The death of an ancient cedar tree inside a remote park on Canada's Vancouver Island is being showcased by an environmental group seeking more protection against illegal loggers.

The 800-year-old tree was attacked by poachers with power saws over time at Carmanah Walbran Provincial Park, the Wilderness Committee reported Thursday. Cedar is valuable as material for roofing shingles.

The poachers, still at large, were able to cut through 80 percent of the base of the tree -- which had a diameter of nine feet -- before park staff finally noticed what was going on, Wilderness Committee campaigner Torrance Coste told msnbc.com. The damage was so severe that park staff had to fell the entire tree for safety reasons.

The park left the fallen tree at the site so that it could decompose, returning nutrients to the soil, Coste said, but since then poachers "have returned at their leisure without fear of consequence and cut up, hauled out, and taken away the tree in sections.

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"This has required seriously heavy equipment," he added. "The area has been trashed, and there are huge steel cables lying around all over the place ... sections of the trunk have been removed up until as recently as two weeks ago."

The Wilderness Committee urged British Columbia, which incorporates Vancouver Island, to beef up funding for park rangers. 

"While the poachers themselves have obviously committed a terrible crime, fault for this incident should also lay with the Ministry of Environment and their long-time negligence of our parks," Coste said. 

The controversy has reached British Columbia's government, with the opposition New Democrat Party criticizing the Liberal Party government, The Canadian Press reported. 

"To suggest that anyone is able to protect all of those areas to the level that the member suggests is fiscally irresponsible," responded Environment Minister Terry Lake.

"I'll tell you what irresponsible is," countered New Democrat Scott Fraser, "10 years ago there were 194 park rangers in British Columbia, there's under 100 now."

The Wilderness Committee, for its part, also fears illegal logging of cedar might be happening elsewhere on Vancouver Island. 

“What we need to know" from the environment ministry "is if cedar poaching is happening anywhere else," Coste said.

A parks official said investigators have little information to work with.

"We have no eyewitnesses or license plates," Don Closson told the Canadian Press.

A police officer echoed the lack of evidence, adding that the poachers were likely after the cedar for roofing shingles.

"It's obviously much more gain than going out and taking a whole pile of firewood," Sgt. Dave Voller told the Canadian Press. "A logging truck loaded with cedar would be worth thousands and thousands of dollars."

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The world's most expensive cable car is undergoing tests in London – but authorities admit the project, which links two Olympic venues, may not open in time for this summer's Games.

The 1,000-yard gondola lift line crosses the River Thames in east London and is planned to be both a commuter route and a tourist attraction.

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It has been enthusiastically backed by London Mayor Boris Johnson, but opponents point out the scheme will use public money despite a huge $57 million sponsorship deal with Dubai-based Emirates Airlines which means the facility will be officially known as the Emirates Air Line.

PhotoBlog: London's new Thames cable car in place - but will it be ready for the Olympics?

It will cost up to $95 million in total, with around $20 million coming from local public funds.

Transit authority Transport for London (TfL), which will operate the cable car, will only say the project will be open "in the summer," raising the prospect that it will not be ready in time for the London 2012 Games in July. TfL insists the route was never part of the Olympic transport plan.

Two 300ft-high pillars will carry more than 30 gondolas across the river from the O2 – the Greenwich concert venue that will host events including the gymnastics and basketball finals – to the Docklands-based ExCel conference center which is being used for boxing, fencing, judo, taekwondo, table tennis, weightlifting and wrestling.

The cost of a journey on the Emirates Air Line has not yet been set, but TfL says it will be similar to the frequent Thames River Boat service whose fares are around $8. Passengers will be able to pay with Oyster cards, the pre-payment "smart card" used by millions of Londoners.

Although the cost will be significantly higher than the equivalent bus or subway journey, the views from the 10-person gondolas traveling 160 feet above the ground are undoubtedly more appealing. 

