Study Finds Hope in Saving Saltwater Fish

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Cornelia Dean
July 30, 2009 - New York Times

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Can we have our fish and eat it too? An unusual collaboration of marine ecologists and fisheries management scientists says the answer may be yes.

In a research paper in Friday's issue of the journal Science, the two groups, long at odds with each other, offer a global assessment of the world's saltwater fish and their environments.

Their conclusions are at once gloomy — overfishing continues to threaten many species — and upbeat: a combination of steps can turn things around. But because antagonism between ecologists and fisheries management experts has been intense, many familiar with the study say the most important factor is that it was done at all.

They say they hope the study will inspire similar collaborations between scientists whose focus is safely exploiting specific natural resources and those interested mainly in conserving them.

"We need to merge those two communities," said Steve Murawski, chief fisheries scientist for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. "This paper starts to bridge that gap."

The collaboration began in 2006 when Boris Worm, a marine ecologist at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, and other scientists made an alarming prediction: if current trends continue, by 2048 overfishing will have destroyed most commercially important populations of saltwater fish. Ecologists applauded the work. But among fisheries management scientists, reactions ranged from skepticism to fury over what many called an alarmist report.

Among the most prominent critics was Ray Hilborn, a professor of aquatic and fishery sciences at the University of Washington in Seattle. Yet the disagreement did not play out in typical scientific fashion with, as Dr. Hilborn put it, "researchers firing critical papers back and forth." Instead, he and Dr. Worm found themselves debating the issue on National Public Radio.

"We started talking and found more common ground than we had expected," Dr. Worm said. Dr. Hilborn recalled thinking that Dr. Worm "actually seemed like a reasonable person."

The two decided to work together on the issue. They sought and received financing and began organizing workshops at the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis, an organization sponsored by the National Science Foundation and based at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

At first, Dr. Hilborn said in an interview, "the fisheries management people would go to lunch and the marine ecologists would go to lunch" — separately. But soon they were collecting and sharing data and recruiting more colleagues to analyze it.

Dr. Hilborn said he and Dr. Worm now understood why the ecologists and the management scientists disagreed so sharply in the first place. For one thing, he said, as long as a fish species was sustaining itself, management scientists were relatively untroubled if its abundance fell to only 40 or 50 percent of what it might otherwise be. Yet to ecologists, he said, such a stock would be characterized as "depleted" — "a very pejorative word."

In the end, the scientists concluded that 63 percent of saltwater fish stocks had been depleted "below what we think of as a target range," Dr. Worm said.

But they also agreed that fish in well-managed areas, including the United States, were recovering or doing well. They wrote that management techniques like closing some areas to fishing, restricting the use of certain fishing gear or allocating shares of the catch to individual fishermen, communities or others could allow depleted fish stocks to rebound.

The researchers suggest that a calculation of how many fish in a given species can be caught in a given region without threatening the stock, called maximum sustainable yield, is less useful than a standard that takes into account the health of the wider marine environment. They also agreed that solutions did not lie only in management techniques but also in the political will to apply them, even if they initially caused economic disruption.

Because the new paper represents the views of both camps, its conclusions are likely to be influential, Dr. Murawski said. "Getting a strong statement from those communities that there is more to agree on than to disagree on builds confidence," he said.

At a news conference on Wednesday, Dr. Worm said he hoped to be alive in 2048, when he would turn 79. If he is, he said, "I will be hosting a seafood party — at least I hope so."

Are Wind farms a Health Risk? US Scientist Identifies 'Wind Turbine Syndrome'

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Noise and vibration coming from large turbines are behind an increase in heart disease, migraine, panic attacks and other health problems, according to research by an American doctor

Margareto Pagano
August 2, 2009 - The Independent/UK

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Living too close to wind turbines can cause heart disease, tinnitus, vertigo, panic attacks, migraines and sleep deprivation, according to groundbreaking research to be published later this year by an American doctor.

