DECRIMINALIZE IT
Germany’s medicinal cannabis start-ups are blooming as it eyes move to legalise recreational use

Image shows a person handling a cannabis plant. Germany's new governing coalition is taking steps to legalising the sale of the drug to adults for recreational use. - Copyright Pexels

By Euronews and AP • Updated: 04/01/2022 - 13:54


A former slaughterhouse in Dresden, Germany is now home to row after row of cannabis plants.

They were planted in November, with the first harvest due in January which will mark the first legal, large scale harvest of cannabis on German soil.

The leaves will be turned into cannabis flour and used in legal medical marijuana products.

The company behind the plantation is called Demecan.

The Berlin-based company was one of three to win tenders from the German cannabis agency to produce cannabis in Germany. The two other companies are still working on their production.

LSD and nicotine could be more important to healthcare than we think

"It is actually something very new. It is a unique facility that we have here in Germany. One of the only German facilities to cultivate medicinal cannabis," said Constantin von der Groeben, managing director of Demecan

"And what we see here is our first batch of medicinal cannabis that we are currently cultivating. This facility will then, next year, output one tonne of dried cannabis flour. So, a thousand kilograms."

Medical cannabis products were legalised by the Federal Government in Germany in 2016.

But the new government, under Chancellor Olaf Scholz, that took over in December 2021, wants to go a step further and legalise the sale of cannabis for recreational use to adults in specialised, licensed shops.

It would be similar to the legislation that is in place in Canada and some US states.

Tokyo 2020 is the first CBD Olympics, but it's proving controversial. Here's why

In Berlin, several start-ups with a cannabis focus have been founded over the last few years.

One is the Sanity Group which specialises in medical cannabis products as well as self-care products containing cannabis CBD oil, which is extracted from the cannabis plant.

Fabian Friede, co-founder of Sanity Group, welcomes the move towards legalisation.

"So, I think overall, on the macro level, the direction is the right one. I think moving towards recreational use of cannabis is awesome. Also, easing up the prescription of medicinal cannabis is awesome," he says.

"But as you already said, it is all about the details. And therefore, I think we are super curious, and the waiting time is the hardest because we would love to start preparing and of course, we do that already. Preparing in every direction, because we don't know exactly in which direction it is going."

Germany’s new coalition

The new German government consists of three parties in a coalition: the Social democratic party, the Green Party, and the Liberal Free Democrats party.

There will be more start-ups. There will be more companies. There will be a whole industry, a sector being around. From regulation, from delivery to the dispensaries, to the logistics

Finn Hänsel

Co-founder, Sanity Group

Before the parties started governing together, they agreed on a coalition contract of over 170 pages which is where the move towards legalisation of cannabis for recreational use is set out.

The documents specify that licensed shops will be allowed to sell cannabis to adults, but apart from that there are not many details.

There is also no firm time plan, but since the government has a mandate period of four years, it is implied that this is the longest possible time frame.

"There will be more start-ups. There will be more companies. There will be a whole industry, a sector being around. From regulation, from delivery to the dispensaries, to the logistics," said Finn Hänsel co-founder of the pharmaceutical company Sanity Group.

"So, I think that it will really be a boom, creating a lot more jobs, creating a lot more tax revenues for the government. So, I actually think, even though it will obviously be competition for us, I think it is good for the market. And to be honest, there is nothing better than healthy competition."

Malta becomes first EU country to legalise cannabis for personal use

You can now order cannabis on Uber in Canada as the ride-hailing app enters the growing industry

Concerns over criminal gangs

There has been some criticism of the plan, specifically from parts of the Christian democratic CDU party that governed Germany for 16 years under Angela Merkel.

There are worries that younger people will have easier access to cannabis from older friends and relatives, and there are people that say it won't decrease crime, but that criminal gangs will move to other drugs or sell the cannabis cheaper than the stores.

The view of the police is that we are adding another drug to the drugs that are already legal, such as nicotine and alcohol, and that we might get another widely used 'people's- drug' in the form of cannabis. And as a police officer I have my doubts about this because it will change the society. But also, for us in the police, we will with some certainty get more work to do.

Jörg Radek

Vice-president, German Police Union GdP

Friede says the concerns will need to be addressed in the final legislation.

"Yes, I understand that there are risks involved with it. I mean, if we are looking at the usage of cannabis for minors and everything, then of course, we need to address that in the details," he said.

"We need to address these risks. But I think not doing anything is also not a solution. Because people are using cannabis, they are just using it in a lower quality, coming from a black market, supporting organised crime. How is that better than the alternative?"

The argument that organised crime will have one less market and the state will in turn have one more avenue for tax revenue was often raised in debates about legalising cannabis in Germany.

But one of two major police unions in the country is sceptical.

"The view of the police is that we are adding another drug to the drugs that are already legal, such as nicotine and alcohol, and that we might get another widely used 'people's- drug' in the form of cannabis," said Jörg Radek, vice president of the German Police Union GdP

"And as a police officer I have my doubts about this because it will change the society. But also, for us in the police, we will with some certainty get more work to do."

Centerra outlines expected settlement terms with Kyrgyz government

Seized mine settlement?

The Canadian Press - Jan 3, 2022 / 

Photo: Centerra

Centerra Gold Inc. has outlined its expected terms to settle a dispute with the Kyrgyz Republic over a gold mine the country seized last year.

The government took over the Kumtor mine in May 2021 citing environmental and safety concerns, though the country has also long accused the company of not paying enough taxes.

The Toronto-based gold miner has denied those allegations and says it is in ongoing negotiations with government representatives to settle matters.

It says it expects any settlement to include Centerra receiving the 26.1 per cent of its shares held by Kyrgyzaltyn JSC, a state-owned company, and for the two nominees from that company on Centerra's board to resign.

