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IN TODAY’S RADIO REPORT: Confirmed yet again: 2010 hottest year on record so far; Fossil fuel death toll still rising … PLUS: The three-month mark of the BP Oil Disaster in the Gulf, and all the oily mess that goes with it … All that and more in today’s Green News Report!
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IN ‘GREEN NEWS EXTRA’ (see links below): CA’s pioneering e-waste program a model gone wrong; ‘Climategate’ debate a polite, well-mannered affair; Geoengineering can’t please everyone!; CBO: Corn based ethanol a waste of taxpayer money; What cap? Dems’ climate word war; If Cap-And-Trade dies, is an energy bill still worthwhile?; Senators press for taxpayer loans to rare earth metals projects; Environmental groups on the rise in China … PLUS: Scientists baffled by unusual upper atmosphere shrinkage …
STORIES DISCUSSED IN TODAY’S ‘GREEN NEWS REPORT’…
- 2010: STILL the Hottest on Record, Again:
- June was the hottest on record, says NOAA: What’s more, March, April, and May 2010 were also the warmest on record. (Christian Science Monitor)
- Last month was the hottest June recorded worldwide, figures show: NASA climate data suggests 2010 on course to be warmest year since records began (Guardian UK)
- Antarctic cold snap kills nine in Argentina: A spell of extreme cold weather has brought ice and snow to much of Argentina, killing at least nine. (BBC)
- Argentina braces for more frigid temperatures: Buenos Aires records its lowest temperatures in a decade (CNN)
- HONDA to introduce 2 Plug-In Electric Models:
- Honda to sell plug-in hybrid, electric cars in 2012: Global competitors from Volkswagen AG (VOWG_p.DE) to Hyundai Motor Co (005380.KS) are preparing to launch strong hybrid models that are more fuel-efficient than Honda’s “mild” hybrids such as the Insight, while also readying battery-run cars. (Reuters)
- Fossil Fuel Death Toll Rises Again:
- 2 bodies found in flooded China mine that traps 11 (AP):
Separately, an explosion late Sunday at a coal mine in northeastern Liaoning province killed four workers and injured 13 others, who were in stable condition, Xinhua said.
On Saturday, 28 miners were killed when an electrical cable caught fire inside a coal shaft in northern Shaanxi province. There were no survivors. The fire happened at the privately owned Xiaonangou coal mine in Sangshuping town.
….
In another accident Saturday, eight workers died when a blaze engulfed a coal mine in central Henan province, Xinhua reported. - 30 killed, 13 trapped in separate Chinese mine incidents (LA Times)
- Eight held after clash at China mine: state media (AFP)
- Environmental groups in China: A new generation of climate-change activists (The Economist)
- The LATEST in the BP Oil Disaster in the Gulf:
- BP Considers New Plan to Permanently Seal Well: As scientists on Monday allayed concerns that BP’s well in the Gulf of Mexico was damaged, the company said it was considering an alternative plan that could permanently seal the gusher sooner than had been anticipated. (NYT Green)
- >Gas seeps not necessarily a problem, because pressure in oil well rising, officials say (NOLA.com)
- BP’s Photoshopped Command Center Just The Latest In A Pattern Of Deception (Huffington Post Green)
- BP’s Secret Ticket Request Line: Want free passes to NBA games and concerts? Just call the world’s most hated oil company. (Mother Jones)
- Secret BP hotline doles out event tickets to lawmakers (SF Gate)
- BP photoshops fake photo of crisis command center, posts on main BP site (Americablog)
- BP fakes another oil spill photo, this time of ‘top kill’ exercise (Americablog)
- Actual Size of Gulf Disaster Still Unknown (Kate Sheppard, Mother Jones):
Yet even after three months of leaking, we still don’t have a solid estimate of how much oil was escaping the well for all that time. The official government flow-rate team last released an estimate on June 15, leaving the range of possible estimates quite large: from 35,000 barrels per day up to 60,000. But with the well now closed in, might we never get an accurate idea of how much oil has been dumped in the Gulf?
- The ‘Super Skimmer’ That Wasn’t (NYT Green)
- Rig had 390 past-due repairs, BP lawyer tells Coast Guard panel (Houston Chronicle)
- Along the Gulf: Seafood prices soar due to oil spill: (USA Today)
- Bush Official Gail Norton on MMS Sex, Meth and Oil: What’s the Big Deal? (Mother Jones)
- BP buys up Gulf scientists for legal defense, roiling academic community: For the last few weeks, BP has been offering signing bonuses and lucrative pay to prominent scientists from public universities around the Gulf Coast to aid its defense against spill litigation. (Mobile Press-Register)
- WATCH: Rachel Maddow Show: BP Tries to Buy Gulf Coast Scientists: (MSNBC):
- Animal Autopsies in Gulf Yield a Mystery: Sifting a range of suspects as Gulf wildlife dies (NY Times)
- BP’s Deepwater Oil Spill – Should the Oil Flow Restart? (The Oil Drum)
- MMS investigations of oil-rig accidents have history of inconsistency (Washington Post):
Until now, 60 inspectors were tasked with investigating all types of incidents. Between 2006 and 2009, those included 30 worker deaths, 1,298 injuries, 514 fires and 23 blowouts that left wells out of control. They conducted 378 investigations in the gulf in roughly the same time period, with 21 considered worthy of more rigorous and extended scrutiny by a panel.
