Rivers of the World Are in a Decline Mode

WASHINGTON – The flow of water in the world’s largest rivers has declined over the past half-century, with significant changes found in about a third of the big rivers. An analysis of 925 major rivers from 1948 to 2004 showed an overall decline in total discharge.

The reduction in inflow to the Pacific Ocean alone was about equal to shutting off the Mississippi River, according to the new study appearing in the May 15 edition of the American Meteorological Society’s Journal of Climate.

The only area showing a significant increase in flow was the Arctic, where warming conditions are increasing the snow and ice melt, said researchers led by Aiguo Dai of the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo.

“Freshwater resources will likely decline in the coming decades over many densely populated areas at mid- to low latitudes, largely due to climate changes, Dai said. “Rapid disappearing mountain glaciers in the Tibetan plateau and other places will make matters worse.”

Added co-author Kevin Trenberth, “As climate change inevitably continues in coming decades, we are likely to see greater impacts on many rivers and water resources that society has come to rely on.”

While Dai cited climate change as a major factor in the changes, the paper noted that other factors are also involved, including dams and the diversion of water for agriculture and industry.

Nonetheless, he said, “long-term changes in streamflow should be a major concern under global warming.”

Indeed, the researchers wrote that “for many of the world’s large rivers the effects of human activities on yearly streamflow are likely small compared with that of climate variations during 1948-2004.”

“This is an important paper with new findings that are relevant to the health of river ecosystems and the people who live near or rely upon rivers to meet water needs,” said Margaret A. Palmer, director of the Chesapeake Biological Laboratory of the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science.

“What is important from this study is these authors show that these decreases are due to a changing climate, not human activities like extractions or dam building, yet these changes will have impacts on humans and ecosystems because many of these regions have large populations and drought-stressed ecosystems,” said Palmer, who was not part of the research team.

Among the rivers showing declines in flow, several serve large populations. These include the Yellow River in northern China, the Ganges in India, the Niger in West Africa and the Colorado in the southwestern United States.

On the other hand, areas with rising streamflow near the Arctic Ocean tend to have small populations.

There was considerable year-to-year variation in the flow of many rivers, but the overall trend over the period showed annual freshwater discharge into the Pacific Ocean fell by about 6 percent, or 526 cubic kilometers of water. That’s close to the 552-cubic kilometer average annual flow of the Mississippi, the researchers reported.

The annual flow into the Indian Ocean dropped by about 3 percent, or 140 cubic kilometers. In contrast, annual river discharge into the Arctic Ocean rose about 10 percent, or 460 cubic kilometers. There was little change in inflow to the Atlantic Ocean, where increases in the Mississippi and Parana rivers were balanced out by decreases in the Amazon River.

A cubic kilometer is a cube one kilometer on each side. A kilometer is about six-tenths of a mile.

Discharge of river water into the oceans deposits sediment near the river mouth and also affects worldwide ocean circulation patterns, which are driven by variations in water temperature and salinity.

In the United States, the flow of the Mississippi River increased by 22 percent over the period because of increased precipitation across the Midwest. On the other hand, the Columbia River’s flow declined by about 14 percent, mainly because of reduced precipitation and higher water usage.

Major rivers showing declines in flow included the Amazon, Congo, Changjiang (Yangtze), Mekong, Ganges, Irrawaddy, Amur, Mackenzie, Xijiang, Columbia and Niger.

Declines in the Niger River in the 1970s and 1980s in particular reflected the Sahel Drought, the paper said. In addition, the periodic El Nino cooling of sea surface waters in the tropical Pacific led to lower flows in the Amazon and higher ones in the Mississippi when the phenomenon was in effect.

Ice bridge holding Antarctic ice shelf cracks up

OSLO – An ice bridge which had apparently held a vast Antarctic ice shelf in place during recorded history shattered on Saturday and could herald a wider collapse linked to global warming, a leading scientist said.

“It’s amazing how the ice has ruptured. Two days ago it was intact,” David Vaughan, a glaciologist with the British Antarctic Survey, told Reuters of a satellite image of the Wilkins Ice Shelf on the Antarctic Peninsula.

The satellite picture, from the European Space Agency (ESA), showed that a 40 km (25 mile) long strip of ice believed to pin the Wilkins Ice Shelf in place had splintered at its narrowest point, about 500 meters wide.

“We’ve waited a long time to see this,” he said.

The Wilkins, now the size of Jamaica or the U.S. state of Connecticut, is one of 10 shelves to have shrunk or collapsed in recent years on the Antarctic Peninsula, where temperatures have risen in recent decades apparently because of global warming.

