Human beings, who are almost unique in having the ability to learn from the experience of others,
are also remarkable for their apparent disinclination to do so.
Douglas Adams

The Gulf of Oil from Space on Day 75 -- Mother Jones

This Earth Observatory posted this image from July 4th of oil from the damaged Deepwater Horizon oil well off the Mississippi Delta. The MODIS on NASA’s Terra captured the natural-color image. The oil appears as an uneven light gray shape east-southeast of the delta.

~ ~ ~

BP: Putting the "Fun" in Dysfunction -- Mother Jones

Talk about creepy foresight meets dark humor: The UK Metro unearthed a 1970s board game marketed by BP, "Offshore Oil Strike." The game's tag line, "The thrills of drilling, the hazards and rewards as you bring in your own …" seems somewhat regrettable given the company's current situation.

Read on ...

Artist places sculptures on melting Arctic iceberg -- Reuters

Ap Verheggen, a 45-year-old artist from The Hague, said he had built the swirling metal sculptures, which represent a dog sled, to highlight the impact of a warmer climate on the Inuit people, who struggle to move around on thinning ice.

"The sea doesn't freeze. People can't trust nature anymore," Verheggen said, before the five meter sculptures were lifted by helicopter onto the iceberg.

"As an artist, I see it as a sort of mission to make people aware of what's happening over here."

Read on ...

Bees are busier than ever as disease besieges colonies -- Washington Post

In normal times, David Hackenberg would begin trucking his 20 million honeybees from the almond orchards of California to the orange groves of Florida this week.

Instead, after a month working the almond blossoms on the West Coast, his exhausted pollinators will get some rest and relaxation in the Georgia woods before the East Coast apple blossoms summon them to work once more next month.

These are not normal times for bees, or for commercial beekeepers, so Hackenberg's pollinators will skip the citrus gig to reduce their exposure to pesticides and get some rest. "Everybody is seeing [bee] losses this winter," said Hackenberg, of Lewisburg, Pa. "This was probably the worst year ever."

Read on ...

I am wondering how you ship 18,000 hives around? Thinking about this will undoubtedly keep me up late tonight!

Who Is to Blame for Global Greenhouse Gas Emissions? -- Scientific America

Global trade, outsourcing and climate change prove how interconnected economic and environmental problems are.

We're not just outsourcing jobs to China and India. We're outsourcing pollution. So says a new analysis of global trade published in the March 1 Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

According to scientists at the Carnegie Institution in Palo Alto, The analysis reveals that more than 2.5 metric tons of carbon dioxideare "used" by individual Americans per year but emitted elsewhere.

Read on ...

Air Pollution: It's Not Just Your Lungs That Suffer - US News & World Report

A growing body of research is shedding light on the ways that air pollutants impinge on the health of the American public. Indeed, the Environmental Protection Agency highlighted this concern in December when, after reviewing the evidence, it ruled that greenhouse gases are detrimental to human health, particularly because they can aggravate asthma and other respiratory illnesses and can produce longer, more intense heat waves that endanger the poor, sick, and elderly. But it's not just lungs that suffer.

To be sure, clean-air advocates have worked to improve the nation's air quality, and the health risks that a particular individual might face directly from breathing polluted air are low. But research consistently is finding that, when spread out over a given population -- be it residents of a certain city or those with a particular disease -- the quality of the air has a very significant impact on public health. When vehicles, factories, power plants, and other machines burn fuel, the chemicals they release into the atmosphere react with one another (and other compounds in the air) in ways that can amplify health hazards. "Greenhouse gases actually increase air pollution and therefore [raise the] potential for more adverse events for people with pre-existing respiratory conditions or heart conditions," says Kent Pinkerton, chair of the environmental health policy committee at the American Thoracic Society.

Read on ...

A week off the grid and in touch with energy -- CNET

There's nothing like living off-grid for a while to make you aware of your environmental and energy footprint. During a family vacation to Belize last week, I got a flavor for what's needed to function, albeit at a leisurely pace, when you're far beyond the reach of power lines.

... The most vivid environmental lesson came to me when we visited one of the islands, or cays, that pop out along the 240-mile barrier reef off the coast. Bringing power lines to a place that takes 35 minutes to get to by boat obviously doesn't make sense, so most of these types of resorts rely on diesel generators. Our location, by contrast, relied largely on solar power.

When Americans buy rooftop solar photovoltaic panels, the total output when the sun is shining is typically anywhere from 2,000 to 5,000 watts or more. But the individual cabins at this resort ran on just one or two solar panels, making maybe 200 to 300 watts. You could barely run a home computer and television with that much juice.

Read on ...

Are Green Power Programs a Scam? - Mother Jones

When a hawker at an Oregon farmers market urged Laura McCandlish—with a coupon for free veggies and a postcard with pictures of bucolic windmills—to sign up for her utility's green power program, she thought it sounded like a good deal: For a few extra pennies per kilowatt hour, her home's energy would come from local turbines instead of dirty coal plants. Right?

read on ...

The Potential for a 40-MPH Man - Wired

New research suggests the human body is capable of handling running speeds up to 40 miles per hour, if only our muscles could contract faster.

read on ...

Could Cars Have Contributed to Mortgage Meltdown? - Wired

Study of foreclosures in three cities finds those who don't have access to mass transit and are more dependent on the cars they own are more likely to default on their mortgage.

read on ...

Time to ban mountaintop mining due to externalized costs - Ars Technica

A new, comprehensive analysis of mountaintop removal mining, which is common in the Appalachian region of the United States, shows that its environmental effects extend to the hydrology of its surroundings, ruining streams and the ecosystems they support. Technically known as "mountaintop mining with valley fills" (MTM/VF), it consists of stripping away forests and topsoil from the tops of mountains and then using explosives to break through rocks that cover the coal inside the mountain. The resulting rocks are then pushed away into valleys, where they interfere with and often bury existing streams.

read on ...

Senator Demands IP Treaty Details - Wired

That a U.S. senator must ask a federal agency to share information regarding a proposed and "classified" international anti-counterfeiting accord the government has already disclosed is alarming. Especially when the info has been given to Hollywood, the recording industry, software makers and even some digital-rights groups.

read on ...

The decade's top 10 quotations - Salon

Before our country can move forward, we need to know how we got here in the first place. Here are a few clues .

read on ...

FTC reminds us that storing data in the cloud has drawbacks - ArsTechnica

The Federal Trade Commission worries that consumers don't really understand the privacy implications to storing some of their most crucial data in the cloud, and it wants the FCC to think about such issues when finalizing its national broadband plan.

read on ...

Kendall-Jackson to drastically cut water usage - CNet

Jackson Family Wines, known for its Kendall-Jackson label, has developed a process to reduce winery water usage by 70 percent.

A new system developed by Jackson Family Wines recycles and filters the hot water used for rinsing, losing only about 10 percent of that water in the process, the company said Tuesday. The system also retains 75 percent of the water's heat. As a result, the process also saves energy.

read on ...

IKEA is as bad as Wal-Mart - Salon
Everyone loves a bargain, but a new book illuminates the dangers of cheap stuff

My mother still owns, and uses, the same vacuum cleaner she bought early in her marriage, just after World War II. She still lives in the house my father -- not a carpenter by trade, but an electrician -- built in the early 1950s with the help of his brothers, a small but sturdy Cape Cod-style dwelling with hardwood floors and solid wood doors that close with a hearty, satisfying clunk (as opposed to the echoey click of hollow-core doors). Today the idea of anything -- a household appliance, a piece of furniture, a house -- being built to last is almost laughable. When your vacuum cleaner stops sucking, you most likely haul it out to the curb and trek to Target or a big-box home-goods store to replace it. Even if you could readily find someone to repair it, the trouble and the cost would be prohibitive. If you need a bookcase, there's always IKEA: Sure, you'd prefer to buy a sturdily built hardwood version that doesn't buckle under the weight of actual books, but who has extra dough to spend on stuff like that? The IKEA bookcase is good enough, for now if not forever.

That cycle of consumption seems harmless enough, particularly since we live in a country where there are plenty of cheap goods to go around. But in her lively and terrifying book "Cheap: The High Cost of Discount Culture," Ellen Ruppel Shell pulls back the shimmery, seductive curtain of low-priced goods to reveal their insidious hidden costs. Those all-you-can-eat Red Lobster shrimps may very well have come from massive shrimp-farming spreads in Thailand, where they've been plumped up with antibiotics and possibly tended by maltreated migrant workers from Burma, Cambodia and Vietnam. The made-in-China toy train you bought your kid a few Christmases ago may have been sprayed with lead paint -- and the spraying itself may have been done by a child laborer, without the benefit of a protective mask.

read on ...

The public trusts scientists - but not their conclusions - arstechnica

The public loves scientists, but it's not so pleased with conclusions that most scientists agree on, such as evolution and climate change. A new set of surveys explains this gap and hints at a widening partisan divide. A recent set of surveys performed by the Pew Research Center shows that the public generally supports scientific research and feels that scientists are valuable members of society, but finds that some of science's conclusions are widely mistrusted, and hints at a widening partisan divide.

read on ...

Well, Wired has created time-lapse video of NASA satellite photos that show "deforestation, urbanization and drought".

Live off the land -- in the city -- MSN

Wild greens, mushrooms, fruit and even fish and game can be harvested in America's urban jungles. Dandelion salad, anyone? Or some batter-fried squirrel?

Feeling squeezed at the supermarket? Maybe you should be looking for food in the parking lot, or in your neighbor's yard.

We're talking dandelions, feral mushrooms, gleaned fruit, local fish or even those wascally wabbits that overrun city greenbelts. Ingenuity plus a little sweat equity can put fresh, healthful food on the table and possibly provide other benefits as well: exercise, relaxation and a different way of looking at your neighborhood.

read on ...

Sludge Happens -- MotherJones

Sludge Happens Recycling sewage into fertilizer might be making us sick. Why doesn't the EPA give a crap?

more ...

The next plastics health scare is here -- ZDNet

The next plastics health scare is here Dana Blankenhorn: Now that you've dumped your old Nalgene bottle because of BPA, you're just in time for the next health scare involving plastics: phthalates, plasticizers used in medical tubing, dialysis bags, clothing and building materials. The charge? That phthalates are endocrine disruptors.

more ...

Global boiling - Salon

Some geologists say rising temperatures will uncork vast deposits of undersea methane. If they're right, we're cooked.

By now we all know what's in store for us if we continue on our emissions-happy path: increasingly hotter days, horrific droughts and floods, angrier storms, acidic ocean waters that will dissolve coral reefs, and a surging sea level that will swallow our coastal cities. Still, that scenario is a virtual sunny day by the pool compared to the cataclysmic climate picture being drawn by some scientists. Never mind carbon dioxide emissions. Let's talk about the vast stores of carbon hidden deep beneath our feet.

more ...

Clue to break-up of ice shelves -- BBC

US researchers have come up with a way to predict the rate at which ice shelves break apart into icebergs. These sometimes spectacular occurrences, called calving events, are a key step in the process by which climate change drives sea level rise.

more ...

Brains More Distracted, Not Slower with Age - Scientific America

Brains slow down as they become more easily distracted. Older brains do not think as quickly as younger brains do. But does this cognitive impairment arise because processing speeds slacken or because the ability to block out irrelevant information falters? A recent study reconciles these two leading hypotheses: older brains have a harder time ignoring distractions in the initial stages of performing a task, which slows down processing.

more ...

Amazon deforestation accelerates -- BBC

The destruction of the Amazon rainforest in Brazil has accelerated for the first time in four years, Brazilian officials say. Satellite images show 11,968 sq km of land was cleared in the year to July, nearly 4% higher than the year before.

more ...

Movie Studios Gang Up on Aussie ISP -- PCWorld

iiNet gets into hot water for attempting to protect customers. In case you didn't know, iiNet is being sued for not doing anything to stop its users from downloading stuff off the Internet. It's a case that could change the landscape of the Internet industry in this country if iiNet loses, as Roadshow, Universal, Paramount, Disney, Fox, Warner Bros. and Columbia, as well as Channel Seven, seek unspecified damages.

more ...

Putting the Kibosh on Spam-Spewing McColo -- PCWorld

When McColo was taken down, worldwide spam volume dropped by 75 percent. Roger A. Grimes looks at how the spam-loving ISP was taken down, and lessons we can learn from this rare anti-spam success.

... It appears that a single security company and a technology columnist for The Washington Post has succeeded in bringing down worldwide spam rates 75% or more. No single event has ever accomplished what Brian Krebs and security firm Security Fix did nearly two weeks ago.

more ...

Shuttle astronaut invents zero-gravity cup -- Reuters

Future space travelers may be drinking their own urine, thanks to the International Space Station's new water recycler, but they can now do so with a touch of class.

more ...

'World mandate' on climate action -- BBC

An opinion poll in 11 countries has produced what organisers term a "global mandate" for action on climate change. About half of the respondents wanted governments to play a major role in curbing emissions, but only a quarter said their leaders were doing enough.

more ...

Drill for Natural Gas, Pollute Water -- Scientific America

The natural gas industry refuses to reveal what is in the mixture of chemicals used to drill for the fossil fuel

... Over the last few years, however, a series of contamination incidents have raised questions about that EPA study and ignited a debate over whether the chemicals used in hydraulic fracturing may threaten the nation's increasingly precious drinking water supply.

more ...

Under Worm Assault, Military Bans Disks, USB Drives -- Wired

The Defense Department's geeks are spooked by a rapidly spreading worm crawling across their networks. So they've suspended the use of so-called thumb drives, CDs, flash media cards, and all other removable data storage devices from their nets, to try to keep the worm from multiplying any further.

more ...

EPA Ruling on Coal Levels Playing Field for Wind, Solar -- Wired

Building an alt-energy power plant is risky and expensive, but thanks to a new ruling by an Environmental Protection Agency panel, building a coal plant may become riskier and more expensive.
The Environmental Appeals Board blocked the EPA from issuing a permit to a proposed coal plant addition near Vernal, Utah, about 150 miles east of Salt Lake City.
Perhaps more importantly, the quasi-independent board, composed of four highly regarded, experienced judges, ruled that the EPA needs to develop a single nationwide standard for dealing with carbon dioxide.

more ...