Centerra says it also expects the Kyrgyz Republic to take all responsibility for the Kumtor mine and to release the company of any claims and to stop all legal proceedings.

It says as part of a settlement it will pay the cash dividends to the Kyrgyz company that it did not pay last year.

Centerra reported a US$926.4 million loss last August on the change of control of Kumtor, while the company continues to operate mines in British Columbia and Turkey.

Centerra Gold confirms talks with Kyrgyzstan for out-of-court settlement over mine dispute

Reuters | January 3, 2022 

Canada’s Centerra Gold on Monday confirmed it was in talks with the Kyrgyzstan government for an out-of-court settlement over a dispute in which the state seized the company’s Kumtor mine.


In May 2021, Centerra kicked off arbitration against the former Soviet republic after it took over the country’s biggest mine for allegedly posing danger to human lives or the environment. The company has denied all the allegations.

The company also froze the government’s stake when it seized the mine, meaning it does not have voting rights, nor is it entitled to dividends.

Centerra on Monday laid out a framework for any resolution of the dispute, saying it should receive around 26.1% of its common stock held by state-owned Kyrgyzaltyn JSC.

It also said the state should assume all responsibility for the company’s two Kyrgyz subsidiaries as well as the Kumtor mine.

“At present, the parties are finalizing the discussion of an amicable agreement, including, among other things, the condition for the full transfer of the Kumtor Gold Company to the Kyrgyz Republic,” Kyrgyzstan President Sadyr Zhaparov said in a statement dated Jan. 2.

In December, a source close to the government told Reuters that Kyrgyzstan was pushing for an out-of-court settlement over the dispute.

Centerra and Kyrgyzstan have a long history of disputes over how to share profit from the 550,000-ounce gold mine.

(By Rithika Krishna; Editing by Ramakrishnan M.)

Wildfires Are Digging Carbon-Spewing Holes in the Arctic

Soaring temperatures are rapidly thawing permafrost, leading to huge sinkholes called thermokarst. Northern fires are making the situation even worse.

PHOTOGRAPH: CHRISTIAN ANDRESEN AND MARK LARA

A PERFECT STORM is ravaging the Arctic—literally. As the world warms, more lightning systems are igniting more peat fires. They burn through ancient buried plant material and release great plumes of greenhouse gases, which further warm the planet. At the same time, as plant species march north thanks to a more hospitable climate, the Arctic is greening. That darkens the landscape and absorbs more of the sun’s energy, further heating the region. It also provides more fuel to burn; dried plants above ground ignite more readily than permafrost, which is made from frozen dirt or sand or gravel mixed with dead plants. But permafrost is now thawing so rapidly that it’s creating massive sinkholes in the earth, up to 100 feet wide and 10 feet deep, a process known as thermokarst.

New research shows how wildfires are exacerbating this land-gouging in north Alaska. After analyzing satellite and aircraft imagery going back to the 1950s, scientists calculated that thermokarst formation has accelerated by 60 percent since then. In the past 70 years, wildfires have burned 3 percent of the landscape but are responsible for 10 percent of thermokarst formation.

“We found that after wildfire activity, the rate in which thermokarst occurs on the landscape is higher for upwards of eight decades,” says plant biologist Mark Lara of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, coauthor of a paper describing the research published in December in the journal One Earth. The cratering creates pits of melted ice and organic matter, which absorb far more solar energy than snow. “If you follow those pits over years to decades, they start to grow and keep growing and getting larger and larger and larger over time. And they all stemmed from that initial small depression after a fire disturbed the tundra,” he continues.

Tundra brings to mind desolation, but this region is in fact packed with life. There aren’t tall trees, but there are lots of grasses and shrubs. These typically trap a layer of snow on the ground; the snow insulates the earth by bouncing the sun’s energy back into space. This encourages the growth and persistence of permafrost, which can sequester thousands of years’ worth of carbon.

PHOTOGRAPH: DIGITAL GLOBE

But that insulation is being undone by climate change, which is heating the Arctic four times as fast as the rest of the planet. “In an undisturbed tundra ecosystem, permafrost is protected by the overlying vegetation and soil organic layers from warming climate,” says climate scientist Yaping Chen of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, lead author on the new paper. “However, when fire occurs, it kills vegetation and removes the insulating organic layers to allow heat to penetrate downward along the soil profile that melts the permafrost.”

That’s allowing vegetation to dry out more easily and giving it more opportunities to ignite during increasingly frequent lightning storms. (More heat means more hot air rising into the atmosphere, which is how thunderclouds form.) Hotter temperatures due to climate change already trigger the thawing that creates thermokarst, the way an ice cube might melt slowly on your countertop. But a wildfire is like holding a flame to that cube.

To make matters worse, the wildfire darkens the ground by charring it, so it will now heat up even more quickly in the sun. If the landscape is level, a neat pit of melted ice will form and grow, because water also readily absorbs solar radiation. All the vegetation that was previously locked in the ice will also sink to the bottom of the watery pit, darkening it even more.

Permafrost is basically a refrigerator for organic matter—and if it warms and thaws, microbes start to proliferate within it, just as they would on your food if you unplugged your fridge. Only these tundra microbes are chewing through millennia-old organic matter, releasing methane, a greenhouse gas that’s 80 times as potent as carbon dioxide. (If there isn’t standing water in the thawed permafrost and the plant material is drier, the microbes will release CO2 instead, but that’s less likely because the craters tend to create little ponds.)