The ESA picture showed a jumble of huge flat-topped icebergs in the sea where the ice bridge had been on Friday, pinning the Wilkins to the coast and running northwest to Charcot Island.

“Charcot Island will be a real island for the first time in history,” Vaughan said.

Vaughan, who landed on the flat-topped ice bridge on the Wilkins in January in a ski-equipped plane with other scientists and two Reuters reporters, said change in Antarctica was rarely so dramatic. It was the first — and last — visit to the area.

The loss of the ice bridge, jutting about 20 meters out of the water and which was almost 100 km wide in 1950, may now allow ocean currents to wash away far more of the Wilkins shelf.

“My feeling is that we will lose more of the ice, but there will be a remnant to the south,” said Vaughan. Ice shelves float on the water, formed by ice spilling off Antarctica, and can be hundreds of meters thick.

Nine other shelves have receded or collapsed around the Antarctic Peninsula in the past 50 years, often abruptly like the Larsen A in 1995 or the Larsen B in 2002 further north.

DISAPPEAR FROM MAP

Cores of sediments on the seabed indicate that some of these ice shelves had been in place for at least 10,000 years. Vaughan said an ice shelf would take many hundreds of years to form.

In January, the remaining ice bridge had been surrounded by icebergs the size of shopping malls, many of them trapped in sea ice. A few seals were visible lolling on sea ice in the low Antarctic sunshine.

On that visit, Vaughan put up a GPS satellite monitoring device and predicted the ice bridge would break within weeks. The plane left quickly, in case the ice was unstable on a part of the world about to disappear from the map.

Temperatures on the Antarctic Peninsula have risen by up to about 3 Celsius (5.4 Fahrenheit) in the past 50 years, the fastest rate of warming in the Southern Hemisphere.

“We believe the warming on the Antarctic Peninsula is related to global climate change, though the links are not entirely clear,” Vaughan said. Antarctica’s response to warming will go a long way to deciding the pace of global sea level rise.

About 175 nations have been meeting in Bonn, Germany, since March 29 as part of a push to agree by the end of 2009 a new U.N. treaty to combat climate change. The talks end on April 8.

The loss of ice shelves does not affect sea levels — floating ice contracts as it melts and so does not raise ocean levels. But their loss can allow glaciers on land to slide more rapidly toward the sea, adding water to the oceans.

The Wilkins does not have much ice pent up behind it. But bigger ice shelves to the south on the frozen continent, where no major warming has been detected, hold back far more ice.

Eating Less Salt Can Have Real Health Benefits

Over the years, Americans have become inured to salt. Most people have no idea how much salt they consume – on average, about 9 to 12 g (or 3,600 to 4,800 mg of sodium) per person per day, according to the American Heart Association (AHA). That’s twice the amount recommended by the government.

In the past four decades, Americans’ salt consumption has risen 50%, mostly as a result of eating more processed foods and more food prepared in restaurants. “Over time, we have adapted our taste buds and adapted our bodies to crave much, much higher levels of salt than we require to function,” says Dr. Kirsten Bibbins-Domingo, an epidemiologist at the University of California, San Francisco. (See the top 10 food trends of 2008.)

Some salt is crucial for good health, of course – to regulate blood pressure and assist with muscle and nerve function – but too much (that is, at the levels we currently consume) can lead to hypertension, heart disease and stroke. If Americans halved their salt intake, as many as 150,000 premature deaths could be prevented each year, according to the American Medical Association. And new research presented March 11 by Bibbins-Domingo at the AHA’s annual conference shows that even small reductions – as little as 1 g of salt per day – could have dramatic effects, saving 200,000 lives over the course of a decade.

Using a sophisticated computer model to analyze trends in heart disease over time among U.S. adults, Bibbins-Domingo and colleagues discovered that incremental population-wide reductions could drastically improve public health. Cutting out just 1 g of salt (or 40 mg of sodium) per person per day could prevent 30,000 cases of coronary heart disease across the U.S. population by 2019. Reducing consumption by half – a more sizable 6 grams – could prevent 1.4 million cases of heart disease during that same period. (See the top 10 medical breakthroughs of 2008.)

While eating less salt would improve the health of the population across the board, researchers found that the benefits would be greatest for African Americans and women. As a group, African Americans tend to have higher blood pressure than the general population, and “many studies suggest that they may be more sensitive to salt,” Bibbins-Domingo says. Her analysis found that a reduction of 3 g of salt per day would reduce heart attacks 8% on average; among African Americans, that rate would drop 10%. A similar result was found in women, whose stroke risk dropped 8% with a 3-g reduction in salt intake; in men, the risk fell 5%.

