Environment

The French MPs believe that despite a “national pact against food wastage” launched last year in France, measures preventing still-edible food being thrown away are “insufficient”.

They cited a World Food Organisation estimate that a third of food products on the planet that are still fit for human consumption are currently “lost or wasted”.

The MPs said they were targeting larger food chains as their “logistics and important stock” made it easier for them to organise such donations than smaller shops.

In France alone, each supermarket produces 200 tons of waste per year. The French throw away between 20 to 30kg of food waste each year, seven of which are unopened when they hit the rubbish bin – representing an estimated €400 (£318) of wasted food per home.

French supermarkets already hand over large amounts of unsold foodstuffs to charity, with Secours Populaire, one association, saying half of the meals it distributed to the poor last year came from big food stores.

Gaëtan Lassale, head of the French federation of food banks, welcomed the proposal, saying: “Donations already work very well in France thanks to tax break incentives, but this text is a good thing as it will enable us to gather even more unsold produce.”

However, he told Le Journal du Dimanche the proposed law would put charities under financial strain as they would be forced to invest in “cold storage, refrigerated lorries or hangars” to store the food.

“Who will pay?” he asked.

Officials of the European Commission recently tabled proposals to allow national governments to extend the list of foods that do not require best-before dates, in a move which they believe will mean 15 million tons less food a year is discarded by households wrongly worried that it is no longer fit for consumption.

In the UK, the Government has estimated that unnecessarily discarded food costs the average British household £480 a year, rising to £680 for a family with children, the equivalent of about £50 a month.

Families still discard 7.2 million tons of food and drink every year, most of which could have been eaten.

Britain has not yet backed the EU proposals and has instead urged a full investigation into safety aspects of the change.

This post originally appeared at Ensia.

“Seed trays, drip tape, mulch film, water pipes, hoop house covers, twine, hose, fertilizer bags, totes, tool handles and everything we use to keep ourselves dry.” On a rainy March afternoon, Kara Gilbert, co-owner of Vibrant Valley Farm, rattles off how plastics are used on the farm as she stamps mud off her boots.

On a visit to the four-acre farm on lush Sauvie Island at the confluence of the Willamette and Columbia Rivers near Portland, Oregon, Gilbert gives me a tour de farm plastics. The fields are just being readied for the season, but black plastic is already laid out under a hoop house. PVC water pipes are being set into place and drip irrigation tape is ready to be deployed, as are plastic sacks of fertilizer. Out in the greening field, little orange-pink plastic plant tags on ankle-high stakes flap in the wet breeze to mark rows of just-sprouted peas.

By farming standards, this is a tiny operation. It sells organic produce to 15 or so local restaurants and through community-supported-agriculture shares, and grows flowers it sells wholesale. But even this small farm, Gilbert says, spends between $4,000 and $6,000 on plastic every year. Maybe more. It’s an environmental trade-off, she explains: Using plastic means saving water.

“In our very fickle climate, if we want to have a local food movement and want to compete with California and Mexico, it’s almost imperative that we have the black plastic,” Gilbert says. “Plastic film or road cloth is a weed suppressant,” explains farm co-owner Elaine Walker. “Black plastic can retain heat and moisture so you don’t need to water as much and you can grow things in the off season.”

Whether it’s this small organic farm coaxing an impressive yield out of a few acres in Oregon or a large conventional operation somewhere else in the world, plastic is a huge part of modern agriculture-a multi-billion-dollar worldwide industry, according to Penn State Extension. Billions of pounds are used around the world each year, with much of the plastic designed for one season’s use.

There’s a growing recognition by farmers and others in the agricultural community of the need for environmentally responsible disposal solutions for these materials. The question, though, is how to do that with materials that are designed to not break down in rain, sun and heat, and that can-if burned or left to degrade-pose environmental health hazards.

Big numbers

Really good numbers on the amount of plastic used in agriculture are hard to come by, but experts in the field, including Gene Jones of the Southern Waste Information eXchange, estimate that US agriculture alone uses about a billion pounds annually. This includes films-used for mulch, greenhouse covers, and to wrap bales, tubing, and pipes. It also includes nursery containers, pesticide containers, silage bags, storage covers, twine, and more.