TfL says the system will move 2,000 passengers an hour -- the equivalent capacity of more than 30 buses.

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ADDIS ABABA, Ethiopia – Ahead of this week's G8 summit at Camp David, Maryland, the musician and global poverty campaigner Bob Geldof has returned to Ethiopia to highlight the issue of famine and climate change – 28 years after his charity appeals first made world headlines.

The singer said G8 leaders have failed to adhere to aid targets set at the Gleneagles summit in 2005.

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The G8 "is capable of contributing to end" poverty, he said.

He also acknowledged that people may have grown tired of his campaigning, but said even basic projects such as the irrigation ditch he was inspecting, saved lives. "I know people are like...'Oh, Geldof, give it a break' but the facts is these people [here] are not dead."

Geldof was one of the key figures behind the Band Aid fundraising music project, launched in 1984 after Ethiopia suffered a devastating famine.

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Peeing while swimming in a lake may not just be taboo – it could also be lethal, for the fish.

At least that's what a group of anglers contend, blaming swimmers for the 500 dead fish that have turned up in a picturesque German lake near Hamburg, The Local reported.

"Swimmers who urinate in the lake are introducing a lot of phosphate," Manfred Siedler, a spokesman for an angler’s group, told Bild newspaper. "We're calculating half a liter of urine per swimmer per day."

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Skeptics questioned whether the outcry was an attempt by fishermen to oust bathers – with whom they have long feuded, according to The Local – but are saying this could be possible.

IO9.com, a Gawker science blog posed the question, “Can anything as natural as peeing in a lake kill the fish?”

The answer, apparently, is yes.

The urine itself doesn’t harm the fish but sets off a series of environmental events that ultimately suffocate the fish.

First, the urine acts as a fertilizer for the blue-green algae in the water. Once they have consumed all the fertilizer, the algae continue sucking up available oxygen in the water, IO9.com explained. When the algae die and start to decompose, they further use up oxygen. That’s when fish start to die.

Bild reported that authorities have poured more than half a million dollars of an anti-phosphate agent called Bentophos into the lake, to no avail.

(Bentophos has been tested in artificial lakes that were shut down due to massive bacterial blooms.)

For now, the lake is closed to swimmers because of the high levels of algae (which can cause swimmer's itch), but the city's environmental authority is fighting the closure, The Local reported.

Kerstin Graupner, a spokeswoman for the environmental authority, told The Local that she blamed natural causes and ice-skaters.

"The ice-skaters make a noise that wakes the fish out of hibernation," Graupner said. "Then they can't breathe and freeze. That's a very common phenomenon."

Graupner’s agency called on a university in Hamburg to test the anglers’ theory. According to The Local, it appears the anglers may have a point – the scientists found anabaena algae blooms, which produce a toxin that ultimately restricts fish breathing.  

The German lake isn’t the only place where officials worry about swimmers; signs at the Great Barrier Reef ask swimmers not to urinate in the water. Doing so apparently kills the corals, which grow in low nutrient waters.

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A plastic card dropped into the ocean 33 years ago has been found on the coast of Alaska, after a potential 88,000-mile journey.

The drift card was one of thousands put into the Bering Sea by National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration staff in the late 1970s and early 1980s, as part of a project to find out where oil would go if there was a spill.

About the size of a postcard, it offered a reward of $1 for its return in three languages: English, Japanese and Russian.

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It was found on a beach at Sealion Cove, near Sitka, Alaska, last month by 12-year-old middle school student and keen beachcomber Emmitt Anderson. "We never know what we're going to find ... I just like to find stuff. When I don't find stuff, I'm not very happy," Anderson told the Daily Sitka Sentinel newspaper.

'Amazingly good condition'
His father Steve contacted NOAA and was put in touch with oceanographer Curtis Ebbesmeyer, who tracks flotsam as it rides the world's currents.

