Universal Jellyfish

"China Wind Power Capacity Could Reach 1,000 GW By 2050"

2011-10-19T20:32:00.002-04:00

Reuters / China's wind power generating capacity, already the world's largest, could reach 1,000 gigawatts by 2050, a study prepared by a think tank of the National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC) showed on Wednesday.

China had more than 41 GW of wind power capacity at the end of 2010.

The potential capacity in 2050 would reduce the country's carbon dioxide emissions by 1.5 gigatonnes per year, roughly equivalent to the combined carbon dioxide emissions of Germany, France and Italy in 2009, the study from the Energy Research Institute under the NDRC showed.

The capacity would generate about 17 percent of China's electricity output in 2050, compared a 1 percent share now.

The International Energy Agency provided technical support for the study.

"Jellyfish image wins wildlife prize" UK

2011-10-19T20:22:00.003-04:00

An image of a jellyfish captured off a small uninhabited Scottish island has scooped the top £5,000 prize in this year's British Wildlife Photography Awards.

The photograph taken by Richard Shucksmith from Shetland was snapped at Sula Sgeir, which means Gannet Rock, a remote island 41 miles north of Lewis that is home to a wide array of marine life.

Greg Armfield, photography and film manager at wildlife charity WWF, described the shot as "fantastic".

He said it was "a truly beautiful shot of a jellyfish that perfectly captures its iridescent colours and magical qualities; all the more remarkable that it exists in UK waters."

The competition, now in its third year, awards a top prize to the overall winner and also £1,000 of prizes from Canon for 10 categories, ranging from animal portraits and behaviour to landscapes, urban wildlife and the British seasons.

"Mexico's newest export to US: Water"

2011-10-19T19:56:00.002-04:00

From msnbc.com:

SAN DIEGO — Mexico ships televisions, cars, sugar and medical equipment to the United States. Soon, it may be sending water north.

Western states are looking south of the border for water to fill drinking glasses, flush toilets and sprinkle lawns, as four major U.S. water districts help plan one of two huge desalination plant proposals in Playas de Rosarito, about 15 miles south of San Diego. Combined, they would produce 150 million gallons a day, enough to supply more than 300,000 homes on both sides of the border.

The plants are one strategy by both countries to wean themselves from the drought-prone Colorado River, which flows 1,450 miles from the Rocky Mountains to the Sea of Cortez. Decades of friction over the Colorado, in fact, are said to be a hurdle to current desalination negotiations.

The proposed plants have also sparked concerns that American water interests looking to Mexico are simply trying to dodge U.S. environmental reviews and legal challenges.

Desalination plants can blight coastal landscapes, sucking in and killing fish eggs and larvae. They require massive amounts of electricity and dump millions of gallons of brine back into the ocean that can, if not properly disposed, also be harmful to fish.

But desalination has helped quench demand in Australia, Saudi Arabia and other countries lacking fresh water....

Water agencies that supply much of Southern California, Phoenix, Las Vegas and Tijuana, Mexico, are pursuing the plant that would produce 50 million gallons a day in Rosarito near an existing electricity plant. They commissioned a study last year that found no fatal flaws and ordered another one that will include a cost estimate, with an eye toward starting operations in three to five years.

Potential disagreements between the two countries include how the new water stores will be used.

The U.S. agencies want to consider helping pay for the plant and letting Mexico keep the water for booming areas of Tijuana and Rosarito. In exchange, Mexico would surrender some of its allotment from the Colorado River, sparing the cost of laying pipes from the plant to California.

Mexico would never give up water from the Colorado, which feeds seven western U.S. states and northwest Mexico, said Jose Gutierrez, assistant director for binational affairs at Mexico's National Water Commission. Mexico's rights are enshrined in a 1944 treaty.

"The treaty carries great significance in our country. We have to protect it fiercely," Gutierrez said.

The San Diego County Water Authority is also considering a plant at Southern California's Camp Pendleton that would produce up to 150 million gallons a day. Poseidon wants to build one in Huntington Beach, near Los Angeles, that would churn out 50 million gallons a day. Those ideas face significant challenges....

The San Diego agency wants to get 10 percent of the region's water from desalination by 2020 as a way to lessen its dependence on the Colorado River, which is connected by aqueduct about 200 miles away. Tijuana also wants to rely less on the river, a priority that gained urgency after a 2010 earthquake knocked out its aqueduct for about three weeks.

Spiritual Atheism

2011-09-16T17:44:00.005-04:00

This is partially in response to: "Beyond ‘New Atheism’" in the New York Times - by Gary Gutting, a professor of philosophy at the University of Notre Dame.

"Kitcher’s secular humanism reanimates the debate, promising much needed serious reflection on whether the divine can or should be eliminated from our moral lives."

What I see as the problem is the divine as being represented by essentially a War God - the War God of the Old Testament. In these debates, many (men, esp.) do not see that that is part of the problem. The problem which many people are rebelling against.

Christianity was liberalized by people who absorbed ideas from old texts from India and other parts of Asia (during the 1800s, 1900s). Transcendence and nature have been considered more important in Asian spirituality than it has in traditional Christianity. So we have liberal Christianity which rejects the ideas of Original Sin and the idea that life and sex are bad. Some Christians, such as those who follow the Pope, and others who take Genesis Literally are more likely to be more attached to the War God - and God as a powerful Male who rules the world.

Religion cannot improve until it leaves such ideas behind - ideas which are really about establishing and maintaining power. A War God is not compatible with the spiritual side of people. The spiritual side of people (right brain thinking - see A Stroke of Insight, by Jill Bolte Taylor, for instance) is about the loss of boundaries, unity with others, peace, love and understanding. And seeing ourselves as part of an amazing universe - not at odds with life - but an integrated part of life. Some gnostics thought along those lines before the Catholic Church put an end to such diversity of thought and spirituality.

Ideas about hell and even heaven are in effect more about the church maintaining power than anything. It is not until all of the power aspects of religions are dropped and life is affirmed - that religion as spirituality can be understood. So it is not a question of the divine being eliminated from our lives - but how we define divine. If life itself is understood to be divine, then there is nothing to eliminate.

"Free to Die"

2011-09-16T17:33:00.002-04:00

By PAUL KRUGMAN
Back in 1980, just as America was making its political turn to the right, Milton Friedman lent his voice to the change with the famous TV series “Free to Choose.” In episode after episode, the genial economist identified laissez-faire economics with personal choice and empowerment, an upbeat vision that would be echoed and amplified by Ronald Reagan.

But that was then. Today, “free to choose” has become “free to die.”

I’m referring, as you might guess, to what happened during Monday’s G.O.P. presidential debate. CNN’s Wolf Blitzer asked Representative Ron Paul what we should do if a 30-year-old man who chose not to purchase health insurance suddenly found himself in need of six months of intensive care. Mr. Paul replied, “That’s what freedom is all about — taking your own risks.” Mr. Blitzer pressed him again, asking whether “society should just let him die.”

And the crowd erupted with cheers and shouts of “Yeah!”

The incident highlighted something that I don’t think most political commentators have fully absorbed: at this point, American politics is fundamentally about different moral visions.

Now, there are two things you should know about the Blitzer-Paul exchange. The first is that after the crowd weighed in, Mr. Paul basically tried to evade the question, asserting that warm-hearted doctors and charitable individuals would always make sure that people received the care they needed — or at least they would if they hadn’t been corrupted by the welfare state. Sorry, but that’s a fantasy. People who can’t afford essential medical care often fail to get it, and always have — and sometimes they die as a result.

The second is that very few of those who die from lack of medical care look like Mr. Blitzer’s hypothetical individual who could and should have bought insurance. In reality, most uninsured Americans either have low incomes and cannot afford insurance, or are rejected by insurers because they have chronic conditions.

So would people on the right be willing to let those who are uninsured through no fault of their own die from lack of care? The answer, based on recent history, is a resounding “Yeah!”

...In the past, conservatives accepted the need for a government-provided safety net on humanitarian grounds. Don’t take it from me, take it from Friedrich Hayek, the conservative intellectual hero, who specifically declared in “The Road to Serfdom” his support for “a comprehensive system of social insurance” to protect citizens against “the common hazards of life,” and singled out health in particular.

Given the agreed-upon desirability of protecting citizens against the worst, the question then became one of costs and benefits — and health care was one of those areas where even conservatives used to be willing to accept government intervention in the name of compassion, given the clear evidence that covering the uninsured would not, in fact, cost very much money. As many observers have pointed out, the Obama health care plan was largely based on past Republican plans, and is virtually identical to Mitt Romney’s health reform in Massachusetts.

Now, however, compassion is out of fashion — indeed, lack of compassion has become a matter of principle, at least among the G.O.P.’s base.

And what this means is that modern conservatism is actually a deeply radical movement, one that is hostile to the kind of society we’ve had for the past three generations — that is, a society that, acting through the government, tries to mitigate some of the “common hazards of life” through such programs as Social Security, unemployment insurance, Medicare and Medicaid.

Are voters ready to embrace such a radical rejection of the kind of America we’ve all grown up in? I guess we’ll find out next year.

"New atlas shows extent of climate change"

2011-09-16T17:27:00.002-04:00

From the Guardian:

In Times Comprehensive Atlas of the World, Greenland has lost around 15% of its ice cover between 10th edition (1999) (left) and 13th edition (2011) (right). Photograph: Times Comprehensive Atlas of the World
If you have never heard of Uunartoq Qeqertaq, it's possibly because it's one of the world's newest islands, appearing in 2006 off the east coast of Greenland, 340 miles north of the Arctic circle when the ice retreated because of global warming. This Thursday the new land – translated from Inuit as Warming Island – was deemed permanent enough by map-makers to be included in a new edition of the most comprehensive atlas in the world.

Uunartoq Qeqertaq joins Southern Sudan and nearly 7,000 other countries and places added or changed since the last edition of the Times Comprehensive Atlas of the World, reflecting political change in Africa, administrative changes in China, burgeoning cities in developing countries, climate change, and large infrastructure projects which have changed the flow of rivers, lakes and coastlines.

The world's biggest physical changes in the past few years are mostly seen nearest the poles where climate change has been most extreme. Greenland appears considerably browner round the edges, having lost around 15%, or 300,000 sq km, of its permanent ice cover. Antarctica is smaller following the break-up of the Larsen B and Wilkins ice shelves.

But the Aral Sea in central Asia, which had previously shrunk to just 25% of its size only 80 years ago, is now larger than it was only five years ago, thanks to Kazakhstan redirecting water into it. Elsewhere in Asia, islands are appearing off the mouths of the Ganges and the Yangtze rivers as the amount of silt brought down from the Himalayas and inland China changes.

Sections of the Rio Grande, Yellow, Colorado and Tigris rivers are now drying out each summer. In Mongolia, the Ongyin Gol has been redirected to allow gold mining, while the Colorado river these days does not reach the sea most years. "We are increasingly concerned that in the near future important geographical features will disappear for ever. Greenland could reach a tipping point in about 30 years," said Jethro Lennox, editor of the atlas.

"Giant crabs make Antarctic leap"

2011-09-09T09:11:00.003-04:00

From BBC.com

Writing in the journal Proceedings B, scientists report a large, reproductive population of crabs in the Palmer Deep, a basin cut in the continental shelf.

They suggest the crabs were washed in during an upsurge of warmer water.

The crabs are voracious crushers of sea floor animals and will probably change the ecosystem profoundly if and when they spread further, researchers warn.

Related species have been found around islands off the Antarctic Peninsula and on the outer edge of the continental shelf.

But here the crabs (Neolithodes yaldwyni) are living and reproducing in abundance right on the edge of the continent itself.

Judging by the density of the crabs and their tracks, the scientists estimate there may be 1.5 million crabs in the basin.

A female crab retrieved from the area was found to be carrying mature eggs and larvae.

"Our best guess is there was an event, or maybe more than one, where warmer water flushed up across the shelf and carried some of the larvae into the basin," said project leader Craig Smith from the University of Hawaii.

It is believed that this species cannot tolerate water colder than 1.4C.

The seas here get warmer as you descend; and the crabs were only found below 850m.

The researchers calculate that they have probably been there only for 30-40 years; before that, the water would have been too cold even at the bottom of the Palmer Deep.

They cannot as yet survive on the continental shelf, which is at a depth of about 500m; but that could change.

"If you look at the rate at which the seas are warming, (the continental shelf) should be above 1.4C within a couple of decades, so the crabs are likely then to come into shallower waters," Professor Smith told BBC News.

With a legspan of up to a metre, the animals are generally top predators in the seafloor ecosystem.

(more)

"30,000 years ago, as few as 1,000 humans in Asia, Europe"

2011-07-26T21:30:00.002-04:00

In USA Today:

Though it may seem difficult to believe in a world with almost seven billion people, humans were once thin on the ground, and at times teetered on the brink of extinction.

For most of the history of our species, there weren't many of us, probably in the "tens of thousands, comparable to modern populations of gorillas and chimpanzees," says Richard Durbin, a genome scientist with the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute in Cambridge, England.

Durbin and Heng Li, a colleague at the Broad Institute of Harvard and Massachusetts Institute of Technology have a paper in this week's edition of the journal Nature in which they present a new method they have developed to look at a single person's DNA sequences and using them as a representative of all their ancestors -- and thus map out the history of the species.

They applied it to seven people: a Chinese man, a Korean man, three Europeans and two Yoruba men from west Africa. What they found was interesting.

Anatomically modern humans originated in southern Africa. It's generally believed that some of them began to move northwards out of Africa between 50,000 to 60,000 years ago.

However the researchers' evidence shows that there was at least some differentiation between African and non-African human populations as early as 100,000 and 120,000 years ago.

In addition, once the European and Asian groups had left the continent, it wasn't as if they never intermingled again. Genetic exchange between the groups continued until around 20,000 years ago, their research found. That doesn't necessary mean one person every year, "but maybe every few hundred another bunch left," says Durbin.

Those populations who left lived through very hard times. The people who became modern Europeans and Asians underwent a severe population bottleneck sometime between 100,000 and 30,000 years ago, getting down to as few as 1,000 people who were reproducing, it appears.

"It also looks like the Africans also decreased at the same time, though not as much," Durbin says.

What's known about that era is that it was one of extreme changes in climate, with ice ages coming and then receding. This was especially a problem in more northern latitudes and perhaps less so in Africa. The latest ice age only finished about 10,000 years ago, after which agriculture began to flourish.

Today's human population represents an enormous shift from those early, few and threatened primates. "The fact that we're pervasive in the world now is sort of an anomaly in the history of great ape populations," says Durbin.

"Sizzle Factor for a Restless Climate"

2011-07-20T11:54:00.001-04:00

By HEIDI CULLEN (in the New York Times)

ENJOYING the heat wave?

The answer is probably no if you live in Abilene, Tex., where temperatures have been at or above 100 degrees for 40 days this summer. It’s been a little cooler in Savannah, Ga., where the mercury hit 90 or more for 56 days in a row. Texas, New Mexico and Oklahoma are coping with their driest nine-month stretch since 1895.

Yes, it has been a very hot summer after one of the most extreme-weather springs on record. It’s time to face the fact that the weather isn’t what it used to be.

Every 10 years, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration recalculates what it calls climate “normals,” 30-year averages of temperature and precipitation for about 7,500 locations across the United States. The latest numbers, released earlier this month, show that the climate of the last 10 years was about 1.5 degrees warmer than the climate of the 1970s, and the warmest since the first decade of the last century. Temperatures were, on average, 0.5 degrees warmer from 1981 to 2010 than they were from 1971 to 2000, and the average annual temperatures for all of the lower 48 states have gone up.

For climate geeks like me, the new normals offer a fascinating and disturbing snapshot of a restless climate. The numbers don’t take sides or point fingers. They acknowledge both powerful natural climate fluctuations as well as the steady drumbeat of warming caused by roughly seven billion people trying to live and prosper on a small planet, emitting heat-trapping greenhouse gases in the process.

Even this seemingly modest shift in climate can mean a big change in weather. Shifting weather patterns influence energy demand, affect crop productivity and lead to weather-related disasters. In the United States, in any given year, routine weather events like a hot day or a heavy downpour can cost the economy as much as $485 billion in crop losses, construction delays and travel disruptions, a recent study by the National Center for Atmospheric Research found. In other words, that extra 1.5 degrees might be more than we can afford.

And while the new normals don’t point to a cause, climate science does. Drawing from methods used in epidemiology, a field of climate research called “detection and attribution” tests how human actions like burning fossil fuels affect climate and increase the odds of extreme weather events.

Heat-trapping pollution at least doubled the likelihood of the infamous European heat wave that killed more than 30,000 people during the summer of 2003, according to a study in the journal Nature in 2004. And if we don’t ease our grip on the climate, summers like that one will likely happen every other year by 2040, the study warned. Human actions have warmed the climate on all seven continents, and as a result all weather is now occurring in an environment that bears humanity’s signature, with warmer air and seas and more moisture than there was just a few decades ago, resulting in more extreme weather.

The snapshots of climate history from NOAA can also provide a glimpse of what’s in store locally in the future. Using climate models, we can project what future Julys might look like. For example, by 2050, assuming we continue to pump heat-trapping pollution into our atmosphere at a rate similar to today’s, New Yorkers can expect the number of July days exceeding 90 degrees to double, and those exceeding 95 degrees to roughly triple. Sweltering days in excess of 100 degrees, rare now, will become a regular feature of the Big Apple’s climate in the 2050s.

The next time NOAA calculates its new temperature normals will be in 2021 — when there will be about another billion people on the planet. Lady Gaga may no longer be hot. But the climate almost surely will be.

Heidi Cullen, a scientist at Climate Central, a journalism and research organization, is the author of “The Weather of the Future: Heat Waves, Extreme Storms, and Other Scenes From a Climate-Changed Planet.”

US Drought Map as of July 12, 2011

2011-07-14T17:39:00.004-04:00

D0 ... Abnormally Dry ... used for areas showing dryness but not yet in drought, or for areas recovering from drought.

Drought Intensity Categories
D1 ... Moderate Drought
D2 ... Severe Drought
D3 ... Extreme Drought
D4 ... Exceptional Drought

Drought or Dryness Types
A ... Agricultural
H ... Hydrological

For more maps - see: http://drought.unl.edu/dm/monitor.html

Regarding Mackerel & Jellyfish

2011-07-11T16:10:00.002-04:00

By George Monbiot:

Last year I began to wonder, this year doubt is seeping away, to be replaced with a rising fear. Could it really have happened? Could the fishing industry have achieved the remarkable feat of destroying the last great stock?

Until 2010, mackerel were the one reliable catch in Cardigan Bay in west Wales. Though I took to the water dozens of times, there wasn't a day in 2008 or 2009 when I failed to take 10 or more. Once every three or four trips I would hit a major shoal, and bring in 100 or 200 fish: enough, across the season, to fill the freezer and supply much of our protein for the year. Those were thrilling moments: pulling up strings of fish amid whirling flocks of shearwaters, gannets pluming into the water beside my kayak, dolphins breaching and blowing. It was, or so it seemed, the most sustainable of all the easy means of harvesting animal protein.

Even those days were nothing by comparison to what the older residents remembered: weeks on end when the sea was so thick with fish that you could fill a bucket with mackerel just by picking them off the sand, as they flung themselves through and beyond the breaking waves while pursuing their prey.

Last year it all changed. From the end of May to the end of October I scoured the bay, on one occasion paddling six or seven miles from land – the furthest I've ever been – to try to find the fish. With the exception of a day on which I caught 20, I brought them back in ones or twos, if at all. There were many days on which I caught nothing at all.

There were as many explanations as there were fishermen: the dolphins had driven them away, the north-westerlies had broken up the shoals, a monstrous fishmeal ship was stationed in the Irish Sea, hoovering up 500 tonnes a day with a fiendish new vacuum device. (Despite a wealth of detail on this story I soon discovered that no such ship existed. But that's fishermen for you).

I spoke to a number of fisheries officials and scientists, and was shocked to discover that not only did they have no explanation, they had no data either.

So I hoped for the best – that the dearth could be explained by a fluctuation of weather or ecology. When the fish failed to arrive at the end of May I told myself they must be on their way. They had, after all, been showing off the south-west of England – it could be only a matter of time. I held off until last weekend...

Far below me I could see the luminous feathers I used as bait tripping over the seabed.

But I could also see something else. Jellyfish. Unimaginable numbers of them. Not the transparent cocktail umbrellas I was used to, but solid, white rubbery creatures the size of footballs. They roiled in the surface or loomed, vast and pale, in the depths. There was scarcely a cubic metre of water without one.

Apart from that – nothing. It wasn't until I reached a buoy three miles from the shore that I felt the urgent tap of a fish, and brought up a single, juvenile mackerel. Otherwise, though I paddled to all the likely spots, I detected nothing but the jellyfish rubbing against the line.

Is this the moment? Have I just witnessed the beginning of the end of vertebrate ecology here? If so, the shift might not be confined to Cardigan Bay. In a perfect conjunction of two of my recent interests, last week a monstrous swarm of jellyfish succeeded where Greenpeace has failed, and shut down both reactors at the Torness nuclear power station in Scotland.

The Israeli branch of Jellyfish Action pulled off a similar feat at the nuclear power station in Hadera this week.

A combination of overfishing and ocean acidification (caused by rising concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere) has created the perfect conditions for this shift from a system dominated by fish to a system dominated by jellyfish....

"Pope blames atheists for global warming"

2011-07-11T13:57:00.004-04:00

From Michael Stone, Portland Humanist Examiner (8-29-2009:

The Pope blames atheists for global warming. Pope Benedict is claiming atheists are responsible for the destruction of the environment. The Pope made the claims in a recent speech given at the Vatican. The claim is a puzzling attack on atheism that frankly makes little sense.

Excerpt from the Pope's speech:

“Is it not true that inconsiderate use of creation begins where God is marginalized or also where his existence is denied? If the human creature's relationship with the Creator weakens, matter is reduced to egoistic possession, man becomes the ‘final authority,’ and the objective of existence is reduced to a feverish race to possess the most possible.”

The irony is that any historical evaluation places the blame for global warming and the degradation of the planet firmly in the lap of Christians and the Catholic church. The Holy Bible, a book atheists firmly reject for good reason, claims that God gave man dominion over the earth. Christians, including Catholics, took these words to heart. They used those words as carte blanche, a justification for all manners of planetary abuse.

Christianity, and Catholicism, are historically anti-environmental. In fact, if blame is to be placed for the current global environmental crisis, it is to be placed squarely upon the Judeo-Christian tradition. The fact that Christianity is anti-environmental is no secret. Indeed, many Christians have taken a perverse pride in claiming their dominion. For example, James Watt, who became U.S. Secretary of the Interior under Ronald Reagan in the early 1980s, wrote an influential and damning article entitled "Ours Is the Earth". Watt, speaking for countless Christians, made it abundantly clear that for believers the earth is "merely a temporary way station on the road to eternal life...The earth was put here by the Lord for His people to subdue and to use for profitable purposes on their way to the hereafter."

For those of the Judeo-Christian tradition, the earth is, for all intents and purposes, disposable, nothing but a waiting room for eternity. As such the waiting room can be plundered in any fashion. After all, the earth is but a temporary and transient thing of no consequence when compared to the promise of eternity (pie in the sky, yum yum!).

The fact that the Pope would bear false witness should surprise no one. Such is the stuff of most religions. The hypocrisy of the Pope is monstrous. He lives in opulent luxury, surrounded by obscene material wealth, while paying lip service to the poor unwashed masses. Children starve for lack of the most minimal of nutrition, while the Pope parades around in designer shoes. Words fail to describe the obscene perversity of this hypocritical buffoon.

The Pope is not alone is his hypocrisy. It is a hallmark of the successful Christian leader to live in luxury while preaching charity. It is one of the great and ugly ironies of religious life. The Pope is just another religious con man, the pointy hat and funny dress symbolic of criminal decadence and moral corruption.

____________

While I know that there are Christians who are also earth/nature-lovers, the Pope does not do Christians, esp. Catholics, a favor with this. Maybe some people will delusionally believe him - but I think he is asking for whatever disdain he gets.

Fukushima City: "Japan citizen groups alarmed by radioactive soil"

2011-07-07T08:14:00.003-04:00

From DesdemonaDespair:

TOKYO, July 4 (AFP) – Soil radiation in a city 60 kilometres (40 miles) from Japan's stricken nuclear plant is above levels that prompted resettlement after the Chernobyl disaster, citizens' groups said Tuesday.

The survey of four locations in Fukushima city, outside the nuclear evacuation zone, showed that all soil samples contained caesium exceeding Japan's legal limit of 10,000 becquerels per kilogram (4,500 per pound), they said.

The highest level was 46,540 becquerels per kilogram, and the three other readings were between 16,290 and 19,220 becquerels per kilogram, they said.

The citizens' groups -- the Fukushima Network for Saving Children from Radiation and five other non-governmental organisations -- have called for the evacuation of pregnant women and children from the town.

The highest reading in the city of 290,000 people far exceeded the level that triggered compulsory resettlement ordered by Soviet authorities following the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster in Ukraine, they said.

Kobe University radiation expert professor Tomoya Yamauchi conducted the survey on June 26 following a request from the groups.

"Soil contamination is spreading in the city," Yamauchi said in a statement. "Children are playing with the soil, meaning they are playing with high levels of radioactive substances. Evacuation must be conducted as soon as possible." […]
________

Meanwhile Japan's Fukushima city denies radiation danger

TOKYO — Japan's Fukushima city said Wednesday its 300,000 people are safe from radiation from the stricken nuclear plant 60 kilometres (40 miles) away, seeking to allay fears voiced by citizen groups.

"We in Fukushima City currently believe we are not in danger," said a city spokesman... "Of course, we acknowledge that many residents are concerned. The city has taken various measures to reduce radiation levels at schools, parks and other areas in addition to regularly monitoring radiation in the environment."

City authorities have removed top soil from school yards, washed down the walls of school buildings and cleared mud from gutters to protect children from radiation exposure, the city spokesman told AFP. School children will soon receive radiation meters to monitor exposure, he said...

Radiation maps show that the areas worst affected by fallout from the the Fukushima disaster lie to the northwest, where Fukushima City is located, due to wind patterns and geographical features of the region.

During Texas drought - lots of water going to Fracking

2011-07-03T22:06:00.001-04:00

From Grist.org:

Texas is experiencing the driest eight-month period in its recorded history. But in 2010, natural gas companies used 13.5 billion gallons of fresh water for hydraulic fracturing, and that could more than double by 2020. Where's all this water coming from? Oh, it was just lying around, in these aquifers! You guys weren't using it to drink or irrigate or anything, right? Guys?

Crockett County, Tx., near San Angelo (which you probably also haven't heard of, but it's not near much else), has gotten less than two inches of rain since October. But water for fracking could soon make up 25 percent of the county's water usage, according to its groundwater conservation manager. Fracking takes between 50,000 and 4 million gallons for a single well, on average, and could take as many as 13 million gallons. And most of that water is gone for good -- 75 percent of it can't be recovered.

Fracking works with brackish water, the stuff that's not really useful for drinking or irrigation. The equipment is just so precious and delicate, though -- we wouldn't want it getting gummed up! "[G]iven the specific sort of engineering and pressure they're using, it's better to have fewer impurities in the water, so fresh water works better," says the president of the pro-oil Permian Basin Petroleum Association. Thank goodness the same can't be said of people and animals and crops!

“Jellyfish” Ensemble"

2011-07-01T18:39:00.003-04:00

Alexander McQueen (British, 1969–2010)
“Jellyfish” Ensemble
Plato’s Atlantis, spring/summer 2010
Dress, leggings, and “Armadillo” boots embroidered with iridescent enamel paillettes
In McQueen’s Words:
“[This collection predicted a future in which] the ice cap would melt . . . the waters would rise and . . . life on earth would have to evolve in order to live beneath the sea once more or perish. Humanity [would] go back to the place from whence it came.”

From the Metropolitan Museum of Art Blog

"Horn of Africa sees 'worst drought in 60 years'"

2011-06-29T08:19:00.002-04:00

From the BBC:

More than 10 million people are thought to be affected across the region.

The UN now classifies large areas of Somalia, Ethiopia, Djibouti and Kenya as a crisis or an emergency.

Charity Save the Children says drought and war in Somalia has led to unprecedented numbers fleeing across the border into Kenya, with about 1,300 people arriving every day.

Three camps at Dadaab, just inside Kenya, are home to well over 350,000 people, but they were built to hold just 90,000 and are severely overcrowded.

A prolonged failure of rains, which began in late 2010, is now taking its toll.

The UN's Office for the Co-Ordination of Humanitarian Affairs (Ocha) warns that the situation is continuing to deteriorate, and the number of people in need will continue to increase.

The numbers now affected are huge, Ohca says: 3.2m in Ethiopia, 3.2m in Kenya, 2.6m in Somalia and more than 100,000 in Djibouti.