“With thermokarst you expose deeper and deeper layers of permafrost to the thawing, much more efficiently than without thermokarst,” says University of Alaska Fairbanks permafrost geophysicist Vladimir Romanovsky, who wasn’t involved in the work. “The thermokarst process can turn a surface which was relatively dry into some sort of wetland, and wetlands are producers of of methane.”

PHOTOGRAPH: CHRISTIAN ANDRESEN AND MARK LARA


New vegetation grows in the pit, and when it dies it rots in this soggy environment, also producing planet-warming gases. So a landscape that was once fairly dry, with carbon locked in the ground, is now much more actively belching emissions. A gradual permafrost thaw would have done this slowly, but the creation of thermokarst kicks the process into overdrive.

At the moment, climate models just aren’t equipped to consider such complexity. “Presently, most studies—especially modeling works—are focused on gradual permafrost thaw, which releases carbon from ground surface,” says Chen. “However, thermokarst formation will expose ancient carbon deep in the soil column to active decomposition. Once initiated, the carbon loss from these horizons may never recover.” According to one study from a separate international team of scientists, without taking this kind of abrupt thaw into account, scientists may be underestimating the climate effect of thawing permafrost by 50 percent.

Across the Arctic, hotter temperatures are already pockmarking landscapes with thermokarst pits, but climate change is also changing the wildfire “regime,” or the way that blazes start and behave. Hotter temperatures create more dry fuel, which allows for fires to become bigger and more intense, and therefore more destructive to the ecosystem and underlying permafrost. And while the team’s modeling only looked at northern Alaska, Lara says that this tundra system is similar to others around the world, particularly in Siberia. “That region is just being lit up and really, really heavily disturbed by wildfire,” says Lara. “A lot of the implications for the amount of thermokarst could be applicable to what they're seeing over there as well.”

“It's really an upending of a system,” Lara adds. “It's pretty crazy how fast things are changing.”

Why don’t we throw all our trash into a volcano and burn it up?

Volcanoes might seem like nature’s incinerators, but using them to burn up trash would be dangerous and disrespectful to indigenous people who view them as sacred.

 by Emily Johnson
January 3, 2022

Credit: Pixabay.

It’s true that lava is hot enough to burn up some of our trash. When Kilauea erupted on the Big island of Hawaii in 2018, the lava flows were hotter than 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit (1,100 Celsius). That’s hotter than the surface of the planet Venus, and hot enough to melt many rocks. It’s also as hot as waste incinerators, which usually burn garbage at 1,800 to 2,200 F (1,000-1,200 C).

But not all lavas are the same temperature. The eruptions in Hawaii produce a type of lava called basalt. Basalt is much hotter and more fluid than the lavas that erupt at other volcanoes, like the thicker dacite lava that erupts at Mount St. Helens in Washington state. For example, the 2004-2008 eruption at Mount St. Helens produced a lava dome with surface temperatures less than about 1,300 F (704 C).

There are 161 volcanoes in 14 U.S. states and territories. Scientists monitor them and warn nearby communities if they see signs that a volcano may erupt. USGS

Beyond temperature, there are other good reasons not to burn our trash in volcanoes. First, although lava at 2,000 degrees F can melt many materials in our trash – including food scraps, paper, plastics, glass and some metals – it’s not hot enough to melt many other common materials, including steel, nickel and iron.

Second, there aren’t many volcanoes on Earth that have lava lakes, or bowl-like craters full of lava, that we could dump trash into. Of all of the thousands of volcanoes on Earth, scientists know of only eight with active lava lakes. They include Kilauea, Mount Erebus in Antarctica and Nyiragongo in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Most active volcanoes have craters filled with rocks and cooled lava, like Mount St. Helens, or with water, like Crater Lake in Oregon.

The third problem is that dumping trash into those eight active lava lakes would be a very dangerous job. Lava lakes are covered with a crust of cooling lava, but just below that crust they are molten and intensely hot. If rocks or other materials fall onto the surface of a lava lake, they will break the crust, disrupt the underlying lava and cause an explosion.

This happened at Kilauea in 2015: Blocks of rock from the crater rim fell into the lava lake and caused a big explosion that ejected rocks and lava up and out of the crater. Anyone who threw garbage into a lava lake would have to run away and dodge flaming garbage and lava.


An eruption from the Cumbre Vieja volcano on the Spanish island of La Palma on Sept. 30, 2021, produced clouds of toxic gas.

Suppose it was possible to dump trash safely into a lava lake: What would happen to the trash? When plastics, garbage and metals burn, they release a lot of toxic gases. Volcanoes already give off tons of toxic gases, including sulfur, chlorine and carbon dioxide.

Sulfur gases can create acidic fog, which we call “vog,” for “volcanic fog.” It can kill plants and cause breathing problems for people nearby. Mixing these already-dangerous volcanic gases with other gases from burning our trash would make the resulting fumes even more harmful for people and plants near the volcano.

Finally, many indigenous communities view nearby volcanoes as sacred places. For example, Halema’uma’u crater at Kilauea is considered the home of Pele, the native Hawaiian goddess of fire, and the area around the crater is sacred to native Hawaiians. Throwing trash into volcanoes would be a huge insult to those cultures.

Emily Johnson, Research Geologist, US Geological Survey. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Mysterious Footprints Suggest Neanderthals Climbed a Volcano Right 

After It Erupted


Footprints on the Ciampate del Diavolo. (edmondo gnerre/Wikimedia Commons/CC BY 2.0)

MIKE MCRAE
3 JANUARY 2022

According to legend, the devil once took a walk down the side of a volcano in southern Italy, each step preserved forever in solid rock.

The tracks are known as the "Ciampate del Diavolo"' or "Devil's Trail" – but details published in 2020 reveal a less diabolical yet far more interesting story on how they came to be.