Ebbesmeyer told msnbc.com that Anderson's drift card had likely been caught in the Aleut gyre, circulating ocean currents that take three years to make an 8,000-mile orbit.

"The question is how many times did it go around? I think it's likely it went around once, it could have gone round 11 times. It's possible it went 88,000 miles. It could have short-circuited the gyre … we'll never quite know," he said.

"Everything in the ocean, particularly plastic, can travel great, great distances," he added.

Ebbesmeyer said the drift card was in "amazingly good condition."

"After 33 years in the ocean, [it] is in quite readable condition," he said. "Plastic doesn't degrade very fast."

Much of the plastic that finds its way into the sea will travel the world for years to come.

"Half of all plastic cannot sink because of its specific gravity. It's as if it was in prison in Flatland [a fictional two-dimensional world]," Ebbesmeyer said.

Study: Plastic in 'Great Pacific Garbage Patch' increases 100-fold

While Anderson's drift card did not make landing very far from where it was released, others have ended up in Europe.

"Across the North Pole, down past Greenland, down to almost New York City, over to the vicinity of London, then turn south to France. That's probably the longest certifiable drift," Ebbesmeyer said.

Even if the Sitka drift card traveled 88,000 miles that may not be the longest ever journey by a piece of plastic in the sea.

An albatross found on Midway Island in the Pacific in 2004 was found to have 512 pieces of plastic in its stomach.

One piece was discovered to have come from a downed aircraft from World War II. It was likely caught in the 12,000-mile turtle gyre, which takes about six years to make its full circle.

Ebbesmeyer said that if that piece of plastic made 10 orbits in 60 years, that would mean it traveled 120,000 miles, equivalent to about five times round the Earth.

Plastic ducks, frogs
He also tracks some 28,800 plastic bath toys called Floatees – turtles, ducks, beavers and frogs – that were lost overboard from a container ship in the mid-Pacific in 1992. 

Hundreds drifted some 2,200 miles and beached -- like Emmett Anderson's drift card -- near Sitka, Alaska.

To date, a duck was seen in Maine in July 2003, while a green plastic frog was spotted in Scotland in August 2003.

Ebbesmeyer, who usually gets one or two reports a year about the floating toys, said some of them may be approaching an epic achievement: Circumnavigating the globe.

"It's possible they have gone something like in the order of round the world," he said.

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Scientists have long focused on Antarctica’s smaller ice sheet as being vulnerable to warming, but two new studies project that part of the continent's much larger ice sheet is also at risk -- and that ice now held back on land there could add to sea level rise by 2100.

"This is the first legitimate evidence that this part of Antarctica is in play," Bob Bindschadler, a NASA earth scientist who has studied Antarctica for 30 years, told msnbc.com. "The potential, the reservoir of ice ... is vast."

In fact, that area, known as the East Antarctic Ice Sheet, has 10 times as much ice as the West Antarctic Ice Sheet. 

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One study, published Wednesday in the journal Nature, used a computer model to project what would happen in Antarctica's Weddell Sea if temperatures rose in line with U.N. projections for 2100. 

The result was a change in ocean circulation and a temperature increase that would disintegrate the now-intact Ronne-Filchner Ice Shelf, with warmer water eating away from underneath.

Ice shelves like Ronne-Filchner sit on water, and thus their disintegration can't raise sea levels directly. But they also hold back ice sheets that sit atop land -- and those would start to drain into the sea if shelves weren't there to block them.

The Ronne-Filchner shelf is unusual in that it "sits on the fence" between Antarctica's two ice sheets, so it "can affect both sides," said Bindschadler, who was not involved in the research.

The finding echoes earlier research showing a similar warming effect in the Amundsen Sea on the other side of the Antarctic Peninsula. Ice shelves along the Amundsen Sea coast have weakened in recent decades. 

"The Weddell Sea is as vulnerable as the Amundsen Sea," study co-author Hartmut Hellmer of Germany's Alfred Wegener Institute said at a press conference, "and it affects a much larger ice shelf."

