Author Archives: turystycznypbs700

Pesticides are blowing into California’s mountains, poisoning frogs

by turystycznypbs700 Posted on July 30, 2013

Pesticides are blowing into California’s mountains, poisoning frogs

By John Upton

Shutterstock

Not all of the pesticide stays where it is sprayed.

Pesticides sprayed over farms in California’s Central Valley appear to be blowing up into the Sierra Nevada mountain range, where they’ve been found in the flesh of frogs in national parks.

Such farm chemicals are thought to be contributing to the ongoing decline of frogs and other amphibians in the Sierra. Mountain hikers used to need to take care to not step on frogs, but now the animals are difficult to find. Sierra amphibians help control insect numbers and provide food for birds and other wildlife, but their numbers are plummeting as they succumb to disease, habitat loss, and other environmental problems.

Researchers collected Pacific chorus frogs from Yosemite National Park, Lassen Volcanic National Park, Giant Sequoia National Monument, Stanislaus National Forest, and Lake Tahoe in 2009 and 2010. They reported in the journal Environmental Toxicology and Chemistry that chemical cocktails of fungicides, herbicides, and insecticides were found accumulating in frogs from each of the sites. None of the pesticides found by the scientists were sprayed close to where the frogs were captured, but all of the pesticides were used in the Central Valley.

“This is the first time we’ve detected many of these compounds, including fungicides, in the Sierra Nevada,” lead researcher Kelly Smalling said. “The data generated by this study support past research on the potential of pesticides to be transported by wind or rain from the Central Valley to the Sierras.”

From the paper:

The hypothesis that pesticides are one of many stressors responsible for amphibian population declines continues to present a challenge because of the large number of pesticides in use, the continual changes in pesticides used, and the difficulty in determining routes of exposures in the wild. …

Their close association with wetlands makes amphibians potentially more sensitive to pesticides because they are exposed to seasonal changes in pesticide use. Even if concentrations are not high enough to be lethal, sublethal effects such as decreased resistance to disease may affect amphibian populations.

John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who tweets, posts articles to Facebook, and blogs about ecology. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants: johnupton@gmail.com.

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Pesticides are blowing into California’s mountains, poisoning frogs

Posted in Anchor, Dolphin, FF, G & F, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Paradise, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Pesticides are blowing into California’s mountains, poisoning frogs

Reports of the Death of Peak Oil Have Been Greatly Exaggerated

by turystycznypbs700 Posted on July 24, 2013

Mother Jones

A week or so ago, there was a mini-flurry of blog posts announcing that peak oil was dead. Thanks to shale oil, tar sands, heavy oil, deepwater oil, and all the other kinds of oil that the peakists didn’t know about, the world was now practically drowning in the stuff.

The whole thing was very strange for several reasons. First, the peak oil community not only knows about all those kinds of nonconventional oil, its forecasts have always included them in minute detail. The question isn’t whether they exist, it’s when production declines in existing mature fields will outpace the modest amounts of new oil we’re getting from nonconventional sources and new drilling technologies. Second, the world isn’t drowning in oil. There’s no dispute that shale oil has ramped up over the past few years, but it’s added only a couple of million barrels a day to worldwide production and it’s likely to start declining pretty quickly (within five or ten years or so). It’s really not that big a deal on a global scale. Third, peak oil has never been only about the exact date that production of oil hits its highest point. It’s been about how long production will plateau; how steep the subsequent decline will be; how expensive it will be to extract nonconventional oil; and how much oil prices will spike up and down as demand bumps up permanently against supply limits.

Hell, a few years ago even the International Energy Agency‌—which historically had refused to acknowledge production limits even theoretically—finally admitted that peak oil was a reality. When you lose the IEA to the dark side, you really ought to just admit defeat.

That said, for the past few years I haven’t been following peak oil in minute detail. I’ve written occasional blog posts on related topics, but that’s about it. So I didn’t respond to the peak oil flurry because I no longer have detailed, up-to-date knowledge of where we are. However, Chris Nelder does, and he has a long blog post today that will bring you up to speed if you’re interested in the latest data. Pay particular attention to the distinction between “crude oil” and “petroleum liquids.” They’re both worth tracking, but they’re different things and they serve different needs. Liquids are useful for a variety of purposes, but if you want gasoline for your car, the only thing you care about is the supply of crude oil.

For what it’s worth (which isn’t much), I note that Nelder and I happen to agree on the overall shape of things: Crude oil production has been almost flat over the past decade, and the likely date of the overall global peak is sometime between now and 2020. After that, we’ll be in irrevocable decline.

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Reports of the Death of Peak Oil Have Been Greatly Exaggerated

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Video: I Was a Hit Man for Miguel Treviño

by turystycznypbs700 Posted on July 18, 2013

Mother Jones

This story first appeared on the Center For Investigative Reporting website.

When Rosalio Reta was 13, the leader of Mexico’s most violent drug cartel recruited him to be an assassin. Miguel Treviño, who was just captured by the Mexican marines, used American teenagers to carry out killings on both sides of the border.

