An Underwater Fight Is Waged for the Health of San Francisco Bay

Chela Zabin will not soon forget when she first glimpsed the golden brown tentacle of the latest alien to settle in the fertile waters of San Francisco Bay.

Heidi Schumann for The New York Times

The broad-leaf kelp is used in miso soup.

“I had that moment of ‘Oh God, this is it, it’s here,’ ” said Dr. Zabin, a biologist with the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center. “I was really hoping I was wrong.”

The tentacle in question was that of an Asian kelp, Undaria pinnatifida, a flavorful and healthful ingredient in miso soup and an aggressive, costly intruder in waters from New Zealand to Monterey Bay.

The kelp, known as wakame (pronounced wa-KA-me), is on a list of “100 of the World’s Worst Invasive Alien Species,” compiled by the Invasive Species Specialist Group. Since her discovery in May, Dr. Zabin and colleagues have pulled up nearly 140 pounds of kelp attached to pilings and boats in the San Francisco Marina alone.

Every year the damage wrought by aquatic invaders in the United States and the cost of controlling them is estimated at $9 billion, according to a 2003 study by a Cornell University professor, David Pimentel, whose research is considered the most comprehensive. The bill for controlling two closely-related invasive mussels — the zebra and the quagga — in the Great Lakes alone is $30 million annually, says the United States Federal Aquatic Nuisance Species Task Force.

Many scientists say that San Francisco Bay has more than 250 nonnative species, like European green crab, Asian zooplankton and other creatures and plants that outcompete native species for food, space and sunlight.

“Here you’ve got a veritable smorgasbord of habitats from shallow and muddy to deep water,” said Lars Anderson, a lead scientist with the United States Agriculture Department. The Oakland port ranks as the fourth busiest in the nation, and ships bring in tiny hitchhikers from across the globe to take up residence in the bay.

Most invasive aquatic species arrive stuck to hulls or as stowaways in ballast water. Wakame first arrived at the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach in 2000, Dr. Zabin and other scientists said. A year later it had moved south into Baja California and north as far as Monterey Bay, where scientists in scuba suits yanked it off boat hulls and marina moorings.

“It’s just like gardening, you can pull out all the weeds you want, but there will always be that little dandelion seed that will sprout and recolonize,” said Steve Lonhart, senior scientist at the Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary. The kelp, which can grow an inch a day, could spread as far north as Canada before the water becomes too cold to sustain it, Dr. Lonhart said.

Native to the Japan Sea, wakame has now spread to the Mediterranean and elsewhere along European coastlines, and to New Zealand, Australia and Argentina, where the fetid smell of rotting kelp has kept beachgoers from parts of the coast.

Wakame harms native kelp, mucks up marinas and the undersides of boats, and damages mariculture like oyster farming.

Money to help eradicate invasive species is difficult to come by on both state and federal levels, particularly in a state facing an unprecedented financial crisis and cuts to programs. “When there is a big wildfire, no one stops and asks, ‘Who is going to pay for this?’ They just fight the fire,” Dr. Anderson said. “We don’t have that kind of automatic response with invasive species.”

On weekends, Dr. Anderson trolls Tomales Bay, 50 miles north of here, in a sea kayak, looking for wakame’s wide leaves.

John Finger is owner of Hog Island Oyster Farm, which has beds in 160 acres of Tomales Bay. His beds yield 2.5 million oysters per year, worth $6 million, Mr. Finger said. Of wakame’s approach, he said, “It seems inevitable that it will show up here.”

Though wakame has not yet been spotted in the bay, Mr. Finger said he was pre-emptively training his staff on how to identify and remove the kelp. “This is just another sign of how small the world is,” he said.

Back in San Francisco, Dr. Zabin and colleagues from nonprofit groups and state and federal agencies have been pooling resources and volunteers, donning scuba and snorkeling equipment and filling black plastic trash bags with the kelp.

But before trucking it to the landfill, Dr. Zabin plans to ship some to Texas. “I got an e-mail from a guy who wants to use it to make biofuel,” Dr. Zabin said. “Maybe he could just come and vacuum it up.”

Climate Change Seen as Threat to U.S. Security

The changing global climate will pose profound strategic challenges to the United States in coming decades, raising the prospect of military intervention to deal with the effects of violent storms, drought, mass migration and pandemics, military and intelligence analysts say.Such climate-induced crises could topple governments, feed terrorist movements or destabilize entire regions, say the analysts, experts at the Pentagon and intelligence agencies who for the first time are taking a serious look at the national security implications of climate change.

