BAN ARCTIC BIRD DROPPINGS!

A major source of chemical contamination in the Arctic turns out to be bird droppings. Wind currents and human activities long have been blamed for fouling the pristine Arctic. But a study by a group of Canadian researchers found that the chemical pollution in areas frequented by seabirds can be many times higher than in nearby regions. Researchers led by Jules Blais of the University of Ottawa studied several ponds below the cliffs at Cape Vera on Devon Island in the Canadian Arctic. Scientists report in Friday's issue of the journal Science that the ponds, which receive falling guano from a colony of northern fulmars that nest on the cliffs, have highly elevated amounts of chemicals.

"If long-range transport was the only thing bringing these chemicals north, we would expect to see a very even distribution," Blais said in a telephone interview. But the chemicals are concentrated in some places, he said, "and we have found a reason ... they can follow biological connections." Blais calls it the boomerang effect. "These contaminants had been washed into the ocean, where we generally assumed they were no longer affecting terrestrial ecosystems. Our study shows that sea birds, which feed in the ocean but then come back to land, are returning not only with food for their young but with contaminants as well. The contaminants accumulate in their bodies and are released on land," Blais said.

The guano that falls into the ponds includes bits of fish, carrion, squid and other marine creatures eaten by the fulmars. Research team member John Smol of Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario, said "the effect is to elevate concentrations of pollutants such as mercury and DDT to as much as 60 times that of areas not influenced by seabird populations." Todd O'Hara of the Institute of Arctic Biology at the University of Alaska in Fairbanks said the report adds new detail to "the role of biotransport in bringing contaminants to the Arctic with clear local impacts. "Certainly, I believe biotransport is an underestimated process and for subsistence users it clearly indicates the need for local assessments of food sources and not to generalize about Arctic contamination," said O'Hara, who was not part of Blais team.

Chemicals such as PCB and DDT are no longer being released into the environment in North America, Blais noted, but were designed to last a long time and are doing so. In addition, he said, other chemicals still in use are toxic and also can last in the environment. Perhaps the lessons learned from PCBs should be applied to other hazardous chemicals too, Blais said. The area of the study is one of the most desolate on Earth, Blais said, and the local food chain is dependent on the guano from the seabirds. Their droppings encourage the growth of mosses and plankton in the ponds, which feed lots of insects, which in turn support small birds called snow buntings, he said. If the seabirds were to disappear the whole ecosystem would disappear, he said.

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THERE'S PLENTY OF OIL

The four giant oil fields, operated by BP PLC and located under thousands of feet of water off the coast of Louisiana, are just beginning to pump their first barrels. At their peak rates later in the decade, they'll produce some 500,000 bbl. per day, an amount akin to floating a small Middle Eastern country such as Syria or Yemen into the Gulf of Mexico. "Add them together, and it's a massive step change," says David Eyton, BP's vice-president for deepwater in the Gulf. "The investment we're making will more than offset declines we're seeing in Alaska and the Continental Shelf."

It may seem today as if the world is running out of oil. The price of crude has hovered around $57 a barrel, in part on fears of a supply crunch in the fourth quarter. Chevron and China National Offshore Oil are battling for control of Unocal. The Senate on June 28 passed the latest version of an energy bill stuffed with $18 billion in tax incentives to encourage energy production. Even legendary oilman T. Boone Pickens is predicting $3-a-gallon gasoline within a year. The national average now: a pricey $2.22.

No doubt, the energy industry is in a precarious position. Two decades of falling prices in the 1980s and '90s discouraged investment. With many of the easy-to-find fields already on the map, big oil producers have been forced to look for new sources in ever-more-hostile environments: not just under thousands of feet of water but also across frozen tundra and in countries rocked by political unrest. As a result, production has risen sluggishly in recent years, while energy demand, particularly from the booming China and India, has exploded. Last year global oil consumption rose 3.4%, to 80.7 million barrels per day, the largest volume increase since 1976.

From that snapshot the oil situation doesn't look good. But there's little reason to assume that the next five years will simply see a continuation of current trends. Thanks to a combination of higher prices, increased exploration and production spending, and improved technology (page 32), oil supplies are poised to grow much faster than they have in recent years. Cambridge Energy Research Associates (CERA), a respected energy consultant, sees 20 or more major new fields coming on line each year through 2010. Altogether those fields could boost worldwide production capacity 15%, from 87.9 million barrels per day to 101.5 million by the end of the decade, CERA estimates. As a result, supply should exceed demand by 7 million bbl. per day, a huge leap from the current cushion of 1 million bbl. That should take pressure off prices. "OPEC countries have the potential, and [most] are increasing production," says Peter Jackson, a CERA researcher. "Non-OPEC production has increased at quite a lick compared to the 1990s."