Every month during 2011, about 15,000 Somalis have fled their country, arriving in Kenya and Ethiopia, according to Ocha.

While conflict has been a fact of life for them for years, it is the drought that has brought them to breaking point. Many have walked for days, are exhausted, in poor health, desperate for food and water.

Nearly one third of all children in the Juba region of Somalia are acutely malnourished, while in parts of Ethiopia the figure is even higher, the UN research says. Parts of Uganda are also suffering from the drought.

"US climate skeptic Soon funded by oil, coal firms"

2011-06-29T08:13:00.003-04:00

* Funding came from Koch Foundation, Southern, Exxon, API
* Private science funding gets close look amid budget cuts
* Soon says never motivated by financial reward

By Timothy Gardner

WASHINGTON, June 28 (Reuters) - Willie Soon, a U.S. climate change skeptic who has also discounted the health risks of mercury emissions from coal, has received more than $1 million in funding in recent years from large energy companies and an oil industry group, according to Greenpeace.

Soon, an astrophysicist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, has also gotten funding from scientific sources including NASA and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. But starting early in the last decade, Soon began receiving more funding from the energy companies, Greenpeace reported.

Last year, the foundation of Charles Koch, chairman and CEO of privately held Koch Industries, gave Soon $65,000 to study how variations in the Sun are related to climate change.

Koch is co-owned by David Koch, founder of Americans for Prosperity, a group aligned with the Tea Party movement, which opposes new air pollution regulations.

Beginning in 2002, Soon's funding mostly came from oil companies, including Southern Co (SO.N: Quote), one of the largest coal burners in the United States, and the American Petroleum Institute, according to documents uncovered in a Freedom of Information Act request by Greenpeace and seen by Reuters.

"A campaign of climate change denial has been waged for over twenty years by Big Oil and Big Coal," said Kert Davies, a research director at Greenpeace US.

"Scientists like Dr. Soon who take fossil fuel money and pretend to be independent scientists are pawns."

Soon was criticized by many climate scientists for a 2003 paper he co-wrote, concluding that 20th century warming was not unusual compared to that of centuries past. About 5 percent of the study's funding, or $53,000, came from the API, they said.

Soon, who says global warming is mostly caused by changes in the Sun, not emissions from burning oil, gas and coal, has written some peer-reviewed studies on global climate change.

More recently, he has written non-peer reviewed papers. In 2007 he co-wrote a paper that concluded polar bears are not threatened by human-caused climate change, which was also funded partially by grants from the oil industry.

While corporate funding of science is not new, the focus on the ethics of such aid is growing as state and federal science grants are reduced amid budget cuts.
--
Soon co-wrote a May 25 opinion piece in The Wall Street Journal called "The Myth of Killer Mercury." In the piece, Soon was identified as a natural scientist from Harvard, but the newspaper did not disclose that he receives most of his funding from the energy industry. The Journal did not return a request for comment.

Soon wrote that the EPA, which is under court order to finalize rules on the pollution from power plants, wants to discipline the energy industry. "To build its case against mercury, the EPA systematically ignored evidence and clinical studies that contradict its regulatory agenda, which is to punish hydrocarbon use," the piece said.

...Soon agreed he had received funding from all of the groups and companies, but denied any group would have influenced his studies....

"Species Migrate Across Newly Ice-free Northwest Passage"

2011-06-26T19:14:00.002-04:00

From the Washington Post:

AMSTERDAM — (AP) When a 43-foot (13-meter) gray whale was spotted off the Israeli town of Herzliya last year, scientists came to a startling conclusion: it must have wandered across the normally icebound route above Canada, where warm weather had briefly opened a clear channel three years earlier.

On a microscopic level, scientists also have found plankton in the North Atlantic where it had not existed for at least 800,000 years.

The whale’s odyssey and the surprising appearance of the plankton indicates a migration of species through the Northwest Passage, a worrying sign of how global warming is affecting animals and plants in the oceans as well as on land.

“The implications are enormous. It’s a threshold that has been crossed,” said Philip C. Reid, of the Alister Hardy Foundation for Ocean Science in Plymouth, England.

“It’s an indication of the speed of change that is taking place in our world in the present day because of climate change,” he said in a telephone interview Friday.

Reid said the last time the world witnessed such a major incursion from the Pacific was 2 million years ago, which had “a huge impact on the North Atlantic,” driving some species to extinction as the newcomers dominated the competition for food.

Reid’s study of plankton and the research on the whale, co-authored by Aviad Scheinin of the Israel Marine Mammal Research and Assistance Center, are among nearly 300 scientific papers written over the last 13 years that are being synthesized and published this year by Project Clamer, a collaboration of 17 institutes on climate change and the oceans.

Changes in the oceans’ chemistry and temperature could have implications for fisheries, as species migrate northward to cooler waters, said Katja Philippart, of the Royal Netherlands Institute of Sea Research who is coordinating the project funded by the European Union.

“We try to put the information on the table for people who have to make decisions. We don’t say whether it’s bad or good. We say there is a high potential for change,” she said.

The Northwest Passage, the route through the frigid archipelago from Alaska across northern Canada, has been ice-free from one end to the other only twice in recorded history, in 1998 and 2007. But the ice pack is retreating farther and more frequently during the summers.

Plankton that had previously been found only in Atlantic sea bed cores from 800,000 years ago appeared in the Labrador Sea in 1999 — and then in massive numbers in the Gulf of St. Lawrence two years later. Now it has established itself as far south as the New York coast, Reid said.

The highly endangered gray whale sighted off the Israeli coast in May 2010 belonged to a species that was hunted to extinction in the Atlantic by the mid-1700s. The same animal — identified by unique markings on its fluke, or tail fin — appeared off the Spanish coast 22 days later, and has not been reported seen since.

Though it was difficult to draw conclusions from one whale, the researchers said its presence in the Mediterranean “coincides with a shrinking of Arctic Sea ice due to climate change and suggests that climate change may allow gray whales to re-colonize the North Atlantic.”

That may be good for the whales, but other aspects of the ice melt could be harmful to the oceans’ biosystems, the scientists warn...

"Oceans on brink of catastrophe"

2011-06-22T12:40:00.003-04:00

From www.independent.co.uk/
"State of seas 'much worse than we thought', says global panel of scientists"

The world's oceans are faced with an unprecedented loss of species comparable to the great mass extinctions of prehistory, a major report suggests today. The seas are degenerating far faster than anyone has predicted, the report says, because of the cumulative impact of a number of severe individual stresses, ranging from climate warming and sea-water acidification, to widespread chemical pollution and gross overfishing.

The coming together of these factors is now threatening the marine environment with a catastrophe "unprecedented in human history", according to the report, from a panel of leading marine scientists brought together in Oxford earlier this year by the International Programme on the State of the Ocean (IPSO) and the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN).

The stark suggestion made by the panel is that the potential extinction of species, from large fish at one end of the scale to tiny corals at the other, is directly comparable to the five great mass extinctions in the geological record, during each of which much of the world's life died out. They range from the Ordovician-Silurian "event" of 450 million years ago, to the Cretaceous-Tertiary extinction of 65 million years ago, which is believed to have wiped out the dinosaurs. The worst of them, the event at the end of the Permian period, 251 million years ago, is thought to have eliminated 70 per cent of species on land and 96 per cent of all species in the sea.

The panel of 27 scientists, who considered the latest research from all areas of marine science, concluded that a "combination of stressors is creating the conditions associated with every previous major extinction of species in Earth's history". They also concluded:

* The speed and rate of degeneration of the oceans is far faster than anyone has predicted;

* Many of the negative impacts identified are greater than the worst predictions;

* The first steps to globally significant extinction may have already begun.

"The findings are shocking," said Dr Alex Rogers, professor of conservation biology at Oxford University and IPSO's scientific director. "As we considered the cumulative effect of what humankind does to the oceans, the implications became far worse than we had individually realised.

"This is a very serious situation demanding unequivocal action at every level. We are looking at consequences for humankind that will impact in our lifetime, and worse, in the lifetime of our children and generations beyond that." Reviewing recent research, the panel of experts "found firm evidence" that the effects of climate change, coupled with other human-induced impacts such as overfishing and nutrient run-off from farming, have already caused a dramatic decline in ocean health.

Not only are there severe declines in many fish species, to the point of commercial extinction in some cases, and an "unparalleled" rate of regional extinction of some habitat types, such as mangrove and seagrass meadows, but some whole marine ecosystems, such as coral reefs, may be gone within a generation.

The report says: "Increasing hypoxia [low oxygen levels] and anoxia [absence of oxygen, known as ocean dead zones], combined with warming of the ocean and acidification, are the three factors which have been present in every mass extinction event in Earth's history.

"There is strong scientific evidence that these three factors are combining in the ocean again, exacerbated by multiple severe stressors. The scientific panel concluded that a new extinction event was inevitable if the current trajectory of damage continues."

The panel pointed to a number of indicators showing how serious the situation is. It said, for example, that a single mass coral bleaching event in 1998 killed 16 per cent of all the world's coral reefs, and pointed out that overfishing has reduced some commercial fish stocks and populations of "bycatch" (unintentionally caught) species by more than 90 per cent.

It disclosed that new scientific research suggests that pollutants, including flame-retardant chemicals and synthetic musks found in detergents, are being traced in the polar seas, and that these chemicals can be absorbed by tiny plastic particles in the ocean which are in turn ingested by marine creatures such as bottom-feeding fish.

Plastic particles also assist the transport of algae from place to place, increasing the occurrence of toxic algal blooms – which are also caused by the influx of nutrient-rich pollution from agricultural land.

The experts agreed that when these and other threats are added together, the ocean and the ecosystems within it are unable to recover, being constantly bombarded with multiple attacks....

The report's conclusions will be presented at the UN in New York this week, when delegates begin discussions on reforming governance of the oceans.

The five great extinctions

The Cretaceous–Tertiary extinction (the End Cretaceous or K-T extinction) 65.5 Mya (million years ago)

Plankton, which lies at the bottom of the ocean food chain took a hard hit in an event that also saw the demise of the last of the non-avian dinosaurs. The giant mosasaurs and plesiosaurs also vacated the seas. An asteroid or volcano eruptions are thought to be to blame.

The Triassic–Jurassic extinction (End Triassic) – 205 Mya

Having a profound affect on sea and land, this period saw 20 per cent of all marine families disappear. In total, half the species known to be living on Earth at that time went extinct. Gradual climate change, fluctuating sea-levels and volcanic eruptions are among the reasons cited for the disappearing species.

The Permian–Triassic extinction (End Permian) 251 Mya

A period known as the "great dying" was the most severe of the earth's extinction events, when 96 per cent of marine species were lost, as well as almost three-quarters of terrestrial species. The planet took a long time to recover from what has also been called "the mother of all mass extinctions".

The late Devonian extinction 360–375 Mya

Three-quarters of all species on Earth died out in a period that may have spanned several million years. The shallow seas were the worst affected and reefs would not recover for another 100 million years. Changes in sea level and climate change were among the suspected causes.

The Ordovician–Silurian extinction (End Ordovician or O-S) – 440–450 Mya

The third largest extinction in Earth's history had two peak dying times. During the Ordovician, most life was in the sea, so it was sea creatures such as trilobites, brachiopods and graptolites that were drastically reduced. In all, some 85 per cent of sea species were wiped out.

Waves of destruction

Case Study One in the panel's report assesses the "deadly trio" of factors – global warming, ocean acidification and anoxia (absence of oxygen). Most if not all of the five global mass extinctions in prehistory carry the fingerprints of these "carbon perturbations", the report says, and the "deadly trio" are present in the ocean today.

Case Study Two looks at coral reefs, and the fact that these "rainforests of the sea" (so-called for their species richness) are now facing multiple threats. The panel concluded that these threats acting together (pollution, acidification, warming, overfishing) will have a greater impact than if they were occurring on their own, and so estimates of how coral reefs will respond to global warming will have to be revised.

Case Study Three examines pollution, which is an old problem, but may be presenting new threats, as a wide range of novel chemicals is now being found in marine ecosystems, from pharmaceuticals to flame retardants, and some are known to be endocrine disrupters or can damage immune systems. Marine litter, especially, plastics, is a huge concern.

Case Study Four looks at over-fishing: it focuses on the Chinese bahaba, a giant fish which was first described by scientists only in the 1930s, but is now critically endangered: it has gone from discovery to near-disappearance in less than 70 years. A recent study showed that 63 per cent of the assessed fish stocks worldwide are over-exploited or depleted.

The Mini-Ice-Age and Global Warming

2011-06-22T12:05:00.005-04:00

There have been articles recently about the lack of sunspot activity and the possible link to a mini-ice age. It has been my idea from what I have read that we probably would be in the midst of an ice age if it were not for rise in CO2 due to industry and cars, etc.

From uk.ibtimes.com

"The reality is that, while the sun may well be about to give us a shove in the direction of cool temperatures, the evidence suggests it won't be anything like enough to drown out the warming effects of our greenhouse gas emissions," he said.

Scientists are in no doubt that the sun has been acting oddly in recent years. Sunspot numbers ebb and flow in cycles lasting around 11 years but over the past three years, observable sunspots have been mostly missing.

These spots have been used by scientists to indicate the sun's magnetic activity is diminishing, and that the sun may even be shrinking. Since 2007, visible sunspot activity has stalled, leading researchers to suggest that the next solar maximum (due in 2013) could be a long while coming. Instead, the sun could go into a prolonged lull lasting several decades.

This has happened before, the most famous example is the Maunder Minimum of 1645-1715 when a period of solar inactivity coincided with a "Little Ice Age" -- rivers that were normally ice-free froze and snow fields remained year-round at lower altitudes, according to NASA.

There is plenty of evidence that such "grand minima" cool the Earth and that the sun's sunspot cycle is closely tied to these phenomena...He cites research conducted by the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany that modelled what would happen to temperatures if a grand minimum started now and continued until 2100. They found that it would lower temperatures by 0.3 °C at most.

Now, when you take into account current greenhouse gas emissions, which are set to raise global temperatures by 2-4°C by 2100, even the most optimistic scenario would see a rise of 2 °C reduced to 1.7 °C. Not an ice age at all, in other words.

The University Corporation for Atmospheric Research has an article Arctic Warming Overtakes 2,000 Years of Natural Cooling with this graph:

New research shows that the Arctic reversed a long-term cooling trend and began warming rapidly in recent decades. The blue line shows estimates of Arctic temperatures over the last 2,000 years, based on proxy records from lake sediments, ice cores and tree rings. The green line shows the long-term cooling trend. The red line shows the recent warming based on actual observations. A 2000-year transient climate simulation with NCAR?s Community Climate System Model shows the same overall temperature decrease as does the proxy temperature reconstruction, which gives scientists confidence that their estimates are accurate....

The new study is the first to quantify a pervasive cooling across the Arctic on a decade-by-decade basis that is related to an approximately 21,000-year cyclical wobble in Earth's tilt relative to the Sun. Over the last 7,000 years, the timing of Earth's closest pass by the Sun has shifted from September to January. This has gradually reduced the intensity of sunlight reaching the Arctic in summertime, when Earth is farther from the Sun.

The research team's temperature analysis shows that summer temperatures in the Arctic, in step with the reduced energy from the Sun, cooled at an average rate of about 0.2 degrees Celsius (about .36 degrees Fahrenheit) per thousand years. The temperatures eventually bottomed out during the "Little Ice Age," a period of widespread cooling that lasted roughly from the 16th to the mid-19th centuries.

Even though the orbital cycle that produced the cooling continued, it was overwhelmed in the 20th century by human-induced warming. The result was summer temperatures in the Arctic by the year 2000 that were about 1.4 degrees C (2.5 degrees F) higher than would have been expected from the continued cyclical cooling alone.

"If it hadn't been for the increase in human-produced greenhouse gases, summer temperatures in the Arctic should have cooled gradually over the last century," says Bette Otto-Bliesner, an NCAR scientist who participated in the study.

____

If the amount of global warming people are causing was small - a person could argue that the greenhouse effect is being beneficial. But it is not minimal, the CO2 is also causing acidification of the oceans, as well as droughts, and more powerful storms and other problems. At the rate the world is warming, along with related problems, denial about problem solving at this point is quite lame, and in my opinion - obnoxious.

"China evacuates 500,000 as flooding breaks worst drought in 50 years"

2011-06-19T08:27:00.001-04:00

From the Guardian.UK:

China has evacuated more than 500,000 people from deadly floods that are devastating areas in the south of the country following the worst drought in 50 years.

At least 105 people have been swept to their deaths or killed in landslides and another 65 are missing after rivers burst their banks. The authorities have issued the highest level of alarm about dykes and dams under dangerous pressure.

Television channels that were only recently broadcasting images of dried-up lake beds are now carrying footage of flooded homes and boats plying their way through inundated streets. China Daily said 550,000 people have been forced to leave their homes.

The dramatic shift is in line with weather trends identified by the Beijing Climate Centre, which says rain is coming in shorter, fiercer bursts, interspersed by protracted periods of drought.

The worst affected province is Zhejiang, where some stretches of the Qiantang river have risen to their highest level since 1955, according to the Flood Control and Drought Relief Office.

In the Zhuji district, which has had 40.5cm of rain since the start of the month, the Puyang river inundated 88 villages and 13,000 hectares of crops.

In neighbouring Jiangxi province, troops have helped 122,400 residents evacuate from vulnerable lowlands, according to the China News Service. Roads have been closed and bridges have collapsed in the floods, which have also affected Hubei, Hunan, Sichuan and Guizhou provinces.

Monitoring stations on 40 rivers have recorded water levels above the safety limit, including Asia's biggest waterway – the Yangtze – which is simultaneously suffering a flood downstream and a drought closer to its source.

" Hot Particles From Japan to Seattle Virtually Undetectable when Inhaled or Swallowed"

2011-06-13T14:24:00.003-04:00

Video of Arne Gunderson on Fairewinds.com

He talks about collecting samples from car air filters in Tokyo and other places in Japan. And the "metallic" taste people get in their mouth when hot particles are abundant (which people got following 3Mile Island, Chernobyl and are now getting in Seattle as well as Japan).

June Heat Wave in USA

2011-06-11T20:31:00.003-04:00

From ThinkProgress:

HEAT WAVE SHATTERS 2,852 U.S. RECORDS, KILLS EIGHT | The fossil-fueled heat wave blazing across the United States east of the Rockies has killed at least eight people, knocked out power from Detroit to Connecticut, and set 1,859 high-temperature and 993 high-minimum-temperature records this week:

____

As you might expect, Toronto and other Canadian areas had record-breaking heat this past week.

Next week is supposed to be cooler.

Formaldehyde, Styrene - carcinogens

2011-06-11T20:23:00.002-04:00

From Thinkprogress.org:

After David Koch Leaves NIH Board, NIH Hands Down Long-Delayed Classification Of Top Koch Pollutant As A Carcinogen

Large manufacturers and chemical producers have lobbied ferociously to stop the National Institutes of Health from classifying formaldehyde as a carcinogen. A wide body of research has linked the chemical to cancer, but industrial polluters have stymied regulators from action.

Last year, the New Yorker’s Jane Mayer reported that billionaire David Koch, whose company Georgia Pacfic (a subsidiary of Koch Industries) is one of the country’s top producers of formaldehyde, was appointed to the NIH cancer board at a time when the NIH delayed action on the chemical. The news was met with protests from environmental groups. Faced with mounting pressure from Greenpeace and the scientific community, Koch left offered an early resignation from the board in October.

Yesterday, the NIH finally handed down a report officially classifying formaldehyde as a carcinogen:

Government scientists listed formaldehyde as a carcinogen, and said it is found in worrisome quantities in plywood, particle board, mortuaries and hair salons. They also said that styrene, which is used in boats, bathtubs and in disposable foam plastic cups and plates, may cause cancer but is generally found in such low levels in consumer products that risks are low. Frequent and intense exposures in manufacturing plants are far more worrisome than the intermittent contact that most consumers have, but government scientists said that consumers should still avoid contact with formaldehyde and styrene along with six other chemicals that were added Friday to the government’s official Report on Carcinogens. Its release was delayed for years because of intense lobbying from the chemical industry, which disputed its findings.

An investigation by ProPublica found that Sens. David Vitter (R-LA) and James Inhofe (R-OK) had used their power to add years of delay to the report. The piece linked Vitter to lobbying from Koch’s Georgia Pacific company, which has plywood plants in Louisiana.

"The Whole Fracking Enchilada"

2011-06-10T19:50:00.003-04:00

By Biologist Sandra Steingraber - from Orionmagazine.org

Fracking is linked to every part of the environmental crisis—from radiation exposure to habitat loss—and contravenes every principle of environmental thinking. It’s the tornado on the horizon that is poised to wreck ongoing efforts to create green economies, local agriculture, investments in renewable energy, and the ability to ride your bike along country roads. It’s worth setting down your fork, pen, cellular phone—whatever instrument you’re holding—and looking out the window.

THE ENVIRONMENTAL CRISIS can be viewed as a tree with two trunks. One trunk represents what we are doing to the planet through atmospheric accumulation of heat-trapping gasses. Follow this trunk along and you find droughts, floods, acidification of oceans, dissolving coral reefs, and species extinctions.

The other trunk represents what we are doing to ourselves and other animals through the chemical adulteration of the planet with inherently toxic synthetic pollutants. Follow this trunk along and you find asthma, infertility, cancer, and male fish in the Potomac River whose testicles have eggs inside them.

At the base of both these trunks is an economic dependency on fossil fuels, primarily coal (plant fossils) and petroleum (animal fossils). When we light them on fire, we threaten the global ecosystem. When we use them as feedstocks for making stuff, we create substances—pesticides, solvents, plastics—that can tinker with our subcellular machinery and the various signaling pathways that make it run.

Natural gas is the vaporous form of petroleum. It’s the Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde of fossil fuels: when burned, natural gas generates only half the greenhouse gases of coal, but when it escapes into the atmosphere as unburned methane, it’s one of the most powerful greenhouse gases of them all—twenty times more powerful than carbon dioxide at trapping heat and with the stamina to persist nine to fifteen years. You can also make petrochemicals from it. Natural gas is the starting point for anhydrous ammonia (synthetic fertilizer) and PVC plastic (those shower curtains).

Until a few years ago, much of the natural gas trapped underground was considered unrecoverable because it is scattered throughout vast sheets of shale, like a fizz of bubbles in a petrified spill of champagne. But that all changed with the rollout of a drilling technique (pioneered by Halliburton) that bores horizontally through the bedrock, blasts it with explosives, and forces into the cracks, under enormous pressure, millions of gallons of water laced with a proprietary mix of poisonous chemicals that further fracture the rock. Up the borehole flows the gas. In 2000, only 1 percent of natural gas was shale gas. Ten years later, almost 20 percent is.

International investors began viewing shale gas as a paradigm-shifting innovation. Energy companies are now looking at shale plays in Poland and Turkey. Fracking is under way in Canada. But nowhere has the technology been as rapidly deployed as in the United States, where a gas rush is under way. Gas extraction now goes on in thirty-two states, with half a million new gas wells drilled in the last ten years alone. We are literally shattering the bedrock of our nation and pumping it full of carcinogens in order to bring methane out of the earth.

And nowhere in the U.S. is fracking proceeding more manically than Appalachia, which is underlain by the formation called the Marcellus Shale, otherwise referred to by the Intelligent Investor Report as “the Saudi Arabia of natural gas” and by the Toronto Globe and Mail as a “prolific monster” with the potential to “rearrange the continent’s energy flow.”

In the sense of “abnormal to the point of inspiring horror,” monster is not an inappropriate term here. With every well drilled—and thirty-two thousand wells per year are planned—a couple million gallons of fresh water are transformed into toxic fracking fluid. Some of that fluid will remain underground. Some will come flying back out of the hole, bringing with it other monsters: benzene, brine, radioactivity, and heavy metals that, for the past 400 million years, had been safely locked up a mile below us, estranged from the surface world of living creatures. No one knows what to do with this lethal flowback—a million or more gallons of it for every wellhead. Too caustic for reuse as is, it sloshes around in open pits and sometimes is hauled away in fleets of trucks to be forced under pressure down a disposal well. And it is sometimes clandestinely dumped.

By 2012, 100 billion gallons per year of fresh water will be turned into toxic fracking fluid. The technology to transform it back to drinkable water does not exist. And, even if it did, where would we put all the noxious, radioactive substances we capture from it?

HERE, THEN, are the environmental precepts violated by hydrofracking: 1) Environmental degradation of the commons should be factored into the price structure of the product (full-cost accounting), whose true carbon footprint—inclusive of all those diesel truck trips, blowouts, and methane leaks—requires calculation (life-cycle analysis). 2) Benefit of the doubt goes to public health, not the things that threaten it, especially in situations where catastrophic harm—aquifer contamination with carcinogens—is unremediable (the Precautionary Principle). 3) There is no away.

This year I’ve attended scientific conferences and community forums on fracking. I’ve heard a PhD geologist worry about the thousands of unmapped, abandoned wells scattered across New York from long-ago drilling operations. (What if pressurized fracking fluid, to be entombed in the shale beneath our aquifers, found an old borehole? Could it come squirting back up to the surface? Could it rise as vapor through hairline cracks?) I’ve heard a hazardous materials specialist describe to a crowd of people living in fracked communities how many parts per million of benzene will raise risks for leukemia and sperm abnormalities linked to birth deformities. I’ve heard a woman who lives by a fracking operation in Pennsylvania—whose pond bubbles with methane and whose kids have nosebleeds at night—ask how she could keep her children safe. She was asking me. And I had no answer. Thirty-seven percent of the land in the township where I live with my own kids is already leased to the frackers. There is no away.

Apple's New Building Plan

2011-06-09T22:02:00.003-04:00

I think this looks very cool - with the green space in the middle. The parking going underground and more trees planted on the ground - including an apricot orchard. It will be 4 stories and there will be room for 12,000 people to work.

more photos here

"Changing Jellyfish Season Could Alter Chesapeake Bay Food Chain"

2011-06-09T16:09:00.003-04:00

From - ClimateCentral.org

By Alyson Kenward

First came hundreds of reports of jellyfish washing ashore in central Florida over the Memorial Day weekend. Since then, people have been spotting blooms of the gelatinous drifters off the coasts Connecticut, Virginia, and South Carolina, all earlier in the summer than expected.

The early appearance of jellyfish along the East Coast is more than just a nuisance for beachgoers. According to scientists, it’s a sign that coastal waters are warmer than usual for time of year, and recent studies suggest the early jellyfish blooms could upset the marine ecosystem in coastal areas, like Maryland's Chesapeake Bay.

“The key thing with jellies is that they do everything so much faster than everything else, they grow and reproduce and are voracious predators, that other animals like fish can’t keep up,” says ecologist Rob Condon from the Dauphin Island Sea Lab in Alabama.

For several years, Condon and colleagues from the Sea Lab and the Virginia Institute of Marine Science (VIMS) have been studying jellyfish that live in the York River, a southern tributary of Chesapeake Bay. They’ve discovered that rapidly-growing blooms of jellyfish are feeding on some of the most nutritious parts of the food web, including small crustaceans, and are converting them into products that sustain bacteria that leave little valuable energy supplies for fish and other sea life.

Condon says the jellyfish are making a similar source of energy-rich material that bacteria feast upon, but that strips the nutritional value out of the river’s food web.

“Ultimately, there is less food for the fish, because the jellyfish are eating it all,” he says. And because not too many animals (including us humans) eat jellyfish, it doesn't seem as though the food energy going into the jellies is moving up the food chain. This week, Condon and his colleagues published a study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, detailing how jellyfish blooms reduce diversity in the marine food chain....

According to Condon, if these warm waters continue to arrive in the earlier and earlier in the springtime, the effects could be felt throughout Chesapeake Bay. "Jellyfish are an important indicator of the health of a marine ecosystem," he says. "If the jellyfish blooms come earlier, there will be big consequences for fish production in the Bay."
_______________

I think we are going to have to learn to like eating jellyfish. I think it can be done.

"Japan mulls closure of N-reactors by April"

2011-06-09T15:55:00.003-04:00

As seen at the OmanTribune.com

TOKYO: All 54 of Japan’s nuclear reactors may be shut by next April, adding more than $30 billion a year to the country’s energy costs, if communities object to plant operating plans due to safety concerns, trade ministry officials said on Wednesday....

___________________

Compared with the cost of the disaster - $30 billion sounds like nothing. Sounds like a good move to me.

Recently Japan owned up to the idea the the reactors not only melted down - but melted through:

The nuclear fuel in three of the reactors at the Fukushima Dai-Ichi nuclear plant has melted through the base of the pressure vessels and is pooling in the outer containment vessels, according to a report by the Japanese government.

