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Anti-Whaling Activist Paul Watson Arrested in Greenland, May Face Extradition to Japan

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Original article by EDWARD CARVER republished from Common Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). 

Danish police arrested anti-whaling activist Paul Watson when his vessel came to port in Nuuk, Greenland, on July 21, 2024. (Photo: Captain Paul Watson Foundation)

The famed campaigner was en route to intercept a new 370-foot Japanese factory whaling ship in the North Pacific when Danish police in Greenland made the surprise arrest, citing an international warrant issued by Japan.

Danish police on Sunday arrested prominent anti-whaling activist Paul Watson when his vessel came to port in Greenland, citing a warrant issued by Japan, a whaling nation that seeks his extradition.

Watson, a 73-year-old Canadian American who co-founded Greenpeace and founded Sea Shepherd, was traveling with 25 volunteers aboard the 236-foot M/Y John Paul DeJoria on a mission to the North Pacific for the Captain Paul Watson Foundation (CPWF), which he started after leaving Sea Shepherd in 2022.

When the vessel arrived in Nuuk, Greenland to refuel, the Danish police immediately boarded and arrested Watson.

The CPWF denounced the surprise arrest, which came as Watson planned to intercept a new Japanese factory whaling ship.

“We implore the Danish government to release Captain Watson and not entertain this politically-motivated request,” Locky MacLean, CPWF’s ship operations director, said in a statement.

Sunday’s arrest came as the M/Y John Paul DeJoria was making its way to the North Pacific via the Northwest Passage after setting off from Dublin. The CPWF team aimed to intercept the Kangei Maru, a new 370-foot, $48 million Japanese factory whaling ship that’s equipped with state-of-the-art drones that expedite the killing of whales.

CPWF argues that the launch of the new vessel signals Japan’s ambitions to restart commercial whaling on the high seas—international waters—in the North Pacific and the Southern Ocean as early as 2025. Japan long whaled the high seas in defiance of international law, under the guise of scientific research, but in recent years it has shifted to whaling in its own territorial waters, which extend 200 nautical miles from its shores.

Watson, who is known for confrontational tactics, was the star of the Animal Planet television show Whale Wars that ran from 2008 until 2015, in which he lead efforts to disrupt Japanese whaling on the high seas.

Over a dozen police and SWAT team members took part in Watson’s arrest in Greenland, an autonomous territory of Denmark. He was handcuffed and taken to local detention. A judge denied him bail on the grounds that he was a flight risk, citing a 2012 case from Germany in which he fled house arrest; he will be held in Nuuk until August 15 as authorities assess his possible extradition to Japan, where he could face up to 15 years in jail, The New York Times reported.

The nature of Japan’s charges against Watson was not specified in media reports. The Interpol arrest warrant cited by Danish police may be an old one, according to CPWF. MacLean said the warrant had “disappeared” from public view a few months ago and may have been made confidential, possibly as a tactic to lull Watson into a false sense of security when traveling internationally.

Original article by EDWARD CARVER republished from Common Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). 

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Decades after the US buried nuclear waste abroad, climate change could unearth it

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https://grist.org/indigenous/decades-after-the-us-buried-nuclear-waste-abroad-climate-change-could-unearth-it/


US military officers watch nuclear waste being dumped on Runit Island in the Marshall Islands.COURTESY OF DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE

A new report says melting ice sheets and rising seas could disturb waste from U.S. nuclear projects in Greenland and the Marshall Islands.

Ariana Tibon was in college at the University of Hawaiʻi in 2017 when she saw the photo online: a black-and-white picture of a man holding a baby. The caption said: “Nelson Anjain getting his baby monitored on March 2, 1954, by an AEC RadSafe team member on Rongelap two days after ʻBravo.’” 

Tibon had never seen the man before. But she recognized the name as her great-grandfather’s. At the time, he was living on Rongelap in the Marshall Islands when the U.S. conducted Castle Bravo, the largest of 67 nuclear weapon tests there during the Cold War. The tests displaced and sickened Indigenous people, poisoned fish, upended traditional food practices, and caused cancers and other negative health repercussions that continue to reverberate today. 