The numbers certainly offer compelling incentives to cut salt consumption, but that’s no easy task. You can put down the salt shaker and cut back on obviously salty snacks, but there’s still so much sodium packed into processed foods that trying to extract it from your diet is a tricky business. “It’s so pervasive in an average U.S. diet that it’s really hard to tell people, ‘You have to avoid salt,’ ” says Bibbins-Domingo.

And there is salt hiding in places you wouldn’t think to look. According to a sodium chart from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, a single slice of commercially made whole-wheat bread has 148 mg of sodium; white bread has 170 mg. Cheerios contains 213 mg of sodium per cup; Total Raisin Bran, 239 mg. And then there are the big offenders: processed soups and sauces. Chicken noodle soup, for example, even after it has been diluted with water during preparation, has a whopping 1,106 mg of sodium per cup. “I think people don’t have a clue,” says Bibbins-Domingo. “The recommended daily amount of salt is about a teaspoon,” she says. “It’s easy to add that much if you’re just adding salt,” let alone all of the salt that’s in food before we break out the shaker. (See pictures of what makes you eat more food.)

If you’re dining out, all bets are off. According to the British organization Consensus Action on Salt in Health, a three-course meal in a restaurant can contain more than 15 g of salt, almost three times the recommended daily amount.

Bibbins-Domingo says it’s especially tough for families with limited income, who tend to rely more on processed or packaged foods and canned fruits and vegetables rather than fresh foods. Patients tell her they’ve cut salted nuts, potato chips and pretzels from their diet and started eating more soup instead. “You realize that they’re actually consuming more salt in their attempt to make healthy choices,” she says.

Any large-scale success in salt-intake reduction would have to involve policymakers and the food industry, say public-health experts. “If you could reduce blood pressure by just a few points, you could reduce hundreds of thousands of deaths,” says Dr. Thomas Frieden, commissioner of New York City’s Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, who recently announced a national campaign to diminish salt intake 20% in the next five years and 40% in the next decade. Frieden, who has in the past targeted trans fats and led the charge to require chain restaurants to list calorie content on menus, has evoked less animosity from the food and restaurant industries with his desalinization efforts than with his previous initiatives.

“[Frieden] is looking for voluntary guidelines. It’s a national movement, and he’s working closely with the industry on developing these re-education guidelines,” says Rob Bookman, an attorney for the New York State Restaurant Association, but he adds wryly, “I don’t know if it’s one big happy family.” (See nine kid foods to avoid.)

Frieden points to a successful salt-reduction campaign in the U.K. as a kind of proof of principle. Several years after the British government launched an aggressive national campaign, which included voluntary reductions in salt content by food manufacturers, British citizens had reduced their annual sodium consumption roughly 10%. “If you look at what happened in the U.K., at first the industry was very concerned,” Frieden says. “But after a few years, they saw that they could drop their salt content 20% to 30% [without losing customers].”

For Bibbins-Domingo, the issue is less about mandating food production or proscribing salt consumption than enabling people to make better choices. “This is actually something that we can achieve with very little cost to our personal liberties,” she says.

But Frieden adheres to a harder line. When asked whether the government should be allowed to influence how or what we eat, he responded with a pointed rhetorical question: “Should industry be allowed to serve us food that makes us sick and kills us?”

Something rare…Bear quintuplets!

Tom Sears

Black bears typically have two cubs; rarely, one or three. In 2007, in northern New Hampshire , a black bear Sow gave birth to five healthy young. There were two or three reports of sows with as many as four cubs, but five was, and is, extraordinary. I learned of them shortly after they emerged from their den and set myself a goal of photographing all five cubs with their mom – no matter how much time and effort was involved. I knew the trail they followed on a fairly regular basis, usually shortly before dark. After spending nearly four hours a day, seven days a week, for six weeks, I had that once-in-a-lifetime opportunity and photographed them. I used the equivalent of a very fast film speed on my digital camera. The print is properly focused and well exposed, with all six bears posing as if they were in a studio for a family portrait.

I stayed in touch with other people who saw the bears during the summer and into the fall hunting season. All six bears continued to thrive. As time for hibernation approached, I found still more folks who had seen them, and everything remained OK. I stayed away from the bears as I was concerned that they might become habituated to me, or to people in general, as approachable friends. This could be dangerous for both man and animal.

