[NYTr] Env: NASA ozone hole data is doctored

[All the News That Doesn't Fit]

You need to go to the blog referenced to see the graphics, which are
quite alarming if this analysis is correct. See also the other webpages
referenced below. -NY Transfer.]

sent by Harry Saloor - Sep 10, 2007

[NASA is doctoring its Antarctic Ozone Hole data big time! It usually
means something far worse than expected is happening. -HS]

What’s Wrong With NASA’s Antarctic Ozone Hole Data?

See: http://feww.wordpress.com

http://ozonewatch.gsfc.nasa.gov/index.html --(NASA's current entries).

Note the sudden drop in the ozone hole area and the "unnatural"
shape of the hole on September 7, 2007.  Also entries for Sept. 5-6
are omitted from the temperature/date graph to make the sudden drop
look "smoother." 

http://ozonewatch.gsfc.nasa.gov/monthly/ -- (NASA's old records). Check
the patterns for the way ozone holes form and fade away each year.
 
Harry

                          ***

World Oceans in Extreme Danger
Posted by feww on September 9th, 2007

Project Censored 2007:
http://www.projectcensored.org/censored_2007/index.htm

Top 25 Censored News Stories of 2007

Oceans of the World in Extreme Danger

Source: Mother Jones, March /April, 2006
Title: The Fate of the Ocean
Author: Julia Whitty

Oceanic problems once found on a local scale are now pandemic. Data
from oceanography, marine biology, meteorology, fishery science, and
glaciology reveal that the seas are changing in ominous ways. A vortex
of cause and effect wrought by global environmental dilemmas is
changing the ocean from a watery horizon with assorted regional
troubles to a global system in alarming distress.

According to oceanographers the oceans are one, with currents linking
the seas and regulating climate. Sea temperature and chemistry changes,
along with contamination and reckless fishing practices, intertwine to
imperil the world’s largest communal life source.

In 2005, researchers from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography and
the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory found clear evidence the
ocean is quickly warming. They discovered that the top half-mile of the
ocean has warmed dramatically in the past forty years as a result of
human-induced greenhouse gases.

One manifestation of this warming is the melting of the Arctic. A
shrinking ratio of ice to water has set off a feedback loop,
accelerating the increase in water surfaces that promote further
warming and melting. With polar waters growing fresher and tropical
seas saltier, the cycle of evaporation and precipitation has quickened,
further invigorating the greenhouse effect. The ocean’s currents are
reacting to this freshening, causing a critical conveyor that carries
warm upper waters into Europe’s northern latitudes to slow by one third
since 1957, bolstering fears of a shut down and cataclysmic climate
change. This accelerating cycle of cause and effect will be difficult,
if not impossible, to reverse.

Atmospheric litter is also altering sea chemistry, as thousands of
toxic compounds poison marine creatures and devastate propagation. The
ocean has absorbed an estimated 118 billion metric tons of carbon
dioxide since the onset of the Industrial Revolution, with 20 to 25
tons being added to the atmosphere daily. Increasing acidity from
rising levels of CO2 is changing the ocean’s PH balance. Studies
indicate that the shells and skeletons possessed by everything from
reef-building corals to mollusks and plankton begin to dissolve within
forty-eight hours of exposure to the acidity expected in the ocean by
2050. Coral reefs will almost certainly disappear and, even more
worrisome, so will plankton. Phytoplankton absorb greenhouse gases,
manufacture oxygen, and are the primary producers of the marine food
web.

Mercury pollution enters the food web via coal and chemical industry
waste, oxidizes in the atmosphere, and settles to the sea bottom. There
it is consumed, delivering mercury to each subsequent link in the food
chain, until predators such as tuna or whales carry levels of mercury
as much as one million times that of the waters around them. The Gulf
of Mexico has the highest mercury levels ever recorded, with an average
of ten tons of mercury coming down the Mississippi River every year,
and another ton added by offshore drilling.

Along with mercury, the Mississippi delivers nitrogen (often from
fertilizers). Nitrogen stimulates plant and bacterial growth in the
water that consume oxygen, creating a condition known as hypoxia, or
dead zones. Dead zones occur wherever oceanic oxygen is depleted below
the level necessary to sustain marine life. A sizable portion of the
Gulf of Mexico has become a dead zone—the largest such area in the U.S.
and the second largest on the planet, measuring nearly 8,000 square
miles in 2001. It is no coincidence that almost all of the nearly 150
(and counting) dead zones on earth lay at the mouths of rivers. Nearly
fifty fester off U.S. coasts. While most are caused by river-borne
nitrogen, fossil fuel-burning plants help create this condition, as
does phosphorous from human sewage and nitrogen emissions from auto
exhaust.