From the Telegraph.UK

Other Recent Headlines:

Japan: green tea exports banned due to high radiation levels 03 Jun 2011
Japanese prime minister survives no-confidence vote after offering to resign 02 Jun 2011
Japan 'underestimated' impact tsunami would have on nuclear plants' 01 Jun 2011
Wary Japanese send sales of Geiger counters soaring 26 May 2011

"Japanese seniors volunteer for Fukushima 'suicide corps'"

2011-06-01T21:44:00.002-04:00

From CNN:

Tokyo (CNN) -- Up a narrow flight of stairs in a modest, non-descript office building, three retirees sit in a cramped room, hunched over their computers and mobile phones. They look like the planning committee for a neighborhood senior breakfast, not the leaders of a 250-member team attempting to defuse one of the worst nuclear meltdowns in history.

But that's exactly what 72-year-old Yasuteru Yamada hopes his seniors group, the Skilled Veterans Corps, will do: help end the crisis at the crippled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant. The group, consisting only of retirees age 60 and up, says it is uniquely poised to work at the radiation-contaminated plant, as the cells of an older person's body divide more slowly than a younger individual. "We have to work instead of them," says Yamada, referring to the estimated 1,000 workers currently at the nuclear plant. "Elders have less sensitivity to radiation. Therefore, we have to work."

Yamada is a former engineer for Sumitomo Metal Industries Ltd. and offers decades of experience, he says. A cancer survivor, Yamada says he values his life but wants to make a difference in the years he has left.

Yamada pauses as his mobile phone rings. He pops out his hearing aids to answer. Another call from the news media, he says, as he excuses himself briefly. Reporters from around the globe have called daily since Yamada announced the existence of his group. They, including this reporter, are calling because of what the prime minister's special adviser to the nuclear crisis publicly dubbed them, the "suicide corps." Goshi Hosono, at a news conference last week, told reporters that while the government was grateful for the offer, there is no immediate need for the elderly volunteers.

Masaaki Takahashi, 65, bristles at the name Hosono gave his team. "I want them to stop calling us the 'suicide corps' or kamikazes," he says. "We're doing nothing special. I simply think I have to do something and I can't allow just young people to do this."

Takahashi is currently tasked with logging the names of donors and volunteers. He says there are more than 900 donors and 250 able-bodied seniors who want to don the white radiation suits and enter the grounds of the plant...

The owner of the nuclear plant, Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO), tells CNN it is thankful for the offer from the seniors group. But it says they currently have enough workers to control the crisis.

But if Hikaru Tagawa is any indication, the plant is having trouble luring employees to the facility. Tagawa is a former temporary worker at Fukushima who lived just a few miles away, an area that is now a mandatory evacuation zone. When CNN met Tagawa, he was living at an evacuation center near Tokyo. "Nothing can make me go back to work there," he says, as his young daughter played nearby. He points out he has two young children and calls the levels of radiation "too dangerous."

30.6 Billion Metric Tons Carbon-dioxide Emissions - 2010

2011-06-01T21:30:00.002-04:00

From USA TODAY:

Worldwide carbon-dioxide emissions from burning fossil fuels reached a record 30.6 billion metric tons in 2010, an international energy group reports. (1 metric ton = 2204.6 lbs)

A reviving world economy was behind the 5% increase from 2008, mainly led by China's and India's growing industries, says the International Energy Agency, based in Paris. Hopes of dampening global warming are dropping with such increases, the agency warned.

"Our latest estimates are another wake-up call," said IEA economist Fatih Birol, in a statement. Emissions dropped slightly in 2009, following the previous record year.

"It is, I guess, remarkable how quickly emissions have rebounded following the recession," says climate scientist Myles Allen of the United Kingdom's Oxford University.

Despite hopes that the global recession could lead to more efficient and lower-emission energy use, he adds, "That seems to have been wishful thinking."

In May, a report from the U.S. National Research Council warned that "the risk of dangerous climate change impacts is growing with every ton of greenhouse gases."

Sea-level rise, heat waves and drought in Southwestern states could follow, the report warned.

Greenhouse gases, most notably carbon dioxide, raise atmospheric temperatures because they are transparent to sunlight but trap heat. Atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide have risen about 23% since 1958, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration...

Tornadoes 2011

2011-05-26T11:57:00.005-04:00

It's been a hell of a tornado year. The Tuscaloosa, Alabama and Joplin Missouri ones have been the worst ones so far. Yesterday we had 5 tornado warnings here in Indiana. While the storm did result in some damage to homes and trees, and a few people - it was nothing like the damage from the F5s.

Joplin, MO
Joplin, Mo

Warmer Ocean Fueling Tornadoes from Mother Jones/ Deep Blue Home:

The stats on tornadoes so far this year are horrifying. A record-breaking 482 people (and ABC News reports 1,500 are unaccounted for in Joplin, Missouri) have been confirmed killed as of 24 May.

We know that spring's a bad season for tornadoes. We know that La Niña years fuel stormy Aprils. But 2011 is redefining even those parameters.

Here's what NOAA has to say about last month alone:

April 2011 set anew record with a total of 875 tornadoes.
The previous April record was set in 1974 with 267 tornadoes.
The average number of tornadoes for the month of April during the past decade was 161.
The previous record number of tornadoes duringany month was 542 tornadoes set in May 2003.
NWS [National Weather Service] records indicate 321 people were killed during the April 25-28 tornado outbreak.
NWS records indicate 361 people were killed during the entire month of April 2011.

Leading up to April's extreme tornadoes were some extreme temperatures, noted Stu Ostro, Senior Meteorologist at the Weather Channel:

The temperature in Laredo reached 111 degrees the day prior to the peak [April] outbreak, the hottest on record at that location for so early in the season. Precipitation extremes have been extreme even by extreme precipitation standards, with April rainfall upwards of 20" in Arkansas and record levels on some rivers in the central US, juxtaposed with an exceptionally large amount of Texas being classified in extreme or exceptional drought.

Now May is racing to catch up to and maybe even pass April. Here's what NOAA finds so far:

The National Weather Service's preliminary estimate is more than 100 tornadoes have occurred during the month of May 2011.
The record number of tornadoes during the month of May was 542 tornadoes set in May 2003.
The average number of tornadoes for the month of May during the past decade is 298.
May is historically the most active month for tornadoes.
As I write, reports are rolling in about a new round of tornadoes—and deaths—in Oklahoma.

Sunday's horrific twister at Joplin, Missouri, was likely a multiple vortex tornado, says Thomas Schwein, deputy director of the National Weather Service’s Central Region, reports the Kansas City Star.

Jeff Masters' WunderBlog describes the Joplin tornado's nine-minute path thus:

A violent high-end EF-4* [Enhanced Fujita Scale] tornado [initial assessment] with winds of 190-198 mph carved a 7-mile long, 3/4 to one mile-wide path of near-total destruction through Joplin beginning at 5:41pm CDT Sunday evening.

*UPDATE: After surveying the Joplin tornado track, the NWS announced that its winds exceeded 200 miles per hour. This makes it the fourth EF-5 tornado this year, according to WonderBlog—and the most costly ever. Initial estimates: $1-3 billion.

So what's fueling this year's record-breaking tornado season? There are the usual suspects, which the Cliff Mass Weather Blog lists as:

Strong Instability
Large Vertical Wind Shear
Low Level Moisture

And then there are sea surface temperatures.

Unusually warm surface waters in the Gulf of Mexico—about 2 degrees Fahrenheit/3.6 degrees Celsius warmer than normal—may be a factor in this season's tornado frequency and strength, according to National Weather Service director Jack Hayes. Add that to an uncommonly southward jet stream track, reports Scientific American, and you've got a recipe for the kinds of disasters we've been seeing so far this year.

Warmer sea surface temperatures are also one of three reasons NOAA is forecasting a 65 percent chance of an above normal season—characterized as 13 or more named storms, 7 or more hurricanes, and 3 or more major hurricanes—in the Atlantic this year.
Lift

"Electrons are fantastically round..."

2011-05-26T11:47:00.001-04:00

From the Guardian.uk

After three months of experiments in a basement laboratory in London, scientists can confirm – with more confidence than ever – that the electron is very, very round.

In the most exquisite measurements yet, researchers declared the particle to be a perfect sphere to within one billionth of a billionth of a billionth of a centimetre. Were the electron scaled up to the size of the solar system, any deviation from its roundness would be smaller than the width of a human hair, the team said.

Abstruse as the experiment might seem, the work has profound implications for scientists wrestling with the mysteries of the cosmos. Even the slightest elongation of the electron can reveal what unknown particles might exist in nature, and even explain why matter won out over antimatter in the universe we observe.

The findings, published in the journal, Nature, already rule out some kinds of particles that theories suggested could pop into existence at the Large Hadron Collider at Cern, the European particle physics laboratory near Geneva.

"It's been hard work. We've been working on this for a long time and we've had a lot of ups and downs," said Jony Hudson, a physicist at Imperial College, London. "We have measured the shape really precisely. The deviations we were looking for are much smaller than the size of the electron. It is very, very round."

The concept of shape might seem obscure when it comes to a subatomic particle, but the rules are the same as for everyday objects. Pick up a pen, for example, and you feel its shape because electrons in the pen push back against the electrons in your hand.

And so it is with the electron itself. The particle is negatively charged, and the more evenly distributed the charge is around the centre of the particle, the more spherical it appears to be.

Scientists pursue ever more accurate measurements of the electron's roundness because any sign of it being mishapen could herald a major discovery. One leading idea known as supersymmetry, which says that every kind of particle we know has a heavy twin, requires the electron to have a slightly distorted shape.

"What's interesting is that the electron is so round it is becoming difficult for theories like supersymmetry to explain it," said Hudson, whose finding already rules out the existence of some supersymmetric particles.

Evidence that the electron is mishapen on a minuscule scale might also explain why the universe we see is made of matter instead of antimatter. At the birth of the cosmos, both were made in equal measure, but some subtle difference between the two caused antimatter to disappear. If the electron is elongated, it will behave differently to its antimatter counterpart, the positron. For example, each would wobble differently in an electric field.

"There must be a difference in the behaviour of matter and antimatter that we've not observed, and amazingly, the shape of the electron might just be enough to explain how the matter-antimatter imbalance built up over billions of years," Hudson said.

His team studied the roundness of electrons by measuring how much, or how little, the particles wobbled in an electric field. The rounder the electron, the less wobble it will display. In the experiment, electrons were anchored to a molecule called ytterbium fluoride and examined with a laser beam. Each measurement took only one thousandth of a second.

Running non-stop for more than three months, Hudson's team took 25 million measurements of electrons and averaged them out. They found no sign of the electron wobbling in the field, meaning it is more spherical than any previous experiment had shown. "To the best of our knowledge, with the experimental precision we have, the electron appears to be round," Hudson said.

In an accompanying article, Aaron Leanhardt at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, said the work provided a window "on the high energy soul of the cosmos".

"This work has important ramifications for the types of particles that can be discovered at high-energy accelerators, and may eventually help to explain the composition of the observable universe," Leanhardt wrote.

Ten lessons from Chernobyl and Fukushima

2011-05-15T09:55:00.001-04:00

BY DAVID KRIEGER (Miami Herald)

PMPROJPROGRESSIVE.ORG

Here are 10 lessons from the Chernobyl nuclear disaster 25 years ago and the Fukushima disaster this year.

1. Nuclear power is a highly complex, expensive and dangerous way to boil water to create steam to turn turbines.

2. Accidents happen, and the worst-case scenario often turns out to be worse than imagined or planned for.

3. The nuclear industry and its experts cannot plan for every contingency or prevent every disaster.

4. Governments do not effectively regulate the nuclear industry to assure the safety of the public. Regulators of the nuclear industry often come from the nuclear industry itself and tend to be too close to it to regulate it effectively.

5. Hubris, complacency and high-level radiation are a deadly mix. Hubris on the part of the nuclear industry and its government regulators — along with complacency on the part of the public — has led to the creation of vast amounts of high-level radiation that must be guarded from release to the environment for tens of thousands of years.

6. The corporations that run the nuclear power plants are protected from catastrophic economic failure by government limits on liability. If the corporations that own nuclear power plants had to bear the burden of potential financial losses in the event of a catastrophic accident, they would not build the plants because they know the risks are unacceptable. It is only when government limits the liability, as the Price-Anderson Act does in the United States, that companies go ahead and build nuclear power plants. No other private industry is given such liability protection, which leaves the taxpayers on the hook.

7. Radiation releases from nuclear accidents cannot be contained in space and will not stop at national borders.

8. Radiation releases from nuclear accidents cannot be contained in time and will adversely affect countless future generations.

9. Nuclear energy — as well as nuclear weapons — and human beings cannot coexist without the risk of future catastrophes. The survivors of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki have long known that nuclear weapons and human beings cannot coexist. Fukushima, like Chernobyl before it, makes clear that human beings and nuclear power plants also cannot coexist.

10. The accidents at Fukushima and Chernobyl are a bracing reminder to phase out nuclear energy. We need to move as rapidly as possible to a global energy plan based upon conservation and various forms of renewable energy: solar cells, wind, geothermal, and energy that is extracted from the oceans and the tides and the currents.

Poet Maya Angelou once said, “History, despite its wrenching pain, cannot be unlived, but if faced with courage doesn’t need to be lived again.” We need the courage to abandon nuclear power. No one should have to experience the wrenching pain of another Chernobyl or another Fukushima.

David Krieger is a councilor on the World Future Council and the chair of the executive committee of the International Network of Engineers and Scientists for Global Responsibility.

Read more: http://www.miamiherald.com/2011/05/15/2216014/ten-lessons-from-chernobyl-and.html#ixzz1MQfxNvhg

Fukushima Disaster Continues

2011-05-15T09:37:00.003-04:00

Accurate data destroys optimistic TEPCO assessment, hampers cooling plan (Asahi.com)

Accurate data shattered the overly optimistic assessment of Tokyo Electric Power Co. concerning the crippled Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant and raised doubts about the company's game plan for ending the crisis.

Measurements from a recently installed water gauge provided conclusive evidence that the condition of the No. 1 reactor at the plant was much more serious than TEPCO officials have acknowledged until now.

TEPCO officials admitted on May 12 that a "meltdown" had occurred in the No. 1 reactor. Fuel rods had melted, and the molten fuel accumulated and caused small cracks at the bottom of the reactor pressure container, they said.

Until now, TEPCO officials only said that fuel rods were partially damaged and compiled a work schedule in April for restoring a stable cooling system based on that assumption.

Despite being unable to obtain accurate measurements from gauges in the reactors damaged in the March 11 Great East Japan Earthquake, TEPCO officials still made those optimistic assumptions.

From immediately after the quake, the measurements from the water gauge at the No. 1 reactor showed very little change, casting doubt on the reliability of the instruments.

After workers entered the No. 1 reactor building and adjusted the water gauge, the data obtained showed water levels so low that the gauge was unable to measure it.

TEPCO officials concluded that water had accumulated in only about 20 percent of the volume of the No. 1 reactor's pressure container.

Other specialists had long warned that the situation at the No. 1 reactor was much more serious than the scenario that TEPCO officials were presenting.

At a news conference April 1, Shunichi Tanaka, a former vice chairman of the Japan Atomic Energy Commission, said all the fuel rods in the No. 1 reactor had melted, raising the possibility of damage to the pressure container.

TEPCO's latest measurements found the temperature of the pressure container was about 100 degrees. If the fuel rods had been exposed because of the low water level, the temperature should have been much higher. The only explanation is that the fuel rods melted, accumulated at the bottom of the pressure container and the melted fuel was cooled by the small volume of water at the bottom.

The No. 1 reactor is not the only one with problems. Small cracks have probably also developed at the bottom of the pressure containers of the No. 2 and No. 3 reactors.

Evidence of that possibility is the highly contaminated water found in the basements of the turbine buildings of the three reactors as well as underground trenches.

The contamination was likely caused by water leaking from the bottoms of the pressure containers of the three reactors.

TEPCO officials now admit that the measurements from the water gauges at the pressure containers in the No. 2 and No. 3 reactors are also unreliable.

While those water gauges will have to be repaired as soon as possible, TEPCO will also have to review its work schedule for cooling the reactors.

That will likely mean rethinking the plan to submerge the containment vessel of the No. 1 reactor in water to cool the pressure container within.

About 10,000 tons of water have already been pumped into the No. 1 reactor's pressure container, but about 3,000 tons of that water are unaccounted for. That likely means the water has leaked out of the containment vessel.

Moreover, if TEPCO continues to pump in water to the reactors to cool them, water contaminated with radiation will continue to leak out from the cracks at the bottoms of the pressure containers.

TEPCO officials have also not denied the possibility that melted fuel has leaked out of the pressure container. That would mean the volume of contaminated water will likely increase, making work in the reactor buildings much more difficult.

Setbacks at Japan nuclear plant(BBC)

A reactor at Japan's crippled nuclear plant has been more badly damaged than originally thought, operator Tepco has said.

Water is leaking from the pressure vessel surrounding reactor 1 - probably because of damage caused by exposed fuel rods melting, a spokesman said.

Contaminated water had also entered the sea from a pit near reactor 3 but this had now been stopped, he said...

He said there was likely to be a large leak in the pressure vessel, possibly caused by the fallen fuel.

"As for a meltdown, it is certain that it has crumbled and the fuel is located at the bottom (of the vessel)," he added.

The water is said to be leaking into the containment vessel and from there into the reactor building.

Experts said the announcement from Tepco did not mean that the situation at the plant had worsened because it was likely that the fuel had dropped to the bottom of the core soon after the 11 March earthquake.

Japan nuclear: Tepco halts Fukushima cooling plan(BBC)

Japanese engineers have abandoned their latest attempt to stabilise a stricken reactor at the Fukushima nuclear plant.

The plant's operator, Tepco, had intended to cool reactor 1 by filling the containment chamber with water.

But Tepco said melting fuel rods had created a hole in the chamber, allowing 3,000 tonnes of contaminated water to leak into the basement of the reactor building.

The power plant was badly damaged by the earthquake and tsunami on 11 March.

Cooling systems to the reactors were knocked out, fuel rods overheated, and attempts to release pressure in the chambers led to explosions in the buildings housing the reactors.

The government and Tepco (Tokyo Electric Power Company) said it would take until next January to achieve a cold shut-down at the plant.

Government spokesman Goshi Hosono said the latest setback would not affect the deadline...

Last week the government agreed a huge compensation package for those affected by the disaster.

Analysts say the final bill for compensation could top $100bn (£61bn).
_______

More info can be found @ Radiation Safety Philippines

Mississippi River Flood 2011

2011-05-15T09:04:00.007-04:00

All the rain we were getting in April and still in May goes down into the Ohio and Mississippi rivers. Louisville, Evansville, New Harmony, IN; Cairo, IL; Memphis, Vicksberg, MI; have been having flooding problems. Now the Morganza spillway gates have been opened to divert some of the water to the western part of Louisiana to spare Baton Rouge and New Orleans. The first time in 40 years. Of course this means that some people will be flooded who may not have been - but that fewer people altogether will be. It's sad all the way around.

A structure is seen nearly covered by floodwater from the Mississippi River, Tuesday, May 3, 2011, north of New Madrid, Mo. Many areas along the river in Missouri's bootheel are seeing significant flooding and ominous flooding forecasts are raising alarm from southeast Missouri to Louisiana and Mississippi. (AP Photo/Jeff Roberson)

The Mississippi flood in Missouri and Tennessee

The Morganza Spillway - opened May 14th 2011

One of the scenarios considered possible regarding the opening of the Morganza Spillway

Jellyfish Dress

2011-04-28T22:56:00.002-04:00

White grocery bags, green dry cleaner bags, and blue newspaper bags that may have wound up polluting the ocean have now been crafted into an aquatic-themed gown.
Photo by: Courtesy of RecycleRunway.com

Seen on Shine.yahoo

April Showers and Storms

2011-04-28T22:34:00.003-04:00

April has been quite a month for storms. It has been the wettest April in Oregon and Ottawa and places in between.

Flooding is a problem around Louisville and other areas around Kentucky and Indiana. There have also been many tornadoes. Yesterday the South got hammered. From Yahoo news:

PLEASANT GROVE, Ala. – Firefighters searched one splintered pile after another for survivors Thursday, combing the remains of houses and neighborhoods pulverized by the nation's deadliest tornado outbreak in almost four decades. At least 290 people were killed across six states — more than two-thirds of them in Alabama, where large cities bore the half-mile-wide scars the twisters left behind.

The death toll from Wednesday's storms seems out of a bygone era, before Doppler radar and pinpoint satellite forecasts were around to warn communities of severe weather. Residents were told the tornadoes were coming up to 24 minutes ahead of time, but they were just too wide, too powerful and too locked onto populated areas to avoid a horrifying body count.

"These were the most intense super-cell thunderstorms that I think anybody who was out there forecasting has ever seen," said meteorologist Greg Carbin at the National Weather Service's Storm Prediction Center in Norman, Okla.

"If you experienced a direct hit from one of these, you'd have to be in a reinforced room, storm shelter or underground" to survive, Carbin said.

The storms seemed to hug the interstate highways as they barreled along like runaway trucks, obliterating neighborhoods or even entire towns from Tuscaloosa to Bristol, Va. One family rode out the disaster in the basement of a funeral home, another by huddling in a tanning bed.

In Concord, a small town outside Birmingham that was ravaged by a tornado, Randy Guyton's family got a phone call from a friend warning them to take cover. They rushed to the basement garage, piled into a Honda Ridgeline and listened to the roar as the twister devoured the house in seconds. Afterward, they could see outside through the shards of their home and scrambled out.

"To me it sounded like destruction," the 22-year-old said. "It was a mean, mean roar. It was awful."

At least three people died in a Pleasant Grove subdivision southwest of Birmingham, where residents trickled back Thursday to survey the damage. Greg Harrison's neighborhood was somehow unscathed, but he remains haunted by the wind, thunder and lightning as they built to a crescendo, then suddenly stopped.

Alabama Gov. Robert Bentley said his state had confirmed 204 deaths. There were 33 deaths in Mississippi, 33 in Tennessee, 14 in Georgia, five in Virginia and one in Kentucky. Hundreds if not thousands of people were injured — nearly 800 in Tuscaloosa alone.

A tower-mounted news camera in Tuscaloosa captured images of an astonishingly thick, powerful tornado flinging debris as it leveled neighborhoods.

"There's a pretty good chance some of these were a mile wide, on the ground for tens of miles and had wind speeds over 200 mph," he said.

...The loss of life is the greatest from an outbreak of U.S. tornadoes since April 1974, when the weather service said 315 people were killed by a storm that swept across 13 Southern and Midwestern states.

"Bolivia enshrines natural world's rights with equal status for Mother Earth"

2011-04-12T15:00:00.001-04:00

From the GuardianUK:

Bolivia is set to pass the world's first laws granting all nature equal rights to humans. The Law of Mother Earth, now agreed by politicians and grassroots social groups, redefines the country's rich mineral deposits as "blessings" and is expected to lead to radical new conservation and social measures to reduce pollution and control industry.

The country, which has been pilloried by the US and Britain in the UN climate talks for demanding steep carbon emission cuts, will establish 11 new rights for nature. They include: the right to life and to exist; the right to continue vital cycles and processes free from human alteration; the right to pure water and clean air; the right to balance; the right not to be polluted; and the right to not have cellular structure modified or genetically altered.

Controversially, it will also enshrine the right of nature "to not be affected by mega-infrastructure and development projects that affect the balance of ecosystems and the local inhabitant communities".

"It makes world history. Earth is the mother of all", said Vice-President Alvaro García Linera. "It establishes a new relationship between man and nature, the harmony of which must be preserved as a guarantee of its regeneration."

The law, which is part of a complete restructuring of the Bolivian legal system following a change of constitution in 2009, has been heavily influenced by a resurgent indigenous Andean spiritual world view which places the environment and the earth deity known as the Pachamama at the centre of all life. Humans are considered equal to all other entities.

But the abstract new laws are not expected to stop industry in its tracks. While it is not clear yet what actual protection the new rights will give in court to bugs, insects and ecosystems, the government is expected to establish a ministry of mother earth and to appoint an ombudsman. It is also committed to giving communities new legal powers to monitor and control polluting industries.

Bolivia has long suffered from serious environmental problems from the mining of tin, silver, gold and other raw materials. "Existing laws are not strong enough," said Undarico Pinto, leader of the 3.5m-strong Confederación Sindical Única de Trabajadores Campesinos de Bolivia, the biggest social movement, who helped draft the law. "It will make industry more transparent. It will allow people to regulate industry at national, regional and local levels."

Foreign Minister David Choquehuanca said Bolivia's traditional indigenous respect for the Pachamama was vital to prevent climate change. "Our grandparents taught us that we belong to a big family of plants and animals. We believe that everything in the planet forms part of a big family. We indigenous people can contribute to solving the energy, climate, food and financial crises with our values," he said.

Little opposition is expected to the law being passed because President Evo Morales's ruling party, the Movement Towards Socialism, enjoys a comfortable majority in both houses of parliament.

However, the government must tread a fine line between increased regulation of companies and giving way to the powerful social movements who have pressed for the law. Bolivia earns $500m (£305m) a year from mining companies which provides nearly one third of the country's foreign currency.

In the indigenous philosophy, the Pachamama is a living being.

The draft of the new law states: "She is sacred, fertile and the source of life that feeds and cares for all living beings in her womb. She is in permanent balance, harmony and communication with the cosmos. She is comprised of all ecosystems and living beings, and their self-organisation."

Ecuador, which also has powerful indigenous groups, has changed its constitution to give nature "the right to exist, persist, maintain and regenerate its vital cycles, structure, functions and its processes in evolution". However, the abstract rights have not led to new laws or stopped oil companies from destroying some of the most biologically rich areas of the Amazon.

"Hiding From Shame, Addicted to Optimism: The Tyranny of Our Collective Comfort Zones"

2011-04-11T11:27:00.001-04:00

by Phil Rockstroh on Common Dreams:

The technologies that inflicted upon the world the ongoing tragedies in both the Gulf of Mexico and Japan serve a dangerous addiction, an addiction to blind optimism, a habituation of mind that allows us to dwell within provisional comfort zones but renders vast spaces of the world into deathrealms.

After each catastrophe, there ensues a scramble to contain the damage leveled, as, concurrently, the apologist of the present system explain the anomalous nature of the event. Yet, this much should be obvious: Attempting to clean up the mess, after it occurs, as oppose to altering the way of life that incurs the damage, is analogous to an addict believing a few days in detox will serve as a solution to his addiction.

In the same way drug dealers are reliant on an addict's unwillingness to reflect on the carnage created in his life, as well as, the havoc reaped in the lives of those near him, engendered by his addiction, the small group of hyper-wealthy elites who benefit from the current system rely on collective cognitive dissidence (or, as it has been termed, the fear of fear itself) to dissuade the public at large from peering deeply into the pernicious situation.

One of an addict's biggest obstacles is his optimism i.e., he is convinced he can figure out somehow, someway to use his drug of choice in a less destructive way…and, by reflex, rebels against the deepening sorrow that he must change.

When large, powerful corporations create messes beyond their ability to control the damage wrought by their institutional cupidity, those in charge spare no expense aggressively confronting the problem…that is, of course, by means of public relations blitzes aimed at the general public, while tsunami-sized waves of campaign contributions flood the coffers of elected officials.

Apropos, a school of thought has developed in which framing the perception of a catastrophe supersedes all other considerations. An after the fact casuistry, possessed of crackpot optimism, similar to the following, is affected: Dated technologies were at fault in that particular mishap, but, not to worry, in the near future, new innovations will safeguard against similar calamities.

Sure thing: The future will be bathed in the benign light of new technological wonders; our dread will be washed away by sparkling clean coal. Magical technological innovations will soon render nuclear power so safe that the only danger to the general public will be posed by the risk of being smothered by its profoundly huggable properties...

(more)

"U.S. Subsidizes Brazilian Cotton to Protect Monsanto's Profits"

2011-04-09T09:59:00.002-04:00

by Emelie Peine From Think Forward via CommonDreams

On February 18, Republicans in the House of Representatives defeated an obscure amendment to the House Appropriations bill by a 2-to-1 margin. The Kind Amendment would have eliminated $147 million dollars that the federal government pays every year directly to Brazilian cotton farmers. In an era of nationwide belt tightening, with funding for things like education and the U.S. Farm Bill on the chopping block, defending payments to Brazilian farmers may seem curious.

In order to understand this peculiar political move, one has to look all the way back to 2002, when Brazil filed a case in the WTO challenging U.S. cotton subsidies. In 2004, the Dispute Settlement Body of the WTO found in favor of Brazil, ruling that government subsidies afforded U.S. cotton producers an unfair advantage and suppressed the world market price, which damaged Brazil's interests. After multiple appeals the WTO upheld the original ruling, and by 2009 the U.S. still had not reformed its cotton programs. Brazil then asked the WTO for permission to retaliate against the U.S. by imposing trade sanctions. The WTO decided that Brazil was entitled to impose 100-percent tariffs on over 100 different goods of U.S. origin. Even more importantly, however, Brazil was entitled to suspend intellectual property rights for U.S. companies, including patent protections on genetically engineered seeds.