The mysterious footprints are well known to those living near Roccamonfina, an extinct volcano in southern Italy that hasn't erupted in tens of thousands of years.

Since 2001, researchers have sought to explain the dozens of impressions left by a small group of human ancestors and even a few animals snaking their way down the mountainside.

But a paper published in January 2020 suggested some individuals were actually heading back up.

Over recent years numerous expeditions have provided detailed measurements on a total of 67 indentations left by the scuffle of feet, hands, and legs, all divided across three distinct tracks headed away from the mountain's summit.

Thanks to the contributions by a team of scientists from institutes across Italy, we obtained details on a further 14 prints – these even larger than the others – some of which head up the mountain rather than down.

Radiometric and geological dating of the various rock strata have already established that the imprints were cast in the soft blanket of ash left in the wake of an eruption around 350,000 years ago, making them some of the oldest preserved human footprints on record.

But just who left these tracks? It's impossible to say for certain based on an assortment of dull shapes pressed awkwardly in time-worn volcanic sediment.

There seemed to be at least five different bodies behind the marks. Further investigations could help whittle down ideas on the sex, body mass, and perhaps even heights of the trekkers.

Given our own Homo sapiens ancestors developed their characteristic traits only 315,000 years ago, we can be pretty confident they weren't members of our own species.

But the researchers have some clues.

One of the clearer imprints provides clear evidence of a grown human male.

And the shapes of many of the footprints point to an interesting possibility. The broad nature of the hindfoot area, with the low rise of the arch, looks suspiciously like the feet of individuals buried in the Sima de los Huesos "Pit of Bones".

The owners of those 430,000-year-old remains have been a topic of debate of the years, progressing from Homo heidelbergensis to Neanderthal, to Denisovan, back to Neanderthal.

Assuming they truly are Neanderthals, it's a reasonable – even if not solid – bet that the footprints were left by a gang of young Neanderthal adults.

Still, the researchers were careful about jumping to conclusions.

"We have decided to keep the attribution to a specific species still pending," lead researcher Adolfo Panarello told New Scientist's Michael Marshall back in January 2020.

Just what inspired an ancient group of hominids to go trouncing through the cooling soot and debris after the mountain violently blew its lid is anybody's guess, though it's clear from the impressions that nobody was in a hurry.

Based on the leisurely pace of around 1 meter per second (3.2 feet per second), the handful of footsteps heading uphill, and a scattering of basalt artifacts found in the vicinity, we might imagine this was just another day in the life by an active volcano.

Slowly treading barefoot through material freshly deposited by a 300 degree Celsius (572 Fahrenheit) flow of billowing pyroclastic insanity isn't exactly for the faint-hearted either, no matter how tough your soles might be.

Going on a back-of-the-envelope calculation, the researchers estimated the blanket would need to have cooled to at least 50 degrees Celsius (122 Fahrenheit), meaning at least several hours needed to have passed between an eruption and the trek.

We might well imagine members of a community living in the shadow of a mountain known to occasionally spew out hot clouds of poisonous gas and muddy ash, with a small band setting across a familiar path to check out the carnage.

Perhaps disaster tourism isn't a recent thing, after all.

This research was published in the Journal of Quaternary Science.

The importance of volcanoes, on Earth and beyond



December 30, 2021

Volcanoes need a new agent. Whenever an eruption starts somewhere on Earth, we’re barraged with news of destroyed buildings, closed airspace, evacuated people and, at worst, injuries and deaths. These extreme impacts do happen during some eruptions, but as any volcanologist would remind you, volcanoes spend most of their lives not erupting. Yet these geologic wonders are still painted as villains in the media, in movies and in books. Robin George Andrews might be that agent volcanoes need to change their public persona, as his new book, “Super Volcanoes: What They Reveal About Earth and the Worlds Beyond,” tries to rehabilitate their image and set them as vital features on and off the Earth.

Even the term “super volcano” was created for the Hollywood ideal of a giant, deadly eruption. There is no technical definition of when a run-of-the-mill volcano upgrades to a super volcano; the term is used to refer to the massive, apocalyptic eruptions that many fear could happen in places like the Yellowstone Caldera in Wyoming. The sorts of eruptions that would fit into the notional definition of “super” haven’t happened for thousands of years, yet even volcanologists have conceded that the term is here to stay.

Andrews’s stated goal is to use his enthusiasm for volcanoes to reboot how we think about these fiery forges. A scientist turned science writer, Andrews realized that the world of academic research on volcanoes wasn’t why he pursued deeper volcanic knowledge while getting his PhD from the University of Otago in New Zealand. Instead, he wanted to spread the gospel of volcanism to the masses that think of them only as portents of doom. In “Super Volcanoes,” he weaves a path through some of the most important recent eruptions and discoveries.

Starting with the 2018 eruption of Kilauea in Hawaii, Andrews jumps back and forth from the past to the present to reveal the history of modern volcanology. Thomas Jaggar’s first attempts to take the temperature of lava in the early 20th century are woven into stories of the start of the 2018 lava flows that buried multiple communities on the slopes of Kilauea. The frantic response to the 2018 eruption is recounted through the eyes of U.S. Geological Survey geologists such as Christina Neal and Wendy Stovall, who put us in their boots as lava fountains are pouring molten rock onto houses and roads.

Super Volcanoes
What They Reveal about Earth and the Worlds Beyond
By Robin George Andrews
Norton.
312 pp. $27.95

Our current understanding of volcanic processes is the thread that connects the chapters. It is surprising to realize that it has been less than 100 years since we recognized the Yellowstone Caldera and its history of enormous eruptions that Andrews calls “Mephistophelian paroxysms.” Yet, even as we learn about these cataclysmic eruptions from Yellowstone that blanketed ash across territory from Montana to Louisiana, it is really the science of volcanoes that drives Andrews’s prose: “But the world won’t end. It would not even come close to bringing civilization crashing down. We know this, because this experiment has already been run.”

