A study published today in the journal Nature brings big bad news about the state of life on our planet. Researchers from Nova Scotia conclude that levels of phytoplankton have fallen by about one percent per year for the last several decades. That decline is correlated with rising water temperatures. Add it up, and that’s a significant decline.

Phytoplankton are the base of most of the oceans’ food webs. If they were to go away, much life in the ocean would be unable to survive. Nobody knows what might happen then.

“A crew capable of capping the well is expected onsite later this afternoon.” That was the story on the Barataria Bay oil spill yesterday.

This morning, the story from the spill, which is now up to about a million barrels, is that it will take between 10 to 12 days to stop the oil spill. After everything that’s been learned, and all the promises from the oil industry that they’ve improved their response time, it’s still a week and a half before a well that’s in shallow water close to shore can be capped.

What will the story be tomorrow?

There are still a few Cold Earthers out there, insistently pushing narratives that the Earth is cooling, rather than warming. A lengthy annual review conducted by hundreds of scientists from around the world and just published by the American Meteorological Society, however, doesn’t support the Cold Earthers’ contentions. The review concludes that:“Global average surface temperatures during the last three decades have been progressively warmer than all earlier decades, making 2000-09 (the 2000s) the warmest decade in the instrumental record.”

The review examines 10 different indicators of global temperature:

air temperature over land
sea-surface temperature
air temperature over oceans
sea level
ocean heat absorption
humidity
tropospheric temperature
Arctic sea ice
glaciers
spring snow cover in the Northern hemisphere

The review found that all of these 10 independently-measured indicators show that global warming is taking place. Take note, Cold Earthers: This review provides a model of global warming held up at 10 points. If you’re going to knock it down, you’ve got to take out more than just one point.

You know that you’re in the middle of a real environmental crisis when your government tells you, “people are warned to avoid time in the immediate area around the river” and declares a “state of disaster”. That’s just the situation that people around Kalamazoo will be confronted with when they wake up this morning.

Oil spills are slapping the United States silly. Just after I got done writing about a new offshore drilling oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, I got news of an oil spill in Michigan. It’s stretched 16 miles long and is moving toward Lake Michigan.

The oil spill is estimated to contain close to one million gallons of crude, and has already fouled many animals, including formerly white swans, living along the Kalamazoo River. It took place when a pipeline run by Enbridge Incorporated burst open.

That pipeline sends millions of gallons across the border out of the United States every day. If we really need more oil drilling to serve domestic American needs, how come we have pipelines like this sending crude oil to foreign customers?

Just when they’ve secured one oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, there’s now another one to deal with. This one was also in Louisiana waters, but closer to the coast than the Deepwater Horizon wreck.

This oil spill took place in Barataria Bay, right behind the lines of defense against the Deepwater Horizon crude oil, amidst the marshes that protect New Orleans from storm surge. There’s not much doubt that this oil will hit the Louisiana Delta’s marshes, as it’s at least a mile in length, and not far at all from the shorelines surrounding it.

The oil spill barge rammed a capped oil well that had been abandoned by the Cedyco oil company. That a spill can come from a capped oil well, long after the well has been sealed, shows an additional risk created by offshore drilling that hasn’t been adequately considered and remedied by Congress.

Considering that this additional oil spill has taken place in the Gulf of Mexico before the Deepwater Horizon oil is even close to being cleaned up, how can we trust that the expansion to new offshore drilling sites will be safe?

What do you call a mineralogist who got fired from the University of Ottawa after he stopped teaching the subject matter of the science courses he was assigned and let his students talk about whatever they wanted in class and gave them all an A+ anyway, who declared that physics is a scientific scam out to get you and that students should refuse to read scientific course curricula, who got arrested when he refused to leave campus, and who blamed the whole episode on “the Israel lobby”?

If he has announced that he thinks global warming is a hoax, and if you are global warming denier Jo Nova, you call him a “physicist” and “former professor and environmental science researcher” and laud his expert opinion. You also treat this as a new scientific defection when actually the story’s kind of old. Anything to make it look like serious science says global warming isn’t real.

