Tag Archives: Environment

Earth Day has special significance this year

The first Earth Day was a red letter day in the long, hard struggle to make being good to the environment … to the Earth … normal instead of a fringe idea held only by quirky college professors and stoned-out hippies. This year, the first significant health care insurance reform bill was passed and it will be a red letter event in a long, hard struggle to make universal quality heath coverage and care normal instead a fringe idea held only by Kenyan born socialist Negros from Chicago. Or whatever the teabaggers are calling it now. So today, at the beginning of a true change in how we do things, we can look back and reflect on another, similar (yet different) change in the way we do things.
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Framing the Pacific Garbage Patch

Various environmental organizations have been using imagery of dead baby birds with toothbrushes in their guts and solid floating masses of garbage to describe and raise alarm about what has become known as the North Pacific Central Garbage Patch. Yet, the small but important amount of research that has been done there shows that the NPCGP consists of many (alarmingly many) pieces of plastic that are very small, the largest being “about the size of the fingernail on your pinkey.”

Albatross may or may not be affected by garbage, but it is not likely that the garbage shown in the guts of the baby birds in these particular media comes from the NPCGP. Yes, the plastic in the NPCGP and elsewhere may have a negative environmental effect, but the pictures of floating garbage, which are all from coastal estuarine regions down river from major “third world” population centers, are NOT of the NPCGP and thus constitute bald faced lies. Bald faced lies by organizations like Green Peace is the fuel that right wing anti-environmental pro-business neo conservative yahoos run on.

But the situation is even worse than that because of what appear to be the misguided efforts of a British Billionaire who has managed to frighten those best in a position to criticize him into remaining silent. In fact, I’m a little nervous writing this blog post.

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Go Green Expo: Minneapolis

The Go Green Expo is, according to its organizers, the nation’s leading eco-focused, interactive and educational showcase. It will debut at the Minneapolis Convention Center this coming weekend, including talks, presentations, and exhibits from a variety of sources including “green businesses”. The idea is to promote energy-efficient and environmentally-friendly products and services. The Expo will include interactive seminars featuring leaders in the green industry, local politics, and community organizations.

I’m going to be officially blogging it, so if you are going send me an email, maybe we can hook up. More on this later!

Global Warming, The Decline of the Moose, and “Minnesota Nice”

We have had a cool summer here in Minnesota, and this has brought out the miscreants who for their own reasons do not want to get on board with the simple, well demonstrated scientific fact that global temperatures have risen, that we humans are the primary cause, and that this climate change has negative consequences.

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Russia to build floating Arctic nuclear stations

Russia is planning a fleet of floating and submersible nuclear power stations to exploit Arctic oil and gas reserves, causing widespread alarm among environmentalists.

A prototype floating nuclear power station being constructed at the SevMash shipyard in Severodvinsk is due to be completed next year. Agreement to build a further four was reached between the Russian state nuclear corporation, Rosatom, and the northern Siberian republic of Yakutiya in February.

details

In how many ways is this a bad idea?

Don’t Take O2 for Granted

There has always been Oxygen on the earth, but it was not floating around free in the atmosphere as it is today (most of it still isn’t). Indeed, it is kind of strange that the earth is blanketed in a mixture of toxic, corrosive liquid (water) and equally corrosive gas (the oxygen in the atmosphere). Imagine showing up at a planet without an atmosphere or liquid water, and splashing the water and spraying the air from he earth all over that planet. Depending on the planet, it could be like throwing vinegar into a bowl of baking soda. Third grade science fair time!

In fact, this could be a test … non-gaseous planets that have previously supported earth-like life would not fizz so much under this test, but those that never had life would be likely to fizz like crazy. Or maybe I’m just crazy.

Anyway, Bad Astronomy Blog has a piece on “When did Earth’s oxygen atmosphere appear?” Check it out.

Global Warming, the Blog Epic ~ 07 ~ Sea Level Change

This is the seventh in a series of reposts from gregladen.com on global warming.

i-e1372cd57ce206dff3631a4a9438e737-epic-GlobalWarming.jpgThis installment is about sea level rise and fall, in the past. Sea level change that results from the formation and melting of glaciers not only has an enormous impact on the physical nature of the landscape, but it also would not have gone unnoticed by people living ever pretty far from the sea!

