, a company Monsanto bought in 2012, which makes seed drills and other devices pulled along behind tractors. Planters have changed radically since they were simple boxes that pushed seeds into the soil at fixed intervals. Some now steer themselves using GPS. Monsanto’s, loaded with data, can plant a field with different varieties at different depths and spacings, varying all this according to the weather. It is as if a farmer can know each of his plants by name.The Climate Corporation planned to use these data to sell crop insurance. But last October Monsanto bought the company for about $1 billion—one of the biggest takeovers of a data firm yet seen. Monsanto, the world’s largest hybrid-seed producer, has a library of hundreds of thousands of seeds, and terabytes of data on their yields. By adding these to the Climate Corporation’s soil- and-weather database, it produced a map of America which says which seed grows best in which field, under what conditions.

Prescriptive planting is catching on fast. Last November another seed producer, Du Pont Pioneer, linked up with a farm-machinery maker, John Deere, to beam advice on seeds and fertilisers to farmers in the field. A farm-supply co-operative, Land O’Lakes, bought Geosys, a satellite-imaging company, in December 2013, to boost its farm-data business.

The benefits are clear. Farmers who have tried Monsanto’s system say it has pushed up yields by roughly 5% over two years, a feat no other single intervention could match. The seed companies think providing more data to farmers could increase America’s maize yield from 160 bushels an acre (10 tonnes a hectare) to 200 bushels—giving a terrific boost to growers’ meagre margins.

But the story of prescriptive planting is also a cautionary tale about the conflicts that arise when data entrepreneurs meet old-fashioned businessfolk. Farmers might be expected to have mixed feelings about the technology anyway: although it boosts yields, it reduces the role of discretion and skill in farming—their core competence. However, the bigger problem is that farmers distrust the companies peddling this new method. They fear that the stream of detailed data they are providing on their harvests might be misused. Their commercial secrets could be sold, or leak to rival farmers; the prescriptive-planting firms might even use the data to buy underperforming farms and run them in competition with the farmers; or the companies could use the highly sensitive data on harvests to trade on the commodity markets, to the detriment of farmers who sell into those markets.

Looking a gift horse in the mouth

In response to such worries, the American Farm Bureau, the country’s largest organisation of farmers and ranchers, is drawing up a code of conduct, saying that farmers own and control their data; that companies may not use the information except for the purpose for which it was given; and that they must not sell or give it to third parties. The companies agree with those principles, though so far their contracts with farmers do not always embody them. Also, once data have been sent and anonymised, farmers might be said no longer to own them, so it is not clear what rights to them they still have. For this reason and others, some Texan farmers have banded together to form the Grower Information Services Co-operative, to negotiate with the data providers.

Another worry is that, since the companies have not yet made the data fully “portable”, farmers may become locked into doing business with a single provider. To assuage all these concerns, the Climate Corporation has set up a free data-storage service for farmers, which others cannot access without the farmers’ permission. New niche data-management firms are entering the market, which should help make it more competitive.

For the time being, though, the biggest companies will dominate prescriptive planting. They collect the most comprehensive data and make better use of them than anyone else. And that raises a problem which affects big data in all its forms. Prescriptive planting could boost yields everywhere, just as mass, anonymised patient records could improve health care. But its success depends on service providers persuading users (farmers or patients) to trust them. If the users think they are taking a disproportionate share of the risks while firms are getting an excessive chunk of the benefits, trust will remain in short supply.

Economist.com/blogs/schumpeter

From the print edition: Business

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NY Times: Buying Insurance Against Climate Change — Mentions Caribbean Models.