After Halloween I received no further reports and could only hope the bears survived until they hibernated.

This spring, before the snow disappeared, all six bears came out of their den and wandered the same familiar territory they trekked in the spring of 2007.

I saw them before mid-April and dreamed nightly of taking another family portrait, an improbable second once-in-a-lifetime photograph

On April 25, 2008 I achieved my dream.

When something as magical as this happens between man and animal, Native Americans say, ‘We have walked together in the shadow of a rainbow.’

And so it is with humility and great pleasure that I share these photos with you.

UN urges world to tackle mercury health threat

The United Nations Environment Program (UNEP) on Sunday urged environment ministers meeting this week in Nairobi to adopt a strategy to curb the use of the highly toxic metal mercury.

“The world’s environment ministers meeting in Nairobi, Kenya this week can take a landmark decision to lift a global health threat from the lives of hundreds of millions of people,” UNEP Executive Director Achim Steiner said in a statement.

More than 100 environment ministers from around the world are due to gather in Nairobi on February 16-20 for UNEP’s annual governing council meeting.

Mercury is a heavy metal whose highly toxic compounds — propagated notably by the production of coal, certain kinds of plastics and improper disposal of fluorescent light bulbs — poison millions of people worldwide.

Fish-eating is the first source of exposure among humans. The effects of mercury ingestion include damage to the brain, kidney and lungs.

Steiner said a policy framework drafted after seven years of extensive research would be submitted to the ministers.

“It covers reducing demand in products and processes — such as high intensity discharge vehicle lamps and the chlor-alkali industry — and mercury in international trade,” he said.

“Other elements include reducing emissions to the atmosphere and cleaning contaminated sites,” Steiner added.

Of the around 6,000 tonnes of mercury entering the environment annually, some 2,000 tonnes comes from power stations and coal fires in homes, he said.

“In the atmosphere or released down river systems, the toxin can travel hundreds and thousands of miles,” the statement said.

As climate change melts the Arctic, mercury trapped in the ice and sediments is being re-released back into the oceans and into the food chain, UNEP said.

The statement said that UNEP and governments had identified a wide range of products and processes offering cost-effective and safe alternatives.

“A clear and unequivocal vision of a low mercury future needs to be set. This will trigger innovation and an ever greater array of cost effective alternatives,” Steiner said

Climate change even worse than predicted: expert

It seems the dire warnings about the oncoming devastation wrought by global warming were not dire enough, a top climate scientist warned Saturday.

It has been just over a year since the Nobel-winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) published a landmark report warning of rising sea levels, expanding deserts, more intense storms and the extinction of up to 30 percent of plant and animal species.

But recent climate studies suggest that report significantly underestimates the potential severity of global warming over the next 100 years, a senior member of the panel warned.

“We now have data showing that from 2000 to 2007, greenhouse gas emissions increased far more rapidly than we expected,” said Chris Field, who was a coordinating lead author of the report.

This is “primarily because developing countries like China and India saw a huge upsurge in electric power generation, almost all of it based on coal,” Field said in a statement ahead of a presentation to the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Without decisive action to slow global warming, higher temperatures could ignite tropical forests and thaw the Arctic tundra, potentially releasing billions of tons of carbon dioxide that has been stored for thousands of years.

That could raise temperatures even more and create “a vicious cycle that could spiral out of control by the end of the century.”

“We don’t want to cross a critical threshold where this massive release of carbon starts to run on autopilot,” said Field, a professor of biology and of environmental Earth system science at Stanford University.

The amount of carbon that could be released is staggering.

Since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution and estimated 350 billions tons of carbon dioxide (CO2) has been released through the burning of fossil fuels.

The new estimate of the amount of carbon stored in the Arctic’s permafrost soils is around 1,000 billion tons. And the Arctic is warming faster than any other part of the globe.

Several recent climate models have estimated that the loss of tropical rainforests to wildfires, deforestation and other causes could increase the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere from 10 to 100 parts per million by the end of the century.

The current level is about 380 parts per million.

“Tropical forests are essentially inflammable,” Field said. “You couldn’t get a fire to burn there if you tried. But if they dry out just a little bit, the result can be very large and destructive wildfires.”

Recent studies have also shown that global warming is reducing the ocean’s ability to store carbon by altering wind patterns in the Southern Ocean.

Ancient Fossil Reveals a Bus Sized Snake in Columbia

NEW YORK – Never mind the 40-foot snake that menaced Jennifer Lopez in the 1997 movie “Anaconda.” Not even Hollywood could match a new discovery from the ancient world.