In the first half of the book, Andrews takes us on a whirlwind tour of volcanoes in all corners of the globe. We join the scientists who study volcanoes and volcanic processes and learn how these processes affect people and life. Andrews has a tendency to introduce us to new characters with a Dickensian rapidity that lessens the impact of all these amazing scientists, but he does show us that the world of volcanology is a broad, diverse community.

In its second half, the book dives deep into the nature of extraterrestrial volcanism. Andrews takes us to Mars, the moon, Venus and the outer planets, mostly on a hunt for how volcanoes are linked to the potential for life on other worlds. At times you do feel like you’ve wandered into a different book. But no matter — Andrews creates a sense of wonder in the reader over the detection in September 2020 of a gas most people have never heard of, phosphine, a chemical compound that’s one part phosphorus and three parts hydrogen. “And the world went bananas,” Andrews writes of that observation, because phosphine has been suggested to be a chemical sign of life. In this case, it would be life in the clouds of our sister planet Venus.

Andrews is gifted in describing volcanic processes in ways that most people can comprehend. When discussing the extremely unusual carbon-rich lavas from Oldoinyo Lengai in Tanzania, he notes that nearby “there is a big chunk of mangled up continental rocks, a 3-billion-year-old or older lump named the Tanzanian craton. Over its lengthy history, mantle plumes have risen . . . tickling the underbelly of the craton and supplying it with plenty of carbon.”

Andrews provides illuminating analogies that capture the uncertainty and unknowns of volcanology. In describing how we don’t know the relationship between big asteroid impacts on the moon and the massive lava flow fields that mark the dark areas on its near side, he writes, “It’s a bit like coming home to find your dog destroyed the pillows on the couch, the toilet paper, the television remote and a few books: you don’t really know which of these fundamental acts of destruction happened first, or last.”

Andrews admits that what he really wants to be is a time traveler. This is clear from “Super Volcanoes.” The book excels when he drops us into a foreign location or time, like a devastating eruption of Yellowstone or in the atmosphere of Venus, and paints us a picture of actually being there. Yet, as we all know, we’re not time travelers. Volcanoes can help record times past, and Andrews reminds us that there is a reason we’ve been writing about them since the time of Pliny: “Time moves on. But volcanoes and eruptions have a timeless effect on our minds, whether we are watching their embers on land, underwater, or in space.”

By Erik Klemetti is an associate professor of earth and environmental sciences and journalism at Denison University. He writes “Rocky Planet,” a column for Discover, and covers volcanic eruptions around the world on Twitter.

 

Logging in watersheds among stressors for declining Pacific salmon, experts say

Logging stress on salmon

The Canadian Press - Jan 3, 2022  | Story: 355943

Photo: The Canadian Press

The compounding effects of climate change and logging are contributing tothe degradation of Pacific salmon habitat, experts say, adding a reassessment of watershed logging and restoration practices will be key to helping struggling fish populations.

Younes Alila, a professor in the department of forest resources management at the University of British Columbia,said decades of clear-cut logging across B.C. have disrupted the landscape's natural mechanisms for mitigating floods and landslides.

Such events along with heatwaves, wildfires, drought and so-called atmospheric rivers of heavy rain are becoming more frequent and severe, which could have significant consequencesfor freshwater salmon habitat, Alila said in an interview.

Before logging, the forest canopy helps to collect rainfall and shade snowpack, slowing down the springtime melt, Alila said. The trees also pump moisture out of the ground, increasing the soil's capacity to absorb runoff, he said.

Clearcutting or logging everything in a given cutblock dominated the province's forest industry in the latter half of the 20th century and it's commonly practised in combination with different approaches that leave more trees standing.

Alila said his research over the last 15 years has consistently shown that clear-cut logging increases the size and frequency of floods of all return periods, referring to the estimated years between floods of a similar size or intensity. What would have been 10, 20, 50 or 100-year floods are all recurring more often after logging, he said.

"That's a huge increase in the flood risk on downstream communities," Alila said.

It's also a risk to salmon, which need certain conditions to spawn including gravel to provide protection for delicate eggs and fry.Surging waters can wash the gravel away, scour eggs from the riverbed or suffocate them with sediment, he said.

With some B.C. salmon populations declining to historic lows, the provincial and federal governments have allocated hundreds of millions of dollars for recovery efforts in recent years, including grant programs aimed at habitat restoration.

Similar to floods,clear-cut logging and forest service roads also increase the severity and frequency of landslides, Alila said. Slides carry debris and sediment that can in turn render habitat unsuitable for spawning and the rearing of juvenile fish.

Slopes become unstable without tree roots as anchors, he said, while the logging roads alone add to the risk as ditches and culverts divert underground runoff to the surface, pushing more water, sediment and debris downstream at a faster pace.

Alila said he's conducting research in one watershed in B.C.'s Interior that's 8,000 square kilometres in size with more than 18,000 kilometres of forest service roads.

"That density of road network is all over B.C. This watershed is no exception," he said.

It takes decades for forests to recover their full hydrological functionality after being logged and replanted, Alila added.

The effects of logging are compounded by climate change, which is stoking increasingly intense wildfires that leave behind "hydrophobic" or water repellent soil, he said. The charred soil gradually recovers its ability to absorb moisture, but the years after a severe wildfire are especially risky for flooding and landslides, he said.

At the same time, Alila said climate change will bring more frequent and severe atmospheric rivers that will push heavy rain further into B.C.'s wildfire-worn Interior.