With large amounts of the world’s water trapped in glaciers (mainly continental glaciers), the sea level drops. When that ice melts, the sea level rises.

As you know, the earth is covered by two kinds of surface: Continents, which are relatively tall and buoyant and which have a tendency to move around, and sea floor, which is structurally different from the continents. But if you look at the oceans, you will see that they cover both sea floor and parts of the continents. The parts of the continents that are covered by sea floor are typically referred to as “continental shelf.” All this … this continental shelf … really is the edge of the continents themselves that happen at the moment to be covered with the sea. There are places, like the coast of California, where there is no shelf, and other places, like the coast of New England, much of the Caribbean and large parts of the Gulf of Mexico, that have extensive shelf. If you removed all the water from this shelf, you could fit a couple of more New England states between Boston (now on the coast) and the new coast line.

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Global Warming, the Blog Epic ~ 05 ~ Causes of Large Scale Change

This is the fifth in a series of reposts from gregladen.com on global warming.

i-e1372cd57ce206dff3631a4a9438e737-epic-GlobalWarming.jpgDuring the 1970s and 80s, creationists had a long list of reasons to doubt evolution, and every one of those reasons was wrong. But they had so many reasons, and it was so hard to keep track of them all, each with various versions, that a creationist that was trying to not live a lie could convince themselves that they had an honest dispute with evolutionary biology. But if you sat down and looked at every detail, “creation science” could be shown to be nothing more than a big bag of falsehoods. So to continue to be a creationist you had to be willing to live that lie.

Then intelligent design creationism came along. IDC does not require that you have a long list of lies. Instead, you have one single great big lie that can’t be disproved (and is utterly unrelated to science, and in fact, can’t be proven, either).
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Global Warming, the Blog Epic ~ 04 ~ Forcing

This is the fourth in a series of reposts from gregladen.com on global warming.

i-e1372cd57ce206dff3631a4a9438e737-epic-GlobalWarming.jpg“Climate Studies” is a “causal” science. Most sciences are “causal” in nature, which is why the sciences and scientists are often loathed and distrusted by people in the humanities and some of the soft sciences. There is not the time or space right now to address this issue, but I’ll just say this: People who criticize science for its interest in causality usually do not understand what scientists are talking about. I think this is partly because people in the humanities and social sciences have gone gaga over the concepts of “agency” and “intentionality,” yet often do not understand those concepts, and often confused them with “cause” and, worst of all, “explanation.” So, the idea of explaining something and the idea of blaming someone become conflated. (I’ve been ragging on the soft sciences and humanities lately: I just want to say that some of the smartest people I know, or know of, are in these areas. It’s the 96% of the rest of them that need to go away or at least become less annoying.)
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Global Warming, the Blog Epic ~ 03 ~ Carbon Dioxide

This is the third in a series of reposts from gregladen.com on global warming.

i-e1372cd57ce206dff3631a4a9438e737-epic-GlobalWarming.jpgWhy It Matters What you Burn and When you Burn It

Carbon Dioxide is a deadly poison. It is about 50% heavier than air, so where it occurs in density, in mines or certain natural vents associated with volcanics, it can accumulate in low spots. There are places in the Western Rift Valley where puddles of Carbon Dioxide form overnight while the air is still. These gas puddles can occur over puddles of water. When animals (such as antelopes) put their head down to the water to drink, they take a few whiffs of the gas and die. A scavenger (a bird, a hyena, a lion) that comes along while the gas is still settled, to feed on the antelope carcass, can suffer the same fate. It will never be long before the gas blows off, so this sort of carcass accumulation is rare and modest but it does happen.

There are lakes (also in Africa) that are saturated, at depth, with carbon dioxide gas dissolved in water. If the lake happens to turn over, the deep water heads to the surface where it is under the influence of less pressure, and thus is capable of holding less gas. So it fizzes, like bubbles in a bottle of soda that is shaken. This accentuates whatever movement originally stirred up the gas, and a huge volume of carbon dioxide is converted from dissolved gas into bubbles in a matter of minutes. The cold (cold because it was down deep) carbon dioxide out-gases at the surface, fills the lake basin, and spreads across nearby settlements potentially killing hundreds. This is what happened at Lake Nyos, Cameroon, in 1986, killing almost 2,000 people.
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