In WTO language, Brazil was allowed to suspend its obligations to U.S. companies under the Trade-related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) agreement. This constituted a major threat to the profits of U.S. agribusiness giants Monsanto and Pioneer, since Brazil is the second largest grower of biotech crops in the world. Fifty percent of Brazil’s corn harvest is engineered to produce the pesticide Bt, and Monsanto’s YieldGard VT Pro is a popular product among Brazilian corn farmers. By targeting the profits of major U.S. corporations, the Brazilian government put the U.S. in a tough spot: either let the subsidies stand and allow Brazilian farmers to plant Monsanto and Pioneer seeds without paying royalties, or substantially reform the cotton program. In essence, Brazil was pitting the interests of Big Agribusiness against those of Big Cotton, and the U.S. government was caught in the middle.

The two governments, however, managed to come up with a creative solution. In a 2009 WTO “framework agreement,” the U.S. created the Commodity Conservation Corporation (CCC), and Brazil created the Brazilian Cotton Institute (BCI). Rather than eliminating or substantially reforming cotton subsidies, the CCC pays the BCI $147 million dollars a year in “technical assistance,” which happens to be the same amount the WTO authorized for trade retaliation specifically for cotton payments. In essence, then, the U.S. government pays a subsidy to Brazilian cotton farmers every year to protect the U.S. cotton program—and the profits of companies like Monsanto and Pioneer.

In 2005, I attended the committee meeting of Brazil’s foreign trade ministry where Pedro Camargo Neto—a Brazilian trade lawyer and then-president of the Brazilian pork producers association—proposed suspension of the TRIPS agreement as retaliation for U.S. non-compliance with the WTO ruling on cotton. It was a brilliant political tactic, and dramatically shows the power of private firms in both countries to influence trade policy in the WTO. When I interviewed him as part of my dissertation, Camargo said the Brazilian cotton case would never have been launched without political pressure and funding from Brazil’s powerful cotton industry. Despite facing substantial resistance from the Brazilian government in launching the case, he said, “the producers were really backing it.”

Today in the U.S., taxpayers are bearing the cost of the cotton subsidies and the cost of failure to reform them. Although major news outlets called the payments yet another insane perversion of already insane U.S. agricultural policy, it clearly wasn’t just about preserving subsidies. In 2006, Steve Suppan anticipated the use—and drawbacks—of TRIPS suspension as a one of few tools of cross-retaliation available to poorer countries. However, because of the size of the market for genetically modified seeds there, TRIPS suspension was Brazil’s trump card. Apparently when the stakes are high enough for American business interests, the government will make sure that American taxpayers subsidize not just agriculture, but intellectual property, too.

"Workers Give Glimpse of Japan’s Nuclear Crisis"

2011-03-31T09:19:00.003-04:00

From the New York Times:

With the power out, trucks were parked in a circle with their lights on, creating a shadowy stage. A manager from the Tokyo Electric Power Company explained how the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant had been slammed by a mammoth tsunami and rocked by hydrogen explosions and had become highly radioactive. Some workers wept.

That was the scene at J-Village, 12 miles south of the plant, on the night of March 15. Hundreds of firefighters, Self-Defense Forces and workers from Tokyo Electric Power convened at the sports training center, arguing long and loudly about how best to restore cooling systems and prevent nuclear fuel from overheating. Complicating matters, a lack of phone service meant that they had little input from upper management.

“There were so many ideas, the meeting turned into a panic,” said one longtime Tokyo Electric veteran present that day. He made the comments in an interview with The New York Times, one of several interviews that provided a rare glimpse of the crisis as the company’s workers experienced it. “There were serious arguments between the various sections about whether to go, how to use electrical lines, which facilities to use and so on.”

The quarreling echoed the alarm bells ringing throughout Tokyo Electric, which has been grappling with an unprecedented set of challenges since March 11, when the severe earthquake and massive tsunami upended northeastern Japan. It is also an insight, through interviews, e-mails and blog posts, into the problems faced by the thousands of often anxious but eager Tokyo Electric Power employees working to re-establish order.

Many of them — especially the small number charged with approaching damaged reactors and exposing themselves to unusually high doses of radiation — are viewed as heroes, preventing the world’s second-worst nuclear calamity from becoming even more dire.

But unlike their bosses, who appear daily in blue work coats to apologize to the public and explain why the company has not yet succeeded in taming the reactors, the front-line workers have remained almost entirely anonymous.

In the interviews and in some e-mail and published blog items, several line workers expressed frustration at the slow pace of the recovery efforts, sometimes conflicting orders from their bosses and unavoidable hurdles like damaged roads. In many cases, the line workers want the public to know that they feel remorse for the nuclear crisis, but also that they are trying their best to fix it.

“My town is gone,” wrote a worker named Emiko Ueno, in an email obtained by The Times. “My parents are still missing. I still cannot get in the area because of the evacuation order. I still have to work in such a mental state. This is my limit.”

...In Tokyo, bosses at Tokyo Electric ordered transmission and distribution teams to prepare their gear, including tons of batteries, cables and transformers. On March 14, workers were told that the assignment was dangerous and that they could opt out. Few did. Many workers felt duty-bound to go to Fukushima, particularly those with families who were directly affected by the earthquake and tsunami.

One worker said in an interview that he left for Fukushima on March 15. His convoy had free rein on the highways, which had been cleared for utility vehicles. The local roads were slower going because parts of some streets had literally disappeared.

After heated arguments about how to proceed during the impromptu meeting at J-Village, teams on March 16 went to the Daiichi plant. Everyone wore a mask and special suit. There, they jury-rigged a connection that carried electricity from a nearby substation to the plant.

“I wanted to plug in the cable as soon as possible so the plant would have power again, but the nuclear people wanted to check the safety of various instruments first,” the worker said. “I was so excited to do something that I couldn’t stand the slow speed of the decision making.”

...At J-Village two days later, several dozen Tokyo Electric workers who had completed their tasks were killing time when their boss walked to a white board where their to-do list was written. Next to the last item, he wrote the character “ryo,” which means “good” or, in this case, “completed.”

“I’ll never forget the moment when the manager told us we were done,” said the longtime Tokyo Electric veteran present that day. “Everyone started yelling and crying.”

Many of the workers also used their cellphone cameras to take pictures of the white board and the character, which was circled in red ink. Lacking beer, the worker and his friends celebrated by sharing two bottles of Coca-Cola.

...But like several false dawns in the effort to control the plant, the work they did to extend electrical power to the facility has yet to provide the turning point it once seemed to promise. The main reactor buildings are either too badly damaged, or too laden with radioactivity, to readily reconnect plumbing and electrical systems. And fellow workers at the plant now face even more severe hazards in keeping the reactors cool by pouring water on the fuel in the reactors and spent fuel pools.

Even in the Tokyo office of the power company, the lights and heaters are shut off to save energy. Many people wear coats at their desks and go home when it gets dark. The nuclear crisis is far from over; their company faces possible bankruptcy or nationalization, and many workers fear for their paychecks.

Radiation Disaster at Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant

2011-03-18T09:19:00.007-04:00

Photo from the Institute for Science and International Security

The March 11 earthquake and tsunami was enough of a disaster in itself. One of the effects of 10 meter tsunami was to knock out the system that cooled the nuclear facility at Fukushima. The plants automatically shut down with an earthquake - but a tsunami of that size was not anticipated. Without cooling, there has been explosions and some amount of melting and release of radiation.

The presence of radiation has made it difficult to have people working at the plant to fix the problems because of the high levels of radiation around the plant. Based on the sievert level (see below) - there are limits to how much a person should be exposed to in an hour, in a day, in a year.

From the BBC ->"After Tuesday's explosions and fire, radiation dosages of up to 400 millisieverts per hour were recorded at the Fukushima Daiichi site, about 250km north-east of Tokyo. Later, a reading of 0.6 millisieverts (mSv) per hour was recorded at the plant's main gate, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) said."

Radiation has spread out app. 15 miles. The US advised an evacuation of 50 miles out. France advised it's citizens to leave the country. Tokyo is about 150 miles away. People have been concerned about the wind direction - as far as radiation spread. It has mostly gone out over the ocean so far.

Summary of conditions put together by Greenpeace as of March 18th:

Overall, with possible exception of spent fuel pool of reactor #3, the status of all facilities is very similar to yesterday, which is a bad thing. Major uncertainty relates to amount of radiation already being released to air and sea, to risk of a violent fire in the cladding of the fuel rods as the spent fuel pools are exposed for hours, as well as to the behavior of the reactor cores as water levels remain low.

Good news is that the violent release of radioactivity due to fire or explosion feared yesterday has not happened yet. Power is still not restored to the facility, but some progress has made to bring off site power and more equipment. This means more effective cooling could be established in some days. At least until that happens, the situation remains critical and unpredictable.

Reactors 1-3: water level in reactors low (about half of fuel rods exposed), no grid power, seawater injection apparently ongoing. Fuel rods have certainly damaged and are releasing radioactive substances.

Fire department has brought in 30 more trucks, at least one reported to be a “Super Bomber” able to shoot to a distance of 2 kilometers. Yesterday police trucks were unable to operate close to plant because of high radiation levels, only SDF (Self Defense Force) trucks that can be operated from inside the cabin were used.

Spent fuel pools of units 1&2: Water levels in Unit 1 are decreasing. Steam was reported from unit 2, expected to be boiling.

Spent fuel pool of unit 3: Water in #3 almost depleted, but Tepco hopes some water is left. Fuel rods have certainly damaged, releasing radioactive substances. The reactor buildings are heavily damaged, allowing releases directly to outside air.

Spent fuel pool of unit 4: Water level very unclear.

Spent fuel pools of units 5&6: Temperatures still rising, water left but level unclear.

Worst case scenarios

* The zirconium contained in the fuel rod cladding can react violently with air, if exposed for hours. This fire would release and spread very large amounts of radioactivity high up in the air. Wide disagreement on the probability of this happening.

* A large amount of molten fuel accumulates at the bottom and a nuclear reaction starts. Very low probability and can be prevented if there is any borated water in the pool.

* Reactor boils dry, molten core breaches reactor pressure vessel and comes in contact with the water in the containment, which boils rapidly causing a steam explosion.

* A major risk is an event (e.g. increased release of radioactivity from a spent fuel pool due to overheating) that raises local radiation levels to completely intolerable levels - preventing further work to restore cooling.

Tepco seemed to suggest that encasing the plant in concrete is an option if cooling efforts fail (according to Reuters live feed).
Wind

Local wind speed slowed down considerably in the morning but direction remained towards the sea. Winds towards Tokyo are still feared for Sunday.
____

A more detailed summary can be found @ Reuters

__________________

There was 3 Mile Island, there was Chernobyl, and now this. This situation has made it clear that all nuclear plants need to have their systems and possible catastrophic scenarios more thought out. There are many plants of the same type in the US - where people have warned of this and this sort of possible problem and yet - nothing has been done to fix and avert the potential problem.

Clearly more people need to accept that nuclear energy poses very extreme risks to people and the environment.

About that Radiation and Sieverts:

The sievert (symbol: Sv) is the SI derived unit of dose equivalent. It attempts to quantitatively evaluate the biological effects of ionizing radiation as opposed to the physical aspects, which are characterised by the absorbed dose, measured in gray. It is named after Rolf Sievert, a Swedish medical physicist renowned for work on radiation dosage measurement and research into the biological effects of radiation.

Frequently used SI multiples are the millisievert (1 mSv = 10−3 Sv = 0.001 Sv) and microsievert (1 μSv = 10−6 Sv = 0.000001 Sv).

An older unit of the equivalent dose is the rem. In some fields and countries, the rem and millirem (abbreviated mrem) continue to be used along with Sv and mSv, causing confusion. Here are the conversion equivalences:

1 Sv = 1000 mSv (millisieverts) = 1,000,000 μSv (microsieverts) = 100 rem = 100,000 mrem (millirem)

Single dose examples:

Eating one banana: 0.0001 mSv
Sleeping next to a human for 8 hours: 0.0005 mSv[1]
Dental radiography: 0.005 mSv[2]
Average dose to people living within 16 km of Three Mile Island accident: 0.08 mSv; maximum dose: 1 mSv[3]
Mammogram: 3 mSv[2]
Brain CT scan: 0.8–5 mSv[4]

International Commission on Radiological Protection recommended limit for volunteers averting major nuclear escalation: 500 mSv
International Commission on Radiological Protection recommended limit for volunteers rescuing lives or preventing serious injuries: 1000 mSv

Hourly dose examples:

Approximate radiation levels near Chernobyl reactor 4 and its fragments, shortly[clarification needed] after explosion are reported to be 10–300 Sv/hr

Yearly dose examples:

Living near a nuclear power station: 0.0001–0.01 mSv/year
Living near a coal power station: 0.0003 mSv/year
Cosmic radiation (from sky) at sea level: 0.24 mSv/year
Natural radiation in the human body: 0.40 mSv/year
New York-Tokyo flights for airline crew: 9 mSv/year
Total average radiation dose for Americans: 6.2 mSv/year

Current average limit for nuclear workers: 20 mSv/year

Lowest clearly carcinogenic level: 100 mSv/year

Elevated limit for workers during Fukushima emergency: 250 mSv/year

Dose limit examples:

Criterion for relocation after Chernobyl disaster: 350 mSv/lifetime

Public dose limits for exposure from uranium mining or nuclear plants are usually set at 1 mSv/yr above background.

Symptom benchmarks

Symptoms of acute radiation (within one day):

0 – 0.25 Sv (0 - 250 mSv): None

0.25 – 1 Sv (250 - 1000 mSv): Some people feel nausea and loss of appetite; bone marrow, lymph nodes, spleen damaged.

1 – 3 Sv (1000 - 3000 mSv): Mild to severe nausea, loss of appetite, infection; more severe bone marrow, lymph node, spleen damage; recovery probable, not assured.

3 – 6 Sv (3000 - 6000 mSv): Severe nausea, loss of appetite; hemorrhaging, infection, diarrhea, peeling of skin, sterility; death if untreated.

6 – 10 Sv (6000 - 10000 mSv): Above symptoms plus central nervous system impairment; death expected.
Above 10 Sv (10000 mSv): Incapacitation and death.

Global Warming & Earthquakes?

2011-03-11T13:08:00.004-05:00

I was skeptical - but it sounds like it could be so....

Japan quake ranks as 5th largest since 1900

PASADENA, Calif. (AP) — The massive earthquake that struck off the coast of Japan Friday ranks as the fifth largest in the world since 1900, scientists said.

The magnitude-8.9 "megathrust" quake is similar to what happened during the 2004 Sumatra quake that spawned a killer tsunami and the earthquake last year in Chile. In all these cases, one tectonic plate is shoved beneath another.

Such earthquakes are responsible for the most powerful shifts in the Earth's crust.

Japan is at particular risk, sitting in the "Ring of Fire" — an arc of earthquake and volcanic zones stretching around the Pacific where about 90 percent of the world's quakes occur.

"The energy radiated by this quake is nearly equal to one month's worth of energy consumption" in the United States, said U.S. Geological Survey scientist Brian Atwater.

Today’s tsunami: This is what climate change looks like

So far, today's tsunami has mainly affected Japan -- there are reports of up to 300 dead in the coastal city of Sendai -- but future tsunamis could strike the U.S. and virtually any other coastal area of the world with equal or greater force, say scientists. In a little-heeded warning issued at a 2009 conference on the subject, experts outlined a range of mechanisms by which climate change could already be causing more earthquakes, tsunamis, and volcanic activity.

"When the ice is lost, the earth's crust bounces back up again and that triggers earthquakes, which trigger submarine landslides, which cause tsunamis," Bill McGuire, professor at University College London, told Reuters.

Melting ice masses change the pressures on the underlying earth, which can lead to earthquakes and tsunamis, but that's just the beginning. Rising seas also change the balance of mass across earth's surface, putting new strain on old earthquake faults, and may have been partly to blame for the devastating 2004 tsunami that struck Southeast Asia, according to experts from the China Meteorological Administration.

Even a simple change in the weather can dramatically affect the earth beneath our feet:

David Pyle of Oxford University said small changes in the mass of the earth's surface seems to affect volcanic activity in general, not just in places where ice receded after a cold spell. Weather patterns also seem to affect volcanic activity - not just the other way round, he told the conference.

Scientists have known for some time that climate change affects not just the atmosphere and the oceans but also the Earth's crust. These effects are not widely understood by the public.

"In the political community people are almost completely unaware of any geological aspects to climate change," said McGuire.

This means a world in which we are warming the earth by pumping greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere at a pace that is unprecedented in Earth's history is also a world in which the consequences of climate change could come hard and fast, including tsunamis and earthquakes.

Parts of the earth that are now rarely affected by tsunamis, such as northern coastal regions, could be hit by "glacial earthquakes," in which glacier ice crashes to earth in massive landslides.

"Our experiments show that glacial earthquakes can generate far more powerful tsunamis than undersea earthquakes with similar magnitude," said Song.

"Several high-latitude regions, such as Chile, New Zealand and Canadian Newfoundland are particularly at risk."

It's often difficult to visualize what climate change-related disasters might look like, but the images pouring out of Japan are yet another reminder of the specter of storm surges supercharged by more powerful weather and rising seas, and even climate-change caused tsunamis. (All of America's coastal cities are vulnerable to these impacts -- including, in this remarkable animation, New York City.) Right on the heels of Brisbane, Snowpocalypse, and Australia's record dust storms, we have yet another reminder of what an Earth transformed by climate change could look like.

Roundup... "May Be Causing Animal Miscarriages and Infertility"

2011-02-25T09:52:00.004-05:00

From farmandranchfreedom.org

Letter by COL (Ret.) Don M. Huber Emeritus Professor, Purdue University to Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack->

January 16, 2011

Dear Secretary Vilsack:

A team of senior plant and animal scientists have recently brought to my attention the discovery of an electron microscopic pathogen that appears to significantly impact the health of plants, animals, and probably human beings. Based on a review of the data, it is widespread, very serious, and is in much higher concentrations in Roundup Ready (RR) soybeans and corn—suggesting a link with the RR gene or more likely the presence of Roundup. This organism appears NEW to science!

This is highly sensitive information that could result in a collapse of US soy and corn export markets and significant disruption of domestic food and feed supplies. On the other hand, this new organism may already be responsible for significant harm (see below). My colleagues and I are therefore moving our investigation forward with speed and discretion, and seek assistance from the USDA and other entities to identify the pathogen’s source, prevalence, implications, and remedies.

We are informing the USDA of our findings at this early stage, specifically due to your pending decision regarding approval of RR alfalfa. Naturally, if either the RR gene or Roundup itself is a promoter or co-factor of this pathogen, then such approval could be a calamity. Based on the current evidence, the only reasonable action at this time would be to delay deregulation at least until sufficient data has exonerated the RR system, if it does.

For the past 40 years, I have been a scientist in the professional and military agencies that evaluate and prepare for natural and manmade biological threats, including germ warfare and disease outbreaks. Based on this experience, I believe the threat we are facing from this pathogen is unique and of a high risk status. In layman’s terms, it should be treated as an emergency.

A diverse set of researchers working on this problem have contributed various pieces of the puzzle, which together presents the following disturbing scenario:

Unique Physical Properties

This previously unknown organism is only visible under an electron microscope (36,000X), with an approximate size range equal to a medium size virus. It is able to reproduce and appears to be a micro-fungal-like organism. If so, it would be the first such micro-fungus ever identified. There is strong evidence that this infectious agent promotes diseases of both plants and mammals, which is very rare.

Pathogen Location and Concentration

It is found in high concentrations in Roundup Ready soybean meal and corn, distillers meal, fermentation feed products, pig stomach contents, and pig and cattle placentas.

Linked with Outbreaks of Plant Disease

The organism is prolific in plants infected with two pervasive diseases that are driving down yields and farmer income—sudden death syndrome (SDS) in soy, and Goss’ wilt in corn. The pathogen is also found in the fungal causative agent of SDS (Fusarium solani fsp glycines).

Implicated in Animal Reproductive Failure

Laboratory tests have confirmed the presence of this organism in a wide variety of livestock that have experienced spontaneous abortions and infertility. Preliminary results from ongoing research have also been able to reproduce abortions in a clinical setting.

The pathogen may explain the escalating frequency of infertility and spontaneous abortions over the past few years in US cattle, dairy, swine, and horse operations. These include recent reports of infertility rates in dairy heifers of over 20%, and spontaneous abortions in cattle as high as 45%.

For example, 450 of 1,000 pregnant heifers fed wheatlege experienced spontaneous abortions. Over the same period, another 1,000 heifers from the same herd that were raised on hay had no abortions. High concentrations of the pathogen were confirmed on the wheatlege, which likely had been under weed management using glyphosate.

Recommendations

In summary, because of the high titer of this new animal pathogen in Roundup Ready crops, and its association with plant and animal diseases that are reaching epidemic proportions, we request USDA’s participation in a multi-agency investigation, and an immediate moratorium on the deregulation of RR crops until the causal/predisposing relationship with glyphosate and/or RR plants can be ruled out as a threat to crop and animal production and human health.

It is urgent to examine whether the side-effects of glyphosate use may have facilitated the growth of this pathogen, or allowed it to cause greater harm to weakened plant and animal hosts. It is well-documented that glyphosate promotes soil pathogens and is already implicated with the increase of more than 40 plant diseases; it dismantles plant defenses by chelating vital nutrients; and it reduces the bioavailability of nutrients in feed, which in turn can cause animal disorders. To properly evaluate these factors, we request access to the relevant USDA data.

I have studied plant pathogens for more than 50 years. We are now seeing an unprecedented trend of increasing plant and animal diseases and disorders. This pathogen may be instrumental to understanding and solving this problem. It deserves immediate attention with significant resources to avoid a general collapse of our critical agricultural infrastructure.

Sincerely,

COL (Ret.) Don M. Huber
Emeritus Professor, Purdue University
APS Coordinator, USDA National Plant Disease Recovery System (NPDRS)

"Starving eagles ‘falling out of the sky’"

2011-02-24T21:33:00.002-05:00

From theGlobeandMail:

VANCOUVER—When David Hancock saw the bald-eagle count on the Chehalis River drop from more than 7,000 to fewer than 400 over a few days in December, he knew a crisis was coming.

Earlier this week, news reports that starving eagles were “falling out of the sky” in the Comox Valley, on Vancouver Island, confirmed his fears.

Wildlife rescue centres on the Island have reported birds growing so weak from hunger that they fall out of trees, or fly so clumsily they hit things. One crashed into a roof.

Mr. Hancock said a collapse of chum salmon runs has left British Columbia’s bald-eagle population without enough food to make it through the winter, leaving them weak from hunger and forcing thousands of birds to scavenge at garbage dumps.

Reports of starving eagles have been coming in from all over the Lower Mainland but seem concentrated in the Comox Valley, he said.

“This is what I said would be happening,” said Mr. Hancock, a biologist, publisher and author of The Bald Eagle of Alaska, BC and Washington.

Mr. Hancock said about 25,000 eagles flock to salmon rivers in the Pacific Northwest in the fall, to feed on the carcasses of spawning salmon. One of the biggest gatherings is on the Chehalis River, about 100 kilometres east of Vancouver, where as many as 9,000 eagles gather in November and December, drawn by what is usually a large run of chum salmon. The big fish, which average about 6 kilograms, are among the last salmon to spawn and their carcasses are usually available on gravel bars well into the winter.

But Mr. Hancock said the chum didn’t arrive in any numbers on the Chehalis this year, reflecting a coast-wide collapse of the species, and then heavy rains washed away what carcasses there were. The birds were forced to disperse, to look for food where they could find it.

“It was absolutely incredible. Within 10 days, we had gone from 7,200 eagles to 345 … So I knew it was going to be a pretty desperate winter,” said Mr. Hancock, who has been studying eagles for 50 years.

“So where did they go? I have a count of 1,387 one day at the Vancouver dump … that was in the week following the Chehalis dispersal,” he said.

Mr. Hancock said many birds have probably left the B.C.’s southern coast, perhaps flying far into the United States, but thousands have remained, and can be seen scattered across farm fields in the Fraser Valley and on Vancouver Island.

Others have flocked to the east coast of Vancouver Island, in the area between Qualicum Beach and Campbell River, which usually has a large herring spawn in early March.

The eagles feed on the fish, which spawn in the shallows, and hunt flocks of gulls and ducks that gather to eat herring eggs.

But the eagles are weak right now, and with heavy snow falling in the area, scrounging road kill or finding other dead animals can be difficult, said Robin Campbell, of North Island Wildlife Recovery Centre, in Errington, near Parksville.

Mr. Campbell said he has nine bald eagles under care, and most of them are recovering from poisoning they got while feeding at the Campbell River landfill.

“We had 1,300 eagles sitting there at the dump the other day,” Mr. Campbell said. “People dump poisoned animals in there and the eagles feed on them … the birds are starving, but a large percentage are poisoned, too.”

Maj Birch, manager of the Mountainaire Avian Rescue Society in Courtenay said she usually handles 40 eagles a year, but in the first two months of this year alone she has taken in 20 birds.

She said most of the birds she is called out to care for are so weak from hunger that “basically you just walk over and pick them up.”

Ms. Birch said many birds are found sitting on the ground.

“One young bird was perched in a tree and it just fell out. One was flying and hit a roof. They are falling, collapsing, losing their ability to fly,” she said.

"UN sees rising risks from climate, toxic chemicals"

2011-02-23T08:28:00.000-05:00

From Straitstimes.com:

GENEVA (AP)- CLIMATE change is a major obstacle to a 2004 global treaty aimed at cutting exposure to 21 highly dangerous chemicals, says a new UN-commissioned report issued on Monday.

The 66-page report says the risks of exposure could increase if more stockpiles and landfills leak due to flooding, or other extreme weather linked to rising temperatures. Chemicals stored in stockpiles or waste dumps to be incinerated or removed later could simply wash away, become more volatile, or escape in the warmer weather through gas emissions, it says.

'Significant climate-induced changes are foreseen in relation to future releases of persistent organic pollutants into the environment ... subsequently leading to higher health risks both for human populations and the environment,' says Donald Cooper, the Geneva-based UN treaty's executive secretary, in the preface.

The report was presented to experts meeting at a UN environment meeting on Monday in Nairobi, Kenya. The treaty, known as the Stockholm Convention on Persistent Organic Pollutants, or POPs, is intended to protect the environment and people's health from what it calls very dangerous chemicals that accumulate in the environment, travel long distances by air and water, and work their way through the food chain.

These chemicals pose a known risk to humans and the environment because they persist in people's bodies - damaging reproductive health, leading to mental health problems, or causing cancer or impede growth.

Initially the treaty focussed on 12 chemicals known as the 'dirty dozen', such as the widely banned pesticides DDT and chlordane. The use of DDT in sprays to kill malaria-spreading mosquitoes has been allowed under exception in the treaty, but the UN says there are good alternatives to combat malaria and hopes to phase out DDT completely by the early 2020s.

"Scientists connect global warming to floods"

2011-02-23T08:21:00.001-05:00

AP story as seen the the heraldtimesonline.com:

Extreme rainstorms and snowfalls have grown substantially stronger, two studies suggest, with scientists for the first time finding the telltale fingerprints of man-made global warming on downpours that often cause deadly flooding.

Two studies in Wednesday’s issue of the journal Nature link heavy rains to increases in greenhouse gases more than ever before.

One group of researchers looked at the strongest rain and snow events of each year from 1951 to 1999 in the Northern Hemisphere and found that the more recent storms were 7 percent wetter. That may not sound like much, but it adds to a substantial increase, said the report from a team of researchers from Canada and Scotland.

The study didn’t single out specific storms but examined worst-of-each-year events all over the Northern Hemisphere. While the study ended in 1999, the close of the decade when scientists say climate change kicked into a higher gear, the events examined were similar to more recent disasters: deluges that triggered last year’s deadly floods in Pakistan and in Nashville, Tenn., and this winter’s paralyzing blizzards in parts of the United States.

The change in severity was most apparent in North America, but that could be because that’s where the most rain gauges are, scientists said.

Both studies should weaken the argument that climate change is a “victimless crime,” said Myles Allen of the University of Oxford. He co-authored the second study, which connected flooding and climate change in the United Kingdom.

Jonathan Overpeck, a University of Arizona climate scientist, who didn’t take part in either study, praised them as sensible and “particularly relevant given the array of extreme weather that we’ve seen this winter and stretching back over the last few years.”

Not all the extreme rain and snow events the scientists studied cause flooding. But since 1950, flooding has killed more than 2.3 million people, according to the World Health Organization’s disaster database.

The British study focused on flooding in England and Wales in the fall of 2000. The disaster cost more than $1.7 billion in insured damages and was the wettest autumn for the region in more than 230 years of record-keeping.