Study Shows Drivers Feel Free to Ignore Speed Limits -- Wired

From the Autopia Unintended Consequences Department comes this dispatch from Tippecanoe County, Indiana, where researchers at Purdue University say the majority of drivers have no problem going 5, 10 or even 20 mph over the speed limit and see no risk in doing so.

more ...

Save the whales, but only when national security isn't at stake -- Scientific American

The U.S. Supreme Court in a 5-4 decision today ruled that the Navy does not have to consider the effect of sonar on whales when training with sonar off the coast of California. "The Court does not question the importance of plaintiffs' ecological, scientific and recreational interests, but it concludes that the balance of equities and consideration of the overall public interest tip strongly in favor of the Navy," Chief Justice John Roberts wrote for the majority. "The determination of where the public interest lies in this case does not strike the Court as a close question."

... The Navy does not dispute the potential danger to the mammals, acknowledging in its own environmental assessments that the sonar may permanently damage as many as 500 whales and temporarily deafen at least 8,000 whales.

more ...

States Ramp Up Data Security Laws -- PCWorld

Massachusetts has enacted data privacy and data security regulations that will make it eke out California for the most wide ranging state privacy and security laws--laws that are likely to impact the policies, practices, procedures, contracts and training used by companies nationwide.

more ...

Unplug for Dollars: Stop 'Vampire Power' Waste -- PCWorld

You can save a few hundred bucks a year by unplugging electronics that aren't in use. Get the lowdown on costs, plus some products to help you cut back on kilowatt consumption.

more ...

Getting hydrogen from water without precious metals -- Ars Technica

One of the most hotly pursued areas of green energy technology is the search for an economical and practical method of splitting water into oxygen and hydrogen. The main target product, hydrogen, is a clean and energy-rich fuel that could substitute for fossil fuels in many contexts. Water is an obvious source of hydrogen, and it may be possible to produce hydrogen using light energy in a renewable and sustainable fashion. In today's issue of Nature Materials, a team of German, Chinese, and Japanese scientists, led by Xinchen Wang, got one step closer to an fully sustainable method for splitting water.

more ...

Bush's seven deadly environmental sins -- Salon

How Bush made a mockery of the nation's environmental laws and values -- and what Obama must do to get us back on track.

more ...

I just contacted my Members of Congress asking them to support the Clean Water Restoration Act. Will you do the same? This legislation is critical because recent Supreme Court rulings have narrowed the scope of protections of the Clean Water Act, putting the drinking water of more than 110 million Americans in jeopardy!

However, Congress has an opportunity to make this right by passing the Clean Water Restoration Act. Click the link below to send your Members of Congress a strong message that you demand clean water.

http://action.lcv.org/campaign/cleanwater_m

Green Energy: Cost-Efficient Process Expected To Turn Algae Into Fuel -- AP

Set amid cornfields and cow pastures in eastern Holland is a shallow pool that is rapidly turning green with algae, harvested for animal feed, skin treatments, biodegradable plastics -- and with increasing interest, biofuel.

more ...

SpaceX Did It -- Falcon 1 Made it to Space -- Wired

SpaceX has made history. Its privately developed rocket has made it into space.
After three failed launches, the company founded by Elon Musk worked all of the bugs out of their Falcon 1 launch vehicles.
The entire spectacle was broadcast live from Kwajalein Atoll in the South Pacific. Cameras mounted on the spacecraft showed our planet shrinking in the distance and the empty first stage engine falling back to Earth.

more ...

Carbon Trading Won't Save Aviation and Shipping -- Wired

Carbon trading schemes won't solve the aviation and shipping industries' problem of soaring carbon emissions, a British climate scientist says, and the cuts needed to address global climate change are so deep that both sectors must limit their growth.

more ...

On Bailout, Candidates Were Surely Themselves -- NY Times

It was classic John McCain and classic Barack Obama who grappled with the $700 billion bailout plan over the last week: Mr. McCain was by turns action-oriented and impulsive as he dive-bombed targets, while Mr. Obama was measured and cerebral and inclined to work the phones behind the scenes.

... Aides and political allies to both men agreed Sunday that perhaps no episode thus far in the campaign better demonstrated how they would approach managing problems as president. Their instincts, temperaments, and leadership traits were in the spotlight in Washington, as well as their limitations and foibles -- characteristics that also showed through stylistically in Friday night's debate.

more ...

Artist Builds Temple of Science -- Wired

At a time when the gulf between religion and science is growing ever greater, an artist has erected a temple for scientific worship. Jonathon Keats, designer of the petri dish God, built The Atheon to get people thinking about what a scientific religion (or religious science?) would look and feel like.

more ...

Where Is Human Evolution Heading? - U.S. News & World Report

If you judge the progress of humanity by Homer Simpson, Paris Hilton, and Girls Gone Wild videos, you might conclude that our evolution has stalled—or even shifted into reverse. Not so, scientists say. Humans are evolving faster than ever before, picking up new genetic traits and talents that may help us survive a turbulent future.

more ...

How Did Life on Earth Get Started? - U.S. News & World Report

On an arid outcropping of basalt in northwestern Australia, some of the oldest rocks on Earth lie exposed to the fierce sun. Formed at the bottom of an ancient ocean, this volcanic material shelters what one scientist calls the "oldest robust evidence" of life. At a scientific meeting at Rockefeller University in May, Roger Buick of the University of Washington said that the 3.5 billion-year-old rocks hold traces of carbon that once made up living organisms.

more ...

Will Respirators Help Our Olympic Athletes? - Slate

Four members of the U.S. Olympic cycling team sparked outrage Tuesday when they disembarked in Beijing wearing masks covering their mouths and noses. The U.S. Olympic Committee has issued several hundred respirators to its athletes to use as they prepare to compete at the Games. Will those masks actually help?

more ...

U.S. Cyclists Are Masked, and Criticism Is Not - NY Times

After months of speculation about how Olympic athletes would react to the air quality problems here, some answers arrived at the airport Tuesday, when four track cyclists on the United States team stepped off their flight wearing masks over their mouths and noses.

more ....

NASA says Mars craft "touched and tasted" water - Reuters

NASA scientists said on Thursday they had definitive proof that water exists on Mars after further tests on ice found on the planet in June by the Phoenix Mars Lander.

"We have water," said William Boynton, lead scientist for the Thermal and Evolved-Gas Analyzer instrument on Phoenix.

"We've seen evidence for this water ice before in observations by the Mars Odyssey orbiter and in disappearing chunks observed by Phoenix last month, but this is the first time Martian water has been touched and tasted," he said, referring to the craft's instruments.

more ...

MIT researchers split water to store solar energy - C|Net

The key to plentiful solar power is water, says Massachusetts Institute of Technology Professor Daniel Nocera.

Nocera and his MIT colleague, Matthew Kanan, on Thursday will publish a technical paper that describes what they claim is a breakthrough in solar energy storage.

The idea is to use the energy from solar photovoltaic panels (or another electricity source) to crack water molecules into hydrogen and oxygen gas. Those gases would be stored and used later in a fuel cell to make electricity when the sun is not shining.

more ....

Will Cockroaches Inherit the Earth? What Wall-E gets wrong about the apocalypse. - Slate

Pixar's post-apocalyptic love story Wall-E finished No. 2 at the box office over the Fourth of July weekend after hauling in $65 million the weekend before. The film depicts a future Earth abandoned by humans, blanketed in garbage, and nearly devoid of life. At the outset, Wall-E, a robot, has but one companion: a friendly cockroach. How did we come to believe that cockroaches will outlive everything else on Earth?

more ...

White House Refused to Open Pollutants E-Mail - NY Times

The White House in December refused to accept the Environmental Protection Agency’s conclusion that greenhouse gases are pollutants that must be controlled, telling agency officials that an e-mail message containing the document would not be opened, senior E.P.A. officials said last week.

more ...

Five Myths About the New Wiretapping Law: Why it's a lot worse than you think. - Slate

Sometime today, the Senate is likely to approve the most comprehensive overhaul of American surveillance law since the Watergate era. Unless you're a government lawyer, a legal scholar, a masochist, or an insomniac, chances are you haven't read the 114-page bill. Don't beat yourself up: Neither have most of the 293 House members who voted for it last week. Ditto the mainstream press, who seem to have relied chiefly on summaries provided by the same lawmakers who hadn't read it.

more ...

Be quiet: the surveillance cameras might hear you - Ars Techinica

Although crime statistics point to the fact that law-and-order issues are actually less of a problem now than in the past, the general public's perception remains one convinced that muggery and buggery hides behind every street corner. Politicans and the media stoke these fears, and we get hastily made laws and policies enacted as a result. Over in the UK, the trend over the past two decades has been to abrogate day-to-day policing of the streets to an army of CCTV cameras. Soon, if scientists have their way, the cameras will be able to train their focus on suspicious sounds automatically with new AI technology.

more ....

Nice Guys Finish Last: Why do we expect presidential candidates to be kind? - Slate

Perhaps it's just a coincidence, but in the past few days I feel I've been overwhelmed by a tsunami of commentary, all of which purports to prove the fundamental nastiness of Barack Obama or, alternatively, the deep unlikability of John McCain. You thought our presidential candidates were nice guys, regular guys, guys who you'd like to sit down and have a beer with? Guess what, lots of people are now telling me: They aren't!

more ...

Nation's Spies: Climate Change Could Spark War - Wired

Environmental groups have been warning for years that global climate change could make already-tense parts of the world even worse, and even spark whole new conflicts. Now, the nation's spies are saying pretty much the same thing.

more ...

Six hours to hack the FBI (and other pen-testing adventures) - Computerworld

It takes a lot to shock Chris Goggans; he's been a pen (penetration) tester since 1991, getting paid to break into a wide variety of networks. But he says nothing was as egregious as security lapses in both infrastructure design and patch management at a civilian government agency -- holes that let him hack his way through to a major FBI crime database within a mere six hours.

more ...

New Climate Report Foresees Big Changes - NYTimes

The rise in concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere from human activities is influencing climate patterns and vegetation across the United States and will significantly disrupt water supplies, agriculture, forestry and ecosystems for decades, a new federal report says.

more ...

Found an interesting article on Slate about whether to idle or shut off you car. It even goes into whether to warm up your car or just start driving.

Some excerpts:

Today's cars use electronic fuel injectors, which rigorously control the amount of gas delivered to the engine when you hit the ignition. As a result, virtually no fuel is wasted during startup, and only a thimbleful is burned as the car roars to life. So forget about the 30-minute axiom you were raised on - the threshold at which it makes more sense to shut off rather than to idle should be expressed in seconds, not minutes.

The researchers concluded that restarting a six-cylinder engine - with the air conditioner switched on - uses as much gas as idling the same car for just six seconds.

Idling is similarly wasteful in frigid temperatures. Contrary to popular belief, cold-weather drivers needn't warm up their cars for longer than 30 seconds. The best way to raise an engine's temperature to optimal levels is to drive it almost immediately after startup; according to a study by the Ontario Ministry of Transportation, a car driven for 12 minutes in 14-degree-Fahrenheit weather will achieve the same temperature as one that idles for 30 minutes. (However, it's best to avoid rapid acceleration during that 12-minute warm-up drive.)

But if we were able to eliminate idling in stop-and-go traffic, the effect could be more dramatic. Right now, it is imprudent (and often illegal) to cut your engine while on public streets. There are automated systems, such as in the vaunted Toyota Prius, that can rapidly turn engines off and on when the car is, say, stopped at a red light or involuntarily "parked" on a bumper-to-bumper freeway; just apply some pressure to the accelerator, and the engine springs back to life. According to the learned folks at Car Talk, the widespread adoption of such technology could reduce our national fuel consumption by as much 10 percent.

more ...

Warming and Storms, Uncertainty and Ethics - NY Times

Over the weekend, a pair of very different climate studies - one physical, one social - illustrated two uncomfortable, and related, realities confronting society as it grapples with possible responses to human-driven global warming.

more ...

Perilous Landings by Soyuz Worry NASA - Washington Post

Two consecutive chaotic and dangerous landings by Soyuz space capsules, including one with an American astronaut aboard, have NASA and space experts concerned about the spacecraft's reliability in ferrying astronauts to and from the international space station.

more ...

The Old Titans All Collapsed. Is the U.S. Next? - Washington Post

Back in August, during the panic over mortgages, Alan Greenspan offered reassurance to an anxious public. The current turmoil, the former Federal Reserve Board chairman said, strongly resembled brief financial scares such as the Russian debt crisis of 1998 or the U.S. stock market crash of 1987... But in the background, one could hear the groans and feel the tremors as larger political and economic tectonic plates collided. Nine months later, Greenspan's soothing analogies no longer wash. The U.S. economy faces unprecedented debt levels, soaring commodity prices and sliding home prices, to say nothing of a weak dollar.

more ...

In Colorado, an unlikely alliance against drilling - CSMonitor

Plans to open up a swath of wilderness are bringing hunters and environmentalists together – and reshaping state politics.

more ...

Earth at 350
By Bill McKibben
The Nation

Even for Americans, constitutionally convinced that there will always be a second act, and a third, and a do-over after that, and, if necessary, a little public repentance and forgiveness and a Brand New Start--even for us, the world looks a little Terminal right now.

It's not just the economy. We've gone through swoons before. It's that gas at $4 a gallon means we're running out, at least of the cheap stuff that built our sprawling society. It's that when we try to turn corn into gas, it sends the price of a loaf of bread shooting upwards and starts food riots on three continents. It's that everything is so inextricably tied together. It's that, all of a sudden, those grim Club of Rome types who, way back in the 1970s, went on and on about the "limits to growth" suddenly seem... how best to put it, right.

All of a sudden it isn't morning in America, it's dusk on planet Earth.