Posted on May 26, 2014 by Bruce

from the Sunday NY Times <http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/25/upshot/buying-insurance-against-climate-change.html>

Buying Insurance Against Climate Change

MAY 24, 2014

Photo

The Alliance of Small Island States has been arguing for an international approach to dealing with losses from climate change. Here, Tarawa in Kiribati, an alliance member battling rising sea levels. Credit Kadir Van Lohuizen/NOOR
Economic View

By ROBERT J. SHILLER

The third National Climate Assessment report — released on May 6 by the White House, and representing the work of more than 240 scientists — warns us about our hazardous future and offers many good ideas for dealing with it. But a most important point may be lost in the crowd.
After discussing how to mitigate the coming dangers, the report says, “Commercially available mechanisms such as insurance can also play a role in providing protection against losses due to climate change.” That sentence should have been in big, bold letters and underlined.

That’s because of the substantial risk that efforts to stop global warming will fail. The implications are staggering, and we must encourage private innovation and government support to insure against the devastating financial losses that will result.

The problem is an age-old one: Each country has a strong individual incentive to take a free ride on the rest of the world — to find self-serving or nationalistic justifications for adding carbon dioxide and other pollutants to the global air supply. Such behavior, which in some ways might benefit the individual country while hurting everyone else, is known in economics as an externality problem, and the world has never solved one of this magnitude. We must face facts: There is a real risk of new kinds of climate-related disaster.

In his latest book, “The Climate Casino: Risk, Uncertainty and Economics for a Warming World” (Yale University Press), my Yale colleague William D. Nordhaus describes the uncertainty of global warming’s specific effects around the world. We are taking major gambles with our environment, he says. Expect surprises.

In March, a United Nations report identified with “high confidence” a number of risks that will be visited on different people unequally. It spoke of the “risk of death, injury, ill health or disrupted livelihoods” in low-lying coastal zones and on small islands — and that is just the start. Food systems may break down. There may not be enough water for drinking and irrigation. Ecosystems may be shattered.

In short, we need to worry about the potential for greater-than-expected disasters, especially those that concentrate their fury on specific places or circumstances, many of which we cannot now predict.

That’s why global warming needs to be addressed by the private institutions of risk management, such as insurance and securitization. They have deep experience in smoothing out disasters’ effects by sharing them among large numbers of people. The people or entities that are hit hardest are helped by those less badly damaged.

But these institutions need ways to deal with such grand-scale issues. Governments should recognize that by giving these businesses a profit incentive to prepare for these unevenly distributed disasters. After all, fire insurance does no good unless you buy it before the house burns down. And you have to diversify your portfolio before the stock market crashes.

Fortunately, we aren’t too late to take action to insure against some climate risks. And yet this has not been a major element in most of the climate debate.

We already have weather derivatives that can help, like the 50 contracts in 13 countries offered by the Chicago Mercantile Exchange. A ski resort can already buy protection against inadequate snowfall and a city can buy protection against too much snowfall next winter by, in effect, taking the opposite side of the same futures contract (through the exchange), thereby pooling their opposite risks. There are also catastrophe bonds, like the three-year, $1.5 billion Everglades Re Ltd. issue sponsored this month by the Citizens Property Insurance Corporation. It would provide relief to the insurer of Floridians hit by a bad hurricane; in such an event, the bond holders would bear losses.

But there is a problem with instruments like these: They tend to focus on relatively short-term risks, and don’t hedge against the increasing cost of disasters over distant future years. Yet if the problems of global warming become more serious, they will very likely be long-lasting, raising some complex, tough-to-quantify issues. Some kinds of crises, like hurricanes, may remain intermittent, but their tendency toward severity may build in a slow, hard-to-predict process and in complex geographical patterns.

Psychologically, it’s hard for most of us to take the initiative on long-term, ill-defined risks. Three scholars — Howard C. Kunreuther and Mark V. Pauly of the University of Pennsylvania and Stacey McMorrow of the Urban Institute — show this in their book, “Insurance and Behavioral Economics: Improving Decisions in the Most Misunderstood Industry” (Cambridge University Press). But they argue that if we’re aware of them, these psychological impediments can be reduced, and they urge the innovation of long-term risk management contracts that address the problem of climate change.