Forests also provide shade and kelp keep streams cool, while logging in riparian areas can push water temperatures above the 18 to 20 C that salmon can typically withstand, especially when combined with the effects of climate change, said Jonathan Moore, a professor of biological sciences at Simon Fraser University.

"The more logging that happens, the less climate change it can withstand," said Moore, whose work focuses on aquatic ecosystems. "Reciprocally, the more watersheds are protected, the more climate change resilient they are."

Moore points to a 2017 study published in the Journal of Environmental Management that examined how stream temperatures in two river basins in Oregon might respond to the restoration of vegetation and "channel morphology," or the interplay between the force of water and the stability of a river's bed and bank.

The researchers found that a combination of channel narrowing and restoring riparian areas could reduce peak summer water temperatures by 1.8 and 3.5 C in the neighbouring river basins, offsetting the projected impacts of climate change.

Their modelling predicted that cooler temperatures as a result of basin-wide restoration would lead to increases in the abundance of juvenile chinook salmon, even when climate change projections for the 2080s were taken into account.

Trees, branches and woody debris that naturally fall into streams also provide nutrients and shelter for migrating and juvenile salmon, Moore noted.

A recent study by Moore and his colleagues found that a combination of changes in ocean and freshwater habitats had driven steep declines in five salmonid populations over 40 years in a river on the northeastern tip of Vancouver Island.

In fresh water habitat, "the strongest signal by far was forestry," he said.

Alila said he hopes the government will recognize that forestry practices need to change significantly, and not just through "tinkering" with existing legislation, in order to protect both salmon habitat and communities from floods and slides.

"If the government doesn't do it voluntarily, they're going to be forced to when we experience ... more of the same flooding that we experienced this fall," he said.

A series of atmospheric rivers brought record-setting rainfall to southwestern B.C. in November, causing destructive landslides and flooding that severed key transportation routes and inundated a prime agricultural area east of Vancouver.

The B.C. government introduced amendments to existing forestry legislation earlier this fall, promising to reshape forest management with a focus on sustainability.

With the proposed changes, a new system of 10-year forest landscape plans developed with First Nations, local communities and other stakeholders would prioritize forest health, replacing the stewardship plans developed largely by industry, Forests Minister Katrine Conroy told a news conference at the time.

Past policies "left too much control of the forest operations in the hands of the private sector" and limited the province's ability to fight climate change, protect old-growth forests and share benefits with local and Indigenous communities, she said.

The B.C. Council of Forest Industries supports "modernizing and further strengthening forest policy to ensure we have a strong, sustainable, and competitive forest sector,'' president Susan Yurkovich said in a statement when the amendments were announced.

John Betts, the executive director of the Western Forestry Contractor's Association, said in a statement provided by the province at the time the announcement was made that the changes would allow the government to better manage forest resources for both climate change and the cumulative effects of resource development.

"For our reforestation sector, it means we will be managing stands and implementing forest practices more sensitive to the complexities and dynamics of how our forest and range ecosystems connect over the landscape and time."

Kerstin Perez is searching the cosmos for signs of dark matter

“There need to be more building blocks than the ones we know about,” says the particle physicist.

Jennifer Chu | MIT News Office
Publication Date: January 2, 2022
PRESS INQUIRIES

“We measure so much about the universe, but we also know we’re completely missing huge chunks of what the universe is made of,” Kerstin Perez says.
Credits:Photo: Adam Glanzman


Kerstin Perez is searching for imprints of dark matter. The invisible substance embodies 84 percent of the matter in the universe and is thought to be a powerful cosmic glue, keeping whole galaxies from spinning apart. And yet, the particles themselves leave barely a trace on ordinary matter, thwarting all efforts at detection thus far.

Perez, a particle physicist at MIT, is hoping that a high-altitude balloon experiment, to be launched into the Antarctic stratosphere in late 2022, will catch indirect signs of dark matter, in the particles that it leaves behind. Such a find would significantly illuminate dark matter’s elusive nature.

The experiment, which Perez co-leads, is the General AntiParticle Spectrometer, or GAPS, a NASA-funded mission that aims to detect products of dark matter annihilation. When two dark matter particles collide, it’s thought that the energy of this interaction can be converted into other particles, including antideuterons — particles that then ride through the galaxy as cosmic rays which can penetrate Earth’s stratosphere. If antideuterons exist, they should come from all parts of the sky, and Perez and her colleagues are hoping GAPS will be at just the right altitude and sensitivity to detect them.

“If we can convince ourselves that’s really what we’re seeing, that could help point us in the direction of what dark matter is,” says Perez, who was awarded tenure this year in MIT’s Department of Physics.

In addition to GAPS, Perez’ work centers on developing methods to look for dark matter and other exotic particles in supernova and other astrophysical phenomena captured by ground and space telescopes.

“We measure so much about the universe, but we also know we’re completely missing huge chunks of what the universe is made of,” she says. “There need to be more building blocks than the ones we know about. And I’ve chosen different experimental methods to go after them.”

Building up

Born and raised in West Philadelphia, Perez was a self-described “indoor kid,” mostly into arts and crafts, drawing and design, and building.

“I had two glue guns, and I remember I got into building dollhouses, not because I cared about dolls so much, but because it was a thing you could buy and build,” she recalls.

Her plans to pursue fine arts took a turn in her junior year, when she sat in on her first physics class. Material that was challenging for her classmates came more naturally to Perez, and she signed up the next year for both physics and calculus, taught by the same teacher with infectious wonder.

“One day he did a derivation that took up two-thirds of the board, and he stood back and said, ‘Isn’t that so beautiful? I can’t erase it.’ And he drew a frame around it and worked for the rest of the class in that tiny third of the board,” Perez recalls. “It was that kind of enthusiasm that came across to me.”

