Category Archives: Environment

Depression 2.0 upside: Fur goes out of season

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Better times ahead. CC/Ron Dunnington

Better times ahead. CC/Ron Dunnington

It’s hard to say whether next year’s Massachusetts Trappers Association fur sale will be a bust, but things have already turned ugly for Renfro, deep in the heart of Texas.

Renfro is a pest control guy who eats his kills, and sells the pelts. Nothing goes to waste. makes shows him to be a real hunter, at least.

Renfro, 46, is the first cog in the many-layered, $15 billion global fur industry, one that is caught in the steel jaws of the global economic downturn.

via Luxury downturn hits U.S. beaver trappers | Reuters.

Country living will kill you

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University of South Carolina

Image: University of South Carolina

Hurricanes and other “superstorms,” reputedly caused by man-made global warming, are not the big killers you might think they are.

Rather, seasonal heat and cold are the biggest natural hazards, according to a new, U.S. “death map” created by University of South Carolina geographers.

The highest mortality levels are in rural areas, the study found.

I can see the wheels turning over at Agenda 21 Central: This map helps make the case that people need to be packed closer together…

From the abstract:

Chronic everyday hazards such as severe weather (summer and winter) and heat account for the majority of natural hazard fatalities. The regions most prone to deaths from natural hazards are the South and intermountain west, but sub-regional county-level mortality patterns show more variability. There is a distinct urban/rural component to the county patterns as well as a coastal trend. Significant clusters of high mortality are in the lower Mississippi Valley, upper Great Plains, and Mountain West, with additional areas in west Texas, and the panhandle of Florida, Significant clusters of low mortality are in the Midwest and urbanized Northeast.

via Abstract | Spatial patterns of natural hazards mortality in the United States.

WaterMill gadget: Not-so-cost effective?

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CC/Danny Barron

Photo: CC/Danny Barron

Some readers of my Boston Globe column today caught a glitch (and a few of those got their knickers twisted) over my thoughts about the WaterMill, a device that sucks drinking water out of the air.

Here’s one very reasonable remark, from “Dave-P-2“:

The WaterMill, although sounding like a good idea, costs $2,000 and takes 11.0 cents of energy to produce a gallon — up to three gallons per day.

I’m all for alternative energy sources, but Mark, do you really think this cool device “should take a bite out of the water bill for most families”?

via These retro phones won’t bust the budget – The Boston Globe

Touché. In my piece, I should have written, “bottled water costs.” But with the solar panel powering the WaterMill, which I do mention, you could theoretically begin making potable water for free.

I also understand that many people prefer the taste, the fluoride and the low costs they get with their municipal water supplies. They also trust the government more than themselves to provide clean water for their families.

Not likely: Engineers "Doing Well by Doing Good"

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CC Ed Schipul

(Do-gooders? Rice University Bioengineering Lab. Photo: CC Ed Schipul)

The engineering professional association IEEE reports that engineers are fairing well.

Good for them.

But to say they are “doing well by doing good” is laughable, generally speaking.

The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers cites technologists working on “solar energy and search engines, cellphones and fuel cells, DNA sequencing and Hollywood blockbusters,” as fairly pathetic examples of do-gooding.

The IEEE goes on in this bit (below) to admit that aerospace and defense, and consumer electronics, are actually the industries keeping engineers in good stead.

IEEE Spectrum: Engineers Are Doing Well by Doing Good
This rise in starting salaries would be even higher were companies not able to get young talent from such places as India, China, and Romania. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics projects that over the next decade, EE ­employment will grow much more slowly than other ­engineering areas, because of the job outflux to other ­countries.

Just breathing is bad for you

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The good news for smokers: You really are not alone. Everyone else is inhaling the same crap.

CC Djuliet / juliette

Photo: CC Djuliet / juliette

The harmful particles found at the ends of burning ciggies are filling the around us, but they are also coming from other sources. The scientist who discovered the new particles (which latch on to metallic nanoparticles), suggests they may be partially responsible for the deaths of a half-million Americans caused by air pollution.

“Metals, such as copper and iron, are the most likely to persist (in the air),” said the scientist, LSU professor Barry Dellinger (link, excerpt, below).

Newly detected air pollutant mimics damaging effects of cigarette smoke
Once PFRs are inhaled, Dellinger suspects they are absorbed into the lungs and other tissues where they contribute to DNA and other cellular damage. Epidemiological studies suggest that more than 500,000 Americans die each year from cardiopulmonary disease linked to breathing fine particle air pollution, he says. About 10 to 15 percent of lung cancers are diagnosed in nonsmokers, according to the American Cancer Society. However, Dellinger stresses additional research is necessary before scientists can definitely link airborne PFRs to these diseases.

Live long and prosper? We might do neither

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Biotech body snatchers. A genetically “inferior” underclass. Increased terrorist attacks. Futurists will “make it so.“

(Marketing buzzword alert: “Futuring,” a verb, is the act of exploring of the future, according to those who do it. Photo: Futurist Thornton A. May flashes the three-finger “Sustainability Symbol.” More about this strange hand signal shortly. Credit: Dragonpreneur, under a Creative Commons license.)

from Mark:

A new book by a futurist and adviser to three U.S. presidents portrays a horrific near future scenario filled with body snatchers, a booming “neuromarket” for false memory implants, and a self-aware internet that rebels against humanity.

