June 3, 2021 — The “dead zone” that appears in the Gulf of Mexico every summer is expected to be smaller than normal this year, according to an announcement Thursday, 3 June from NOAA scientists.
This year’s hypoxic area – which features little or no oxygen to sustain marine life – is forecasted to be about 4,880 square miles, or roughly twice the size of Delaware. The five-year average for the “dead zone” is about 5,400 square miles, slightly smaller than Connecticut.
June 9, 2020 — The massive “dead zone” in the Gulf of Mexico is causing up to $2.4 billion dollars in damage to fisheries and marine habitat every year, a new report says.
Covering an area about the size of New Hampshire, the 6,700-square-mile zone of low dissolved oxygen has long been the bane of shrimpers and other fishers off the coasts of Louisiana and eastern Texas. A report released this month from the Union of Concerned Scientists offers the first comprehensive assessment of the dead zone’s economic impact, and warns the root problem — agricultural pollution from the Mississippi River — is likely to grow in severity as the world’s climate changes.
“Gulf Coast communities know that the dead zone impacts their livelihoods, but research has never put a dollar value on its damage to the fishing industry,” said Rebecca Boehm, a UCS economist and the report’s author. “This study quantifies both the amount of nitrogen flowing to the Gulf from farms upstream, and the toll it is taking economically on the foundation of the Gulf fishing industry.”
June 5, 2020 — NOAA scientists announced on 3 June that the forecast for the Gulf of Mexico hypoxic area, more commonly referred to as the “dead zone,” will be larger than average in 2020.
The current forecast of the dead zone – an area of low to no oxygen that can kill fish and other marine life – predicts an area of roughly 6,700 square miles, which is larger than the recent average measured size of the dead zone of 5,387 square miles. For comparison, 6,700 square miles is roughly the size of the U.S. states of Rhode Island and Connecticut combined.
August 14, 2019 — The Interior Department is ordering further analysis of the Vineyard Wind project’s impact on commercial fishing as well as a study of the industry’s cumulative impacts on the environment.
New England commercial fishermen have applauded the decision saying the project has been moving too fast and hasn’t addressed their concerns about fish displacement and navigational safety.
Scallop fisherman Eric Hansen in New Bedford, MA says the industry has been expressing its issues with the Vineyard Wind project for years. He’s pleased the federal government is finally listening.
The Union for Concerned Scientists, led by Andrew Rosenberg, who served as northeast regional administrator, and later deputy director of the National Marine Fisheries Service, has established a hotline for National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) employees to report allegations of “political meddling” by President-elect Trump and his incoming Administration.
“I am hearing a lot of worry,” Rosenberg told Bloomberg regarding a potential Trump selection to head the agency. “The worry is that they will be putting another ideologue in place,” Rosenberg said.
December 21, 2016 — The following is excerpted from a story by Michael Bastach. It was published yesterday in The Daily Caller.
Environmentalist worry over President-elect Donald Trump reached new heights when activists set up an anonymous hotline for government climate scientists to report “political meddling” by the incoming administration.
Bloomberg reports “outside scientists are setting up an anonymous hotline for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s employees to report political meddling” over fears Trump could delete public climate data and silence researchers.
“I am hearing a lot of worry,” Andrew Rosenberg, a top activist at the at the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) in Cambridge, Mass., told Bloomberg. “The worry is that they will be putting another ideologue in place.”
UCS set up the hotline for climate scientists in the wake of news Trump’s administration could tamper with taxpayer-funded climate data. Interestingly enough, it’s a rumor they started.
Trump’s transition team has never said anything to indicate they would alter any public databases — a fact Freedman admitted. But it was too late, scientists, activists and media outlets began to preach the story as gospel.
Climate scientist and Slate columnist Eric Holthaus led the charge and asked people to fill it with climate data “you don’t want to see disappear.” Scientists at the University of Toronto and the University of Pennsylvania created a “Guerrilla Archiving team” to download data before Trump could “delete” it.
Holthaus, to his credit, argued budget cuts are more likely to force agencies to jettison climate data rather than malicious acts by Trump appointees. But it’s hard to say since Trump has not nominated anyone to head NOAA or NASA.
Budget cuts could shrink some efforts to monitor the climate, but it’s unlikely to result in wholesale deleting of taxpayer-funded databases, along with the planes, buoys and weather stations that go along with it.