Fossils from northeastern Colombia reveal the biggest snake ever discovered: a behemoth that stretched 42 to 45 feet long, reaching more than 2,500 pounds.

“This thing weighs more than a bison and is longer than a city bus,” enthused snake expert Jack Conrad of the American Museum of Natural History in New York, who was familiar with the find.

“It could easily eat something the size of a cow. A human would just be toast immediately.”

“If it tried to enter my office to eat me, it would have a hard time squeezing through the door,” reckoned paleontologist Jason Head of the University of Toronto Missisauga.

Actually, the beast probably munched on ancient relatives of crocodiles in its rainforest home some 58 million to 60 million years ago, he said.

Head is senior author of a report on the find in Thursday’s issue of the journal Nature.

The discoverers of the snake named it Titanoboa cerrejonensis (“ty-TAN-o-BO-ah sare-ah-HONE-en-siss”). That means “titanic boa from Cerrejon,” the region where it was found.

While related to modern boa constrictors, it behaved more like an anaconda and spent almost all its time in the water, Head said. It could slither on land as well as swim.

Conrad, who wasn’t involved in the discovery, called the find “just unbelievable…. It mocks your preconceptions about how big a snake can get.”

Titanoboa breaks the record for snake length by about 11 feet, surpassing a creature that lived about 40 million years ago in Egypt, Head said. Among living snake species, the record holder is an individual python measured at about 30 feet long, which is some 12 to 15 feet shorter than typical Titanoboas, said study co-author Jonathan Bloch.

The beast was revealed in early 2007 at the University of Florida’s Florida Museum of Natural History in Gainesville. Bones collected at a huge open-pit coal mine in Colombia were being unpacked, said Bloch, the museum’s curator of vertebrate paleontology.

Graduate students unwrapping the fossils “realized they were looking at the bones of a snake. Not only a snake, but a really big snake.”

So they quickly consulted the skeleton of a 17-foot anaconda for comparison. A backbone from that creature is about the size of a silver dollar, Bloch said, while a backbone from Titanoboa is “the size of a large Florida grapefruit.”

So far the scientists have found about 180 fossils of backbone and ribs that came from about two dozen individual snakes, and now they hope to go back to Colombia to find parts of the skull, Bloch said.

Titanoboa’s size gives clues about its environment. A snake’s size is related to how warm its environment is. The fossils suggest equatorial temperatures in its day were significantly warmer than they are now, during a time when the world as a whole was warmer. So equatorial temperatures apparently rose along with the global levels, in contrast to the competing hypothesis that they would not go up much, Head noted.

“It’s a leap” to apply the conditions of the past to modern climate change, Head said. But given that, the finding still has “some potentially scary implications for what we’re doing to the climate today,” he said.

The finding suggest the equatorial regions will warm up along with the planet, he said.

“We won’t have giant snakes, however, because we are removing most of their habitats by development and deforestation” in equatorial regions, he said.

Report: Some climate damage already irreversible

By Randolph E. Schmid
AP Science Writer / January 26, 2009

WASHINGTON (AP) — Many damaging effects of climate change are already basically irreversible, researchers declared Monday, warning that even if carbon emissions can somehow be halted temperatures around the globe will remain high until at least the year 3000.

“People have imagined that if we stopped emitting carbon dioxide the climate would go back to normal in 100 years, 200 years; that’s not true,” climate researcher Susan Solomon said in a teleconference.

Solomon, of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Earth System Research Laboratory in Boulder, Colo., is lead author of an international team’s paper reporting irreversible damage from climate change, being published in Tuesday’s edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

She defines “irreversible” as change that would remain for 1,000 years even if humans stopped adding carbon to the atmosphere immediately.

The findings were announced as President Barack Obama ordered reviews that could lead to greater fuel efficiency and cleaner air, saying the Earth’s future depends on cutting air pollution.

Said Solomon, “Climate change is slow, but it is unstoppable” — all the more reason to act quickly, so the long-term situation doesn’t get even worse.

Alan Robock, of the Center for Environmental Prediction at Rutgers University, agreed with the report’s assessment.

“It’s not like air pollution where if we turn off a smokestack, in a few days the air is clear,” said Robock, who was not part of Solomon’s research team. “It means we have to try even harder to reduce emissions,” he said in a telephone interview.

Solomon’s report “is quite important, not alarmist, and very important for the current debates on climate policy,” added Jonathan Overpeck, a climate researcher at the University of Arizona.