Where is the new supply coming from? Pretty much across the globe. After hiking its exploration-and-production expenditures by 50% since 2000, to $12 billion a year, Exxon Mobil Corp expects to add more than 1.2 million bbl. per day of new supply by 2007 from 27 projects, including ones off the coast of Angola and Russia's Sakhalin Island. Chevron Corp. expects its Big Five fields in West Africa, Australia, the Gulf of Mexico, and Kazakhstan to generate 800,000 more bbl. per day by 2009 -- a third of its current production. "We've got that pretty well mapped out," says Chevron Vice-Chairman Peter J. Robertson. "Projects are more complex now. They take a little longer. There's still plenty of oil in the world."

Not everyone agrees, of course. For starters, CERA's projections don't take into account the possibility of political instability, natural disasters, or other unforeseeable events that are facts of life in the oil business. What's more, despite all the new fields coming on stream, some experts argue that they won't be enough to compensate for the declining output of existing fields, which are being depleted at a rate of 5% per year. Since 1960 only four super-giant oilfields have been found outside the Middle East -- in China, Russia, Mexico, and Alaska -- and all except China's Daqing field are in steep decline. "Discovery size is going down," says J. Robinson West, chairman of consultant PFC Energy. "Decline rates are a problem."

Even mighty Saudi Arabia's ability to increase output substantially has come into question. The world's biggest oilfield, Saudi Arabia's Ghawar, has been producing for more than 50 years and is showing signs of age, with increasing amounts of water leaking into the oil, according to technical papers by Saudi Aramco engineers cited in a new book, Twilight in the Desert.

Certainly, global energy producers are struggling to clear all sorts of hurdles as they respond to rising demand. The number of rigs drilling for oil and gas worldwide is up 35% since the start of the decade, to 2,500. That's putting pressure on the prices of oil-field services. Operating costs at major oil companies now average $13.75 a barrel, a 33% increase since 1999, according to brokerage firm A.G. Edwards Inc. Even CERA believes that oil production could hit a plateau around 2020. If that happens, the world economy could face a major setback. Fuel prices would soar and energy-dependent sectors would be seriously crimped. Opening new reserves can be painstakingly complex and slow. BP's operations in the Caspian Sea illustrate the challenges. The company and its partners first signed a production-sharing agreement for the 5-billion-bbl Azeri-Chirag-Gunashli field there in 1994. Discovered by the Soviet Union in the 1970s, the Baku crude is relatively easy to tap. The hard part: agreements to build, and then building, a $3.2 billion pipeline to carry the oil to tankers in the Mediterranean Sea. That took years of negotiations with the governments of Azerbaijan, Georgia, Turkey, and neighboring states. The first crude began flowing through the pipeline last month. By 2008 the project should reach its peak capacity of 1 million bbl. per day.

Moreover, much of the new supply expected in the next few years will come from what the industry calls "unconventional sources" -- fields that require additional technologies to harvest their hydrocarbons. These include heavy- sulfur oil that must undergo additional refining before it can be turned into fuels, as well as coal-bed methane fields, where oil and natural gas is drilled within coal deposits. Two other potential energy strikes are tight sands and shale oil, where rock must be fractured using high-pressure water or chemicals to loosen up the reserves. Another major source: offshore deepwater fields.

Unconventional fields cost more to develop than traditional ones do, but their potential is huge. Estimates of the reserves trapped in Canada's oil sands, where oil is mined like coal from big deposits, top 175 billion bbl. -- larger than those of Iran or Iraq. Producers such as Suncor Energy Inc. and Imperial Oil Ltd are expected to spend $38 billion over the next 10 years there, taking already fast-growing production in the country from 1 million barrels per day to 2.6 million.

Such sources will account for 30% of all supplies in 2010, up from just 10% in 1990, according to CERA. ExxonMobil figures the world contains some 7 trillion bbl. of heavy oil, oil sands, and shale-oil reserves alone, an amount roughly equal to those of all conventional reserves. If just 20% of those were recovered, ExxonMobil figures that would top the 1 trillion bbl. of conventional oil produced on the planet to date. If numbers like that prove to be accurate, today's worries over oil supplies could seem like a distant memory in just a few short years. Let's hope the optimists are right.

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Male fertility not harmed by phthalates

The California phthalate freaks will be SO disappointed

Contrary to earlier reports, everyday exposure to phthalates -- chemical plasticizers used extensively in household products and in certain medical products -- may not have harmful effects on fertility in young men, a new study shows.

Previous studies suggested that low levels of phthalate exposure could adversely affect human semen, the authors explain in a report in Epidemiology, a medical journal, but high doses of phthalates are required to provoke male reproductive toxicity in rats.