Some progress is being made: The Caribbean Catastrophe Risk Insurance Facility is one recent example of institutional sharing of climate risks. Then there is the Alliance of Small Island States, formed in 1990 as a response to climate change. The group represents 5 percent of the world’s population, and its island members are scattered around the globe. But if sea levels rise substantially, all of them will be affected. These countries generally aren’t big enough to have a heartland that can help coastal dwellers in a climate catastrophe. The alliance has been arguing for an international approach to dealing with such loss and damage.

These are only beginnings. We have a crucial need to bring innovation to our risk-management institutions. We need to make them flexible, to clarify their long-term international legal status, to develop mechanisms and indexes that can be the basis of long-term risk management contracts and to educate the public about them. Most important, we need concrete action now to build a mechanism that will provide real help for the victims of climate-change disasters.

ROBERT J. SHILLER is Sterling Professor of Economics at Yale.

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Aquaculture and Mariculture

Posted on May 23, 2014 by Bruce

The National Geographic Magazine for June, 2014, has an excellent article on aquaculture <http://www.nationalgeographic.com/foodfeatures/aquaculture/>, an important resource management tool for small islands.

Here’s a summary graphic:

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An NGO Making a Difference: South River Federation, Annapolis, MD

Posted on May 19, 2014 by Bruce

Posted in Development, Erosion & Sediment Control, Uncategorized, Watershed Management | Leave a comment

College Grads Past 10 Years: Income Flat; Debts Up 35%

Posted on May 16, 2014 by Bruce

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Beavers versus Humans — A Case of Underfunded Infrastructure

Posted on May 14, 2014 by Bruce

The April 13th Bay Journal has a great OpEd by Tom Horton <http://www.bayjournal.com/article/core_sediments_reveal_when_a_wetter_bay_was_wildly_healthier> about Grace Brush’s research, and beavers, that spells it out:

Chesapeake Born

Core sediments reveal when a wetter Bay was wildly healthier

  • By Tom Horton on April 13, 2014

Grace S. Brush of Johns Hopkins University holds a core sample taken from the Blackwater River in 2003. Sediment core samples taken from the bottom of the Bay have revealed how changes on the land have affected water quality. (Dave Harp)

Grace S. Brush of Johns Hopkins University holds a core sample taken from the Blackwater River in 2003. Sediment core samples taken from the bottom of the Bay have revealed how changes on the land have affected water quality. (Dave Harp)

It’s common knowledge that the healthy Chesapeake Bay described by John Smith in 1608 was greener, its forest extending across more than 90 percent of its six-state watershed.Less appreciated is how much soggier, boggier, swampier and wetter that good, green watershed was. Beavers that likely numbered in the low millions controlled the hydrology of hundreds of thousands of streams—damming, impounding and creating a rich and damp mosaic on the landscape.

“Great Shellfish Bay” — American Indians’ name for the Chesapeake — might be amended to include “Great Beaver Bay” if we acknowledge the intimate connections between water and watershed.The wetter, better-beavered landscape checked sediment; converted nitrogen-laden runoff that plagues today’s water quality into harmless gas; restrained the peaks of floods; and recharged the Bay’s rivers during droughts. It created a cleaner, clearer, stable place for life.Bevies of beavers might be the cheapest way to a better Bay; but legions of tree-felling, land-flooding rodents would conflict too heartily with human schemes.

But beaver mimicry is another matter, restoring wetness every way and everywhere we can — from rain gardens throughout suburbia, to strategically placed, engineered wetlands, to retention dams in farm and roadside drainage ditches.Current efforts just scratch the surface of what is possible.

Low-lying, poorly drained, heavily ditched farmland everywhere should be a prime target for purchase and reversion to the wild and wet. Retrofitting every paved surface to let stormwater soak in would advance the cause further.We needn’t achieve the watershed of John Smith to see results. The Bay showed substantial resilience in the face of increasing human pressures for centuries, only to truly fall fatally apart in the 1950s.

