Ransom A. Myers, 54, the world-renowned fisheries biologist whose research showed that the number of large fish in the world’s oceans has dropped by 90 percent in the past 50 years, died of a brain tumor March 27 at a hospital in Halifax, Nova Scotia.

The journal Science has just published a major paper co-written by Dr. Myers, “Cascading Effects of the Loss of Apex Predatory Sharks from a Coastal Ocean,” about the importance of sharks in marine ecosystems. There is an abstract of the paper on the Science website.

More than any other scientist, Ransom’s work has alerted us to the full extent of the rapid decline in fish populations in recent years, particularly large pelagics and other predators.

Click for the full Washington Post obituary of Myers.

Replacing wild strains of Anopheles with malaria-resistant GM mozzies could make a huge difference in the fight against malaria. Between 300 and 500 million people contract malaria every year, of which about 1 to 3 million die from the disease. Most of them are children, mostly poor, most living in sub-Saharan Africa.

Engineering malaria resistance into wild mosquitoes could also reduce the amount of insecticides and repellents currently used in human habitations or directly applied for protection against malaria. (I’m spraying myself with DEET as I write these words — an evening ritual for most of us who live in the tropics.)

This development thus raises potentially difficult issues for people deeply opposed in principle to the creation and release into the wild of genetically modified organisms of any kind.

Johns Hopkins University researchers found that the malaria-resistant FM mosquitoes out bred their natural counterparts, suggesting that allowing them to breed with normal insects would spread their resistance through the wild population. The modified mosquitoes have also been given a gene to make their eyes glow red, allowing them to be easily identified.

Trials are unlikely to start for at least five years. Researchers need to do more tests to ensure that the new strain would not lead to more virulent strains of malaria, and that the genes would not spread to other insects.

Liz Hurley’s long-haul wedding has produced a carbon footprint so large that it would take the average British couple more than 10 years to contribute as much to heating up the planet as she and Arun Nayar have done in little over a week. It would take a typical Indian couple a massive 123 years.

According to an Oxford-based footprinting consultancy, Hurley’s celebrations will result in the release of around 200 tonnes of carbon into the atmosphere. Carbon emissions really do mount when you charter Learjets. Only the bridal party flew by chartered jet from the Cotswalds to Mumbai — everyone else had to go commercial. But there were seven Learjets to ferry important guests from Mumbai to Jodhpur. And then Elton John did fly his personal helicopter to Gloucestershire (sort of rhymes with Worcestershire). And the flowers and caterers were flown in too. It all adds up, I guess.

I’m not a big fan of Al Gore, but I was among those who reacted negatively when false accusations against the former VP picked up from USA Today were dragged into this forum. But I confess I’m warming to the idea of the press focusing more attention on celebrities, politicos, and every-day billionaires when their unnecessary carbon excesses reach the truly grotesque.

Two hundred tonnes of carbon for one celebrity wedding may be extraordinarily wasteful, and publicizing this may help shift public awareness toward a greater acceptance of needed measures like a carbon tax, but we also need some perspective. Peat and forest fires in Indonesia, where I live, are responsible for an estimated 2 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide every year, according to a Wetlands International report cited on Mongabay.com, and may have exceeded 2.5 billion tonnes during the extreme El Nino year of 1997. See also this report in National Geographic. The U.S., the world’s largest producer of greenhouse gases, is responsible for 7-8 billion tonnes every year.

Divisions over nuclear power and renewable energy threatened to derail the EU’s campaign to assume a global leadership role in the fight against climate change at the bloc’s spring summit which began last night. [...]

But France, backed by several east European countries, insisted carbon-free nuclear power be included within the EU energy mix and rejected [German Chancellor] Angela Merkel’s proposal to make a 20 percent target for renewable energy binding on all 27 members.

At his swansong summit, the outgoing French president Jacques Chirac insisted that he would only agree to binding energy targets if nuclear power were included and proposed that 45 percent of the mix come from non-fossil fuel sources. France gets 80 percent of its power from nuclear power plants.

The Reuters story is more upbeat, saying that:

European Union leaders were on the brink of agreeing on Thursday to set a binding pan-European target for renewable energy sources as part of an ambitious strategy to fight climate change.

After the first working session of a two-day summit, Swedish Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt said the 27 leaders had agreed in principle to set a mandatory target for renewable sources such as wind, solar and hydro-electric power, and allocate the burden among member states later.

“We have agreed that we need a target for renewable energy supply and that it will be binding, but it will follow a discussion on what that means for each member state,” Reinfeldt told reporters.

This debate is important in its own terms, and also as an effort to raise the bar before the G8 Heiligendamm Summit in June, when the U.S., China, and other countries will be asked to agree to a new scheme for new limits on global carbon emissions to replace the Kyoto Pact a global carbon trading scheme, and other measures to mitigate global warming.

