Tag Archives: blue marble

Is it Obama? Is it Gore? No! It’s the Green Ninja!

by HarralGeidl697 Posted on January 22, 2013

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

President Obama’s high-profile statements about climate change in his inauguration speech—”Some may still deny the overwhelming judgment of science, but none can avoid the devastating impact of raging fires, and crippling drought, and more powerful storms”—will need to be backed by strong action if there’s any hope of dimming recent attacks on science in America’s classrooms.

The National Center for Science Education lists four new bills in the last week alone that have been introduced in state legislatures: two in Oklahoma, and one each for Missouri and Colorado. For example, House Bill 179, introduced in the Missouri House of Representatives on January 16, labels as controversial the teaching of “biological and chemical evolution;” Ditto for Colorado, which on the same day introduced House Bill 13-1089 (PDF) which also misrepresents global warming and evolution as questionable science.

No wonder Dr Eugene Cordero thinks climate change needs a superhero. Bam! Enter the Green Ninja, the not-very-talkative martial arts master who whips up all sorts mayhem to teach young minds about carbon footprints, energy-saving strategies and gas guzzling leaf blowers, a kind of climate-bent Captain Planet, for a younger generation.

Cordero—both the creator of Green Ninja and a climate scientist at San Jose State University—has already created a series of videos and lesson plans for teachers. And they are now looking to the crowd on the popular funding website Kickstarter for more cash to produce a 16-episode YouTube series, starting this Spring. At the time of writing, with just 10 days to go, the Green Ninja team has raised half of its stated $10,000 goal.

Link: 

Is it Obama? Is it Gore? No! It’s the Green Ninja!

Posted in GE, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , | Comments Off on Is it Obama? Is it Gore? No! It’s the Green Ninja!

Visit the Tiny Town Where Big Coal Will Meet Its Fate

by LeannqOsborn Posted on January 22, 2013

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

Last week Beijing saw its infamous smog thicken to unprecedented levels, driven largely by emissions from coal-fired power plants across China. In recent years coal from US mines has stoked more and more of these plants, in effect offshoring the health impacts of burning coal. This year, much of the US coal industry’s focus will be on pushing an unfolding campaign that seeks to dramatically ramp up the amount of coal we ship overseas.

Morrow County, Oregon, is a quintessientially green pocket of the Pacific Northwest. It’s capped by the Columbia River, which winds past the hipsters in Portland en route to the sea, often carrying schools of the salmon that have long been an economic staple for locals. But Morrow County could soon become a backdrop for the transformation of the US coal industry, if a planned loading zone for massive shipments of coal—harvested in the Powder River Basin in Montana and Wyoming, and packed into Asia-bound cargo ships—gets final approval.

Right now, local, state, and federal lawmakers are hammering out the details in what is unfolding as one of the biggest climate fights of 2013.

Chart by Tim McDonnell

The Port of Morrow, where coal would be transferred from inland trains onto outbound river barges in the small town of Boardman, is just one of five proposed new coal export terminals now under consideration in Oregon and Washington. If built, the terminals could more than double the amount of coal the US ships overseas, most of it bound for insatiable markets in China, India, South Korea, and a suite of other Asian nations.

It’s the next giant leap forward for the US coal industry, which has in recent years turned increasingly to the East as domestic demand dwindles and Obama-era clean air regulations make it next to impossible to build new coal-burning facilities at home. But Big Coal’s ability to sell its wares overseas is increasingly bottlenecked by maxed-out export facilities, most of which are on the Atlantic-facing East Coast, anyway, better situated for shipments to Hamburg than Hong Kong. So, says Brookings Institute energy analyst Charles Ebinger, building the new West Coast terminals could be a matter of life or death for US coal.

“There’s a lot of coal in the domestic market that can’t be utilized,” Ebinger says. “The Asian market is the fastest-growing coal market in the world. If we wish to continue to export coal these terminals are very important… whatever volume of coal we could export would find a market.”