There's a number--a new number--that makes this point most powerfully. It may now be the most important number on Earth: 350. As in parts per million (ppm) of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

A few weeks ago, our foremost climatologist, NASA's Jim Hansen, submitted a paper to Science magazine with several co-authors. The abstract attached to it argued--and I have never read stronger language in a scientific paper--"if humanity wishes to preserve a planet similar to that on which civilization developed and to which life on earth is adapted, paleoclimate evidence and ongoing climate change suggest that CO2 will need to be reduced from its current 385 ppm to at most 350 ppm." Hansen cites six irreversible tipping points--massive sea level rise and huge changes in rainfall patterns, among them--that we'll pass if we don't get back down to 350 soon; and the first of them, judging by last summer's insane melt of Arctic ice, may already be behind us.

more ...

The computer security paradox - Raiden's Realm

One of the most prized rights of any American is the right to privacy and security. It's something people in some countries would kill for. Yet now there appears to be a very frightening trend growing. Your privacy and security are being thrown out the window wholesale in favor of easier access by law enforcement. A recent example of this can be seen with the announcement that Microsoft has been providing a tool to investigators that can effectively rip your Windows security to shreds in seconds, exposing all your private data to whoever wants to look at it.

more ...

IBM, Microsoft Trounce Apple on Climate Friendliness Scorecard - Wired

Scorecard IBM earned top honors among electronics manufacturers on a recently-updated climate friendliness scorecard (.pdf), earning 77 out of a possible 100 points to beat runners-up Canon, Toshiba, Sony and HP in a ranking of the companies' responsiveness to climate change. IBM, which makes big, hulking servers and mainframe computers, even beat out Microsoft (38 points) and Google (55), whose products are composed entirely of electrons. Apple, which has taken heat from Greenpeace for the allegedly toxic chemicals in its iPhone, scored a pathetic 11 out of 100.

more ...

Viacom, Google set for fight to bitter end over Safe Harbor - Ars Technica

It has been just over a year since Viacom launched its $1 billion lawsuit against Google for "brazen disregard of intellectual property laws" on YouTube. Although we haven't heard much news about the case as of late, some fightin' words have come out of both sides recently to indicate that the case is still going strong. There's no sign of an impending settlement, either, as Viacom is still beating the piracy drum and Google continues to stand its ground. Because of this, the eventual outcome of the Viacom suit may set a legal precedent that could send ripples throughout the entire Internet.

more ...

Our New Energy Crisis - Mother Jones

Almost four years ago, when oil was trading at around $40 a barrel, Paul Roberts wrote a story for Mother Jones on a bleak scenario gaining currency among energy insiders, but not yet in the mainstream consciousness: peak oil, basically the notion that the world's petroleum resources are nearing exhaustion. If the theory held true, Roberts warned, oil prices could soon leap to "perhaps as high as $100 per barrel - a disaster if we don't have a cost-effective alternative fuel or technology in place."

Welcome to the disaster: $100-a-barrel oil is in the rearview mirror, and no cost-effective (or even cost-prohibitive) alternative has emerged. The most dire consequences of this failing - hurricanes, drought, extinction - are occurring far more rapidly than even Slideshow Al could have predicted four years ago. And then there's the war.

It's easy enough to blame Dick Cheney, Big Oil, Detroit - all of whom have done their part in obstructing progress. But their chicanery distracts us from the far greater problem, one that, unfortunately, comes down to Organic Chemistry 101. Every technological advance of the last 150 years has been powered by a unique, extremely energy-dense, but finite - and, as it turns out, planet-killing - source of fuel. Switching away from fossil energy requires an economic and social transformation at least as great as the Industrial Revolution. And we have to build this new economy on the fumes of the old, hoping that we don't run out of gas, or ice caps, before we get there. As Roberts points out in this special issue on energy, if we sit on our hands or let the process be hijacked by vested interests, "there may not be enough crude left in the ground to fuel a second try."

Read on ...

Ignoring the Supreme Court - Washington Post
The Bush administration punts on greenhouse emissions

The Bush administration never had any intention of doing what the Supreme Court commanded it to do a year ago today: regulate greenhouse gas emissions. We infer this because, even though President Bush ordered his agencies last May to work together to meet the court's directive, and even though the Environmental Protection Agency delivered to the White House last December its finding that those pollutants endanger public welfare, a prerequisite for regulation, EPA Administrator Stephen L. Johnson announced last week a plan to seek public input starting in the spring on how best to limit the emissions. Translation: punt to the next administration. This giant step backward is the starkest example yet of the chasm between the words and deeds of Mr. Bush on climate change.

Read on ...

Bad Phorm? UK ISPs to sell clickstream data to advertisers - Ars Technica

Deep packet inspection gear has long had the ability to peer inside users' datastreams to pull out all sorts of interesting information, but a UK company called Phorm is taking DPI to the next level by using it to sell ads. The company's ambitious goal: segment users into small and highly-accurate "channels" by reading the URLs they visit, the search terms they use, and the content of the pages they visit. The resulting channels are then sold to advertisers who are salivating at the thought of better targeting. Actual users are predictably less thrilled, however, and a row over the issue has erupted in Britain.

more ...

AP probe finds drugs in drinking water - Associated Press

A vast array of pharmaceuticals - including antibiotics, anti-convulsants, mood stabilizers and sex hormones - have been found in the drinking water supplies of at least 41 million Americans, an Associated Press investigation shows.
To be sure, the concentrations of these pharmaceuticals are tiny, measured in quantities of parts per billion or trillion, far below the levels of a medical dose. Also, utilities insist their water is safe.

more ...

How to Date the Grand Canyon: Go With the Flow - Wired

Geologists maintain that the Colorado River carved the Grand Canyon's walls very gradually over a long period of time, and they have found new evidence to nail down exactly how long.

... Its banded walls make up one of the most magnificent landscapes on Earth. And yet it seems the only time reporters bother to mention its geology is when they are writing about creationists and their bogus claims that the Grand Canyon formed a few thousand years ago. It's a shame, because the real story of the Grand Canyon is a riveting epic. Even its scientific history is fascinating: Figuring out just how old the Grand Canyon is has challenged geologists for 150 years. And just this week, the mystery may be solved.

more ...

Torrent roars at Grand Canyon: Outcome of Glen Canyon release won't surface for several weeks - Rocky Mountain News

Martha Hahn is clutching the front of a motorized raft Wednesday afternoon as it strains against surging currents on the Colorado River.

Hahn is chief of science at Grand Canyon National Park, and she's onboard to observe how the river is responding to the mighty torrent of water being turned loose from the Glen Canyon Dam.

The release is an attempt to re-create the roaring springtime flows that shaped the river before the dam was built in the 1960s.

more ...

A slide show from the Denver Post

A NBC Nightly News report on the 60 hour flow.

New supercomputer is a rack of PlayStations - The Sydney Morning Herald

When the PlayStation3 was released in November 2006, Gaurav Khanna's wife braved long queues so he could be one of the first people in the US to get his hands on the gaming console. But the astrophysicist was not itching to burn some rubber in Gran Turismo or shoot hoops in NBA 07. Instead he wanted to build his own supercomputer.

Record-High Ratio of Americans in Prison - Washington Post

More than one in 100 adults in the United States is in jail or prison, an all-time high that is costing state governments nearly $50 billion a year, in addition to more than $5 billion spent by the federal government, according to a report released today.

No impact from Energy Saving Day - BBC

The UK's first Energy Saving Day has ended with no noticeable reduction in the country's electricity usage. E-Day asked people to switch off electrical devices they did not need over a period of 24 hours, with the National Grid monitoring consumption.

In Norway, Global Seed Vault guards genetic resources - IHT

With plant species disappearing at an alarming rate, scientists and governments are creating a global network of plant banks to store seeds and sprouts - precious genetic resources that may be needed for man to adapt the world's food supply to climate change.

The Satellite Shootdown: Behind the Scenes - US News & World Report

Capt. R. M. Hendrickson stepped across the deck of the guided missile cruiser USS Lake Erie last Saturday afternoon to a bank of ballistic missile launch tubes, motioning to the particular 2-by-2-foot location from which a missile flew from the ship positioned at the time some 420 miles northwest of Hawaii.

F.C.C. to Act on Delaying of Broadband Traffic - NY Times

The head of the Federal Communications Commission and other senior officials said on Monday that they were considering taking steps to discourage cable and telephone companies from discriminating against content providers as the broadband companies go about managing heavy Internet traffic that they say is clogging their networks.

Survey: Many Americans Switch Faith Identity - Washington Post

Forty-four percent of Americans have either switched their religious affiliation since childhood or dropped out of any formal religious group, according to the largest recent survey on American religious identification.

US to set 'binding' climate goals - BBC

The US is ready to accept "binding international obligations" on reducing greenhouse gas emissions, officials say, if other nations do the same.

Putin's Iron Grip on Russia Suffocates His Opponents - NY Times

Shortly before parliamentary elections in December, foremen fanned out across the sprawling GAZ vehicle factory here, pulling aside assembly-line workers and giving them an order: vote for President Vladimir V. Putin's party or else. They were instructed to phone in after they left their polling places. Names would be tallied, defiance punished.

Move Over, Oil, There's Money in Texas Wind - NY Times

The wind turbines that recently went up on Louis Brooks's ranch are twice as high as the Statue of Liberty, with blades that span as wide as the wingspan of a jumbo jet. More important from his point of view, he is paid $500 a month apiece to permit 78 of them on his land, with 76 more on the way.

It's Time To Drink Toilet Water - Slate

Officials in Orange County, Calif., will attend opening ceremonies today for the world's largest water-purification project, among the first "toilet-to-tap" systems in America. The Groundwater Replenishment System is designed to take sewage water straight from bathrooms in places like Costa Mesa, Fullerton, and Newport Beach and—after an initial cleansing treatment—send it through $490 million worth of pipes, filters, and tanks for purification. The water then flows into lakes in nearby Anaheim, where it seeps through clay, sand, and rock into aquifers in the groundwater basin. Months later, it will travel back into the homes of half a million Orange County residents, through their kitchen taps and showerheads.

Crayons Down! - MotherJones

If there is a creature more fickle than your typical four-year-old, it's hard to think of one offhand. One day they're buttoning their own shirts and uttering words of ancient wisdom, and the next they're pooping on the living room floor because monsters have invaded the bathroom. They are immune to logic and can barely sit still long enough to nibble a chicken nugget. In a nutshell, "standardized" and "preschooler" are not words you'd normally use in the same sentence.

In Endorsing Obama, Kennedy Anoints a Prince and Tells Clintons To Cool It - MotherJones

Democrats don't come much more traditional than Teddy Kennedy, the grand man of the Democratic Party. So his endorsement of Barack Obama--implicitly an anti-endorsement of Hillary Clinton--has punch. Endorsements routinely don't matter much in presidential campaigns--with a few exceptions. A politician who controls a machine--say, a governor--can come in quite handy on Election Day. In this case, Kennedy brings two piping hot dishes to the Obama potluck.

Administration Forest Plan Assailed - Washington Post

Proposal Would Allow Logging, Roads in Alaska's Tongass - Millions of acres of the country's largest national forest would be open for logging and other development under a Bush administration forest management plan released yesterday, a move critics said will hurt wildlife and destroy pristine lands.

The Tao of ScreenIn search of the distraction-free desktop - Slate

If your computer desktop is anything like mine - and, brother, it is - you've paved over every spare pixel in an iconistan of clutter. Desktop design originated in a wistful visual metaphor, the clean, still work surface, encouraging users to productive ends. Leaps forward in computing horsepower and the rise of constant Internet use has transformed the tabletop terra firma into a cockpit, an antic terminal for the networked self. Our desktops are now a thick impasto of tabbed windows, pull-down menus, dashboard widgets, and application alerts. No possible distraction gets left behind, no link, feed, IM, twitter, or poke unheeded.

Senate Delays Eavesdropping Vote - AP/US News

The Senate granted at least a temporary victory to the White House on Thursday, turning back an attempt to increase court oversight of the government's surveillance of phone calls and e-mails that involve people inside the United States.

Rising Anti-Americanism in Russia - US News

Vladimir Dobrovinsky, 33, a teacher at a design school in Moscow, says he's not interested in politics. But bring up America and the well-traveled, university-educated Dobrovinsky holds forth. He criticizes Washington's "crude interference" in world affairs. He complains that Russia is not treated as an important partner by the Bush administration. "A lot of Russians," he says, "are angry that America deals with us like we're Thailand."

Big Brain Theory: Have Cosmologists Lost Theirs? - NY Times

It could be the weirdest and most embarrassing prediction in the history of cosmology, if not science. If true, it would mean that you yourself reading this article are more likely to be some momentary fluctuation in a field of matter and energy out in space than a person with a real past born through billions of years of evolution in an orderly star-spangled cosmos. Your memories and the world you think you see around you are illusions.

U.S. Given Poor Marks on the Environment - NY Times

A new international ranking of environmental performance puts the United States at the bottom of the Group of 8 industrialized nations and 39th among the 149 countries on the list.

Virgin Galactic unveils SpaceShipTwo model - Reuters

Entrepreneur Richard Branson on Wednesday unveiled a model of the spaceship he hopes will be the first to take paying passengers into space on a regular basis as soon as next year.

Geophysicists Urge Steep Cuts in Greenhouse Gas Emissions - Scientific American

The scientists of the American Geophysical Union (AGU) warn that greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions must be slashed in half to keep temperatures from rising 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit (2 degrees Celsius)—or else. "Warming greater than 2 degrees Celsius above 19th-century levels is projected to be disruptive, reducing global agricultural productivity, causing widespread loss of biodiversity and - if sustained over centuries - melting much of the Greenland ice sheet with ensuing rise in sea levels of several meters," the AGU declares in its first statement in four years on "Human Impacts on Climate."

A sled, a cow, the future - Mountain Gazette

Few people may believe that at age 57, I recently T-boned, so to speak, a pregnant, 1,000-pound cow while riding my Flexible Flyer sled down the steepest county road in western Montana. To rural sledders, this is plausible, but perhaps not to adults of my generation. The mean age for the 55,000 sledders injured badly enough last winter to need an ER visit is 9.9, a dismal statistic that reveals a paucity of Baby Boomers still willing to have fun hurtling down mountains with a minimum of control. Sledding down icy back roads is a pure and noble calling that offers countless opportunities for high-speed rides on metal-runners that are only somewhat steerable. Obstacles to doing so abound, from so-called common sense, to cows, like the one I collided with.