In her paper Solomon, a leader of the International Panel on Climate Change and one of the world’s best known researchers on the subject, noted that temperatures around the globe have risen and changes in rainfall patterns have been observed in areas around the Mediterranean, southern Africa and southwestern North America.

Warmer climate also is causing expansion of the ocean, and that is expected to increase with the melting of ice on Greenland and Antarctica, the researchers said.

“I don’t think that the very long time scale of the persistence of these effects has been understood,” Solomon said.

Global warming has been slowed by the ocean, Solomon said, because water absorbs a lot of energy to warm up. But that good effect will not only wane over time, the ocean will help keep the planet warmer by giving off its accumulated heat to the air.

Climate change has been driven by gases in the atmosphere that trap heat from solar radiation and raise the planet’s temperature — the “greenhouse effect.” Carbon dioxide has been the most important of those gases because it remains in the air for hundreds of years. While other gases are responsible for nearly half of the warming, they degrade more rapidly, Solomon said

Before the industrial revolution the air contained about 280 parts per million of carbon dioxide. That has risen to 385 ppm today, and politicians and scientists have debated at what level it could be stabilized.

Solomon’s paper concludes that if CO2 is allowed to peak at 450-600 parts per million, the results would include persistent decreases in dry-season rainfall that are comparable to the 1930s North American Dust Bowl in zones including southern Europe, northern Africa, southwestern North America, southern Africa and western Australia.

Gerald Meehl, a senior scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, said, “The real concern is that the longer we wait to do something, the higher the level of irreversible climate change to which we’ll have to adapt.” Meehl was not part of Solomon’s research team.

While scientists have been aware of the long-term aspects of climate change, the new report highlights and provides more specifics on them, said Kevin Trenberth, head of climate analysis at the center.

“This aspect is one that is poorly appreciated by policymakers and the general public and it is real,” said Trenberth, who was not part of the research group.

“The temperature changes and the sea level changes are, if anything underestimated and quite conservative, especially for sea level,” he said.

While he agreed that the rainfall changes mentioned in the paper are under way, Trenberth disagreed with some details of that part of the report.

“Even so, there would be changes in snow (to rain), snow pack and water resources, and irreversible consequences even if not quite the way the authors describe,” he said. “The policy relevance is clear: We need to act sooner … because by the time the public and policymakers really realize the changes are here it is far too late to do anything about it. In fact, as the authors point out, it is already too late for some effects.”

Co-authors of the paper were Gian-Kaspar Plattner and Reto Knutti of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich and Pierre Friedlingstein of the National Institute for Scientific Research, Gif sur Yvette, France.

The research was supported by the Office of Science at the Department of Energy.

Malaysia uses satellite to fight illegal logging: report

KUALA LUMPUR (AFP) – Malaysia is zooming in on forests with a satellite in order to fight illegal logging which its government says is harming the major timber exporting country, a report said Sunday.

Darus Ahmad, deputy director-general with the Malaysian Remote Sensing Agency, said the “eye in the sky” programme was put in place in October.

“There is always criticisms that our forests are diminishing,” he was quoted as saying by the New Sunday Times newspaper.

Darus said that using satellite images the authorities can establish a national forest inventory of the country’s total area of forest cover.

They can then check whether logging in a particular area is legal or not, he said, adding that the facility was currently available in the western peninsular part of Malaysia only.

Darus also said the system can be used to prevent air pollution by detecting forest fires and illegal land clearing.

In the 1990s alone, Malaysia lost more than 13 percent of its forests, with much of the deforestation on the island of Borneo, which it shares with Indonesia and Brunei.

The World Wildlife Fund at the time estimated that illegally logged trees made up about one third of Malaysia’s timber exports.

Prime Minister Abdullah Ahmad Badawi last year pledged not to indiscriminately approve logging licences, amid mounting concern that clearances are threatening endangered species and tribal communities.

Deputy Prime Minister Najib Razak, who also heads the National Forestry Council, later warned that illegal logging could undermine Malaysia.

“It can jeopardise our efforts to preserve biodiversity, flora and fauna and have an impact on global warming. At the international level, illegal logging portrays a negative image of our country,” he said.

“It can harm our national economy as the timber industry produces 23 billion ringgit (6.8 billion dollars) worth of wood-based products a year,” he added.

The European Union market accounts for about 30 percent of Malaysia’s annual timber exports.

World’s highest drug levels entering India stream

PATANCHERU, India – When researchers analyzed vials of treated wastewater taken from a plant where about 90 Indian drug factories dump their residues, they were shocked. Enough of a single, powerful antibiotic was being spewed into one stream each day to treat every person in a city of 90,000.

