The outlook is poor for some abundant species. The authors note that “52% of all species for which population trends are known are declining, including 22% of those classified as of Least Concern. These trends indicate that the overall conservation status of mammals will likely deteriorate further in the near future, unless appropriate conservation actions are put in place.”

The study was done in conjunction with an update to the Red List of threatened species, which is maintained by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN). A species listed as “Least Concern” by the IUCN is at the opposite end of the spectrum from “Extinct.”

On the positive side, the study notes that “at least 5% of currently threatened species have stable or increasing populations.” This includes the reintroduction of the black-footed ferret to the United States. It had disppeared from the wild, but thanks to captive breeding programs run by the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service, it has been returned to the wild in eight Western states and Mexico. It is now listed as “Endangered” rather than “Extinct in the Wild.”

The United States has 440 mammal species. Indonesia has the most, with 670. South America, Africa and Southeast Asia have the largest, most diverse numbers of mammals.

What are the largest threats to mammals? “Worldwide, habitat loss and degradation (affecting 40% of species assessed) and harvesting (hunting or gathering for food, medicine, fuel, and materials, which affect 17%) are by far the main threats … ” However, for marine mammals “the dominant threat is accidental mortality (which affects 78% of species), particularly through fisheries by-catch and vessel strike.”

Land mammals in South and Southeast Asia are the most threatened, while marine mammals in the North Atlantic, North Pacific and Southeast Asia are most endangered.

There was some more good news as well. Overall, the diversity of mammals was richer than scientists thought. There were 700 new mammals not covered in the survey in 1996.

For more info, here’s a Washington Post article describing the study.

What do you think of the plight of the world’s mammals?

Most homes will be open October 4 or 5, but some states will have solar tours later in October and even in November. Check the ASES’ list of tours in each state.

According to the ASES press release, last year’s National Solar Tour attracted more than 115,000 people in 2,900 communities in 46 states. The Tour happens every October, which is National Solar Energy Awareness Month.

Neal Lurie, director of marketing and communications for ASES, told, me via e-mail that since 1993 there have been more than 600,000 installations of solar power or solar hot water in the United States. Solar sales in America now exceed $1 billion per year, but solar power still accounts for less than one percent of U.S. energy production.

Sales do keep increasing, however. According to Lurie, global annual solar sales (photovoltaics) rose by 41 percent per year from 2001-2007.

So people are doing it and you can visit their homes this month and see the results — and ask questions. As I’ve mentioned before in this blog, solar hot water is the most cost effective option, because it pays for itself sooner than solar photovoltaic panels will, in most cases.

If you visit a house that is part of the tour, post your comments here!

(Photo courtesy of the National Renewable Energy Laboratory’s photographic information exchange.)

These stones are the oldest whole rocks we’ve ever found; however, isolated mineral grains from Australia have been dated to 4.36 billion years old. The Earth is 4.6 billion years old.

This discovery is another example of how we are still learning about our planet and its basic components. The press release about this study noted that, in addition to their age, the rocks are also significant for their chemical composition, which resembles that of volcanic rocks in geologic settings where tectonic plates are crashing together. “This gives us an unprecedented glimpse of the processes that formed the early crust,” said Carlson.

I’m always fascinated by superlative discoveries such as this one. How about you? Post your comments here!

Sitting on the seminar panel to discuss “The Climate Policy Puzzle: Piecing Together Solutions” were Juliet Eilperin (Washington Post environment and politics reporter); Bracken Hendricks (senior fellow with the Center for American Progress and a founder of the Apollo Alliance); James J. McCarthy (professor of biological oceanography at Harvard University and current president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science); Jim Rogers (chair, president and CEO of Duke Energy); and David Goldston (columnist for the journal Nature and a former Chief of Staff of the House Committee on Science). Lisa Mullins, anchor and senior producer of The World, moderated the discussion.

They talked about politics and climate change, prospects for a bill in Congress and the presidential candidates’ climate views. Two things that kept coming up were the ideas of energy conservation and energy efficiency. Most of the panelists agreed these are significant things we can do right now to reduce energy use and carbon emissions.

Here are a few quotes from the panel discussion:

David Goldston: “It would be better to hear people say ‘save, baby, save.’ Conserve. Energy efficiency is a cheaper, easier better way to start.”

Jim Rogers: “We need to aspire to become the most energy efficient economy in the world. Because, a.) The world is going to 9 billion people by 2050, will put stress on commodities, cement, you name it. 1.6 billion people who don’t have electricity or access to the modern world,” and are going to want it, he said. They need access and deserve it.

Bracken Hendricks: Energy efficiency has great potential.