Foolproof Online Dating Tips for Desperate Guys - Wired

There are a lot of guys out there on the internet who desperately want to find a woman to share their life with, and who don't want to have to go outside to do it. If you're one of them, you may find yourself wondering why the women you meet in chat rooms, discussion groups and online games have so far failed to love you.

California Sues EPA; Says State Law Greener, Cleaner Than Feds - Wired

California today sued the federal Environmental Protection Agency today for preventing the state from reducing greenhouse gas emissions in its cars.

Big Brother gets bigger, says global privacy study - C|Net

According to a new international privacy report, governments around the world are increasingly invading the privacy of citizens with surveillance, identification systems, and archiving of private data.

US Near Bottom of Global Privacy Index - AP/Wired

Individual privacy is under threat around the world as governments continue introducing surveillance and information-gathering measures, according to an international rights group.

House Sends President An Energy Bill to Sign - Washington Post

A year of rhetoric, lobbying, veto threats and negotiations ended yesterday as the House of Representatives voted 314 to 100 to pass an energy bill that President Bush is to sign this morning. The bill will raise fuel-efficiency standards for automobiles, order a massive increase in the use of biofuels and phase out sales of the ubiquitous incandescent light bulb popularized by Thomas Edison more than a century ago ...

For farmers and agribusiness, it is a windfall, providing more support than perhaps even the farm bill. It doubles the use of corn - based ethanol - despite criticism that corn-based ethanol is driving up food prices, draining aquifers and exacerbating fertilizer runoff that is creating dead zones in many of the nation's rivers.

UK hands control of Basra to Iraq forces - Reuters

Britain handed over security in Basra province to Iraqi forces on Sunday, effectively marking the end of nearly five years of British control of southern Iraq.

Bali Forum Backs Climate 'Road Map' - Washington Post

U.S. Accedes on Aid Pledges, Wins Fight to Drop Specific Targets for Emissions Cuts. Delegates from nearly 190 countries emerged from a final 24 hours of bruising negotiations Saturday with an agreement on a new framework for tackling global warming, one that for the first time calls on both the industrialized world and rapidly developing nations to commit to measurable, verifiable steps.

The world has continued, in the words of Italian astronomer Pierantonio Cinzano, to "envelop itself in a luminous fog." Cinzano’s 2001 atlas of artificial night sky brightness estimated that two-thirds of the U.S. population, and one-fifth of the world population, can no longer see the Milky Way with the naked eye.

from Michelle Nijhuis's story, "Quest for Darkness" in Hich Country News (subscription required)

U.N. climate talks under pressure to drop 2020 goals - Reuters

The United States has urged a tough 2020 target for rich nations to axe greenhouse gas emissions to be dropped from a draft text at climate change talks in Bali, delegates said on Monday.

Security concerns raised as China fills U.S. medicine chest - McClatchy Newspapers

The medicine cabinet in the average U.S. home is filling with drugs made in China, and some experts say that could be a prescription for trouble.

Linux is about to take over the low end of PCs - Desktop Linux

Sometimes, several unrelated changes come to a head at the same time, with a result no one could have predicted. The PC market is at such a tipping point right now and the result will be millions of Linux-powered PCs in users' hands.

Senate rejects far-reaching energy bill - CSM

There's still hope the nation may get a nice green-energy law for Christmas – not the big fat one environmentalists wanted, but a slimmed-down version that probably includes fuel economy and biofuel provisions. ...the Senate failed to approve a more far-reaching House energy bill that promised to cut US dependence on imported oil and global warming emissions.

Six places in the world where climate change could cause political turmoil - CSM

From Nepal to Nigeria, Indonesia to the Arctic Circle, a warmer world poses different problems.

Data-recovery firm reveals top client mishaps - C|Net

Ant infestations, oil saturation, and failed parachute jumps are some of the unusual fates that have befallen innocent data-storage devices recently, according to data-recovery company Kroll Ontrack's list of the most unusual recovery jobs it has faced in the last

Iran's Nukes: Now They Tell Us? - Time

The President looked awful. He stood puffy-eyed, stoop-shouldered, in front of the press corps discussing the stunning new National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) that Iran halted its nuclear-weapons program in 2003. He looked as if he'd spent the night throwing chairs around the Situation Room. ...

Google to dig up more personal records: Software to index more state files such as school test scores - AP

Googling something or someone? If the state of Florida has public records about your subject, they might show up in your search results.

Spinning the NIE Iran Report - Time

The Rashomon-like battle to interpret the new National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Iran is well under way. All sides of the Iran nuclear dispute are working hard to make their own reading of the report the accepted one, and to emphasize the findings that best suit their agendas. Those agendas will remain unchanged by the NIE: Israel and Washington hawks want military action against a grave and gathering threat; the Bush Administration is pursuing coercive diplomacy; the Europeans want to avoid war. And it is those agendas that will shape each player's response to the NIE in what promises to be a furious battle over Iran policy in the months to come. A guide to the players and their likely plays ...

Scientists Beg for Climate Action - AP

For the first time, more than 200 of the world's leading climate scientists, losing their patience, urged government leaders to take radical action to slow global warming because "there is no time to lose."

Judge: Reconsider bird ruling: Agency decided to keep grouse off endangered list - Rocky Mountain News

A federal judge has ordered the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to reconsider a decision to keep the greater sage grouse off the endangered species list, a ruling that could have significant implications for Colorado's fast-growing oil and gas industry.

Australia steals show at Bali climate talks - Reuters

Australia won an ovation at the start of U.N.-led climate change talks in Bali on Monday by agreeing to ratify the Kyoto Protocol, isolating the United States as the only developed nation outside the pact.

... A new treaty is meant to widen the Kyoto Protocol, which binds 36 industrial countries to cut greenhouse gas emissions by 5 percent below 1990 levels by 2008-12. The United States and developing nations have no caps under Kyoto.

... The United States, as the world's top greenhouse gas emitter, has been feeling the heat from developing nations demanding the rich make stronger commitments to curb emissions.

Read on ...

Taser death in Canada sparks heated debate around the world - CSM

The death of a Polish man at Vancouver International Airport has sparked an intense debate in Canada over the increasing use of Tasers by law-enforcement officials. Concerns over the use of these electric shock guns has mounted in several other countries after a UN Committee on Human Rights recently labeled their impact "torture."

Heritage Foundation on Hunger: Let Them Eat Broccoli - MotherJones
Poor people aren't hungry; they're fat.

While most Americans were planning for the annual ritual of overconsumption known as Thanksgiving, the good folks at the Heritage Foundation, America’s leading architects of conservative thought for at least three decades, were doing their part to add to the holiday cheer. According to a November 13 Heritage article, well-off revelers could stuff their faces unhampered by guilt about the less fortunate, because there are no longer any hungry people in the United States.

Sen. Clinton proposes moratorium on foreclosures - Reuters

Democratic presidential hopeful Hillary Clinton proposed on Monday a 90-day moratorium on home foreclosures to give financially troubled borrowers time to work with lenders and avoid losing their homes.

U.S. report contradicts Bush on Iran nuclear program - Reuters

U.S. intelligence has determined that Iran halted its nuclear weapons program in 2003 but believes it is continuing to develop technical capabilities that could be used to build a bomb, a government report said on Monday.

Bali climate summit: a test of the world's resolve - CSM

Next week is seen as crunch time in the fight against global warming. Representatives from some 130 nations will gather in Bali, Indonesia, beginning a two-year effort to agree on a new pact to cut greenhouse-gas emissions - one that goes well beyond the goals of the current Kyoto Protocol.

Microsoft FUDwatch II: Internet Explorer vs. Firefox security - C|Net

Microsoft is at it again. Or, rather, Jeff Jones is. Jones is Microsoft's security strategy direction and is the one who periodically remixes history and data to declare that Windows is more secure than Linux. Now he's declaring that Internet Explorer is much safer than Firefox.

Ad Targeting Improves on Web Sites - AP

Based on the weather reports and restaurant listings you check out online, Yahoo Inc. has a good idea where you live. Based on searches you've done, the Web portal might also know where you want to go. Don't be surprised then to suddenly see an advertisement on flight deals between those two places. It's what United Airlines did with an ad on Yahoo earlier this year as people browsed for something completely unrelated to travel.

Study Details How U.S. Could Cut 28% of Greenhouse Gases - NY Times

The United States could shave as much as 28 percent off the amount of greenhouse gases it emits at fairly modest cost and with only small technology innovations, according to a new report.

A large share of the reductions could come from steps that would more than pay for themselves in lower energy bills for industries and individual consumers, the report said, adding that people should take those steps out of good sense regardless of how worried they might be about climate change. But that is unlikely to happen under present circumstances, said the authors, who are energy experts at McKinsey & Company, the consulting firm.

Facebook's Beacon More Intrusive Than Previously Thought - PC World

A Computer Associates security researcher is sounding the alarm that Facebook's controversial Beacon online ad system goes much further than anyone has imagined in tracking people's Web activities outside the popular social networking site. Beacon will report back to Facebook on members' activities on third-party sites that participate in Beacon even if the users are logged off from Facebook and have declined having their activities broadcast to their Facebook friends.

Mothers Skimp as States Take Child Support - NY Times

The collection of child support from absent fathers is failing to help many of the poorest families, in part because the government uses fathers’ payments largely to recoup welfare costs rather than passing on the money to mothers and children.

Lawmakers Set Deal on Raising Fuel Efficiency - NY Times

Congressional negotiators reached a deal late Friday on energy legislation that would force American automakers to improve the fuel efficiency of their cars and light trucks by 40 percent by 2020.

Deep concern over Three Gorges Dam - BBC

There are fears that China's Three Gorges Dam is causing serious environmental problems, despite official claims to the contrary. Local farmers, environmental campaigners and even officials themselves have voiced concern about environmental damage.

Going Green? Easy Doesn't Do It
By Michael Maniates - Washington Post

Thanksgiving nicely focuses our attention on things of lasting importance: family, friends, community, a rich harvest. None of these blessings come without cost or sacrifice. Today, then, we might consider what we must give of ourselves to preserve such abundance in the face of increasing climatic instability.

One needn't ponder this question in a vacuum. Several best-sellers offer advice about what we must ask of ourselves and one another. Their titles suggest that we needn't break much of a sweat: "It's Easy Being Green," "The Lazy Environmentalist," or even "The Green Book: The Everyday Guide to Saving the Planet One Simple Step at a Time."

Although each offers familiar advice ("reuse scrap paper before recycling" or "take shorter showers"), it's what's left unsaid by these books that's intriguing. Three assertions permeate the pages: (1) We should look for easy, cost-effective things to do in our private lives as consumers, since that's where we have the most power and control; these are the best things to do because (2) if we all do them the cumulative effect of these individual choices will be a safe planet; which is fortunate indeed because (3) we, by nature, aren't terribly interested in doing anything that isn't private, individualistic, cost-effective and, above all, easy.

This glorification of easy isn't limited to the newest environmental self-help books. The Web sites of the big U.S. environmental groups, the Environmental Protection Agency and even the American Association for the Advancement of Science offer markedly similar lists of actions that tell us we can change the world through our consumer choices, choices that are economic, simple, even stylish. Al Gore himself isn't immune. His recent Live Earth concert featured a who's-who lineup of celebrities who said that if we all do our little bit to recycle and conserve -- the simple things, mind you, because that's all we'll need (translation: that's all they think we'll go for) -- we can together rescue the world for our children and grandchildren.

Read on ...

Meanwhile, on the campaign trail ...

David Horsey - 21 November 2007

The following are some key findings in a report issued Saturday by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change:

• Global warming is "unequivocal." Temperatures have risen 1.3 degrees Fahrenheit in the last 100 years. Eleven of the last 12 years are among the warmest since 1850. Sea levels have gone up by an average seven-hundredths of an inch per year since 1961.
• About 20 percent to 30 percent of all plant and animal species face the risk of extinction if temperatures increase by 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit. If the thermometer rises by 6.3 degrees Fahrenheit, between 40 to 70 percent of species could disappear.
• Human activity is largely responsible for warming. Global emissions of greenhouse gases grew 70 percent from 1970 to 2004. The concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is far higher than the natural range over the last 650,000 years.
• Climate change will affect poor countries most, but will be felt everywhere. By 2020, 75 million to 250 million people in Africa will suffer water shortages, residents of Asia's large cities will be at great risk of river and coastal flooding, Europeans can expect extensive species loss, and North Americans will experience longer and hotter heat waves and greater competition for water.
• Extreme weather conditions will be more common. Tropical storms will be more frequent and intense. Heat waves and heavy rains will affect some areas, raising the risk of wildfires and the spread of diseases. Elsewhere, drought will degrade cropland and spoil the quality of water sources. Rising sea levels will increase flooding and salination of fresh water and threaten coastal cities.
• Even if greenhouse gases are stabilized, the Earth will keep warming and sea levels rising. More pollution could bring "abrupt and irreversible" changes, such as the loss of ice sheets in the poles, and a corresponding rise in sea levels by several yards.
• A wide array of tools exist, or will soon be available, to adapt to climate change and reduce its potential effects. One is to put a price on carbon emissions.
• By 2050, stabilizing emissions would slow the average annual global economic growth by less than 0.12 percent. The longer action is delayed, the more it will cost.

The Associated Press

Nordic nations sound alarm over melting Arctic - Reuters

Nordic nations sounded the alarm on Wednesday about a quickening melt of Arctic ice and said the thaw might soon prove irreversible because of global warming.

Sweden, Finland, Denmark, Norway and Iceland also urged all governments to agree before the end of 2009 a broader U.N. plan to curb greenhouse gases in succession to the Kyoto Protocol.

"The Arctic and the world cannot wait any longer," environment ministers from the five nations said in a joint statement after talks in Oslo. The five all have Arctic territories.

Read on ...

EPA's record settlement with utility could lead to other deals - CSM

A utility's dramatic agreement this week to trim smokestack pollution may do more than help clear the nation's skies. It may clear the legal logjam that has kept other large utilities from cutting similar deals that could trigger reductions in harmful power-plant emissions.

By one estimate, US power plants could cut their emissions of pollutants linked to acid rain and smog by 20 percent.