Recent war games and intelligence studies conclude that over the next 20 to 30 years, vulnerable regions, particularly sub-Saharan Africa, the Middle East and South and Southeast Asia, will face the prospect of food shortages, water crises and catastrophic flooding driven by climate change that could demand an American humanitarian relief or military response.

An exercise last December at the National Defense University, an educational institute that is overseen by the military, explored the potential impact of a destructive flood in Bangladesh that sent hundreds of thousands of refugees streaming into neighboring India, touching off religious conflict, the spread of contagious diseases and vast damage to infrastructure. “It gets real complicated real quickly,” said Amanda J. Dory, the deputy assistant secretary of defense for strategy, who is working with a Pentagon group assigned to incorporate climate change into national security strategy planning.

Much of the public and political debate on global warming has focused on finding substitutes for fossil fuels, reducing emissions that contribute to greenhouse gases and furthering negotiations toward an international climate treaty — not potential security challenges.

But a growing number of policy makers say that the world’s rising temperatures, surging seas and melting glaciers are a direct threat to the national interest.

If the United States does not lead the world in reducing fossil-fuel consumption and thus emissions of global warming gases, proponents of this view say, a series of global environmental, social, political and possibly military crises loom that the nation will urgently have to address.

This argument could prove a fulcrum for debate in the Senate next month when it takes up climate and energy legislation passed in June by the House.

Lawmakers leading the debate before Congress are only now beginning to make the national security argument for approving the legislation.

Senator John Kerry, the Massachusetts Democrat who is the chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee and a leading advocate for the climate legislation, said he hoped to sway Senate skeptics by pressing that issue to pass a meaningful bill.

Mr. Kerry said he did not know whether he would succeed but had spoken with 30 undecided senators on the matter.

He did not identify those senators, but the list of undecided includes many from coal and manufacturing states and from the South and Southeast, which will face the sharpest energy price increases from any carbon emissions control program.

“I’ve been making this argument for a number of years,” Mr. Kerry said, “but it has not been a focus because a lot of people had not connected the dots.” He said he had urged President Obama to make the case, too.

Mr. Kerry said the continuing conflict in southern Sudan, which has killed and displaced tens of thousands of people, is a result of drought and expansion of deserts in the north. “That is going to be repeated many times over and on a much larger scale,” he said.

The Department of Defense’s assessment of the security issue came about after prodding by Congress to include climate issues in its strategic plans — specifically, in 2008 budget authorizations by Hillary Rodham Clinton and John W. Warner, then senators. The department’s climate modeling is based on sophisticated Navy and Air Force weather programs and other government climate research programs at NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

The Pentagon and the State Department have studied issues arising from dependence on foreign sources of energy for years but are only now considering the effects of global warming in their long-term planning documents. The Pentagon will include a climate section in the Quadrennial Defense Review, due in February; the State Department will address the issue in its new Quadrennial Diplomacy and Development Review.

“The sense that climate change poses security and geopolitical challenges is central to the thinking of the State Department and the climate office,” said Peter Ogden, chief of staff to Todd Stern, the State Department’s top climate negotiator.

Although military and intelligence planners have been aware of the challenge posed by climate changes for some years, the Obama administration has made it a central policy focus.

A changing climate presents a range of challenges for the military. Many of its critical installations are vulnerable to rising seas and storm surges. In Florida, Homestead Air Force Base was essentially destroyed by Hurricane Andrew in 1992, and Hurricane Ivan badly damaged Naval Air Station Pensacola in 2004. Military planners are studying ways to protect the major naval stations in Norfolk, Va., and San Diego from climate-induced rising seas and severe storms.

Another vulnerable installation is Diego Garcia, an atoll in the Indian Ocean that serves as a logistics hub for American and British forces in the Middle East and sits a few feet above sea level.

demics, military and intelligence analysts say.

Mountain Critter A Candidate For Endangered List

The American pika could become the first animal in the continental U.S. listed under the Endangered Species Act because of climate change. The cute relative of the rabbit lives in the mountain West, and researchers say warmer temperatures put it at risk for extinction.

