Thanks to Franke James:

Severe pollution causing disease outbreaks, cancer, birth defects and decreasing male births in Great Lakes Communities according to a suppressed CDC report:

MONTREAL GAZETTE

Leaked report on the Great Lakes is a wake-up call

High levels of pollution pose a health threat. U.S., Canadian
decision-makers keep public in the dark for fear of lawsuits, expensive
cleanups, scientist says
WILLIAM MARSDEN The Gazette
Thursday, February 14, 2008

At least 9 million people living on the United States side of the Great
Lakes basin may be in danger from high levels of chemical pollution,
according to a secret study that has been withheld from the public.
The study was kept secret from the public for seven months until this week
when it was leaked to the Centre for Public Integrity in Washington, D.C.

The 400-page study was done by the U.S. Centres for Disease Control and
Prevention on behalf of the International Joint Commission, which oversees
issues relating to the joint management of the Great Lakes.
The study shows there are 26 “areas of concern (AOC),” where there are
elevated levels of illnesses that can be traced to pollution.

These areas of concern are spread out through all five of the Great Lakes
with particular intensity in Chicago, Detroit and Buffalo. More than 9
million people live inside the boundaries of these AOCs.
The report states that illness in the populations “compares unfavourably …
with the U.S. population.”
For instance, the report identifies elevated levels of infant mortality in
26 AOCs, and of premature births in four AOCs.
The study also identified 108 hazardous waste sites, of which 71 are or
could be public health hazards.
Powerful lake currents can distribute the chemical and hydrocarbon
pollutants including dioxins throughout the Great Lakes system and down the
St. Lawrence River. Migratory marine life such as eels, which swim from Lake
Ontario to the Gulf of St. Lawrence, also distribute the pollutants.

The study mirrors a series of reports previously done by Health Canada in
the 1990s that revealed 17 Canadian AOCs, where there were elevated levels
of illnesses that could be traced to pollution.
When the Canadian reports were printed in 1998 they also were kept from the
public. In this case, Health Canada circulated them only to public health
officials in the 17 AOCs.

One study was leaked to a reporter in Windsor, Ont., in 2000, forcing Health
Canada to release the rest.
The Americans have claimed that their study was suppressed because the
science was substandard.
Michael Gilbertson, a former International Joint Commission scientist who
was one of three scientists to peer review the U.S. study, said the reasons
behind the suppression were political.

“Their real reason is that in the States and also in Canada at the moment
there is really a reluctance within the governments to acknowledge that
there are any effects of these chemicals on fish or wildlife or on human
health,” he said.
Gilbertson said the governments are afraid of lawsuits and expensive
cleanups.
“I mean you can find sources of chemicals in the environment,” he said. “But
if you actually find effects, this has a connotation of liability.
Governments are extremely reluctant to allow their scientists to start
making statements about the effects of chemicals on fish, wildlife or on
humans. Particularly on humans.”

The Canadian study, for example, found a series of outbreaks of Minamata
disease in Thunder Bay, Collingwood, Sarnia and Cornwall. Minamata disease,
which includes cerebral palsy among its symptoms, is caused by mercury
poisoning.
Each of the affected areas had large chlor-alkali plants that used mercury
for making chlorine. At various times between 1948 and 1995, these plants
released 742 tonnes of mercury into the Great Lakes. Mercury dumped in
Sarnia went down the St. Claire River to Lake St. Claire and then down the
Detroit River to Lake Erie.

Canadian research has also found an inexplicable drop in the male-female
ratio on the Aamjiwnaang Reserve near Sarnia. The number of male babies had
dropped 40 per cent in the mid-1990s. The reserve is surrounded by 46 large
chemical plants and refineries.

Furthermore, Health Canada studies showed, the Windsor area suffered from
much higher mortality and morbidity rates than in the rest of Ontario.

The federal government and the province of Ontario launched a program in
2000 to reduce pollution in the Great Lakes.
So far, two areas - Collingwood and nearby Severn Sound - have been removed
from the AOC list.
wmarsden@thegazette.canwest.com

- To see the U.S. Centres for Disease Control and Prevention report go to
www.publicintegrity.org/default.aspx
C The Gazette (Montreal) 2008

The Numbers Guy writes a column about how much water it takes to grow and produce a single hamburger: 617 gallons!

Yikes. And I thought it was bad that corn ethanol requires 5 gallons…

Of course most of that water goes right back into the eco-system.

A huge storm in the North Atlantic brought storm surges as high as 20 feet yesterday to Europe and the UK. Barriers on the Thames were closed to protect London. This is the biggest surge since 1953. Fortunately no one was hurt and damage was minimal.

The issue here is that climate change doesn’t simply mean higher ocean levels. Even a slight rise in levels, combined with more violent weather due to warming, will mean more and more of these storms in regions where they have been very rare in the past. Because there was no historical record of major storm surges, these coastal areas are highly developed and support dense populations. The potential for future destruction is much higher because of this.

This is a classic environmental feedback loop. Warming generates storms, higher ocean levels mean higher surges. Interestingly, the same storm caused unstable snowpack conditions in Switzerland, creating dangerous avalanche conditions.

Residents of Atlanta, Georgia may open their taps in the next month and have nothing come out. 14,500 lawn and landscape workers have been laid off because there is no water. The state has done nothing to deal with the crisis except for asking residents to ‘take shorter showers’. (!) Real estate developers have built like crazy and were never required to prove there was enough water to support the development.

North Carolina today asked its residents to halve their water use through Halloween so the state can evaluate its ability to handle a water crisis.

300,000 Southern Californians (update- make that 500,000) flee fires that cannot be fought because of Santa Ana winds, extreme drought conditions and large amounts of dead, dry brush. Thousands of homes will be lost.

The Great Lakes are down seven inches from their normal levels due to very dry winters. Each inch of loss means that 8000 tons of raw materials that drive manufacturing in the region cannot be shipped this year because of the danger of shipping running aground.

In Canada’s West glaciers are rapidly disappearing. These glaciers supply the lakes and rivers that are the primary water sources for huge farms. The permafrost on the mountains is melting so that snow runoff, instead of running into the streams, is being absorbed by the ground, accelerating the losses to the water sources.

The Colorado river is drying up. It is the only supply of water for the entire South West including much of Mexico as underground aquifers are no longer viable. Yet there have been 300 hundred golf courses built in the region in the last five years.

These stories are all current today. In each case there is no man-made solution, no emergency action we can take to fix the problem. Nor are we doing anything about this- not a thing. We are building housing like crazy in areas that have no regional water sources. A study released today shows that carbon emissions worldwide have risen drastically since 2000, much faster than expected. Again, we are doing nothing.

No matter how rich we are here in North America, we cannot sustain life without water. We have no infrastructure to produce water where there is no natural source and building such an infrastructure would mean mustering hundreds of billions of dollars and a solid political consensus that understands the emergency nature of the problem. Not much chance of that taking place.

I have friends who tell me they can’t read this blog too often because it is depressing. I have held off on blogging because there is too much climate change news every day. It is obvious that this thing is upon us full force yet there is still denial at the very center of power. We have to reach these people somehow and get their attention. Perhaps having dry faucets in the thousands of McMansions around Atlanta will wake a few people up.