Idea first floated at the TEDxOilSpill conference by Francis Belland of the X Prize Foundation and David Gallo of Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute becomes real.

Since the BP gusher started spewing millions of gallons of crude oil and methane into the Gulf of Mexico more that three months ago, there have other high profile spills, including one of China’s largest, near the city of Dalian, that created a 170 mile slick. Closer to my home in Chicago, a pipeline break released over 800,000 gallons into western Michigan’s Kalamazoo river, which flows into Lake Michigan.

Last year, Australia took a one-two punch, first with a tanker spill that fouled 40 miles of Queensland’s coast, then an oil rig blow-out eerily similar to the Deepwater Horizon disaster. In Nigeria, oil spills have become such an every day nightmare – an estimated 7,000 between 1970 and 2000 - that the tally is measured in units of “Exxon Valdez” (over 50 and still counting).

Clearly, if you drill, it will spill. Although the X Prize Foundation’s Oil Clean-up Challenge was developed in response to the mess in the Gulf, its importance goes far beyond our local oily waters. “The oil industry has focused on,”How do you drill deeper, further, more efficiently. Little money has actually been spent so far on “How do you clean it up properly?’, ” notes Peter Diamandis,  X Prize CEO.

With $1.4 million in incentive prizes provided by the Schmidt Family Foundation, the Challenge is designed to wrap up next summer, with demonstrations of the promising technologies at the National Oil Spill Response Research & Renewable Energy Test Facility (OHMSETT) in Leonardo, New Jersey.

RELATED READING:

“Introducing the Oil Clean-up Challenge,” by Wendy Schmidt, Huffington Post

“TEDxOilSpill: Surface Slicks, Deep Water Despair, Galaxies of Oil Platforms and Why We Really, Truly, Don’t Need Oil” by J.A. Ginsburg, TrackerNews Editor’s Blog

What happens when the future comes early? When does record-breaking weather segue from unfortunate inconvenience to an inconvenient truth?

Trailer from Al Gore's documentary on climate change

When…

• China reports massive floods affecting 75% of its provinces? The tally of dead and missing now tops 1,000, with the devastation said to affect 110 million people. 645,000 homes have been destroyed. The economic hit is estimated to at $21 billion – and rising. Or…

• Russia has a drought like it hasn’t seen in 130 years? The country’s breadbasket is toast: 20% of the wheat crop is lost at a financial cost that could easily exceed $1 billion.  Meanwhile, lack of air conditioning and love of liquor has led to thousands of “swimming while drunk” deaths. Or…

• Argentina and Uruguay shiver in below freezing temperatures? Hypothermia in the streets of Buenos Aires and snow reported in seaside resort town. Or…

• the Rio Grande actually looks like a big raging river? Some sections along the U.S. / Mexican border have risen 17 feet and more above flood stage, cutting off clean water supplies, affecting tens of thousands of people, destroying thousands of homes and triggering mass evacuations. Or…

• NOAA says 2010 is on track to becoming the hottest year on record? Earth has been on a hot streak for the last 304 months (a little over 25 years), with the average monthly global temperatures exceeding than the average for entire 2oth century. This past June was the hottest on record.

“Warmer than average global temperatures have become the new normal,” says Jay Lawrimore, chief of climate analysis at NOAA’s National Climatic Data Center, which tracks these numbers. “The global temperature has increased more than 1 degree Fahrenheit [0.7 degree C] since 1900 and the rate of warming since the late 1970s has been about three times greater than the century-scale trend.”…

…”Frankly, I was expecting that we’d see large temperature increases later this century with higher greenhouse gas levels and global warming,” Stanford climate scientist Noah Diffenbaugh, who headed up the research, said in a prepared statement. “I did not expect to see anything this large within the next three decades.”

Was last Spring’s  Nashville flood, which took the region by surprise after 13 inches of rain fell in 24 hours, a local catastrophe or part of much larger trend? What about the 8 inch deluge than drowned Milwaukee last week? Or the second tornado ever to hit the Bronx?

WEATHER HAPPENS / CLIMATES CHANGE

If man-made greenhouse gases are behind the deadly weather, that’s good news: We can still do something about it. But as a new study of historic droughts in Asia shows, the ramifications of disturbed weather patterns can be devastating, no matter what the cause.

Scientists at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory spent 15 years collecting samples from more than 300 sites across Asia to create an atlas of tree ring data for monsoon weather patterns. The correlations between major droughts and political unrest are striking, if not completely surprising. From the collapse of the Khmer civilization to the demise of the Ming Dynasty and the French Revolution, nothing topples a government faster than a desperate hungry mob.

Perhaps the worst drought, the scientists found, was the Victorian-era “Great Drought” of 1876-1878. The effects were felt across the tropics; by some estimates, resulting famines killed up to 30 million people. According to the tree-ring evidence, the effects were especially acute in India, but extended as far away as China and present-day Indonesia. Colonial-era policies left regional societies ill-equipped to deal with the drought’s consequences, as historian Mike Davis details in his book Late Victorian Holocausts. Famine and cholera outbreaks at this time in colonial Vietnam fueled a peasant revolt against the French.