For their study, Dr. Bosse A.G. Jonsson from Lund University Hospital, Sweden, and colleagues looked for associations between phthalate metabolite levels in urine and semen quality and reproductive hormone parameters in 234 young Swedish men entering the military. There was "no clear pattern of associations" between any of the phthalate metabolites and any of the biomarkers of reproductive function measured. In fact, exposure to phthalic acid seemed to be associated with improved reproductive function, as measured by several markers.

"I do not think it is clear whether phthalate constitutes a risk for the male fertility," Jonsson told Reuters Health. "More studies must be performed." "We plan to study biological samples stored in biobanks from pregnant mothers and study the fertility in their grown-up male children," Jonsson added.

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"RARE" BIRD NOT RARE AT ALL

Efforts aimed at saving one of the world's rarest birds of prey from extinction may be too late, a genetic analysis by researchers at the University of Michigan and The Peregrine Fund suggests. The last remaining Cape Verde Kites, considered by some to be the rarest raptors in the world, are not Cape Verde Kites at all, but more common Black Kites, the research shows. The real Cape Verde Kites apparently disappeared some time ago and never were a uniquely different species.

The finding, recently published online in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B, adds a new twist to the ongoing debate about how species are defined and how those definitions are used to guide conservation efforts, said David Mindell, a professor of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology and director of the U-M Museum of Zoology. "It's important to recognize distinctive species as the focus for scarce conservation funds, but as this example shows, there are cases in which species that were recognized over 100 years ago actually aren't valid species," Mindell said. "In such cases, funds might be redirected to species in dire need."

The birds known as Cape Verde Kites live only on the Cape Verde Islands, about 300 miles west of the African country of Senegal in the Atlantic Ocean. Conservationists have been concerned that habitat loss, widespread use of rodent-killing chemicals and other factors were driving those birds to the brink of extinction and threatening other types of wildlife on the islands. In 2002, biologists captured five birds thought to be Cape Verde Kites and considered starting a captive breeding program. "That's an expensive proposition, so we wanted to take a look at the Cape Verde Kite to get an idea of how distinctive it was genetically-whether it really was something unique that would justify the effort," Mindell said. Working with U-M postdoctoral fellow Jeff Johnson and Richard Watson of The Peregrine Fund, Mindell performed a genetic analysis on material from contemporary Black Kites, Red Kites and historical Cape Verde Kite museum specimens collected between 1897 and 1924 as well as the five kites captured on the Cape Verde Islands in 2002.

"The bottom line," Mindell said, "was that the few kites that are out there now are not Cape Verde Kites; they're Black Kites, which are widely distributed throughout the Old World and are not in danger. Further-and this was even more surprising-the historical specimens of Cape Verde Kites don't even hold together as a distinct group." On the genealogical tree the researchers constructed, the museum specimens originally identified as Cape Verde Kites are not one another's closest relatives; they're scattered within a larger group of Red Kites. Cape Verde Kites, Red Kites and Black Kites are closely related, medium-sized birds of prey, similar in size to red-tailed hawks. Their plumage is mainly brown and reddish, and their tails are forked. All are opportunistic predators, feeding on insects, small vertebrates and carrion.

The researchers' conclusions don't mean that all conservation efforts in the Cape Verde Islands should be called off. Other species on the islands, such as the Raso Lark and the Cape Verde Warbler, are at risk, Mindell said. In the long view, Mindell believes studies such as this one bolster the credibility of conservation biologists by showing that the scientists are unbiased and willing to accept results that run counter to expectations. "We're taking a neutral approach by consistently applying criteria for determining what are distinct evolutionary entities, and the results can go either way," Mindell said. "Sometimes we'll find genetically unique populations that are well-justified for conservation efforts. But we might also find some that were misidentified initially, where people thought that because populations were out on some islands or in unique habitats they were reproductively isolated and genetically distinctive. We're very much in favor of conserving species, habitats and ecosystems; but when it comes to recommendations for particular groups of organisms, we need to carefully assess their status as distinctive species."

The University of Michigan Museum of Zoology collections, housed in the Ruthven Museums Building, include about 15 million specimens, representing mammals, birds, amphibians and reptiles, fishes, mollusks, mites and insects. Researchers study the materials to learn about and analyze biological diversity and to discover the processes and principles of evolution.

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Many people would like to be kind to others so Leftists exploit that with their nonsense about equality. Most people want a clean, green environment so Greenies exploit that by inventing all sorts of far-fetched threats to the environment. But for both, the real motive is to promote themselves as wiser and better than everyone else, truth regardless.

Global warming has taken the place of Communism as an absurdity that "liberals" will defend to the death regardless of the evidence showing its folly. Evidence never has mattered to real Leftists

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