The whole “people in the Pacific Northwest drink too much coffee” thing has gotten to be a pretty crusty, lazy old joke. But it turns out they drink so much coffee that in areas where waste systems are less regulated, the ocean is becoming a mildly caffeinated beverage, National Geographic News reports.

Caffeine levels off the potentially polluted areas were below the detectable limit, about 9 nanograms per liter. The wilder coastlines were comparatively highly caffeinated, at about 45 nanograms per liter …

“Caffeine is pretty darn ubiquitous, and there is growing evidence that this and other understudied contaminants are out there,”  said [hydrologist Dana] Kolpin, of the USGS’s Toxic Substances Hydrology Program in Iowa City, Iowa.

Who’s laughing now, huh? These concentrations aren’t exactly espresso-level, writes Bill Chameides, dean of Duke’s Nicholas School for the Environment:

Even the highest concentrations of caffeine observed by Rodriguez del Rey et al are much, much smaller than the concentrations in a typical cup of coffee (500,000,000 nanograms per liter). Is that too low to have an effect? We’ll have to await further study to know for sure. In the meantime, chalk another one up to the the growing list of environmental fingerprints attributable to humans in the Anthropocene.

Let’s just hope that ocean creatures aren’t getting slowly addicted to caffeine like us humans. Otherwise, if we ever clean this mess up, the entire ocean will have a roaring headache. And you don’t want to come face to face with an oyster going through caffeine withdrawal. Trust me.

Lake Delton, in the Wisconsin Dells, has been looking a little like your mom: hard-used and fungusy. Algae overgrowth gave the lake a greenish cast, and made it appear less-than-healthy to swim in. The solution, according to the company that maintains Lake Delton: Just dump a whole lot of blue dye in there and call it a day.

It cost Aqua Engineering over $30,000 to dye the 267-acre lake, which to be fair is a lot less per square foot than it costs me to dye my hair. But locals are still thinking it might not have been the best use of their tourism dollars, mainly because it doesn’t actually do a damn thing to solve the lake’s algae problem. It’s the aquatic equivalent of spray-on hair in a can from QVC. (Or, perhaps more accurately, of spray-painting your lawn green in a drought.)

At very least, this probably won’t make things worse. Aqua Engineering got permission from Wisconsin’s Department of Natural Resources for the procedure, and the dye shouldn’t harm the environment or people who swim in the water. Except, presumably, when they get out and are instantly mobbed by Avatar fanboys.

Last night, fresh off a day crackling with one diplomatic success after another, Mitt Romney attended a fundraiser and said this:

“The EPA has an important responsibility, and that is to keep clean and make more clean our air and our water. … My view is that the EPA, if it keeps to its mission and does not use its power to foster or further an anti-carbon energy agenda, would be a more effective department,” Romney told the crowd when asked about the agency. “I believe the EPA has to see itself as being responsible for our air and water and not take action which can prevent us from taking advantage of the extraordinary energy resources we have, such as coal, oil, natural gas.”

Emphasis added.

Romney’s absolutely correct. I mean, this is basically how doctors treat illnesses. You do absolutely nothing preventative nor even to treat the illness itself. All you do is clean up after symptoms. It’s why all the best medical schools specialize in the proper use of vomit buckets and Band-Aid application.

We expect him to shortly announce his strategy for addressing climate change: Once the world is 20 degrees warmer and re-stabilized after the tumultuous adaptation period, we should give everyone up to three (3) bottled waters a day.

Before the 2008 Olympics in Beijing, there was broad concern about the impact that air pollution would have on the athletes. The city’s well-documented problems with ozone and fine particles were not the sort of thing conducive to fast sprint times and/or not having a stroke. So authorities cracked down, greatly reducing vehicle traffic, closing factories, and inducing rain. It worked. They curbed ground-level pollutants and improved cardio-vascular health for residents and athletes alike (and brought down CO2 emissions along the way). A team at the University of Rochester noted a “direct correlation” between reduced pollution and an immediate health impact.

Unfortunately for England, the environment has taken up a new strategy for ruining the Olympics: rain.

“My biggest worry is actually the weather,” said [London 2012 Chief Executive] Paul Deighton, adding that much of the construction was carried out in torrential rain in recent months.

“We’ve got a lot of events that are outside. I think the impact the weather has on people’s mood, how they enjoy the games, is very big.

“So for me, if I have a prayer I could make, it’s every extra day of sunshine just makes for a better experience for everybody here in town.”

Deighton has cause for concern. An unusually static southward shift in the jet stream combined with increased atmospheric moisture has meant one of the rainiest summers in recent memory.

