Tag Archives: Environment

Flash: Radiation really is bad for you

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No safe level. Photo: Jon Åslund/Flickr CC

Once again, it appears we need a “conspiracist” — in this case, the indefatigable Alan Watt — to remind us that the National Academy of Sciences long ago stated the obvious: That there is no safe level for radiation exposure.

Listen to the archive of Alan’s April 8 radio program (you’ll find it via the link, below), and re-remember your basic biophysics.

Alan always writes a wee poem to accompany his archive posts. Here’s a portion:

Power-Elite and Scientific Combination, Guaranteeing Life’s Ruination:

There’s Radiation Swirling Around Each Head

It Will Add Many to the Great Book of the Dead

Over Many Years Propagandists Will Shout, Blustering, Denying the Effects of Fallout

Whilst Elitists, Comfortable in City-Size Bunker

And the Common Fearful in Cellars Hunker…

via Cutting Through the Matrix with Alan Watt – Clearing the rubbish from the road to reality.

“Garbage wars” to threaten stability in developing nations, futurists say

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Some states make so much garbage, they’re shipping it to other states.

But now Pennsylvania, South Carolina and Louisiana are limiting how much they will accept from places like New York.

And that trend is about to go global, according to the World Future Society, which predicts protests in the developing countries at risk of becoming garbage heaps for the “rich.”

Trash producers in the developed world will ship much more of their debris to repositories in developing countries. This will inspire protests in the receiving lands. Beyond 2025 or so, the developing countries will close their repositories to foreign waste, forcing producers to develop more waste-to-energy and recycling technologies. Ultimately, it may even be necessary to exhume buried trash for recycling to make more room in closed dump sites for material that cannot be reused. Waste-to-energy programs will make only a small contribution.

via 2011 Top Ten: 4. Will there be garbage wars in the future? | World Future Society.

Mysterious global warming "hiatus" blamed on sudden ocean cooling

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Photo: Steve Ryan/Flickr CC

Scientists don’t want us to get bogged down in the details — the ups-and-downs of global temperatures. The mercury is still rising, they say…

That is, except in large parts of the globe, and during certain decades:

“The suddenness of the drop in Northern Hemisphere ocean temperatures relative to the Southern Hemisphere is difficult to reconcile with the relatively slow buildup of tropospheric aerosols,” Thompson said.“We don’t know why the Northern Hemisphere ocean areas cooled so rapidly around 1970. But the cooling appears to be largest in a climatically important region of the ocean,” Wallace said.

via Sudden Ocean Cooling Likely Aided Mid-20th Century Global Warming Hiatus in Northern Hemisphere.

"Geek" plugs GMO foods in O'Reilly cookbook

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In “Cooking for Geeks: Real Science, Great Hacks, and Good Food’’ (O’Reilly, about $35), Jeff Potter blends boring recipes, such as those for garlic mashed potatoes and chocolate chip cookies, with punishingly detailed (even for many geeks, I imagine) discussions of the chemistry behind tastes and fragrances, and the importance of cooking things long and hot enough to prevent foodborne illnesses.

But at times the book reads like more than a cookbook whose author is benignly attempting to work-up a new angle.

In a weird tangent, Potter makes a backhanded pitch for foods made with genetically modified organisms.

“What if a strain of rice could be produced that was more resilient in the face of floods and droughts?’’ asks Potter, as if saying “no’’ to such a product would make you heartless to the needs of people in developing nations.

Potter calls the GMO issue “an intensely charged political and social minefield.’’

But as any geek will tell you, the GMO debate is also about science. And scientists have not yet even agreed on standards for assessing the safety of GMO foods.

A geek puts pots and pans next to his beakers – The Boston Globe.

BP's oil busting chemical not so bad for animals, kids,suggest feds

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EPA, NIH: Corexit 9500 might not be so bad for her, after all. Photo: Mark Baard/Flickr CC

EPA and NIH report that the most widely used dispersant (soap) being used to make big oil blobs into smaller ones in the Gulf of Mexico, is not an endocrine disruptor.

Corexit 9500, the currently used product, does not contain NPEs and did not show any ER activity. Cytotoxicity values for six of the dispersants were statistically indistinguishable, with median LC50 values 100 ppm. Two dispersants, JD 2000 and SAF-RON GOLD, were significantly less cytotoxic than the others with LC50 values approaching or exceeding 1000 ppm.

via Analysis of Eight Oil Spill Dispersants Using Rapid, In Vitro Tests for Endocrine and Other Biological Activity – Environmental Science & Technology ACS Publications.

Striking while the iron's hot: Heat waves common in coming decades, scientists announce

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Photo: Lucy Boynton/Flickr CC

The body forgets pain easily. Perhaps that’s why Stanford scientists are taking this opportunity to do a little imprinting.

The Stanford scientists — one of whom is now working for a US DOE lab — insist that heat waves “and other hot events” might be commonplace by 2039.

The researchers also determined that the hottest daily temperatures of the year from 1980 to 1999 are likely to occur at least twice as often across much of the U.S. during the decade of the 2030s.

“By the decade of the 2030s, we see persistent, drier conditions over most of the U.S.,” Diffenbaugh said. “Not only will the atmosphere heat up from more greenhouse gases, but we also expect changes in the precipitation and soil moisture that are very similar to what we see in hot, dry periods historically. In our results for the U.S., these conditions amplify the effects of rising greenhouse gas concentrations.”

via Heat waves could be commonplace in the US by 2039, Stanford study finds.