Researchers found that global warming more than doubled the likelihood of that flood occurring.

For years, scientists, relying on basic physics and climate knowledge, have said global warming would likely cause extremes in temperatures and rainfall. But this is the first time researchers have been able to point to a demonstrable cause-and-effect.

The scientists took information that shows an increase in extreme rain and snow events from the 1950s through the 1990s and ran dozens of computer models numerous times. They put in the effects of greenhouse gases — which come from the burning of fossil fuels — and then ran numerous models without those factors.

Only when the greenhouse gases are factored in do the models show a similar increase to what actually happened. All other natural effects alone don’t produce the jump in extreme rainfall.

In fact, the computer models underestimated the increase in extreme rain and snow. That is puzzling and could be even more troubling for our future, said Michael Oppenheimer of Princeton University, who wasn’t part of the study.

Most of the 10 outside climate experts who reviewed the papers for the Associated Press called the research sound and strong.

SPIKE IN # OF STILLBORN DOLPHINS ON COAST

2011-02-22T22:12:00.002-05:00

From Sunherald.com:

GULFPORT -- Baby dolphins, some barely three feet in length, are washing up along the Mississippi and Alabama shorelines at about 10 times the normal number for the first two months of the year, researchers are finding.

Seventeen young dolphins, either aborted before they reached maturity or dead soon after birth, have been collected on the coasts of the states in the past two weeks, both on the barrier islands and mainland beaches.

This is the first birthing season for dolphins since the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico; however, Moby Solangi, director of the Institute for Marine Mammal Studies in Gulfport, said it’s too early to tell why they died.

“For some reason, they’ve started aborting or they were dead before they were born,” Solangi said. “The average is one or two a month. This year we have 17 and February isn’t even over yet.”

It’s the most that Solangi has seen in the two states and he’s been watching the Gulf for 30 years, recording dolphin data in Mississippi for 20. The institute has collected 13 infant dolphins in the last two weeks and three more on Monday along the Gulfport and Horn Island beaches.

Bill Walker, head of the Mississippi Department of Marine Resources said his teams will work with the institute to collect the bodies of infant dolphins on Horn Island.

“Something is amiss,” Walker said Monday. “It could be oil-related. Who knows? Some of these mothers were probably exposed to oil. Whether it rendered them unable to carry their calves, we just don’t know.”

Early in the season
When a dolphin is born, its mother has the job of making sure it gets to the surface for its first breath of air.

If the baby is dead, the mother still tries. Over and over, sometimes for hours. She stays with the baby, not realizing fully that it is dead. She will hit it with her tail, grasp it, pull it and nudge it gently, hoping to get it to breathe.

“The more desperate the animal gets when the calf is not breathing, the more intense her behavior becomes,” Solangi said. “I’ve watched it.”

She goes into a frenzy trying to get the baby to respond and then stays with her dead infant, sometimes for hours before she lets it go.

That’s why some of the dead dolphin infants identified in the last two weeks have trauma to their bodies, he said.
“They didn’t die by being hit,” Solangi said.

The institute performed necropsies, animal autopsies, on two of them Monday and have data collected from the other bodies in the past two weeks.

"Sterility in frogs caused by environmental pharmaceutical progestogens"

2011-02-19T10:26:00.002-05:00

From Eurakalert.org:

Frogs appear to be very sensitive to progestogens, a kind of pharmaceutical that is released into the environment. Female tadpoles that swim in water containing a specific progestogen, levonorgestrel, are subject to abnormal ovarian and oviduct development, resulting in adult sterility. This is shown by a new study conducted at Uppsala University and published today in the scientific journal Aquatic Toxicology.

Many of the medicines that people consume are released into the environment via sewage systems. Progestogens are hormone preparations used in contraceptives, cancer treatment and hormone replacement therapy for menopausal discomfort. Different kinds of progestogens have been identified in waterways in a number of countries. Associate professor Cecilia Berg and doctoral student Moa Kvarnryd at the Department of Environmental Toxicology at Uppsala University have shown that levonorgestrel can cause sterility in female frogs at concentrations not much higher than those measured in the environment. The research group is part of MistraPharma, one of the world's largest research networks focusing on pharmaceuticals and the environment.

"The findings represent important initial evidence that an environmental progestogen can adversely affect frogs," says Cecilia Berg.

Female tadpoles that swam in water containing low concentrations of levonorgestrel exhibited a greater proportion of immature ovarian egg cells and lacked oviducts, entailing sterility. The African clawed frog (Xenopus tropicalis) served as the model organism. It is during the tadpole stage that development of frog reproductive organs begins. The process is governed by the hormone system. The findings underscore the importance of studying how pharmaceuticals affect animals in our environment, which is one objective of MistraPharma.

"Our findings show that pharmaceuticals other than oestrogen can cause permanent damage to aquatic animals exposed during early life stages," says Cecilia Berg.

Indianapolis International Airport wants a Solar Farm

2011-02-19T10:18:00.002-05:00

From the IndyStar.com:

"Landing a power deal"

Indy airport's planned solar farm would be the largest in the state

The warm rays of the sun may be the next big thing to make money for Indianapolis International Airport.

The airport is looking for a developer to build what would be the largest solar energy farm in the state on 30 acres of airport-owned land near the end of a runway.

It would generate 10 megawatts of electricity an hour -- enough to power up to 6,000 homes -- and that electricity would be sold to Indianapolis Power & Light. The airport would make money by leasing the property to a company that would build and operate the array of thousands of solar panels.

Other airports, including Denver and Fresno, Calif., have put money-making solar farms near runways on property not suitable for other types of developments.

It was not known how much revenue the solar farm would generate for the airport. The move is part of a larger plan approved by the airport Friday to generate more than $190 million over the next 30 years from hundreds of acres of its undeveloped land.

Industry experts estimate that a developer would have to spend $30 million to build the solar farm and that the equipment could generate electricity for at least 30 years.

"Solar power isn't just a hippie dream anymore," said Travis Murphy, who worked in the state's renewable energy agency and now sells solar systems for Johnson Melloh Solutions. "Solar energy is not just something that environmentalists will do anymore, but it has become an opportunity for businesses and homes."

The airport's solar farm would send a highly visible message of public support for renewable energy, said Mark Hedegard, the airport's senior business development director.

Thousands of solar panels -- tinted black so the glare doesn't blind airplane pilots -- would be planted next to the airport's front door. Millions of airplane passengers going to the Col. H. Weir Cook terminal building each year and millions more motorists on I-70 would pass the solar farm.

The site is tucked next to a long, circular ramp that is used by vehicles getting off the interstate and heading onto the road to the new terminal.

By far, it would be the biggest single solar power site in the state, according to Murphy. He said a survey last year conservatively estimated about 750 kilowatts of solar power had been built in Indiana.

An additional 1.76 megawatt array of 5,700 solar panels is being built on the roof of the Emmett J. Bean Federal Center, the military's finance facility in Lawrence.

Andrew Crocox, project manger for electric contractor Ermco, said the Bean array should be making electricity for the IPL grid by April.

Several industry insiders said federal tax credits and accelerated depreciation on the equipment have sparked a national rush to invest in solar power, along with methane gas, wind turbines and other renewable sources of energy...

"Helping Veterans Trade Their Swords for Plows"

2011-02-06T10:48:00.003-05:00

From the New York Times:

VALLEY CENTER, Calif. — On an organic farm here in avocado country, a group of young Marines, veterans and Army reservists listened intently to an old hand from the front lines.

“Think of it in military terms,” he told the young recruits, some just back from Iraq or Afghanistan. “It’s a matter of survival, an uphill battle. You have to think everything is against you and hope to stay alive.”

The battle in question was not the typical ground assault, but organic farming — how to identify beneficial insects, for instance, or to prevent stray frogs from clogging an irrigation system. It was Day 2 of a novel boot camp for veterans and active-duty military personnel, including Marines from nearby Camp Pendleton, who might be interested in new careers as farmers.

“In the military, grunts are the guys who get dirty, do the work and are generally underappreciated,” said Colin Archipley, a decorated Marine Corps infantry sergeant turned organic farmer, who developed the program with his wife, Karen, after his three tours in Iraq. “I think farmers are the same.”

At their farm, called Archi’s Acres, the sound of crickets and croaking frogs communes with the drone of choppers. The syllabus, approved by Camp Pendleton’s transition assistance program, includes hands-on planting and irrigating, lectures about “high-value niche markets” and production of a business plan that is assessed by food professionals and business professors.

Along with Combat Boots to Cowboy Boots, a new program for veterans at the University of Nebraska’s College of Technical Agriculture, and farming fellowships for wounded soldiers, the six-week course offered here is part of a nascent “veteran-centric” farming movement. Its goal is to bring the energy of young soldiers re-entering civilian life to the aging farm population of rural America. Half of all farmers are likely to retire in the next decade, according to the Agriculture Department.

“The military is not for the faint of heart, and farming isn’t either,” said Michael O’Gorman, an organic farmer who founded the nonprofit Farmer-Veteran Coalition, which supports sustainable-agriculture training. “There are eight times as many farmers over age 65 as under. There is a tremendous need for young farmers, and a big wave of young people inspired to go into the service who are coming home.”

About 45 percent of the military comes from rural communities, compared with one-sixth of the total population, according to the Carsey Institute at the University of New Hampshire. In 2009, the Agriculture Department began offering low-interest loans in its campaign to add 100,000 farmers to the nation’s ranks each year...

Farming offers veterans a chance to decompress, Mr. Archipley said, but, more important, provides a sense of purpose. “It allows them to be physically active, be part of a unit,” he said. “It gives them a mission statement — a responsibility to the consumer eating their food.”

...“One thing I’ve noticed about agriculture is that you become a creator rather than a destroyer,” he said amid ornamental eucalyptus shrubs.

...Matthew McCue, 29, formerly Sergeant McCue, runs Shooting Star CSA outside San Francisco with his partner, Lily Schneider, delivering boxes of organic produce directly to consumers.

He recalled how orchard farmers in Iraq pridefully shared their pomegranates, tomatoes and melons.

“You learn how to face death,” he said of his service in Iraq. But in farming, he learned, “There was life all around.”

African Land Grabs (Dystopia)

2011-01-31T22:43:00.008-05:00

From the Guardian:

Land grabs have grabbed global attention. It's on the agenda at the World Economic Forum this week, and as the trend for large land acquisitions accelerates, it has moved from being primarily a story about Middle Eastern petrodollars pouring into Africa, to a much more widely spread phenomenon affecting many parts of south-east Asia, such as the Phillipines, as well as Latin America.

In Cambodia, 15% of land has been signed over to private companies since 2005, a third of which are foreign. A new set of research studies from the International Land Coalition find the competition for land increasingly global and unequal.

Many of the deals are shrouded in secrecy, so the scale of what is happening is not clear, nor is it clear who is benefiting from these deals; a number of new reports try to tease these issues out, such as the International Institute for Environment and Development's analysis of legal contract, which is published on Monday.

It's not hard to see why the subject generates so much attention. It's partly the secrecy element, partly the fear: who is buying up the future? Large-scale land acquisition prompts all too vividly visions of a dystopian future in which millions of the hungry are excluded from the land of their forefathers by barbed wire fences and security guards as food is exported to feed the rich world.

This is no longer just a fear for the future. The US environmentalist Lester Brown points out in his new book, World on the Edge, that in 2009 Saudi Arabia received its first shipment of rice produced on land it had acquired in Ethiopia while at the same time the World Food Programme was feeding 5 million Ethiopians. Similarly in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, China has acquired 7 million hectares for palm oil production and yet millions of people in the DRC are dependent on international aid for food.

Brown warns that "land grabbing is an integral part of the global power struggle for food security". He argues that geopolitics for several centuries have been dominated by the issue of access to markets, but increasingly in the future this will be replaced by the overriding importance of access to supplies. Food importing countries are anxiously securing their food supplies, all too aware that exporting countries can impose export bans to meet their needs. In 2007 both Russia and Argentina, major grain exporters, put in place export bans and it sent waves of panic around the world, which have probably played a big part in fuelling land acquisition deals.

Much of the attention so far has focused on Africa. Most of the biggest deals have been in countries such as Ethiopia, Mali and Sudan. The imminently independent south Sudan has seen investors queuing up to exploit one of the areas of greatest potential for as yet under developed agricultural land. In comparison with many other areas of the world, land in Africa is very cheap; in Ethiopia, land can be leased for as little as $1 an acre.

China is acquiring land at the fastest rate, but South Korea is not far behind. It has now set up an agency specifically dedicated to making direct agreements with farmers and landowners to secure supplies.

Many African governments are defensive about the deals. Ethiopian President Meles Zenawi is expected to talk on the subject in Davos this week; in the past he has argued that investment in African agriculture is crucial to improve the continent's low agricultural productivity. He has argued that foreign investors bring in mechanisation and expertise which is vital for development. Many campaigners would agree that investment is badly needed, but insist that the future for African agriculture is not mechanised monocultures for export but supporting sustainable smallholder agriculture. They argue that the latter is far more likely to ensure food security for the poorest Africans.

Some land deals claim to try to meet the needs of smallholders and bring investment at the same time. When I visited Mali recently, a number of local campaigners argued that the Millennium Challenge Account project had invested in the irrigation needed and was training local farmers.

But this small example was outweighed by the enormous anxiety in Mali about the foreign investors who were leasing hundreds of thousands of hectares in a country where the population is rapidly expanding and the land suitable for agriculture is shrinking as the desert expands. Lester Brown rightly points out that the real issue here is not so much land deals as water deals. What is driving the land grabs is the scarcity of water. Saudi Arabia used to produce a lot of wheat, but it is the decline of its aquifers that is forcing it to look abroad to secure its future food.

Leasing and buying land are always ultimately about access to water, and in many parts of Africa this could be a major source of future conflict. Sudan and Ethiopia both feed water into the Nile; intensifying production in these areas could divert water. The Libyan lease of 100,000 hectares in Mali has involved the construction of a massive dam, diverting water from the Niger, a river on which several countries, including Niger and Nigeria, depend....

This phenomenon reflects all too starkly the powerlessness of smallholder farmers across the world. They lack the formal land rights or the access to political power in their countries which would enable them to ensure these deals worked in their interests. Instead, the future of their children is being sold over their heads.

"China speeds ahead of the rest" (on pollution)

2011-01-31T21:39:00.002-05:00

From the Guardian.uk:

World carbon dioxide emissions are one way of measuring a country's economic growth too.

And the latest figures - published by the respected Energy Information Administration - show CO2 emissions from energy consumption - the vast majority of Carbon Dioxide produced.

A reduction in global greenhouse gas emissions is not only the goal of environmentalists but also of pretty much every government in the world. Currently 192 countries have adopted the Kyoto protocol with the aim of collectively reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 5% of the 1990 levels by 2012.

The map, above (you can get it as a PDF file here) is produced by Guardian graphic artists Mark McCormick and Paul Scruton. It shows a world where established economies have large - but declining - carbon emissions. While the new economic giants are growing rapidly. This newly-released data is from 2009 - the latest available.

On pure emissions alone, the key points are:

• China emits more CO2 than the US and Canada put together - up by 171% since the year 2000
• The US has had declining CO2 for two years running
• The UK is down one place to tenth on the list, 8% on the year. The country is now behind Iran, South Korea, Japan and Germany
• India is now the world's third biggest emitter of CO2 - pushing Russia into fourth place
• The biggest decrease from 2008-2009 is Ukraine - down 28%. The biggest increase is Chile - up 74%

But that is only one way to look at the data - and it doesn't take account of how many people live in each country. If you look at per capita emissions, a different picture emerges where:

• Some of the world's smallest countries and islands emit the most per person - the highest being Gibraltar with 152 tonnes per person
• The US is still number one in terms of per capita emissions among the big economies - with 18 tonnes emitted per person
• China, by contrast, emits under six tonnes per person, India only 1.38
• For comparison, the whole world emits 4.49 tonnes per person

More graphs, etc. at link

"EPA knowingly approved bee-killing pesticide"

2011-01-31T21:23:00.001-05:00

From Natural News.com:

A Colorado beekeeper recently obtained a leaked document revealing that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) knows a popular crop pesticide is killing off honey bees, but has allowed its continued approval anyway. Despite opposition from its own scientists, EPA officials first gave the a-okay to Bayer CropScience's toxic pesticide clothianidin in 1993 based on the company's own flawed safety studies. But now it has been revealed that the EPA knew all along about the dangers of clothianidin and decided to just ignore them.

By now, most people know that honeybees are dying off at an incredibly disturbing rate. Colony collapse disorder (CCD), a condition where bees stray from the hive and never find their way back, is nixing millions of nature's pollinators every year. Previous studies have pinpointed various environmental toxins as the primary culprits, including toxic pesticides like clothianidin (http://www.naturalnews.com/028429_c...).

And the leaked document, which was written by the EPA's Office of Chemical Safety and Pollution Prevention, explains clearly that "[c]lothianidin's major risk concern is to nontarget insects (honey bees)" and that "[a]cute toxicity studies to honey bees show that clothianidin is highly toxic on both a contact and an oral basis." The letter was in response to a request from Bayer to have clothianidin approval expanded for use on cotton and mustard in addition to its other approved uses.

So if clothianidin poses a significant threat against honey bees, and the EPA has known about this all along, why was it ever approved in the first place? And if Bayer's original safety studies have been shown to be contradictory to actual science, why has the EPA failed to go after Bayer for falsifying safety data? Apparently those who make the final decisions at the EPA have no actual interest in the truth and would rather cater to corporate interests at the expense of public health.

Several European nations have outlawed the use of clothianidin, including Germany, Francy, Italy and Slovenia. U.S. growers of conventional crops, however, continue to use the dangerous chemical thanks to corrupt EPA officials. And when all the honey bees die and there are no pollinators left to grow food, these same EPA officials will be responsible for the mass murder of millions of people.

Learn more: http://www.naturalnews.com/030921_EPA_pesticides.html#ixzz1Cfc05wO5

Major Tipping Points & Consequences for Insurance

2011-01-25T10:22:00.003-05:00

From Worldwildlife.org

from page 25

from page 32

Topsy-Turvy Weather...

2011-01-25T10:01:00.002-05:00

From the New York Times:

Judging by the weather, the world seems to have flipped upside down.

For two winters running, an Arctic chill has descended on Europe, burying that continent in snow and ice. Last year in the United States, historic blizzards afflicted the mid-Atlantic region. This winter the Deep South has endured unusual snowstorms and severe cold, and a frigid Northeast is bracing for what could shape into another major snowstorm this week.

Yet while people in Atlanta learn to shovel snow, the weather 2,000 miles to the north has been freakishly warm the past two winters. Throughout northeastern Canada and Greenland, temperatures in December ran as much as 15 to 20 degrees Fahrenheit above normal. Bays and lakes have been slow to freeze; ice fishing, hunting and trade routes have been disrupted.

Iqaluit, the capital of the remote Canadian territory of Nunavut, had to cancel its New Year’s snowmobile parade. David Ell, the deputy mayor, said that people in the region had been looking with envy at snowbound American and European cities. “People are saying, ‘That’s where all our snow is going!’ ” he said.

The immediate cause of the topsy-turvy weather is clear enough. A pattern of atmospheric circulation that tends to keep frigid air penned in the Arctic has weakened during the last two winters, allowing big tongues of cold air to descend far to the south, while masses of warmer air have moved north.

The deeper issue is whether this pattern is linked to the rapid changes that global warming is causing in the Arctic, particularly the drastic loss of sea ice. At least two prominent climate scientists have offered theories suggesting that it is. But others are doubtful, saying the recent events are unexceptional, or that more evidence over a longer period would be needed to establish a link.

Since satellites began tracking it in 1979, the ice on the Arctic Ocean’s surface in the bellwether month of September has declined by more than 30 percent. It is the most striking change in the terrain of the planet in recent decades, and a major question is whether it is starting to have an effect on broad weather patterns.

Ice reflects sunlight, and scientists say the loss of ice is causing the Arctic Ocean to absorb more heat in the summer. A handful of scientists point to that extra heat as a possible culprit in the recent harsh winters in Europe and the United States.

Their theories involve a fast-moving river of air called the jet stream that circles the Northern Hemisphere. Many winters, a strong pressure difference between the polar region and the middle latitudes channels the jet stream into a tight circle, or vortex, around the North Pole, effectively containing the frigid air at the top of the world.

“It’s like a fence,” said Michelle L’Heureux, a researcher in Camp Springs, Md., with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

When that pressure difference diminishes, however, the jet stream weakens and meanders southward, bringing warm air into the Arctic and cold air into the midlatitudes — exactly what has happened the last couple of winters. The effect is sometimes compared to leaving a refrigerator door open, with cold air flooding the kitchen even as warm air enters the refrigerator...

James E. Overland, a climate scientist with NOAA in Seattle, has proposed that the extra warmth in the Arctic Ocean could be heating the atmosphere enough to make it less dense, causing the air pressure over the Arctic to be closer to that of the middle latitudes. “The added heat works against having a strong polar vortex,” he said.

Judah Cohen, director of seasonal forecasting at a company called Atmospheric and Environmental Research in Lexington, Mass., has spotted what he believes is a link between increasing snow in Siberia and the weakening of the polar vortex. In his theory, the extra snow is creating a dense, cold air mass over northern Asia in the late autumn, setting off a complex chain of cause and effect that ultimately perturbs the vortex.

Dr. Cohen said in an interview that the rising Siberian snow might, in turn, be linked to the decline of Arctic sea ice, with the open water providing extra moisture to the atmosphere — much as the Great Lakes produce heavy snows in cities like Buffalo and Syracuse.... But Dr. Cohen acknowledges, as does Dr. Overland, that some of his ideas are tentative and need further research.

In interviews, several scientists recalled that in the decade ending in the mid-1990s, the polar vortex seemed to be strengthening, not weakening, producing mild winters in the eastern United States and western Europe.

At the time, some climate scientists wrote papers attributing that change to global warming. Newspapers, including this one, printed laments for winter lost. But soon after, the apparent trend went away, an experience that has made many researchers more cautious.

John M. Wallace, an atmospheric scientist at the University of Washington, wrote some of the earlier papers. This time around, he said, it will take a lot of evidence to convince him that a few harsh winters in London or Washington have anything to do with global warming.

“Just when you publish something and it looks like you’re seeing a connection,” Dr. Wallace said, “nature has a way of humbling us.”

_______________________

I could see how both warmer winters and colder winters could both be attributed to global warming - esp. when you know how much warmer it in the north when it is colder Europe and North America. It's silly to assume that the weather is going to be only warmer all over the place. Esp. when you have things like ocean currents changing because of the melting of fresh water, etc.

"Driving Straight Into Catastrophe"

2011-01-25T09:58:00.002-05:00

From IPSnews:

PARIS, Jan 24, 2011 (IPS) - Despite repeated warnings by environmental and climate experts that reduction of fossil fuel consumption and greenhouse gas emissions is fundamental to forestalling global warming, disaster appears imminent. According to the latest statistics, unprecedented climate change has Earth hurtling down a path of catastrophic proportions.

The Paris-based International Energy Agency (IEA) estimates that the global consumption of primary energy in 2010 reached some 500 exajoules (EJ), a number just under the worst-case scenario formulated ten years ago by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The IPCC’s Special Report on Emissions Scenarios, published in 2000, calculated the worst-case scenario as 525 EJ consumed in one calendar year.

The IEA found that coal was one of the largest sources of energy consumed in 2010, comprising approximately 27 percent of the total energy consumption. Coal, one of the cheapest sources of energy, is considered the filthiest of all, as far as greenhouse gases emissions (GHGE) are concerned.

Correspondingly, the global GHGE, measured as equivalent to carbon dioxide, reached at least 32 billion tonnes last year, only one step below the most pessimistic scenario imagined by the IPCC in 2000: 33 billion tonnes of CO2.

The results for 2010 were conditioned by the present global economic crisis – meaning that under normal economic circumstances, the numbers would have been higher. In other words, total consumption of energy in 2010 would have been worse than the most pessimistic scenario the IPCC formulated ten years ago had the global economy been in better shape.

These findings have prompted leading environmental experts to warn that humankind is racing towards destruction. (more here)

Some of the Worst Countries for Women

2011-01-25T09:55:00.001-05:00

PAPUA NEW GUINEA: Girls get just five years of formal education before going to work. They are four times more likely than men to contract HIV.

HAITI: Nearly 50 percent of women in the capital's shantytown, Cité Soleil, have beensexually assaulted - not surprising when you consider that rape was criminalized only three years ago.

NEPAL: The female literacy rate is at 35 percent; if girls aren't married off in their teens, there's a good chance they'll be sold by their families to sex traffickers.

SIERRA LEONE: This is the worst place to be a woman, according to the Human Development Report. Only 24 percent of women are literate, and one in eight die during pregnancy or childbirth. Life expectancy is 43.

AFGHANISTAN: A woman dies during childbirth every half-hour, the highest maternal mortality rate in the world. Domestic violence is endemic; 87 percent of Afghan women have been assaulted by a family member.

From: Marie Claire

Hot Glue Jellyfish (or something)

2011-01-21T10:47:00.001-05:00

created by Christy Brinkman - on display at Halcyon Contemporary Art in Terre Haute, Indiana

"Sick Gulf Residents Beg Officials for Help"

2011-01-15T23:35:00.002-05:00

By Dahr Jamail

NEW ORLEANS, Louisiana, Jan 14, 2011 (IPS) - In an emotionally charged meeting this week sponsored by the National Commission on the BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill, fishermen, Gulf residents and community leaders vented their increasingly grave concerns about the widespread health issues brought on by the three-month-long disaster.

"Today I'm talking to you about my life," Cherri Foytlin told the two commissioners present at the Jan. 12 meeting. "My ethylbenzene levels are 2.5 times the 95th percentile, and there's a very good chance now that I won't get to see my grandbabies…What I'm asking you to do now, if possible, is to amend [your report]. Because we have got to get some health care."

Ethylbenzene is a form of benzene present in the body when it begins to break down. It is also present in BP's crude oil.

"I have seen small children with lesions all over their bodies," Foytlin, co-founder of Gulf Change, a community organisation based in Grand Isle, Louisiana, continued.

"We are very, very ill. And dead is dead. So it really doesn't matter if the media comes back… or the president hears us, or… if the oil workers and the fishermen and the crabbers get to feed their babies and maybe have a good Christmas next year… Dead is dead…I know your job is probably already done, but I'd like to hire you if you don't mind. And God knows I can't pay you. But I need your heart. And I need your voice."

The commission, appointed by President Barack Obama, released its final report this week after a six-month investigation into the nation's worst-ever oil disaster.

The report recommended a massive overhaul of the oil industry's failed safety practices in the Gulf, as well as the creation of a new independent agency to monitor offshore drilling activity.

However, most of the 250 people at the meeting here focused on the health crisis that has exploded in the wake of the April 2010 disaster, leaving former BP clean-up workers and Gulf residents alike suffering from ailments they attribute to chemicals in BP's oil and the toxic dispersants used to sink it.

Dr. Rodney Soto, a medical doctor in Santa Rosa Beach, Florida, has been testing and treating patients with high levels of oil-related chemicals in their bloodstream.

These are commonly referred to as volatile organic compounds (VOCs). Anthropogenic VOCs from BP's oil disaster are toxic and have negative chronic health effects.

Dr. Soto is finding disconcertingly consistent and high levels of toxic chemicals in every one of the patients he is testing.

"I'm regularly finding between five and seven VOCs in my patients," Dr. Soto told IPS. "These patients include people not directly involved in the oil clean-up, as well as residents that do not live right on the coast. These are clearly related to the oil disaster."

Nevertheless, U.S. government agencies like the Environmental Protection Agency, Food and Drug Administration, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, along with President Obama himself, have declared the Gulf of Mexico, its waters, beaches, and seafood, safe and open to the public.

Gulf residents at the meeting on Wednesday made sure the two commissioners were aware of the health crisis they are facing...

"Toxics Found in Pregnant U.S. Women in UCSF Study"

2011-01-15T23:29:00.002-05:00

Multiple chemicals, including some banned since the 1970s and others used in items such as nonstick cookware, furniture, processed foods and beauty products, were found in the blood and urine of pregnant U.S. women, according to a UCSF study being released today.

Of the 163 chemicals studied, 43 of them were found in virtually all 268 pregnant women in the study. They included polychlorinated biphenyls or PCBs, a prohibited chemical linked to cancer and other health problems; organochlorine pesticides; polybrominated diphenyl ethers, banned compounds used as flame retardants; and phthalates, which are shown to cause hormone disruption.

Some of these chemicals were banned before many of the women were even born.

The presence of the chemicals in the women, who ranged in age from 15 to 44, shows the ability of these substances to endure in the environment and in human bodies as well, said lead author Tracey Woodruff, director of the UCSF Program on Reproductive Health and the Environment...