Continue Reading »

Read this article – 

Visit the Tiny Town Where Big Coal Will Meet Its Fate

Posted in GE, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , | Comments Off on Visit the Tiny Town Where Big Coal Will Meet Its Fate

With Warming, Soil Releases More CO2… Though Less Over Time as Microbes Adapt

by BayalaHillesland628 Posted on January 20, 2013

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

Study plots at the Harvard Forest Long-Term Ecological Research site in Massachusetts where researchers have been warming two areas with underground cables to simulate a warmer climate. The photo shows a January thaw on a 50°F day. The heated plots melted before the unheated ones: Alix Contosa, postdoctoral researcher at University of New Hampshire

Warmer temperatures from a warming climate force the release of carbon dioxide from soils into the atmosphere, driving even more climate warming. That’s the bad news. The good news is that the effect diminishes over time—over 18 years, and counting. This according to a new paper just published in Nature Climate Change.

We know that microorganisms in the soil release 10 times the CO2 that humans release on a yearly basis. These soil processes are normally kept in check by plants, which uptake C02 from the atmosphere. But a warming climate is driving changes in the carbon cycle.

Model soil bacteria: pmecologic via Flickr

To examine how that might be unfolding on at least one patch of our planet—the Harvard Forest Long-Term Ecological Research site in Massachusetts—the researchers warmed two plots with underground cables, one plot for two years, the other for 18. They then measured the efficiency of soil organisms in utilizing food sources that come from plants. Here’s some of what they found:

In the two-year scenario, warming temperatures drastically reduced the efficiency of soils to utilize complex food sources (specifically phenol) from decomposing wood and leaves by 60 percent.
In the long-term scenario, where soils were warmed to 9°F (5°C) above ambient temperatures for 18 years, the soil microorganisms regained some efficiency—suggesting that warmed soils might eventually release less CO2 than otherwise predicted.

Why the change? The authors hypothesize that long-term warming may change the community of soil microorganisms to become more efficient. Perhaps the composition of the species changes, or the original species adapt, or the availability of various nutrients changes, or some or all of the above.

“While they’re low on the charisma scale soil,” says lead author Serita Frey, at the University of New Hampshire, “soil microorganisms are so critically important to the carbon balance of the atmosphere.”

(Thanks microorganisms!)

These findings could lead to critical changes in the way the carbon cycle is predicted, since common ecosystem models don’t factor in the temperature response of the microbial community. “There is clearly a need for new models that incorporate an efficiency parameter that is allowed to fluctuate in response to temperature and other environmental variables,” says co-author Johan Six, at the University of California, Davis.

In the video, author Serita Frey describes her long-term work with soil.

The paper:

Serita D. Frey, Juhwan Lee, Jerry M. Melillo, and Johan Six. The temperature response of soil microbial efï¬&#129;ciency and its feedback to climate. Nature Climate Change. DOI: 10.1038/NCLIMATE1796

Link – 

With Warming, Soil Releases More CO2… Though Less Over Time as Microbes Adapt

Posted in GE, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , | Comments Off on With Warming, Soil Releases More CO2… Though Less Over Time as Microbes Adapt

Friday Downer: BPA Substitute Is Still Bad For You

by f45 Posted on January 18, 2013

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

Years of research have found evidence that Bisphenol A—also know as BPA—is making humans fat and anxious, screwing with our ovaries, and making us develop tumors in our breasts and brains. Those findings have prompted regulators in the US, Canada, and the European Union to ban BPA in baby bottles (though other products still contain it). But new research published this week in the journal Environmental Health Perspectives indicates that a major chemical substitute isn’t much better.

BPA creates problems when it leaches into foods and liquids, since inside the human body it mimics estrogen and screws with your endocrine system. Given the ever-growing body of evidence that it’s bad for you, manufacturers have been looking for BPA substitutes. One of those newer substitutes is Bisphenol S. While it is less likely to leach from the plastic when it comes in contact with heat or sunlight, it can still leach into food and liquids under normal use. This most recent study, conducted with rat cells, found once it got into their bodies, Bisphenol S behaved much like BPA. Like BPA, BPS also disrupts the endocrine system, making cells signal, grow, and die in ways they shouldn’t.