Jim Rogers: “I’d like to see an arms race on energy efficiency … That would make a difference in our world … Electricity industry mission for the 21st century: Bring access to energy efficient products and services. Save-a-Watt program – we get incented for every megawatt I reduce. I believe we’re at the threshold of changing our mission … our business model.”

(You can watch a video of the panel discussion here.)

Can Americans use less energy? If the response to high gasoline prices is any indication, the answer is yes. Since last November, Americans have driven 53.2 billion miles less than they did over the same period a year earlier, according to the Federal Highway Administration. In June 2008, we drove 4.7 percent fewer miles than in June 2007.

High energy prices might encourage people to conserve, but the challenge is huge. The Department of Energy expects electricity demand for residences to rise 27 percent by 2030.

Jim Rogers’ idea for a Save-a-Watt program — giving power companies incentives to help consumers use less energy — makes a lot of sense to me. I first read about this about a year ago in a column by Thomas Friedman of the New York Times. In the Grantham forum this month, Rogers indicated that state regulations are making it difficult to implement his Save-a-Watt program. That’s a shame.

As Rogers said in the Friedman article, “The most environmentally sound, inexpensive and reliable power plant is the one we don’t have to build because we’ve helped our customers save energy.”

How can we get there and conserve more energy and make our use of energy more efficient? Should states implement Save-a-Watt? How much can conservation and energy efficiency help? Post your comments here!

As I write this, the two routes remain open. The National Ice Center reported September 5 that the Northern Sea Route was open and as of September 11 the agency still classified the Northern Sea Route as open water. This is the third year in a row that the Northwest Passage has been open for part of the summer.

The image (top left) from the National Snow and Ice Data Center shows open water (blue) going all the way around the sea ice (white). The blue open water makes a kind of horseshoe shape from one side of Greenland to the other. The orange line marks the normal extent of sea ice for that day, September 11, for the period 1979-2000.

Later this month, when the summer melting season ends, we’ll learn how much Arctic sea ice retreated this year (so far it’s the second-lowest on record). But it’s remarkable that the two Arctic sea routes — the Northwest Passage north of Canada, and the Northern Sea Route over Europe and Asia — were open (but not ice free) this year.

An article on NASA’s Earth Observatory site notes that this is the first time in at least 50 years that the two passages have been open together. I guess that’s how long we’ve recorded the availability of those routes.

The World Meteorological Organization defines “open waters” as waters with no more than 10 percent sea ice concentration and no ice of land origin, such as icebergs. It’s not clear sailing through these “open waters,” because some ice is still present and conditions can change. In his DotEarth blog, Andrew Revkin reports the chief scientist at the National Ice Center as saying the Northern Sea Route could close in a matter of hours, so sending ships through it was not recommended. In theory you could sail from Greenland west across the top of Canada, north of Russia and Europe, and return to Greenland again. But in practice the route could close up on you quickly.

Still, the fact that these two lengendary passages are open reflects how the Arctic region is changing. Revkin writes that the Arctic is on track to become an open ocean in summer.

Why is so much ice melting? Currents, winds, warmer ocean waters and climate change all play a role in melting Arctic ice. Revkin notes that Arctic experts “hold a range of views on how much of the recent big ice retreats is due to human activities.” It seems reasonable to say that there is likely to be at least some human influence here. We know that the northern regions are warming more quickly than the rest of the globe and that people are very likely causing most of that warming, per the 2007 IPCC reports.

An open Arctic Ocean could attact industry — shipping, oil and natural gas rigs. What do you think about the present melting and what the future holds for the Arctic? Post your comments here!

Update, posted September 18: The National Snow and Ice Data Center reported on September 16 that the Arctic sea ice appeared to have reached its smallest extent for the year on September 12. It was the second-lowest sea ice minimum since 1979 and it reinforces the strong negative trend in sea ice extent over the last 30 years. Learn more at nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/

Scientists with the agency’s Agricultural Research Service (ARS) compared sweet potato and cassava grown in Maryland and Alabama to corn grown in those states. They found that sweet potatoes yield two to three times as many carbohydrates for fuel ethanol production, per acre, as corn does. That puts sweet potatoes at the low end of yields for sugar cane — the top ethanol crop. Cassava performed similarly in Alabama.

“Sweet potato looks really good and could serve as one potential source of bioethanol for the future,” said Lew Ziska, an ARS plant physiologist at the Crop Systems and Global Change Laboratory in Beltsville, Md.

Here are the numbers from the study: For the sweet potatoes, carbohydrate production was 4.2 tons an acre in Alabama and 5.7 tons an acre in Maryland. For corn, carb production was 1.5 tons an acre in Alabama and 2.5 tons an acre in Maryland.

Planting more sweet potatoes for fuel production would allow farmers to move corn crops out of the ethanol market and back into production for food or animal feed. This could help lower food prices related to corn worldwide (tortillas, high fructose corn syrup).