Dr Nina Pierpont, a leading New York paediatrician, has been studying the symptoms displayed by people living near wind turbines in the US, the UK, Italy, Ireland and Canada for more than five years. Her findings have led her to confirm what she has identified as a new health risk, wind turbine syndrome (WTS). This is the disruption or abnormal stimulation of the inner ear's vestibular system by turbine infrasound and low-frequency noise, the most distinctive feature of which is a group of symptoms which she calls visceral vibratory vestibular disturbance, or VVVD. They cause problems ranging from internal pulsation, quivering, nervousness, fear, a compulsion to flee, chest tightness and tachycardia - increased heart rate. Turbine noise can also trigger nightmares and other disorders in children as well as harm cognitive development in the young, she claims. However, Dr Pierpont also makes it clear that not all people living close to turbines are
susceptible.

Until now, the Government and the wind companies have denied any health risks associated with the powerful noises and vibrations emitted by wind turbines. Acoustic engineers working for the wind energy companies and the Government say that aerodynamic noise produced by turbines pose no risk to health, a view endorsed recently by acousticians at Salford University. They have argued that earlier claims by Dr Pierpont are "imaginary" and are likely to argue that her latest findings are based on a sample too small to be authoritative.

At the heart of Dr Pierpont's findings is that humans are affected by low-frequency noise and vibrations from wind turbines through their ear bones, rather like fish and other amphibians. That humans have the same sensitivity as fish is based on new discoveries made by scientists at Manchester University and New South Wales last year. This, she claims, overturns the medical orthodoxy of the past 70 years on which acousticians working for wind farms are using to base their noise measurements. "It has been gospel among acousticians for years that if a person can't hear a sound, it's too weak for it to be detected or registered by any other part of the body," she said. "But this is no longer true. Humans can hear through the bones. This is amazing. It would be heretical if it hadn't been shown in a well-conducted experiment."

In the UK, Dr Christopher Hanning, founder of the British Sleep Society, who has also backed her research, said: "Dr Pierpont's detailed recording of the harm caused by wind turbine noise will lay firm foundations for future research. It should be required reading for all planners considering wind farms. Like so many earlier medical pioneers exposing the weaknesses of current orthodoxy, Dr Pierpont has been subject to much denigration and criticism and ... it is tribute to her strength of character and conviction that this important book is going to reach publication."

Dr Pierpont's thesis, which is to be published in October by K-Selected Books, has been peer reviewed and includes an endorsement from Professor Lord May, former chief scientific adviser to the UK government. Lord May describes her research as "impressive, interesting and important".

Her new material about the impact of turbine noise on health will be of concern to the Government given its plans for about 4,000 new wind turbines across the country. Ed Miliband, the Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change, has made wind power a central part of his new green policy to encourage renewable energy sources. Another 3,000 are planned off-shore.

Drawing on the early work of Dr Amanda Harry, a British GP in Portsmouth who had been alerted by her patients to the potential health risk, Dr Pierpont gathered together 10 further families from around the world who were living near large wind turbines, giving her a cluster of 38 people, from infants to age 75, to explore the pathophysiology of WTS for the case series. Eight of the 10 families she analysed for the study have now moved away from their homes.

In a rare interview, Dr Pierpont, a fellow of the American Academy of Pediatrics, told The Independent on Sunday: "There is no doubt that my clinical research shows that the infrasonic to ultrasonic noise and vibrations emitted by wind turbines cause the symptoms which I am calling wind turbine syndrome. There are about 12 different health problems associated with WTS and these range from tachycardia, sleep disturbance, headaches, tinnitus, nausea, visual blurring, panic attacks with sensations of internal quivering to more general irritability.

"The wind industry will try to discredit me and disparage me, but I can cope with that. This is not unlike the tobacco industry dismissing health issues from smoking. The wind industry, however, is not composed of clinicians, nor is it made up of people suffering from wind turbines." The IoS has a copy of the confidential manuscript which is exhaustive in its research protocol and detailed case series, drawing on the work of leading otolaryngologists and neurotologists - ear, nose and throat clinical specialists.

Some of the earliest research into the impact of low-frequency noise and vibrations was undertaken by Portuguese doctors studying the effects on military and civil personnel flying at high altitudes and at supersonic speed. They found that this exposure may also cause the rare illness, vibroacoustic disorder or VAD, which causes changes to the structure of certain organs such as the heart and lungs and may well be caused by vibrations from turbines. Another powerful side effect of turbines is the impact which the light thrown off the blades - known as flicker - has on people who suffer from migraines and epilepsy.