All these vital and hopeful links between the once and future Bay are detailed wonderfully in a unique library in the Bay’s bottom opened only recently by scientists like Grace S. Brush of Johns Hopkins University.Her 2009 paper, “Historical Land Use, Nitrogen and Coastal Eutrophication: A Paleoecological Perspective*,” published in Estuaries and Coasts, should be required reading for anyone at any level teaching about Chesapeake Bay (or about beavers).

Essentially, Brush figured how to “read” the Bay’s land use history going back millennia, and how changes in the watershed translated into changes in the water.She did this by extracting yards-long cores of sediment from across the Bay’s bottom. Then, bottom to top, ancient past to present day, she analyzed the seeds and pollens and other data deposited there.At a level deep in the sediments washed from the watershed around A.D. 1000, for example, charcoal from more frequent fires corresponds to a centuries-long medieval warming period.

She can tell when forest clearing for European agriculture began as pollen from the ragweed of open fields increases; and when the Bay’s underwater grass pollens dived sharply in the 1970s after centuries of relative abundance.

This last evidence was critical in disabusing the false hope of some government officials that the seagrass decline was just a natural cycle.Volumes from the library, summarized in Brush’s paper, show how forests began to take a serious hit around the middle 1800s as a growing human population, the invention of the steel plow and markets for timber led to the clearing of all but about 20 percent of the watershed by the early 1900s.

The watershed since then has actually re-greened — to nearly 60 percent forest — as people moved into towns and cities, and farms were able to produce more food on fewer acres. But it was a different sort of green, significantly less wet.

Trapping largely abolished the beavers and their dams by the mid-1750s. Indeed, the sediment cores show a small but significant decrease in nitrogen runoff, a trend that would not turn up until human sewage and commercial fertilizers came on strong in the 1900s. Brush suspects the decline may reflect a decline in beaver poop.In addition, drainage ditching for farms, roads and development further dried out the landscape. “Well-drained” is not as good as it sounds. And increased paving made rain run off hurriedly, no time to soak in.

So it was a different kind of green that returned. Brush’s sediment cores show a big decline in pollens from wetland vegetation and moisture-loving plants in general.

The sediment library documents a most telling shift occurred rapidly in mid-20th century, as human inputs of nitrogen and other pollutants soared. The dominant algae in the Bay shifted dramatically from bottom-dwelling species to surface-floating algae.

The estuary was beginning to “flip,” to lose its bottom — its oysters, its plankton, and by the 1970s, its vital seagrass meadows. The capsize of an incredible ecosystem was complete.It wasn’t just the loss of wetness. Overharvesting, oyster diseases, intensive agriculture, sewage and air pollution were all culprits.

Still, there’s a future for the Chesapeake in its past, as remembered in its sediments, and it’s wet.avatar_453.jpgAbout Tom Horton
Tom Horton covered the Bay for 33 years for The Sun in Baltimore, and is author of six books about the Chesapeake. He is a freelance writer, splitting his time between Baltimore and Maryland’s Eastern Shore.

Read more articles by Tom Horton

* A Powerpoint of the Grace Brush presentation to MD DNR is available on-line at <http://www.dnr.state.md.us/streams/pdfs/brush29apr09.pdf&gt;

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governance Big Data – Big Problem

Posted on May 5, 2014 by Bruce

The Big Caveats for Big Data, as summarized by Tom Simonite of the MIT Technology Review is at:

http://www.technologyreview.com/view/527071/five-things-obamas-big-data-experts-warned-him-about/

Five Things Obama’s Big Data Experts Warned Him About

The rise of big data techniques poses risks to society that call for new laws, a White House report concludes:

When President Obama spoke in January about reforming U.S. surveillance, he also asked a panel of experts to spend 90 days investigating the potential consequences of the use of technology that falls under the umbrella term “big data.” The 68-page report was published today and repeatedly emphasizes that big data techniques can advance the U.S. economy, government, and public life. But it also spends a lot of time warning of the potential downsides, saying in the introduction that:

“A significant finding of this report is that big data analytics have the potential to eclipse longstanding civil rights protections in how personal information is used in housing, credit, employment, health, education, and the marketplace.”