And it wasn’t just ciprofloxacin being detected. The supposedly cleaned water was a floating medicine cabinet — a soup of 21 different active pharmaceutical ingredients, used in generics for treatment of hypertension, heart disease, chronic liver ailments, depression, gonorrhea, ulcers and other ailments. Half of the drugs measured at the highest levels of pharmaceuticals ever detected in the environment, researchers say.

Those Indian factories produce drugs for much of the world, including many Americans. The result: Some of India’s poor are unwittingly consuming an array of chemicals that may be harmful, and could lead to the proliferation of drug-resistant bacteria.

“If you take a bath there, then you have all the antibiotics you need for treatment,” said chemist Klaus Kuemmerer at the University of Freiburg Medical Center in Germany, an expert on drug resistance in the environment who did not participate in the research. “If you just swallow a few gasps of water, you’re treated for everything. The question is for how long?”

Last year, The Associated Press reported that trace concentrations of pharmaceuticals had been found in drinking water provided to at least 46 million Americans. But the wastewater downstream from the Indian plants contained 150 times the highest levels detected in the U.S.

At first, Joakim Larsson, an environmental scientist at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden, questioned whether 100 pounds a day of ciprofloxacin could really be running into the stream. The researcher was so baffled by the unprecedented results he sent the samples to a second lab for independent analysis.

When those reports came back with similarly record-high levels, Larsson knew he was looking at a potentially serious situation. After all, some villagers fish in the stream’s tributaries, while others drink from wells nearby. Livestock also depend on these watering holes.

Some locals long believed drugs were seeping into their drinking water, and new data from Larsson’s study presented at a U.S. scientific conference in November confirmed their suspicions. Ciprofloxacin, the antibiotic, and the popular antihistamine cetirizine had the highest levels in the wells of six villages tested. Both drugs measured far below a human dose, but the results were still alarming.

“We don’t have any other source, so we’re drinking it,” said R. Durgamma, a mother of four, sitting on the steps of her crude mud home in a bright flowered sari a few miles downstream from the treatment plant. High drug concentrations were recently found in her well water. “When the local leaders come, we offer them water and they won’t take it.”

Pharmaceutical contamination is an emerging concern worldwide. In its series of articles, AP documented the commonplace presence of minute concentrations of pharmaceuticals in U.S. drinking water supplies. The AP also found that trace concentrations of pharmaceuticals were almost ubiquitous in rivers, lakes and streams.

The medicines are excreted without being fully metabolized by people who take them, while hospitals and long-term care facilities annually flush millions of pounds of unused pills down the drain. Until Larsson’s research, there had been widespread consensus among researchers that drug makers were not a source.

The consequences of the India studies are worrisome.

As the AP reported last year, researchers are finding that human cells fail to grow normally in the laboratory when exposed to trace concentrations of certain pharmaceuticals. Some waterborne drugs also promote antibiotic-resistant germs, especially when — as in India — they are mixed with bacteria in human sewage. Even extremely diluted concentrations of drug residues harm the reproductive systems of fish, frogs and other aquatic species in the wild.

In the India research, tadpoles exposed to water from the treatment plant that had been diluted 500 times were nonetheless 40 percent smaller than those growing in clean water.

The discovery of this contamination raises two key issues for researchers and policy makers: the amount of pollution and its source. Experts say one of the biggest concerns for humans is whether the discharge from the wastewater treatment facility is spawning drug resistance.

“Not only is there the danger of antibiotic-resistant bacteria evolving; the entire biological food web could be affected,” said Stan Cox, senior scientist at the Land Institute, a nonprofit agriculture research center in Salina, Kan. Cox has studied and written about pharmaceutical pollution in Patancheru. “If Cipro is so widespread, it is likely that other drugs are out in the environment and getting into people’s bodies.”

Before Larsson’s team tested the water at Patancheru Enviro Tech Ltd. plant, researchers largely attributed the source of drugs in water to their use, rather than their manufacture.

In the U.S., the EPA says there are “well defined and controlled” limits to the amount of pharmaceutical waste emitted by drug makers.

India’s environmental protections are being met at Patancheru, says Rajeshwar Tiwari, who heads the area’s pollution control board. And while he says regulations have tightened since Larsson’s initial research, screening for pharmaceutical residue at the end of the treatment process is not required.

Factories in the U.S. report on releases of 22 active pharmaceutical ingredients, the AP found by analyzing EPA data. But many more drugs have been discovered in domestic drinking water.