Specialized products figure into the mix as well. Farmers in cooler regions use plastic to enhance warmth, for example, while in the southern US farmers use plastic to cool soil and plants. “There’s some reflective, some colored plastic, but all deal with the sun at different times of year,” says Jeremy Nipper, sales representative for Kennco Manufacturing, a Florida-based farm machinery company whose products include equipment to deploy agricultural plastics and collect and dispose of used field plastics. Plastic films laid down on planting rows also helps keep fertilizer from running off fields when it rains. And, as Walker explains, plastic mulch films helps suppress weeds.

Worldwide, the agricultural plastic film market alone was estimated to be worth $5.87 billion in 2012. That year’s global demand, according to one market analyst, was more than 9.7 million lbs., with about 40% of this being used in mulching. China is estimated to be the world’s largest consumer of agricultural plastic films, using about 60% of all such plastic.

“Horticulture and vegetables use an astonishing amount,” says Nate Leonard, field coordinator for Cornell University’s Recycling Agricultural Plastics Program.

Reduce, reuse, recycle

What to do with all this plastic when it’s no longer useful is the ongoing challenge.

“There [is] lots of interest in reducing the impacts,” says Scott Coleman, vice president of strategic development for Delta Plastics, an Arkansas-based company that specializes in agricultural irrigation tubing.

Historically, discarded agricultural waste has been taken to landfills or been burned or buried, often on farm property. But most states have now enacted rules against outdoor plastics burning, and this has spurred interest in other options.

One is trying to use less plastic in the first place-often by extending use through more than one growing season. For example, Nipper explains that some growers can get two seasons out of one set of plastic mulch films by reusing with a different crop.

Currently only about 10% of farm plastics are recycled.Walker notes that instead of thin film that’s hard to reuse, Vibrant Valley Farms has been using sturdier road cloth that will last for several seasons for weed suppression and to retain moisture and heat. Similarly, while Florida watermelon growers use thin single-use plastics, strawberry growers get two seasons out of plastic not quite twice as thick.

By far the biggest opportunity to reduce farm plastic waste, however, is through recycling. Currently only about 10% of farm plastics are recycled. Increasing that number will depend on making drop-off more convenient and expanding options for giving plastic a second life.

In New York, where a statewide ban on backyard or farm burning of plastics was passed in 2009, the Cornell program worked with the state’s Department of Environmental Conservation to pioneer agricultural plastics recycling and do educational outreach about recycling options through extension programs and local soil and water conservation districts.

While collection for recycling is one challenge, preparing and processing agricultural plastics so they can be recycled and finding a market for the many different kinds of agricultural plastics add even more complexity.

“The solid waste [management] people thought we were crazy to get involved because there were no markets for this plastic,” says Leonard. “It was an exciting breakthrough when we found someone who would take this,” he says. One of the first companies Cornell’s recycling program found that could use this plastic was a manufacturer of plastic sidewalk and paving materials.

Another big issue in recycling agricultural plastics is dirt and debris. “The problem with high dirt content is that it’s really hard on machinery,” says Coleman. There can also be concerns about transporting contaminants such as pathogens with that debris.

Agri-Plas, an agricultural plastics recycler in Brooks, Oregon, handles most kinds of plastics, from bale wrapping and fertilizer bags to hard plastics and drip tape. Enormous piles of sorted plastics stand at the Agri-Plas facility, located in the midst of Willamette Valley farm country: colorful cubes of twine, clusters of black drip tape and seed trays, white mounds of plastic wrap and bags, and, in a special area, blue and white pesticide buckets that have been triple rinsed before collection.

Agri-Plas is also one of the nine or so facilities around the country that are working with Ag-Container Recycling Council a take-back and recycling program for used pesticide containers started by 20 major agricultural chemical manufacturers in 1992. The member companies help support the program financially and designated contractors process the collected material into plastic products the program has approved as safe for “post-pesticide” use. These are typically things people won’t touch on a regular basis, like outdoor drain tile, says Mary Sue Gilliland, vice president of operations and business development. This precaution is taken even though according to ACRC tests, virtually no pesticide residues remain after proper cleaning and processing. The program is considered successful with a recycling rate of about 33%, says ACRC executive director Ron Perkins.