Here are five specific things the report warns the president of:

1. Data on all of us is piling up fast in the hands of public and private sector organizations and can’t practically be clawed back.

“Data, once created, is in many cases effectively permanent … The technological trajectory, however, is clear: more and more data will be generated about individuals and will persist under the control of others. Ensuring that data is secure is a matter of the utmost importance.”

2. Privacy laws are outdated. The primary legislation governing data privacy is the Privacy Act of 1974 and the Electronic Communications Privacy Act of 1986. One problem the report raises is that these laws are hard to apply to data stored in the cloud.

“We will continually need to examine our laws and policy to keep pace with technology, and should consider how the protection of content data stored remotely, for instance with a cloud provider, should relate to the protection of content data stored in a home office or on a hard drive. This is true of emails, text messages, and other communications platforms, which over the past 30 years have become an important means of private personal correspondence, and are most often stored remotely.”

3. The way data is used to “personalize” prices, promotions, and access to financial services creates risks of discrimination against minority groups.

“The ability to more precisely target advertisements is of enormous value to companies … However, private-sector uses of big data must ensure vulnerable classes are not unfairly targeted. The increasing use of algorithms to make eligibility decisions must be carefully monitored for potential discriminatory outcomes for disadvantaged groups, even absent discriminatory intent.”

4. Efforts to make online ad tracking more transparent are a mess.

“Users, more often than not, do not understand the degree to which they are a commodity in each level of this marketplace … technologies to improve transparency and privacy choices online have been slow to develop, and for many reasons have not been used widely by consumers.”

5. Congress needs to enact new legislation. The report ends with six concrete policy proposals, two of which require action from Congress: updating the 1986 Electronic Communications Privacy Act and passing a new law to set hard rules on how companies should respond to data breaches, such as that which saw details of 40 million credit and debit cards stolen.

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What would Alister Think?

Posted on April 18, 2014 by Bruce

This search link at the Digital Library of the Caribbean/Caribbean Newspaper Digital Library <http://dloc.com/results/table/?text=%22eric+gairy%22+%22grenada+newsletter%22> shows 136 references to “Eric Gairy” in the Grenada Newsletter (published 1974 to 1992 by Cynthia and Alister Hughes in St. George’s), in case anyone wonders, as I did, what dear departed Alister might have to say about renaming the Botanic Garden after the first Prime Minister . . . . . or leader of the Mongoose Gang, if you will. . . . [A search on “Eric Gairy”and “mongoose” in the 477 editions of the Grenada Newsletter catalogued at the DLoC shows 33 hits — perhaps it would be more appropriate to rename the zoological garden rather than the Botanical Gardens?]

from the CaribJournal <http://www.caribjournal.com/2014/04/16/grenada-to-rename-botanical-gardens-for-first-prime-minister/>

Grenada to Rename Botanical Gardens For First Prime Minister

April 16, 2014 | 11:39 am | Print

Grenada to Rename Botanical Gardens For First Prime Minister


Above: the Botanical Gardens in Grenada

By the Caribbean Journal staff

Grenada will be renaming its Botanical Gardens after the country’s first Prime Minister, Sir Eric Matthew Gairy, according to the government.

Social Development Minister Delma Thomas said a team would soon begin upgrades to the gardens as part of the project.

“We will have a group of volunteers, international volunteers, who will be joining our local persons, students from TAMCC, in helping to revitalize the whole area to make it an attractive site as we recognize the tremendous contribution that Sir Eric Mathew Gairy made to Grenada,” Thomas said following a Cabinet briefing on Tuesday.

In a statement, the government said the renaming was part of a government initiative to honour Gairy.

“Our father of independence, he was our first prime Minister and he has done a lot for our country and we must recognize what he has done,” Thomas said.