Possibly complicating the situation, Larsson’s team also found high drug concentration levels in lakes upstream from the treatment plant, indicating potential illegal dumping — an issue both Indian pollution officials and the drug industry acknowledge has been a past problem, but one they say is practiced much less now.

In addition, before Larsson’s study detected such large concentrations of ciprofloxacin and other drugs in the treated wastewater, levels of pharmaceuticals detected in the environment and drinking water worldwide were minute, well below a human dose.

“I’ll tell you, I’ve never seen concentrations this high before. And they definitely … are having some biological impact, at least in the effluent,” said Dan Schlenk, an ecotoxicologist from the University of California, Riverside, who was not involved in the India research.

And even though the levels recently found in Indian village wells were much lower than the wastewater readings, someone drinking regularly from the worst-affected reservoirs would receive more than two full doses of an antihistamine in a year.

“Who has a responsibility for a polluted environment when the Third World produces drugs for our well being?” Larsson asked scientists at a recent environmental research conference.

M. Narayana Reddy, president of India’s Bulk Drug Manufacturers Association, disputes Larsson’s initial results: “I have challenged it,” he said. “It is the wrong information provided by some research person.”

Reddy acknowledged the region is polluted
, but said that the contamination came from untreated human excrement and past industry abuses. He and pollution control officials also say villagers are supposed to drink clean water piped in from the city or hauled in by tankers — water a court ordered industry to provide. But locals complain of insufficient supplies and some say they are forced to use wells.

Larsson’s research has created a stir among environmental experts, and his findings are widely accepted in the scientific community.

“That’s really quite an incredible and disturbing level,” said Renee Sharp, senior analyst at the Washington-based Environmental Working Group. “It’s absolutely the last thing you would ever want to see when you’re talking about the rise of antibiotic bacterial resistance in the world.”

The more bacteria is exposed to a drug, the more likely that bacteria will mutate in a way that renders the drug ineffective. Such resistant bacteria can then possibly infect others who spread the bugs as they travel. Ciprofloxacin was once considered a powerful antibiotic of last resort, used to treat especially tenacious infections. But in recent years many bacteria have developed resistance to the drug, leaving it significantly less effective.

“We are using these drugs, and the disease is not being cured — there is resistance going on there,” said Dr. A. Kishan Rao, a medical doctor and environmental activist who has treated people for more than 30 years near the drug factories. He says he worries most about the long-term effects on his patients potentially being exposed to constant low levels of drugs. And then there’s the variety, the mixture of drugs that aren’t supposed to interact. No one knows what effects that could cause.

“It’s a global concern,” he said. “European countries and the U.S. are protecting their environment and importing the drugs at the cost of the people in developing countries.”

While the human risks are disconcerting, Sharp said the environmental damage is potentially even worse.

“People might say, ‘Oh sure, that’s just a dirty river in India,’ but we live on a small planet, everything is connected. The water in a river in India could be the rain coming down in your town in a few weeks,” she said.

Patancheru became a hub for largely unregulated chemical and drug factories in the 1980s, creating what one local newspaper has termed an “ecological sacrifice zone” with its waste. Since then, India has become one of the world’s leading exporters of pharmaceuticals, and the U.S. — which spent $1.4 billion on Indian-made drugs in 2007 — is its largest customer.

A spokesman for the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, representing major U.S. drugmakers, said they could not comment about the Indian pollution because the Patancheru plants are making generic drugs and their members are branded. A spokesman for the Generic Pharmaceutical Association said the issues of Indian factory pollution are “not within the scope of the activities” of their group.

Drug factories in the U.S. and Europe have strictly enforced waste treatment processes. At the Patancheru water treatment plant, the process is outdated, with wastewater from the 90 bulk drug makers trucked to the plant and poured into a cistern. Solids are filtered out, then raw sewage is added to biologically break down the chemicals. The wastewater, which has been clarified but is still contaminated, is dumped into the Isakavagu stream that runs into the Nakkavagu and Manjira, and eventually into the Godawari River.

In India, villagers near this treatment plant have a long history of fighting pollution from various industries and allege their air, water and crops have been poisoned for decades by factories making everything from tires to paints and textiles. Some lakes brim with filmy, acrid water that burns the nostrils when inhaled and causes the eyes to tear.

“I’m frustrated. We have told them so many times about this problem, but nobody does anything,” said Syed Bashir Ahmed, 80, casting a makeshift fishing pole while crouched in tall grass along the river bank near the bulk drug factories. “The poor are helpless. What can we do?”