(The Heiligendamm Summit piece in the New Scientist referenced above probably deserves its own item, but I’m trying to conserve bytes.)

The deal, covering two reactors for Yangjiang in Guangdong Province, had originally been awarded to Toshiba Corp.’s Westinghouse Electric Co., which will get an agreement for two other reactors in Shandong Province. The sources said that China needs to add two reactors a year to meet a 2020 target of increasing the share of nuclear in total power from 2.3 percent to 4 percent. Areva and Westinghouse are competing to build as many as 26 more reactors by 2020 as China turns to atomic energy to cut pollution and carbon emissions and reduce its reliance on oil.

ChristinaMac posted in a January 2007 thread about nuclear power that:

Up until now, I’ve been thinking that the Chinese are just going to be conned into nuclear power by greedy uranium and nuclear technology corporations. Now I see that there’s a chance that they might wake up to this. I can’t help noticing that wherever “first and second world countries” have had experience of nuclear power — people don’t want it.

As OhmExcited pointed out in that same thread, France gets 80 percent of its electric power from nuclear, and the French people that I know seem very happy about it, merci beaucoup. Which “first and second world countries” with “experience of nuclear power” is ChristinaMac talking about?

China’s current plan to boost nuclear generation to a mere 4 percent of total power by 2020 is simply a matter of way too little, way too late.

Now here’s a question for the rapidly thinning ranks of the reality-based. Got your spreadsheets ready?

Assuming North America and Europe actually manage to stabilize their carbon emissions by 2010 (and I realize that on current performance that may be a ridiculous assumption), and assuming average annual GDP growth of around 7 percent (well below recent levels) in China and India over the next 13 years, how much of their total energy would China and India have to get from nuclear by 2020 for there to be a snowball’s chance in hell (and I don’t mean that as a literary figure) for the planet to be on track to hold global carbon emissions constant at 2010 levels into the mid-21st century?

Extra credit: If you believe your answer to the first question, what should we do about it? (Other than look for soon-to-be beachfront real estate opportunities in the Rockies, I mean.)

But much of the attention is focused on Rudd’s Sunday appointment of Peter Garrett, a Greenpeace board member and former lead singer of the Australian rock band Midnight Oil, to take charge of crafting Labor’s new policies on climate change.

“Climate change represents one of the most significant and important issues that Australians must confront now and into the future,” Garrett said. “I want to work for leader Rudd to make sure that we roll up our sleeves and do the very best that we can, and I want to put the Howard Government on notice that it’s fiddling while Australia burns.”

(See the International Herald Tribune and the Australia Broadcasting Corp for more.)

Like the U.S., Australia has never ratified the Kyoto Treaty, and Howard has long been an ally of the Bush White House on climate change. But the Australian public’s concern about climate change has intensified after four years of intense drought, and Howard’s government has starting making noises about carbon-trading and renewable energy. In November, a panel commissioned by Howard proposed lifting Australia’s restrictions on nuclear energy and uranium mining. The commission advocated developing nuclear power and easing curbs on uranium mining, which it claimed could reduce carbon emissions from coal and lift revenues from uranium exports by $1.4 billion a year. It also advocated constructing 25 nuclear reactors to supply a third of Australia’s electricity by 2050. (See the Gristmill discussion of the report.)

The labor party, traditionally opposed to uranium exports and adopting nuclear power as a means of reducing carbon emissions, is increasingly split on the issue, like much of the Australian public.

One critic of Labor’s new willingness to think nuclear is the head of the Green Party, Bob Brown. “Our question to Peter is going to be, ‘Will you stand for what you sang for and is the Labor Party going to be able to accommodate the extraordinary changes in policy that are required if this planet is to get out of the current dive in its environmental fortune?’” Brown reportedly said.

Garrett formerly headed the Australian Conservation Foundation, which holds vociferously negative positions on uranium mining and nuclear power. (See the ACF website.)

“Few rules and fewer protesters draw animal testing to China,” by Jehangir S. Pocha (originally in the Boston Globe), discusses Bridge Pharmaceuticals, a San Francisco-based company that is outsourcing animal testing to China, where — as a recent article in Forbes (also written by Pocha) described it — “scientists are cheap, lap animals are plentiful and animal-rights protestors are kept at bay, muzzled by an authoritarian state.”

Bridge CEO Glenn Rice said the company’s Beijing facilities were designed to meet U.S. standards on animal care, and it anticipates receiving USDA certification by year-end. He was clear, moreover, about the main reason why moving testing to China makes economic sense:

This is a country with a large number of canines and primates…. Animal testing also does not have the political issues that it does in the US or Europe or even India, where there are religious issues as well.

“Big pharma” companies such as Eli Lilly, Novartis, Pfizer, and Roche have already started or plan new research and development centers in China. Earlier this month, PETA issued queries and stockholder suits to Eli Lilly and Pfizer, demanding they justify their decisions to outsource animal testing to countries with no or poor animal welfare standards. PETA has also written a letter to U.S. Secretary of Commerce Carlos Gutierrez asking him to take steps to ensure that China “enforces basic animal welfare laws in its animal-testing laboratories.”

