Scientists fear that global warming will bring climatic turbulence, with changes coming in big jumps rather than gradually
Fred Pearce
Wednesday August 30, 2006
The Guardian
Richard Alley's eyes glint as we sit in his office in the University of Pennsylvania discussing how fast global warming could cause sea levels to rise. The scientist sums up the state of knowledge: "We used to think that it would take 10,000 years for melting at the surface of an ice sheet to penetrate down to the bottom. Now we know it doesn't take 10,000 years; it takes 10 seconds."
That quote highlights most vividly why scientists are getting panicky about the sheer speed and violence with which climate change could take hold. They are realising that their old ideas about gradual change - the smooth lines on graphs showing warming and sea level rise and gradually shifting weather patterns - simply do not represent how the world's climate system works.
Dozens of scientists told me the same thing while I was researching my book The Last Generation. Climate change did not happen gradually in the past, and it will not happen that way in the future. Planet Earth does not do gradual change. It does big jumps; it works by tipping points.
The story of research into sea level rise is typical of how perceptions have changed in the past five years. The conventional view - you can still read it in reports from the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change - holds that sea levels will start to rise as a pulse of warming works its way gradually from the surface through the 2km- and 3km-thick ice sheets on Greenland and Antarctica, melting them. The ice is thick and the heat will penetrate only slowly. So we have hundreds, probably thousands, of years to make our retreat to higher ground.
Recent research, however, shows that idea is wholly wrong. Glaciologists forgot about crevasses. What is actually happening is that ice is melting at the surface and forming lakes that drain down into the crevasses. In 10 seconds, the water is at the base of the ice sheet, where it lubricates the join between ice and rock. Then the whole ice sheet starts to float downhill towards the ocean.
"These flows completely change our understanding of the dynamics of ice sheet destruction," says Alley. "Even five years ago, we didn't know about this."
This summer, lakes several kilometres across formed on the Greenland ice sheet, and drained away to the depths. Scientists measured how, within hours of the lakes forming, the vast ice sheets physically rose up, as if floating on water, and slid towards the ocean. That is why Greenland glaciers are flowing faster, and there are more icebergs breaking off into the Atlantic Ocean. That is why average sea level rise has increased from 2mm a year in the early 1990s to more than 3mm a year now.
Soon it could be a great deal more. Jim Hansen of Nasa, George Bush's top climate modeller, predicts that sea level rise will be 10 times faster within a few years, as Greenland destabilises. "Building an ice sheet takes a long time," he says. "But destroying it can be explosively rapid."
Alarmist? No. It has happened before, he says. During the final few centuries of the last ice age, the sea level rose 20 metres in 400 years, an average of 20 times faster than now. These were sudden, violent times. And the melting was caused by tiny wobbles in the Earth's orbit that changed the heat balance of the planet by only a fraction as much as our emissions of greenhouse gases are doing today.
Violent change
There is more evidence of abrupt and violent change, most of it culled from ice cores, lake sediments, tree rings and other natural archives of climate. We now know that the last ice age was not a stable cold era but near-permanent climate change. Towards the end, around 11,000 years ago, average temperatures in parts of the Arctic rose by 16C or more within a decade. Alley believes it happened within a single year, though he says the evidence in the ice cores is not precise enough to prove it.
All this comes as a surprise to us because, in the 10,000 or so years since the end of the last ice age, the climate has been, relatively speaking, stable. We have had warm periods and mini ice ages; but they were little compared with events before.
It is arguable that this rather benign world has been the main reason why our species was able to leave the caves and create the urban, industrial civilisation we enjoy today. Our complex society relies on our being able to plant crops and build cities, knowing that the rains will come and the cities will not be flooded by incoming tides. When that certainty fails, as when Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans last year, even the most sophisticated society is brought to its knees.
But there is a growing fear among scientists that, thanks to man-made climate change, we are about to return to a world of climatic turbulence, where tipping points are constantly crossed. Their research into the workings of the planet's ecosystems suggests why such sudden changes have happened in the past, and are likely again in future.
One driver of fast change in the past has been abrupt movements of carbon between the atmosphere and natural reservoirs such as the rainforests and the oceans. Hundreds of billions of tonnes of carbon dioxide can burp into the atmosphere, apparently at the flick of a switch.