The jet stream, next Tuesday.

The forecast for the next 10 days shows some rain; a forecast of the jet stream suggests it will run south of Britain for the beginning part of the Games. Being on the northern side of the jet stream means, in the words of the BBC, “conditions are cooler and wetter which means we in Britain keep getting hit by rain.”

Not the end of the world, mind you — but an impairment to athletes and fans alike. As Beijing demonstrated, it could be worse.

And, of course, it is. From ThinkProgress:

According to Dr. William S. Silvers of the American Academy of Allergy, Asthma & Immunology (AAAAI), the air quality in London during the 2012 Olympic games — set to start in three days — could cause a “narrowing of the airways” in athletes competing outdoors.

Currently, London has a higher concentration of nitrogen dioxide in the atmosphere than Beijing, China, had during the last summer Olympic games before the Chinese government banned half of all cars in an effort to reduce pollution. London has spent far less than China did to address air pollution.

London has helpfully set up a website to track air quality. If you’re going to an event, you’ll want to check that first to determine if you’ll need your inhaler. You should probably just bring that umbrella regardless.

Weird things are happening to lobsters.

In June, we brought you the story of a blue lobster, Old Blue (a name I gave him just now), found by a fisherman in Nova Scotia who’d never before seen a blue lobster in his many years of lobster-hunting.

The odds he finds another one are getting better every day.

Reports of odd-colored lobsters used to be rare in the lobster fishing grounds of New England and Atlantic Canada. Normal lobsters are a mottled greenish-brown.

But in recent years, accounts of bright blue, orange, yellow, calico, white and even split lobsters — one color on one side, another on the other — have jumped. It’s now common to hear several stories a month of a lobsterman bringing one of the quirky crustaceans to shore.

It’s not clear why there are more reports of colored lobster. It could be that more people have cameras to back up their tall tales. But it’s also possible that overfishing is to blame.

The off-colored lobsters are more susceptible to predators because they stick out more on the ocean bottom, rather than blending in like normal ones, said Diane Cowan, executive director of The Lobster Conservancy in Friendship, Maine.

“But with the predator population down, notably cod, there might be greater survival rates among these color morphs that are visually easier to pick out,” she said.

Lobster used to be so abundant that eating it was a mark of poverty; its meat was used to feed servants and as fertilizer. Even now, lobster catches in Maine are so big that it sells at lower prices than deli meat in the state.

Lobster-gatherers in Connecticut aren’t so lucky. Their stocks have been dramatically depleted since the late ’90s, dropping from 3.7 million pounds in 1998 to 142,000 in 2011 — the lowest haul ever.

As the number of lobsters hauled into this and other port towns from the Long Island Sound has dwindled, the fishing industry has largely blamed a single culprit: mosquito pesticides.

The industry’s claims hadn’t been supported until a state study this month found traces of pesticides in Long Island Sound lobsters for the first time. The report isn’t definitive, and its authors at the Connecticut Department of Energy and Environmental Protection said more studies are needed. …

Besides mosquito spraying, other culprits could include an increase in predators like striped bass and black sea bass, Mr. Simpson said. The Long Island Sound’s temperature been rising, frequently exceeding the 68 degree threshold that is healthy for lobsters. Bacterial or parasitic infection is another possibility.

Lobster is a unique- and valuable-enough animal that shifts in abundance from overfishing, pollution, and changing water temperatures are tracked and identifiable. The remaining questions, then, are the extent to which those factors influence supply — and, of course, how the economics of lobster evolve in the future.

Trashed, a documentary directed by Candida Brady and executive-produced by and starring Irons (with a score by Vangelis), looks at the toxic effects an endless worldwide buildup of waste has on our health and environment. To be honest, I kind of wish such a powerhouse of film-industry talent had tackled a slightly more cutting-edge or original issue — I mean, Jeremy Irons’ voice over a Vangelis theme is a surefire way to lend gravity to any situation, and it just seems a bit of a waste (ahem) to use such drama to approach what I see as a pretty broad, old-school environmental issue: We throw too much shit away! We should recycle instead! Yeah, and did you know there’s a hole in the ozone layer?

That said, Trashed lays out the scope of the situation pretty effectively, starting with the problem of our dumps filling to capacity, leading many cities to resort to incineration, which may get rid of the trash itself, but releases dioxins into the environment that ruin farmland and cause cancer and birth defects. These toxins have become so prevalent that everyone contains low levels of them in their body, but high levels can be especially harmful to developing fetuses. This means it can take a generation after initial exposure for the effects to become obvious.

