Image by Getty Images via @daylifeAir pollution 'damaging Europe's wildlife havens
A team of EU scientists said nitrogen emissions from cars, factories and farming was threatening biodiversity.It's the second report this week warning of the on-going risks and threats linked to nitrogen pollution.The Nitrogen Deposition and Natura 2000 report was published at a key scientific conference in Edinburgh.Earlier this week, the European Nitrogen Assessment - the first of its kind - estimated nitrogen damage to health and the environment at between £55bn and £280bn a year in Europe, even though nitrogen pollution from vehicles and industry had dropped 30% over recent decades.
some of the nitrogen spread to fertilise crops is carried in the atmosphere to fertilise weeds, possibly a great distance from where the chemicals were first applied.The effects of fertilisation and acidification favour common aggressive species like grasses, brambles and nettles.They harm more delicate species like lichens, mosses, harebells and insect-eating sundew plants
Keystone XL, a proposal to build a 1,700-mile pipeline to transport oil from Canada's tar sands region to the Gulf Coast.
Since Keystone XL would cross an international border, it requires State Department approval. Critics have been trying to convince the administration to reject the proposal on the grounds that extracting oil from Alberta's tar sands is extremely destructive to the land, that tar sands oil produces more greenhouse gas emissions than conventional oil, and that potential pipeline leaks could threaten water supplies relied upon by hundreds of thousands of Americans. Proponents argue the pipeline would offer economic benefits and provide energy from a nearby and friendly nation.
To find out what's at stake in this fight, I spoke with Susan Casey-Lefkowitz, international program director for the Natural Resources Defense Council, which fiercely opposes the Keystone XL project. The following transcript of our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Radioactivity Spikes Again in Sea Near Fukushima Plan
How Socialists Built America
If there’s one constant in the elite national discourse of the moment, it is the claim that America was founded as a capitalist country and that socialism is a dangerous foreign import that, despite our unwarranted faith in free trade, must be barred at the border. This most conventional “wisdom”—increasingly accepted at least until the recent grassroots mobilizations in Wisconsin, Ohio, Michigan and Maine—has held that everything public is inferior to everything private, that corporations are always good and unions always bad, that progressive taxation is inherently evil and that the best economic model is the one that allows the wealthy to gobble up as much of the Republic as they choose before anything trickles down to the great mass of Americans. Rush Limbaugh informs us regularly that proposals to tax people as rich as he is for the purpose of providing healthcare for kids and jobs for the unemployed are “antithetical” to the nation’s original intent and that Barack Obama’s reforms are “destroying this country as it was founded.”
The president says he’s not a socialist, and the country’s most outspoken socialists heartily agree. Indeed, the only people who seem to think Obama displays even the slightest social democratic tendency are those who imagine that the very mention of the word “socialism” should inspire a reaction like that of a vampire confronted with the Host.
Obama really is avoiding consideration of socialist, or even mildly social democratic, responses to the problems that confront him. He took the single-payer option off the table at the start of the healthcare debate, rejecting the approach that in other countries has provided quality care to all citizens at lower cost. His supposedly “socialist” response to the collapse of the auto industry was to give tens of billions in bailout funding to GM and Chrysler, which used the money to lay off thousands of workers and then relocate several dozen plants abroad—an approach about as far as a country can get from the social democratic model of using public investment and industrial policy to promote job creation and community renewal. And when BP’s Deepwater Horizon oil well exploded, threatening the entire Gulf Coast, instead of putting the Army Corps of Engineers and other government agencies in charge of the crisis, Obama left it to the corporation that had lied about the extent of the spill, had made decisions based on its bottom line rather than environmental and human needs, and had failed at even the most basic tasks.
So we should take the president at his word when he says he’s acting on free-market principles. The problem, of course, is that Obama’s rigidity in this regard is leading him to dismiss ideas that are often sounder than private-sector fixes.
Polar animals' antifreeze has a spiky secret
Many cold-blooded creatures employ a natural antifreeze to protect themselves from the damage that large ice crystals would cause. These antifreeze molecules lock onto ice crystals, but not liquid water - though how they do this has been a mystery.
Making It Count: CCPA's federal election blog
- From The Missing Issues File: Poverty Reduction
- The Legend of Zero
- Jeffrey Simpson Walks the Party Line on Corporate Taxes
- Canada’s Caribbean Tax Holiday
- Harper Strategists Working From US Republicans’ Playbook
From The Missing Issues File: Climate Change
April 14th, 2011 Seth Klein · 3 Comments · Environment
Did I miss something, or did the two-hour English election debate go by with only one passing reference to climate change, the most urgent issue of our time? There seems to be an inverse relationship at play between the severity of the crisis and its place on the political radar.The issue is receiving much less attention than it did in the last federal election (the Dion factor?). Yet the science tells us that the situation is more urgent, not less.Last weekend, Bill McKibben (founder of 350.org, and author most recently of Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet) gave an outstanding talk in Vancouver (to a capacity crowd of 500). Twenty years ago, McKibben’s book The End of Nature was the first to introduce the coming reality of global warming to a general audience.Today, McKibben reminds is that that future is now. Climate change is happening. In the last year alone we have seen temperature records shattered, devastating droughts and fires in Australia and New Zealand, and because warmer air holds more water vapor, disastrous flooding, most notably in Pakistan.Given you are well aware of the quality of knaves, rogues and fools running for office, it should be no surprise that some of us smell a rat in the hypocrisy of the Chinese / U.S. ‘climate change/ carbon credits’ where Europe has hobbled itself to charge higher energy costs to its industry.