Campaigners have consistently argued that much research hitherto has been based on written complaints to environmental health officers and manufacturers, not on science-based research. But in Denmark, Germany and France, governments are moving towards building new wind farms off-shore because of concern over the potential health and environmental risks. In the UK there are no such controls, and a growing number of lobbyists, noise experts and government officials are also beginning to query the statutory noise levels being given to councils when deciding on planning applications from wind farm manufacturers. Lobbyists claim a new method of measuring is needed.

Dr Pierpont, who has funded all the research herself and is independent of any organisation, recommends at least a 2km set-back distance between potential wind turbines and people's homes, said: "It is irresponsible of the wind turbine companies - and governments - to continue building wind turbines so close to where people live until there has been a proper epidemiological investigation of the full impact on human health.

"What I have shown in my research is that many people - not all - who have been living close to a wind turbine running near their homes display a range of health illnesses and that when they move away, many of these problems also go away."

A breakthrough into understanding more of the impact of vibrations came last year, she said, when scientists at Manchester University and Prince of Wales Clinical School and Medical Research Institute in Sydney showed that the normal human vestibular system has a fish or frog-like sensitivity to low-frequency vibration. This was a turning point in understanding the nature of the problem, Dr Pierpont added, because it overturns the orthodoxy of the current way of measuring noise. "It is clear from the new evidence that the methods being used by acousticians goes back to research first carried out in the 1930s and is now outdated."

Dr Pierpont added that the wind turbine companies constantly argue that the health problems are "imaginary, psychosomatic or malingering". But she said their claims are "rubbish" and that medical evidence supports that the reported symptoms are real.

Case study: 'My husband had pneumonia, my father-in-law had a heart attack. Nobody was ill before'

Jane Davis, 53, a retired NHS manager, and her husband, Julian, 44, a farmer, lived in Spalding, Lincolnshire, until the noise of a wind farm 930m away forced them to leave

"People describe the noise as like an aeroplane that never arrives. My husband developed pneumonia very quickly after the turbines went up, having never had chest problems before. We suffer constant headaches and ear nuisance. My mother-in-law developed pneumonia and my husband developed atrial fibrillation - a rapid heartbeat. He had no pre-existing heart disease. Our blood pressure has gone up. My father-in-law has suffered a heart attack, tinnitus and marked hearing loss.

" I understand this can be regarded as a coincidence, but nobody was ill before 2006."

The defence: 'Wind turbines are quiet and safe'

The British Wind Energy Association, UK's biggest renewable energy trade association, said last night: "One of the first things first-time visitors to wind farms usually say is that they are surprised how quiet the turbines are.

"To put things in context: the London Borough of Westminster registered around 300,000 noise complaints from residents in 2008, none from wind turbines. The total number of noise complaints to local councils across the country runs into millions.

"In contrast, an independent study on wind farms and noise in 2007 found only four complaints from about 2,000 turbines in the country, three of which were resolved by the time the report was published.

"Wind turbines are quiet, safe and sustainable. It is not surprising that, according to a DTI report, 94 per cent of people who live near wind turbines are in favour of them. There is no scientific research to suggest that wind turbines are in any way harmful, and even many of the detractors of wind energy are honest enough to admit this.

"Noise from wind farms is a non-problem, and we need to move away from this unproductive and unscientific debate, and focus on our targets on reducing carbon emissions."

US Weighs Risks of Civilian Harm in Cyberwarfare

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John Markoff and Tom Shanker
August 1, 2009 - The New York Times

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It would have been the most far-reaching case of computer sabotage in history. In 2003, the Pentagon and American intelligence agencies made plans for a cyberattack to freeze billions of dollars in the bank accounts of Saddam Hussein and cripple his government's financial system before the United States invaded Iraq. He would have no money for war supplies. No money to pay troops.

"We knew we could pull it off - we had the tools," said one senior official who worked at the Pentagon when the highly classified plan was developed.

But the attack never got the green light. Bush administration officials worried that the effects would not be limited to Iraq but instead create worldwide financial havoc, spreading across the Middle East to Europe and perhaps to the United States.