…
MMS levied financial penalties 154 times in the past five years, agency officials testified last month. Although the agency now may assess fines of up to $35,000 per day, in five years it collected only $8.5 million. Its largest fine between 2000 and 2009 was $697,500, according to an MMS Web site. - Will BP spill taint Cameron’s U.S. visit? (Reuters)
- BP Lobbied Brits Ahead of Lockerbie Bomber Release: BP confirmed today that it had lobbied the British government in late 2007 over a prisoner transfer agreement with Libya prior to the release of Lockerbie bomber Abdel Baset al-Megrahi. (AOL News)
- David Cameron to meet with US senators over Lockerbie bombing: David Cameron is slated to meet today with four US senators regarding reports that oil giant BP had a hand in the release of Abdel Baset al-Megrahi, the only person convicted in the 1988 Lockerbie bombing that killed 270 people. (Christian Science Monitor)
- BP to sell assets to pay for spill (Reuters)
- “Two Stories” of Gulf Seafood: News reports tread the line between confidence and caution (Columbia Journalism Review)
- After Oil Spills, Hidden Damage Can Last for Years (NY Times)
- As Oil Industry Fights a Tax, It Reaps Subsidies (NY Times)
‘GREEN NEWS EXTRA’ (Stuff we didn’t have time for in today’s audio report)…
- California’s pioneering e-waste program a model gone wrong: By paying more than $320 million to collect and recycle computer monitors and televisions, the state has built a magnet for fraud totaling tens of millions of dollars, including illegal material smuggled in from out of state. (Sacramento Bee)
- Climategate’ debate: less meltdown, more well-mannered argument: Polemical and partisan characterises the climate debate online – but at last night’s Guardian debate there was courteousness and a distinct warmth in the air (Guardian UK)
- Geoengineering can’t please everyone: Adding aerosols to the atmosphere will not counter global warming in all regions. Attempting to offset global warming by injecting sunlight-reflecting gases into the upper atmosphere isn’t the quick fix for global climate change that advocates believe it might be, a new study finds. (Nature)
- CBO: Corn based ethanol: a waste of taxpayer money (Daily Kos)
- What cap? Dems’ climate word war: Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid played dumb last week when a reporter asked him if the energy and climate bill headed to the floor would come with a “cap” on greenhouse gas emissions.
- If Cap-And-Trade Dies, Is An Energy Bill Still Worthwhile? (The Vine)
- Senators press Energy Dept. to back rare earth metals projects: A bipartisan group of senators is pressuring the Department of Energy (DOE) to issue loan guarantees for projects that expand domestic supplies of rare earth metals, which are critical to alternative energy projects and now come largely from China. (The Hill)
- Environmental groups in China: A new generation of climate-change activists (The Economist)
- Scientists baffled by unusual upper atmosphere shrinkage (CNN):
An upper layer of Earth’s atmosphere recently shrank so much that researchers are at a loss to adequately explain it, NASA said on Thursday.
The thermosphere, which blocks harmful ultraviolet rays, expands and contracts regularly due to the sun’s activities. As carbon dioxide increases, it has a cooling effect at such high altitudes, which also contributes to the contraction.
But even these two factors aren’t fully explaining the extraordinary contraction which, though unlikely to affect the weather, can affect the movement of satellites, researchers said.
“This is the biggest contraction of the thermosphere in at least 43 years,” John Emmert of the Naval Research Lab was quoted as saying in NASA news report.
Maddow’s Soprano’s clip actually reminds me of the search for a 5th Circuit Court judge and the district court in New Orleans who has not been “contaminated” by the oil cartel.
Sounds like Tony Soprano’s lawyers have a higher ethical standard for recusal than the likes of Judge Martin Feldman.
I’ve chased the news and politics for a few years now.
Nov 30-Dec 1 last year I reached the end of my rope on the Iran scam. By that I mean I had followed the back-and-forth between the USA and Iran and picked up with some calls from offside that all was not right with the media presentation of ‘the way things are.It didn’t matter what CIA or IAEA said or how many promises were made about giving Iran a new deal and a fair shake…nothing changed in the position of hammering Iran over their nuclear program…just like Iraq. We know how that worked out. Zilch. Nada.
And it finally jelled that it was stupid. What nation in their right mind is going to undertake a program proving they have no inconvenient surprises for invaders unless they are vehement in their conviction that nuclear arms must be controlled ?