The results of the annual bottlenose dolphin count along the Maryland coast, conducted by the Baltimore National Aquarium, have been released. 117 dolphins were counted this year. That’s compared with 344 dolphins counted last year.

Those numbers sound like bad news for bottlenose dolphins in the Atlantic, but they might not actually be, given the longer patterns of observations over the last 13 years of the citizen science count. In 2007, only 17 dolphins were counted. In 2002, only 9 were found.

It turns out that this count of bottlenose dolphins is highly variable from year to year. So, it’s only over the very long term that the citizen science effort will reveal meaningful understanding of population trends.

That doesn’t mean that the project isn’t worthwhile. However, there’s no reason to panic because of a change over just one year.

Global temperature this year is the hottest ever recorded. The United States is suffering its worst oil spill ever. Still, the Democratic Party, which controls the White House and both houses of Congress, can’t summon the wherewithal to create law to deal with the climate and energy crisis.

Barack Obama hasn’t done much of anything to push for the legislation’s passage. Democrats in both houses of Congress have spent the last year and a half breaking promises, crafting bills that would do more to channel public money to oil and coal companies than to create energy reform.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid now says that he’ll stop working on climate legislation, and just pass a little bill that might tweak liability caps for offshore drilling… unless the Republicans object too much, of course, in which case Reid will abandon that effort too.

Reid says that he isn’t really giving up completely on the effort to pass climate legislation. He says he’ll try again, with a completely new bill in the autumn… two months before Election Day… as he focuses on his campaign to keep his job.

Rumors are that, while the new bill won’t have a carbon tax, or cap-and-trade provisions, or anything else to reduce the greenhouse gas emissions that are actually causing global warming, it might include a half-million grant program to provide Americans with parasols that they could use to protect themselves from the hot sun as they walk from their front doors to their sport utility vehicles… or… not.

Republicans are poised to make significant gains in both houses of Congress this November. That makes this year the last chance for climate legislation for probably at least another decade. Our nation has been waiting for climate legislation since the 1980s.

We can’t afford another generation of inaction. The biosphere is cooking. But then, what’s the biosphere, when there are other legislative priorities to take care of?

After all, just yesterday, Congress passed a law which will give the post office at 100 Orndorf Drive in Brighton, Michigan a new name. Isn’t that what voters brought the Democrats into power for in 2008?

Yes we… sigh.

When I saw the University of Washington’s Polar Science Center presentation of Arctic sea ice volume last month, I thought that perhaps its latest reading might be a transient graphing error:

But a month later, Arctic sea ice volume remains down after a staggering drop:

The astute among you may notice that the y-axis measures an anomaly in ice volume: specifically, deviation from the 1979-2009 average for the calendar day on which measurement occurs. If you’re a climate change skeptic, you might think, “Aha, I bet that the change in Arctic sea ice volume is nothing compared to the magnitude of the sea ice that is there.”

Given the appearance of the graph, that might be a reasonable suspicion, but it would also be wrong. At its nadir last September, the volume of Arctic sea ice was 5,800 cubic kilometers, a value 67% lower than the September Arctic sea ice volume in 1979. At the latest assessment made as of July 17, the volume of Arctic sea ice was more than 10,000 cubic kilometers below the average July volume from 1979-2009, and the 1979-2009 average July Arctic sea ice volume is only about 19,000 cubic kilometers:

In short, more than half of the Arctic sea ice volume you would have seen in a late 20th Century July is gone now.

Last year, Cold Earthers reacted with huge laughs when Energy Secretary Steven Chu proposed a program of moving to light-colored roofs as a way to combat global warming. Chu’s idea was that roofs with light coloring would reflect more solar enery back into outer space instead of absorbing it, but the industry-aligned pundits who don’t believe global warming is real declared the proposal to be merely spacey.

A commenter at the Global Warming Hoax site called Chu’s roof proposal “rather silly”. “It’s ridiculous,” said Cold Earther Steven Milloy.

The Cold Earthers didn’t have any particular scientific research to back their disdain of Chu’s proposal. They just glanced at the idea and dismissed it as a matter of reflex. They used any argument they could think of, no matter how absurd, to argue against Chu’s idea. Milloy even suggested that reflecting some of the sun’s energy back away from the Earth could damage the sun. He asked, “What if we do this, and solar activity decreases?”