That is why the Met Office's warning that the Amazon rainforest could die by mid-century, releasing its stored carbon from trees and soils into the air, is so worrying. And why we should take serious note when Peter Cox, professor of climate systems at Exeter University, warns that the world's soils, which have been soaking up carbon for centuries, may be close to a tipping beyond which they will release it all again.
Other threats lurk on the horizon. We know that there are trillions of tonnes of methane, a virulent greenhouse gas, trapped in permafrost and in sediments beneath the ocean bed. There are fears this methane may start leaking out as temperatures warm. It seems this happened 55m years ago, when gradual warming of the atmosphere penetrated to the ocean depths and unlocked the methane, which caused a much greater warming that resulted in the extinction of millions of species.
All this suggests that, in one sense, the climate sceptics are right. They say the future is much less certain than the climate models predict. They have a point. We know less than we think. But the sceptics are wrong in concluding that the models have been exaggerating the threat. Far from it. Evidence emerging in the past five years or so suggests the presence of many previously unknown tipping points that could trigger dangerous climate change.
Can we call a halt? Hansen says we have 10 years to turn things round and escape disaster. James Lovelock, author of the Gaia theory, which considers the Earth a self-regulated living being, reckons we are already past the point of no return. I don't buy that. For one thing, there is no single point of no return. We have probably passed some, but not others. The water may be lapping at our ankles, but I am not ready to head for the hills yet. I'm an optimist.
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Source: Michigan State University
Posted: August 23, 2006
Released into the atmosphere most prodigiously with the launching of the industrial age, the toxic element falls back onto Earth, and accumulates particularly in North American wetlands. A Michigan State University researcher working closely with the U.S. Geological Survey finds wildfires, growing more frequent and intense, are unleashing this sequestered mercury at levels up to 15 times greater than originally calculated.
The report, “Wildfires threaten mercury stocks in northern soils,” appears this week in the online edition of Geophysical Research Letters.
“This study makes the point that while peat lands are typically viewed as very wet and stagnant places, they do burn in continental regions, especially late in the season when water tables are depressed,” said Merritt Turetsky, assistant professor of plant biology and fisheries and wildlife at MSU. “When peat lands burn, they can release a huge amount of mercury that overwhelms regional atmospheric emissions. Our study is new in that it looks to the soil record to tell us what happens when peat soil burns, soil that has been like a sponge for mercury for a long time.”
Normal atmospheric conditions naturally carry the mercury emitted from burning fossil fuel and other industry northward, where it eventually settles on land or water surfaces. The cold, wet soils of the boreal forest region in Alaska and northern Canada have been efficient resting places for mercury.
“When we walk across the surface of a peat land, we are standing on many thousands of years of peat accumulation,” Turetsky said. “This type of wetland is actually doing us a service. Peat lands have been storing mercury from the atmosphere since well before and during the Industrial Revolution, locking it in peat where it’s not causing any biological harm, away from the food web.”
In addition to industrial activity, climate change also appears to be disrupting mercury’s cycle. Increasingly, northern wetlands are drying out. Forest fires are burning more frequently, more intensely, and later in the season, which Turetsky believes will make peat lands more vulnerable to fire. In May, Turetsky co-wrote another Geophysical Research Letters paper that documented recent changes in North American fires and suggested that more frequent summer droughts and severe fire weather have increased burn areas.
“We are suggesting that environmental mercury is just like a thermometer. Levels will rise in the atmosphere with climate change, but due to increasing fire activity in the north and not solely due to warming,” said Jennifer Harden, soil scientist at the U.S. Geological Survey and co-author of the study.
In this month’s paper, Turetsky, with co-authors Harden and James Crock of the U.S. Geological Survey; Hans Friedli and Lawrence Radke of the National Center for Atmospheric Research; and Mike Flannigan and Nicholas Payne of the Canadian Forest Service, measured the amount of mercury stored in soils and vegetation of forests and peat lands, then used historical burn areas and emission models to estimate how much of that mercury is released to the atmosphere at a regional scale during fires.
The group has spent more than five years studying prescribed burns in addition to natural fires to measure the influence of burning on terrestrial mercury storage. They also have sampled smoke plumes to measure atmospheric mercury levels as fires blaze.
Their findings indicated that drier conditions in northern regions will cause soil to relinquish its hold on hundreds of years of mercury accumulation, sending that mercury back into the air at levels considerably higher than previously realized.