If the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service decides to list the pika, that could prompt new restrictions on the activities that create greenhouse gasPikas, which look like 6-inch potatoes with round mouse ears, live in rocky areas high up in the mountains. They're viciously territorial, and once they lay claim to a home, they hate to move. So, while other species have responded to climate change by migrating upslope, pikas are dying off.

Chris Ray, a researcher at the University of Colorado, wants to know more about why that is. Her research team has been tagging the ears of pikas and placing temperature sensors near their homes. After some preliminary research, she says, climate change is the only obvious explanation.

"Ironically, it looks like global warming might be resulting in pikas freezing to death," Ray says.

Warmer temperatures have reduced the snowpack in the mountains, and pikas rely on snow for shelter from cold wind.

"A thick blanket of snow keeps the ground at, approximately, freezing and keeps it from going below freezing," Ray says. "The air temperature can drop way below freezing. So, a pika under a thick blanket of snow never experiences temperatures far below freezing."

Ray says climate change also could affect pikas in the summer, when they gather cut grass and flowers to make hay. If it's too hot, they might not gather enough food to make it through the winter.

Following The Lead Of The Polar Bears

The pika has the potential to become a huge problem for industries that emit greenhouse gases. While polar bears were listed last year, their habitat is far away from the fossil fuel-burning activities responsible for climate change. The pika lives much closer, and industries are worried that could have a huge effect on the economy.

"We're very concerned about policy developments that could constrain the development of natural gas," says Richard Ranger, senior policy adviser with the American Petroleum Institute. The Rocky Mountain West has experienced a natural-gas drilling boom in recent years.

Ranger says the Endangered Species Act is the wrong mechanism for dealing with climate change. He wants policymakers to do that through laws and regulations that give greater consideration to effects on the economy. He also says environmental groups just haven't made a good case that the pika is facing extinction in the near future.

Could Save Other Species

The Center for Biological Diversity filed the petition to list the pika. Shaye Wolf, a biologist with the group, says the government needs to consider a very long time horizon, because the climate will continue changing well after greenhouse gas emissions are reduced.

"The pika is sort of this alarm bell of impacts and losses [that will] happen if we don't stop global warming," Wolf says. "And the pika can act as an umbrella species to protect other wildlife in these mountain ecosystems." Wolf says that might prevent the government from having to list those species in the future.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is expected to announce a decision on whether to list the pika early in 2010.es

Climate change seen as threat to U.S. security

The changing global climate will pose profound strategic challenges to the United States in coming decades, raising the prospect of military intervention to deal with the effects of violent storms, drought, mass migration and pandemics, military and intelligence analysts say.

Such climate-induced crises could topple governments, feed terrorist movements or destabilize entire regions, say the analysts, experts at the Pentagon and intelligence agencies who for the first time are taking a serious look at the national security implications of climate change.

Recent war games and intelligence studies conclude that over the next 20 to 30 years, vulnerable regions, particularly sub-Saharan Africa, the Middle East and South and Southeast Asia, will face the prospect of food shortages, water crises and catastrophic flooding driven by climate change that could demand an American humanitarian relief or military response.

An exercise at the National Defense University, an educational institute overseen by the military, last December explored the potential impact of a flood in Bangladesh that sent hundreds of thousands of refugees streaming into neighboring India, touching off religious conflict, the spread of contagious diseases and vast damage to infrastructure.

“It gets real complicated real quickly,” said Amanda J. Dory, the deputy assistant secretary of defense for strategy, who is working with a Pentagon group assigned to incorporate climate change into national security strategy planning.

Much of the public and political debate on global warming has focused on finding substitutes for fossil fuels, reducing emissions that contribute to greenhouse gases and furthering negotiations toward an international climate treaty — not potential security challenges.

But a growing number of policy makers say that the world’s rising temperatures, surging seas and melting glaciers are a direct threat to the national interest. If the United States does not lead the world in reducing fossil-fuel consumption and thus emissions of global warming gases, proponents of this view say, a series of global environmental, social, political and possibly military crises loom that the nation will urgently have to address.

This argument could prove a fulcrum for debate in the Senate next month when it takes up climate and energy legislation passed in June by the House.

Lawmakers leading the debate before Congress are only now beginning to make the national security argument for approving the legislation.

Senator John Kerry, the Massachusetts Democrat who is the chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee and a leading advocate for the climate legislation, said he hoped to sway Senate skeptics by pressing that issue to pass a meaningful bill.