Reta is now serving time in a Texas prison for one of the 30 killings he claims to have committed. He spoke to The Center for Investigative Reporting prior to Treviño’s arrest about the years he spent as a hit man for the leader of the Zetas. The interview is airing now for the first time.

Reta says he feels remorse and shame for the life he led as a killer. “It gets to a point where I can’t even stand myself,” Reta tells CIR. “It’s eating me inside little by little, and there’s nothing I can do or say to justify my actions.”

CREDITS:
Producer: Josiah Hooper
Co-Producer: Bruce Livesey
Editor: Angela Reginato
Senior Supervising Editor: David Ritsher
Associate Producer: Rachel de Leon
Intern: Andrew Nathan Bergman
Production Assistant: Owen Wesson
Voiceover Talent: Daffodil Altan, Marco Villalobos
Senior Producer: Stephen Talbot
Executive Producer: Susanne Reber
Archival images provided by Associated Press, Mexico attorney general’s office website, Mexico Interior Ministry

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Video: I Was a Hit Man for Miguel Treviño

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"White House Down": A Harsh Critique of The Military-Industrial Complex, Starring Sweaty Channing Tatum

by turystycznypbs700 Posted on June 28, 2013

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

White House Down
Columbia Pictures
129 minutes

“Ever heard of the military-industrial complex???” President James Sawyer (played by Jamie Foxx) asks his gun-toting protector John Cale (Channing Tatum), as the two hide in a White House elevator shaft. President Sawyer is explaining to Cale why he believes armed right-wingers have invaded and occupied the White House and begun frightening tourists and shooting government officials.

In the past few months, there’s been an emerging cinematic trend of destroying the White House. Just as 1998 saw the wide release of both Armageddon and Deep Impact, this year features the release of not one but two Hollywood action movies about terrorists miraculously overrunning the White House. In Olympus Has Fallen, starring Gerard Butler (released in March), a band of North Korean fanatics take over the West Wing—with the help of a Secret Service agent who betrays America because he’s fed up with globalization and Wall Street. In White House Down (released on Friday), it’s white, American-born, ultra-conservative lunatics—who do so with the help of a Secret Service agent who betrays America because President Sawyer isn’t being militaristic enough.

The film is directed by Roland Emmerich, whose sole purpose as a filmmaker is demolishing the White House, whenever he isn’t spreading scandalously awful lies about William Shakespeare. WHD is a mixed bag of B-movie pluses and minuses. There are moments when the dialogue is so laughably terrible and the bullet-riddled situations so wildly absurd that the scenes succeed on the merits of “so-bad-it’s-good.” But those moments are too often negated by tedious, sloppily choreographed action, and generic plot points designed to be taken way more seriously than they have any right to be. Emmerich’s unwillingness to commit to a delightfully trashy tone makes for an uneven action-comedy experience at best.

And the script, penned by James Vanderbilt, is one enormous pander to the most naïve impulses of your average dime-store liberal. The president’s agenda is defined by making peace with all the Arab, Muslim, and Persian world. After forging friendly relations with Iran’s new reformist leader, President Sawyer (most definitely a Democrat) announces in a legacy-defining speech the Sawyer Doctrine—which includes the withdrawal of every single American soldier stationed in the Middle East. He sets out to convince practically every country on the planet to sign a new peace treaty, and vows to take on the US’ out-of-control, conflict-hungry defense industry and its lapdogs in Congress.

War veteran and wannabe Secret Service agent Cale admires the president’s vision. But far-right gunmen who want to wage nuclear war against Iran do not, so they conquer the White House and start killing scores of innocents. Audiences might also notice that one of the deranged right-wing insurgents is a huge fan of a cable news network that’s clearly a stand-in for Fox News. As the henchmen round up the hostages, the American terrorist spots the network’s White House correspondent, played by an actor who physically resembles Fox’s Ed Henry. The terrorist proceeds to gush about how much he loves their Sawyer-bashing coverage, and how Ed-Henry-look-alike is basically the only truth-teller in the media.

Not to spoil the entire movie, but (spoiler alert) Jamie Foxx, Channing Tatum, and the liberals win the day, and the hawkish, Fox News-adoring, reactionary killers wind up either in jail or ripped to shreds by explosives and ammunition. It’s typical Hollywood liberalism with gigantic firearms.

Now here’s one of WHD‘s trailers, which makes the movie look far better—and much more dramatic—than it is:

White House Down gets a wide release on Friday, June 28. The film is rated PG-13 for prolonged sequences of action and violence including intense gunfire and explosions, some language and a brief sexual image. Click here for local showtimes and tickets.

Click here for more movie and TV coverage from Mother Jones.

To read more of Asawin’s reviews, click here.

To listen to the movie and pop-culture podcast that Asawin cohosts with ThinkProgress critic Alyssa Rosenberg, click here.

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"White House Down": A Harsh Critique of The Military-Industrial Complex, Starring Sweaty Channing Tatum

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