While there is still debate in the scientific community about what the long-term effects of dioxin exposure may be, Trashed provides a horrifying example of worst-case-scenario dioxin poisoning when Irons visits a hospital room in Vietnam filled with jars of preserved, deformed fetuses — severely conjoined twins, misshapen heads, etc. The scene made me suddenly sit up and pay attention to a film I was getting ready to dismiss as another lackluster doom-and-gloom doc. These specimens were probably victims of the most deadly dioxin, TCDD: Agent Orange to you and me, famously sprayed as a defoliant during the Vietnam War.

Then Irons goes to a hospital unit full of children “lucky” enough to survive with severe deformities — we’re talking kids with no eyes, missing limbs, breathing tubes. As only a brief segment, this part of the movie felt a little like a cheap freak-show tactic to get our attention, but the shock value is certainly effective. These kids were born 30 years after the war. What other appalling results of toxic waste contamination have we yet to see?

Irons showcases other problematic examples of waste buildup by exploring the Great Pacific Garbage Patch and visiting poor people who try to eke out a living by combing through heaps of trash for items they can resell (a common occupation in cities across the globe). Meanwhile, every day the piles grow higher with the cast-off byproducts of our throwaway culture.

He also highlights San Francisco’s progress toward its zero-waste goal (through an extensive compost and recycling program) as an example of how we could be dealing more responsibly with our refuse. The city now recycles 75 percent of its waste; getting to that level throughout the United States (the country as a whole recycles only 33 percent of waste), the film says, would create 1.5 million jobs.

The story of San Francisco’s success also provides more support for the growing argument that cities are the entities best positioned to lead action on many sustainability efforts. Cities are smaller and more cohesive than states or nations, obviously, but urban areas also house over half the world’s population. If every city achieved what San Francisco has, we could actually make significant progress where reducing waste is concerned.

Other than the Agent Orange babies, whose bleak existence you’ll remember next time you’re about to casually chuck something in the garbage, there’s little in Trashed that will shock you or offer a new perspective on long-established global dilemmas like toxic waste, landfill overflow, plastic pollution, and melting Arctic ice. But it will make you appreciate that beneath Irons’ hawk-like gaze and haughty accent, this intimidating on-screen villain spends time being a good guy in real life.

Check out the trailer:

Photographer Palíndromo Mészáros has a whole series of photographs documenting the aftereffects of a 2010 toxic aluminum spill in Hungary. They’re all pretty staggering, but this one in particular really messed with our heads. This is not a before photo and an after photo stitched together. This is just what this forest looks like now, two years after being flooded with aluminum-heavy sludge that killed underbrush and left a red stain on trees. 

The accident at the Ajkai Timföldgyár aluminum plant released about 35 million cubic feet of aluminum-infused caustic mud from holding reservoirs, resulting in a spill that affected 15 square miles and killed at least nine people. In some places, the wave of sludge reached seven feet high (as you can see in this photo). The red color is from aluminum byproducts, still marking trees and houses two years later.

You can see the rest of Mészáros’ series at American Photo.

Not that it’s a HUGE surprise that Fox News has beliefs about the environment that are the opposite of true, but just FYI, they are now apparently telling viewers that pollution is good for forests. That means the REAL pollution is CLEAN AIR! It’s like you environmentalists don’t even WANT trees to grow.

It’s true that excess nitrogen, for instance, can help plants up to a point. But it’s still bad for forests, which is why it’s called pollution. Saying that “pollution helped grow forests” without adding “… until it killed them” is like saying “oh, you need water to live? Well, then you’ll love drowning.”

Thanks to Todd Gregory for the screenshot.

One of the best ways to determine how much plastic is polluting a region of the ocean is, unfortunately, to autopsy dead birds in the region. One species of bird in particular, the Northern fulmar, eats nearly anything, rarely regurgites plastic, and is populous enough to die in large numbers over a broad area. So scientists scour the beach for dead Northern fulmars and cut them open. Fun.

What they’ve found recently suggests a massive increase in the amount of plastic these birds are ingesting in the Pacific Northwest. From the Globe and Mail:

Necropsies of 67 of the beached gull-like seabirds collected between October 2009 and April 2010 from the coasts of B.C., Washington and Oregon indicated nearly 93 per cent of them had bellyfuls of plastic, she said.

One bird had 454 pieces of plastic in its gut, said [University of British Columbia researcher Stephanie] Avery-Gomm, the study’s lead author and graduate of the university’s zoology department.

Not only are more birds ingesting plastics, they’re ingesting more of it.

The mass of plastic that’s eaten also increased dramatically — from 0.04 grams in 1969-1977 to 0.385 grams in the current study, she said, adding the average northern fulmar weighs about 800 grams.