Mr. Kerry said he did not know whether he would succeed but that he had spoken with 30 undecided senators on the matter.

He did not identify the senators he had approached, but the list of undecideds includes many from coal and manufacturing states and from the South and Southeast, which will face the sharpest energy price increases from any carbon emissions control program.

“I’ve been making this argument for a number of years,” Mr. Kerry said, “but it has not been a focus because a lot of people had not connected the dots.” He said he had urged President Obama to make the case, too.

Mr. Kerry said the continuing conflict in southern Sudan, which has killed and displaced tens of thousands of people, is a result of drought and expansion of deserts in the north. “That is going to be repeated many times over and on a much larger scale,” he said.

The Department of Defense’s assessment of the security issue came about after prodding by Congress to include climate issues in its strategic plans — specifically, in 2008 budget authorizations by Hillary Rodham Clinton and John W. Warner, then senators. The department’s climate modeling is based on sophisticated Navy and Air Force weather programs and other government climate research programs at NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

The Pentagon and the State Department have studied issues arising from dependence on foreign sources of energy for years but are only now considering the effects of global warming in their long-term planning documents. The Pentagon will include a climate section in the Quadrennial Defense Review, due in February; the State Department will address the issue in its new Quadrennial Diplomacy and Development Review.

“The sense that climate change poses security and geopolitical challenges is central to the thinking of the State Department and the climate office,” said Peter Ogden, chief of staff to Todd Stern, the State Department’s top climate negotiator.

Air quality poorer in Malaysia's Borneo

Air quality in Malaysia's Sarawak state on Borneo island edged towards "very unhealthy" levels of pollution Sunday as wildfires raged in forests and peat-growing land in the state.

The Air Pollutant Index (API) recorded unhealthy levels of between 122 and 197 in four areas on Sunday morning, three in Sarawak and one in southern Johor state, the Environment Department said on its website.

The API considers a score of 101-200 to be unhealthy, while 201-300 is very unhealthy.

According to the Star newspaper, wildfires were raging in more than 1,000 hectares (around 2,500 acres) near the Sarawak-Brunei border, causing thick smoke.

Malaysia was hit with the worst haze levels recorded this year on Wednesday and Thursday, when the API recorded six "unhealthy" areas.

Officials said the haze was caused by hundreds of forest fires that were blazing in the Indonesian provinces of Kalimantan and Sumatra, and in Sarawak.

Farmers in Indonesia and Malaysia's half of Borneo island burn forests every year to clear land for agriculture, sending plumes of smoke across neighbouring countries.

The haze hit its worst level in 1997-1998, costing the Southeast Asian region an estimated nine billion dollars by disrupting air travel and other business activities.

Chemical Industry Lends Support to Reform

In a reversal, chemical industry leaders said last week they are joining environmentalists, public health groups and consumer advocates in seeking more robust federal regulation of chemicals.

For the first time, chemical manufacturers said they are willing to furnish the Environmental Protection Agency with health and exposure data they have gathered that are related to their chemicals, and to allow the agency to determine whether the chemicals are safe to use.

They said tougher government regulation is the best way to reassure consumers about the health impact of various chemicals.

"The fundamental duty of the chemical industry and government that regulates it is to make sure those products are safe," said Cal Dooley, president and chief executive of the American Chemistry Council.

The industry has long insisted that the 1976 federal law governing chemicals, the Toxic Substances Control Act, has been working well.

But a number of critics, including the Government Accountability Office, say the law is weak and does not enable the government to ensure the safety of thousands of chemicals that have been introduced into consumer goods and the environment. This year, the GAO flagged chemical regulation as an urgent priority that Congress and the White House should address.

Dooley and top executives from several companies, including Dow, said the industry wants Congress to give the EPA new authority and resources to ensure the safety of chemicals used in such things as furniture, cellphones and grocery bags.

This is a radical departure from where industry was a few months or a year ago," said Richard Denison, a senior scientist at the Environmental Defense Fund. "We're getting to a point where industry feels it needs to play nicer cop here, if they're going to have a seat at the table and a voice in determining what they see as happening, which is reform."

The industry leaders said they want a strong federal policy because, in its absence, states and even localities are passing laws to restrict certain chemicals, making it nearly impossible for national companies to comply with a patchwork of rules.