As complicated as pesticide container recycling sounds, plastic twine seems to pose even greater challenges. The material, Gilliland says, “is very abrasive and beats the heck out of machinery.” In one outdoor bay at Agri-Plas, workers are busy removing hay from plastic twine, by hand. “There’s no other way to do this,” says Gilliland.

Finding a use

Agri-Plas does some processing on site, shredding and grinding. But that’s the comparatively easy part of plastics recycling, says Gilliland and others in this industry. The real challenge is finding a company that can use the recycled plastic.

A company called Encore in Salinas, California, is now making reusable grocery bags from recycled agricultural plastics. Delta Plastics is using ag plastics to make EPA-compliant trash-can liner bags and exploring ways to put used plastics into new drip tape.

“Twenty years ago, as we were producing [agricultural irrigation] pipe and saw the waste created from it, our founder saw there was a need to figure out a solution,” says Coleman. “Finally, we came up with a proprietary method for processing dirty pipe.” Delta Plastics uses much of this material itself, but it also sells it in pellet form to other manufacturers who mainly use it to make new plastic sheets and film.

Meanwhile, other companies are making products that include plastic pavers, outdoor building materials and other items that are less technically finicky than plastic sheeting.

Finding a company that can process any of this plastic domestically also remains a challenge, says Gilliland. She estimates that about 40% or more of the agricultural plastic collected for recycling goes to export, typically to China or elsewhere in Asia.

Another solution some companies-including one called Agilyx, which lists venture capital firms and Richard Branson among its investors-have been experimenting with is turning waste agricultural plastic into fuel oil. But this has proved problematic for a number of reasons, among them how federal and local governments regulate such processes, says Gilliland. Still she thinks this solution, if done properly, might pencil out as an environmentally preferable option given the logistical difficulties of repurposing the vast quantities of soiled, used agricultural plastics.

Out on Sauvie Island, a cloudburst has passed and a bald eagle and several honking geese have flown by. Kara Gilbert kneels down in the muddy spring ground next to a small orange plastic flag and picks a pea sprout. A few yards away, plastic sacks of soil amendments and last season’s black plastic road cloth is waiting to be laid out for 2015 planting-testimony to the complexity of inputs that need to be managed today to produce even the simplest of foods. “You have to taste this,” she says handing over the tiny leafy greens, “they’re awesome.”

Yum! Brands, the organization that claims KFC, Taco Bell and Pizza Hut, on Thursday reported a zero deforestation arrangement for its palm oil sourcing. The move came after forceful battles by ecological gatherings that argued that the restaurants weren’t doing what’s needed to guarantee the palm oil they used to cook food wasn’t connected to human rights misuses, obliteration of peat lands, and logging of rainforests.

The strategy sets December 2017 as focus for creating shields for palm oil sourcing. Yum! says it will just come from suppliers who block farmstead advancement in high carbon stock and high preservation esteem ranges, in the same way as rainforests and peat lands; have debate determination forms set up; offer traceability to the plant level; and evade underage laborers and constrained work.

The benchmarks apply Yum’s! worldwide fast food business, the importance it applies to every last bit of its restaurants.

Yum! has a comparable arrangement of rules for its paper and fiber sourcing.

The declaration was immediately accepted by Greenpeace, which battled against the organization’s mash and paper sourcing practices in 2012.

Rolf Skar, Woods Crusade Executive at Greenpeace USA., said, “Yum! Brands’ new palm oil policy is a good sign it’s listening to customers around the world who want rainforest destruction taken off the menu.”

He added, “more clearly define terms like ‘high carbon stock forest’ and ‘best management practices’ for peat lands in order to make sure change really happens on the ground.”

Nonetheless, the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS), a support assembly discharged on Wednesday, a scorecard giving Yum! a zero out of 100 rank on its palm oil approach, which needed more from the organization.

“Yum! Brands seem to have good intentions with this commitment, “said UCS’s Lael Goodman in an announcement. “The problem is that palm oil is also a common ingredient in some the company’s baked goods and sauces – products that are prepared by a third-party vendor – and are not covered under the commitment. This is where the commitment loses steam.”

However, Goodman said that the approach would increase Yum! on UCS’s scorecard, moving it out of the base position it imparted to Wendy’s, Carl’s Jr, Dairy Ruler, and Domino’s.