So buoyed, she set off after high school for Columbia University, where she pursued a major in physics. Wanting experience in research, she volunteered in a nanotechnology lab, imaging carbon nanotubes.

“That was my turning point,” Perez recalls. “All my background in building, creating, and wanting to design things came together in this physics context. From then on, I was sold on experimental physics research.”

She also happened to take a modern physics course taught by MIT’s Janet Conrad, who was then a professor at Columbia. The class introduced students to particle physics and the experiments underway to detect dark matter and other exotic particles. The detector generating the most buzz was CERN’s Large Hadron Collider in Geneva. The LHC was to be the largest particle accelerator in the world, and was expected imminently to come online.

After graduating from Columbia, Perez flew west to Caltech, where she had the opportunity to go to CERN as part of her graduate work. That experience was invaluable, as she helped to calibrate one of the LHC’s pixel detectors, which is designed to measure ordinary, well-known particles.

“That experience taught me, when you first turn on your instrument, you have to make sure you can measure the things you know are there, really well, before you can claim you’re looking at anything new,” Perez says.

Front of the class

After finishing up her work at CERN, she began to turn over a new idea. While the LHC was designed to artificially smash particles together to look for dark matter, smaller projects were going after the same particles in space, their natural environment.

“All the evidence we have of dark matter comes from astrophysical observations, so it makes sense to look out there for clues,” Perez says. “I wanted the opportunity to, from scratch, fundamentally design and build an experiment that could tell us something about dark matter.”

With this idea, she returned to Columbia, where she joined the core team that was working to get the balloon experiment GAPS off the ground. As a postdoc, she developed a cost-effective method to fabricate the experiment’s more than 1,000 silicon detectors, and has since continued to lead the experiment’s silicon detector program. Then in 2015, she accepted a faculty position at Haverford College, close to her hometown.

“I was there for one-and-a-half years, and absolutely loved it,” Perez says.

While at Haverford, she dove into not only her physics research, but also teaching. The college offered a program for faculty to help improve their lectures, with each professor meeting weekly with an undergraduate who was trained to observe and give feedback on their teaching style. Perez was paired with a female student of color, who one day shared with her a less than welcoming experience she had experienced in an introductory course, that ultimately discouraged her from declaring a computer science major.

Listening to the student, Perez, who has often been the only woman of color in advanced physics classes, labs, experimental teams, and faculty rosters, recognized a kinship, and a calling. From that point on, in addition to her physics work, she began to explore a new direction of research: belonging.

She reached out to social psychologists to understand issues of diversity and inclusion, and the systemic factors contributing to underrepresentation in physics, computer science, and other STEM disciplines. She also collaborated with educational researchers to develop classroom practices to encourage belonging among students, with the motivation of retaining underrepresented students.

In 2016, she accepted an offer to join the MIT physics faculty, and brought with her the work on inclusive teaching that she began at Haverford. At MIT, she has balanced her research in particle physics with teaching and with building a more inclusive classroom.

“It’s easy for instructors to think, ‘I have to completely revamp my syllabus and flip my classroom, but I have so much research, and teaching is a small part of my job that frankly is not rewarded a lot of the time,’” Perez says. “But if you look at the research, it doesn’t take a lot. It’s the small things we do, as teachers who are at the front of the classroom, that have a big impact.”

End of bonus likely caused spike in

retirements at City of Calgary in 2021

Social Sharing

• Facebook

• Twitter

• Email

• Reddit

• LinkedIn

Council voted to scrap long-running retirement allowance

for city employees, effective last week

Scott Dippel · CBC News · Posted: Jan 04, 2022 

The benefit dated back to the 1960s and wasn't part of any collective agreements. (David Bell/CBC)

Officials believe the end of the City of Calgary's retirement allowance for its employees sparked an increase in retirements last year.

In 2019, city council voted to do away with the long running retirement bonus for its employees.

As a retention incentive, the city offered a retirement payment to employees with more than 25 years of service that was equivalent to the cost of their annual vacation entitlement.

So if long time employees earned six weeks of vacation time annually, the city would pay them six weeks of salary to take with them when they retired.

The benefit dated back to the 1960s and wasn't part of any collective agreements.

Council viewed it as an anachronism, and that doing away with it could save about $4.3 million a year.

• Council votes to end retirement allowance payments to City of Calgary workers

In voting to scrap the allowance, council was advised by the city solicitor to give adequate notice to employees, so it fixed Dec. 31, 2021 as the date it would be abolished.

Data from the city shows that approximately 600 employees retired in 2021, up from the normal average of about 350 annual retirements in recent years.

The city's manager of talent management, Bill Oakes, said it's thought that the end of the retirement allowance played a hand in that increase.

"We don't ask employees for the reasons for their retirement," said Oakes.

"However, we suspect that for those employees that were eligible to retire — being that they were 55 or older — and if they were planning on retiring [in 2021] or in the near future, that this would be enough of an incentive, I guess, for them to want to take advantage of having this opportunity available to them."

Retirees believed to set record in 2021

Oakes said it's believed 600 retirements in a single year would set an all-time record for the city.

With more than 14,000 employees, he said the increase in departures isn't expected to pose any serious problems for the city or its many services.

"We have things like succession plans in place and work on developing our employees," said Oakes.

"We are fortunate enough to have pretty good bench strength there for people to be able to move into roles and good ability to recruit within the market that we have here in Calgary."

Oakes said Dec. 31 marked a hard stop for the allowance for its management staff. But the allowance will actually continue for a time for its unionized employees, as the withdrawal of the bonus may be a factor in the collective bargaining process with civic unions.