Fears of such collateral damage are at the heart of the debate as the Obama administration and its Pentagon leadership struggle to develop rules and tactics for carrying out attacks in cyberspace.

While the Bush administration seriously studied computer-network attacks, the Obama administration is the first to elevate cybersecurity - both defending American computer networks and attacking those of adversaries - to the level of a White House director, whose appointment is expected in coming weeks.

But senior White House officials remain so concerned about the risks of unintended harm to civilians and damage to civilian infrastructure in an attack on computer networks that they decline any official comment on the topic. And senior Defense Department officials and military officers directly involved in planning for the Pentagon's new "cyber command" acknowledge that the risk of collateral damage is one of their chief concerns.

"We are deeply concerned about the second- and third-order effects of certain types of computer network operations, as well as about laws of war that require attacks be proportional to the threat," said one senior officer.

This officer, who like others spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the classified nature of the work, also acknowledged that these concerns had restrained the military from carrying out a number of proposed missions. "In some ways, we are self-deterred today because we really haven't answered that yet in the world of cyber," the officer said.

In interviews over recent weeks, a number of current and retired White House officials, Pentagon civilians and military officers disclosed details of classified missions - some only considered and some put into action - that illustrate why this issue is so difficult.

Although the digital attack on Iraq's financial system was not carried out, the American military and its partners in the intelligence agencies did receive approval to degrade Iraq's military and government communications systems in the early hours of the war in 2003. And that attack did produce collateral damage.

Besides blowing up cellphone towers and communications grids, the offensive included electronic jamming and digital attacks against Iraq's telephone networks. American officials also contacted international communications companies that provided satellite phone and cellphone coverage to Iraq to alert them to possible jamming and ask their assistance in turning off certain channels.

Officials now acknowledge that the communications offensive temporarily disrupted telephone service in countries around Iraq that shared its cellphone and satellite telephone systems. That limited damage was deemed acceptable by the Bush administration.

Another such event took place in the late 1990s, according to a former military researcher. The American military attacked a Serbian telecommunications network and accidentally affected the Intelsat satellite communications system, whose service was hampered for several days.

These missions, which remain highly classified, are being scrutinized today as the Obama administration and the Pentagon move into new arenas of cyberoperations. Few details have been reported previously; mention of the proposal for a digital offensive against Iraq's financial and banking systems appeared with little notice on Newsmax.com, a news Web site, in 2003.

The government concerns evoke those at the dawn of the nuclear era, when questions of military effectiveness, legality and morality were raised about radiation spreading to civilians far beyond any zone of combat.

"If you don't know the consequences of a counterstrike against innocent third parties, it makes it very difficult to authorize one," said James Lewis, a cyberwarfare specialist at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington.

But some military strategists argue that these uncertainties have led to excess caution on the part of Pentagon planners.

"Policy makers are tremendously sensitive to collateral damage by virtual weapons, but not nearly sensitive enough to damage by kinetic" - conventional - "weapons," said John Arquilla, an expert in military strategy at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, Calif. "The cyberwarriors are held back by extremely restrictive rules of engagement."

Despite analogies that have been drawn between biological weapons and cyberweapons, Mr. Arquilla argues that "cyberweapons are disruptive and not destructive."

That view is challenged by some legal and technical experts.

"It's virtually certain that there will be unintended consequences," said Herbert Lin, a senior scientist at the National Research Council and author of a recent report on offensive cyberwarfare. "If you don't know what a computer you attack is doing, you could do something bad."

Mark Seiden, a Silicon Valley computer security specialist who was a co-author of the National Research Council report, said, "The chances are very high that you will inevitably hit civilian targets - the worst-case scenario is taking out a hospital which is sharing a network with some other agency."

And while such attacks are unlikely to leave smoking craters, electronic attacks on communications networks and data centers could have broader, life-threatening consequences where power grids and critical infrastructure like water treatment plants are increasingly controlled by computer networks.

Over the centuries, rules governing combat have been drawn together in customary practice as well as official legal documents, like the Geneva Conventions and the United Nations charter. These laws govern when it is legitimate to go to war, and set rules for how any conflict may be waged. Two traditional military limits now are being applied to cyberwar: proportionality, which is a rule that, in layman's terms, argues that if you slap me, I cannot blow up your house; and collateral damage, which requires militaries to limit civilian deaths and injuries.