“The company scored a zero as of yesterday, but today’s announcement will surely raise their score somewhat,” she stated.

“However, if Yum! Brands wants to be an environmental leader amongst fast food giants, the company should to extend the commitment to all forms of palm oil and bulk up its transparency efforts. Such transparency efforts include reporting the quantities of palm oil used and on the commitment’s implementation.”

Yum’s! dedication has been made much simpler as of recent years with the reception of zero deforestation arrangements by a percentage of the world’s biggest palm oil makers and dealers, including Brilliant Agri Assets, Wilmar, Cargill, Musim Mas, IOI, and Bunge.

These approaches have developed as a direct after effect of weight from backing gatherings and shoppers concerned over palm oil’s part in driving change of peat lands and rainforests for farms.

The damage was found mostly in Malaysia and Indonesia; however the business has its sights on growing in West and Focal Africa, the Amazon, Focal America, and different parts of tropical Asia.

From where I’m standing, the city-sized Baogang Steel and Rare Earth complex dominates the horizon, its endless cooling towers and chimneys reaching up into grey, washed-out sky. Between it and me, stretching into the distance, lies an artificial lake filled with a black, barely-liquid, toxic sludge.

Dozens of pipes line the shore, churning out a torrent of thick, black, chemical waste from the refineries that surround the lake. The smell of sulphur and the roar of the pipes invades my senses. It feels like hell on Earth.

Welcome to Baotou, the largest industrial city in Inner Mongolia. I’m here with a group of architects and designers called the Unknown Fields Division, and this is the final stop on a three-week-long journey up the global supply chain, tracing back the route consumer goods take from China to our shops and homes, via container ships and factories.

You may not have heard of Baotou, but the mines and factories here help to keep our modern lives ticking. It is one of the world’s biggest suppliers of “rare earth” minerals. These elements can be found in everything from magnets in wind turbines and electric car motors, to the electronic guts of smartphones and flatscreen TVs. In 2009 China produced 95% of the world’s supply of these elements, and it’s estimated that the Bayan Obo mines just north of Baotou contain 70% of the world’s reserves. But, as we would discover, at what cost?

Element of success

Rare earth minerals have played a key role in the transformation and explosive growth of China’s world-beating economy over the last few decades. It’s clear from visiting Baotou that it’s had a huge, transformative impact on the city too. As the centre of this 21st Century gold-rush, Baotou feels very much like a frontier town.

In 1950, before rare earth mining started in earnest, the city had a population of 97,000. Today, the population is more than two-and-a-half million. There is only one reason for this huge influx of people – minerals. As a result Baotou often feels stuck somewhere between a brave new world of opportunity presented by the global capitalism that depends on it, and the fading memories of Communism that still line its Soviet era boulevards. Billboards for expensive American brands stand next to revolution-era propaganda murals, as the disinterested faces of Western supermodels gaze down on statues of Chairman Mao. At night, multicoloured lights, glass-dyed by rare earth elements, line the larger roads, turning the city into a scene from the movie Tron, while the smaller side streets are filled with drunk, vomiting refinery workers that spill from bars and barbecue joints.

Even before getting to the toxic lake, the environmental impact the rare earth industry has had on the city is painfully clear. At times it’s impossible to tell where the vast structure of the Baogang refineries complex ends and the city begins. Massive pipes erupt from the ground and run along roadways and sidewalks, arching into the air to cross roads like bridges. The streets here are wide, built to accommodate the constant stream of huge diesel-belching coal trucks that dwarf all other traffic.

After it rains they plough, unstoppable, through roads flooded with water turned black by coal dust. They line up by the sides of the road, queuing to turn into one of Baotou’s many coal-burning power stations that sit unsettlingly close to freshly built apartment towers. Everywhere you look, between the half-completed tower blocks and hastily thrown up multi-storey parking lots, is a forest of flame-tipped refinery towers and endless electricity pylons. The air is filled with a constant, ambient, smell of sulphur. It’s the kind of industrial landscape that America and Europe has largely forgotten – at one time parts of Detroit or Sheffield must have looked and smelled like this.

