News bites: BP plans Australian deepwater drilling, a warning about ‘total jelly domination’ and more

“A year after Obama’s visit to China, the envisioned partnership has largely evaporated. The U.S. has filed a complaint at the World Trade Organization against China’s policies favoring its producers of wind and solar equipment. Cooperation in climate change talks has been rare,” AP reports.

“On the eve of Hu’s U.S. visit, the conflict is emblematic of a range of areas, from climate to technology to reducing strains in the the global economy, where Beijing sees its interests as very different from Washington even as they pledge cooperation,” the story adds.

Reuters reports on a climatic mechanism that could increase global warming.

“Shrinking ice and snow cover in the Northern Hemisphere is reflecting ever less sunshine back into space in a previously underestimated mechanism that could add to global warming, a study showed,” the piece states.

“Satellite data indicated that Arctic sea ice, glaciers, winter snow and Greenland’s ice were bouncing less energy back to space from 1979 to 2008. The dwindling white sunshade exposes ground or water, both of which are darker and absorb more heat,” it adds.

Finally, Yale Environment 360 looks at the troubling proliferation of jellyfish in the world’s oceans, noting that in recent years, “Populations of several jellyfish species have made inroads at the expense of their main competitor — fish — in a number of regions, including the Yellow Sea, the Gulf of Mexico, and the Black Sea.

“Overfishing and deteriorating coastal water quality are chief suspects in the rise of jellies. Global warming may be adding fuel to the fire by making more food available to jellyfish and opening up new habitat. Now, researchers fear, conditions are becoming so bad that some ecosystems could be approaching a tipping point in which jellyfish supplant fish,” the story states.

The future could look a lot like the distant past, jellyfish-wise.

“Total jelly domination would be like turning back the clock to the Precambrian world, more than 550 million years ago, when the ancestors of jellyfish ruled the seas.”