Ziska said his team were looking for crops that could be grown on marginal land with few synthetic inputs, such as fertilizers and pesticides, and could compete with corn in ethanol production.
Sweet potato and cassava fit the bill.

Right now we get most of our ethanol from the starch, or carbohydrates, in corn kernels. It’s a two-step process: First the starch gets converted into sugar, then the sugar into ethanol.

“There are a couple of advantages with sweet potato over corn,” Ziska said in an interview. “The first one is that you have a lot more carbohydrates overall. Corn typically has about 60 to 65 percent starch in the kernels; and that’s the principal source for ethanol. Sweet potato has about 80 to 90 percent total carbohydrates in the tuber. The other advantage is that, of those carbohydrates, in sweet potato, about 20 to 30 percent of them are sucrose, are sugar, and can be more easily converted into ethanol than starch can.”

Sweet potato has another advantage: It does not require as much fertilizer or pesticide as corn does. Corn uses large amounts of nitrogen fertilizer to grow and Ziska estimates that at least half of the nitrogen in use in the United States is converted from natural gas — a fossil fuel for which prices have shot up recently.

Ziska said sweet potatoes can be grown along the Eastern seaboard from New Jersey to Florida, and possibly in the Northwest as well.

We’re not talking small potatoes, either.

“These are not the sweet potatoes you would buy at Thanksgiving. These things are 20-, 30-pound tubers. So they’re huge,” said Ziska. These roots are bred to be very large and are normally chopped up and used as animal feed, he explained.

[Update, Sept. 8: I spoke today to John Kimber of the North Carolina Sweet Potato Commission Foundation, who said that not many sweet potatoes are grown for animal feed in the U.S., but in China -- the world's largest producer of sweet potatoes -- about 80 percent of them are grown for animal feed. And those potatoes are higher in dry matter or carbs.]

Sweet potatoes sound like a sweet solution to the biofuel vs. food problem, but there are some hurdles to overcome. Start-up costs for sweet potato are high, due to the labor needed. “A lot of the sweet potato acreage is not entirely mechanized either for planting or for harvesting,” said Ziska. Sweet potato harvester machines are coming on line now and could make it more practical for more farmers to grow the crop commercially.

Ziska has submitted the paper describing the study to the journal Biomass and Bioenergy. The ARS published a press release August 20.

I think this is a great development. Now we have a crop that can efficiently produce ethanol — and we don’t have to saturate the environment with chemicals to do it. Remember, all that fertilizer leads to dead zones in the oceans.

We should ramp up sweet potato production for ethanol, so that we can put more corn back into the food supply. Balance is good, diversifying ethanol sources is good. What do you think? Post your comments below!

Worldwide, this year appears to continue a trend of slightly higher-than-normal — or above the 20th-century mean — temperatures since about 1980.

In the United States, most of the country has had temperatures near or below normal so far this year, except for the Southwest and Northeast, which have experienced above-normal temps. See this page for year-to-date U.S. temperature maps.

For July, however, U.S. temps were 0.7 degrees Fahrenheit above the 20th-century mean. See this NOAA link for more info about U.S. temperatures and precipitation in July.

NOAA notes in the reports that all data is preliminary.

We don’t know how the rest of the year will turn out, but I wanted to post this NOAA information to share the data we have — and to rebut the notion of a cooling trend mentioned in a reader comment on this Earth & Sky radio show about influences on climate change.

Of course the data I’m sharing here are only for the first seven months of the year. The recent trends, however, are clear. Check out NOAA’s final report about 2007, which it describes as “a top 10 warm year for the U.S. and globe.” The global analysis section notes that “During the past century, global surface temperatures have increased at a rate near 0.05°C/decade (0.09°F/decade), but this trend has increased to a rate of approximately 0.15°C/decade (0.27°F/decade) during the past 25 to 30 years. ”

So the trend is one of increased warming, a greater rate of warming, during the last three decades.

If you look at the graphs in that 2007 annual report, you’ll see the trend since 1976 or 1980 is one of increasingly warmer temperatures.

I interviewed NOAA senior scientist Bruce B. Collette about fish barcodes back in May. Here’s the radio segment from that interview: Building a global fish-barcode library

The global effort to catalog these fish barcodes is called the Fish Barcode of Life initiative, or Fish-BOL. They’re trying to barcode all 30,000 species of fish in the next few years.

The girls peformed a useful experiment with surprising results. I’m somewhat shocked that 25 percent of the fish were sold under different names. Maybe I’m just naive about the industry. It’s a small sample, of course, in a very big city, so it’s hard to say how prevalent fish fraud may be. But we know that it is happening.