Quiet plant

One of our first visits in the city is to a processing plant that specialises mainly in producing cerium, one of the most abundant rare earth minerals. Cerium has a huge number of commercial applications, from colouring glass to making catalytic converters. The guide who shows us around the plant explains that they mainly produce cerium oxide, used to polish touchscreens on smartphones and tablets.

As we are wandering through the factory’s hangar-like rooms, it’s impossible not to notice that something is missing. Amongst the mazes of pipes, tanks, and centrifuges, there are no people. In fact there’s no activity at all. Apart from our voices, which echo through the huge sheds, the plant is silent. It’s very obviously not operating. When asked, our guide tells us the plant is closed for maintenance – but there’s no sign of that either: no maintenance crews, no cleaning or repairs being done. When pushed further our guide gets suspicious, wonders why we are asking so many questions, and clams up. It’s a behaviour we’ll encounter a lot in Baotou – a refusal to answer questions or stray off a strictly worded script.

As we leave, one of our party who has visited the area before suggests a possible explanation: could local industry be artificially controlling market scarcity of products like cerium oxide, in order to keep rare earth prices high? We can’t know for sure that this was the case the day we visited. Yet it would not be unprecedented: in 2012, for example, the news agency Xinhua reported that China’s largest rare earth producer was suspending operations to prevent price drops.

One of Baotou’s other main exports is neodymium, another rare earth with a variety of applications. Again it is used to dye glass, especially for making lasers, but perhaps its most important use is in making powerful yet lightweight magnets. Neodymium magnets are used in consumer electronics items such as in-ear headphones, cellphone microphones, and computer hard-drives. At the other end of the scale they are a vital component in large equipment that requires powerful magnetic fields, such as wind farm turbines and the motors that power the new generation of electric cars. We’re shown around a neodymium magnet factory by a guide who seems more open than our friend at the cerium plant. We’re even given some magnets to play with. But again, when our questions stray too far from applications and to production and associated environmental costs, the answers are less forthcoming, and pretty soon the visit is over.

The intriguing thing about both neodymium and cerium is that while they’re called rare earth minerals, they’re actually fairly common. Neodymium is no rarer than copper or nickel and quite evenly distributed throughout the world’s crust. While China produces 90% of the global market’s neodymium, only 30% of the world’s deposits are located there. Arguably, what makes it, and cerium, scarce enough to be profitable are the hugely hazardous and toxic process needed to extract them from ore and to refine them into usable products. For example, cerium is extracted by crushing mineral mixtures and dissolving them in sulphuric and nitric acid, and this has to be done on a huge industrial scale, resulting in a vast amount of poisonous waste as a byproduct. It could be argued that China’s dominance of the rare earth market is less about geology and far more about the country’s willingness to take an environmental hit that other nations shy away from.

And there’s no better place to understand China’s true sacrifice than the shores of Baotou toxic lake. Apparently created by damming a river and flooding what was once farm land, the lake is a “tailings pond”: a dumping ground for waste byproducts. It takes just 20 minutes to reach the lake by car from the centre of the city, passing through abandoned countryside dominated by the industrial architecture on the horizon. Earlier reports claim the lake is guarded by the military, but we see no sign. We pass a shack that was presumably a guard hut at one point but it’s abandoned now; whoever was here left in a hurry, leaving their bedding, cooking stove, and instant noodle packets behind when they did.

We reached the shore, and looked across the lake. I’d seen some photos before I left for Inner Mongolia, but nothing prepared me for the sight. It’s a truly alien environment, dystopian and horrifying. The thought that it is man-made depressed and terrified me, as did the realisation that this was the byproduct not just of the consumer electronics in my pocket, but also green technologies like wind turbines and electric cars that we get so smugly excited about in the West. Unsure of quite how to react, I take photos and shoot video on my cerium polished iPhone.

You can see the lake on Google Maps, and that hints at the scale. Zoom in far enough and you can make out the dozens of pipes that line the shore. Unknown Fields’ Liam Young collected some samples of the waste and took it back to the UK to be tested. “The clay we collected from the toxic lake tested at around three times background radiation,” he later tells me.