Bisphenol A, a chemical used in cans and other food packaging that has been linked to health problems including brain development, was found in 96 percent of the women. A broken-down form of DDT, a pesticide banned in the United States in 1972, was found in virtually all the women.

Although some flame retardants were banned from clothing in the 1970s, Blum said, similar retardants were used in other consumer goods such as the foam in furniture, the plastic around television sets and even baby products. She blamed much of the ubiquitousness of the chemicals on California's strict flammability laws, which are often modeled by other states.

Dr. Sarah Janssen, senior scientist at the Natural Resources Defense Council in San Francisco, said the levels of exposure shown in the study were low, but she was concerned about fetal harm that could be caused by the mother's exposure to multiple chemicals acting together.

"The study's results show that unborn babies are exposed to a soup of chemicals - and furthermore, because the women in the study were tested for exposure to only a fraction of chemicals on the market - the study also suggests that pregnant women are likely carrying and passing onto their fetuses many more chemicals than have been reported here," she said.
Reducing exposure

While it is impossible to completely avoid exposure, here are some suggestions from health experts on reducing exposure to some harmful chemicals:

Eating: Eat a well-balanced diet, wash hands often and do not smoke. This will help maintain overall health and reduce some of the effects of harmful chemicals.

Microwaving: Avoid microwaving food in plastic. Use ceramic or glass instead.

Cleaning: Keep a clean home. Toxic chemicals are present in household dust and dirt.

Shopping: Choose products wisely - everything from paints, cleaning supplies to cookware and beauty products. Select safer, nontoxic products.

Source: UCSF Program on Reproductive Health and the Environment

Floods in Australia

2011-01-15T22:53:00.004-05:00

A Photo Survey
Some examples:
Toowoomba

Toowoomba

__________________________A masive plume of muddy water flows from the Brisbane River mouth into Moreton Bay. Photo: Bruce Long

From Germaine Greer:
Australian floods: Why were we so surprised?
...So, yeah, as Australians say, the problem is rain. The ground is swollen with months of it. The new downpours have nowhere to go but sideways, across the vast floodplains of this ancient continent. We all learned the poem at school, about how ours is "a sunburnt country . . . of droughts and flooding rains". Groggy TV presenters who have been on extended shifts, talking floods for endless hours, will repeat the mantra, so hard is it wired into the heads of Australian kids. And yet we still don't get it. After 10 years of drought, we are having the inevitable flooding rains. The pattern is repeated regularly and yet Australians are still taken by surprise.

The meteorologists will tell you that the current deluge is a product of La Niña. At fairly regular intervals, atmospheric pressure on the western side of the Pacific falls; the trade winds blow from the cooler east side towards the trough, pushing warm surface water westwards towards the bordering land masses. As the water-laden air is driven over the land it cools and drops its load. In June last year the bureau of meteorology issued a warning that La Niña was about "to dump buckets" on Australia. In 1989-90 La Niña brought flooding to New South Wales and Victoria, in 1998 to New South Wales and Queensland. Dr Andrew Watkins, manager of the bureau's climate prediction services, told the assembled media: "Computer model forecasts show a significant likelihood of a La Niña in 2010." In Brisbane the benchmark was the flood of 1974; most Queenslanders are unaware that the worst flood in Brisbane's history happened in 1893. Six months ago the meteorologists thought it was worthwhile to warn people to "get ready for a wet, late winter and a soaked spring and summer". So what did the people do? Nothing. They said, "She'll be right, mate". She wasn't....

One of the penalties of living on the east coast, as most Australians do, is that all the rain that falls on the mountains known as the Dividing Range heads your way. Up here, at the top of the watershed, I have only to fear a landslide, which will happen if slopes now bulging with water actually burst. At sea level, it's anybody's guess. Meteorologists and hydrologists try to predict peak levels and peak times, and have to revise their estimates up and down like yo-yos.

The world is aware of what has been happening in Australia because so much of Queensland's capital city, Brisbane, the "most livable city in Australia", is now submerged in dirty brown water. Smaller towns in Australia have been flooded for months; some have been flooded five times since the beginning of December. What the rest of the world must be asking is why Australians don't take steps to minimise the destruction? In the southern US you could take your Chevy to the levee; Australians rarely build them. An eight-metre levee has kept the town of Grafton dry, though the Clarence river is in massive spate, but Yamba, further downstream has no levee and is under water. Goondiwindi has an 11-metre levee to protect it from the Macintyre river, but hydrologists have predicted a peak of 10.85 metres – far too close for comfort. Evacuations have begun....

In the case of Toowoomba, Grantham and Murphy's creek, there was nothing to be done. The Lockyer valley suffered a flash flood, in which a sudden deluge generated an eight-metre wave of water that ripped through the towns, drowning people in their cars, popping houses off their stumps, and whirling them down stream. The resulting TV footage has been seen by Australians hundreds of times. It is the stuff of nightmares, with cars and buses bouncing end over end down streets full of people clutching at anything they can find to avoid being swept away. The army is now involved in searching for the bodies of the 61 people still missing; there is no more talk of rescue. The total dead to date is 26....

The colour of the water reveals a terrible truth. What is being washed downstream is topsoil. The water moves so rapidly because so much of the land has been cleared....When the settlers first arrived on the coast of northern New South Wales and southern Queensland, the rivers were navigable. As the "scrubs" (the settlers' way of referring to rainforest) were ripped out, the seasonal rains carried the topsoil into the rivers, which silted up and then began to flood.

The fresh water now entering the seas off Australia is expected to drift northwards to where the Great Barrier Reef is already struggling with rising sea temperatures. In ecological terms, worse, perhaps very much worse, is on the way. Australia owes it to the rest of the world to get a handle on its regular floods. Or she won't be right, mate.

The creatures of the rainforest are used to rain. After gorging on the treefrogs that are mating in a rainpool by the house, a night tiger snake has come up to sleep the day away on my verandah. A rufous fly-catcher is hunting for his breakfast under the verandah roof because there are no insects out in the rain. The regent bowerbird is enjoying his morning shower 50 metres up in the top of the quandong, meticulously grooming each gleaming feather.

Anger at the Government

2011-01-14T14:10:00.003-05:00

I think it makes sense to be angry that the government is putting large corporations before the rights of people.

I think it makes sense to be angry that the government is spending too much on the military, is giving away too much to banks, is too influenced by those with money.

I don't think it makes sense for the majority of people to be angry that the government provides reasonable services like education, health, and welfare for those who cannot take care of themselves.

This government is supposed to be a government that represents the people - but when many of those people are persuaded by propaganda that supports the interests of the large corporations and the military, then what we have is a government that represents the large corporations and the military.

So if you want to be angry - be angry about that.

Mental Illness and Culture and Consequences

2011-01-14T13:26:00.005-05:00

Another side of this (the attempted assassination of Gabrielle Giffords - 6 killed, 13 wounded), is that the perpetrator was mentally ill. Some people would like to assume that that means it was a random act - as if the young man might have killed anyone. The fact is that he had singled out Gabrielle Giffords in particular. He shot her in the head (but she lived) and then he shot off many rounds with his automatic ammo cartridge. So there was some political connection. Also - she was concerned about the hate and threats coming from the Tea Party group - so I think that it is more than likely that perpetrator picked up on that. He also ranted about the Constitution, currency and other things that Tea Party people have also ranted about.

But beyond that - mental illness can also be part of a culture. For one thing, the way a culture is, can exacerbate stress. How difficult it can be to fit in, to start out in life. Expectations. Bullying has often show up to be a problem with the perpetrators of massacres by young people, though it hasn't been mentioned here that I know of. Jared Loughner may well have been Schizophrenic, but much of the Tea Party stuff exudes paranoia - so he may have naturally picked up on that. Being mentally ill does not make someone violent - but if someone listened to enough stuff that encouraged violence, as Tea Party people have been doing, it's not so hard to see that having an effect.

And the other thing is that it's the right-wing (and esp. Tea Partiers) that is against providing mental health services, just as they are against making health care accessible. It's all part of the same concept that those on the left support - the government providing services for those who need them. The delusion on the right is that people should take care of themselves, as if everyone is capable of that. So in their world, apparently even Schizophrenic people would all hold jobs. Really - I don't know what they expect. That their families will care for them? That churches will? They certainly don't want the government to - it's not in the constitution. Or maybe it is - but if it was - they would deny it. The only thing they want to government to do is provide the military and perhaps couple of other things. Maybe states could provide roads (but even those have been sold off).

My fear is that most of the people of the Right wing/Tea Party are mentally ill (and are at least delusional and somewhat paranoid) - and that could amount to third?half? of the country. So many people persuaded by nonsense - persuaded against what is in the interests of the vast majority of people in this country. There are too many people who will not accept reality and there are too many people who are all too happy to stir up anger at the government - as if we would be better off being run by a corporation (for the profit of those in power).

On Culture and Consequences

2011-01-14T11:49:00.009-05:00

Concerning reactions in the wake of the attempted assassination of Gabrielle Giffords (6 killed, 13 wounded)...

Gabrielle Giffords understood that words have consequences.That one's words can lead to actions by others.

"For example, we’re on Sarah Palin’s targeted list, but the thing is, that the way that she has it depicted has the crosshairs of a gun sight over our district. When people do that, they have to realize that there are consequences to that action,” Giffords said in an interview with MSNBC. (from the HT-Bloomington)

Some people, including media personality Jon Stewart, like to pretend that words do not have consequences. That lyrics and tones of songs have no consequence. Essentially that the culture around us has no consequence. That art has no consequence - or affect on people. I very strongly disagree.

I think that the corporate media seeks to influence the culture, including our values and ideas and feelings and actions, as well as buying and voting decisions. That is not a delusion. They have reasons, such as a profit motive, such as maintaining power and influence.

Other people seek to influence the culture by discovering and expressing the truth. While all of us have 'truths' that are unique (based on who we listen to, what we pay attention to, what actions and ideas have come into our circle of awareness - along with our own abilities to understand and analyze our surroundings), many of us realize that it is quite different to try to have one's truth based on scientific knowledge and controlled studies than it is to base one's truth based on the rants of people who hate science and who spew false facts (often taking things out of context or making them up entirely) and hate.

The truth is not always a happy thing. The fact that the way we collectively live our lives causes Global Warming, Dead Zones, and Extinctions is not happy. Nor is Poverty and Inequality, etc. But even the tone of our speech (whether truth or falsehoods) has an effect. According to Dr. Douglas Fields, "Rudeness Is a Neurotoxin"

Jon Stewart, on his show, often makes fun of right-wing people who spout nonsense. Part of the effect of that is that people who watch can feel somewhat in community with others that watch, and are happy that others understand nonsense as nonsense. It is nice to see the hate-spouting people made fun of - to have them put into a context that dis-empowers their hate and nonsense. Stewart's show has become part of the liberal culture. So it's odd to see Stewart say that none of that could be expected to have an effect on others - nor could the hate speech that he makes fun of.

Stewart does not generally spout hate, that I am aware of. I think he can tend to be somewhat misogynistic (or at the very least - he will not be mistaken to be a feminist), as can other somewhat liberal pundits such as Bill Maher. I think that part of the "truth" that they have absorbed is the idea we are all separate and not connected (and that those in power should have no expectation of concern for those without power).

I remember Stewart's response to someone who challenged him on his apparent sexism (the lack of women and women's point of view on his show) was that "women are not funny". So was he being funny, or is that his truth - or is that the truth concerning the role of women in our society? Our culture has an overabundance of possibilities (though not an overabundance of feminists).

On the one hand, artists want to be free to express themselves (I'm assuming this is Stewart's take), but people like Palin and Limbaugh, and Beck are not artists - even though they create fictions. To some extent, Maher and Limbaugh were/are on the same page - they were both against the idea that people should be "politically correct". The concept that they were against was the idea that people shouldn't go around spouting racist and sexist crap. That idea has gone even farther with the latest round of right-wingness - where not only do they (Palin, Limbaugh, Beck) want the right to be rude, they want to go around "Joking" that liberals or anyone who disagrees with them should be shot and killed.

Some would like to suggest that both sides are equally rude and vitriolic, but it is one of the leading figures of the right-wing, tea-party who is disseminating imagery of rifle targets on people and talking about reloading (Palin, but with a lot of support from others). They get a lot of people riled up, and they have a lot of influence. And they are in nearly complete denial about it.

Krugman had a good column today, A Tale of Two Moralities about the " deep divide in American political morality." There is only one side that is pushing to bring down the government as we know it - and right now that is the vitriolic right-wing. I think those who identify with that need to own up to what and who they are supporting and the message that is being sent out.

I also think that while artists should have freedom to express what they want - the art and artists that make it into the forefront sends a message about what kind of society we are. For instance, when artists who create art that is about being pro-macho and anti-women rise to the top (and when art by women is more likely to be excluded), that says that we are not moving forward as a society. It says that the ideology of rudeness, and of Limbaugh - the entrenched tradition of white-male domination is (still) winning. (And yes, Palin and other women support that ideology),

As artists, what we express about our society can have an influence. As consumers, what we consume, endorse, and spread around also has an influence. That's how society works.

Global Warming & Changes to Oceanic Currents

2011-01-07T10:37:00.002-05:00

From Eawag: Swiss Federal Institute of Aquatic Science and Technology:

Corals provide evidence of changes to oceanic currents through Global Warming

Examination of deep sea corals reveals that there have been drastic changes to oceanic currents in the western North Atlantic since the 1970s. The influence of the cold water Labrador Current, which is in periodic interchange with the warm Gulf Stream, has been decreasing continually since the 1970s. Occurring at the same time as Global Warming this phenomenon is unique in the past 2000 years. These results are reported by researchers from the University of Basel and Eawag in the current edition of the scientific journal «PNAS».

One of the oldest known weather systems in the world is the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO), the periodic variation of atmospheric pressure difference between the Azores and Iceland. It dictates not only whether the winters in Europe will be cold and dry or wet and warm, but also influences the oceanic currents in the North Atlantic. On the continental shelf off Nova Scotia, the NAO seems to control the interaction between different water masses. During positive phases, the oceanography of the north-west American continental shelf is dictated by a relatively warm water mass at 10 degrees Celsius which is salty and nutrient-rich, originating from the Gulf Stream. If the NAO is in a negative phase, the Labrador Current is dominant, a relatively cold water mass at 6 degrees Celsius, which is relatively nutrient-poor scarce and originates from sub-polar regions.

Using new geochemical methods, an international team of researchers including the biogeochemists Prof. Moritz Lehmann (University of Basel) and Dr. Carsten Schubert (Eawag – Swiss Federal Institute of Aquatic Science and Technology) were able to prove that a drastic change to a «warm water mode» occurred in the western North Atlantic in the early 1970s. This change, the timing of which coincides with and may be directly related to Global Warming, is unique in the last 2000 years.

Corals record climate data

The researchers made use of the fact that water masses carry different nitrogen isotopic signatures (different ratios of the stable nitrogen isotopes 15N und 14N) depending on their origins. These signals are then recorded in the biomass of deep sea corals hundreds of metres below the surface that feed on sinking organic particles from above. The deep sea corals thus allow a reconstruction of the oceanic current ratios over the last few decades. An exact dating of the individual samples is possible due to the corals’ production of easily identifiable annual growth rings. The researchers were able to show a clear reduction in the 15N/14N ratio since 1970 which indicates that the role of the cold Labrador Current, with a higher 15N/14N ratio is becoming less important.

Possible alternative bio-ecological or geochemical causes for such a change in the stable isotope ratio were able to be excluded by the researchers using component-specific nitrogen analyses of the corals. Depending on the food chain structure, changes occur in the 15N/14N ratio of specific amino acids in the corals’ individual annual growth rings. The nitrogen isotope signatures of the amino acids show that the food chain effect did not play a significant role at least since the 1970s.

Global Warming with consequences

Isotopic analysis of fossil deep sea corals from the same region confirms that the nitrogen isotope ratios and thus the oceanic current situation have remained practically unchanged over the past 2000 years. This indicates that the oceanographic change in oceanic currents of this scale, which has been occurring since the 1970s, is a unique occurrence within the past 2000 years.

The researchers suspect there is a direct connection between the changes in the oceanic currents in the North Atlantic and Global Warming primarily caused by human activities.

"Bees in freefall as study shows sharp US decline"

2011-01-06T22:24:00.002-05:00

From the Guardian:

The abundance of four common species of bumblebee in the US has dropped by 96% in just the past few decades, according to the most comprehensive national census of the insects. Scientists said the alarming decline, which could have devastating implications for the pollination of both wild and farmed plants, was likely to be a result of disease and low genetic diversity in bee populations.

Bumblebees are important pollinators of wild plants and agricultural crops around the world including tomatoes and berries thanks to their large body size, long tongues, and high-frequency buzzing, which helps release pollen from flowers.

Bees in general pollinate some 90% of the world's commercial plants, including most fruits, vegetables and nuts. Coffee, soya beans and cotton are all dependent on pollination by bees to increase yields. It is the start of a food chain that also sustains wild birds and animals.

But the insects, along with other crucial pollinators such as moths and hoverflies, have been in serious decline around the world since the last few decades of the 20th century. It is unclear why, but scientists think it is from a combination of new diseases, changing habitats around cities, and increasing use of pesticides.

Sydney Cameron, an entomologist at the University of Illinois, led a team on a three-year study of the changing distribution, genetic diversity and pathogens in eight species of bumblebees in the US.

By comparing her results with those in museum records of bee populations, she showed that the relative abundance of four of the sampled species (Bombus occidentalis, B. pensylvanicus, B. affinis and B. terricola) had declined by up to 96% and that their geographic ranges had contracted by 23% to 87%, some within just the past two decades.

Cameron's findings reflect similar studies across the world. According to the Centre for Ecology and Hydrology in the UK, three of the 25 British species of bumblebee are already extinct and half of the remainder have shown serious declines, often up to 70%, since around the 1970s. Last year, scientists inaugurated a £10m programme, called the Insect Pollinators Initiative, to look at the reasons behind the devastation in the insect population.

Cameron's team also showed that declining species of bee had higher infection levels of a pathogen called Nosema bombi and lower genetic diversity compared with the four species of bee that were not in decline – B. bifarius, B. vosnesenskii, B. impatiens and B. bimaculatus.

The N. bombi pathogen is commonly found in bumblebees throughout Europe but until now has been largely unstudied in North America. The infection reduces the lifespans of individual bees and also results in smaller colony sizes...

The collapse in the global bee population is a major threat to crops. It is estimated that a third of everything we eat depends upon pollination by bees, which means they contribute some £26bn to the global economy.

Other identified causes of bee decline include parasites such as the bloodsucking varroa mite and viral and bacterial infections, pesticides and poor nutrition stemming from intensive farming methods...

Birds Falling from the sky (dead), fish kills

2011-01-04T15:34:00.003-05:00

First it was in Arkansas on New Year's Eve, now another event in Louisiana. It's very weird.

From the Guardian, UK (since it has become international news):

t began, in portentous fashion, approximately half an hour before midnight on New Year's Eve, when the Arkansas Game and Fish Commission (AGFC) began hearing reports of blackbirds falling from the sky in Beebe, a town of approximately 5,000 people in the centre of the state.

Before midnight struck thousands of birds dropped in an area about a mile long and half a mile wide, mostly dead but some still alive. A helicopter flight by AGFC officials found no other dead birds outside this small area. Some of the bodies were sent to the state's livestock and poultry commission laboratory, and others to the Wisconsin-based National Wildlife Health Centre.

It was not an unprecedented phenomenon, according to Karen Rowe, an AGFC ornithologist. She said: "Test results (in previous incidents) usually were inconclusive, but the birds showed physical trauma and the flock could have been hit by lightning or high-altitude hail."

Keith Stephens, from the commission, said later that it was believed New Year's Eve fireworks could be a more likely cause, scaring the birds from their roosts and causing them to die from stress.

The birds were very common in the predominantly rural area, feeding mainly on grain, Stephens told CNN. "If someone was to shoot fireworks in an area where they were roosting, while they were asleep, then that could have been what caused their deaths," he said. He was "very confident" that further tests on the birds' bodies would find the cause.

Separately, up to 100,000 dead drum fish were found washed up along a 20-mile stretch of the Arkansas River near to Ozark, about 120 miles away.

The AGFC said disease appeared to be the culprit here, but that tests to confirm this would take up to a month to complete.
-----
Then (From the Baton Rouge Advocate):

LABARRE — Hundreds of dead and dying birds littered a quarter-mile stretch of highway in Pointe Coupee Parish on Monday as motorists drove over and around them.

State biologists are trying to determine what led to the deaths of the estimated 500 red-winged blackbirds and starlings on La. 1 just down the road from Pointe Coupee Central High School.

The discovery of the dead birds — some of which were lying face down, clumped in groups, while others were face up with their wings outstretched and rigid legs pointing upward — comes just three days after more than 3,000 blackbirds rained down from the sky in Beebe, Ark.

Necropsies performed Monday on the birds in Arkansas showed the birds suffered internal injuries that formed blood clots leading to their deaths, The Associated Press reported...

Slota also declined to speculate on a cause for the deaths, but he said a search of USGS records shows there have been 16 events in the past 30 years involving blackbirds where at least 1,000 of the birds have died seemingly all at once.

"50 Doomiest Graphs of 2010"

2010-12-31T19:13:00.002-05:00

From Desdemona Despair.net

For Example:

Go to the link to see more....

"Mount Everest's Sherpas Ring Warning Bell on Global Warming "

2010-12-31T17:11:00.002-05:00

(2010 Top Environment Alert From www.stumbleupon.com)

When sherpas ring the warning bell on climate change the world should listen: Mount Everest is becoming increasingly dangerous to climb because global warming is melting glacier ice along its slopes, according to Apa, a Nepalese Sherpa who grew up in the foothills to Mount Everest, reached the 29,035-foot (8,850-metre) summit on Saturday for the 20th time, breaking his own previous world record for 19 ascents.Rising temperatures have melted much of the ice on the steep trail to the summit and climbers are struggling to get traction on the exposed rock surface.

A recent report by scientists at University College London said the Himalayan glaciers are retreating faster than many others around the world, at rates ranging from 10 to 60 metres per year. Professor Steve Edwards, an earth scientist who coauthored the report, titled "The Waters of the Third Pole," said the effects of glacial melting posed a real risk to climbers.

“The general trend shows that the Himalayan glaciers as a whole are melting faster than many others. It is probably the fastest rate of melting in the world,” he said.

“The result is that in the summer months there is going to be a lot of slush on the ice fields. There is also the risk of glacial outburst floods, where the meltwater tops the bank of sediment left behind by the glacier during a period of intense melting and crashes down the river valley, destroying everything in its path.”

The melting ice has also exposed deep crevasses which climbers could fall into, and experts have warned that people scaling the mountain risk being swept away by “outburst floods” from rising volumes of glacial meltwater.

After returning to Kathmandu on Tuesday, Apa said: "The rising temperature on the mountains has melted much ice and snow on the trail to the summit. It is difficult for climbers to use their crampons on the rocky surfaces." He said there was hardly any exposed rock on the trail to the summit when he first climbed Everest in 1989, but now the slopes are dotted with bare rocks.

Climbing-mount-everest-10 The world’s highest mountain is becoming an increasingly popular tourist destination, with a procession of novice climbers scaling the summit with the help of highly expert Sherpas like Apa. But experts have warned that many amateur climbers may not be aware of the risks they face in tackling Everest.

.Casey Kazan via The Telegraph

"World's biggest snake threatened by backpackers"

2010-12-26T19:32:00.004-05:00

From the Telegraph.UK:

By Michael Howie, La Paz

But for the anacondas that live in the swamps surrounding the Yacuma River in northern Bolivia, this invasion of gap year travellers and other hardy tourists is proving disastrous.

Biologists say the entire population of anacondas in one of the jewels of the Amazon basin will be wiped out within three years because of the deadly effect on the snakes of the insect repellant used by most backpackers to help protect against malaria.

The number of tourists going on tours of the pampas that snake there way through jungle and grasslands 250 miles north of La Paz has exploded from a few hundred to nearly 12,000 a year in the past decade.

Travellers are enticed by the promise of getting up close and personal with the world's largest snake - sometimes picking them up and hlding them - as well as swimming with river dolphins, catching pirhanas, and spotting monkeys, sloths and an array of other flora and fauna.

But sightings of the snake are becoming increasingly elusive and as many as 30 of the awe-inspiring creatures, which can measure up to 30ft in length and are known to strangle and devour prey as diverse as caiman crocodiles and cows, are being found dead every year, according to local guides.

Roberto Justiniano, a tour guide and biologist working closely with other scientists to assess the impact of the unrestrained tourism boom, revealed that the growing quantity of toxins being washed into the waterways from travellers is proving too much for the anacondas.

"The high-strength insect repellant that tourists use to protect themselves from mosquitos is absolutely fatal to the anacondas.
"They are amphibians and breath through their skin. The insect repellant, along with some types of sun cream, is extremely toxic. It is getting washed into the pampas and left in the swamps where tourists are hunting for the snakes.

"We are finding between 25 and 30 dead anacondas which have been poisoned. It is terrible."

Amphibians, such as snakes and frogs, are highly susceptible to the chemicals contained in many types of insect repellant, in particular those that contain DEET. This is partly because they breathe and absorb water through their skin, providing an easier way for contaminants to enter the animal's body. Environmentalists recommend using safer insect repellants based on natural oils, but many tourists complains these are less effective.

Zoologists estimate that only around 200 anacondas remain in the Yacuma River swamps, a sharp fall from the population of nearly 1,000 a few years ago.

"A few years years ago you had a 90 per cent chance of seeing anacondas - maybe three or four together. Now you are very lucky if you see one."

He added: "A study has been carried out by other biologists which shows the ecosystem will collapse in three years if things continue as they are."

The fear is that insects, fish and smaller amphibians would be wiped out within the river basin, resulting in the collapse of the entire food chain.

"Bundle Up, It’s Global Warming"

2010-12-26T19:27:00.005-05:00

Today - Washington, DC was getting 10-12 inches of snow again (like last year). The snow extended as far south as Savannah Georgia. We got a nice Christmas Eve snow before it headed east.

From the New York Times:

By JUDAH COHEN
Lexington, Mass.

THE earth continues to get warmer, yet it’s feeling a lot colder outside. Over the past few weeks, subzero temperatures in Poland claimed 66 lives; snow arrived in Seattle well before the winter solstice, and fell heavily enough in Minneapolis to make the roof of the Metrodome collapse; and last week blizzards closed Europe’s busiest airports in London and Frankfurt for days, stranding holiday travelers. The snow and record cold have invaded the Eastern United States, with more bad weather predicted.

All of this cold was met with perfect comic timing by the release of a World Meteorological Organization report showing that 2010 will probably be among the three warmest years on record, and 2001 through 2010 the warmest decade on record.

How can we reconcile this? The not-so-obvious short answer is that the overall warming of the atmosphere is actually creating cold-weather extremes. Last winter, too, was exceptionally snowy and cold across the Eastern United States and Eurasia, as were seven of the previous nine winters.

For a more detailed explanation, we must turn our attention to the snow in Siberia.

Annual cycles like El Niño/Southern Oscillation, solar variability and global ocean currents cannot account for recent winter cooling. And though it is well documented that the earth’s frozen areas are in retreat, evidence of thinning Arctic sea ice does not explain why the world’s major cities are having colder winters.

But one phenomenon that may be significant is the way in which seasonal snow cover has continued to increase even as other frozen areas are shrinking. In the past two decades, snow cover has expanded across the high latitudes of the Northern Hemisphere, especially in Siberia, just north of a series of exceptionally high mountain ranges, including the Himalayas, the Tien Shan and the Altai.

The high topography of Asia influences the atmosphere in profound ways. The jet stream, a river of fast-flowing air five to seven miles above sea level, bends around Asia’s mountains in a wavelike pattern, much as water in a stream flows around a rock or boulder. The energy from these atmospheric waves, like the energy from a sound wave, propagates both horizontally and vertically.

As global temperatures have warmed and as Arctic sea ice has melted over the past two and a half decades, more moisture has become available to fall as snow over the continents. So the snow cover across Siberia in the fall has steadily increased.

The sun’s energy reflects off the bright white snow and escapes back out to space. As a result, the temperature cools. When snow cover is more abundant in Siberia, it creates an unusually large dome of cold air next to the mountains, and this amplifies the standing waves in the atmosphere, just as a bigger rock in a stream increases the size of the waves of water flowing by.

The increased wave energy in the air spreads both horizontally, around the Northern Hemisphere, and vertically, up into the stratosphere and down toward the earth’s surface. In response, the jet stream, instead of flowing predominantly west to east as usual, meanders more north and south. In winter, this change in flow sends warm air north from the subtropical oceans into Alaska and Greenland, but it also pushes cold air south from the Arctic on the east side of the Rockies. Meanwhile, across Eurasia, cold air from Siberia spills south into East Asia and even southwestward into Europe.