“We’re talking about mercury that has been relatively harmless, trapped in peat for hundreds of years, rapidly being spewed back into the air,” Turetsky said. “Some of it will fall back onto soils. Some will fall into lakes and streams where it could become toxic in food chains.
“Our findings show us that climate change is complex and will contribute to the pollution of food chains that are very far away from us, in remote regions of the north.”
The research was funded by the U.S. Geological Survey, the National Center of Atmospheric Research (supported by the National Science Foundation), and the Electric Power Research Institute. Turetsky’s May paper in Geophysical Research Letters was funded by NASA. Turetsky’s work also is supported by the MSU Michigan Agricultural Research Station.
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Juan Cole
21/08/2006
Overseas readers who don't watch US-based cable news may not know that there is a news blackout on the 24 hours news stations, which have shown endless hours of useless speculation on a ten year old small town murder case. Why the cable news channels in the US behave in this stupid and lemming-like fashion no doubt has to do with the severe discipline of the advertising market and its dependence on ratings. I.e., news has to generate 20 percent profits, which it cannot do, and so lurid infotainment is substituted. It is also possible that they are deliberately attempting to turn American gray matter into mush so as to ensure that nobody on this continent notices what is really going on around them.
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DemocracyNow and AFP
13th August 2006
AFP Story:
The US government was closely involved in planning Israel's military operations against Lebanon's Hezbollah militia even before the July 12 kidnapping of two Israeli soldiers, a US magazine reported.
Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Seymour Hersh writes in The New Yorker magazine that President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney were convinced that a successful Israeli bombing campaign against Hezbollah could ease Israel's security concerns and also serve as a prototype for a potential US preemptive attack to destroy Iran's nuclear installations.
Citing an unnamed Middle East expert with knowledge of the current thinking of the Israeli and US governments, Hersh said Israel had devised a plan for attacking Hezbollah -- and shared it with Bush administration officials -- well before the July 12 kidnappings.
"When they grabbed the soldiers in early July, that was then a pretext" for Israel's assault on Hezbollah, Hersh said Sunday on CNN television.
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Corvallis, Ore. -- The most severe low-oxygen ocean conditions ever observed on the West Coast of the United States have turned parts of the seafloor off Oregon into a carpet of dead Dungeness crabs and rotting sea worms, a new survey shows. Virtually all of the fish appear to have fled the area.
Scientists, who this week had been looking for signs of the end of this "dead zone," have instead found even more extreme drops in oxygen along the seafloor. This is by far the worst such event since the phenomenon was first identified in 2002, according to researchers at Oregon State University. Levels of dissolved oxygen are approaching zero in some locations.
"We saw a crab graveyard and no fish the entire day," said Jane Lubchenco, the Valley Professor of Marine Biology at OSU. "Thousands and thousands of dead crab and molts were littering the ocean floor, many sea stars were dead, and the fish have either left the area or have died and been washed away.
"Seeing so much carnage on the video screens was shocking and depressing," she said.
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By STACY SHELTON
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Published on: 08/13/06
Skidaway Island — For 20 years, a scientist near Savannah has taken weekly water samples from the same dock, giving him a composite snapshot of the estuary's health.
Pieced together, the view goes from good to fair, and getting worse. Peter Verity's data tells him the estuary — where rivers wrestle with the sea — is in trouble.
Dissolved oxygen, the breath of life for shrimp, blue crabs, oysters and fish, is declining at an alarming rate. Within 10 years, Verity, a professor at the Skidaway Institute of Oceanography, predicts there won't be enough left for the sea life we love to eat. Those creatures will be replaced by jellyfish, which don't need as much dissolved oxygen and feed on the type of organisms that grow in a polluted estuary, he says.
Verity's already witnessed change. Between 1987 and 2000, his sampling showed a 70 percent increase in jellyfish.
Verity and other scientists who have researched similar changes worldwide say they can sum up the cause in a single word: people.
As more homes, condominiums, marinas and businesses are built on the coast, pollution increases in tidal creeks and estuaries. Treated sewage discharges and stormwater runoff carry fertilizers from lawns, golf courses and farms and oil and other pollutants from pavement and rooftops.
"We need to stop what we're doing now and either mitigate or reduce [the impacts] because we're going downhill in a hurry," Verity said.
