Yearly Archives: 2013

Dark Snow Project on The Weather Channel

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The melting of the Greenland ice sheet is a problem, and it seems to be happening faster than scientists had originally thought it might. This is probably because of soot darkening the snow, which collects solar heat and melts the ice. Some, perhaps much, of this soot may come from the extensive fires we are experiencing. That increase in fires is probably caused by global warming. The problem is, we don’t know enough about the “Dark Snow” phenomenon. There is a group of scientists trying to study this, and they have turned to Crowd Funding to help make this possible.

Here is recent coverage on The Weather Channel.

Click here to find out more and, hopefully, donate a few bucks to help save the planet.

Can Obama’s Organizing For Action (OFA) help save the planet? The jury is out.

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You’ve gotta love South Minneapolis.

My friend Sharon Sund passed me an email this morning about an Organizing for Action meeting in South Minneapolis to discuss climate change activism. Sharon and I had been talking about local climate change activism earlier in the week so she thought I’d liked to go to this meeting and see what they are up to.

Organizing for Action(OFA) is an offshoot of the Obama campaign, a grassroots non profit that is separate from any campaign committee (so they don’t support or run candidates) that organizes in favor of Obama’s issues like getting some sensible gun regulation or immigration reform passed in Congress, or keeping Obama care intact.

The organizer of the event described OFA’s structure and purpose, gave a bit of a pep talk, and then opened it up for discussion.

I was the first person to speak up, and after making a brief remark about some interesting climate science related news I won’t bother you with here, I brought up Keystone XL pipeline. I noted that it would be awful nice and a lot easier to get a climate change component of OFA going if Obama would just come out and say “no” to Keystone. The official OFA response, blew me away. Keystone XL might be someone’s personal issue, and that was fine, but since the President was neutral on it at the moment, OFA was as well.

Now, I don’t want to take credit or breaking the meeting. Had I not said something about Keystone, the guy next to me, or the woman behind me, or the guy two seats down, or the woman across the room, or any one of the 30 hard core activists attending the meeting, would have. I know this because once Keystone was brought up, and the need for Obama to take a stand, and in particular, oppose the pipeline was mentioned, everybody in the room had something to say, clearly indicating that they had all thought about it quite a bit.

Keystone is not a personal issue. It is the key, urgent, not-to-be-ignored grassroots issue that OFA and Obama should be all over.

I kinda feel bad for the organizer because he was swamped. I think we stayed on keystone for about an hour. He would say, “OK, let’s move on to a different issue. Sally, did you have something, I saw your hand up?” and Sally would say something very brief not about keystone, and then, “Well, I was in Nebraska last month chaining myself to construction equipment to stop the pipeline …” and then it would be back to the Keystone XL Pipeline. Or the organizer would say, “Oh, Bill, I see you’ve had your hand up,” and Bill would say, “Yeah, that idea of having house meetings to discuss climate would be good. This way we can get together and plan an organized push to get the President to do the right thing on the Keystone Pipeline..” and so on and so forth.1

There are two things that I now know for certain. The first, which I learned tonight, is that Obama for America will not have an effective climate change component if Obama does not come out in opposition to Keystone. Every single one of those activists is involved in a half dozen different projects, some focused on one issue, other on many, that they devote considerable time to, and that they regard, quite rightly, as very important. Many of the individuals in the room are heavily involved already in climate change activism and are already working with existing political groups, churches, or other organizations on climate change (our local 350.org guy was there for example). These climate change activists don’t need the OFA, though the OFA needs them. In fact, the meeting organizer had noted how great it was when OFA engaged in a new issue, and brought new volunteers into the fold in so doing. Most importantly, this little meeting tonight was a microcosm of the larger political landscape. Obama has to lead on climate change. He’s taken a few steps in that direction. And we’re all waiting around for the next couple of steps. Right now, Obama has not moved forward enough for us to find any space behind him so that he can actually lead us.

The consensus at tonight’s meeting was this: The local Minneapolis OFA has to take a message back to Obama and OFA headquarters: Yes, of course we’ll help. But first you need to get your head out of the sand. In particular, the Alberta tar sands. And then we will do more than help. We’ll carry you.

The second thing I know for certain, but that I didn’t learn from this meeting because I already knew it is this: The people of South Minneapolis (and adjoining inner ring suburbs) are awesome.2

See also: Obama’s decision on the Keystone Pipeline IS a legacy making or breaking thing.
Added: See also OFA Refuses To Push On Keystone

and

OFA Refuses To Push On Keystone

1Those were not the actual names of participants or what they said. Since I’m not prepared to report those things exactly, I’m just wildly paraphrasing to make the point.

2A word I’ve probably used four times in my entire life. Just so you know.

Blockading A Coal Plant in Massachusetts (Breaking news)

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Environmental activists have just taken up a position off shore of the Brayton Point coal plant, near Fall River Massachusetts, in an effort to block access by a ship attempting to deliver coal there.

This is the boat.
This is the boat.
THIS is their web site, where there is a live Ustream.

One of the activists, Jay O’Hara, is tweeting from here: @oharjo and using the hashtag #coalisstupid

Here is a press release related to this event:

BREAKING NEWS: ACTIVISTS BLOCKING COAL SHIP “ENERGY ENTERPRISE” AT BRAYTON POINT COAL PLANT IN MASSACHUSETTS

Activists have begun a blockade of an incoming coal ship at the Brayton Point Power plant, outside Fall River, Massachusetts.