That is why the Eastern United States, Northern Europe and East Asia have experienced extraordinarily snowy and cold winters since the turn of this century. Most forecasts have failed to predict these colder winters, however, because the primary drivers in their models are the oceans, which have been warming even as winters have grown chillier. They have ignored the snow in Siberia.

Last week, the British government asked its chief science adviser for an explanation. My advice to him is to look to the east.

It’s all a snow job by nature. The reality is, we’re freezing not in spite of climate change but because of it.

Eastern Arctic warming trend alarms scientists

2010-12-16T19:54:00.001-05:00

From NunatsiaqOnline:

OTTAWA— You might think of scientists as calm and cool.

But the first three presenters during the opening session of the three-day ArcticNet conference in Ottawa sounded alarmed by the increasingly visible signs of Arctic warming and the limited amount of money that Canada will spend to understand what’s happening.

Ice has cracked up — once in a while taking Nunavut hunters with it. Lakes continue to dry up, while permafrost melts and the tundra is greening, 650 scientists, officials and northerners heard Dec. 15.

Observations from the ground in the Eastern Arctic, from places like Iqaluit — where ice in Frobisher Bay is only now forming — and views taken by satellites at 500 kilometres above the earth’s surface showed ArcticNet participants that ice formation in 2010 is abnormally slow.

So far this winter, it’s been “very, very slow,” and like last year “very late in freezing up,” said Trudy Wohlleben, an ice forecaster with the Canadian Ice Service.

The most “unusual things [are] going on in the winter,” Wohlleben said.

Nothing is progressing as it used to, she said, listing a string of peculiar happenings:

• air temperatures 20 C above normal at the beginning of the year in the Baffin Island communities of Clyde River and Qikiqtarjuaq;

• large ice cracks south of Resolute Bay last January, which caused a hunter to float off on an ice floe;

• and other cracks in land-fast ice spreading throughout the High Arctic islands, endangering research stations, causing problems for polar trekkers and swallowing up a Twin Otter.

This past spring, ice on Hudson Bay broke up three to four weeks earlier, and the Nares Strait between Ellesmere Island and Greenland, which usually freezes fast from February to July, never froze up solid.

This year, looking ahead into 2011, may carry similar surprises, with recent air temperatures 20 C registering above average over the Foxe Basin, Wohlleben said.

Weak ice could also lead to more storms as ice cracks cause water temperatures to warm and then lead to even more ice break-up and more storms in a frightening loop.

What’s needed is more monitoring with more remote sensing devices like the buoys dropped on ice lands earlier this year, she said.

More monitoring of lakes and other fresh waterways also needs to be done, because they’re good indicators of climate change, said Frederick Wrona from the University of Victoria...

"Nations again try to bridge rich-poor climate gap"

2010-11-29T14:27:00.002-05:00

AP-Cancun

World governments begin another attempt Monday to overcome the disconnect between rich and poor nations on fighting global warming, with evidence mounting that the Earth's climate already is changing in ways that will affect both sides of the wealth divide.

During two weeks of talks, the 193-nation U.N. conference hopes to conclude agreements that will clear the way to mobilize billions of dollars for developing countries and give them green technology to help them shift from fossil fuels affecting climate change.

After a disappointing summit last year in Copenhagen, no hope remains of reaching an overarching deal this year setting legal limits on how much major countries would be allowed to pollute. Such an accord was meant to describe a path toward slashing greenhouse gas emissions by mid-century, when scientists say they should be half of today's levels.

Eighty-five countries have made specific pledges to reduce emissions or constrain their growth, but those promises amount to far less than required to keep temperatures from rising to potentially dangerous levels.

The recriminations that followed the Danish summit have raised questions over whether the unwieldy U.N. negotiations, which require at least tacit agreement from every nation, can ever work.

Adopting scaled back ambitions for Cancun, if successful, could restore confidence in the process...

While delegates haggle over the wording, timing and dollar figures involved in any agreement, scientists and political activists at the conference will be offering the latest indications of the planet's warming. Some 250 presentations are planned on the sidelines of the negotiations.

Meteorologists are likely to report that 2010 will end up tied for the hottest year globally since records began 131 years ago.
The U.N. scientific body that won the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize for its climate change report, which called global warming "unequivocal" and almost certainly caused by human activity, is expected to tell the conference its findings and warnings of potential disasters are hopelessly out of date.

Agronomists are due to report on shifting weather patterns that are destabilizing the world's food supply and access to clean water, and that could lead to mass migrations as farmers flee drought or flood-prone regions.

As often during the three-year process, attention will focus on the United States and China, two often belligerent nations representing the industrialized and developing world.

Norfolk, VA & Sea Level Rise

2010-11-28T09:28:00.001-05:00

From the New York Times:

In this section of the Larchmont neighborhood, built in a sharp “u” around a bay off the Lafayette River, residents pay close attention to the lunar calendar, much as other suburbanites might attend to the daily flow of commuter traffic.

If the moon is going to be full the night before Hazel Peck needs her car, for example, she parks it on a parallel block, away from the river. The next morning, she walks through a neighbor’s backyard to avoid the two-to-three-foot-deep puddle that routinely accumulates on her street after high tides.

For Ms. Peck and her neighbors, it is the only way to live with the encroaching sea.

As sea levels rise, tidal flooding is increasingly disrupting life here and all along the East Coast, a development many climate scientists link to global warming.

But Norfolk is worse off. Situated just west of the mouth of Chesapeake Bay, it is bordered on three sides by water, including several rivers, like the Lafayette, that are actually long tidal streams that feed into the bay and eventually the ocean.

Like many other cities, Norfolk was built on filled-in marsh. Now that fill is settling and compacting. In addition, the city is in an area where significant natural sinking of land is occurring. The result is that Norfolk has experienced the highest relative increase in sea level on the East Coast — 14.5 inches since 1930, according to readings by the Sewells Point naval station here.

Climate change is a subject of friction in Virginia. The state’s attorney general, Ken T. Cuccinelli II, is trying to prove that a prominent climate scientist engaged in fraud when he was a researcher at the University of Virginia. But the residents of coastal neighborhoods here are less interested in the debate than in the real-time consequences of a rise in sea level.

When Ms. Peck, now 75 and a caretaker to her husband, moved here 40 years ago, tidal flooding was an occasional hazard.

“Last month,” she said recently, “there were eight or nine days the tide was so doggone high it was difficult to drive.”

Larchmont residents have relentlessly lobbied the city to address the problem, and last summer it broke ground on a project to raise the street around the “u” by 18 inches and to readjust the angle of the storm drains so that when the river rises, the water does not back up into the street. The city will also turn a park at the edge of the river back into wetlands — it is now too saline for lawn grass to grow anyway. The cost for the work on this one short stretch is $1.25 million.

The expensive reclamation project is popular in Larchmont, but it is already drawing critics who argue that cities just cannot handle flooding in such a one-off fashion. To William Stiles, executive director of Wetlands Watch, a local conservation group, the project is well meaning but absurd. Mr. Stiles points out that the Federal Emergency Management Agency has already spent $144,000 in recent years to raise each of six houses on the block.

At this pace of spending, he argues, there is no way taxpayers will recoup their investment.

“If sea level is a constant, your coastal infrastructure is your most valuable real estate, and it makes sense to invest in it,” Mr. Stiles said, “but with sea level rising, it becomes a money pit.”

Many Norfolk residents hope their problems will serve as a warning.

“We are the front lines of climate change,” said Jim Schultz, a science and technology writer who lives on Richmond Crescent near Ms. Peck. “No one who has a house here is a skeptic.”

"Pittsburgh Bans Natural Gas Drilling"

2010-11-27T20:58:00.002-05:00

From YES magazine:

by Mari Margil, Ben Price
posted Nov 16, 2010

"Pittsburgh Councilman Doug Shields, sees this fight as about far more than drilling, saying 'It’s about our authority as a community to decide, not corporations deciding for us.'”

In a historic vote, the City of Pittsburgh today adopted a first-in-the-nation ordinance banning corporations from natural gas drilling in the city.

Faced with the potential for drilling—and the controversial new practice known as “fracking” or hydraulic fracturing—within city limits, the Pittsburgh City Council unanimously said “no.” Fracking means injecting water laced with sand and toxic chemicals underground to create deep ground explosions that release the gas. It’s a technique first tried in Texas, and which is now being used in Pennsylvania, where the Marcellus Shale geological formation, a source of natural gas, is buried over a mile down. The Marcellus Shale stretches from New York, through Pennsylvania, into Ohio and West Virginia.

Fracking has been demonstrated to be a threat to surface and groundwater, and has been blamed for fatal explosions, the contamination of drinking water, rivers, and streams. Because it disturbs rock that’s laced not only with methane, but with carcinogens like benzene and radioactive ores like uranium, forcing the mix to the surface adds to the dangers.

Pittsburgh sits atop the Marcellus Shale and corporations have already purchased leases to drill there, including under area parks and cemeteries.

"With this vote we are asserting the right of the city to make critical decisions to protect our health, safety, and welfare."
-Councilman Doug Shields
The ordinance sponsor, Pittsburgh Councilman Doug Shields, led the charge to ban drilling, and was later joined by five co-sponsors. During the months leading up to today’s vote, Shields passionately advocated for the ordinance, saying that the city is “not a colony of the state and will not sit quietly by as our city gets drilled.” He sees this fight as about far more than drilling, saying “It’s about our authority as a community to decide, not corporations deciding for us.”

Drafted by the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund (CELDF), Pittsburgh’s ordinance elevates the rights of people, the community, and nature over corporate “rights” and challenges the authority of the state to pre-empt community decision-making.

As natural gas drilling expands across Pennsylvania, there’s been a debate among opponents of fracking over the best course to take. Some are arguing for “responsible drilling” and severance taxes; others want to “zone out” drilling from residential areas or around schools.

Advocates and communities are finding, however, that calling on corporations to be more accountable, without changing the powers and authorities corporations have been given by state and federal government, means asking them to take voluntary steps. Even communities that adopt zoning restrictions requiring drilling pads to be located away from homes or schools find that because the drilling is horizontal, its impact still reaches into those places they are trying to protect.

Meanwhile, hopes that the state—either the legislature or the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection—will help, have been similarly dashed. The state was recently found to be paying thousands of dollars to a private contractor to investigate citizens advocating against drilling. Meanwhile, hundreds of thousands of industry dollars went to candidates in the recent elections. Those monies helped elect candidates who will ensure that drilling proceeds without interference from citizens across the region. Further, the state continues to issue permits to corporations to drill despite growing community opposition.

Corporations, empowered with constitutional privileges conferred upon them by the courts, have long worked hand-in-hand with elected officials and government agencies at the state and federal level to pave the way for drilling. They’ve been successful in exempting natural gas drilling and fracking from federal regulations and they’ve put in place state laws pre-empting municipalities from taking any steps to reign in the industry.

Communities like Pittsburgh are coming to the conclusion that it's up to them to stop practices they disagree with. Their efforts are not just about stopping the drilling, but about who gets to make decisions for the community—corporations empowered by the state, or people and their communities...

Provisions in the ordinance eliminate corporate “personhood” rights within the city for corporations seeking to drill, and remove the ability of corporations to wield the Commerce and Contracts Clauses of the U.S. Constitution to override community decision-making.

In addition, with adoption of the ordinance, Pittsburgh became the first city in the U.S. to recognize legally binding rights of nature....

New Study- 200 Years of Fish Population Data

2010-11-21T19:30:00.001-05:00

From Wired:

By digging up and poring over old books and records of Mediterranean marine life, scientists have filled a 200-year gap in fish population data.

The data, generated from from naturalists’ accounts and fish-market records published between 1818 and 2000, shows the clear decline of fishes in the Adriatic Sea (east of Italy) and provides a crucial baseline comparison for the ongoing collapse of today’s fisheries.

“The understanding of fish communities’ changes over the past centuries has important implications for conservation policy and marine resource management,” the authors wrote in a study published Nov. 17 in the journal PLoS ONE. Ignoring old records, they added, has led to a “historical myopia” in fishery science that underestimates the loss of natural resources.

It’s no puzzle why. Prior to the mid-20th century, large-scale surveys of marine life didn’t happen and, for that matter, there wasn’t the modern-day level of concern about natural resources or the impetus to conserve them. Back then, there were only fish-catch records and naturalists’ qualitative descriptions of life beneath the waves.

To gather the information, an Italian team of ecologists and marine scientists scoured the libraries, museums and archives of six European cities. In total, the search turned up 36 books by naturalists and dozens of detailed catch records from fish markets spanning almost two centuries.

Using statistical methods to combine and integrate the descriptive naturalist records with fish-catch tallies, the scientists partially reconstructed the rise and fall of 255 fish species in the region.

Sharks in the Adriatic Sea made up about 17 percent of the total fish population in 1800, while bottom-dwellers (such as hake, flounder and anglers) made up 27 percent of all fish. By 1950, the populations had dipped to 11 percent and 20 percent, respectively. Meanwhile, the proportion of smaller and faster-breeding fish rose from about 12 percent of the population to more than 28 percent.

“Chondrichthyes are highly vulnerable to [human] disturbances, and especially to fishery,” the authors wrote, thanks to their large size, slow growth and breeding behavior. As fishermen nabbed such large fish, the smaller and more-nimble species thrived because they weren’t being eaten as readily (by sharks or humans).

Fish population declines due to human activity since the mid-20th century are established and substantial, with encroachment by non-native fish species, habitat alteration and pollution all contributing to shrinking and more-fragile populations of fish. While it’s not entirely clear how large a role fishing pressure played prior to 1950, the authors say their “results indicate that pre-industrial fisheries had already had significant impacts” on fish populations in the Adriatic.

The study can’t offer a worldwide assessment of fishery health in the past. But turning old records of marine life into useful datasets may prove promising for assessing past fish populations in other regions.

“Naturalists’ eyewitness accounts of fish species, which have long been disregarded by fishery biologists as being ‘anecdotal’ and not ‘science,’ proved to be a useful tool for extending the analysis into the past, well before the onset of field-based monitoring programs,” the authors wrote.

"Scientists find toxic algae in open ocean"

2010-11-16T21:38:00.002-05:00

From the Santa Cruz Sentinel:

SANTA CRUZ - Blooms of toxic algae can occur in the open ocean, a team led by UC Santa Cruz and Moss Landing Marine Lab scientists reported last week.

Once thought to be a problem plaguing only the coast, causing fisheries closures and wildlife deaths, the research shows that open sea algae populations also occasionally bloom into toxic soup.

The scientists found toxin-producing algae almost everywhere they looked within open regions of the Pacific. The scientists also detected domoic acid, the toxin that the algae produces. The toxicity exploded whenever iron was added to the water, producing a population boom.

"They grew like a fury," said UCSC ocean scientist Mary Silver, who designed the research. "They are really responsive to iron."

Algae blooms visible from the moon grew during previous studies fertilizing open ocean waters with iron. Kenneth Coale, director of the Moss Landing Marine Laboratories, led these studies in 1995 and 2002. The toxicity of the blooms could not be confirmed until more sensitive measures were invented.

Even up to 12 years later, algae toxin remained in the iron-enriched seawater samples Coale had in storage.

"It was always a nagging, gut feeling about domoic acid," said Coale. "After teaming up with Mary Silver's group, that nagging suspicion was confirmed."

Since the algae consume the carbon dioxide, Coale's research led to proposals to fertilize the ocean on a mass scale to stave off global warming. The discovery of the algae's toxicity throws a wrench into these plans.

"We should use this as a caution," said Silver. "Using iron fertilization as a remedy for global warming would be dangerous."

Domoic acid attacks the nervous system. During blooms, the algae that produces it become a dominant food for small fish and shellfish. Animals higher up in the food chain amass poisonous amounts of the toxin because the algae lodges in the guts of their prey.

"With high algae levels, fish pick them up," said Silver. "With their stomachs loaded with cells, they can be quite toxic."

Harmful algae blooms occur seasonally along California's coast, leading to a ban on shellfish harvesting between May and November to protect public health. In humans, the toxin attacks the brain, producing confusion, memory loss and hallucinations.

Marine mammals with domoic acid poisoning rarely recover, according to Coale.

"They can't forage; they can't migrate. They get lost and re-strand themselves," he said. "It's pretty much the end of the line for them."

"Sea level rise threatens Alexandria, Nile Delta"

2010-11-16T21:17:00.002-05:00

(Reuters) - Twenty years ago, Taher Ibrahim raced his friends across Alexandria's beaches, now rising seas have swept over his favorite childhood playground.

Alexandria, with 4 million people, is Egypt's second-largest city, an industrial center and a port that handles four-fifths of national trade. It is also one of the Middle East's cities most at risk from rising sea levels due to global warming.

"There were beaches I used to go to in my lifetime, now those beaches are gone. Is that not proof enough?" asked Ibrahim, a manager at a supermarket chain who is in his 40s.

Flooding could displace entire communities in Alexandria and the low-lying Nile Delta, the fertile agricultural heartland of Egypt's 79 million people.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) predicts that the Mediterranean will rise 30 cm to 1 meter this century.

More than half of Egypt's people live within 100 km of the coast. A 2007 World Bank study estimated that a one-meter sea level rise could displace 10 percent of the population.

Officials say salt water could submerge or soak 10 to 12 percent of farmland in the world's largest wheat importer.

"Climate change is happening at a pace that we had not anticipated," Suzan Kholeif of the National Institute of Oceanography and Fisheries told Reuters. "Our records are clear and in my line of work, it is already a reality."

But reliable data on local climate patterns is scarce and official responses are slow and uncoordinated, experts say.

Egyptian officials do not deny there may be risks but doubt the scale of Egypt's vulnerability, saying more research is needed...

More than 58 meters of coastline have vanished every year since 1989 in Rasheed, also known as Rosetta, said Omran Frihy of the Coastal Research Institute...

Increased salinity seeping into underground waters will degrade farmland and cut production, experts say, in a country where food price rises have sparked unrest in the past.

Yet Egypt has no clear and unified climate change strategy.

"There are lots of plans but they are not integrated nor are they complete," said Mohamed Borhan, manager of a U.N.-supported project on how the Nile Delta can adapt to climate change.

"The right priorities are not set and the people working on the plans are failing in communicating," he said.

Some experts argue that uncertainty about the scale of the risk Egypt is facing makes it hard to adopt strategies...

Taxi driver Ahmed Fattah said he doubted Alexandria itself would disappear beneath the Mediterranean but that he and his family could only wait and see.

"I worry that the government won't do anything until a crisis hits us. By then, we may be swept away by the waves."

"Whales in México Are Getting Sunburn"

2010-11-16T21:13:00.002-05:00

From hispanicallyspeakingnews.com:

As if the marine ecosystem wasn’t threatened enough by oil spills and excessive noise, the thinning of the ozone layer may be scarring the world’s whales from severe sunburn, experts said Wednesday.

A study of whales in the Mexican coast over the past few years, shows that the biggest mammals have blisters and other typical damage of exposure to the ultraviolet radiation. Simply put, whales are getting sunburned.

Whales seem to be particularly susceptible to sunburns, partly because they must spend extended periods of time on the surface of the ocean in order to breathe, socialize, and feed their calfs. Lacking fur or feathers, whales sunbathe naked.

Laura Martinez-Levasseur, the lead author of the study puts it: “Humans can put on clothes or sunglasses — whales can’t.”

Photographs were taken of the whales to examine any visible damages, and small skin samples were collected to analyze the state of their skin cells.

Her study confirmed suspicions first raised by one of her colleagues: The cetaceans are showing lesions associated with sun damage, and many of their skin samples revealed patterns of dead cells associated with exposure to UV radiation.

As with humans, the lighter-skinned whales seemed to have the most trouble dealing with the sun. Blue whales had more severe skin damage than darker-skinned mammals—like fin whales and sperm whales—even though the latter spend bigger chunks of time at the surface.

Fortunately, the study found no indications of skin cancer among the whales studied, although Martinez-Levasseur, who is also a Ph.D. student at Queen Mary, University of London, noted that only tiny samples were taken of the massive animals.

"WINDSTALK: WIND POWER WITHOUT BLADES"

2010-10-25T22:17:00.003-04:00

From EnergyBoom.com:

It’s counterintuitive, but the idea that wind turbines without blades could generate as much energy per square meter as standard wind turbines is based on scientific observation.

The science behind New York design firm Atelier DNA’s “windstalks” is simple kinetic energy; the same energy found in a field of swaying prairie grass. Like many of the Land Art Generator exhibits, Atelier takes it cue directly from Nature to deliver resource-economical and highly effective but visually intriguing forms of energy and energy conservation.

The Land Art Generator initiative is a series of aesthetic yet fully functional energy generating and efficiency measures produced by collaborating artists, architects, scientists, landscape architects, and engineers.

Sponsored by Masdar City, an emerging, clean technology zone located outside Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates, or UAE, the competition awarded Atelier’s offering, simply named Windstalk, second prize.

Masdar City, which aims to be the world’s first carbon neutral and self-sufficient city via clean energy technologies like wind and solar, is being built by the Abu Dhabi Future Energy Company, a wholly owned subsidiary of Mubadala Development Company.

Inspired by Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, Crown Prince of Abu Dhabi, the city is the UAE’s answer to developing a clean technology hub. Ironic, that the very area which has so far offered us little but polluting fossil-fuel forms of energy is also showing us the way to a sustainable future.

Windstalk has also successfully evaded the more common complaints surrounding traditional wind turbines, namely, that they are noisy, emit annoying vibrations that affect humans, cows and other animals, and kill birds. In addition, designers have managed to incorporate energy storage that mimics hydropower.

Windstalk specifications call for 1,203 highly flexible carbon fiber poles 180 feet high and one foot in diameter at the base tapering to 2 inches at the top. The poles are filled with piezoelectric ceramic discs alternating with electrodes connected by cables along the length of each pole – one cable for positive-pole electrodes, another for negative-polarity electrodes. When the wind blows, the flexing of the poles compresses the discs, generating a charge which flows through the electrodes. Light-emitting diodes, or LEDs, at the top of each pole glow brighter or dimmer depending on the amount of energy being generated, or go entirely dark when the wind isn’t blowing – a clever but ludicrously expensive barometer to calculate desert sandstorms.

"West African floods swamp Benin"

2010-10-25T08:47:00.002-04:00

COTONOU (AFP) — Families sleep by the roadside under shelter made of scrap wood and metal, their homes destroyed by the rains in Benin -- the country seen as the hardest-hit by West African floods this rainy season.

"I had two children who died by drowning on October 2 after the rain that hit Cotonou," said Delphine Behanzin, 37, as she sat in the shade. "I'm lost. They were my reason to live."

Floods have hit a wide swathe of West and Central Africa in recent months, destroying entire villages and killing more than 100 people in Nigeria alone. Burkina Faso, Chad and Niger are among the other nations affected.

The United Nations says 377 people have died in the flooding, with nearly 1.5 million people affected since the start of the rainy season in June.

But UN officials say the small nation of Benin, a country of some 8.8 million people, has been dealt the hardest blow.

Some 43 people have died, while about 360,000 have been affected, according to the UN's Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA). Nearly 100,000 people have been left homeless.

Almost two-thirds of the nation has been hit by flooding, according to a statement issued by the UN which said the humanitarian situation was "becoming increasingly worrying."

A recent survey of the city of Cotonou, the economic capital, and of the country's south by helicopter showed "that the crisis has been underestimated", according to the statement.

Aid officials have rushed to provide clean water and emergency shelter, while further outbreaks of cholera are also feared. There have already been some 800 cases, including seven deaths.

Heavy rains have hit Benin this season, and the Oueme river has overflowed its banks at a number of locations.

Cotonou is located at the river's mouth, and makeshift camps have sprouted along the city's edge in recent weeks, though the city centre has not been affected.

Aicha, 26, said the rains destroyed her small fruit-selling business and aid has been slow to arrive.

"Severe drought afflicts Brazilian Amazon"

2010-10-25T08:41:00.001-04:00

From the BBC:

The money will fund water pumping and purification, as well as food deliveries to towns cut off by the drop in river levels.

The Brazilian air force has already flown 500 tonnes of supplies to areas that usually depend on water transport.

The River Amazon at Manaus has fallen to its lowest level since 1963.

Scientists say the region is facing its worst drought since that year.

In Amazonas state 27 municipalities have declared a state of emergency because of the dry spell.

Several tributaries of the Amazon have almost completely dried up, paralysing river transport and the fishing industry.

The rainy season in the region usually begins in November.

The Peruvian Amazon, 2,000km (1,240 miles) upstream has also been affected.

Environmental groups say severe droughts are likely to become more frequent in the Amazon as a result of global warming, putting further strain on the rainforest.

The Amazon is the world's second-longest river, after the Nile, but discharges far more water from its mouth and drains more territory.

The Tea Party - Promotion of Ignorance

2010-10-20T10:30:00.006-04:00

Delaware Republican Senate candidate Christine O'Donnell, in a debate with her opponent Chris Coons at Widener Law school, exposed her ignorance of the constitution. The Right Wing blogs and pundits went on to defend her and call her "right".

The relevant part (From Scienceblogs.com):

"Let me just clarify," O'Donnell pressed. "You're telling me that the separation of church and state is found in the First Amendment?"

"The government shall make no establishment of religion," Coons said, summarizing the gist of the specific words in the First Amendment's establishment clause.

"That's in the First Amendment?" O'Donnell asked again, eliciting further laughter from the room.

O'Donnell's defenders (Limbaugh, blogs, etc.) are spinning it such that "She was right" that the constitution does not have the phrase "separation of Church and State" - when she clearly did not know that the constitution says that the government shall make no establishment of religion. She was arguing at the time that public schools should be free to teach creationism or "intelligent design" if that was what people in the local school districts believed. She did not get that teaching religion in public schools violates the constitution.

The Separation of Church and State comes from a letter that Thomas Jefferson wrote clarifying the intention of the first Amendment:

"...I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should 'make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,' thus building a wall of separation between Church & State."

The phrase was quoted by the United States Supreme Court first in 1878, and then in a series of cases starting in 1947. The phrase itself does not appear in the U.S. Constitution, although the First Amendment of the Bill of Rights states that "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof."

Perfect People (Eugenics and Socialism)

2010-10-12T19:04:00.021-04:00

Earlier today I watched the 1998 Swedish Documentary about eugenics called Homo Sapiens 1900. It considered the eugenics movement in the US, Sweden, USSR and Germany.

While I have been well aware of the the eugenics movement and the idea of perfecting races and/or groups of people, one thing this brought out was the socialist connection. This documentary presented part of the idea of socialism as being all part of the idea of the perfect society. These ideas grew out of the growing understanding of Darwin's Theory of Evolution.

Some scientists became intent on the idea of deciding what the ultimate human characteristics are, categorizing them and devising ways to most efficiently have them reproduced in the population. Dr. Haiselden, from the US, wanted to liberate America from it's presumably defective heritage and promoted (and carried out) infanticide. Charles Davenport founded the Eugenics Record Office on Long Island with the idea of it going national. People targeted included the poor, those in prisons, mental institutions, blacks and new immigrants. The world's first compulsory sterilization law was passed in 1907. Tens of thousands were sterilized.

Scientists in Sweden wanted to have the perfect Swedish population, with the "stock" protected from outside influence and "inferiors" prevented from procreating by encouraging that they be sterilized. The Institute of Race Biology was estaablished. In 1934, their parliament passed a non-compulsory sterilization law. About 8000 were sterilized in Sweden before the law was eliminated.

Some ideas that some may have been altruistic about - such as providing education and health care for everyone, others may have had grandiose ideas of creating the "perfect" society (for enemy defeating purposes or simply convoluted idealism).

Eugenics was meant to be people-directed evolution. This was when IQ tests were developed and promoted. People were given medical exams, and winning families were expected to compete with their pedigrees - as if they were dogs. The Miss America pageant was evidently also inspired by this mentality - started in 1921, the rule was that "contestants must be of good health and of the white race."

Russia apparently had the idea of creating a more productive labor force for factories and whatnot and at the same time had the idea that everyone would be a genius. Those ideas do not necessarily mesh well. Also - people didn't like the idea of one "Superman" fathering 10,000 children (an idea that some promoted). Stalin decided he didn't like eugenics and had the scientists who worked on it expelled or killed.

In the 30s, Stalin's ideas of nationalism and the perfect society inspired his "Great Purge" where many were killed and millions of ethnic minorities were deported. Stalin relocated those from the following groups to Siberia and the Central Asian republics - Ukrainians, Poles, Romanians, Koreans, Volga Germans, Crimean Tatars, Kalmyks, Chechens, Ingush, Balkars, Karachays, Meskhetian Turks, Finns, Bulgarians, Greeks, Latvians, Lithuanians, Estonians, and Jews. He executed anyone he considered to be an "enemy of the people" - many were just regular folks such as workers, peasants, homemakers, teachers, priests, nuns, musicians, ballerinas, soldiers, pensioners, and beggars.