Meanwhile, since its peak in 2000, the global wild fish harvest has
begun a sharp decline despite progress in seagoing technologies and
intensified fishing. So-called efficiencies in fishing have stimulated
unprecedented decimation of sealife. Long-lining, in which a single
boat sets line across sixty or more miles of ocean, each baited with up
to 10,000 hooks, captures at least 25 percent unwanted catch. With an
estimated 2 billion hooks set each year, as much as 88 billion pounds
of life a year is thrown back to the ocean either dead or dying.
Additionally, trawlers drag nets across every square inch of the
continental shelves every two years. Fishing the sea floor like a
bulldozer, they level an area 150 times larger than all forest
clearcuts each year and destroy seafloor ecosystems. Aquaculture is no
better, since three pounds of wild fish are caught to feed every pound
of farmed salmon. A 2003 study out of Dalhousie University in Nova
Scotia concluded, based on data dating from the 1950s, that in the wake
of decades of such onslaught only 10 percent of all large fish (tuna,
swordfish) and ground fish (cod, hake, flounder) are left anywhere in
the ocean.

Other sea nurseries are also threatened. Fifteen percent of seagrass
beds have disappeared in the last ten years, depriving juvenile fish,
manatees, and sea turtles of critical habitats. Kelp beds are also
dying at alarming rates.

While at no time in history has science taught more about how the
earth’s life-support systems work, the maelstrom of human assault on
the seas continues. If human failure in governance of the world’s
largest public domain is not reversed quickly, the ocean will soon and
surely reach a point of no return.

Comment:
After release of the Pew Oceans Commission report, U.S. media, most
notably The Washington Post and National Public Radio in 2003 and 2004,
covered several stories regarding impending threats to the ocean,
recommendations for protection, and President Bush’s response. However,
media treatment of the collective acceleration of ocean damage and
cross-pollination of harm was left to Julia Whitty in her lengthy
feature. In April of 2006, Time Magazine presented an in-depth article
about earth at “the tipping point,” describing the planet as an
overworked organism fighting the consequences of global climate change
on shore and sea. In her Mother Jones article, Whitty presented a look
at global illness by directly examining the ocean as earth’s
circulatory, respiratory, and reproductive system.

Following up on “The Last Days of the Ocean,” Mother Jones has produced
“Ocean Voyager,” an innovative web-based adventure that includes
videos, audio interviews with key players, webcams, and links to
informative web pages created by more than twenty organizations. The
site is a tour of various ocean trouble spots around the world, which
highlights solutions and suggests actions that can be taken to help
make a difference.

UPDATE BY JULIA WHITTY

This story is awash with new developments. Scientists are currently
publishing at an unprecedented rate their observations—not just
predictions—on the rapid changes underway on our ocean planet. First
and foremost, the year 2005 turned out to be the warmest year on
record. This reinforces other data showing the earth has grown hotter
in the past 400 years, and possibly in the past 2,000 years. A study
out of the National Center for Atmospheric Research found ocean
temperatures in the tropical North Atlantic in 2005 nearly two degrees
Fahrenheit above normal; this turned out to be the predominant catalyst
for the monstrous 2005 hurricane season—the most violent season ever
seen.

The news from the polar ice is no better. A joint NASA/University of
Kansas study in Science (02/06) reveals that Greenland’s glaciers are
surging towards the sea and melting more than twice as fast as ten
years ago. This further endangers the critical balance of the North
Atlantic meridional overturning circulation, which holds our climate
stable. Meanwhile, in March, the British Antarctic Survey announced
their findings that the “global warming signature” of the Antarctic is
three times larger than what we’re seeing elsewhere on Earth—the first
proof of broadscale climate change across the southern continent.

Since “The Fate of the Ocean” went to press in Mother Jones magazine,
evidence of the politicization of science in the global climate wars
has also emerged. In January 2006 NASA’s top climate scientist, James
Hansen, accused the agency of trying to censor his work. Four months
later, Hansen’s accusations were echoed by scientists at the National
Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, as well as by a U.S. Geological
Survey scientist working at a NOAA lab, who claimed their work on
global climate change was being censored by their departments, as part
of a policy of intimidation by the anti-science Bush administration.

Problems for the ocean’s wildlife are escalating too. In 2005,
biologists from the U.S. Minerals Management Service found polar bears
drowned in the waters off Alaska, apparent victims of the disappearing
ice. In 2006, U.S. Geological Survey Alaska Science Center researchers
found polar bears killing and eating each other in areas where sea ice
failed to form that year, leaving the bears bereft of food. In
response, the International Union for the Conservation of Nature and
Natural Resources revised their Red List for polar bears—upgrading them
from “conservation dependent” to “vulnerable.” In February, the U.S.
Fish and Wildlife Service announced it would begin reviewing whether
polar bears need protection under the Endangered Species Act.

Since my report, the leaders of two influential commissions—the Pew
Oceans Commission and the U.S. Commission on Ocean Policy—gave
Congress, the Bush administration, and our nation’s governors a “D+”
grade for not moving quickly enough to address their recommendations
for restoring health to our nation’s oceans.

Most of these stories remain out of view, sunk with cement boots in the
backwaters of scientific journals. The media remains unable to discern
good science from bad, and gives equal credence to both, when they give
any at all. The story of our declining ocean world, and our own future,
develops beyond the ken of the public, who forge ahead without altering
behavior or goals, and unimpeded by foresight.