A federal report by the Government Accountability Office published last month examines what’s left of that nuclear contamination, not only in the Pacific but also in Greenland and Spain. The authors conclude that climate change could disturb nuclear waste left in Greenland and the Marshall Islands. “Rising sea levels could spread contamination in RMI, and conflicting risk assessments cause residents to distrust radiological information from the U.S. Department of Energy,” the report says. 

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https://grist.org/indigenous/decades-after-the-us-buried-nuclear-waste-abroad-climate-change-could-unearth-it/

Continue ReadingDecades after the US buried nuclear waste abroad, climate change could unearth it

‘Frightening’: Greenland Losing 33 Million Tons of Ice Per Hour Due to Climate Crisis

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Original article by JULIA CONLEY republished from Common Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). 

Migratory birds sit on ice floating in the Baffin Bay in the Arctic Ocean near Pituffik, Greenland on July 15, 2022.  (Photo: Kerem Yücel/AFP via Getty Images)

A new study finds the island’s ice sheet is retreating 20% more than previously thought.

New research on the rate at which Greenland’s glaciers are melting shed new light on how the climate emergency is rapidly raising the chance that crucial ocean current systems could soon collapse, as scientists revealed Wednesday that the vast island has lost about 20% more ice than previously understood.

Scientists at the National Aeronautics and Space Agency (NASA) Jet Propulsion Laboratory led the study, published in Nature, which showed that Greenland’s ice cap is losing an average of 33 million tons of ice per hour, including from glaciers that are already below sea level.

The researchers analyzed satellite photos showing the end positions of Greenland’s glaciers every month from 1985 to 2022, examining a total of about 235,000 end positions.

Over the 38-year period, Greenland lost about 1,930 square miles of ice—equivalent to one trillion metric tons and roughly the size of Delaware.

An earlier study had estimated that 221 billion metric tons had been lost since 2003, but the researchers added another 43 billion metric tons to that assessment.

Previous research had not quantified the level of ice melt and breakage from the ends of glaciers around the perimeter of Greenland.

“Almost every glacier in Greenland is retreating. And that story is true no matter where you look,” Chad Greene, a glaciologist at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory who led study, told The New York Times. “This retreat is happening everywhere and all at once.”

Because the glaciers examined in the study are already below sea level, their lost ice would have been replaced by sea water and would not have contributed to sea-level rise.

But as Greene told The Guardian, “It almost certainly has an indirect effect, by allowing glaciers to speed up.”

“These narrow fjords are the bottleneck, so if you start carving away at the edges of the ice, it’s like removing the plug in the drain,” he said.

The previously unaccounted-for ice melt is also an additional source of freshwater that pours into the North Atlantic Ocean, which scientists warn places the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) at risk of collapse.

AMOC carries warm water from the tropics into the North Atlantic, allowing nutrients to rise from the bottom of the ocean and supporting phytoplankton production and the basis of the global food chain.

A collapse of the system would also disrupt weather patterns across the globe, likely leading to drier conditions and threatening food security in Asia, South America, and Africa, and increasing extreme weather events in other parts of the world.

One analysis found the collapse could take place as soon as 2025.

Charlie Angus, a member of the Canadian Parliament representing the New Democratic Party, noted that the study was released as Canada’s government continues to support fossil fuel production and what experts call false solutions to the planetary heating crisis—including a $12 billion carbon capture and storage project led by tar sands oil companies.

The Environmental Voter Project in the U.S. urged Americans to consider the latest statistics on melting glaciers when choosing the candidates and political parties they will support in 2024.

“Greenland is losing 30 million tons of ice an hour,” said the group. “So vote like it.”

Original article by JULIA CONLEY republished from Common Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). 

Continue Reading‘Frightening’: Greenland Losing 33 Million Tons of Ice Per Hour Due to Climate Crisis