Gairy served as Prime Minister of Grenada from 1974 until 1979, when he was overthrown by a coup.

Bruce
bpotter

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Five-Meter Shark Tagged off Western Australia

Posted on April 15, 2014 by Bruce

A Series of Articles from Western Australia (WA) about [Great White] Sharks
from Australia Broadcasting. . . <http://www.abc.net.au/news/2014-04-15/swimmes-warned-after-great-white-spotted-off-south-west-coast/5392236>

Massive great white shark attracted to whale carcass on WA beach prompts warning to swimmers

Updated 2 hours 33 minutes ago

Biggest great white shark tagged by Fisheries at Albany on WA's south coast Photo: The 5.04-metre great white was tagged by Fisheries officers off the coast of Albany last month.
Map: Albany 6330

An image of one of the biggest great white sharks ever tagged has sparked a flurry of online interest and a fresh warning to swimmers off WA’s south coast.

The 5.04-metre shark, the largest ever fitted with an internal acoustic tag off the Australian coast, was detected near Albany at the weekend when a distressed whale beached itself.

The City of Albany closed beaches on Saturday and the carcass was removed, but the massive shark is believed to have remained in the area.

The shark was fitted with an internal tag last month when it was swimming near Mistaken Island off the Albany coast.

Department of Fisheries officers hooked the great white and flipped it onto its back near the side of their boat.

The department’s Mark Kleeman said a photo taken during the procedure shows the shark in a state of temporary paralysis known as “tonic immobility”.

“In a sense the shark basically goes to sleep, which enables our technical officers to do a small surgical procedure to implant an acoustic tag inside the shark’s gut cavity,” he said.

At the time it was taken the Fisheries officer was completing the final stitches to the female shark’s belly as it lay docile in the water.

Mr Kleeman said the shark woke up as soon as it was flipped over.

 

“It was an impressive feat,” he said.

“In this instance the shark came pretty much instantaneous back to life.

“All the ropes and the equipment used to secure the animal has quick release clips on it, so she was quickly released so she swam off very strongly.”

He said the tag – the second to be attached to the animal – would allow it to be monitored for the next 10 years.

The giant great white has been detected periodically near Albany since it was tagged.

It was last detected at Ellen Cove, near one of the city’s popular swimming beaches, at 5:44am (AWST) today.

Mr Kleeman said swimmers near Albany should be cautious for the next few days.

“Obviously with that whale incidence and the distress signals that would have sent out, it would have attracted sharks and they will probably frequent the beach on and off for the next few days,” he added.

WA seeking to extend catch-and-kill program

Western Australia currently has a catch-and-kill policy for great white, tiger and bull sharks larger than three metres that come close to certain beaches.

The State Government recently moved to extend federal approval for the divisive program for another three years.

Fatal shark attacks in WA since 2000

  • Surfer Chris Boyd: Gracetown, Nov 23, 2013
  • Surfer Ben Linden: Wedge Island, July 14, 2012
  • Diver Peter Kurmann: Geographe Bay, March 31, 2012
  • Diver George Wainwright: Rottnest Island, Oct 22, 2011
  • Swimmer Bryn Martin: Cottesloe Beach, Oct 10, 2011
  • Surfer Kyle Burden: Bunker Bay, Sept 4, 2011
  • Surfer Nick Edwards: Gracetown, Aug 17, 2010
  • Snorkeler Brian Guest: Port Kennedy, Dec 27, 2008
  • Snorkeler Geoffrey Brazier: Abrolhos Islands, Mar 18, 2005
  • Surfer Brad Smith: Gracetown, July 10, 2004
  • Swimmer Ken Crew: North Cottesloe, Nov 6, 2000

WA introduced the policy of setting baited drum lines off five Perth beaches and two in the south-west following an increase in fatal shark attacks in the past 10 years.

Albany does not have baited drum lines off the coast.

Federal approval for the policy only lasts for three more weeks and in order to be extended, the program will have to face a full environmental assessment under Commonwealth law.