The author of “The Extreme Future,” James Canton, Ph.D. (below), was a student of Alvin Toffler, according to Publisher’s Weekly. He will be speaking at the U.S. Army War College this fall, at a conference aimed not at predicting, but shaping, the future.

“The goal of futuring (exploring the future) is not to predict the future but to improve it,” reads a quote from futurist Edward Cornish, on the U.S. Army War College’s website.

For more about how futurists plan our futures, see these blurbs and broadcasts by Alan Watt.

Bloggers from the military and intel communities are talking about the book. Here is an excerpt from one dot-mil blog:

(Dr.) Canton…includes “Top Ten” lists detailing everything from Energy Trends to Robo-Futures.

In THE EXTREME FUTURE, Dr. James Canton predicts that:

• The high cost of oil will force the West to invent new alternatives to oil and lead to depressed OPEC economies, leading to more terrorism against the West

• Radical life extension will create a two-class global society of those who live over 150 years and of those who cannot afford to

• The Internet will develop an awareness of itself and its own personality and rebel against human controls

• Human cloning will become the ultimate in identity theft

• A nuclear exchange between Pakistan and India is more likely then not

• Copy-cat products from Asia—from drugs to auto parts—will perform better then the original branded products they’re based on

• Radical life extension will reshape entire markets and society

• The new global Innovation Economy will deliver widespread prosperity and wealth

A dark New England day, 228 years ago

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Mizzou tree ring experts blame Canadian wildfires

from Mark:

George Washington’s diary notes a “dark day” on May 29, 1780, in the midst of the Revolutionary War. He wasn’t referring to a lost battle, or some other bad turn in the struggle against tyranny.

Rather, Washington was describing a mysterious midday darkening of the sky.

Colonists then, and one modern ebook author, saw the event as a terrifying sign from God:

A correspondent of the Boston Gazette and Country Journal (of May 29, 1780) reported observations made at Ipswich Hamlet, Mass., “by several gentlemen of liberal education:”

“About eleven o’clock the darkness was such as to demand our attention, and put us upon making observations. At half past eleven, in a room with three windows, twenty-four panes each, all open toward the southeast and south, large print could not be read by persons of good eyes.

“About twelve o’clock, the windows being still open, a candle cast a shade so well defined on the wall, as that profiles were taken with as much ease as they could have been in the night.

May 19, 1780 and some people in New England thought judgment day was at hand. Accounts of that day, which became known as ‘New England’s Dark Day,’

Scientists at the Missouri Tree-Ring Laboratory (I reckon they do a lot of counting there) now say it was wildfires in Canada that darkening the skies that day:

Mystery Of Infamous ‘New England Dark Day’ Solved By Three Rings
Limited ability for long-distance communication prevented colonists from knowing the cause of the darkness. It was dark in Maine and along the southern coast of New England with the greatest intensity occurring in northeast Massachusetts, southern New Hampshire and southwest Maine. In the midst of the Revolutionary War, Gen. George Washington noted the dark day in his diary while he was in New Jersey.

Zealots haunt environmentalist religion

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Global warming now a core “belief” among environmentalists, says Freeman Dyson

(Love your mother.)

from Mark:

Environmentalism is a secular religion that we can all get behind, physicist Freeman Dyson writes in the Times.

There is just one problem: The movement, Dyson argues, is run largely by non-scientists, and many of those believe that “global warming is the greatest threat to the ecology of our planet.” (See excerpt, below.)

Now any global warming skeptic is being labeled in popular culture as “an enemy of the environment.”

One transhumanist (or H+, short for human-plus) complains that many of his fellows have already bought into the global warming “dogma.” Follow the link, below, to see the comments to this blog post, at Sentient Developments:

Sentient Developments: Freeman Dyson on the ‘religion of environmentalism’ There is a worldwide secular religion which we may call environmentalism, holding that we are stewards of the earth, that despoiling the planet with waste products of our luxurious living is a sin, and that the path of righteousness is to live as frugally as possible. The ethics of environmentalism are being taught to children in kindergartens, schools, and colleges all over the world.

MIT's plug-in Porsche

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In MIT’s electric Porsche, I could reach my in-law’s Cape home in 39 minutes, and still have some juice left to take the kids out for ice cream.

Students at MIT’s Electrochemical Laboratory have stuffed this 1976 Porsche (right) with batteries, and are limiting their experiments to MIT parking lots.

One MIT grad student says the Porsche consumes the electrical equivalent of 65 miles per gallon.

MIT student ingenuity plus high-tech batteries yields advanced all-electric Porsche – MIT News Office
With a click and a hum, the sleek Porsche 914 pulled away from the curb while onlookers watched anxiously and the passenger gazed down at a laptop plugged into the dashboard.

Why the drama? Once powered by a conventional gasoline engine, the 1976 Porsche now operates on 18 high-tech batteries–the result of work by dedicated MIT students and their mentors.