Oceans

A September 2008 photo released by the Ocean Conservancy on March 10, 2009, shows a trash-covered beach in Manilla, Philippines. (Tamara Thoreson Pierce/Ocean Conservancy/AP)

CLICK HERE - REPORT - World Economic Forum - The New Plastics Economy: Rethinking the future of plastics

CLICK HERE - STUDY - Independent study tallies 'true catch' of global fishing

washingtonpost.com - by Sarah Kaplan - January 20, 2016

There is a lot of plastic in the world’s oceans.

It coagulates into great floating “garbage patches” that cover large swaths of the Pacific. It washes up on urban beaches and remote islands, tossed about in the waves and transported across incredible distances before arriving, unwanted, back on land. It has wound up in the stomachs of more than half the world’s sea turtles and nearly all of its marine birds, studies say . . .

. . . But that quantity pales in comparison with the amount that the World Economic Forum expects will be floating into the oceans by the middle of the century.

January–August 2015 Blended Land and Sea Surface Temperature Percentiles. (NOAA)

CLICK HERE - PAPER - Exceptional twentieth-century slowdown in Atlantic Ocean overturning circulation

washingtonpost.com - by Chris Mooney - September 24, 2015

. . . we learned from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration that the first eight months of 2015 were the hottest such stretch yet recorded for the globe’s surface land and oceans, based on temperature records going back to 1880. . . .

In the North Atlantic Ocean south of Greenland and Iceland, the ocean surface has seen very cold temperatures for the past eight months. . . .

. . . And while there may not yet be any scientific consensus on the matter, at least some scientists suspect that the cooling seen in these maps is no fluke but, rather, part of a process that has been long feared by climate researchers — the slowing of Atlantic Ocean circulation.

CIDRAP NEWS by Lisa Schnirring                                                                               June 3, 2015

(Scroll down for WHO stuation report.)

In  its weekly epidemiologicpidemiologic profile of the outbreak Wednesday, the World Health Organization (WHO) said Ebola activity in Guinea and Sierra Leone has become more intense and widespread since May 10, when the region saw cases hit a 10-month low.

Last week the two countries reported 25 new lab-confirmed cases, 13 in Guinea and 12 in Sierra Leone. The number is up from 12 reported the week before.

Overall, the total of confirmed, probable, and suspected cases in the two countries and Liberia—which is now Ebola free—has risen to 27,145, including 11,147 deaths, the WHO said.

Image: BP's Deepwater Horizon oil platform burns in April 2010, fouling the Gulf Coast: Is it responsible for a massive die-off of dolphins? (Gerald Herbert / Associated Press)

latimes.com - February 16th 2015 - Michael Hiltzik

In the years since its Deepwater Horizon oil spill befouled huge stretches of the Gulf of Mexico, oil giant BP has honed its skill at cherry-picking scientific studies to duck responsibility for the spill's environmental impacts.

Its latest effort concerns a study of a massive die-off of bottlenose dolphins in the gulf from 2010 through June 2013, occurring mostly after the April 2010 Deepwater Horizon blowout caused the worst oil spill in history. The peer-reviewed study, led by Stephanie Venn-Watson of the National Marine Mammal Foundation in San Diego, was funded by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and published last week in the open-access journal PLoS One.