"You're seeing more and more activity at the state level in terms of bans of certain chemicals or states trying to institute their own chemical management systems," Dooley said. "It's a reflection of their lack of confidence in the current regulatory system to assess the safety of those chemicals."

Under current laws, the government has little or no information about the health hazards or risks of most of the 80,000 chemicals on the U.S. market today.

When the Toxic Substances Control Act was passed, it exempted from regulation about 62,000 chemicals already in commercial use. Chemicals developed after the law's passage did not have to be tested for safety. Instead, companies were asked to report information on the health effects of their compounds, and the government would decide whether additional tests were needed.

In more than 30 years, the EPA has required additional studies for about 200 chemicals. The statute has made banning or restricting chemicals extremely difficult, and the EPA has banned just five chemicals since 1976.

Under the law, the government cannot act unless a chemical poses a health threat. However, the EPA cannot force companies to provide the kind of information that would show a health risk.

The hurdles are so high that the agency has been unable to ban asbestos, widely acknowledged as a likely carcinogen and barred in more than 30 countries. Instead, the EPA relies on the industry to cease voluntarily production of suspect chemicals.

Sen. Frank Lautenberg (D-N.J.) plans to reintroduce a bill in September that would overhaul U.S. chemical regulation. It would require the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to use bio-monitoring studies to identify industrial chemicals that have become so common that they show up in the blood of newborn babies, then decide whether those chemicals should be restricted or banned. A study by the nonprofit Environmental Working Group found an average of 200 industrial chemicals in the umbilical cords of newborns.

The bill, known as the Kid-Safe Chemical Act, would require chemical manufacturers to provide health and safety information on chemicals and prove that they do not pose an unacceptable health risk before they could be used in products.

Dooley said the chemical trade group's declaring support for reform improves the chances that Lautenberg's bill will advance in Congress this session.

"If you can find greater alignment between environmental, consumer groups and industry, that can have an influence on Congressional scheduling of legislation to reform the law," Dooley said

Carbon Nanomaterials: Fine for Fly Food, Bad for Fly Coating

A fruit fly walked into a test tube, got coated in carbon black, and lost its ability to climb. Sound like the set up for some bad science-based joke? Nope, it's the premise of a preliminary safety test for carbon nanoparticles.

Nanotechnology—whether multiwalled carbon nanotubes, buckyballs or nanosize particles of silver—has barely begun to make its way into everyday products. But, in an effort to stave off the kind of after-the-fact bad news that has plagued introduced materials ranging from asbestos to bisphenol A (BPA), scientists are preemptively testing the potentially ill effects of the tiny molecules and even atoms engineered at the scale of one billionth of a meter or smaller.

So biologist David Rand of Brown University and his colleague set out to see what impact four types of carbon nanoparticles—buckyballs (fullerene C60), carbon black as well as single-walled and multiwalled carbon nanotubes—had on larval and adult fruit flies (Drosophila melanogaster).

By mixing the different carbon nanoparticles into fruit fly food—small enough to be ingested by larval mouths as tiny as 50 micrometers wide—the scientists delivered a dose of as much as 1,000 micrograms per gram of food without any ill effect on the young insects. Some of the carbon nanoparticles ended up discoloring portions of the subsequent adult flies (see picture), proving it was ingested in quantity but without ill effect, and those adults were able to breed normally in turn.

But carbon black and single-walled nanotubes were not so kind to adult fruit flies exposed in test tubes to layers of the fine nanoparticles in powder form. These quickly engulfed the flies and could not be cleaned off by normal grooming behavior, killing them within six hours. These extrafine nanoparticles also made it impossible for the flies to climb the walls of test tubes—a requisite ability for the average fruit fly—perhaps by blocking or interfering with the foot pads or fluids that enable this feat, the scientists speculate.

Further, flies exposed to lower doses that did not kill them spread the tiny particles to an uncontaminated adjacent test tube, and even to other flies. "Such transport and redeposition may bring nanoparticles into contact with human or environmental receptors that might not otherwise be exposed," the researchers wrote in the upcoming August 15 Environmental Science & Technology. "In these scenarios, we expect nanoparticle–insect adhesion and transport similar to microbial transport by flies [that] act as disease vectors."

It remains unclear what the impact of such human exposure might be, although some studies have suggested breathing some nanoparticles might have health impacts similar to asbestos, which is a carcinogen. If that's the case, beware of flies bearing nanotubes