The political opposition to the now crippled U.S. Climate Bill should be quaking in their boots. Given the staggering amount of scientific evidence linking human-generated greenhouse gas emissions to global warming and climate change, they will bear the blame for blocking action when it could have made a difference. (According to a new survey published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 97% of scientists say climate change “very likely” has a man-made component.)

A BOUNTY OF BLIGHTS: CAUSE & EFFECT OR COINCIDENCE?

The cruelty of blight is uniquely insidious. Hopes, dreams and futures are destroyed along with crops. A blight is promise snatched away. In a matter of weeks, sometimes days, sometime hours, months of labor is laid to waste and investment is turned to debt.

It doesn’t take much: just a few invisible spores carried by the wind to a host plant. Once a botanical beach-head is established, blights – which thrive in the monocultures of modern agriculture – quickly become “community diseases,” spreading from plant to plant, field to field, region to region, painting once verdant fields black with the brush of death.

The first major victory in the The Green Revolution was genetic lab-tweak that made wheat impervious to a blight called stem rust, while also increasing yields – a rare and remarkable “two-fer” benefit. So significant was this breakthrough, plant biologist Norman Borlaug was award the Nobel Prize for it. The dream of eradicating hunger seemed within reach. Yet a little over a half-century later, the solution – crop protection provided by a single gene – has become part of the problem.

In 1999, a strain of rust was discovered in a wheat field in Uganda that had evolved past the genetic barrier. Dubbed “Ug99,” it has since splintered off into several strains or “races,” some of which are impervious to more recently developed multi-gene defenses. In a little over a decade, stem rust has traveled 5,000 miles and now threatens grain production in Africa and Asia, and indirectly threatens production everywhere else. From the pathogen’s perspective, all wheat has become more or less alike as diversity has been systematically bred away.

Wheat is the primary source of calories for millions of people worldwide, and accounts for around 30 percent of global grain production and 44 percent of cereals used as food. Globally, wheat provides nearly 55 percent of the carbohydrates and 20 percent of the food calories we consume every day.

- Dr. Mahmoud Solh, Director General of the Syria-based International Center for Agricultural Research in the Dry Areas (ICARDA).

With so much at stake, an international collaborative effort, spearheaded by the Borlaug Global Rust Initiative, is playing a frantic game of defense, developing resistant strains to deploy strategically as barriers to slow the blight’s spread. But the work requires the cooperation of countries otherwise at odds, such as India and Pakistan. And it takes money: steady, dependable funding and lots of it.

Stem rust isn’t the only globetrotting super-pathogen:

• An especially aggressive strain of brown streak virus is attacking Cassava, a staple for 800 million people in Africa, Asia and South America. In the 6 years since it was first spotted in East Africa, it has spread at pandemic speed. Cassava, a drought-tolerant plant that requires very little tending, is particularly important for regions beset with malaria and HIV/AIDS. Its loss means billions of dollars more needed for basic food aid.

• Late blight, a.k.a. the blight that caused Ireland’s Great Potato Famine, turns out to also have a taste for American tomatoes. Last year, its spores not only rode the wind, but took to the highways, hitching on seedling plants trucked to home improvement stores across the country. In only two years, it appears to have become entrenched.

• Stripe rust, another wheat  plague, was recently discovered to have an alternate host, the common ornamental barberry plant, on which the fungus sexually reproduces. The resulting genetic diversity of the fungus, set against the genetic uniformity of wheat, supplies the resilience that has made it so difficult to stamp out.

A warming world favors pathogens’ survival over winter, while shifting weather patterns can blow them into new territories. Human-mediated transport (trade and travel) clearly play a large role as well.

Whatever the drivers, these colliding trends of record-breaking weather / climate change and emerging plant diseases spell big trouble for global food security. In just the past month, wheat prices spiked 30%, due mostly to the Russian drought. Russia will still have enough for domestic needs, but higher prices are expected to drive up inflation, and there will be that much less for export. Stem rust primarily affects small farmers gowing for local consumption in the developing countries. Higher global commodity prices also translates into higher food aid costs.

According to the scientists at NOAA, the extreme weather of 2010 may very well be the “new normal.” Hotter, colder, wetter, drier. And way beyond inconvenient.

FURTHER READING

• “NOAA: June, April to June, and Year-to-Date Global Temperatures are the Warmest on Record,” NOAA data sheet (2010)

• “Climate Bill, R.I.P.” by Tom Wilkinson, Rolling Stone

• “Rust in the Bread Basket: A crop-killing fungus is spreading out of Africa towards the world’s great wheat-growing areas,” The Economist

• Al Gore’s Amazon books page
  

Map of swine flu outbreak - with time animation bar (BBC)

• In the U.K., experts predict there could be as many as a 100,000 cases per day by August – which would also dash hopes for an economic recovery any time soon, according to a new study.