Watch the black byproduct of rare earth mining pouring into the lake at Baotao (Credit: Richard John Seymour/Unknown Fields)

Unknown Fields has an unusual plan for the stuff. “We are using this radioactive clay to make a series of ceramic vessels modelled on traditional Ming vases,” Young explains, “each proportioned based on the amount of toxic waste produced by the rare earth minerals used in a particular tech gadget.” The idea is to illustrate the impact our consumer goods have on the environment, even when that environment might be unseen and thousands of miles away.

After seeing the impact of rare earth mining myself, it’s impossible to view the gadgets I use everyday in the same way. As I watched Apple announce their smart watch recently, a thought crossed my mind: once we made watches with minerals mined from the Earth and treated them like precious heirlooms; now we use even rarer minerals and we’ll want to update them yearly. Technology companies continually urge us to upgrade; to buy the newest tablet or phone. But I cannot forget that it all begins in a place like Bautou, and a terrible toxic lake that stretches to the horizon.

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Read the first two instalments in this series, whereTim Maughan and the Unknown Fields group visits the Chinese city of Yiwu, the real home of Christmas and explore the invisible shipping network that keeps the world running.
This trip was organised and funded by theUnknown Fields Division, a group of architects, academics and designers at the Architectural Association School of Architecture in London.

I’d seen some photos before I left for Inner Mongolia, but nothing prepared me for the sight – The alien environment at Baotou lake

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” Why Low Oil Prices Won’t Stop The Growth Of Renewable Energy“

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CREDIT: AP/Matt Young

Oil prices might be very low, but that’s not going to take away from investments in renewable energy.

That’s at least the consensus from Citigroup, the latest investment researcher to say clean energy won’t be slowed by cheap oil, Bloomberg reported Monday. Deutsche Bank and Goldman Sachs have also predicted that the oil price slump won’t affect renewable energy growth.

There’s a simple reason for this: Oil and renewables aren’t really in competition. Oil powers cars and heaters, and renewable energy – by and large – powers the electricity grid. (As we get more electric cars, transportation could increasingly rely on renewable energy, but we’re still pretty far from widespread electric car adoption.)

The United States generated merely one percent of its electricity with oil in 2014, according to the Energy Information Administration. Globally, only 11 countries get more than 20 percent of their electric power from oil, Bloomberg reported.

Natural gas, not oil, is in competition with renewable energy. The fastest-growing source of energy, natural gas-powered plants now provide more than a quarter of the U.S. electricity supply. However, if low oil prices cause suppliers to limit production, natural gas prices could actually go up, making renewable energy even more cost effective.

Renewable sources, including hydropower, contributed about 12 percent of the U.S. electricity supply last year.

Citigroup’s optimistic prediction about renewables comes at a time when clean energy investment is growing across the globe. Worldwide, investment in renewable energy went up 17 percent last year, according to a U.N. report released Tuesday.

“Once again in 2014, renewables made up nearly half of the net power capacity added worldwide,” Achim Steiner, UN Under-Secretary-General and Executive Director of UNEP, said in a statement.

The cost-benefit analysis of renewable energy has been a huge debate in recent years. While conservative groups like Americans for Prosperity say we can’t afford to go renewable, others say we can’t afford not to. More than two-thirds of today’s proven fossil fuel reserves need to still be in the ground in 2050 in order to prevent catastrophic levels of climate change, according to the International Energy Agency.

Fortunately for clean energy proponents, prices for both wind and solar have fallen dramatically in recent years. The price of a residential solar system dropped by nearly half in the past five years, according to the Solar Energy Industries Association. Likewise, the cost of wind energy has dropped nearly 60 percent since 2009. Research shows during that same time period, jobs in the U.S. solar industry have grown by 85 percent.

In fact, the promise of job growth in the United States has been one of the strongest counterarguments to the perceived cost of renewable energy. As the United States and other countries announce carbon-cutting measures in advance of the U.N. climate talks in Paris later this year, it’s becoming clearer what clean energy job growth could look like on a global scale.

In “Assessing the Missed Benefits of Countries’ National Contributions,” also released Monday, scientists at the NewClimate Institute said that carbon-reduction commitments could create a million new “green jobs” in the United States, China, and the European Union by 2030.

“It is an economic incentive to act on climate for local benefits on fossil fuel imports, jobs and air pollution,” Niklas Höhne, one of the report’s authors, told ThinkProgress. “For many situations renewables are cost competitive with fossil fuel power plants. If then in addition the co-benefits are taken into account, they are often the preferred choice.”

