environment
pharyngula | October 2, 2007I wrote of my fondness for salmon the other day, and now I learn of a strange and rather satisfying coincidence: Larry Craig was an enemy of the salmon.
The surprising fall of Sen. Larry Craig, R-Idaho, removes a longtime obstacle to efforts by Democrats and environmentalists to promote salmon recovery on Northwest rivers.
Craig, who was removed from leadership posts on the Senate Appropriations and Energy committees after a sex scandal, is known as one the most powerful voices in Congress on behalf of the timber and power industries. Environmentalists have fought him for years on issues from…
j7uy5 | September 26, 2007The government, finally getting wise,
has installed
href="http://www.plenglish.com/Article.asp?ID=%7BA602DDD6-4C6E-413C-8299-F951DBA7CC0C%7D&language=EN">100
stations to measure wind velocity in 32 areas. The
idea tis to get a map of available resources for the generation of wind
power, specifically with the intention of reducing dependence on
foreign
oil.
There is already a demonstration project with 1.67MW wind generators.
This
particular demonstration project is expected to supply about
10WM by the middle of next year.
It is located east of Havana.
scientificactivist | September 25, 2007Storm World: Hurricanes, Politics, and the Battle Over Global Warming
by Chris Mooney
Harcourt: 2007, 400 pages.
Buy now! (Amazon)
At 2:09 am on September 13, 2007, Hurricane Humberto made landfall just east of Galveston, Texas--still the site of the deadliest natural disaster in US history, the Galveston Hurricane of 1900. With maximum sustained winds of 85 mph, though, Hurricane Humberto was just a Category 1 storm (the weakest category on the Saffir-Simpson Scale). While it was the first hurricane to make landfall in the US since the record-breaking and devastating 2005 hurricane…
j7uy5 | September 18, 2007Courtesy of
rel="tag">NASA, we have this pair of images
illustrating the record
growth rate of
href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hurricane_Humberto_%282007%29">hurricane
Humberto (2007):
From
href="http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Newsroom/NewImages/images.php3?img_id=17773">Earth
Observatory Newsroom:
Though it was not a powerful storm,
Hurricane Humberto did set a record when it formed in the Gulf of
Mexico and came ashore at the Texas–Louisiana state line in
mid-September 2007. According to National Hurricane Center records, no
storm has ever developed to hurricane…
voltagegate | September 17, 2007About a century and a half too late for John Franklin, I'm afraid.
The fact that the sea ice is melting in and around the NW Passage is not news; scientists have been following that progression for many years now, which according to this PR from ScienceDaily has been measured at a average rate of 100,000 square kilometers lost per year. The big news here is that the very latest results are in: the Passage has lost one million square kilometers of sea ice cover just last year. It is currently at its lowest level since the original satellite assessment in the 1970's.
According to a spokesman…
grrlscientist | September 17, 2007tags: oekologie, blog carnival
I am late noting this, but the 9th edition of the Oekologie blog carnival has been available for you to read since Saturday. So go there and be sure to read their linked stories -- there's lots there for you to read and appreciate.
grrlscientist | September 17, 2007tags: earthquakes, tsunamis, geology
I carefully follow the news of Indonesia and other places in the South Pacific Ocean because that's where my research birds come from. So I was listening to radio reports of the recent spate of Sumatran earthquakes with great concern, worried that yet another tsunami would result. But as I listened to these reports, I noticed something else that was unusual; the reporters referred to multiple earthquakes occurring in the region, rather than one quake that was preceeded by foreshocks and followed by aftershocks. So of course, I had to ask the resident…
voltagegate | September 15, 2007Sarda has some great posts for this months edition, perfect with a cup of coffee on a cool Saturday morning.
revere | September 15, 2007I spend some of my time working with citizen groups from contaminated communities. There are a frightful number of them in the United States, as there are everywhere. The stories are frequently heartbreaking and the polluters heartless. So it's good to remind myself that things could be worse. A lot worse. In fact the US is much better off than most other countries in the world, including European countries when it comes to a polluted environment. The main reason government environmental protection regulations. I'm not saying they have done the job they need to do, and under the Bush…
j7uy5 | September 14, 2007The Guardian Unlimited has a provocative
article on the role of
endocrine disruptors in increasing the ratio of girl babies to boy
babies in the Arctic.
I've written about the topic before (
href="http://scienceblogs.com/corpuscallosum/2007/02/endocrine_disruptors.php">1
2)
as have
href="http://scienceblogs.com/terrasig/2007/02/lavender_and_tea_tree_oils_may.php">Abel
and
href="http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2006/12/satans_perfect_food_tofu.php">PZ.