• In Argentina, flat-footed bureaucrats are in the cross-hairs for taking too long to implement protective measures. Now Argentine pigs are sick, too.

• In Saudi Arabia, where nary a pig dares wander, officials are bracing for millions of devout Muslims planning hajj trips this November, advising the old, young, pregnant and those with chronic conditions to reschedule.

• In the U.S., a new survey suggests that obesity doubles the risk for serious flu complications. Exactly why this is so is a bit of mystery, but a mouse study may provide a clue. Fat mice produce elevated amounts of leptin, a hormone involved in immune response. Researchers theorize that the mice became desensitized to leptin, so their immune systems don’t kick into gear fast enough. When their immune systems finally do kick in, they go into overdrive with a “cytokine storm” – a defense so strong, it kills the host.

At the other end of the spectrum in the developing word are the nearly one billion chronically hungry weakened by malnutrition. Now factor in air pollution, which has long been known to exacerbate respiratory illnesses in general, and it is really not too much of stretch to say that almost everyone suffers from some kind of complicating underlying condition. To put it in medical terms, co-morbidities are probably the rule, not the exception.

Still, there is something particularly unfair and frightening about the risk to pregnant women. Though case numbers are small, a disturbing trend has begun to emerge of otherwise healthy women fighting for their lives and the lives of their unborn babies only days after coming down with swine flu.

ABC "Nightline" segment opens with the story of Audrey Opdyke, 26 weeks pregnant, who came down with swine flu. She was put in an induced coma to try to save the baby. Shortly after this piece aired, an emergency C-section was performed. The baby did not surive.

The CDC’s page on “Pregnant Women and Novel Influenza A (H1N1) Virus: Considerations for Clinicians” does not discuss etiology, but it might be similar to the obesity story — although instead of leptin desensitizing the immune system, pregnancy itself might act as a dampener (to prevent rejection of the fetus). By the time the mother’s body mounts a defense, it is too much, too late.

Influenza presents another, more subtle, threat to the unborn: Exposure to the virus in the first trimester appears to increase the (still small) risk the child will develop schizophrenia later in life. Again, the “how” remains murky, but if it is due to the mother’s immune response rather than direct exposure to the virus, then a vaccine, which also triggers an immune response, could be dangerous.

As swine flu begins to spread into the developing where maternal health care is already spotty, the effects of this pandemic could prove especially heartbreaking.

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PIGS, PATHOGENS & OPPORTUNITY

Now a second strain of a combo pig/human/avian influenza virus has been identified in Saskatchewan, Canada. So far it causes only mild illness and spreads pig-to-pig and  pig-to-person. Whether it can spread person-to-person is still unknown; the illness may be so mild that patients aren’t tested. But it shows that such viral mixing is likely much more common than previously thought, and that large hog factory farms with their high density populations provide a perfect setting.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the world in the Philippines, pigs have been identified as a host of Reston ebolavirus, the only strain that isn’t fatal to humans. The discovery, via metagenomics, came as a surprise. (listen to Science magazine podcast with APHIS-USDA researcher Michael McIntosh). The pigs were also suffering from  porcine reproductive and respiratory disease syndrome, the severity of which may have been the result of co-infection. USDA researchers are concerned, of course, about food production and safety implications. The WHO is worried about the ease of pig to human transmission. In January, several hog farm workers, along with a butcher, tested positive for REV antibodies. Should the strain mutate into a more virulent or even lethal version, all bets are off on stopping the carnage.

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Eventually, the fog of the current battle against swine flu (a.k.a. “Pandemic H1N1 2009 “) will lift. One can only hope that then policy-makers will  – finally – begin to shift focus to the biggest “underlying condition” of all: a modern farming system rife with significant public health dangers. Otherwise, almost inevitably, they will find themselves in a few years once again calling for emergency conferences, fretting over limited budgets, drawing up distribution plans for vaccines and resistance-prone anti-virals and fighting a variation of the very same war.

Perhaps Peter Cooke put it best in the cult classic “Frog & Peach” routine he performed with Dudley Moore about a catastrophic failure of a restaurant located in the middle of the Yorkshire Moors. When asked whether he had learned from his mistakes, Cook’s proud proprietor replies, “Yes! I have learned from my mistakes! And I am sure I could repeat them exactly!”

Well, exactly…

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FURTHER READING

When Pigs Flu: Swine-flu outbreak could be linked to Smithfield factory farms (Tom Philpott/Grist)

Follow the Pigs! – Swine Flu, Factory Farms, Mapping and Public Health (TrackerBlog)

A Virus by Any Other Name: Lessons from an Outbreak (so far…) (TrackerBlog)

Fresh (movie trailers – pay particular attention to segment on pig farmer Russ Kremer’s life-changing bout with farm-incubated MRSA)

Food, Inc (movie website / trailer)

Polyface Farm’s Joel Salatin interview (Venture / Bloomberg TV)