But,but,but…AGW ! Emergency.
What, it this a rerun of ‘Lost in Space’ by the robot convinced all is lost ?For starters, carbon credits are a lovely chance to engage in lucrative fraud revolving around an outrageous presumption : an international tax on the use of fire. Secondly, if the proposers of this emergency don’t take it seriously…maybe they know something you don’t.As for myself, when somebody tells me they can foretell the future because they can foretell the past…..it really is long past time one had a good grip on one’s wallet.
Part of this should be from an awareness that deployment of unproven technology is at least as iffy as if one were buying a vehicle from designs that were not backed by experience nor field tests. Solar designs were benchmarked a year or so ago by a 12 year old lad who showed inefficiencies riddled current designs by whole orders of magnitude.
Wind power is haunted by bugaboos of wildlife kills, subsonic vibration, and catastrophic gearbox failure from wind gusts.Don’t bother telling me we need to take the medicine when the proposition of ‘scientific inerrancy’ is no more than an oxymoron flaunted as sound doctrine.I’ve been sold a Bill of Goods and am trying to forward it without due cause and responsible consideration ? That is the Poisoning the Well logical fallacy propagandizing disagreement with the models of the situation as they are presented.I’ll give you inquiry. Hold on to your hat.
http://opitslinkfest.blogspot.com/2010/03/climate.htmlYou will note that I haven’t neatly diagrammed a case which I propose as Divine Revelation. Life is a bit more messy than that, which is why I included a diversity of ideas for consideration.On Wednesday, April 13, the daily sunspot number reached a new high for Solar Cycle 24 when it hit 153. I looked back over this calendar year and saw that the previous high was 137 on March 8, 2011, 16 points lower than Wednesday. That week’s Solar Update said that “the last time the daily sunspot number was higher than this was July 7, 2005, when it was 149.”
I knew I would have to inspect sunspot numbers prior to that date to find something higher, which would be on the after-the-peak down-side of Solar Cycle 23. I went hereand only had to look two days earlier to July 5, 2005, when it was 181. In fact, the day prior to that was even higher, 192. If you look at that table, you can see that around the end of June and in early July 2005, the Sun produced a good burst of activity on Solar Cycle 23’s down side. You can read a bulletin from early July 2005 here. At that time, we must have assumed that we were already near a low point in the sunspot cycle, but did not know that five years later, we would still be waiting for a significant increase in sunspot activity. The bulletin mentions this was the most activity seen since November 26, 2003.
Click source for moreSource Link: .arrl.org/news/the-k7ra-solar-update
Professor Nasif Nahle found something deeply troubling about the man-made global warming theory (AGW). He explains, “I started out wanting to debunk those deniers of science.”
Nahle had originally believed that human emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2) were warming the atmosphere until he found an incorrect assumption on the Greenhouse Effect hypothesis.
Invited to attend a televised debate on the Indonesian Tsunami that addressed whether global warming was a factor in that catastrophe, Nahle checked the validity of calculations into the so-called greenhouse effect. “That was when I saw it was junk science
Nahle, from the Autonomous University of Nuevo Leon in Monterrey, N. L., Mexico, has worked professionally as a scientist for over 40 years. His findings are set to add more fuel to the fire in the vigorous debate over the validity of a cornerstone of the science of environmental activism.In his new paper, ‘Determination of the Total Emissivity of a Mixture of Gases Containing 5% of Water Vapor and 0.039% of Carbon Dioxide at Overlapping Absorption Bands’ the Mexican biologist turned climate researcher proves that in nature, CO2 and water vapor mix together to decrease infrared radiation emissions/absorptions in the air. This is the opposite of what conventional climatology has been saying years.
Click source to read FULL report from John O'Sullivan
Source Link: suite101.com
“To my surprise, I found that the hypothesis was flawed and that the AGW proponents were inventing variables and constants. As I starting to apply the correct data and algorithms, I was realizing that the whole hypothesis was wrong from the physics standpoint."The 60-year-old’s career is now firmly focused on climate-related research; in 2010 he began working on Climate Change and Biodiversity at the Superior School of Biology, University Juarez of the State of Durango. Nahle is so converted in his thinking that he now calls the greenhouse gas theory, ”antiscience" and "pseudoscience.”Other science specialists in the fields of atmospheric physics, astrophysics, chemistry and biology as well as mathematicians, have also been looking with a critical eye at the controversies in climate science and publishing papers going against the views of establishment climatology, a science largely comprised of generalists not specialist scientists, according to Canadian climatologist, Dr. Timothy Ball. Ball concurs with such skeptic criticisms adding that it "raises questions about who is qualified to provide oversight."As scepticism about global warming increases I asked Nasif why it has taken so long for more independent scientists to speak out. He replied, “In my experience, other scientists follow the mainstream about the greenhouse effect (GHE) without examining its basis. If they would examine the issue in more depth like I did, they would realize that it is not true; the GHE just doesn't exist.”
Read more at Suite101: Greenhouse Gas Theory Discredited by 'Coolant' Carbon Dioxide http://www.suite101.com/content/greenhouse-gas-theory-discredited-by-coolant-carbon-dioxide-a365870#ixzz1Jkj04wjl
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