links for 2008-08-15

• Benign Deflation in a New Keynesian Model - Macro and Other Market Musings
• Why inflation? - Interfluidity
• Hope behind this statute - The Edge of the American West
• Rapid Growth Found in Oxygen-Starved Ocean ‘Dead Zones’ - NYTimes.com
• Oil and politics - Los Angeles Times
• Stern Sees Higher Unemployment, Lower Inflation - Real Time Economics
• Real-Time Data Set - Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia

Comments

[Let It Be]

Macro..."Entekhabi uses a standard New Keynesian model to find the optimal rate of inflation and it turns out to be negative."

Yes, let it be.

[anne]

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/15/us/15oceans.html?ref=science&pagewanted=print

August 15, 2008

Rapid Growth Found in Oxygen-Starved Ocean 'Dead Zones'
By BINA VENKATARAMAN

Many coastal areas of the world's oceans are being starved of oxygen at an alarming rate, with vast stretches along the seafloor depleted of it to the point that they can barely sustain marine life, researchers are reporting.

The main culprit, scientists say, is nitrogen-rich nutrients from crop fertilizers that spill into coastal waters by way of rivers and streams.

A study to be published Friday in the journal Science says the number of these marine "dead zones" around the world has doubled about every 10 years since the 1960s. About 400 coastal areas now have periodically or perpetually oxygen-starved bottom waters, many of them growing in size and intensity. Combined, the zones are larger than Oregon.

"What's happened in the last 40, 50 years is that human activity has made the water quality conditions worse," the study's leader author, Robert J. Diaz, said in an interview.

The trend portends nothing good for many fisheries, said Dr. Diaz, a professor at the Virginia Institute of Marine Science at the College of William and Mary. "Dead zones," he said, "tend to occur in areas that are historically prime fishing grounds."

Indeed, while the size of dead zones is small relative to the total surface of the oceans, scientists say they account for a significant part of ocean waters that support commercial fish and shellfish species.

Seasonally, low oxygen levels wipe out fish and crustaceans from dead-zone bottom waters in places like the Gulf of Mexico, Chesapeake Bay and the Baltic Sea, leaving little life other than microbes. Among places where dead zones have grown in recent years are coastal China and the Kattegat Sea, where the Norway lobster fishery collapsed. The zones have also cropped up unexpectedly in pockets off the coast of South Carolina and the Pacific Northwest.

The dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico this summer covers a swath nearly the size of Massachusetts. That zone has more than doubled in size in the last 20 years.

"There are large areas of the gulf where you can't catch any shrimp," said Nancy N. Rabalais, executive director of the Louisiana Universities Marine Consortium, who has studied the dead zone there for more than two decades. "It's sort of a losing battle."

Scientists attribute dead zones to a process that begins when nitrogen from agricultural runoff and sewage stimulates the growth of photosynthetic plankton on the surface of coastal waters. As the organisms decay and sink to the bottom, they are decomposed by microbes that consume large amounts of oxygen. As oxygen levels drop, most animals that live at the bottom cannot survive.

"The overwhelming response of the organisms in our coastal areas is to migrate or to die," Dr. Diaz said. "To adapt to low oxygen water, it has to be a part of your evolutionary history. It's not something you can develop in a 40- or 50-year time period." ...

[Alex Tolley]

Re: Rapid Growth Found in Oxygen-Starved Ocean ‘Dead Zone'

This is only going to get worse as food shortages stimulate more fertilizer use, especially globally. Historically we have treated the air and water systems as infinite sinks for our wastes, but we are increasingly running up against their limits. However these effects are not irreversible. Lake Erie was once a dead zone at depth, but revived with better waste management.

[anne]

Extra! Read all about it!

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/15/us/politics/15edwards.html?hp=&pagewanted=print

August 15, 2008

Lawyers’ Ties Hint at Extent of Hiding Edwards’s Affair
By SERGE F. KOVALESKI and MIKE MCINTIRE

John Edwards’s affair may have gone on longer than he admitted and the effort to conceal it may have been much more extensive than has been reported.

[Julio]

"John Edwards’s affair may have gone on longer than he admitted "

WHAT?? Shoot, I just dropped my cup of tea all over my bed!!

Wait, I got my posts crossed...

I'm going out for a long cup of coffee. It's that kind of day...

[kthomas]

anne, I recall you speaking about how important it is that we ship fertilizers to 3rd world countries. Does this make you reconsider?

[kthomas]

The amount od media attention that John Edwards is getting for his stupid affair is way out of proportion. You'd think he was the DNC candidate.

[anne]

K Thomas:

"Anne, I recall you speaking about how important it is that we ship fertilizers to 3rd world countries. Does this make you reconsider?"

An important and complex question, that could be echoed for assistance on drilling wells that are used in ecologically destructive ways as I am learning. I have no ready answer, but am thinking.