Childfree movement gets its greenwash

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Part of the problem. Photo: Alan Turkus

I am  sure that some in the childfree movement feel so self-conscious about their choice not to raise kids that they need, occasionally, to create a smug, in-your-face manifesto.

The latest missive from the childfree movement, which has been around since the 1960s, comes in awash in green.

Lisa Hymas, in an essay at Grist*, claims that humans who choose not nurture other humans are making an admirable choice for the planet, and their pocketbooks.

Hymas, a disciple of Al Gore and Stephanie Mills of the Post Carbon Institute (think about that one, for a moment), writes that being childfree is a “luxurious indulgence that just so happens to cost a lot less for me and weigh a lot less on the carbon-bloated atmosphere.”

Hymas does not avoids mentioning adoption, abortion or infanticide, issues that would have introduced some ethical complexity to the piece.

The green solution, according to a Grist editor and blogger.

Hymas also uses a hackneyed rhetorical technique — the false premise — to get her point across.

She suggests, without any supporting evidence, that people with kids typically look down on those who have none.

A link to HuffPo’s coverage of Hymas’ manifesto, is below.

via Ultimate Way to Go Green? Don’t Have Kids, Writer Lisa Hymas Says – AOL News.

*Note: I have written for Grist myself, about environmental issues.

Gulf oil spill a sucker punch to lazy science reporters

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The takeaway: Too many science journalists lack skepticism, and balls. — MB

Science reporters and bloggers are guilty of overstating the ability of microbes, nanobots and other technologies to prevent and to lap-up oil spills.

As a result, TV and Web viewers are being lulled into thinking there’s a fix for everything, including BP’s latest pooch-screw.

Here is the underlying problem: Rather than treating scientists and technologists as potential liars — as we are trained to do with pols, for example — we science journos typically treat our subjects with reverence.

To the science writer, I say, the next time any company puts a hard hat on you, and gives you the nickel tour of its facilities, wipe that look of astonishment off your face, and remember to ask, “Will this work?” “Is it safe?” “Where’s the documentation?” and “What if…?”

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There’s a stunning slide show, meanwhile, over at Boston.com. Here’s a snip from the text accompanying the images, via PuppetGov:

“While tracking the volume of the continued flow of oil is difficult, an estimated 5,000 barrels of oil possibly much more continues to pour into the gulf every day. While visible damage to shorelines has been minimal to date as the oil has spread slowly, the scene remains, in the words of President Obama, a ‘potentially unprecedented environmental disaster.’”

via The Big Picture: Disaster unfolds slowly in the Gulf of Mexico | PuppetGov.

What happens at a Rainbow gathering?

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Nine bucks to Flux will buy you some answers. — MB

Previous gathering. Photo: Alexander Konovalenko/Flickr CC

Journalist and videographer Flux Rostrum, whose work has appeared on Democracy Now and at other prominent outlets, operates the NOmadjik Media Bus — the green grease-burning rig that’s brought us stories from coal country and NOLA, to just about everywhere else that real news is happening.

This summer, Flux will be working with the Petrol-Free Gypsy Carnival Tour, and reporting from the anarchic Rainbow Gathering — a be-in with roots in the 1960′s, which is now threatened by police activity in US national parks.

Reporters such as those from Flux’s Mobile Broadcast News protect our freedom to congregate in our publicly-owned lands.

I’ve just added my $9 to the pool. Please join me!

“Donations will be used to subsidize the NOmadjik Media Bus which will be providing media assistance this summer to the Petrol Free Gypsy Tour in May and vital off grid media distribution infrastructure on the ground at the National Rainbow Gathering in June & July.”

via Mobile Broadcast News | Flux Rostrum’s Fundraiser on Crowdrise.

Welcome to the New World of the "Anthropocene"

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Force of nature. Photo: Ville Miettinen/Flickr CC

Scientists are wielding a nonscientific term in an effort to modify human behavior. — MB

Humans have wrecked the planet so badly in the past two hundred years — on an order of magnitude equivalent to meteor strikes, or tectonic plate shifts — that we’ve earned a place in the geologic record, a group of scientists say.

Led by the Nobel Prize-winning atmospheric chemist, Paul Crutzen, they write in the latest issue of Environmental Science and Technology (excerpt and link, below) that we are living the “Anthropocene Epoch,” in which humans are cracking ice sheets and wiping out vulnerable critters with their CO2 emissions and settlement habits.

Shockingly enough, Crutzen, who first came up with “Anthropocene” (New Human) ten years ago, admits the term is “informal and not precisely defined.”

In other words, Anthropocene is not a scientific term at all.

But that doesn’t mean that scientists can’t use the term to push an agenda:

“The concept of the Anthropocene might, therefore, become exploited, to a variety of ends. Some of these may be beneficial, some less so. The Anthropocene might be used as encouragement to slow carbon emissions and biodiversity loss, for instance; perhaps as evidence in legislation on conservation measures 31; or, in the assessment of compensation claims for environmental damage. It has the capacity to become the most politicized unit, by far, of the Geological Time Scale—and therefore to take formal geological classification into uncharted waters.”

via The New World of the Anthropocene1 – Environmental Science & Technology ACS Publications.