Study co-author Cheryl Watson, a professor in the biochemistry and molecular biology department at the University of Texas, notes that both BPA and BPS can have a large impact even in small doses, much like hormones. “If hormones act that potently, it’s not much of a surprise that componds that mimic hormones act very potently,” Watson told Mother Jones.

Watson also suggested that there should be more testing of chemicals like BPS before they’re put into consumer products. She’s working with other biologists and chemists on an effort, called Tierd Protocol for Endocrine Disruption (or TiPED) to get the two branches of science to collaborate on this kind of testing. “Why not pretest chemical before someone does all the work and investment of putting them into a product, and then we spend the next 20 years fighting about it?” said Watson. “Think of all the money spent on lawsuits, human disease. There’s an awful lot of societal expense in regulating these products after they are introduced.”

View article – 

Friday Downer: BPA Substitute Is Still Bad For You

Posted in GE, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , | Comments Off on Friday Downer: BPA Substitute Is Still Bad For You

TSA Dumps Porno Airport Scanners. Good Riddance!

by iscciaglewstrone123 Posted on January 18, 2013

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

Image from a backscatter X-ray airport scanner, of the kind that will be gone from all US airports by June: US Dept of Homeland Security via Wikimedia Commons

By June those X-ray-emitting, full-frontal-and-full-backside-exposing airport scanners will be gone, the Transportation Security Administration announced today. The reason: Rapiscan, their maker, can’t meet the software requirements to block the naked view of travelers for a more generic one.

David Kravets at Wired Blog writes of another potential (and potentially more ominous) reason for the ban—falsifying test data:

The announcement comes three months after Rapiscan came under suspicion for possibly manipulating tests on the privacy software designed to prevent the machines from producing graphic body images.

The European Union has already banned backscatter X-ray scanners over health concerns… worries that most X-rays are received by one of our more supersensitive organs: our skin. I wrote about that here and here.

TSA removed 76 of the X-ray scanners from busier airports last year and will dump the remaining 174 by June, reports Bloomberg. Although all those porno scanners are destined for government agencies across the country. Sorry, federal employees.

Meanwhile in US airports TSA will continue to deploy the (presumably safer) millimeter wave technology scanners made by L-3 Communications, which has mastered generic-outline imaging.

Personally, I’m just glad I won’t have to get to the airport extra early anymore to make the extra long wait for an extra special pat down.

More:  

TSA Dumps Porno Airport Scanners. Good Riddance!

Posted in GE, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , | Comments Off on TSA Dumps Porno Airport Scanners. Good Riddance!

Why You Should Be Optimistic About Renewables, In One Chart

by dig1iti43 Posted on January 18, 2013

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

When it comes to America’s energy future, it seems like all we ever hear about these days is natural gas. To hear the deafening outcry over fracking, to see the flares of North Dakota’s drilling boom twinkling in space, you’d think we’d gone ahead and set every other type of power production to low simmer on the backburner. Turns out, it just ain’t so. The latest update from the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, an independent government agency that regulates interstate electricity trading, reveals that in 2012 wind was the fastest-growing energy source, adding a full seven percent more megawatts than natural gas. Dig it:

Chart by Tim McDonnell

Continue Reading »

Continued here – 

Why You Should Be Optimistic About Renewables, In One Chart

Posted in GE, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , | Comments Off on Why You Should Be Optimistic About Renewables, In One Chart

Farewell, Obama’s "Green Dream Team"

by 7GrittonMaine146 Posted on January 18, 2013

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

Another member of President Barack Obama’s cabinet is on his way out the door. On Thursday night, Bloomberg News reported that Energy Secretary Steven Chu is planning to leave the Obama administration. The Nobel Prize winner plans to announce his intentions next week, according to sources “familiar with the matter.”