Under the proposal, the WA Government would set up to 60 baited drum lines off metropolitan and south-west beaches from November 15 to April 30 each year.

Another 12 would be held in reserve to be deployed when sharks over three metres come close to WA beaches.

Lines would not be set in any proposed marine sanctuary zone, gazetted or proposed recreation zone in any Western Australian marine park or designated fish habitat protection area.

Since the program’s inception the Government has been forced to fend off countless protests and a Supreme Court legal challenge.

ABC Fact Check: Can governments protect people from killer sharks?

Shark policy remains controversial

In March, the Environmental Protection Authority (EPA) ruled out assessing Western Australia’s controversial shark cull, saying it posed a negligible risk to the species.

The decision to cull has been controversial and there have been a number of public protests.

The EPA was called on to assess the policy and rule whether it was environmentally acceptable.

It received 23,000 submissions during a public consultation, which ended in February.

In March, Sea Shepherd failed to get a Supreme Court order to stop the cull.

It had argued the catch-and-kill policy had been improperly introduced, but the Supreme Court ruled the introduction of the drum lines was valid.

Video: Explained: How shark baiting works (Animation by Lucy Fahey)

 

Related stories

[The banner at the top of the Potter’s Weal blog <Pottersweal period com> is Muriwai Beach on North Island, New Zealand, where a beach guard was killed the week before by three sharks. Beware big fish in the antipodes. BP]

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Increased Power Outages . . .

Posted on April 11, 2014 by Bruce

Report: Power outages due to weather have doubled since 2003

From the Washington Post’s “Weather Gang:”

(Climate Central)

(Climate Central)

Climate Central released a report Thursday with a remarkable conclusion, but one that may not surprise too frequently “in the dark” Washington, D.C.-area residents: the number of weather-related power outages has shot up since the 1980s, and doubled since 2003.

The Princeton, NJ-based non-profit conducted a national analysis of the last 28 years of outage data from U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Electricity Delivery and Energy Reliability, and from the North American Electric Reliability Council. It found a stunning ten-fold increase in outages over the period, spanning 1984-2012.

Some of the increase since the 1980s is due to increased outage reporting, Climate Central cautions. ”Yet even since 2003, after stricter reporting requirements were widely implemented, the average annual number of weather-related power outages doubled,” the report finds.

(Climate Central)

(Climate Central)

Virginia and Maryland were both among the ten states with the most weather-related outages since 2003, ranking 5th and 6th, respectively. In that time span, the region was rocked by Hurricanes Isabel (2003), Irene (2011), and Sandy (2012), the June 2012 derecho, and Snowmageddon (2010), all mass-outage events.

Four power companies which serve the Washington, D.C. region (Dominion, Pepco, Baltimore Gas and Electric, and Allegheny) were among the top 25 utilities with the most reported major weather-related outages from 2003-2012, nationally.

The surge in outages raises the question: what’s the cause of the uptick?

Climate Central explains many factors may be driving the increase – from a vulnerable grid under heavy demand to an apparent increase in extreme weather events, some of which may be linked to human-induced climate change. It describes climate change as an outage “threat multiplier” but cautions linking certain extreme weather events to climate change is difficult.

“Climate change is, at most, partially responsible for this recent increase in major power outages, which is a product of an aging grid serving greater electricity demand, and an increase in storms and extreme weather events that damage this system,” the report concludes. “But a warming planet provides more fuel for increasingly intense and violent storms, heat waves, and wildfires, which in turn will continue to strain, and too often breach, our highly vulnerable electrical infrastructure.”

The full report is worth a read: BLACKOUT: EXTREME WEATHER, CLIMATE CHANGE AND POWER OUTAGES

Jason Samenow

Jason Samenow is the Capital Weather Gang’s chief meteorologist and serves as the Washington Post’s Weather Editor. He earned BA and MS degrees in atmospheric science from the University of Virginia and University of Wisconsin-Madison.
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