CPS also impacted

The end of the allowance also caused a spike in retirements at the Calgary Police Service.

Up to the end of November, 76 retirements had occurred in 2021. That was up from the 39 departures that happened in 2020.

Data from CPS shows its 2021 retirements included 30 civilian staff and 46 officers.

Deputy police chief Raj Gill said the number of officers departing will pose a bit of a challenge.

Retirements at the City of Calgary, including police, are way up, in part, due to the elimination of retirement allowances. (Calgary police)

He said there have been some limitations on the size of each recruit class during the pandemic. It's anticipated it may take up to a year to fill the newly vacated positions, in addition to the annual recruitment that takes place.

That will place more pressure on front line officers, so Gill said steps are being taken internally to ensure the number of officers on the street is maintained.

"We are looking at redeploying certain other resources, and also how we can adjust some of our normal business to make sure that we provide the front line members with the support and the resources that they need," said Gill.

"So, there are impacts to the organization until we are able to fill the vacancies and address the attrition that we've experienced."

Could take a year to hire replacements

In a normal year, Gill said there are generally more retirements in the first half of the year. But in 2021, more retirements came in the last half of the year and it's believed that the end of the retirement allowance was behind that.

He estimates it could take up to a year to fill all of the retirements with new recruits.

Gill said 112 officers were hired in 2021, which was short of the goal that CPS had set for the year.

• VIDEO
  Calgary police chief reflects on year defined by protests, low morale and loss of force's own

However, he said it is finding outstanding applicants who want to join CPS, and their hiring target for 2022 is to train 135 new recruits.

"We have fantastic people who continue to want to be members of the Calgary Police Service," Gill said.

"So it is something that we're very proud of in terms of our recruiting standard and the type of people that we're hiring, and we continue to hire high quality people."

 

Op-Ed: Is Economic Growth Compatible With Decarbonization?

New research says that the answer is "yes"

Pixabay file image

PUBLISHED JAN 2, 2022 4:43 PM BY GEMINI NEWS

 

[By Edgar Hertwich]

Economic growth is the aim of many policies. Still, economic growth is also the ultimate cause of pollution and climate change. A growing consensus of activists and scientists calls for ending economic growth and even “de-growth” in rich countries – pointing to the urgent need to protect nature and preserve resources for future generations.

All economic activity requires energy, and in our modern world, most of the power comes from fossil fuels which cause carbon emissions.

Think tanks and industry associations suggest that we need to pursue “green growth.” Yet what is the empirical evidence for the emissions-increasing effect of economic growth? Is it possible to have green growth, meaning economic growth that does not increase but reduces greenhouse gas emissions?

Many studies have looked at the historical data for carbon emissions and economic activity, as measured by the gross domestic product (GDP). Researchers have identified a wide range of relationships, looking at various sets of countries and periods. While some research suggests that economic growth leads to rapid increases in carbon emissions, other studies have found a modest increase or even a decrease.

Economic growth increases carbon emissions

We have assembled and analyzed the largest dataset of countries’ carbon emissions and underlying energy and economic variables. Our statistical analysis ascertained that economic growth increases carbon emissions.

Every percent growth raises emissions by a percent. We could gain this insight only by identifying other factors that also affect the rise in emissions. These factors provide us with the levers we need to halt global warming.

All economic activity requires energy, and in our modern world, most of the power comes from fossil fuels which cause carbon emissions. Hence, it is not surprising that more economic activity leads to higher carbon emissions. Not all economic activity is equally energy-gorging, however, and not all energy sources contribute the same amount of carbon emissions.

How can previous research offer such a divergence of findings regarding the same underlying relationship? Most studies looked at subsets of the data we used. They treated economic growth as the only factor determining carbon emissions. In our study, we identified several factors which have independently influenced countries’ carbon emissions. The most important of these are economic productivity, the mix of energy sources, industry’s share of the GDP, and electricity.

Some countries shifted to renewable energy

We found that during periods of economic growth, some countries increased their share of coal in the energy mix and thus increased their carbon emissions even faster. Other countries, meanwhile, shifted away from coal to gas or away from fossil fuels to renewable energy sources and therefore decreased their carbon emissions.

Some countries turned to electricity and reduced their emissions. In contrast, others continued to use fossil fuels, and their emissions remained high.

Scientists have long debated whether carbon emissions reductions and economic growth can co-exist. The developments of the last decade show impressively that the answer is: Yes.

New Zealand, Sweden, and the United Kingdom have achieved this feat, amongst others. It requires, however, that the driving factors contributing to reduced carbon emissions rise fast enough to offset the upward pressure caused by economic growth.

Services instead of industrial production

New renewable energy sources need to compensate for the increase in the energy demand because of higher economic growth and replace some coal or gas fueling the economic activity. Or new and more profitable economic activity replaces previous, more polluting one, such as business services in the UK replaced industrial production.

The faster a country grows, the more difficult it is to achieve this balance. This reality is one reason why no emerging economy has achieved emissions reductions while continuing its pace of economic growth. Green growth is possible but requires strong climate policies. De-growth will reduce emissions but may rob us of the means to invest in decarbonization.

It is essential to change the economic structure of development activity towards a service economy and shift the energy supply toward renewable sources and nuclear power. Doing so can reduce the harmfulness of economic development.

Basing development on coal and oil and changing industrial structure afterward is harmful to the environment and economically wasteful and politically challenging. It is wiser to change the sequence: Clean up first, and then invest in development.

Prof. Edgar Hertwich is International Chair of NTNU's Industrial Ecology Programme.

A version of this opinion piece was previously published in Norwegian, in Dagens Næringlsiv. It appears here courtesy of NTNU / SINTEF and may be found in its original form here.