The agreement, announced Tuesday by the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), sends a powerful, though not necessarily decisive, signal to other utilities, legal analysts say.

In settling an EPA lawsuit, the nation's largest utility, American Electric Power, agreed to spend $4.6 billion to reduce its emissions of sulfur dioxide (SO2) by 79 percent and nitrogen oxides (NOx) by 69 percent.The EPA called the settlement its largest pollution-enforcement victory ever.

Read on ...

Gone: Mass Extinction and the Hazards of Earth's Vanishing Biodiversity - Julia Whitty MotherJones

It is a fact widely accepted by biologists but little known by the population at large. By the end of the century, half of all species on Earth may be extinct due to global warming and other causes. Who will survive the world's dwindling biodiversity, and why?

We awake in our tents in the moonlight to what sounds like a dance troupe in wooden clogs practicing on rock under stunted juniper trees. It's a half-dozen Carmen mountain white-tailed deer, scraping at the ground with bootlike hooves, bending gracile necks to chew on wet soil and lick it dry. They're harvesting the minerals and moisture from our urine soaked into the parched earth of the high desert, the herd toiling through the night and into the morning in a pursuit tenacious enough to enlighten us to the wastefulness of our own bodies. Clearly, the three of us have squandered most of what we drank hiking to 7,400 feet on the south rim of Texas' Chisos Mountains. From the deer's point of view, our arrival here is the next best thing to rain.

Come morning, we pack camp and loiter on the precipice, staring across wracked ranges and sunburnt country to the Rio Grande thousands of feet below, and to the even higher country of Mexico's Sierra Madre. Here, in Big Bend National Park, one of America's truly wild places, there's barely a sign of human impact, and not a sound of it—not planes, cars, or human voices. The silence is so thick that our ears feel congested, and we jump when the quiet is pierced by the whistle of a peregrine falcon on its glide path through thin air.

We spend a couple of hours here with binoculars, map, and compass, scanning 100-mile visibility, scrutinizing the area below the rim and trying to find a trail we might travel another day. Although we don't know it, we're peering down into the place where a lost hiker is desperately trying to find the same trail and a freshwater spring midway along it. At this point he has been without water for three days. We don't see him stumbling through cholla and nopales cactus and writing farewell notes to loved ones—though he is likely staring up at the mirage of us silhouetted against the sky.

Ironically, this corner of the Chihuahuan Desert is lush at the moment, watered by rains two months ago that are still working their way through soils and roots and cells, so that many plants are blooming and an explosion of butterflies jams the breezes. The cacti are swollen with hoarded water. The Chisos oaks are dropping so many acorns that park rangers have closed trails where black bears are fattening on them. Countless millions of walking-stick insects are coupled in such dense mating congregations in the canopies of mesquites that entire trees appear to be walking through the sky. Everything is haloed in the golds, yellows, and greens of desert grasses, some taller than us, all bowed under heavy seed heads destined to feed and water kangaroo rats.

Read on ...

Practical Values: Hard to Break - MotherJones

As the scary studies about plastic's health effects pile up, should we kick the habit?

My moment of plastic panic came a few months ago. As a science writer, I've spent the past several years following the steady stream of research into the disturbing effects of the chemicals that leach into our bodies from everyday plastic objects. I'd managed to stay pretty calm about these unsettling discoveries, but then I went to yet another presentation where renowned scientists described new, peer-reviewed findings on how plastic's ingredients may cause reproductive abnormalities and obesity. Afterward, I huddled with the other journalists present, brimming with uneasy questions: Does this mean we should ditch our refillable plastic water bottles? Is it safe for our kids to chew on plastic toys? Should we try to go completely plastic free?

It's one thing to use cloth shopping bags in the name of ecofriendliness or to forswear plastic cutlery in the pursuit of style; it's another to eschew plastics because they might be a health risk. But are you about to give up your computer or cell phone? What about your bike helmet or your child's car seat? Your contact lenses? Your toothbrush? Probably not.

Then what to do about the alarming fact that plastic's chemical constituents are percolating throughout our bodies, apparently interfering with our metabolism, our sex organs, and our children's neurological and reproductive development? The Centers for Disease Control has found two compounds—phthalates, used in polyvinyl chloride (pvc) plastic, and bisphenol A, a building block of polycarbonate plastics—in the urine of a majority of Americans tested. Both chemicals are short-lived once they enter the environment, but they're being scrutinized for their potential to mimic and disrupt our hormones—even before we're born.

Read on ...

Photo Essay: Sea Change - MotherJones

As climate change melts the permafrost, Arctic villages slip into the sea, taking a way of life with them.

View on ...

~

The Top Pundits In America - Forbes

What exactly is a pundit? According to the dictionary, it's "a person who makes comments or judgments, especially in an authoritative manner; critic or commentator."

There's certainly no shortage of that in the media these days.

Call the past decade the era of the talking head. Cable news networks trying to one-up each other in the ratings roll out programs hosted by people with pointed positions, most of them going one-on-one with guests who also bring strong views and--sometimes--expertise to the table.

Read on ...

Fertilizers, deformities linked - Rocky Mountain News

Fertilizers from farms and lawns are responsible for frog deformities cropping up in ponds and lakes across North America, a new study shows.

The finding not only has implications for worldwide amphibian declines, but could shine light on such diseases as cholera, malaria, West Nile virus and diseases affecting coral reefs, said assistant professor Pieter Johnson of the University of Colorado's ecology and evolutionary biology department.

Andrew Blaustein, zoologist from Oregon State University, hailed the CU finding as one of the first to connect the "drastic" problem of fertilizers with the proliferation of parasites and several diseases that can deform amphibians and sicken humans.

Read on ...

Ice withdrawal 'shatters record' - BBC

Arctic sea ice shrank to the smallest area on record this year, US scientists have confirmed.

The National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) said the minimum extent of 4.13 million sq km (1.59 million sq miles) was reached on 16 September.

The figure shatters all previous satellite surveys, including the previous record low of 5.32 million sq km measured in 2005.

Earlier this month, it was reported that the Northwest Passage was open.

The fabled Arctic shipping route from the Atlantic to the Pacific is normally ice-bound at some location throughout the year; but this year, ships have been able to complete an unimpeded navigation.

Read on ...

Gorillas head race to extinction - BBC

Gorillas, orangutans, and corals are among the plants and animals which are sliding closer to extinction.

The Red List of Threatened Species for 2007 names habitat loss, hunting and climate change among the causes.

The World Conservation Union (IUCN) has identified more than 16,000 species threatened with extinction, while prospects have brightened for only one.

Read on ...

~

Is a Virus Behind the Bee Plague? - MIT Technology Review

Scientists have identified a likely culprit underlying the massive and mysterious plague that has killed off tens of millions of bees in the United States over the past year. By sequencing the DNA of every microbe inhabiting the bees, researchers have pinpointed a novel virus strongly linked to infected hives. The findings could help beekeepers protect their colonies. The research also suggests an effective new method for identifying infectious pathogens, be they from bees or humans.

"This is a very significant finding," says Dewey Caron, an entomologist at the University of Delaware, in Maryland, who was not involved in the study. "It's not yet a smoking gun, but it really helps narrow the search."

Over the past year, tens of millions of bees have mysteriously vanished from their hives, amounting to a loss of 50 to 90 percent of U.S. colonies. While honeybee populations have sustained several major hits to their numbers over the past century, this particular plague is unique in that adult bees seem to disappear from their hives without a trace. Because honeybees pollinate hundreds of species of fruits, vegetables, and nuts--commercial beekeepers truck their hives across the country during flowering season to pollinate crops--that loss is a major agricultural concern.

Read on ...

~

Carmakers Defeated On Emissions Rules: States Can Set Standards, Judge Says - Washington Post

A federal judge in Vermont yesterday rejected an attempt by automakers to block individual states from adopting their own standards for limiting greenhouse gas emissions from cars and trucks.

Judge William Sessions III of U.S. District Court in Burlington ruled that state action to limit greenhouse gas emissions from new vehicles -- standards that originated in California in 2002 and have since been adopted by Vermont and at least 10 other states -- was not preempted by federal rules on vehicle fuel economy.

The decision follows a Supreme Court ruling in April that the Environmental Protection Agency violated the Clean Air Act by declining to regulate greenhouse gas emissions from vehicles. It also comes as automakers are confronted with growing public demand and governmental pressure to build more fuel-efficient vehicles. This fall, Congress is to take up vehicle fuel-efficiency legislation that could bring about the biggest change in fuel-economy laws since the 1970s.

Read on ...

Katrina: A reality check for all towns - AP/Rocky Mountain News

Katrina is old news, right? New Orleans - who cares? It's just another big city with big problems, bad luck and bad weather. Get over it.

Actually, please don't.

Don't ever get over the tragedy of New Orleans. It's your tragedy, too.

What happened to this historic city two years ago is more than the obvious cautionary tale of what might befall your community after a natural disaster or a terrorist strike. It's also a sad reflection of what's happening now - today, in your hometown and across an anxious and ailing nation.

Read on ...

~

Why the American West is out front on curbing greenhouse gases - Christian Science Monitor

The emissions cap under the Western Climate Initiative is equivalent to taking 75.6 million cars off the road.

Even without Baghdad-like summer temperatures in Phoenix and other desert environs, heat has always been a major issue across the American West. For one thing, it relates directly to three of the classical earthly elements: water, air, and, of course, fire. That is, air quality and pollution, water-loaded snowpacks and glaciers, and wildfires made worse by hot weather patterns.

So it's not surprising that climate change is seen by many citizens and officials out West as a big deal – so big that Western states and cities have been at the forefront of tackling global warming. Last week, six Western governors and two Canadian provincial leaders "pledged & to enforce a tough regional cap on greenhouse gas emissions," the Los Angeles Times reported.

Read on ...

Just Don't Call Them Communes - U.S. News and World Report

It's the luxury edition of the American exurb: hilltop scenery, new-money mansions, horses galloping behind split-rail fences. About 25 miles west of Washington, D.C., Loudoun County boasts a median household income of $98,483, twice the national rate. It's the kind of place beloved by D.C. power brokers, whose sprawling estates serve as monuments to the American dream. These days, however, Loudoun County is also at the forefront of a very different if no less American vision: the commune.

The idea that like-minded individuals should forge a community is on something of a comeback tour. An online directory of "intentional communities" has more than doubled in the past two years to 1,295 in North America, and 20 new listings are added each month.

Past imperfect. But forget the term commune. Try "ecovillage," where residents live in Earth-friendly homes on communal land, or "cohousing," where a common house serves as a gathering place. Driven by a green ethos and discontent with impersonal suburbs, residents frequently dine together, share possessions, and baby-sit one another's children. But shared income is a thing of the past, and private homes are essential. Still, the old stereotypes of socialism, drugs, and rebellion dog these communities. "We've fought this for years," says Joani Blank, a cohousing advocate who lives in a divvied-up former market in Oakland, Calif. "Our ideology is about neighborhoods more than anything else."

Poverty and disillusionment drove many older communes to extinction, but the idea was reincarnated, particularly in Europe, in the post-Cold War era. By 1995, Danish activists Hildur and Ross Jackson had created the Global Ecovillage Network to promote sustainable living around the world. Even some of the most archetypal communes, such as the 1960s socialist experiment, the Farm in Tennessee, have reshaped themselves. In New York, the 175-acre EcoVillage at Ithaca boasts two 30-home neighborhoods, office space, and working farms.

Read on ...

Earth too warm? Bury the CO2. - CSM

Under a blazing west Texas sun, with a whiptail lizard and cattle looking on, Rebecca Smyth works with an assistant to lower a measuring line, then a hose, and finally a slender plastic capsule down an old water well 200 feet deep.

She's hoping the water samples she collects will yield clues to what is, arguably, one of mankind's most pressing environmental questions: Can nations bury their greenhouse gases?

If they can, then governments will have bought themselves a decades-long respite as they search for less carbon-intensive energy sources. If they can't, then a significant rise in global temperatures by 2100 looks inevitable, if fossil-fuel consumption continues at its current pace.

Read on ...

~

FCC to Rule on Wireless Auction: Lobbying Intense As Google Seeks To Open Market - Washington Post

The Federal Communications Commission will set the rules tomorrow governing the auction of $15 billion of public airwaves, a decision with stakes so high that the major U.S. cellular carriers and Google have spent millions of dollars on a lobbying campaign in an attempt to influence the outcome. The decision could dramatically alter the nation's cellphone industry.

Google, the giant Internet search company, wants to extend its popular tools, which include e-mail and video, to the rapidly expanding mobile phone market. To do so, it may spend billions to build a new, open network it says will loosen the grip telecom operators have over how consumers use their cellphones.

Currently, the major U.S. wireless carriers, including AT&T and Verizon Wireless, largely decide which Web sites, music-download services and search engines their customers can access on their cellphones. This is accomplished by wireless companies determining which cellphones will receive their services: AT&T, for example, is the only carrier available to users of Apple's iPhone.

Read on ...

~

U.S. vehicles rank bottom in fuel efficiency - Reuters

The United States ranks at the bottom of industrialized countries in vehicle fuel-economy standards, but would jump far up the list if legislation to boost mileage requirements clears Congress and is signed into law, according to a report released on Monday.

The report comes as the House of Representatives will debate energy legislation this week, and some lawmakers want to tack on language to significantly increase the miles American cars and trucks travel on a gallon a gasoline.

U.S. fuel-efficiency requirements for passenger cars have been stuck at 27.5 miles per gallon since 1985, while the standard for pickups, minivans and other light trucks will increase from 20.7 mpg in 2004 to 24 mpg in 2011.

Read on ...

Can 'green chic' save the planet? - CSMonitor

Ecofriendly buying choices alone can't sustain America's lifestyle, experts warn – unless 'looking green' becomes 'voting green.'

Green, it seems, has gone mainstream. Magazines like Elle, Fortune, and Vanity Fair have published "green issues" in the past year, and the Academy Awards were carbon neutral. The Vatican recently announced plans to offset its 2007 emissions, while Costa Rica pledged to arrive at "net zero" by 2021.