If you lived in the many parts of the United States and Europe last week and were in need of a reprieve from persistent, frigid temperatures, you would have found relief in the most unlikely of places.

Part of Antarctica hit a record high of 63.5 degrees Fahrenheit last Tuesday, the hottest ever reported, according to the climate monitor OGIMET.

By comparison, Washington DC was 46 degrees, New York City reached 45 degrees, and the temperature in London topped 50 degrees.

While scientists warn not to draw conclusions from a single weather event, the temps hue closely to more alarming, long-term trends in the southern continent.

Antarctica’s floating ice shelves have recently decreased by as much as 18 percent in some spots over the last 18 years, says a new study, published in the journal Science. As the oceans have warmed, they’ve spurred more of the frozen mass to become water, researcher Fernando Paolo told VICE News.

“There is evidence that the amount of warm ocean water reaching the ice shelves has increased, so more warm water under these is causing the melt,” Paolo, a PhD candidate with UC San Diego’s Scripps Institute of Oceanography, told VICE News. “And there is a lag in the response time of the environment. So, even if conditions changed now, 20 years from now the environment will still be reacting this way.”

And the findings indicate that sea levels are certain to continue rising, Doug Martinson, a professor with the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory at Columbia University, told VICE News.

“You could stop global warming tomorrow but that doesn’t matter from this perspective because there’s already so much heat stored in the ocean, it’ll keep coming up and melting the ice,” Martinson, who was not involved in Paolo’s study, told VICE News.

The study, which advanced previous research on Antarctica’s ice mass, compiled 18 years of continuous data starting in 1994, and found that the bulk of melt occurred between 2003 and 2012, Paolo noted.

“We could see there was an acceleration of loss,” Paolo said of the ice mass. “Another important thing we were able to see was that some of the ice shelves have a large fluctuation of gain and loss in volume over time. So, if you look at a shorter period, you won’t see the trend.”

Air temperatures on the Antarctic Peninsula – where the record high was documented last week – have been found to further affect ice melt there, Paolo said, so such steamy weather could certainly cause more reason for concern.

“On the Antarctic Peninsula we have a weather station so we know the weather is responsible for changes,” Paolo said.

Still, one or two extremely hot days cannot be directly attributed to global warming, said Hugh Ducklow, also a professor with Lamont-Doherty. He warned of drawing too many conclusions from the 63.5-degree weather.

“I don’t believe that you can attribute any isolated event to global warming. This is just like saying the next 100-degree day or next hurricane in NYC is due to global warming,” Ducklow told VICE News. “A warmer climate could increase the likelihood of occurrence of hot days, but the individual events are not ’caused’ by global warming.”

Related: Antarctica’s melting ice sheets might bring more sea level rise to the US than anywhere else

And regardless of the air temperature, the ocean’s conditions actually have a far stronger impact on the melting ice and rising sea levels, Martinson explained.

“The heat contained in water is thousands of times stronger than the heat of the atmosphere,” Martinson said of the sea’s ability to dissolve Antarctic ice.

Follow Meredith Hoffman on Twitter: @merhoffman

“Heat is absorbed in the ocean like a sponge, and a good amount of that heat is coming up. Where it comes up it melts underside of the ice shelves,” Martinson said, warning that the phenomenon could push the sea level dangerously high. “I don’t like to say ‘doomsday scenario’ but this is sort of pointing toward it.”

We just found out that the Commonwealth Club of California – the “nation’s oldest and largest public affairs forum” – plans to honor Chevron CEO John Watson as a “distinguished global citizen” who has “given back” to the global community. They’re actually going to honor Watson’s ability to abuse his power, wealth and corporate connections to evade accountability for the wide range of environmental and human rights crimes he has overseen as head of Chevron since 2010? WHAT?!

There are a myriad of reasons why presenting such an award to Watson is outrageous. Massive pollution and health crises in Ecuador, death and destruction in Nigeria, lying to shareholders, abuse of the justice system, trampling free speech in the U.S., dumping millions into local elections to undermine democracy… the list of Chevron’s violations goes on and on. Watson has either overseen or has taken a personal role in advancing strategies that attack Chevron’s critics and has gone to extraordinary lengths to avoid accepting responsibility for Chevron’s well documented actions of harming both people and the planet. It took less than a day to find almost 40 human rights and environmental organizations ready and willing to denounce this decision. If we had taken a week it would easily have been well over 100.

