Moment Plastic Enters Food Chain Captured on Video

One way waste plastic enters the global food chain

A researcher has filmed the moment plastic microfiber is ingested by plankton, thereby entering the marine and global food chain.

About 150 million tons of plastic vanishes from the world’s waste inventory each year.

Freeze frame from a video captured by Dr Richard Kirby shows plankton ingesting plastic microfiber. Source: BBC.

Video and article posted at Plankton ingesting plastic microfiber.

Additional reading:

Click to access PataPlastFinalReport.pdf

Major FMD Outbreak in Egypt Threatens N Africa, Mideast

FMD has killed thousands of animals, sickened tens of thousands more in Lower Nile Delta region

A major outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease (FMD) in Egypt is threatening to spread throughout North Africa and the Middle East, the U.N. Food & Agriculture Organization (FAO) has warned.

Disaster Calendar 2012 – March 26

[March 26, 2012]  Mass die-offs resulting from human impact and the planetary response to the anthropogenic assault could occur by early 2016.  SYMBOLIC COUNTDOWN: 1,451 Days Left to the ‘Worst Day’ in Human History

• Egypt. A major outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease (FMD) in Egypt has killed more than 4,600 farm animals, mostly calves, and sickened more than 40,000 in the Lower Nile Delta region.
  • The disease is threatening to spread throughout North Africa and the Middle East, the U.N. Food & Agriculture Organization (FAO) has warned.
  • The new strain of  the FMD virus known as SAT2 is currently circulating throughout the region.
  • Livestock have no immune protection against SAT2 and vaccines currently available in Egypt are said to be ineffective against the new strain.
  • “The area around the Lower Nile Delta appears to be severely affected,” said FAO’s Chief Veterinary Officer.
  • “Vaccines are in limited supply for the FMD virus now present in Egypt. The country has some reserves of its own vaccines, but these do not protect against the SAT2 strain,” said FAO.
  • Milk, meat and other food products from sick animals are unsafe for consumption mainly because they contaminate the food chain.
  • Some 6.3 million buffalo and cattle and 7.5 million sheep and goats are at risk in Egypt, according to FAO’s livestock census data.
  • FMD  is  highly infectious and affects all cloven-hoofed animals, including sheep, cattle, buffalo, goats and pigs, causing serious production losses, and can be lethal, especially in younger animals.

FMD in mouth. Ruptured oral vesicle in a cow with Foot-and-mouth disease. Photo source: USDA

Global Disasters: Links, Forecasts and Background

• The First Wave of World’s Collapsing Cities
• Back to the Primordial Future
• Mass Die-offs

• 2010 Disasters [Links to 2010 Disaster Calendar]
• Mega Disasters
• 2011 Disaster Calendar
• 2012 Disaster Calendar:  Collapse has already Begun

CO2 forcing deadly changes in the oceans

Rising GHG is choking the oceans, devastating marine ecosystems and destroying the food chain: Study

Quote of the Day:

“We are becoming increasingly certain that the world’s marine ecosystems are approaching tipping points. These tipping points are where change accelerates and causes unrelated impacts on other systems.” John F. Bruno, marine researcher at the University of North Carolina.

Related Links:

• May Global Temperature Warmest on Record
• Ocean Accumulated Significant Heat Content Since 1993
• Verifiable Impacts of Climate Change (Part II)
• Verifiable Impacts of Climate Change Despite Dinosaurs

• Ocean Deserts Source of GHG
• North Atlantic Ocean Garbage Patch
• Back from the “Great Pacific Garbage Patch”
• WILD FACTS SERIES: Our Oceans Are Dying!
• Southern Ocean already losing ability to absorb CO₂

• Tourism: A Major Destructive Force Killing Oceans:Thousands of marine mammals, sea turtles, seabirds and others, are choked or poisoned each year by eating trash discarded in the ocean…

• Oceans, Where Life Started, Are Dying – Part V : Hundreds of thousands of tons of surplus chemical weapons including large quantities of arsenic, cyanide, mustard gas, sarin gas and VX nerve gas are dumped off the US Atlantic coast as well as off other countries. [And a number of nuclear weapons are lying down there, too!]

• Terrible Ocean Headlines : About one third of the world’s annual emissions of CO2 is absorbed by the surface of the oceans forming carbonic acid (ancient name acid of air or aerial acid), H₂CO_3, which is increasing the acidity of the oceans to as much as 7.7 pH in some areas off the California coast. [Pre-industrial (1700s) ocean pH: 8.179]

• Oceans, Where Life Started, Are Dying – Part IV : Researchers found evidence of corrosive water about 20 miles off the west coast of North America from Canada to Mexico.

• Human carbon emissions make oceans corrosive : ‘Carbon dioxide spewed by human activities has made ocean water so acidic that it is eating away at the shells and skeletons of starfish, coral, clams and other sea creatures …’

• The Eight Steps that Help Kill More of Our Fish : How Your Car’s Exhaust Emissions Helps Create Dead Zones and Kill Our Fish.

• Global warming could starve oceans of oxygen: study : Areas of the eastern Atlantic and Pacific Oceans with low amounts of dissolved oxygen have expanded in the past 50 years, apparently in line with rising temperatures.

• The Floating Toxic Garbage Island : A patch of garbage twice as large as the continental United States and dubbed the Great Pacific Garbage Patch floats in the middle of the Pacific Ocean in North Pacific Gyre.

• Oceans, Where Life Started, Are Dying – Part III : Tourism: The Most Destructive Human Activity After Warfare

• Oceans, Where Life Started, Are Dying – Part II : Major Problems: Fertilizer Runoff; Tourism; Coastal Developments [and Ocean Warming due to climate change]

• Oceans, Where Life Started, Are Dying – Part I : Our Oceans Are Now Dying!

• Dead Zones : Eutrophication—the overenrichment of water by nutrients such as nitrogen and phosphorus—has emerged as a leading water quality problem. This report identifies over 415 areas worldwide that are experiencing eutrophication symptoms, and there are significant information gaps in many regions. (Source: WRI)

Food Fetishism + Cheap Oil = Mounting Pollution

Excerpts from

The Death of Homo Sapiens Sapiens (Part 1)

Cheap oil has distorted the notion of creating ‘economic gains’ to such great extents that governments subsidize the industry to export and import the same product, often in similar quantities, within the same fiscal period. Country A exports Q tons of product P to country B, while it imports Q tons of the same product P from country B at the same time, with a net zero gain in commodity exchange for either country. However, the exchange produces about 9Q tons of CO2e pollution, nine times the weight of the commodity that was flown in either direction, for every 1,000 miles that the consignment is airborne.

Our weekly shopping basket includes items that would have flown more air miles than the average family fly in their lifetime! A 1kg (2.2lb) bag of New Zealand kiwifruit (in any of its cadmium, arsenic, lead, mercury… or organochlorine varieties) produces about 142kg (313lb) of CO2e (carbon dioxide equivalent gases) pollution flying to the US, or 188.7kg (416lb) of CO2e to Europe.

Related Links:

• The Death of Homo Sapiens Sapiens

1. Killed by Homo Economicus
2. Domination by Disinformation
   
3. Is a Future Possible?
   
4. Exponential Growth Economy and Oil
   
5. Where Is All the Money?
6. Exporting Democracy to the Middle East

• The Food Chain:Environmental Cost of Shipping Groceries Around the World