You don't have to be an environmentalist to care about protecting the Earth's wildlife. Just ask a Chinese fruit farmer who now has to pay people to pollinate apple trees because there are no longer enough bees to do the job for free. And it's not just the number of bees that is dwindling rapidly – as a direct result of human activity, species are becoming extinct at a rate 1,000 times greater than the natural average. The Earth's natural resources are also suffering. In the past few decades alone, 20% of the oceans' coral reefs have been destroyed, with a further 20% badly degraded or under serious threat of collapse, while tropical forests equivalent in size to the UK are cut down every two years. These statistics, and the many more just like them, impact on everyone, for the very simple reason that, in the end, we will all foot the bill. … Read ahead
Source: bbc.co.uk
Forgetting the reusable cloth shopping bags on a few shopping excursions can result in an abundance of petroleum-based plastic shopping bags. Vilified for wreaking havoc on our oceans and clogging landfills for all eternity, the cheap and easy answer … 
Sharks have trawled the world’s oceans for millions of years—the earliest species predated the dinosaurs. Today, many species rule as apex predators that dominate the top of the underwater food chain. In every ocean in the world—at astonishing depths and shallow waters alike—they hunt. Sharks also stimulate the imaginations of humans, who seem eternally fascinated by their strength, speed, and unmatched ability as predators. Indeed, the popularity of … 
It sounds like a promising prospect, actually: an ocean where no one has to worry about the threat of a sleek, dark shape rising from the depths with a million teeth and an appetite for limbs. Seals everywhere would rejoice, no doubt. But an ocean without sharks is actually a troubling, potentially disastrous prospect in terms of marine ecosystems—and a disturbingly possible one if things keep going at the rate they are. “This is a pressing concern, and we are in danger of living in a world effectively devoid of sharks,” said Stuart Sandin, a marine ecology expert from the Scripps Institute of Oceanography. “Fishermen around the world are devastating shark populations.” It could mean an unfitting end to an animal that has outlived the dinosaurs and plied the oceans for more than 400 million years, surviving near-global extinction events and outliving countless other marine species. But according to several studies, sharks nearly everywhere are in serious decline due to human activity. A report from the … 
Wednesday, citing a new comprehensive review of the last decade of climate data. Without addressing why this is happening, the researchers said there was no doubt that every decade on Earth since the 1980s has been hotter than the previous one, and that the planet has been warming for the last half-century. This confirms the findings of the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which reported in 2007 with 90 percent certainty that climate change is occurring. The IPCC also said that human activities contribute to this phenomenon. The new report was released after U.S. Senate Democrats delayed any possible legislation to curb climate change until September at the earliest. Prospects for U.S. climate change legislation this year are considered slim. Released by the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration as “The 2009 State of the Climate Report,” the new report draws on the work of 303 scientists from 48 countries, including data from last year. The 10 key planet-wide indicators of a warming climate identified by the report are: — Higher temperatures over land — Higher temperatures over oceans — Higher ocean heat content — Higher near-surface air temperatures (temperatures in the troposphere, where Earth’s … 
The Wendy Schmidt Oil Cleanup X Challenge hopes to “find the most effective and environmentally-safe solutions for capturing oil from all spills at the spill site, thus limiting their impacts and protecting our oceans, shores, marshes, and, importantly, the health and well-being of the people and wildlife which live and thrive in these communities.” Wendy Schmidt is personally funding the Oil Cleanup challenge; Schmidt is the wife of Google CEO Eric Schmidt, and is broadly involved in philanthropic efforts, particularly energy development and conservation of natural resources. The challenge will run for a year, and aims to spur development and demonstration of quickly deployable, highly efficient means of recovering crude oil from the ocean surface. The competition will run in two phases; the first phrase runs through April 2011 and invites proposals, which will be evaluated by a panel of expert judges from academia and industry. The judges will select up to 10 teams to demonstrate their technology for cleaning up oil on the ocean surface in a head-to-head competition at the … 
Microscopic plants in the ocean, called phytoplankton, are among the most important creatures on Earth and produce half of the planet’s oxygen. But they are in trouble. A new study finds that since 1950, the amount of phytoplankton in the ocean’s surface waters — the basis of the ocean’s food web — has declined by 40 percent. Biologist Boris Worm is noted for his studies showing that the world’s fisheries are in sharp decline. Most of that trend is due to overfishing, but it turns out that may not be the whole story. So the researcher at Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia has now turned his attention to the marine food chain and the ocean plant life that ultimately feeds almost everything else. “The very fundamental question would be: Is the ocean getting more or less green? Is it increasing in plant life or decreasing?” Worm says. This is a hard question to answer. Satellite studies show that the greenness of the ocean varies widely year to year, decade to decade. It would take many decades of data to see if there’s a long-term trend. Worm has now unearthed more than a century of data taken using an instrument called a Secchi disk, which measures the transparency of ocean water. “The Secchi disk is a beauty because it is the simplest oceanographic instrument,” Worm says. “It has also been in continuous use since it was invented in the late 1800s, and it hasn’t changed since then.” Basically, oceanographers lower the white disk on a rope and note how deep it is when it disappears from view. Oceanographers have taken half a million measurements like this throughout the world’s oceans, so Worm and his colleagues collected piles of that data and looked for trends. “What we found was that phytoplankton was declining in 8 out of 10 large ocean regions,” he says. And the trend was pretty dramatic, averaging 1 percent per year, year after year, according to their study in this week’s … 
The proposal has three main aims: cleaning our oceans of enormous waste, creating new land, and constructing a sustainable habitat. Recycled island seeks to recycle the plastic waste on the spot and recycle it into a floating entity.” I contacted Ramon Knoester via email to answer some of our questions about Recycled Island: …