"Cyberwar is problematic from the point of view of the laws of war," said Jack L. Goldsmith, a professor at Harvard Law School. "The U.N. charter basically says that a nation cannot use force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any other nation. But what kinds of cyberattacks count as force is a hard question, because force is not clearly defined."

A Wind Farm Is Not the Answer

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The green movement's fixation with technology reveals that we are asking the wrong questions

Paul Kingsnorth
August 1, 2009 - The Guardian/UK

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How would you imagine an environmentalist would react when presented with the following proposition? A power company plans to build a new development on a stretch of wild moorland. It will be nearly seven miles long, and consist of 150 structures, each made of steel and mounted on hundreds of tons of concrete. They will be almost 500 feet high, and will be accompanied by 73 miles of road. The development will require the quarrying of 1.5m cubic metres of rock and the cutting out and dumping of up to a million cubic metres of peat.

The answer is that if you are like many modern environmentalists you will support this project without question. You will dismiss anyone who opposes it as a nimby who is probably in the pay of the coal or nuclear lobby, and you will campaign for thousands more like it to be built all over the country.

The project is, of course, a wind farm - or, if we want to be less Orwellian in our terminology, a wind power station. This particular project is planned for Shetland, but there are many like it in the pipeline. The government wants to see 10,000 new turbines across Britain by 2020 (though it is apparently not prepared to support the Vestas wind turbine factory on the Isle of Wight). The climate and energy secretary, Ed Miliband, says there is a need to "grow the market" for industrial wind energy, and to aid this growth he is offering £1bn in new loans to developers and the reworking of the "antiquated" (ie democratic) planning system, to allow local views on such developments to be overridden.

Does this sound very "green" to you? To me it sounds like a society fixated on growth and material progress going about its destructive business in much the same way as ever, only without the carbon. It sounds like a society whose answer to everything is more and bigger technology; a society so cut off from nature that it believes industrialising a mountain is a "sustainable" thing to do.

It also sounds like an environmental movement in danger of losing its way. The support for industrial wind developments in wild places seems to me a symbol of a lack of connectedness to an actual, physical environment. A development like that of Shetland is not an example of sustainable energy: it is the next phase in the endless human advance upon the non-human world - the very thing that the environmental movement came into being to resist.

Campaigners in Cumbria are fighting a proposed wind development near the mountain known as Saddleback, a great, brown hulk of a peak which Wordsworth preferred to call by its Celtic name, Blencathra. Wordsworth thought the wild uplands a place of epiphany. Other early environmentalists, from Thoreau to Emerson, knew too of the power of mountain and moor to provide a clear-eyed and humbling view of humanity.

Many of today's environmentalists will scoff if you speak to them of such things. Their concerns are couched in the language of business and technology - gigawatt hours, parts per million of carbon, peer-reviewed papers and "sustainable development". The green movement has become fixated on a single activity: reducing carbon emissions. It's understandable, what the science tells us about the coming impacts of climate change is terrifying. But if climate change poses a huge question, we are responding with the wrong answers.

The question we should be asking is what kind of society we should live in. The question we are actually asking is how we can power this one without producing carbon. This is not to say that renewable energy technologies are bad. We need to stop burning fossil fuels fast, and wind power can make a contribution if the turbines are sensitively sited and on an appropriate scale.

But the challenge posed by climate change is not really about technology. It is not even about carbon. It is about a society that has systematically hewed its inhabitants away from the natural world, and turned that world into a resource. It is about a society that imagines it operates in a bubble; that it can keep growing in a finite world, forever.

When we clamour for more wind-power stations in the wilderness, we perhaps think we are helping to slow this machine, but we are actually helping to power it. We are still promoting, perhaps unintentionally, the familiar mantras of industrial civilisation: growth can continue forever; technological gigantism will save us; our lives can go on much as they always have.

In the end, climate change presents us with a simple question: are we going to live within our means, or are we, like so many civilisations before us, going to collapse? In that question lies a radical challenge to the direction and mythologies of industrial society. All the technology in the world will not answer it.