"We found a mechanism which drives warm water towards the coast with an enormous impact on the Filchner-Ronne Ice Shelf in the coming decades," he added in a statement released with the study.

"It appears all hell could break loose there, too," added Bindschadler.

The second study, published in Nature Geoscience on Wednesday, found that near the Ronne-Filchner ice shelf the West Antarctic Ice Sheet has a slope that would accelerate melt since warmer seas would flow toward the ice being held back on land.

That scenario, said Bindschadler, "sets off alarms in my mind."

The study authors -- and Bindschadler -- emphasized that the east sheet has not started eroding but they certainly worry about the potential.

"It still doesn't look like they've done much," Bindschadler said of the ice streams that could flow into the Weddell Sea, "but lo and behold, the vulnerability is perhaps greater than the ice shelves we've been focused on recently."

Tom Wagner, also a NASA earth scientist who studies ice, said the work was "the first to tie everything together -- from the ocean through to the glaciers.

"While all projections have uncertainty," he added, "the physical processes considered here are well known and the extrapolations reasonable." 

Just how much ice could escape into the sea -- and raise global sea levels -- if the Ronne-Filchner ice shelf disintegrated is the big unknown. 

The two studies didn't look at that aspect but "we think there is cause for concern," said Martin Siegert, co-author of the slope study and a University of Edinburgh researcher.

Another group at the Alfred Wegener Institute is now studying the potential impact on sea levels. 

If the ice sheet flow toward the sea is as great as the ice shelf loss, the institute said in its statement, then global sea levels would rise 0.17 inches a year.

That might not sound like much, but sea levels rose by just 0.05 inches a year from 2003 to 2010 due to ice melt, the institute noted. 

Moreover, the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change projects other sources will raise sea levels between seven inches and two feet by 2100, potentially flooding many low-lying areas.

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The amount of plastic trash in the "Great Pacific Garbage Patch" has increased 100-fold during the past 40 years, causing "profound" changes to the marine environment, according to a new study.

Scientists from Scripps Institution of Oceanography in San Diego found that insects called "sea skaters" or "water striders" were using the trash as a place to lay their eggs in greater numbers than before.

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In a paper published by the journal Biology Letters, researchers said this would have implications for other animals, the sea skaters' predators -- which include crabs --  and their food, which is mainly plankton and fish eggs.

The scientists also pointed to a previous Scripps study that found nine percent of fish had plastic waste in their stomachs.

The "Great Pacific Garbage Patch" -- which is roughly the size of Texas -- was created by plastic waste that finds its way into the sea and is then swept into one area, the North Pacific Subtropical Convergence Zone, by circulating ocean currents known as a gyre.

The Scripps Environmental Accumulation of Plastic Expedition, known as SEAPLEX, traveled about 1,000 miles west of California in August 2009.

A statement on Scripps' website said the scientists had "documented an alarming amount of human-generated trash, mostly broken down bits of plastic the size of a fingernail floating across thousands of miles of open ocean."

Scripps graduate student Miriam Goldstein, SEAPLEX’s chief scientist, said that plastic had arrived in the ocean in such numbers in a "relatively short" period.

"Plastic only became widespread in late '40s and early '50s, but now everyone uses it and over a 40-year range we've seen a dramatic increase in ocean plastic," she said. "Historically we have not been very good at stopping plastic from getting into the ocean so hopefully in the future we can do better." 

Sea skaters -- relatives of pond water skaters -- normally lay their eggs on flotsam such as seashells, seabird feathers, tar lumps and pumice. The sharp rise in plastic waste had led to an increase in egg densities in the gyre area, the study found.

"We're seeing changes in this marine insect that can be directly attributed to the plastic," Goldstein said in a statement.

She told BBC News that the addition of "hundreds of millions of hard surfaces" to the Pacific was "quite a profound change."