Climatologists, on the other hand, didn’t waste their time with idle speculation. They dedicated themselves to empirical study of the premises of Steven Chu’s suggestion. This week, the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory released the results of its research of the concept. Their work found evidence that Chu was on the right track after all – that light colored roofs could result in a cooling effect on a global scale. The impact could be enough to negate two years of current carbon dioxide emissions.

Think that the oil spill crisis is over, just because BP has finally, after three months, placed a cap on the Deepwater Horizon drill site in the Gulf of Mexico? Think again.

Yesterday morning, I mentioned a new oil spill in Dalian, China that occurred when two petroleum pipelines exploded. That oil spill has now doubled in size, to cover over 400 square kilometers. Just days into this spill, a long stretch of shoreline has already been fouled with thick black sludge.

The Dalian oil spill has also claimed a human victim, literally swallowing him up. Zhang Liang was one of a pair of firefighters who were attempting to loosen a pump that had been plugged by the thick crude – as deep as 20 centimeters on top of the water. He could not make it out alive.

These photographs of the incident were taken by Greenpeace China, whose campaign manager Ailun Yang commented, “Our planet’s over-reliance on petroleum caused this tragedy. It is a sad day for those involved in the clean-up effort, and for the planet as whole. Ultimately it is we human beings who pay the price for our oil addiction.”

Think that the oil spill crisis is over? No, it won’t be over until our addiction to fossil fuels is over.

Have we learned the lesson, or will we all sink into the filth of petroleum like Zhang Liang? The signs aren’t hopeful. Even as Zhang Liang was drowning in crude oil, Louisiana’s U.S. Representative John Fleming rose to give a speech before Congress in which he argued against even a 6-month delay in the expansion of offshore drilling along America’s coastline.

Congressman Fleming said that the delay in expanding offshore drilling was doing more damage than the oil spill itself. Mr. Fleming ought to take a step back before he makes statements like that. Has the temporary moratorium caused an explosion killing eleven workers? Has anyone drowned in the moratorium? Has the moratorium caused pollution that will linger for generations?

If we want jobs, fine. Let’s create jobs – in an energy revolution that will take us away from the deadly, outdated technology of the fossil fuel economy, toward a more sustainable future.

As anyone who’s spent any time near a newsstand, a tv set, a radio, a computer terminal, a coffee shop or a barber shop has heard within the past few months, when offshore oil drilling rigs are erected there’s a significant danger of environmental disaster and economic devastation to nearby fishing and tourism industries.

As anyone who’s spent any time near a travel magazine and a map can figure out, the state of Maine’s economy relies heavily upon fishing and tourism. Without these two sources of income, the state would fall into a disastrous slump.

And yet when Republican candidate for Governor of Maine Paul LePage was asked the following question in a gubernatorial debate this May:

“Would you support offshore drilling in the waters off the Maine Coast?”

Paul LePage answered with just one word:

“Yes.”

If you live in Maine, I encourage you to take a moment when you find yourself at the side of a bay, down at the mouth of a harbor or on the shore of one of Maine’s many offshore islands. Take a breath of the fresh air and ask yourself, “Do I want an oil spill here?”

Ask yourself that question at least once before you cast a vote this November.

Right now, the man who’d bring offshore oil drilling to Maine is ahead 8 points in the polls.

Just as the plug on the Deepwater Horizon drill site has begun to leak again, we’ve got another reminder that the Gulf of Mexico oil spill is merely an especially large example of what’s going on in the sloppy oil industry all the time. Another oil spill has erupted, this one half way around the world.

Along the coast of China, two crude oil pipelines have exploded, creating a fire that lasted for 15 hours, and spewed enough oil to cover about 180 square kilometers of water.

This afternoon, at the end of a rural road on the southern shore of Lake Ontario, I walked with my family along a rocky beach. At the moment we reached the shore, four bald eagles flew over our heads.

Then I looked back to the land, and saw disposable diapers wedged in among the rocks.