Verity presented his dissolved oxygen research in June at an international conference of his peers and published it this month in an academic journal, Estuaries and Coasts. His bottom line: Georgia's bays and inlets, lined with tidal marshes now teeming with infant and juvenile sea life, is headed toward hypoxia, a dead zone incapable of supporting shellfish and fish.
Hypoxia is already severe at times in the Gulf of Mexico off the Louisiana coast and in the Chesapeake Bay near Washington. An associated problem, harmful algae blooms that release fish-killing toxins, has affected virtually every coastal state, threatening human health and dealing economic blows to seafood industries worldwide.
Data collected by the Georgia Department of Natural Resources along the coast tracks Verity's findings. But the state has only been extensively monitoring water quality for about six years.
Spud Woodward, the assistant director of the Georgia Coastal Resources Division, which regulates marine fisheries, said there isn't enough information to know how much shrimp, blue crabs, oysters and fish are suffering from man-made changes to the state's coastal landscape.
"The multimillion-dollar question is what are those effects going to mean for the life support for species that we place great value on? That's what we would like to know," Woodward said. "A lot of that change we want to blame on man, but a lot of that is due to natural fluctuations, I think. It's like the debate on global warming — how much of that is man and how much of it is the natural variation that you're going to see out there?"
State law to be clarified
Not far from where Verity is studying the Skidaway River, a state-appointed group of public officials, business owners, developers, consultants and environmentalists have been debating a seemingly simple question since May: What is waterfront property?
Their answer could have far-reaching impacts on the way the Georgia coast develops — and ultimately on the health of Georgia's estuaries and marshes.
Coastal marshes are green and brown canelike grasses that grow in the salty mixture of tidal waters between the sea-facing barrier islands and the mainland. In Georgia, they form a protective band four to six miles wide and encompass an area of about 378,000 acres. The state's marshlands are considered to be among the nation's most extensive and productive. They are the nursery for young fish and shellfish.
Under the Coastal Marshlands Protection Act, a state law passed in 1970, the state claimed ownership of the tidal marshes and required landowners to seek permission before building community docks, marinas, bridges and causeways across them. It is the state's only tool for regulating development on the coast. But recent court battles pitting developers against environmentalists has called the state's authority into question.
Developers, who have been on the losing end of three separate court decisions, say the state only has the right to regulate the construction of structures in or over the tidal marsh, such as a marina. Environmentalists say the law gives the state the right to regulate development along the entire waterfront, including hotels and swimming pools, single-family homes and condominiums. Their argument is that stormwater runoff from the paved surfaces and rooftops has an impact on the marsh and as such must be regulated by the state.
To help clarify the law, the state Board of Natural Resources earlier this year appointed the Uplands Stakeholder Group — the people who have been debating coast land regulations since May. They are to come up with suggestions for regulating stormwater runoff, limiting paved surfaces and creating buffers, the natural areas that separate the marsh from development. The group is set to vote on recommendations Aug. 21.
While the stakeholders are having a tough time agreeing on all the issues, they have reached consensus on one point. Left unchecked, man-made pollution will ruin Georgia's marshlands.
Committee member Duane Harris, former director of the state's Coastal Resources Division and now a consultant to developers, said at July's meeting, "What we do here is not going to matter unless the Board of Natural Resources and the General Assembly does something to protect the coast."
Samples hold surprises
When Verity arrived at the Skidaway Institute two decades ago after getting his doctorate in biological oceanography from the University of Rhode Island, he decided to keep doing what he'd learned there: sample water for dissolved oxygen levels. At the time, researchers thought a lack of oxygen was unlikely to ever plague Georgia's estuaries and marshes. They assumed constant movement of sea water along Georgia's 90-mile coastline would create enough churn to ensure high oxygen levels.
Still, Verity made water sampling a weekly routine. He figured at least it would be a good technique for his students to learn.
What he discovered over the next two decades surprised him. During hot summer months, dissolved oxygen in the estuary he sampled dropped to levels nearly lethal to sea life.
"People didn't think [dissolved oxygen] could go down," Verity said.
This year, after his research proved the worsening trend, he received a $450,000 National Science Foundation grant to collect another five years' worth of data.
Verity says he'll need a lot more money — he estimates $1.8 million over five years — to track what is causing the decline in dissolved oxygen.
"We need to start taking steps now while the problems are relatively small," he said.