Makes no sense. Worse, they are getting fuel and tech from a neighbour who has proved in the past it has no sense of ha ha about nuclear arms in their back yard. Cuban Missile Crisis is a phrase that usually rings most peoples’ chimes.
So I ran a search on the parameters “the U.S. Suspects”, playing with it in different engines to see what shook loose.
A weird one showed up. Dec 1 at My Opera, and Dec 4 at Blogger, Opit’s LinkFest! was running articles on the damndest strange hoax I had ever seen. And I was finding confirmation from online and correspondence from a science writer that science itself was being scammed. Not that what Cheney had done to parks and the environment didn’t already stink to high Heaven. Staff there had complained of errant b.s. Even the Smithsonian was ringing with stories of false and spun reporting of science stories.
So I guess I was prepped a bit to remember stories from the 70’s that flat contradicted the media’s “Conventional Wisdom” about Global Warming.
Don’t get me wrong. Climate Change is something I would have expected after reading stories years ago about how current climate is a historical anomaly in being moderate. If your baseline is atypical, change is almost guaranteed.
Not that it would be the first time.
Remember political framing ? Strawman Argumentation and Poisoning the Well Argumentation ; debater’s tricks of False Logic ?
What else would you call a deal where if you disagree with the story you are told you are a ‘Denier’ ? Couldn’t run a better frameup if one was discussing Pagans by calling them some made up or inappropriate word as a pejorative. Atheism and Agnosticism are religious comparative terms for those outside the narrow channel of Theocracy.
Calling umpteen tribes ‘Indians’ as if they were one people works wonders for promoting ignorance. The same noise is promoted today in Afghanistan.
That’s what we have here. Except, like politics, where you have two war parties offering ‘ a choice’, you get two politically motivated pressure groups engaging in a public melee sure to confuse, prejudice and disarm intelligent evaluation.
I haven’t seen a better job done on UFO’s.
Anyway. I collected a bunch of articles and sources to muse over the mess. A lot of it is very convincing. And then silly stuff appears, like this atmospheric collapse being exaggerated by the cooling effect of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Say what ?
Or the list of factors and unknown effects that buggers what would be an extremely complicated model even without acknowledging little things like nobody knows how to deal with albedo changes from clouds and heat transfer from the major mechanism doing so : water circulation in liquid and air in various vectors and states. Simplifying that so you can calculate it is not something you can prove works for making projections in any timeline we’re likely to employ, let alone validating the computational model.
It gets worse. It’s a real brouhaha in fact, including the fact that money is perverting testimony : and that’s something alleged by the ‘establishment’ itself…as if that was a one-sided phenomenon.
opitslinkfest.blogspot.com is where you will find ‘Climate in Contention’ in the Topical Index. And no : I did not collect stories promoting one view. It’s enough to start to appreciate that a staged show is in progress.
Well, first off, Opit, you’ll be glad to learn that the ‘global cooling’ story from the 70s that is constantly recycled by deniers is actually a myth:
The supposed “global cooling” consensus among scientists in the 1970s “” frequently offered by global-warming skeptics as proof that climatologists can’t make up their minds “” is a myth, according to a survey of the scientific literature of the era.
…
Thomas Peterson of the National Climatic Data Center surveyed dozens of peer-reviewed scientific articles from 1965 to 1979 and found that only seven supported global cooling, while 44 predicted warming. Peterson says 20 others were neutral in their assessments of climate trends.
The study reports, “There was no scientific consensus in the 1970s that the Earth was headed into an imminent ice age.
Unlike today, where climate scientists and earth systems scientists are nearly unanimous. So you can drop that one.
Secondly, you are conflating journalists and politicians with scientists. Journalists (“science writers”) and politicians are not climate scientists; as non-scientists, their attempts to communicate their understanding of the current state of climate science can be inadequate, inarticulate and even downright inaccurate.
To understand the scientific data on climate change using actual scientific data from qualified scientists in an easy-to-understand format, go to SkepticalScience.com for the full debunking.
What you’re really talking about is the how non-scientists understand and communicate the scientific evidence. The actual scientific evidence is a better basis for your evaluation.
You said:
No, only one of the parties has the objective scientific fact to back it up. The earth’s atmosphere is warming far, far faster than at any time in geologic history — even the “skeptic” scientists like Lindzen don’t dispute that fact — only how much humans contribute to it. What you’re talking about is the policy response to the scientific evidence of climate change — “politically motivated pressure groups” can’t change the objective scientific data, only challenge the interpretation of that data and the government’s policy response to it. With billions of dollars in profits for the fossil fuel industry threatened by any policy change away from their products (trillions in profits if you count the manufacturing, industrial, and agricultural sectors), there is huge incentive to keep things just as they are, especially when those profits depend on being allowed to pollute for free, forever. Spending millions to protect your billions works.
Again, go to SkepticalScience.com and you’ll find a treasure trove of actual science upon which to base your evaluation.