Green has also gone trendy. Last week, Whole Foods Market released a limited edition, $15 cotton bag with "I'm not a plastic bag" emblazoned on its side. When the bag went on sale at outlets in Taiwan, a stampede followed. In Hong Kong, throngs shut down a shopping mall. In New York City last week, lines formed at dawn. Later that day, bags were offered on Craigslist for between $200 and $500. "These bags are walking billboards," says Isabel Spearman, a spokeswoman for the bag's designer, Anya Hindmarch. "You do have to make something trendy, and it becomes a habit. That's the whole point."

Savvy marketers have clearly tapped into something. But the green craze has many asking how, if at all, it addresses what many characterize as an impending climate catastrophe.

Read on ...

Discovery Channel team paying Austin firm to offset carbon output. - Austin American-Statesman

In the most recent twist on the carbon-neutral movement, a Tour de France cycling team is offsetting its carbon dioxide emissions through an Austin renewable energy company.

Technically, the bicyclists for the Discovery Channel Pro Cycling Team - which has an office in Austin and featured Lance Armstrong on its roster when he won his seventh and final Tour de France in 2005 - emit only as much carbon dioxide as they exhale while pedaling through France this month. But behind and in front of them lurk the support vehicles that carry coaches, water and spare rims - and spew pollutants from their tailpipes.

That's why the Discovery Channel team is paying Austin's Green Mountain Energy Co. to offset the estimated 62 tons of carbon dioxide generated by the race support vehicles during the team's cycling season. The savings is equivalent to bicycling instead of driving a car more than 151,000 miles - or about the same distance as riding the Tour de France 68 times, according to Green Mountain Energy.

Read on ...

Solar Power Captures Imagination, Not Money - New York Times

The trade association for the nuclear power industry recently asked 1,000 Americans what energy source they thought would be used most for generating electricity in 15 years. The top choice? Not nuclear plants, or coal or natural gas. The winner was the sun, cited by 27 percent of those polled.

It is no wonder solar power has captured the public imagination. Panels that convert sunlight to electricity are winning supporters around the world - from Europe, where gleaming arrays cloak skyscrapers and farmers' fields, to Wall Street, where stock offerings for panel makers have had a great ride, to California, where Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s "Million Solar Roofs" initiative is promoted as building a homegrown industry and fighting global warming.

But for all the enthusiasm about harvesting sunlight, some of the most ardent experts and investors say that moving this energy source from niche to mainstream — last year it provided less than 0.01 percent of the country’s electricity supply — is unlikely without significant technological breakthroughs. And given the current scale of research in private and government laboratories, that is not expected to happen anytime soon.

Read on ...

~

Climate Change Debate Hinges On Economics - Washington Post

Here's the good news about climate change: Energy and climate experts say the world already possesses the technological know-how for trimming greenhouse gas emissions enough to slow the perilous rise in the Earth's temperatures.

Here's the bad news: Because of the enormous cost of addressing global warming, the energy legislation considered by Congress so far will make barely a dent in the problem, while farther-reaching climate proposals stand a remote chance of passage.

Despite growing public concern over global warming, the House has failed to agree on new standards for automobile fuel efficiency, and the Senate has done little to boost the efficiency of commercial office buildings and appliances. In September, Congress is expected to start wrestling with more ambitious legislation aimed at slowing climate change; but because of the complexity of the likely proposals, few expect any bill to become law. Even if passed by Congress and signed by President Bush, the final measure may not be tough enough to slow global warming.

Read on ...

~

Web radio stations win a last-minute stay of execution - Salon

Wired's indispensable digital-music maven Eliot Van Buskirk reports some good breaking news: Internet radio stations will not shut down this Sunday.

Many Web radio outfits feared closure as their legal fight against staggering new music royalty rates met failure this week. On Thursday, the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals refused to block the new rates, which are scheduled to go into effect Sunday. But as a result of public outcry -- which, in turn, sparked congressional outcry -- SoundExchange, the recording-industry group that collects royalties, has agreed not to immediately enforce the rates, pending negotiations with webcasters.

I just spoke to Tim Westergren, the founder of Pandora, the hugely popular Internet radio station that allows people to create personalized music channels. I asked Westergren if Pandora will shut down Sunday: "No, we won't," he said.

Read on ...

~

Paris readies for Velib frenzy - BBC

The humble bicycle is getting a boost in Paris as the city council launches Velib, a free bike scheme to encourage people to give up the motor in favour of pedal power.

Cycling in Paris is not a sport for the faint hearted.

The traffic runs as smoothly as a snail in treacle and drivers' tempers are about as sweet as bitter aloes.

The local authority in Paris is depositing 20,000 heavy-duty bicycles in 750 or so special racks around the city and anyone who wants one simply swipes his or her ordinary travel card and pedals off wherever they want to go.

Read On ...

'Faux' gas tax tests resolve on global warming - The Christian Science Monitor

Rep. John Dingell says he expects his proposal for a hefty 'carbon tax' on gasoline will prove Americans don't really want to change their energy-rich lifestyle.

Rep. John Dingell (D) might seem like the last guy to want a big new tax aimed squarely at Americans' gas guzzlers. For more than 50 years in Congress, he's represented southeastern Michigan – home to thousands of US auto workers.

But the Democrats' "dean of the House" is calling for a whopping tax on gasoline and other emitters of carbon dioxide (CO2), a greenhouse gas that scientists say causes global warming. Whether he really believes that's the way to address climate change – not to mention keeping his seat in Congress – is another matter.

Representative Dingell admits he's proposing a carbon tax just to prove that Americans don't really want to make big changes in their energy-rich lifestyle. Asked last weekend in a C-SPAN interview whether people would be willing to pay higher prices because of energy legislation, Dingell said he doubted "that the American people are willing to pay what this is really going to cost them."

Read on ...

~

Russia suspends arms control pact - BBC

Russian President Vladimir Putin has suspended the application of a key Cold War arms control treaty.

Mr Putin signed a decree citing "exceptional circumstances" affecting security as the reason for the move.

Russia has been angered by US plans to base parts of a missile defence system in Poland and the Czech Republic.

The 1990 Conventional Forces in Europe Treaty (CFE) limits the number of heavy weapons deployed between the Atlantic Ocean and the Urals mountains.

Read on ...

Huge telescope set to scour skies - BBC

One of the world's largest optical telescopes is set to peer into space for the first time.

Installed on a 2,400m-high (7,900ft) peak on the Canary Island of La Palma, the huge telescope consists of a mirror measuring 10.4m (34.1ft) in diameter.

The Spanish-led Great Canary Telescope (GTC) is extremely powerful and will be able to spot some of the faintest, most distant objects in the Universe.

Read on ...

~

Bush Distorts Qaeda Links, Critics Assert - New York Times

In rebuffing calls to bring troops home from Iraq, President Bush on Thursday employed a stark and ominous defense. "The same folks that are bombing innocent people in Iraq," he said, "were the ones who attacked us in America on September the 11th, and that’s why what happens in Iraq matters to the security here at home."

It is an argument Mr. Bush has been making with frequency in the past few months, as the challenges to the continuation of the war have grown. On Thursday alone, he referred at least 30 times to Al Qaeda or its presence in Iraq.

But his references to Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, and his assertions that it is the same group that attacked the United States in 2001, have greatly oversimplified the nature of the insurgency in Iraq and its relationship with the Qaeda leadership.

Read on ...

~

Birthing bears head for land as Arctic ice gets scarcer - San Francisco Chronicle

Increasing numbers of pregnant polar bears are coming to land to give birth instead of staying on the thinning Arctic sea ice, a trend that signals a bleak future for their population there, a U.S. Geological Survey study has found.

Data from northern Alaska show that the proportion of the bears' dens that are on pack ice declined from 62 percent between 1985 and 1994 to 37 percent from 1998 to 2004, according to the study, which was published Thursday in the journal Polar Biology.

The scientists based their findings on 89 females that were captured and collared and then followed using satellite technology. They ruled out hunting and attraction to bowhead whale bones as other possible causes for changing denning locations.

Read on ...

~

'Move On'? Not So Fast, Mr. President - Washington Post

President Bush made several unsupported assertions about the war in Iraq during his press conference yesterday ... but when it comes to sheer audacity, nothing came close to his response when asked how he felt about two of his top advisers leaking Valerie Plame's identity as a CIA agent to reporters.

Jennifer Loven gets it right in her Associated Press story: "President Bush always said he would wait to talk about the CIA leak case until after the investigation into his administration's role. On Thursday, he skipped over that step and pronounced the matter old news hardly worth discussing.

"'It's run its course,' he said. 'Now we're going to move on.'

"Despite a long history of denouncing leaks, Bush declined to express any disappointment in the people who worked for him and who were involved in disclosing the name of a CIA operative. Asked about that . . . the president gave a dodgy answer.

"'It's been a tough issue for a lot of people in the White House,' he said.

Read on ...

An Underwater Fence to Stop Invasive Species - Washington Post

A century ago, engineers blasted the Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal out of limestone to reverse the Chicago River, an unprecedented engineering feat that linked Lake Michigan with the Mississippi River.

The project served its purpose, sucking water from the lake to flush out the growing city's waste, but there was an unintended consequence: It created a pathway between two previously distinct ecosystems and a route for invasive species traveling in both directions. Until recent years, though, heavy pollution in the canal prevented fish from swimming through it.

Today, the canal is cleaner, and the infamous Asian carp and the round goby are both threatening to take advantage. But the government is stepping up its efforts to stop them.

Read on ...

From Christian Science Monitor - What's happening to the bees?

Beekeeper James Doan first began finding empty hives last fall. Entire bee colonies seemed to have up and vanished, leaving their honey behind. Noting the unusually wet fall in Hamlin, N.Y., he blamed the weather. Unable to forage in the rain, the bees probably starved, he reasoned.

But when deserted hives began appearing daily, "we knew it was something different," he says. Now, at the beginning of the 2007 pollination season, more than half of his 4,300 hives are gone. "I'm just about ready to give up," says Mr. Doan from his honeybee wintering site in Ft. Meade, Fla. "I'm not sure I can survive."

The cause of the die-offs has yet to be determined. Its effect on the food supply may be significant. Longer-term, it may also force a rethinking of some agricultural practices including our heavy reliance on human-managed bees for pollination.

Scientists call it "colony collapse disorder" (CCD). First reported in Florida last fall, the problem has since spread to 24 states. Commercial beekeepers are reporting losses of between 50 and 90 percent, an unprecedented amount even for an industry accustomed to die-offs.

Many worry that what's shaping up to be a honeybee catastrophe will disrupt the food supply. While staple crops like wheat and corn are pollinated by wind, some 90 cultivated flowering crops – from almonds and apples to cranberries and watermelons – rely heavily on honeybees trucked in for pollinization. Honeybees pollinate every third bite of food ingested by Americans, says a Cornell study. Bees help generate some $14 billion in produce.

Read on

MIT Technology Review - Bush's Polar-Bear Problem

The administration tells scientists attending international meetings not to discuss polar bears, climate change, or sea ice.

Polar bears can't get a break these days. First we saw them in Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth desperately swimming about in the Artic in search of ice floes that seem to have disappeared due to global warming. Now we hear that experts working for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service can't talk about these giant white-furred beasts in overseas scientific meetings about climate change.

The order to squelch talk about polar bears came in a "new requirement" listing to government scientists traveling abroad. Henceforth, if they are participating in a meeting "involving or potentially involving climate change, sea ice, and/or polar bears," they need to report this and have a spokesperson assigned to articulate the administration's policies.

Read the rest

After surviving 20 million years, China's goddess of the Yangtze might be the first big aquatic mammal to become extinct due to our activity.

http://news.independent.co.uk/environment/article2083841.ece

Check out this blog post on MotherJones discussing frozen sea methane amongst other things.

This article on High Country News talks about how "the Park Service finds itself watcheddogged by former staffers who no longer fear the consequences of protest."

Old but Faithful by Stephen J Lyons - How a feisty group of government retirees faced down the Bush administration and changed the future of America’s national parks

(Subscription required ... but it is worth it!)

From the Christian Science Monitor:

With alarms bells over global warming ringing ever louder and more insistent, is it possible - or credible - for an active scientist working on climate questions to be skeptical of the cause or future severity?

Amid mounting evidence that temperatures are rising on planet Earth, the "skeptics" and "agnostics" are a smaller band than they used to be. Yet those who do still harbor doubts about a looming global-warming crisis are quietly continuing to test alternative ideas about how climate works and what, if not the burning of fossil fuels, might be causing the temperature creep.

This week some of the doubters testified at a Senate hearing on global warming, perhaps their last chance to take the bully pulpit for at least two years, now that Congress is shifting to Democratic control. At a hearing chaired by Sen. James Inhofe (R) of Oklahoma, who has dismissed warnings of a global-warming crisis as a hoax, they expressed misgivings about the reliability of climate forecasts and questioned whether the current warming even is unusual, among other things.

Read on

NASA and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) scientists report this year's ozone hole in the polar region of the Southern Hemisphere has broken records for area and depth.

www.nasa.gov/vision/earth/lookingatearth/ozone_record.html

From NASA News:

NASA scientists have determined that the formation of clouds is affected by the lightness or darkness of air pollution particles. This also impacts Earth's climate.

In a breakthrough study published today in the online edition of Science, scientists explain why aerosols -- tiny particles suspended in air pollution and smoke -- sometimes stop clouds from forming and in other cases increase cloud cover. Clouds not only deliver water around the globe, they also help regulate how much of the sun's warmth the planet holds. The capacity of air pollution to absorb energy from the sun is the key.

Read More

An expert panel convened by the BBC concludes that climate change is "real and severe", but maybe not "catastrophic".

~ Update ~

Here are a couple of related articles on Newsweek:

The President: Shades of Green - George W. Bush thinks of himself as a conservationist, but activists call his policies destructive to the environment.
Going Green - With windmills, low-energy homes, new forms of recycling and fuel-efficient cars, Americans are taking conservation into their own hands.