Of course, some of the birds that wash up dead have been killed by the plastic they’ve ingested. The material can’t be ingested properly and can block the birds’ intestinal tracts. It’s like a murder mystery where the victim leaves one last clue identifying the culprit.

The extent of the presence of plastic, Avery-Gomm suggests, indicates that plastic pollution is far more of a problem in the Pacific Northwest than was previously understood. For her, the takeaway is simple: People need to be more conscious of how much plastic they’re throwing away. Oh, and also, we need to better monitor the extent of plastic pollution.

I’ll get the scalpels.

The Pacific Ocean is a pretty darned big place. The hull of the 72-foot former racing yacht Sea Dragon, not so much, especially when crammed full of research equipment and 14 full-sized human-type people not necessarily accustomed to the rigors of the open ocean. But that’s just what the intrepid team of oceanic avengers from the 5 Gyres Institute are up against as they race across the Pacific on a collision course with the great field of debris washed away from Japan by last year’s devastating Tohoku earthquake and tsunami.

Imagine cramming into an RV and driving from Nome, Alaska, to Tierra Del Fuego with the cast of Road Rules Season 9. (That would be the Maximum Velocity Tour, but I’m sure you knew that, gentle reader.) Now try to imagine that the I-5 is heaving 30 to 40 feet into the air, is full of sharks, and generally wants you dead. Add to that, Theo won’t stop spraying you with the super soaker he brought for some reason, and you’ve got a pretty good idea of the potential horror involved here.

Scientist, adventurer, and Gulf War veteran Marcus Eriksen previously floated the length of the Mississippi on a raft made of plastic bottles and sailed from California to Hawaii on a boat made of trash to raise awareness of the pollution problem facing us all. What he saw changed his life. “I couldn’t believe how much waste was littering our coastlines,” he says.

Eriksen and his wife, Anna Cummins, cofounded the 5 Gyres Institute in 2009 to study the Earth’s five great subtropical gyres — enormous, slow-moving whirlpools on the ocean’s surface — and raise awareness of the horrifying levels of garbage floating within. These great pelagic depressions (I think I just named Jimmy Buffet’s next album) serve as the Earth’s mighty bellybuttons, collecting all sorts of unwanted refuse, the vast bulk of it, plastic.

The most infamous of these gyres holds The Great Pacific Garbage Patch, and while the notion of an island of garbage a thousand miles across is an exaggeration, what is actually out there might be far more insidious. “Those five gyres make up about 21 percent of the planet’s surface, and they are covered in this thin confetti of plastic,” says Eriksen, who has trolled for trash across the high seas.

This confetti, made of particles the size of fish food, is often coated with a thin layer of industrial chemicals and petroleum, creating little poison pills that fish in turn eat and absorb. But very little is known about how this stuff travels, and that’s where the tsunami debris comes in.

Some of the debris has already made landfall in North America, most notably a Harley Davidson discovered on a Canadian beach earlier this year (perhaps the first time a Harley has made it over 4,000 miles without breaking down) and, shockingly, a 66-foot-long concrete dock covered in millions of invasive organisms that washed up on the Oregon coast.

But according to Eriksen, this debris is only the vanguard. “The stuff washing up in British Columbia right now, that is the stuff affected by wind,” he says, speaking via satellite phone, noting that anything peeking above the surface of the Ocean acts as a sail, speeding its journey east. “But what’s subsurface, what’s beneath the waves, hasn’t made its way across yet.”

For an organization dedicated to studying the effects of plastic pollution in the sea, last year’s catastrophe provided a unique opportunity. “You don’t often get a chance to take an entire city, put it in the ocean, and see what happens to all the stuff,” Eriksen says. “That’s what happened here.”

Eriksen and his team of scientists, journalists, and environmentalists sailed from Yokahama Japan on June 10. They sailed halfway across the ocean until finding their first piece of tsunami debris on June 17, then turned south to travel the length of the debris field. “What’s left behind is going to be plastics and anything that’s trapping air, say lightbulbs, car tires still on the rim, insulated refrigerators, boat hulls,” Eriksen says.

Eriksen says the stuff should help answer some questions: “What’s the impact on marine life? How much is out there, and what kind of pollutants are sticking to the materials that are left behind? Are there going to be mountains of trash washing up along the Hawaiian beaches a year from now?”

In the meantime, Eriksen and his shipmates are bunking a foot from their boat-mates, spending a goodly portion of their days heaving along with their storm-tossed decks, and all in the name of a cleaner, plastic-free sea. Follow the adventures of these ocean adventurers at the fantastic 5 Gyres blog.