"In the North Pacific, for example, there's no floating seaweed like there is in the Sargasso Sea in the North Atlantic. And we know that the animals, the plants and the microbes that live on hard surfaces are different to the ones that live floating around in the water," she added.

A garbage patch has also been found in the Atlantic Ocean, lying a few hundreds miles off the North American coast from Cuba to Virginia.

Oceanographer Curtis Ebbesmeyer, who said he coined the phrase the "Great Pacific Garbage Patch," told msnbc.com by phone that the only solution was to switch to using biodegradable plastic and let the plastic gradually disperse.

"We can't clean it up. It's just too big. You'd have to have the entire U.S. Navy out there, round the clock, continuously towing little nets. And it's produced so fast, they wouldn't be able to keep up," he said.

Ebbesmeyer said in 10,000 years scientists might find a layer of plastic in the ground and use this as evidence of "the plastic people."

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WASHINGTON -- Some of Greenland's glaciers are moving about 30 percent faster than they did 10 years ago, contributing to rising global sea levels, but that still may not be enough to reach the most extreme projections for 2100, scientists reported on Thursday.

Researchers have been monitoring the big ice sheets of Greenland and Antarctica for decades as one indication of the impact of human-spurred climate change.

Made of compacted snow, these glaciers can move toward the sea, and when they get there, they dump water into the oceans around them. The faster they move, the more water they add, and the higher the oceans get.

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Not all glaciers move at the same pace, according to Twila Moon and her co-authors at the University of Washington and Ohio State University, whose research is published in the current issue of the journal Science.

Inland glaciers with no outlet to the sea poke along at top speeds of 30 to 325 feet a year, the researchers found, while those that end at the ocean can travel 7 miles a year.

The glaciers that flow to the sea around Greenland are the ones to watch, Moon said in a telephone interview, because that is where four-fifths of the loss of ice in Greenland occurs.

Satellite surveys of more than 200 glaciers showed that these comparatively fast-movers in the east, southeast and northwest areas of Greenland increased their speed by an average of 30 percent from 2000 to 2011.

The researchers found that the glaciers heading for the water were not accelerating as much as had been speculated in earlier projections of the worst that could happen. Based on those projections, there was a previous forecast of sea level rise of about 6 feet by century's end.

That would be enough to inundate parts of the U.S. Gulf coast, Alaska, Italy, France, England, Scotland, Denmark, Brazil, India, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, China, Japan, the Korean peninsula, Southeast Asia and Australia, according to maps of sea level rise at the Center for Remote Sensing of Ice Sheets. 

The latest research indicates this is unlikely by 2100.

"Two meters is really kind of a worst case," Moon said. "Now we have the luxury of a little bit more time and being able to actually look at the observations from the last 10 years. At this point it doesn't look like there's any evidence for the worst-case scenario."

A low projection of 8 inches is within reach, the researchers found, and even a small rise in sea level can add to the risks of storm surges and floods. As Moon put it, "If you raise the floor of a basketball court, you're going to have a lot more slam-dunks."

Because multiple factors contribute to sea level rise, it is difficult to determine the exact impact of Greenland's melting glaciers. Global seas have been rising by a bit more than 1 inch a year.

Just knowing how much ice is going into the ocean around Greenland does not give the complete picture, according to a related article in Science. Projections of regional sea level rise are complicated, but they are needed, said co-author Joshua Willis of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

"What people really need to know is, how is sea level going to change in my backyard?" Willis said in a telephone interview. To figure that out, he said, scientists must not only figure out the glacier melt situation on a global scale but also add factors like wind, geology, water temperature and even gravity that can have powerful impacts in specific areas.

In southern Louisiana, for example, the land is sinking as the seas are rising, creating a potential double-whammy there. In Greenland, by contrast, the land may actually rise as the weight of heavy ice slides off, like a couch cushion rebounding after a person gets up after a long sit.

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