I have been wandering around the internet recently reading up on climate change. I have found the following websites of interesting:

• You Control Climate Change - The EU new website for the individuals of the EU
• Climate Ark - a portal for climate change and global warming
• U.S. Global Change Research Program
• Climate Change on UNEP.net

This search was spark by recent news items including these:

• 2 Industry Leaders Bet on Coal but Split on Cleaner Approach - NYTimes
• Warming Atmosphere Expands Tropics - Scientific America
• New Forecast: Hot and Hotter - Science Magazine
• Temperature Rising - U.S. News and World Report

An interesting read on how industry groups diverted public attention away from serious waste reduction.

The Origins of Anti-Litter Campaigns

Breaking the Global-Warming Gridlock by Daniel Sarewitz and Roger Pielke Jr.

Both sides on the issue of greenhouse gases frame their arguments in terms of science, but each new scientific finding only raises new questions—dooming the debate to be a pointless spiral. It's time, the authors argue, for a radically new approach: if we took practical steps to reduce our vulnerability to today's weather, we would go a long way toward solving the problem of tomorrow's climate.

Published in Altaltic Monthly in July of 2000, this article is still a very good and educational read.

Late last year in Goldfield, Iowa, a refinery began pumping out a stream of ethanol, which supporters call the clean, renewable fuel of the future.

There's just one twist: The plant is burning 300 tons of coal a day to turn corn into ethanol - the first US plant of its kind to use coal instead of cleaner natural gas.

Read on: http://www.csmonitor.com/2006/0323/p01s01-sten.html?s=hns

© Ann Telnaes - 06/17/2005

Former Bush Aide Who Edited Reports Is Hired by Exxon

At Exxon Mobil Corp.'s laboratories here, there isn't a solar panel or windmill in sight. About the closest Exxon's scientists get to "renewable" energy is perfecting an oil that Exxon could sell to companies operating wind turbines.

Oil giants such as BP PLC and Royal Dutch/Shell Group are trumpeting a better-safe-than-sorry approach to global warming. They accept a growing scientific consensus that fossil fuels are a main contributor to the problem and endorse the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, which caps emissions from developed nations that have ratified it. BP and Shell also have begun to invest in alternatives to fossil fuels.

Not Exxon. Openly and unapologetically, the world's No. 1 oil company disputes the notion that fossil fuels are the main cause of global warming. Along with the Bush administration, Exxon opposes the Kyoto accord and the very idea of capping global-warming emissions. Congress is debating an energy bill that may be amended to include a cap, but the administration and Exxon say the costs would be huge and the benefits uncertain. Exxon also contributes money to think tanks and other groups that agree with its stance.

More

**********

© Mike Luckovich - 06/17/2005

Changing planet revealed in atlas

The UN issues an atlas of satellite images showing how humans have changed the face of the earth.

From the AP:

Reaction across the West to the Bush administration's decision Thursday to open up nearly a third of all remote national forest lands to road building, logging and other commercial ventures.

ALASKA:

"It's a hotly debated item, but what we're going to see out of this, I think, is an effort by this administration to balance the areas that don't have roads in them and allow other areas to have road access.'' —Alaska Gov. Frank Murkowski.

"In Alaska where so much of our land is federally controlled, local input on the use and management of those lands is critical to a community's success. I applaud the administration for setting out a policy where the people of each state can be heard. — U.S. Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska.

ARIZONA:

"It's a shame and one of the most striking things about the whole process is how dishonest it's been. ... The old plan helped to protect roadless areas in national forests. The new plan completely reverses protection for roadless areas. It's a wholesale abandonment of protection for roadless areas. Putting a fancy name on it does not change the facts.'' —Erik Ryberg, a Southwest forest advocate for the Tucson-based Center for Biological Diversity.

"The Bush administration is focused on harming the national forests. Arizona forest is public land, and they don't belong to the timber industry or any one industry.'' —Sandy Bahr, a spokeswoman for the Sierra Club.

CALIFORNIA:

"California's forests are one of our state's most treasured and valued resources. I am committed to protecting the vibrant health and sustainable future of our forests. In keeping with that commitment and the assurances we have from the U.S. Forest Service, roadless areas in California will remain roadless.'' —California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger.

"We have no plans to build roads in the roadless areas of the national forests in California. ... Areas are roadless here for a reason.'' —Matt Mathes, regional spokesman for the U.S. Forest Service.

"It's a much more sane policy in dealing with our roadless areas.'' —Phil Aune, vice president, California Forestry Association.

"We think this is a tragic gutting of the roadless rule that had such popular support and would have done so much to protect California's roadless areas.'' —Ryan Henson, policy director, California Wilderness Coalition.

COLORADO:

"We're disappointed the way it's turned out, but we look forward to working with Gov. (Bill) Owens to save as much roadless land in Colorado as possible.'' —David Petersen, head of the roadless land program for Colorado's chapter of Trout Unlimited.

"Trees, wildlife, and fish don't respect state boundaries, and I don't think decisions about management of roadless areas — or other parts of the national forests — should be based on those lines, either,'' —Rep. Mark Udall, D-Colo., who also called the rules "a significant step backward.''

"There is not one single Western state that's not been asking the federal government for more power to determine these kinds of decisions.'' —Jim Sims, executive director of the Denver-based Western Business Roundtable.

IDAHO:

"We congratulate the Bush Administration for taking such a positive step toward resolving the roadless debate. This rule recognizes that a broad dictate over 60 million acres is simply unacceptable. By empowering states to offer suggestions on the management of roadless area in their states, the Forest Service can craft management plans to local conditions, reflecting local priorities while maintaining the lands for everyone.'' —Statement issued by Idaho's congressional delegation.

"We are extremely disappointed that the new Bush plan fails to provide adequate protection for the last roadless areas in the country. These areas are some of the most important areas for fish and wildlife. They provide far and away the best hunting and fishing opportunities in the country.'' —Jonathan Oppenheimer of the Boise-based Idaho Conservation League.

MONTANA:

"It's a complete betrayal of the trust, the promises the Forest Service and the Department of Agriculture made to keep our backcountry lands intact. ... Our hope is that the governor will prevent this senseless assault on Montana's heritage.'' —John Gatchell, conservation director with the Montana Wilderness Association

"The Bush administration has put subsidizing timber companies ahead of clean drinking water and wildlife habitat.'' —Michael Garrity, executive director of the Alliance for the Wild Rockies.

"We welcome our opportunity to provide input and we won't be shy about providing it.'' —Montana Gov. Brian Schweitzer.

NEVADA:

"While this has been a volatile issue nationally, I'm in favor of this policy change because I strongly believe in state's rights. I look forward to seeing the details of the new roadless designation rule which sounds like a more reasonable and measured approach than the one it's replacing.'' —Nevada Gov. Kenny Guinn.

"This action is one of the biggest environmental rollbacks by the Bush administration. ... Roadless areas provide some of the best fishing and hunting in the West. — Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev.

NEW MEXICO:

"The Bush Administration has provided a way to deal with the roadless issue that empowers states. I was deeply disappointed with the Clinton Administration's attempt to shut out state and local voices in the management of federal roadless land.'' —Sen. Pete Domenici, R-N.M., chairman of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee.

"This is a classic example of the Bush administration trashing our democracy and trashing our forests. Today, the clean drinking water, wildlife and recreational opportunities of our wild forests are severely damaged.'' —Bryan Bird, forest program coordinator for Forest Guardians, a Santa Fe, N.M.-based environmntal group.

OREGON:

"This administration is not replacing or doing away with the Clinton rule. They're coming up with a process to protect and manage these important areas, because for the last couple years there has been no rule.'' —Chris West with Portland, Ore.-based American Forest Resource Council, who noted that in 2003 a federal judge ruled that the Clinton rule was illegal.

UTAH:

"I can't say that we're shocked given this administration, but this is really a travesty of a policy. In the course of the process that led to the roadless rule, about four million comments were collected and they were overwhelmingly in favor of protecting the land.'' —Heidi McIntosh, conservation director for the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance.

"This rule gives great flexibility to governors to respond on a forest-by-forest basis. It also allows the needs and concerns of local communities to be addressed.'' —Mike Styler, executive director of the Utah Department of Natural Resources.

WASHINGTON:

"The administration couldn't hear thunder in a quiet room. The public has said very clearly they want these areas protected. They are special places. People understand that pristine forests are unusual, they are rare, they are unique. "They have said by the millions that they want them protected.'' —Todd True with Seattle-based Earthjustice.

"We value our national forest roadless areas in Washington state. They are important habitat for endangered fish and wildlife, help provide clean water and opportunities for recreation and solitude, and contribute to the wonderful natural environment we enjoy in the Pacific Northwest. We hope to have most, if not all, of our national forest roadless areas in Washington protected.'' —Washington Gov. Christine Gregoire.

WYOMING:

"This procedural rule change does not alter any of the existing Forest Service planning criteria, regulations or law. It is a cosmetic attempt to appear to act without any real change. This is really a costly exercise in futility for the states and a mechanism for the Forest Service to deflect political pressure. I frankly wish they would have spent their efforts on making the planning process more effective and efficient for the average citizen rather than adding another layer.'' —Wyoming Gov. Dave Freudenthal.

"I think it would really help a lot of these small communities that rely on it. ... We would like to see it for the plain and simple reason the town was very dependent on logging.'' —Mary Pigg, co-owner of RJR Logging in Saratoga, Wyo., which has not had any business for nearly years because the lack of logging forced area sawmills to close.

1994-'03 stats show an unsettling trend

Air quality in three of Colorado's national parks has worsened over the past decade despite tougher rules and millions of dollars spent to fight pollution, according to new information released by the federal government.

Rocky Mountain National Park, along with Great Sand Dunes in the San Luis Valley and Mesa Verde in the southwest corner of the state, have seen either increasing smog, worsening visibility or both in the 10 years from 1994 through 2003.

But there also is some good news in the numbers. Visibility on clear days at Rocky Mountain National Park is improving. In addition, new regulations more tailored to the park's specific problems are expected to make at least a dent in the pollution that's dirtying its air.

Of Colorado's four national parks, the data is most complete for Rocky Mountain. It shows smog levels rising and worsening visibility on the haziest days. It also shows that increasing levels of nitrogen compounds are falling on the park, chemicals that can gradually acidify park waters and soils.

Rocky Mountain News

The new rule will abandon a remedy favored by most environmental groups in favor of a system of tradable pollution allowances that is more congenial to industry.

The New York Times

Here are three urgent issues that need your help.

Please let your representatives in Washington D.C. know that you care about our planet and all the life that lives on it.

Protect Our National Forests

Save the Clean Water Act

Save the Clean Air Act

Thank You, Peter

from The Washington Post:

Ten of the nation's top climate researchers warned yesterday that policymakers must act soon to address the dangers associated with global warming, which they described as a looming threat that will hit hardest and soonest at the world's poor and at farmers.

"By mid-century, millions more poor children around the world are likely to face displacement, malnourishment, disease and even starvation unless all countries take action now to slow global warming" and sea-level rises that will follow, Michael Oppenheimer, who teaches geosciences and international affairs at Princeton University, said at a conference. "Imagine the difficulties faced by families in Bangladesh. An area where about 8 million people now live would be underwater if global sea level were to rise half a meter. Where are they going to go?"

More: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A44598-2004Jun15.html

To bad G. W. Bush doesn't read the newspapers, or maybe that's simply "doesn't read!" ;)

Contributed by Working Assets

In the next few weeks, the Senate is poised to vote on legislation to fight global warming.

The McCain-Lieberman Climate Stewardship Act (S. 139) is a bipartisan bill that mandates limits on greenhouse-gas emissions by U.S. polluters and requires cuts to take effect by 2010.

Last October, the legislation was unfortunately defeated in a 43-55 vote, but Senators McCain and Lieberman are bringing it back to the Senate floor for a new vote later this month.

It has become clear that neither corporations nor the Bush administration will take action to reverse global warming, so it’s up to the thoughtful, independent voices in the U.S. Senate to take up the charge.

Urge your senators to back the McCain-Lieberman bill and slow global warming before it’s too late.

Click here to take action!

New York Times - June 10, 2004

A research firm that the Bush administration commissioned to analyze its plan to lower emissions from coal-fired power plants compared the plan with two competing legislative proposals and concluded in a report released Wednesday that the administration's plan was the weakest.

At the invitation of the environmental coalition Clear the Air, the international research firm Abt Associates, which often conducts studies for the Environmental Protection Agency, used the same methodology in assessing all three. It found that the administration's plan, called the Clear Skies Act, would save as many as 14,000 lives but that the other bills would save more - 16,000 in one case and 22,000 in the other.

The findings, included in a report, "Dirty Air, Dirty Power," were immediately attacked by industry groups as a "repackaged" argument that focused on only one source of emissions. The administration's chief environmental policy adviser echoed the criticism, saying that the administration plan provided benefits as part of an overall strategy to meet air quality standards that were more stringent than ever.

But officials from Clear the Air said the report provided evidence that the administration's approach to curbing emissions from power plants did not do enough soon enough, and in the process, saved power companies from spending huge sums on technologies that would reduce emissions.

More: http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/10/politics/10air.html

NYT Editorial, published May 21, 2004:

After more than three years of steady criticism for its regressive policies on air pollution, the Bush administration is enjoying well-deserved praise for a new regulatory initiative that will greatly reduce harmful emissions from diesel-powered construction equipment and other off-road machinery. The rule will apply to engines in more than six million pieces of equipment, everything from bulldozers to tractors and airport baggage trucks. Off-road diesel engines account for a quarter of the smog-producing pollutants and more than half of the soot from mobile sources. They are believed to be responsible for 12,000 premature deaths annually as well as hundreds of thousands of respiratory illnesses.

The rule is the most important clean air initiative to originate in and be brought to fruition by the Bush administration. An earlier regulation limiting trucks' and buses' diesel emissions was formulated under President Bill Clinton and upheld by Mr. Bush. The new rule builds on the old, first requiring cleaner fuels — without that, advanced pollution control equipment cannot work — then requiring cleaner engines, which are expected to be about 90 percent cleaner than current models.

At least as important as the rule itself is the process that produced it. For once, the administration sought the views of somebody other than its patrons in industry, including, in this instance, state and local governments and environmentalists. The result was a solution that everyone could support. It would be wonderful if the administration would apply the same open, collaborative model to other controversial and unresolved issues, chief among them mercury pollution

Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.
News Release: 2004-126

On June 19, NASA will launch Aura, a next generation Earth-observing satellite. Aura will supply the best information yet about the health of Earth's atmosphere.