I also didn’t know the public could start sending samples to the Fish-BOL team; I’m trying to find out if this was a one-off thing or if we can all start sending samples, or if we can get fish tested at all at this point.

- - - - - - -

Update, August 22 at 8:37PM ET: Paul Hebert, co-chair of the Fish-BOL Initiative, told me via e-mail that his team will test fish samples for interested members of the public, for a $25 fee. The fish sample can be fresh or cooked, although Hebert says he can’t promise a full-length sequence if the sample is cooked. You must send it preserved in ethanol (ethyl alcohol). If you don’t have a vial with ethanol, Hebert’s team will send you one. Keep the fish in your fridge while you wait to receive the vial. You can find contact info on the Fish-BOL Web site. I’ll post more specific contact info as I receive it.

- - - - - - - - - -

In any case, I wanted to share more of what Collette told me a few months ago about the scientific uses of fish barcoding, beyond identifying the fish you bought at the store. Here’s what he said:

“Another use that’s very important in fisheries to the National Marine Fisheries Service, is identification of larvae … Larval marine fishes are like caterpillars and moths, they’re very different from the adults and we need a whole other set of characters to identify them. Now, we can take an eyeball from a small larval fish and get the DNA from that and match it, or compare it, with the DNA from adults of all the species known to occur in the area and we can determine what it is. So, we can for the first time, positively identify larval, very small larvae of the commercial species of tunas. This has been very difficult in the past, and almost impossible in some cases, but it can now be done using barcodes.”

Collette also noted that fish barcoding will help with fishery law enforcement, identifying by-catch and protecting endangered species.

“Our fisheries catch lots of species, but the American consumer only is interested in eating certain species, but we have to worry about concentrations of other species that are being caught, too. And we put observers out on many fishing vessels, but it’s difficult for them to document what was collected. But if we give them a whole series of small vials with alcohol and they can just drop a piece of tissue in and then they come back and have it analyzed and say, well, you were catching an endangered species and you shouldn’t do that. So, that kind of enforcement of by-catch, endangered species and forensic identification are all going to be made much simpler once we’ve got the library of DNA codes in a given region.”

One endangered species did turn up in the girls’ experiment — Acadian redfish. So not only are some fish markets committing fraud by selling one fish under the name of another, but they’re also selling illegal fish. I assume endangered species are illegal to sell, at least I’d hope they would be. This practice is wrong; hopefully NOAA can start using fish barcode analysis soon to protect endangered species and seafood consumers.

What do you think of this fish story and the fish barcoding? Post your comments here!

Estimates from the 1980s put the total western lowland gorilla population at less than 100,000, spread across seven Central African nations. Scientists had suspected that in recent years the total was down to 50,000, due to hunting and ebola virus. The new census shows that conservation efforts in Congo Republic have paid off.

The gorilla species is still listed as critically endangered, but the report was a bright light in the global news cycle, which seems to contain a lot of stories about declining species. Many other primate species are losing population, especially in Vietnam and Cambodia, where 90 percent of primates are at risk. See Andrew Revkin’s coverage in the New York Times and a nice accompanying photo gallery.
- - - - -

In another bit of upbeat news, the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) reported August 12 that humpback whales are recovering and are no longer at high risk of extinction.

Humpback whales numbered in the low thousands in the 1960s, but after a hunting ban went in place in 1966, their numbers have rebounded to 60,000 worldwide. The population is growing at 5 percent per year in the North Pacific.

The IUCN also reported that southern right whales are also making a comeback. North Atlantic right whales, however, are not — only about 300 remain.

It’s encouraging, and amazing, that we can find thousands of previously unknown gorillas in the remote jungles of Central Africa. Our planet still holds many surprises and if we set our mind to it, we can preserve its incredible diversity — as these two examples show.

The globes are placed throughout the main gardens, near the Botanic Garden conservatory, and across the street in Bartholdi Park. The exhibit also includes a “green garage” with a green roof; a small display of solar panels (from the Department of Energy) that generates 211 watts of power — enough to run the nine compact flourescent light bulbs on it; and there’s also a “Sustainable Schoolyard.”

Each globe makes its point in a different way. Some draw you in with beautiful designs; one is covered with plastic bottles and toys, to illustrate the need for all of us to reduce our consumption of such things. Another is covered with small windmills to represent wind power. Others illustrate how to green your home, conserve water or drive smartly. View my photos of about half of the globes.

All, however, draw on the “blue marble” image of a small, fragile world seen from afar. Our planet — the only one in the universe known to harbor life — is fragile, small, finite. We should take care of it.

One of the exhibit’s signs said it best: “The 22nd century begins 92 years from now. Three more generations will be born. The way we choose to live, eat, commute, work, play, garden and shop has consequences. What shall we demand of ourselves and each other?”

Demand sustainability.