If the blue crabs, shrimp, oysters and finned fish abandon the Georgia coast to bacteria and jellyfish, it could cost millions of dollars to bring them back, he said.
Taxpayers have contributed nearly $4 billion over 10 years to restoring the Chesapeake Bay's health. They'll keep paying. The federal government has demanded the bay be cleaned up by 2010, and recent studies have estimated the cost at between $13 billion and $28 billion.
If Georgia's coastal waters reach a similar crisis, Verity said, "It may be we're not paying for it, but the next generation will."
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From James Doran in Anchorage, Alaska
MICROSCOPIC bacteria made five holes, each smaller than the diameter of a penny, that caused the shutdown of America’s biggest oilfield, at Prudhoe Bay, Alaska, investigators believe.
Although the investigation, led by scientists and engineers from BP, is in its early stages, it is understood that bacteria that live on oil sludge in the pipelines caused the rapid corrosion of more than 16 miles of steel pipe.
“This bacteria and the sludge is the key to this mystery of the cause of this corrosion,” a BP spokesman said. “We never anticipated this kind of build-up of solids in the pipeline, or that this bacteria would live there.”
While only five holes have been found so far, the BP investigation has identified as many as 16 potential holes.
The oil company reckons that the replacement of more than 20 miles of transit pipelines in Prudhoe Bay could cost about $100 million (£53 million).
Much greater is the financial impact from the loss of BP’s quarter-share of Prudhoe Bay’s 400,000 barrel per day output, representing about $7 million per day in revenue forgone. BP is expected to learn today from regulators whether it can continue to pump oil from the western side of the oilfield during repair work.
Kurt Fredriksson, commissioner of Alaska’s Department of Environmental Conservation, told The Times: “We have regularly checked this line and the corrosion crept up on us much faster than anyone imagined.”
Frank Murkowski, the Governor of Alaska, instituted a state-wide hiring freeze on Wednesday to help to stem a shortage of skilled workers to fix the leaking pipe.
He said that the state attorney-general would investigate Alaska’s “right to hold BP fully accountable for losses to the state”.
News Hounds
August 8, 2006
The audience for Fox News' "Dayside" sank to a new low on Tuesday (August 8, 2006) during discussion of the fighting along the Israeli-Lebanese border.
Egged on by substitute host Steve Doocy (or Doocey as the chyron spelled it at one point), the audience literally laughed at the suffering of Lebanese civilians caught between Hezbollah and Israeli bombs.
Doocy was interviewing Tania Mehanna, a senior war correspondent for Lebanese Broadcasting Corporation, when he chided Lebanese civilians for not standing up to Hezbollah fighters whom he said are positioning rockets in front of their homes. 'I think I'd be angry as Hezbollah," Doocy said.
Listen to Mehanna's answer and to the audience response.
Later, a man in the audience claimed that Arabs have made up the idea that Israel is bombing Lebanon and that the buildings are not being bombed but are falling down because of "faulty construction".
Chilling.
Link to Video
August 7, 2006
by Rodrigue Tremblay
The New American Empire
"A highwayman is as much a robber when he plunders in a gang as when single; and a nation that makes an unjust war is only a great gang."
Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790), Father of the American Constitution
"Never think that war, no matter how necessary, nor how justified, is not a crime."
Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961)
"It is my conviction that killing under the cloak of war is nothing but an act of murder."
Albert Einstein (1879-1955)
Can a democracy turn fascist and militaristic? It sure can, and that is the most severe threat a democracy can ever face. The 20th Century example was Germany in the 1930's. -The Nazi Party was elected in November 1932, with only 33.1 percent of the votes, but when its leader Adolf Hitler was appointed Chancellor on January 30, 1933, it immediately began subverting the German Weimar Constitution by concentrating political power in its own hands, while increasing military expenditures. The Nazi government then suspended a number of constitutional protections of civil liberties under the pretext of external and internal threats to its security. The following steps taken by Nazi Germany were to initiate a series of illegal wars of aggression against other countries. This culminated with World War II in which more than 50 million people died.
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By Elsa McLaren and agencies
Heavy snow has fallen on Johannesburg for the first time in 25 years as South Africa faces some of its harshest weather conditions for decades.
Across the world extreme weather is affecting millions of people, with the east coast of America baking in a heatwave and tens of thousands of Chinese having to flee their homes as Typhoon Prapiroon approaches.