(Hey, good luck with that! I’m sure the Chinese authorities will get serious about this once they realize PETA has taken the scary step of sending Sec. of Commerce Carlos Gutierrez a formal letter.)

Pressure on big pharma may not do much to address the problem. According to Pocha …

… real growth is likely to come from midsized companies who outsource their animal testing or preclinical trials to companies like Bridge which can offer them prices that are about half those charged by US competitors. By 2008, that could double the size of the preclinical outsourcing industry, which was worth $2 billion last year.

China was already a tough place to be an animal. Now this. I’m willing to credit Rice when he says Bridge’s Beijing operation will adhere to at least minimal U.S. standards, but there should be no illusions about the dozens (soon, hundreds) of Chinese-owned and -operated facilities that already have or are about to get involved in this business.

More than anything else, this story is a sad but overdue lesson in the tragic law of unintended consequences.

There was probably a moment when it might have been possible for people who care about the treatment of animals to agree on a compromise position that addressed the welfare and interests of animals used for testing. But PETA and other organizations basically gave us the choice of supporting their impractical and impossible goal of bringing a complete end to animal testing or — see their Stop Animal Tests! website — being the enemy.

In a sense, PETA has succeeded. Animal testing may indeed effectively cease both in the U.S. and Europe, but at the cost of pushing the entire animal testing industry to a country where the few animal-welfare regulations in place are almost never enforced, and a society where public support for even minimal animal-welfare rights is almost completely lacking. Great work, guys.

Specter opens the article by introducing us to Shoba, a young mother living with her husband and five children in Kesum Purbahari, a New Delhi slum, where women with buckets and pails line up at dawn to wait for a tanker truck carrying water. Everyone knows that to drink the thick, brown water from the community standpipe is to risk serious illness or even death. Some days, the tanker doesn’t come.

India, with 20% of global population, receives only 4% of the world’s annual supply of fresh water. India’s groundwater aquifers are quickly disappearing from over-pumping.

Even in prosperous neighborhoods of cities like Delhi and Mumbai, water is available for just a few hours a day — and often only as a brown and sludgy trickle — forcing millions of middle class Indians to stumble out of bed at three or four in the morning to turn on their taps.

Humans need about 50 liters of water a day, of which only 2-3 liters are consumed as drinking water — the rest is for cooking, bathing, and sanitation. The average American consumes 400-600 liters daily, more than anyone else, while European consumption is half that. India, Specter notes, promises its people — but rarely provides — 40 liters per day. (Unlike energy consumption, however, North America’s waste of water has little or no relationship to shortages on the other side of the world.)

Nearly half the people in the world don’t have the kind of clean water and sanitation that were available two thousand years ago to the citizens of ancient Rome. More than a billion people lack access to potable drinking water, and at least that many have never seen a toilet. Half the hospital beds on earth are occupied by people with an easily preventable waterborne disease.

The article examines India’s emerging water crisis in considerable depth. In his conclusion, Specter cites Peter Gleick, who points out that per capita water consumption in the U.S. is now less than it was 25 years ago — not because of conscious efforts to reduce water use, but because of changes in the U.S. economy and the introduction of more efficient ways of using water in both agriculture and industry.

“This is really good news,” Gleick says. “Because it means we can do better. We don’t need to run out of water. We just need to think more seriously about how we can avoid using it.”

Australia, with 40% of the world’s uranium reserves, currently has no commercial nuclear power plants and strictly limits uranium mining. Along with the U.S., Australia refused to join as a signatory to the 1997 Kyoto Protocol.

The panel, commissioned by Prime Minister John Howard’s government last June, asserted that developing nuclear power and easing curbs on uranium mining could reduce carbon emissions from coal and lift revenues from uranium exports by $1.4 billion a year. The commission advocated constructing 25 nuclear reactors to supply a third of Australia’s electricity by 2050.

Spokespersons from Australian green and environmental groups and the opposition Labour party were highly critical of panel’s recommendations. But four years of intense drought has intensified concerns about global warming, and polls show that the Australian public may now be closely divided on the issue of nuclear energy.

The commission said that at current prices, nuclear energy would be 20 to 50 percent more expensive than power from coal-fired plants. But as greenhouse gas emissions are monetized in coming years through taxes and carbon-trading schemes, nuclear power will be become cost competitive.

Said Ziggy Switkowski, the main author of the report:

“The earliest that nuclear electricity could be delivered to the grid would be 10 years, with 15 years more probable,” . “This gap may close in the decades ahead, but nuclear power, and renewable energy sources, will only become competitive in Australia in a system where the costs of greenhouse gas emissions are explicitly recognized.”