How is it then that none of this leaves a sour taste in the mouths of the Board of Governors at the Commonwealth Club?

Yes, this is all clearly a way for the Commonwealth Club to have a very successful fundraising gala. You present a symbolic award to someone like Watson and all his friends and colleagues come to dine and celebrate, donating thousands to the Club and paying exorbitant amounts for dinner and drinks at the Ritz Carlton. But just how far does someone need to go before it becomes in bad taste to “honor” them, despite how much money it may bring in? Would Bill Cosby be invited to the dinner alongside Jennifer Siebel Newsom as she talks about her work and film project on behalf of women and girls? I think not.

Yet Watson and Chevron’s acts to criminalize free speech and attack their critics were recently condemned by the Sierra Club, Greenpeace, Amnesty International and a host of other respected groups. Chevron famously lost in its effort to buy the elections in Richmond, hoping to completely undermine the democratic process. Why? Because their new puppets in Richmond would then drop the city’s lawsuit for the deadly refinery fire of 2012.

When Watson took over Chevron in 2010 his company’s handling of its Ecuador disaster took a very different and distinctly aggressive tone. Watson had been one of the architects of Chevron’s merger with Texaco years before. He was there when Amazon Watch warned Chevron not to proceed because of the enormous liability in Ecuador. He knew that Texaco admitted to deliberately dumping billions of gallons of toxic waste into the pristine inhabited rainforest. He knew Texaco documents were uncovered proving the company’s policy of hiding leaks and not reporting spills during its operations. Apparently, just as the Texaco executives decided that it was worth the human and environmental toll to save $3 per barrel by dumping the waste for decades instead of lining their open toxic waste pits, Watson decided the merger with Texaco was worth the cost. He literally agreed to own Texaco’s mess.

When Watson took over from David O’Reilly in 2010, he had a choice. He could have ushered in a new era for the company. He could have apologized to the people of Ecuador. He could have negotiated a settlement and agreed to clean up the Amazon wasteland his company had created. True – to do so would have cost a tremendous amount of money. But in addition to being the right thing to do, and stemming the wave of deaths from cancer, it would have also been fiscally responsible. And it would have earned Watson a legitimate reason to be recognized by a group like the Commonwealth Club.

For in the end, Chevron has spent over a billion dollars already just fighting to avoid its responsibility. Lawyers have built careers (and billed more than the affected communities in Ecuador make in a lifetime) providing legal defense for Chevron. When all is said and done, and Chevron finally pays for the clean-up, when it realizes that the resolve of the affected communities and their many global allies in supporters is stronger, then it will have paid twice over for its acts in Ecuador. Thousands more will have died from cancer, however. They are suffering and dying at this very moment.

Will Watson or anyone at the Commonwealth Club gala give a moment’s thought to them on April 2nd?

We could all shrug our shoulders and write this whole event off as just more of the rich patting themselves on the back and move on. But there is a real danger here. The danger is that this isn’t just a pro-oil company lobby group celebrating Watson’s acts to thwart renewable energy programs. This is an institution founded for debate and discussion on the issues of the day granting legitimacy to a known corporate criminal who is free from accountability only because he and his company are rich enough to hire 60 law firms and over 2000 legal professionals to drag on the legal saga for ages in hopes that the affected communities will literally die out and their supporters will exhaust the resources to assist them any more. That act must be protested. The standard that allows Watson to stand next to people acknowledged for actually trying to better the world must always be condemned. That is why we register our outrage. It is on behalf of those sick and dying in Richmond, Nigeria, Ecuador and elsewhere, who John Watson could have assisted – and didn’t.

It probably won’t be until the day Chevron finally pays the Ecuadorian judgment when the reckoning comes for Watson. Perhaps only when the bill at long last arrives, when Chevron’s assets are seized and Watson can’t hide that he’s cost shareholders billions of wasted dollars, that organizations like the Commonwealth Club will keep the name of Watson off the list. At that point it would just be in bad taste.