At least four South Africans have been reported dead, police said yesterday. Snow, rain and rockfalls have closed mountain roads across the country.
Torrential rains caused flooding in the eastern and southern Cape. The bodies of two men and two children were recovered yesterday after their car was swept from a bridge into a rain-swollen river in the coastal town of George. Rescuers were looking for a fifth person also believed to have been in the car.
Snow, freezing temperatures and gale force winds were expected to persist in parts of the country today, according to the weather service, which had posted cold-weather warnings on its website
Kevin Rae, assistant manager of forecasting at the South African Weather Service in Pretoria, said: “It [the snow] is by no means freakish but I would certainly classify it as rare."
Johannesburg last had snow on September 11, 1981. Widespread snow across the country had been recorded only twice in the past 20 years, in 1981 and 1988.
In the United States the National Weather Service was again posting heat warnings from Massachusetts to South Carolina and Oklahoma.
Since Sunday, local authorities have confirmed that there have been at least 12 heat-related deaths and a further seven more are suspected. The same heat wave has been blamed for about 164 deaths last week in California.
In Boston, a pregnant woman died on Saturday after collapsing at a Red Sox game, and yesterday, an 18-month-old boy was found dead inside a van in Kentucky.
In Illinois, at least six heat-related deaths have been confirmed in Cook County since Sunday, and police believe that another six deaths in Chicago yesterday could be heat-related.
To add to the sweltering temperatures, power blackouts have affected thousands of customers along the east coast due to high demand.
Today in Pakistan flash flooding and mudslides triggered by heavy rains have killed 19 people and injured 10.
Police said that another five people are believed missing.
continues
Tue Aug 1, 2006 12:09pm ET177
NEW DELHI (Reuters) - Three Indian doctors caught on camera apparently agreeing to amputate the healthy limbs of beggars are to be questioned by the Indian Medical Council, an official said Tuesday.
Secretly filmed footage taken by the CNN-IBN news channel and broadcast Saturday showed one of the doctors asking for 10,000 rupees (about $215) to amputate a lower leg, leaving a stump that may draw sympathy -- and a few rupees -- from passersby.
He then suggests chopping off three fingers from the man's left hand.
Police said one of the three doctors had been questioned and denied the allegations, but that no arrests had been made.
The doctor, from Ghaziabad in the north Indian state of Uttar Pradesh and a satellite town of the capital, New Delhi, explains how he can stitch up blood vessels in a healthy limb, causing it to blacken with gangrene over a few days.
A prospective beggar can be booked into the doctor's claiming to have had an accident, and then have the amputation carried out without raising eyebrows, he explains.
"Believe me if there are two beggars in front of you and one of them is lame, you will give the money to the lame beggar," the station recorded him as saying in Hindi.
Dr Indrajit Ray, who chairs the Medical Council of India's ethics committee, said the three doctors would be summoned to appear before the committee later this month but was unable to say whether they were registered with the council.
If found guilty, they would almost certainly be permanently banned from practicing in India, he said.
Continued...
August 1, 2006
UN Warns of Environmental Disaster
While the war rages on, a huge environmental disaster is threatening Lebanon's coast. Up to 35,000 tons of oil have spilled into the Mediterranean following Israeli air strikes -- now it is a race against time to prevent long-term damage and the destruction of a fragile ecosystem.
The Lebanese government is calling it the biggest ecological catastrophe in the country's history. Between July 13 and 15, Israeli jets bombed the Jiyyeh power station, located 30 kilometers south of Beirut, and caused up to 35,000 tons of fuel oil to gush into the sea. The oil slick has now spread along 80 kilometers of Lebanon's 225 kilometer coastline and has already reached Syria. A clean up operation is badly needed, but continuing hostilities between the Israeli army and Hezbollah have made this virtually impossible. Now, the catastrophe is threatening to damage the environment across many parts of the Mediterranean.
The United Nations Environmental Program (UNEP) is warning of long-term damage if the oil is not cleaned up as quickly as possible. "Every day that passes will increase the potential damage of this tragic incident," UNEP director Achim Steiner told Reuters.
According to the Lebanese Environment Ministry, the worst may be yet to come. Another tank at the same power plant with around 25,000 tons of fuel is still burning and there is a risk that it could leak or explode. The fire has created a thick cloud of black smoke that has polluted the air over Beirut and its suburbs.
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