Meanwhile, of course, Germany was becoming increasingly committed to the idea of racial perfection within it's borders. There were these ideas that many countries wanted to make their countries "pure". There were 750,000 ethnic Germans in the USSR and the Germans wanted to relocate them to Poland after driving the Poles out - making an enlarged Germany with more room for more Germans. Stalin sent many of the Germans to Siberia - which ironically saved possibly 200,000 Jews from Hitler.

In 1937 - the "new German man" was glorified at the German exhibition of the World's Fair in Paris. As Germany went farther over the top, many countries, including the US, cooled it on the eugenics ideas when they heard what was going on - as they could see where the propaganda was leading. Germany's purge included Jews, Romani, people with disabilities, Soviet prisoners of war, Polish and Soviet civilians, homosexuals, Jehovah's Witnesses and other political and religious opponents.

What is odd to me, in this day and age - 2010, is how the right wing, conservatives in the US are against Socialism ( I, as a liberal, would be against Socialistic ideas that mean that society is trying to be engineer evolution and create a super-race), and yet many (especially the leaders like Limbaugh) are very pro-white nationalistic males. They seem to hate the idea that other groups such as women, blacks, Muslims, Hispanics are becoming more equal, more vocal, more powerful. People who are white supremacists are able to feel at home with the right-wing.

The liberals, who are more likely to be for Socialist ideas such as health-care for all, a good public education, equal rights, unemployment, etc. include those ideas for everyone - women, men, equality for races. Conservative & Libertarians (and Tea Party advocates) are less likely to see that there IS a problem of inequality or of discrimination.

Some people could bring up the eugenics and say that it was a Socialist enterprise and that that makes all Socialism bad. But the "badness" came from the ideas of racism (and nationalism) - creating the perfect white race - the more white, the better. Similarly, someone could bring up eugenics to demonize science - because there were scientists who were participating with and promoting these ideas. But again, the "badness" came from the negativity involved in the goals (the manipulating of nature while dominating and devaluing others), not in the fact that science was involved.

(In general, I have difficulty understanding how Republicans or Tea Parties can be so anti-intellectual, anti-science, but this would be one example they could use. I would add such uses as the creation and distribution of many toxic chemicals and products without proper regard to their effects on the environment. But in general - and with better values - science can be a positive thing.)

Somehow - the right-wing has embraced the idea that liberals are like Hitler - but Hitler was all about the Super-man- white-Christian-German and the "normal" German family - and if anything, it's the conservatives who are for the Super-man-white-Christian-American and the "normal" American family. The right-wing isn't sending people off to be killed, but their propaganda and actions against Muslims and Hispanics have a similar "We are the good guys, you are the bad guys" sense about them - and have resulted in deaths by zealots. Their actions against Mexicans in this country, their setting up and jailing Muslims as terrorists (and general negativity which leads some to violence against them), the anti-gay rhetoric which leads to bullying and suicides are more Hitleresque than anything liberals are doing.

The badness has to do with the acceptance and encouragement of domination by the already powerful against the minority and/or weakened group. Whether a group gives themselves that power by saying they speak for God, or the State, or Science, the result can be the same. Hitler used all three - God, State and Science. The right wing says they have God and they don't want the State or Science - but they still want domination (and use the State and Science when it suits them). Many liberals would still use the benefits of Science and the State to achieve a more equitable and peaceful society - but the goals of liberals now have little or nothing to do with the goals of the eugenicists. (Some liberals feel that they are trying to do the will of God, but don't generally try to influence others by claiming that their will and God's will are the same.) Liberals like promoting health and education to make the civilization better - but not to make some Super-society or Perfect People or race. And not that everyone is going to be a genius - or than anyone will be perfect.

But it is nice for people to have a chance - and for society to help those who need help - because we are not given the same abilities or opportunities, or wealth to start off with. Liberals tend to see that society is skewed to benefit those with money, which conservatives tend to not notice or embrace because they identify with being affluent (or both). Since white men have a history of dominance in the last few centuries, and since much money has been made on the backs of unpaid or badly paid women and minorities and other disenfranchised groups- a redistribution of money and assets does not seem like a bad idea. If anything, it flips what the eugenicists had in mind on it's head. Where the eugenicists were all about improving the situation of the dominant white race (already in power - but apparently threats were perceived), the liberals would like to do things to make society more equitable.

-margaret

"Huge Parts of World Are Drying Up..."

2010-10-12T10:05:00.002-04:00

From Science Daily:

The soils in large areas of the Southern Hemisphere, including major portions of Australia, Africa and South America, have been drying up in the past decade, a group of researchers conclude in the first major study to ever examine "evapotranspiration" on a global basis.

Most climate models have suggested that evapotranspiration, which is the movement of water from the land to the atmosphere, would increase with global warming. The new research, published online this week in the journal Nature, found that's exactly what was happening from 1982 to the late 1990s.

But in 1998, this significant increase in evapotranspiration -- which had been seven millimeters per year -- slowed dramatically or stopped. In large portions of the world, soils are now becoming drier than they used to be, releasing less water and offsetting some moisture increases elsewhere.

Due to the limited number of decades for which data are available, scientists say they can't be sure whether this is a natural variability or part of a longer-lasting global change. But one possibility is that on a global level, a limit to the acceleration of the hydrological cycle on land has already been reached.

If that's the case, the consequences could be serious.

They could include reduced terrestrial vegetation growth, less carbon absorption, a loss of the natural cooling mechanism provided by evapotranspiration, more heating of the land surface, more intense heat waves and a "feedback loop" that could intensify global warming.

"This is the first time we've ever been able to compile observations such as this for a global analysis," said Beverly Law, a professor of global change forest science at Oregon State University. Law is co-author of the study and science director of the AmeriFlux network of 100 research sites, which is one major part of the FLUXNET synthesis that incorporates data from around the world.

"We didn't expect to see this shift in evapotranspiration over such a large area of the Southern Hemisphere," Law said. "It is critical to continue such long-term observations, because until we monitor this for a longer period of time, we can't be sure why this is occurring."

Some of the areas with the most severe drying include southeast Africa, much of Australia, central India, large parts of South America, and some of Indonesia. Most of these regions are historically dry, but some are actually tropical rain forests.

Greater evapotranspiration was expected with global warming, because of increased evaporation of water from the ocean and more precipitation overall. And data indeed show that some areas are wetter than they used to be.

However, other huge areas are now drying out, the study showed. This could lead to increased drought stress on vegetation and less overall productivity, Law said, and as a result less carbon absorbed, less cooling through evapotranspiration, and more frequent or extreme heat waves.

Hungary Battles Flood of Toxic Sludge

2010-10-05T18:38:00.003-04:00

From the BBC:

Emergency services in Hungary are trying to stop a torrent of toxic red sludge flowing into major waterways, including the River Danube.

A state of emergency has been declared in three western counties after the chemical waste burst from a reservoir at an alumina plant.

Four people are known to have died, with 120 injured. Six more are missing.

At least seven villages and towns are affected including Devecser, where the torrent was 2m (6.5ft) deep.

The flood swept cars from roads and damaged bridges and houses, forcing the evacuation of hundreds of residents.

The sludge - a mixture of water and mining waste containing heavy metals - is considered hazardous, according to Hungary's National Directorate General for Disaster Management (NDGDM).

While the cause of the deaths has not been established officially, it is believed the victims probably drowned.

Some 600,000-700,000 cubic metres (21m-24m cubic feet) of sludge escaped from the plant, 160km (100 miles) from the capital, Budapest.

With 7,000 people affected directly by the disaster, a state of emergency was declared in the county of Veszprem where the spill occurred, and Gyor-Moson-Sopron and Vas, where the sludge appeared to be heading.

At least 390 residents have been relocated and 110 rescued from flooded areas, the NDGDM said...

"White House to go solar"

2010-10-05T18:17:00.003-04:00

From yahoo:

WASHINGTON – Solar power is coming to President Barack Obama's house.

The most famous residence in America, which has already boosted its green credentials by planting a garden, plans to install solar panels atop the White House's living quarters. The solar panels are to be installed by spring 2011, and will heat water for the first family and supply some electricity.

Energy Secretary Steven Chu announced the plans Tuesday in Washington at a conference of local, state, academic and nonprofit leaders aimed at identifying how the federal government can improve its environmental performance.

Former Presidents Jimmy Carter and George W. Bush both tapped the sun during their days in the White House. Carter in the late 1970s spent $30,000 on a solar water-heating system for West Wing offices. Bush's solar systems powered a maintenance building and some of the mansion, and heated water for the pool.

Obama, who has championed renewable energy, has been under increasing pressure by the solar industry and environmental activists to lead by example by installing solar at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, something White House officials said has been under consideration since he first took office.

The decision perhaps has more import now after legislation to reduce global warming pollution died in the Senate, despite the White House's support. Obama has vowed to try again on a smaller scale.

U.S. Military Orders Less Dependence on Fossil Fuels

2010-10-05T12:49:00.005-04:00

While I would like to see the size and scope of the military reduced - this is a step in the right direction as far as renewables are concerned. With the military being such a huge consumer of fuels, this is significant.
___________
Oil tankers that were set on fire in Pakistan. The convoys that haul fuel to bases have been sitting ducks for enemy fighters.

From the New York Times:
With insurgents increasingly attacking the American fuel supply convoys that lumber across the Khyber Pass into Afghanistan, the military is pushing aggressively to develop, test and deploy renewable energy to decrease its need to transport fossil fuels.

Last week, a Marine company from California arrived in the rugged outback of Helmand Province bearing novel equipment: portable solar panels that fold up into boxes; energy-conserving lights; solar tent shields that provide shade and electricity; solar chargers for computers and communications equipment.

The 150 Marines of Company I, Third Battalion, Fifth Marines, will be the first to take renewable technology into a battle zone, where the new equipment will replace diesel and kerosene-based fuels that would ordinarily generate power to run their encampment.

Even as Congress has struggled unsuccessfully to pass an energy bill and many states have put renewable energy on hold because of the recession, the military this year has pushed rapidly forward. After a decade of waging wars in remote corners of the globe where fuel is not readily available, senior commanders have come to see overdependence on fossil fuel as a big liability, and renewable technologies — which have become more reliable and less expensive over the past few years — as providing a potential answer. These new types of renewable energy now account for only a small percentage of the power used by the armed forces, but military leaders plan to rapidly expand their use over the next decade.

In Iraq and Afghanistan, the huge truck convoys that haul fuel to bases have been sitting ducks for enemy fighters — in the latest attack, oil tankers carrying fuel for NATO troops in Afghanistan were set on fire in Rawalpindi, Pakistan, early Monday. In Iraq and Afghanistan, one Army study found, for every 24 fuel convoys that set out, one soldier or civilian engaged in fuel transport was killed. In the past three months, six Marines have been wounded guarding fuel runs in Afghanistan.

“There are a lot of profound reasons for doing this, but for us at the core it’s practical,” said Ray Mabus, the Navy secretary and a former ambassador to Saudi Arabia, who has said he wants 50 percent of the power for the Navy and Marines to come from renewable energy sources by 2020. That figure includes energy for bases as well as fuel for cars and ships.

“Fossil fuel is the No. 1 thing we import to Afghanistan,” Mr. Mabus said, “and guarding that fuel is keeping the troops from doing what they were sent there to do, to fight or engage local people.”

He and other experts also said that greater reliance on renewable energy improved national security, because fossil fuels often came from unstable regions and scarce supplies were a potential source of international conflict.

Fossil fuel accounts for 30 to 80 percent of the load in convoys into Afghanistan, bringing costs as well as risk. While the military buys gas for just over $1 a gallon, getting that gallon to some forward operating bases costs $400.

“We had a couple of tenuous supply lines across Pakistan that are costing us a heck of a lot, and they’re very dangerous,” said Gen. James T. Conway, the commandant of the Marine Corps.

Col. Robert Charette Jr., director of the Marine Corps Expeditionary Energy Office, said he was “cautiously optimistic” that Company I’s equipment would prove reliable and durable enough for military use, and that other Marine companies would be adopting renewable technology in the coming months, although there would probably always be a need to import fuel for some purposes.

While setting national energy policy requires Congressional debates, military leaders can simply order the adoption of renewable energy. And the military has the buying power to create products and markets. That, in turn, may make renewable energy more practical and affordable for everyday uses, experts say....

"Philippine coral reefs - in hot water"

2010-09-24T22:05:00.003-04:00

The Philippine Star:

Imagine taking a dip in a hot spring for 10 to 30 minutes — what a relaxing thought! But imagine being in a hot spring for several hours, or even days — that certainly would not be good for your health. That is the situation our coral reefs find themselves in. Since last May, the water temperature of the western Philippines (from Luzon to the Visayas, Palawan and Mindanao) has been 2 to 3°C above normal. The abnormally high water temperature is killing plenty of coral.

What is coral bleaching?

At first glance, coral simply looks like either a rock (if it is hard coral which has an outer skeleton made of limestone) or a plant (if it is soft coral which does not produce a limestone skeleton). But actually, coral is a colony of tiny animals called coral polyps. Each coral polyp can roughly be described as having a body (that looks like your wrist and hand pointing up) with tentacles (which look like your fingers) and a mouth (imagine a hole in the center of your palm). Living inside the body tissue of each coral polyp are microscopic plants (called “zooxanthellae”). These tiny algae produce nutrients for the polyp. The coral returns the favor by providing the algae with a place to live. Algae come in a rainbow of colors. It is the algae living inside the coral, which give color to the coral.

When corals are severely stressed, these are forced to release the algae living in their tissues. This is a last ditch effort by the corals to save themselves. Without the algae, corals lose their color and turn white, hence the term “coral bleaching.”

For corals, “bleaching” means not just a change in their color, it also means they are already in a life-or-death situation. (Please note that when coral is newly bleached, it is not yet dead. If the source of stress is removed and if not too much time has passed, it may still be possible for the coral to recover.)

Latest findings

In 1998, a significant bleaching killed over 90 percent of the corals in 19 percent of coral reefs worldwide. For the past few months, scientists from the University of the Philippines-Marine Science Institute (UP MSI) and De La Salle University’s Br. Alfred Shields Marine Station have gathered data indicating that a massive bleaching event may be unfolding in our seas. Dr. Perry Aliño of the UP MSI says that up to 75 percent of our corals may be severely affected. This is a worrisome scenario because we have so few healthy reefs left, according to Dr. Al Licuanan of the DLSU. His studies show that if major bleaching events occur every 10 years, then in 50 years, only 11 percent of our corals will remain. If major bleaching was to occur more often (i.e., every five years), only one percent of our corals will remain after 50 years. Recent analyses involving many local scientists show one third of all coral species worldwide now are more likely to go extinct because of climate change and local impacts.

Much to lose

Bleaching has a huge negative impact, not only on coral but also on man. If coral bleaches and is unable to recover, then it dies and becomes covered with long tufts of algae. Residents of the diverse marine community, whose lives revolve around the coral reef, disappear. Small fish which feed either on the coral or on algae disappear, together with the bigger fish which feed on them. Shrimps, crabs, starfish, sea cucumbers, squids, sea snails, etc. have to leave the dead reef. Ultimately, the local community suffers because fish catch is greatly affected, together with income from tourism. According to Mags Quibilan of UP MSI, the bleaching event of 1998 resulted in an income loss of $15 million for the El Nido area in Palawan.

We can help

• Report sightings of bleached coral to the Philippine Coral Bleaching Watch on Facebook.

• To give coral as much chance as possible to recover from the high temperature of the ocean, reduce the other sources of stress for coral, such as:

• Sedimentation – Soil that goes into the ocean as a result of agricultural run-off, coastal development, and mining kills coral.

• Pollution – Corals need clean and clear water.

• Destructive fishing methods – overfishing, blast fishing, cyanide fishing

• Garbage – Please do not throw litter into the sea, no matter how small. You would be surprised how many candy wrappers and sachets of shampoo are found on top of corals. These smother and kill corals.

• Diver damage – To scuba divers: as much as possible, please avoid touching or stepping on corals.

• Support the creation and better management of more Marine Protected Areas (MPAs) — Coral bleaching has affected all reef areas, including MPAs, but better recovery has been observed in MPAs compared to unprotected sites.

Deformed Fish on Athabasca River (Canada)

2010-09-20T20:47:00.002-04:00

From the Tyee.ca:

Given the regularity with which fisherman now catch deformed fish, Schindler suggested that a federally funded fish health study on the Athabasca River "should be a much higher priority [for Ottawa] than funding hockey rinks and new fighter jets." Aboriginal communities and leaders downstream of the oil sands have been calling for such studies for nearly a decade.

Of 27 whitefish, burbot and northern pike recently collected by Robert Grandjambe, a resident of Fort Chip, seven had deformities, lesions, curved spines and bulging eyes. No reliable data exists on the actual percentage of deformed fish being caught downstream from the oil sands. But it may range from two to 20 per cent, says Schindler....

Ladouceur, who has been fishing commercially for 53 years on the lake and has lost eight family members to cancer, said, "I never saw deformed fish in my younger days. We've been trying to get some help to figure this out."

"We are human beings. Alberta Premier Ed Stelmach treats his dogs better. Sorry to say, but we need help."

Toxic brew identified by scientists

Many industrial sources now pollute the Athabasca River, including pulp mills, agricultural run-off, abandoned uranium mines and municipal waste. But two studies published in the prestigious Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) have also shown that industrial air pollution and watershed destruction directly caused by the oil/tar sands has contaminated the river with heavy metals and petroleum compounds called polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs).

However, both Ottawa and the Alberta government, which are dependent on oil sand taxes and royalties, claim that all the pollution in the river is naturally occurring based on proprietary data collected by an industry-funded group.

Yet a 2009 study by David Schindler and Erin Kelly found that oil sands air pollution now blackens the snow with thousands of tonnes of bitumen particulates and PAHS during the winter within a 50 kilometre radius of the industry upgraders, resulting in an annual 5,000 barrel oil spill on the river during spring run-off.

Last month another study by Erin Kelly and David Schindler showed that air pollution and watershed destruction by the oil sands industry directly adds a rich brew of heavy metals including arsenic, thallium and mercury into the Athabasca river and at levels up to 30 times greater than permitted by pollution guidelines. Many heavy metals can increase the toxicity of PAHs.

Furthermore several studies have also found high levels of PAHs in six billion barrels of oil sands mining waste (enough to stretch to the moon and back 12 times) now stored in huge dams covering an area larger than the city of Vancouver...

Fish can absorb PAHS from water and sediment via their gills, skin and stomach. Different PAHs can cause totally different diseases and deformities in different fish species, including cataracts, tumors of the skin and liver, weakened immune systems, deformities, bile duct cancers and heart troubles.

PAHs can persist and behave in unexpected ways. A 2003 high profile study in the journal Science found that weathered oil from 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill, including PAHs, continued to poison and affect the lifespan of fish and sea otters at sublethal levels more than a decade later. Long term PAH exposure not only stunted the growth of young pink salmon embryos, for example, but decreased their lifespan by 50 per cent.

"Land of dead fish"

2010-09-20T10:41:00.003-04:00

_______________These dead fish were found in a Louisiana bayou that was affected by oil from the BP spill but it is not known what killed them in such numbers.

REUTERS - FISH carcasses from a massive fish kill in the Bayou Chaland area of Plaquemines Parish, Louisiana, are shown in this handout photograph taken last Friday and released on Wednesday.

The cause of the deaths has not yet been determined, but the area the carcasses were discovered in was affected by oil from the Gulf of Mexico oil spill. Among the dead fish were pogie fish, redfish, shrimp, crabs and freshwater eels.

On Wednesday, BP chief Tony Hayward defended the company's safety procedures as British MPs grilled him over the oil spill.

Mr Hayward said the spill - the worst environmental catastrophe in US history - was 'devastating' to him personally but denied that there had been any cost-cutting at the energy giant in the run-up to the accident....

"Melting sea ice forces walruses ashore in Alaska"

2010-09-14T13:14:00.002-04:00

AP-Tens of thousands of walruses have come ashore in northwest Alaska because the sea ice they normally rest on has melted.
Federal scientists say this massive move to shore by walruses is unusual in the United States. But it has happened at least twice before, in 2007 and 2009. In those years Arctic sea ice also was at or near record low levels.

The population of walruses stretches "for one mile or more. This is just packed shoulder-to-shoulder," U.S. Geological Survey biologist Anthony Fischbach said in a telephone interview from Alaska. He estimated their number at tens of thousands.

Scientists with two federal agencies are most concerned about the one-ton female walruses stampeding and crushing each other and their smaller calves near Point Lay, Alaska, on the Chukchi Sea. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is trying to change airplane flight patterns to avoid spooking the animals. Officials have also asked locals to be judicious about hunting, said agency spokesman Bruce Woods.

The federal government is in a year-long process to determine if walruses should be put on the endangered species list.

Fischbach said scientists don't know how long the walrus camp-out will last, but there should be enough food for all of them.
During normal summers, the males go off to play in the Bering Sea, while the females raise their young in the Chukchi. The females rest on sea ice and dive from it to the sea floor for clams and worms.

"When they no longer have a place to rest, they need to go some place and it's a long commute," Fischbach said. "This is directly related to the lack of sea ice."....

Women's Suffrage

2010-09-13T23:19:00.010-04:00

Suffragists marching down 5th Avenue in 1917_____________

I recently noticed an article in Science magazine that suggested people's feelings about equality were determined in part by how wealth was distributed. So if you were a male who lived in a place where males inherited and kept family wealth you would essentially grow up figuring that was normal. Like Nietzche and his Master/Slave idea - if you were on the master side - you may likely find a way to justify that (as he did) while those on the powerless side would more than likely find fault with the unequal set-up.

I have a set of 1911 Encyclopedia Britannicas (this volume has also been posted online). I was noticing the section on "Women". It discusses the rights and lack there-of of women. In 1910, mothers were responsible for support of any illegitimate children up to the age of 16, while fathers of legitimate children had custody rights unless the father's were guilty of some sort of misconduct. Women were prevented from inheriting real estate if there were any male heirs. Husbands could get divorced if their wives had sex outside of marriage, but women could not if their husbands did, unless the husband was also cruel or deserted them.

Being written in 1910, women's suffrage was a hot topic. A Quaker by the name of Anne Kent of Chelmsford is credited with starting up the "Sheffield Female Political Association" - getting the movement off the ground in England in the 1850s. Soon after, Lydia Ernestine Baker created the "Englishwoman's Journal". There was agitation to change laws relating to married women's property and earnings. Some also fought for the rights of unmarried working women. (In The USA, the first woman's suffrage convention was held in 1848 in Seneca Fall, NY with Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Martha C. Wright and Lucretia Mott (Wright and Mott and many others in the group were "radical Quakers"). Here, again, property rights were part of the issue.)

John Stuart Mill was known for making Women's Suffrage an Election issue in England. He is also known for his book, "The Subjection of Women." He was a proponent of individual rights over state rights, including the rights of people who were then slaves, as well as the rights of women (while others were arguing that women and blacks were inferior). Mills idea of utilitarianism has been called the "greatest-happiness principle" - that people should act so as to produce the greatest happiness for the greatest number of people, within reason. Early in his career he was a free-market economist - but refined his ideas and became more socialist in outlook. Mills recognized the problem of the tyranny of the majority.

The Britannica article about women suggested as an example of the argument against women's suffrage A.V. Dicey's 1909 article ""Woman's Suffrage" in Quarterly Review (can be found online). Dicey argued that women getting the vote would be bad for Great Britain. He was afraid women would vote against the interests of the empire. He didn't think women had the education or judgement to vote. He was afraid it would lead to women having equal rights. Dicey was also worried that with women getting the vote, that all men would also get the vote. So instead of the vote being cast by male property owners (app. 7,000,000), it would be open to 20,000,000-24,000,000 people. The power of the then current voters would be drastically diminished.

Dicey also did not recognize that men and women might have different interests or concerns.

Dicey, of course, is a prime example of someone with disproportionate power who wanted to maintain the inequality that favored himself. John Stuart Mill would also have benefitted from inequality, but he is an example of someone who can see what is truly the best course of action to take, as opposed to that which is merely the best for himself and those with his education and status. He was also able to see and understand that there is value in the natural world and that unlimited growth of industry, etc. would result in the destruction of the environment and a reduced quality of life.

There were, of course, various anti-suffrage groups such as the Women's National Anti-Suffrage League which submitted a petition to the English Parliament in 1907 with 87,500 names against women's suffrage, but it was discovered to be fraudulent. The Catholic Encyclopedia c. 1912 recommended that Catholics support the anti-suffrage movement. As the 1911 Britannica states, "Though Christianity and a broadening of men's theories of life tended to raise the moral and social status of women, yet Paul definitely assigns subservience as the proper function of women, and many of the fathers looked upon them mainly as inheriting the temptress function of Eve."

It is no coincidence that Quakers who are non-hierarchical in their religious practices have been more likely to push for social changes addressing equal rights for all, as opposed to people of other denominations that maintain a rigid hierarchy and male dominance. Elizabeth Cady Stanton found organized Christianity to be too sexist and she would not participate. She was more radical than even the "radical Quakers."

The isolation of every human soul and the necessity of self-dependence must give each individual the right to choose his own surroundings. The strongest reason for giving woman all the opportunities for higher education, for the full development of her faculties, her forces of mind and body; for giving her the most enlarged freedom of thought and action; a complete emancipation from all forms of bondage, of custom, dependence, superstition; from all the crippling influences of fear — is the solitude and personal responsibility of her own individual life. The strongest reason why we ask for woman a voice in the government under which she lives; in the religion she is asked to believe; equality in social life, where she is the chief factor; a place in the trades and professions, where she may earn her bread, is because of her birthright to self-sovereignty; because, as an individual, she must rely on herself [...].

- Elizabeth Cady Stanton's final appearance before members of the United States Congress in 1892. She died in 1902.

In England, women over the age of 30 got the vote in 1918; providing they were householders, married to a householder or if they held a university degree. Universal suffrage for all adults over 21 years of age was not achieved until 1928. In the USA, women got the right to vote in 1920. This November's election marks a mere 90 years that women have the right to vote in the US.

Some contemporary women leaders include (from an article in Time): Julia Gillard, Prime Minister of Australia; Johanna Sigurdardottir, Prime Minister of Iceland; Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, President of Argentina; Dalia Grybauskaite, President of Lithuania; Angela Merkel, Chancellor of Germany; Sheik Hasina Wajed, Prime Minister of Bangladesh; Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, President of Liberia; Tarja Halonen, President of Finland; Kamla Persad-Bissessar, Prime Minister of Trinidad and Tobago; Laura Chinchilla, President of Costa Rica

Contaminated Shellfish (As you would expect)

2010-09-09T20:39:00.003-04:00

From The Epoch Times:

By any normal examination, nothing seemed off. The oil couldn’t be seen or smelled, but lab tests on the oysters and soil showed the contaminant levels were through the roof.

“We didn’t see anything unusual. That was kind of the disturbing part when we got the results back,” said Lower Mississippi River Keeper Paul Orr, from the Water Keeper Alliance.

Orr went to several sites in the Gulf of Mexico with a team of researchers to take samples of the soil, plants, and sea life. The team has results from two locations and is still waiting on the rest. “When the numbers came back, I was quite surprised they were so high,” Orr said.

What they were looking for were polynuclear aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs)—carcinogenic contaminants from the BP oil spill. Since PAHs carry a kind of fingerprint, BP can be traced as the source of some of the contaminated areas.

“We did find it in large quantities in the soil sediment, as well as in vegetation and organisms—oysters and some in the crabs,” said Wilma Subra, a MacArthur Award-winning chemist who conducted the tests.

Subra said that other contaminants were found along with the PAHs, and “we’re not talking parts-per-million or parts-per-billion.” “It was there in substantial concentrations. If you had to test it to determine whether or not that area would be applicable to being harvested, those concentrations were way over the concentration you would ever even consider.”

The team is waiting for results from fish and shrimp samples. Among the team are members of the Gulf Oil Disaster Recovery, Water Keeper Alliance, and the Louisiana Environmental Action Network.

Many of the locations were investigated following tips from local fishermen who said they could see or smell oil in the areas.

Some Mississippi state waters were reopened to commercial fishing last month. FDA Commissioner Margaret Hamburg released a statement on Aug. 2, saying, “We are confident all appropriate steps have been taken to ensure that seafood harvested from the waters being opened today is safe and that Gulf seafood lovers everywhere can be confident eating and enjoying the fish and shrimp that will be coming out of this area.”

Subra said she is concerned that, based on her latest findings, there could still be problems. “They are apparently not testing nearly as many organisms as we would like, and apparently they are not testing in all the areas where we are finding the visual residual oil,” she said.

In some areas, plants were still covered in oil, and a sheen could be seen on the soil. She shared her hope that the findings will lead to further studies into whether the seafood in the Gulf is safe. Other sites have been horrific. Among them was a small island where the ground was littered with dead and dying birds.