Chu came to Washington from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California, where he served as director. He’s a nerd’s nerd—a guy who does physics problems for fun and continued to bike to work in Washington (at least when the Secret Service would allow him to). He has been an advocate of a better energy policy and expanded government investment in research and development in his post at the department. But he often found himself stymied by the politics and bureaucracy of Washington, as The New Republic chronicled last year. He also found himself on the hot seat when the solar company Solyndra went bankrupt shortly after receiving a $528 million loan guarantee from the DOE.

With Chu’s departure, there will be only one person left from Obama’s original “Green Dream Team,” a term environmental groups endowed upon the president’s appointees to key departments. Green jobs guru Van Jones is long gone. Climate “czar” Carol Browner resigned two years ago, and the special post created for her was dissolved a few months later. Jane Lubchenco, the head of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, has said she plans to depart in February. EPA head Lisa Jackson also announced her plans to leave the agency at the end of December. And earlier this week, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar signaled that he, too, is signing off. Meanwhile, the change of leadership at the State Department—with John Kerry likely taking over for Hillary Clinton—is expected to shape our international climate policy as well as key decisions like the fate of the Keystone XL pipeline.

That leaves only one of President Obama’s original “green” appointments in place (at least as far as we know right now)—Council on Environmental Quality Chair Nancy Sutley. This is pretty significant, as the appointees on in these posts have pretty major roles in shaping environmental policy. The administration keeps saying that climate and energy will be an important issue in the next term, but there’s no question that a change of leadership in all the key agencies will impact what happens in the next four years.

See original article:

Farewell, Obama’s "Green Dream Team"

Posted in GE, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , | Comments Off on Farewell, Obama’s "Green Dream Team"

Ontario Cares Aboot Coal

by 1LymSlagter473 Posted on January 17, 2013

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

Ontario, Canada’s most populous province, will become the first jurisdiction in North America to boot coal completely out of its energy mix, the province’s Minister of Energy, Chris Bentley, announced last week. By the end of 2013, Ontario will shutter 17 of its 19 coal-fired power plants, leaving less than one percent of the province’s energy mix provided by coal, and close the last two next year, a decision Bentley says was fueled by concern about global climate change and local health.

The phase-out has been coming down the pipeline since 2003, and it’s already paying off: Canada’s Pembina Institute found that greenhouse emissions from Ontario’s energy sector fell by 30 million tons in the last decade.

The move is made somewhat easier by the fact that Ontario was never a major coal addict to begin with: In 2011, less than three percent of its total power generation came from coal; that same year in the US, the share was 42 percent. And part of what has tended to make coal so intractible in the US—thousands of jobs on the line—is a non-issue for Ontario, which never had its own coal mining industry, importing most of its supply from the US, Bentley said. The province, although a net electricity exporter, also imports a little of its power from adjacent US states and Canadian provinces; a spokesperson for Ontario’s Independent Electricity System Operator said they had no way to know whether any of the imported power came from coal-fired plants.

Ramping down coal over the last several years has given Bentley time to shore up other energy resources to fill the supply gap, including a booming wind industry—which more than tripled in the last five years—and, like in the US, a growing dependency on natural gas.

Down here south of the border, although our appetite for coal is waning, industry lobbyists and GOP pols from states like West Virginia are raising hell, and we’re still pretty far from zero. And even though the US has its own unique challenges in confronting coal compared to Ontario, Bentley says he learned one thing from his experience cutting it out that can apply to his US counterparts: “There are far more people who are supportive than the critics would like you to believe.”

From – 

Ontario Cares Aboot Coal

Posted in GE, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , | Comments Off on Ontario Cares Aboot Coal

Pet Fish Could Give You Freaky Antibiotic-Resistant Skin Diseases

by trasze2aja Posted on January 16, 2013

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

Have a freshwater fish tank at home? Stop petting Nemo and Wanda for a minute, and take a deep breath. Ornamental fish in the US, many of which come from Asia, are hosting antibiotic-resistant bacteria which could spread diseases to their human owners, a new report put out by researchers at Oregon State University reveals.

“The range of resistance is often quite disturbing,” the authors wrote in their report, which was published in the January edition of the Journal of Fish Diseases. “Imported ornamental fish are commonly colonized with bacterial species of potential human and animal harm.”