Aura will help scientists understand how atmospheric composition affects and responds to Earth's changing climate. The satellite will help reveal the processes that connect local and global air quality. It will also track the extent to which Earth's protective ozone layer is recovering.

Aura will carry four instruments designed to survey different aspects of Earth's atmosphere. The instruments will provide an unprecedented and complete picture of the composition of the atmosphere. Aura will survey the atmosphere from the troposphere, where mankind lives, through the stratosphere, where the ozone layer resides and protects life on Earth.

Aura's space-based view of the atmosphere and its chemistry will complete the first series of NASA's Earth Observing System satellites. The other satellites are Terra, which monitors land; and Aqua, which observes Earth's water cycle.

"Gaining this global view of Earth will certainly reap new scientific discoveries that will serve as essential stepping stones to our further exploration of the Moon, Mars and beyond, the basis of the Vision for Space Exploration," NASA Administrator Sean O'Keefe said.

Aura will help answer key scientific questions, including whether the ozone layer is recovering. Aura data may prove useful in determining the effectiveness of international agreements that banned ozone-depleting chemicals like chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs).

Aura will accurately detect global levels of CFCs and their byproducts, chlorine and bromine, which destroy ozone. Aura will also track the sources and processes controlling global and regional air quality. It will help distinguish between natural and human-caused sources of these gases. When ozone exists in the troposphere, it acts as an air pollutant. Tropospheric ozone is linked to high levels of precursors such as nitrogen dioxide, carbon monoxide and volatile hydrocarbons. Aura will help scientists follow the sources of tropospheric ozone and its precursors.

"Aura, the first comprehensive laboratory in space to help us better understand the chemistry and composition of the Earth's atmosphere, is fundamentally a mission to understand and protect the very air we breathe, " said NASA Associate Administrator for Earth Science Dr. Ghassem Asrar. "It is also a perfect complement to our other Earth Observing System satellites that, together, will aid our nation and our neighbors by determining the extent, causes, and regional consequences of global change."

As the composition of Earth's atmosphere changes, so does its ability to absorb, reflect and retain solar energy. Greenhouse gases, including water vapor, trap heat in the atmosphere. Airborne aerosols from human and natural sources absorb or reflect solar energy based on color, shape, size and substance. The impact of aerosols, tropospheric ozone and upper tropospheric water vapor on Earth's climate remains largely unquantified. Aura's ability to monitor these agents will help unravel some of their mystery.

Aura's four instruments, the High Resolution Dynamics Limb Sounder; the Microwave Limb Sounder; the Ozone Monitoring Instrument; and the Tropospheric Emission Spectrometer will work together to provide measurements in the troposphere and stratosphere to help answer important climate questions.

The High Resolution Dynamics Limb Sounder was built by the United Kingdom and the United States. The Ozone Monitoring Instrument was built by the Netherlands and Finland in collaboration with NASA. NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., constructed the Tropospheric Emission Spectromer and Microwave Limb Sounder. NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md., manages the Aura mission.

NASA's Earth Science Enterprise is dedicated to understanding the Earth as an integrated system and applying Earth System Science to improve prediction of climate, weather, and natural hazards using the unique vantage point of space.

For Aura information and images on the Internet, visit http://www.gsfc.nasa.gov/topstory/2004/0517aura.html or http://aura.gsfc.nasa.gov/ .

The Bush administration is considering counting fish raised in hatcheries when determining if species are going extinct.

SEATTLE, May 8 — Three years ago, Mark C. Rutzick was the timber industry's top lawyer trying to overturn fish and wildlife protections that loggers viewed as overly restrictive. Back then, he outlined to his clients a new strategy for dealing with diminishing salmon runs. By counting hatchery fish along with wild salmon, the government would help the timber industry by getting salmon off the endangered species list, Mr. Rutzick wrote.

Now, as a high-ranking political appointee in the Bush administration who is a legal adviser to the National Marine Fisheries Service, Mr. Rutzick is helping to shape government policy on endangered Pacific salmon. And in an abrupt change, the Bush administration has decided for the first time to consider counting fish raised in hatcheries when determining if some species are going extinct.

The new plan, which officials have said is expected to be formally announced at the end of the month, closely follows the position that Mr. Rutzick advocated when he represented the timber industry.

More: http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/09/national/09SALM.html?hp

Three things that caught my eye today:

1. Colorado River named most endangered river in the USA
2. The revisions of the Clean Air Act for Colorado is about to go before a state regulatory board
3. EPA is about to announce that Denver will go back on the list of Dirty Cities because of rising smog levels

Just a fine day for this state with Earth Day just 8 days away.

I was checking out the P.O.V. Borders Environment site and found these interesting facts.

Bottled Water

• Americans spend 3 times as much for water as gasoline
• Americans spend $11,000 per minute on bottled water
• of the 100 brands tested by the NRDC, 1/3 failed to meet the clean water standards for tap water

Air

• The top 10 greenest vehicles of 2003 where all Japanese
• There are approximately 600 million cars around the world
• to accommodate its 214 million cars, the U.S. has paved 3.9 million miles of road, enough to circle the earth 157 times

Kind of interesting, if you ask me.

One final thought: The U.S. would save 4 million barrels of oil a day if everyone drove a hybrid car. Just think what that would do to OPEC and it's strangle hold on oil production.

Via BushGreenWatch:

The EPA is relaxing air pollution limits for oil production and exploration operations on Alaska's North Slope, according to agency records released yesterday by Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER).

"Emissions of nitrogen oxides on the North Slope are now as high as those for the entire metropolitan area of Washington, D.C.," PEER said in a letter to EPA Administrator Mike Leavitt last week, asking him to veto an agency permit.[1] Nitrogen oxides (NOx) are a greenhouse gas and source of smog.

PEER said the change in pollution rules is the result of closed-door meetings between industry, the EPA and Alaska regulators. A 2003 letter from the EPA to an Alaska official indicates that EPA initially opposed the changes affecting emissions by massive oil facilities based at Prudhoe Bay.[2]

"The pollution stakes of this action are enormous and the benefits will be realized if EPA merely enforces its own rules," said Jeff Ruch, PEER's executive director.

At immediate issue is a permit for new facilities at a large BP complex. BP is Alaska's second-largest oil producer and operates most North Slope oil fields.

Contrary to EPA guidance, PEER said, the new BP facility is classified as a stand-alone operation and not included (or "aggregated") into its existing permit. By subdividing their operations, operators have been allowed to divide up their facilities into smaller and smaller units. As a result, each stays below the threshold for pollution control requirements established in the Clean Air Act.

A former Alaska state environmental engineer, Bill MacClarence, raised concerns about this method of categorizing facilities with regulators and then approached PEER.

Elevated levels of NOx represent a serious health problem for workers and native communities in the region. In the Arctic, air pollution is more significant than in temperate zones because the region is subject to extreme atmospheric inversions, with the pollution trapped in a mixing layer only a few feet above the surface. Besides NOx, other pollutants, such as sulfur dioxide and hydrogen sulfide emissions, are increasing and will continue to increase as the oil fields age.

Last month, Alaska's top pollution regulator told EPA she wanted more federal oversight of BP, saying BP had failed to meet its "corporate accountability and environmental responsibility objectives" and needed increased scrutiny by federal regulators. She cited two mishandled North Slope spills.[3]

###
TAKE ACTION (I did)
Urge EPA Administrator Mike Leavitt to reverse the BP deal through PEER's website.
http://www.peer.org/alaska/leavittpetition.html

###
SOURCES:
[1] PEER letter to EPA, Feb. 5, 2004 - http://www.peer.org/alaska/petition.html
[2] Environmental Protection Agency letter to Alaska Department of Environmental Conservation, Aug. 14, 2003. - http://www.bushgreenwatch.org/BP/EPALetter.PDF
[3] "BP hasn't lived up to spill agreement, DEC chief charges," Anchorage Daily News, Jan. 14, 2003. - http://www.adn.com/front/story/4619923p-4583561c.html

Pacific Dictates Droughts and Drenching
The cooler and drier conditions in Southern California over the last few years appear to be a direct result of a long-term ocean pattern known as the Pacific Decadal Oscillation, according to research presented recently at the 2004 meeting of the American Meteorological Society.
more...

To Reopen Monument, Cash Is Order of the Day
NEW YORK -- The Statue of Liberty, a worldwide symbol of this nation's freedom, remains shuttered and closed to visitors more than two years after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
National Park Service officials say they cannot afford the estimated $5 million needed to build emergency exits and reopen the statue. So although tourists can ride a ferry across the harbor to Liberty Island, they cannot walk into the bronze monument, which has yellow police tape stretched around its perimeter.
more...

Kay Cites Evidence Of Iraq Disarming
U.S. weapons inspectors in Iraq found new evidence that Saddam Hussein's regime quietly destroyed some stockpiles of biological and chemical weapons in the mid-1990s, former chief inspector David Kay said yesterday.
The discovery means that inspectors have not only failed to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq but also have found exculpatory information -- contemporaneous documents and confirmations from interviews with Iraqis -- demonstrating that Hussein did make efforts to disarm well before President Bush began making the case for war.
more...

Bush Backs Away From His Claims About Iraq Arms
WASHINGTON, Jan. 27 — President Bush declined Tuesday to repeat his claims that evidence that Saddam Hussein had illicit weapons would eventually be found in Iraq, but he insisted that the war was nonetheless justified because Mr. Hussein posed "a grave and gathering threat to America and the world."
more...

9/11 Commission Says It Needs More Time
WASHINGTON, Jan. 27 — The independent commission investigating the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks announced on Tuesday that it was seeking an extension of its deadline to complete the investigation until at least July, raising the prospect of a public fight with the White House and a final report delivered in the heat of the presidential campaign.
more...

My God Is Your God
Let's get this straight: The god called variously "Allah," "Yahweh" and "God" are all one and the same.
more...

FYI, I went down on the bike yesterday morning and thus I have been stuck at home mending some ribs. It is comfortable to sit and that is about it. This has given me lots of time to cruise the information highway!

I.M.F. Says U.S. Debts Threaten World Economy: Excessive fiscal deficits in the US could hurt the long-term sustainability of the American and global economies, the International Monetary Fund warned.
1. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/3377795.stm
2. http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/08/business/08FUND.html?th

Warming May Threaten 37% of Species by 2050 : In the first study of its kind, researchers in a range of habitats including northern Britain, the wet tropics of northeastern Australia and the Mexican desert said yesterday that global warming at currently predicted rates will drive 15 to 37 percent of living species toward extinction by mid-century.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A63153-2004Jan7.html

Wraps come off solo record plane: Richard Branson and Steve Fossett have unveiled the plane which will attempt the first solo-piloted non-stop trip around the world without re-fuelling.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/3380137.stm

Feds seek wiretap access via VoIP: In pursuing "criminals, terrorists and spies," the FBI and the Justice Department are renewing their efforts to listen in on voice conversations carried across the Internet.
http://news.com.com/2100-7352_3-5137344.html

Study: Wi-Fi weaving its way into homes: An estimated 50 million homes in Europe, the United States and Asia will have Wi-Fi connections by 2007, according to new data released Wednesday.
http://news.com.com/2100-7351_3-5136533.html

From Westword:
Rich in wildlife and natural resources, the Roan Plateau survived the last energy boom. Will this one destroy it?
By Alan Prendergast
The stark shale cliffs rise north of the interstate, towering over the town of Rifle. From below, the 3,500-foot stone pillars look forbidding and lifeless, like books placed on a shelf for show. But to Joe Clugston, there's nothing dead about the geologic upheaval looming over his home -- not yet, anyway.
The Article

Sierra Club readers rank Bush Administration's 2003 attacks on the environment

The Sierra Club - sierraclub.com - 12/31/03

1. MERCURY RISING - Issued public health warnings to pregnant women and children about mercury after announcing policy changes to triple amount of mercury pollution allowed from power plants.
2. SUPER DUPED - Became first administration to support shifting burden of Superfund toxic waste cleanups from polluters to taxpayers.
3. SOOTY SANTA - Dismantled provision of Clean Air Act that requires oldest, dirtiest power plants and refineries to curb soot and smog pollution.
4. BACK IN BLACKOUT - Proposed a national Energy Bill that did nothing to reduce dependence on foreign oil, repair or address antiquated electricity grid, or protect special places from oil and gas drilling.
5. DRILLING WILDERNESS - Opened nearly 9 million pristine acres in Northwest Alaska to the oil and gas industry for exploration and drilling.
6. STONEWALLING, BIG TIME (tied)- Continued to withhold documents from secret meetings between Bush/Cheney Energy Task Force and energy industry lobbyists.
7. DON'T AX, DON'T TELL (tied) - Promoted a wildfire policy that expanded commercial logging in the backcountry but did little to protect people where they live.
8. NEXT STOP, SHINOLA - Allowed untreated sewage to be blended with treated sewage, cut funding for local sewage treatment, and didn't require health officials to warn public about sewage in water.
9. CRITICAL CONDITION - Obliterated the process of critical habitat designation for imperiled wildlife under the Endangered Species Act.
10. COP OFF - Continued pattern of willful negligence for enforcement of even basic clean water and clean air laws.
11. POST 9/11 LIES - Discovered by EPA Inspector General to have lied about post 9/11 environmental health hazards near Ground Zero.
12. ROAD WARRIOR - Expanded the legal loophole that allows obnoxious road claims through federally protected wilderness, national parks, and public lands.
13. HOG WASH - Secretly negotiated backroom deal to exempt giant animal factories from laws governing air and toxic pollution.
14. POLLUTED LOGIC - Refused to classify industrial carbon emissions, linked to global warming, as an official pollutant under the Clean Air Act.
15. HOT AIR - Proposed fantasy hydrogen power initiative to improve auto fuel efficiency rather than promoting more proven technologies like gas-electric hybrids.
16. ESTATE TOX - Ended a 25-year ban on the sale of PCB-laden real estate.

http://www.workingforchange.com/article.cfm?itemid=16211