James Hrynyshyn, on Island of Doubt, has
already commented on
the Guardian article:
href="http://scienceblogs.com/…
revere | September 11, 2007When smoking bans in public places were first broached, some of the fiercest opposition came from bar and restaurant lobbyists who predicted it would be their ruination. In March of this year 2006 Scotland instituted a ban and the rest of the UK on July 1. What's the verdict so far? If you read the business news, you might be a bit confused. Here are five headlines about pub chain, JD Weatherspoon:
Wetherspoon sales slump on smoking ban (TimesOnline)
Wetherspoon Says Pub Sales Growth Slowed After Smoking Ban (Bloomberg)
Wetherspoon warns on smoking ban (Daily Telegraph)
Wetherspoon cautious…
voltagegate | September 10, 2007Bill Moyers wrote a piece about surface mining the other day, talking about a recent change to the policy in 2006:
The proposed new rule codifies the 2004 buffer zone proposals and, according to THE NEW YORK TIMES, "seems specifically to authorize the disposal of 'excess spoil fills,' a k a mine waste, in hollows and streams."
THE NEW YORK TIMES in reporting the proposed changes stated: "The Office of Surface Mining in the Interior Department drafted the rule, which will be subject to a 60-day comment period and could be revised, although officials indicated that it was not likely to be…
voltagegate | September 10, 2007
Perhaps the best fair in all of Western PA is the Somerset Historical Society's Mountain Craft Days, which finished up yesterday, under the threat of looming rain clouds. Fortunately, we didn't need to break out the umbrellas this year (nor did I break out the camera - I forgot it, sadly).
It's set on the SHS's ground outside of the town, and is more or less a showcase of the cream of local artisans selling their wares, combined with demonstrations of how people lived in the 18th Century Appalachians - they have replicas of cabins, cooking & laundry methods, musicians playing period…
mikethemadbiologist | September 4, 2007Over at Shifting Baselines, there's an interesting discussion of a question that economist Steven Levitt asks: why are we eating so much shrimp? Unfortunately, the way the question is phrased--is it supply or demand--ignores the history of another crustacean craze. Lobster.
It's hard to believe, in an era where lobster is a gourmet delicacy, that it was once viewed as equivalent to eating vermin (think 'sea cockroach'). In seventeenth and eighteenth century Maine, enlightened legislators passed laws prohibiting the provision of lobster to slaves, servants, and wards. Consequently,…
voltagegate | September 4, 2007Tim Caro from UC Davis and Paul Scholte from Leiden University wrote a "policy piece" , a sort of editorial in the September issue of the African Journal of Ecology, bringing up some surprising trends regarding the decline of antelope populations within national parks. We hear enough about poaching outside of the parks certainly, but this is news to me. Conservation efforts may need some tweaking.
Of late, antelope have been doggedly tracked - by air, through scat sampling, etc. - due to insufficient data in the past and their reduced numbers are revealing three anthropogenic, "proximate"…
j7uy5 | September 4, 2007IBM is launching
href="http://linuxgazette.net/142/lg_bytes.html">Project
Big Green. Part of the initiative is to consolidate
operations in the world's largest data centers. They will
replace nearly 4,000 servers with 30 refrigerator-sized
System
Z mainframes, running Linux, using virtualization technology.
This will reduce energy usage by about 80%, saving about $250
million per year.
What's more, the consolidation will leave plenty of room for
future expansion.
face="Times New Roman, Times, serif">Tesla Roadster
The University of New Hampshire is going to
href="http…
clock | September 1, 2007Beautiful green lawn that covers up the water shortage, kills all insects and irritates the asthmatics!
clock | September 1, 2007Chaoslillith alerts:
Environmentalists Challenge Political Interference With 55 Endangered Species in 28 States, Seek to Restore 8.7 Million Acres of Protected Habitat Across the Country:
The Center for Biological Diversity today filed a formal notice of intent to sue the Department of the Interior for political interference with 55 endangered species in 28 states. The notice initiates the largest substantive legal action in the 34-year history of the Endangered Species Act.
At stake in the suit is the illegal removal of one animal from the endangered species list, the refusal to place three…
pharyngula | August 31, 2007This sounds so familiar. A few years ago, a historian of science, Naomi Oreskes, reviewed the literature on climate change and concluded that there is a unanimous consensus in the published work that anthropogenic carbon is a major contributor to global warming. Now a denialist has re-analyzed those papers and is saying that Oreskes was wrong : almost half of the papers are "neutral", neither supporting nor refuting anthropogenic change, while 6% do reject the idea.
I say this is familiar because I see papers published all the time that have the word "evolution" in the title, use evolutionary…