The researchers examined 32 freshwater fish, including common household species like neon tetras, cory catfish, and flame gouramis. They found that the fish, which came from Colombia, Florida and Singapore, had antibiotic-resistant bacteria that could potentially spread to humans, including Staphylococcus, which causes Staph infections of the skin; Aeromonas, which gives you stomach flu symptoms; and a type of Mycobacterium that causes skin lesions (not to be confused with the kind that breeds tuberculosis.)

The fish were most resistant to the antibiotics Tetracycline, which is used to treat infections like chlamydia in humans, and Bactrim, which is often used to treat women’s urinary tract infections and bronchitis. The authors point out in the report that “this is not surprising considering the widespread use of these classes of antibiotics in the ornamental fish industry.” However, the researchers also found that the fish were resistant to some antibiotics that aren’t commonly used. “We don’t know why that is, it could be industry testing that’s going on somewhere,” Tim Miller-Morgan, a veterinary aquatics specialist with Oregon State University who co-authored the report, told Mother Jones. The report notes that frequent and unregulated use of antibiotics is a growing problem in the ornamental fish industry, which is worth about $900 million.

But there is good news: Miller-Morgan says that “the overall risk to human from these infected fish is low,” although he suggests that individuals who have compromised immune systems consult their doctors, and people with open wounds refrain from cleaning their fish tanks. “You just need to be aware,” he says. “I wouldn’t stop keeping ornamental fish.”

But if, after reading this report, you’re hell-bent on getting rid of Goldy and Phish, you can always copy what the scientists did: Kill them “via decapitation followed by exsanguination” and then cut out their kidneys.* “This is the quickest, most humane way to kill the fish,” given that “results can be compromised when an anesthetic is used,” Miller-Morgan says.

This is why I’m not a biologist.

*Please don’t actually do this to your pets.

Visit site:

Pet Fish Could Give You Freaky Antibiotic-Resistant Skin Diseases

Posted in GE, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , | Comments Off on Pet Fish Could Give You Freaky Antibiotic-Resistant Skin Diseases

Atomic Scientists: Humans Still Pretty Close to Self-Annihilation. Drink!

by u60uurf Posted on January 15, 2013

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

Last year, the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists moved the minute hand on its “Doomsday Clock” one minute closer to midnight. This year, the group of scientists decided to keep the symbolic timepiece at 11:55, signaling that its members don’t believe things are getting any better when it comes to global annihilation.

The clock, which has been around since 1947, was created to symbolize the threat of nuclear power, but now also represents other man-made threats to humanity.

Back in 2010, the group was optimistic, as it elected to set the clock back by one minute. But this year the group says that the world has been consumed by economic threats, to the detriment of other pressing issues like nuclear proliferation and climate change. Members of the BAS wrote a letter to President Barack Obama citing those concerns, and asking him to “partner with other world leaders to forge the comprehensive global response that the climate threat demands, based on equity and cooperation across countries.” They wrote:

2012 was the hottest year on record in the contiguous United States, marked by devastating drought and brutal storms. These extreme events are exactly what climate models predict for an atmosphere laden with greenhouse gases. 2012 was a year of unrealized opportunity to reduce nuclear stockpiles, to lower the immediacy of destruction from weapons on alert, and to control the spread of fissile materials and keep nuclear terrorism at bay. 2012 was a year in which—one year after the partial meltdown at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station—the Japanese nation continued to be at the earliest stages of what will be a costly and long recovery.

The group also noted that Obama’s next term provides another opportunity to address these issues:

“We have as much hope for Obama’s second term in office as we did in 2010, when we moved back the hand of the Clock after his first year in office,” said Robert Socolow, chair of the Science and Security Board at BAS. “This is the year for U.S. leadership in slowing climate change and setting a path toward a world without nuclear weapons.”

See more here: 

Atomic Scientists: Humans Still Pretty Close to Self-Annihilation. Drink!

Posted in GE, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , | Comments Off on Atomic Scientists: Humans Still Pretty Close to Self-Annihilation. Drink!