Apart from playing host to one of the most unconventional election days in Australia’s history, August 21st also marked a rather unfortunate milestone – when humanity consumed all of the renewable resources that nature has been able to generate during this year.
Earth Overshoot Day is an initiative of the new economics foundation and the Global Footprint Network, and signifies the day in which human demand has outstripped the annual biocapacity of the Earth. Since the first Earth Overshoot Day in 1987, human consumption has been continuously growing beyond the sustainable …

The hadal zone: deep sea trenches over 11,000 meter deep (deeper than Mount Everest is high), the pressure rises to 1,000 bar, there is no light and food is scarce.
It (the Hadal zone) offers a glimpse of what life on Jupiter’s moon, Europa, might look like. A new species of archaebacteria, Pyrococcus CH1,was recently discovered thriving on a mid-Atlantic ridge within a temperature range of 80 to 105°C and able to divide itself up to a hydrostatic pressure of 120 Mpa (1000 times higher than the atmospheric pressure). Excedrin Migraine …

By Ian Wylie
Financial Times Published: August 9 2010 23:35 | Last updated: August 9 2010 23:35
The cold call asking you to pledge money to a charity is an uncomfortable conversation at the best of times. But what if the person on the other end of the line happens to be the third-richest man in the world?
It seems Warren Buffett, who has been calling up fellow American billionaires to ask them to donate at least half their wealth to charitable causes, also knows an evasive answer when he hears one. “Sometimes they’re just …

… or at least that seems to be what Australia’s Opposition leader thinks would happen if he stopped the expansion of marine protected areas in Australian waters:
In a policy aimed at marginal Queensland seats, Mr Abbott said a Coalition government would ”immediately suspend the marine protection process which is threatening the livelihoods of many people in the fishing industry and many people in the tourism industry”.
”All of us want to see appropriate environmental protection, but man and nature have to live together,” Mr Abbott said as he toured the seat …

Analysis of nearly 1,000 sperm whale tissues (sampled using a dart gun, not the Japanese harpoon method) reveals ‘jaw dropping’ levels of cadmium, aluminum, chromium, lead, silver, mercury, and titanium:
“The entire ocean life is just loaded with a series of contaminants, most of which have been released by human beings,’’ Payne said in an interview at the International Whaling Commission’s annual meeting.
“These contaminants, I think, are threatening the human food supply. They certainly are threatening the whales and the other animals that live in the ocean,’’ he said.
Roger Payne (a …

Here’s an interesting perspective on the current oil spill from the NYT: cold, dark, teeming with life:
The deep seabed was once considered a biological desert. Life, the logic went, was synonymous with light and photosynthesis. The sun powered the planet’s food chains, and only a few scavengers could ply the preternaturally dark abyss.
Then, in 1977, oceanographers working in the deep Pacific stumbled on bizarre ecosystems lush with clams, mussels and big tube worms — a cornucopia of abyssal life built on microbes that thrived in …

Watch this: “The Story of Cap and Trade” from the people that brought you “The Story of Stuff”. I love this animation for so many reasons, starting with the Einstein quote in the opening credits, “We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them”.
Annie Leonard outlines that there are three major problems with cap and trade: free permits, false offsetting, and distractions from the real solutions.
Cap and trade has previously been used for sulfur dioxide to stop acid rain. Its success …

Professor Neville Nicholls, Monash University
Contrary to the impression you might have gained from the media, the global climate is NOT cooling. In fact, the last twelve months, June 2009 – May 2010, has been the hottest June-May period on record, in both the 31-year satellite record of lower atmosphere global temperature and the 131-year surface global temperature record. In both data series the last 12 months have been more than 0.4C hotter than the average temperature of the last two decades of the 20th century.
The figure below plots the time …

Viosca Knoll 906 is a deep sea coral reef approximately 1300ft (~400m) below the Gulf of Mexico, home to a thriving Leiopathes (black coral) ecosystem. The number ’906′ identifies the oil and gas lease block that encompasses area – in this case, ’906′ reef is situated approximately 20 miles north of the Deepwater Horizon oil rig disaster where 11 workers lost their lives, and thousands of gallons of oil per day is pouring into the Gulf. The New York Times Green blog is reporting on how this reef will act …

Dwarfing the Exxon Valdez: the Gulf of Mexico oil spill is ‘the worst environmental disaster the US has faced‘. As numerous attempts to stop the oil spill fail, the hurricane season in the Gulf looms large. What happens next is anyone’s guess:
A predicted busy hurricane season this summer is on a collision course with an unprecedented oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, and the results are anyone’s guess, weather experts say.
“The problem is that this is a man-made experiment we wish we hadn’t made,” said Jenni Evans, a …

Here is a truely inspirational Palindrome: not only does this video read the opposite in reverse, the meaning is the exact opposite too (credit to Jonathan Reed):

I am part of a lost generation
and I refuse to believe that
I can change the world
I realize this may be a shock but
“Happiness comes from within.”
is a lie, and
“Money will make me happy.”
So in 30 years I will tell my children
they are not the most important thing in my life
My employer will know that
I have my priorities straight because
work
is more important than
family
I tell …

Mangroves provide enormously important and economically valuable ecosystem services to coastal communities throughout the tropics. They provide at least US $1.6 billion each year in ecosystem services worldwide, but a startling statistic from a recent study is that eleven of the worlds 70 mangrove species (16%) are at elevated threat of extinction. The IUCN Mangrove Red List Assessment Team have recently published a peer reviewed assessment of the vulnerability to extinction risk to the worlds mangrove species. The teams assessment provides evidence that there are particular areas of geographical concern, …

Note an extended version of this article was originally published on the Huffington Post here.  Also read about the study here on Futurity and here on the BBC.
Betting on biodiversity loss is a pretty sure thing.  The earth’s plant and animal species are disappearing at a sobering rate due to pressures including habitat loss, climate change, pollution and over-harvesting.  Despite a few success stories and steps in the right direction, we are falling far short of stemming these losses.
Biodiversity is the entire range of biological variety in the world, …

…

Here’s a fascinating documentary of a Pacific Island community in Papua New Guinea facing the reality of sea level rise and climate change:
Takuu atoll is an idyllic home to articulate, educated people who maintain a 1200 year-old culture and language with pride – but all is not well in paradise. Takuu is disintegrating and when two scientists arrive to investigate, the people realise their attempts to preserve the atoll are currently making the situation worse (more here).

Oil spill threatens to eclipse the Exxon Valdez, reaches the shore on the Mississippi River delta,could become the worst environmental disaster in decades, leak might not be stopped for weeks.  Here’s what David Kennedy of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has to say:
“I am frightened. This is a very, very big thing. And the efforts that are going to be required to do anything about it, especially if it continues on, are just mind-boggling.”
210,000 gallons a day, and the conservative pundits don’t even bat an eye …