…

At 9 am this morning, environmental activists Ken Ward, 57 of Jamaica Plain, MA, and Jay O’Hara, 31, of Bourne,MA, anchored their 32’ lobster boat, the Henry David T, in the channel opposite the Brayton Point coal power plant.

They intend to block the “Energy Enterprise,” a coal tanker en route to deliver fuel to the power plant. The boat is transporting “mountain top removal coal” from Hampton, Roads, Virginia –and is expected to arrive later today.

Activists are calling for the immediate closure of BraytonPoint Power Station in order to avert catastrophic climate change.

“The world is teetering on the brink of climate chaos from which there will be no retreat,” said Jay O’Hara, captain of the Henry David T, a 1965 wooden lobster boat. “We know exactly what must be done to avoid the very worst. And the single most important action is to stop burning coal.”

The Brayton Point plant is the single largest coal polluter in New England.

In a separate announcement, members of 350 New Jersey and 350 Massachusetts today released a letter that was hand delivered to Dominion President and CEO, Thomas F. Farrell II and New Jersey-based Energy Capital Partners founder and Senior Partner Doug Kimmelman, opposing the sale of Brayton Point and calling on Dominion Energy to work with Massachuetts Governor Deval Patrick to close the plan.”

At 9:30 am, Ken Ward called the Somerset police to inform them, “We are conducting a peaceful nonviolent protest against the use of coal. We have anchored near the pier atBrayton Point.”

The men were inspired to take action by 350.org co-founder Bill Mckibben’s call for a summer of climate action, and galvanized by the proposed sale of the BraytonPoint Power Station by Dominion Energy to Energy Capital Partners.

Image from the power station’s web site.

Should you drink tap water or bottled water?

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This is the time of year, spring, when a lot of people switch to drinking bottled water instead of tap water. They do this because in their particular area the tap water seems to “go bad” … usually it is a mild smell or a slightly icky taste. This makes people fear their tap water, so they go to the store and buy bottled water. What has happened in many cases is that the local municipal water supply has done everything it can reasonably do to clean up and make nice the water that comes out of your tap, but there is this slight taste or smell because in the spring, that is what water does in many of our sources, including wells, rivers, and reservoirs. It depends on where you live, and it probably depends on the year as well.

Your municipal water is safe. Tap water always has “stuff” in it that is not H2O, but in the spring, some of that stuff is a bit more detectable than at other times of the year.

People are making two mistakes. 1) Not drinking the tap water because they think it is bad for them. It may be unpleasant, and that may be a reason to not drink it, but it is not bad for you. And, 2) quitting tap water forever, switching to bottled water because they think their water has gone bad forever. Or they just get used to the bottled water and stick with it.

Peter Gleick has a lot of information about Bottled Water, some of which is on his new blog. The total amount of Carbon you are releasing into the atmosphere by drinking a liter of bottled water is something like an order of magnitude greater than for tap water, for example. You just shouldn’t be using bottled water if you have a run of the mill municipal water supply.

Speaking of water, Skeptically Speaking just did a show on the topic:

Drinking Water

This week, we’re looking at the science and the history of the water that makes life and society possible. We’ll speak to law and environment professor James Salzman, about his book Drinking Water: A History. And we’re joined by Juewen Liu, chemistry professor at the University of Waterloo, to talk about his work using DNA to detect water-borne impurities that could make water unsafe.

Click here to get the podcast.

Photo Credit: Lightsurgery via Compfight cc

Other posts of interest:

Also of interest: In Search of Sungudogo: A novel of adventure and mystery, which is also an alternative history of the Skeptics Movement.

Want to boycott stuff? There’s an app for that.

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Vote with your wallet. Tired of the Koch Brothers ruining everything for everybody? Prefer to buy products from companies that contribute to Sandy relief? Do you just want to know which major megacorporation produced the item you are considering putting in your shopping cart?

Wouldn’t it be nice to have an app that allowed you to scan the product’s bar codes and quickly determine which evile empire you are supporting, or avoiding supporting, with your purchasing decision. Well, there is, and it is called Buycott. Click here to see iOS version
icon

From the app developers:

How Buycott works

-Join a campaign to help a cause you care about and commit to actively supporting the companies on your side of the issue, while avoiding those that oppose your position.

-Scan product barcodes and Buycott will find out what company owns that product (and who owns that company, ad infinitum).

-Using this information, Buycott will determine whether you have joined a campaign that includes the product’s owners.

Features

– Lookup the ownership structure of any product and trace it all the way back to its parent company with our interactive family tree diagram.

– Offers a variety of contact data for companies and brands, so you can easily inform them of your decision to support or avoid their products.

– Scans all major retail barcodes (UPC-A, UPC-E, EAN8, EAN13, etc).

– Create your own campaign from buycott.com

Once installed you have to sigh up. I chose the “Log In with Facebook” option and then was asked if Buycott could post to my friend’s walls. I said no. The signup failed. So, right there, somebody needs to sit these kids down (the ones who made the app) and explain to them the meaning of Irony.

So then I signed up with the manual sign up and I got an “error creating account” error. No explanation.

So, I’d like to try this app out for you but it’s broke, so I can’t. But I also know that word of this app just went around the internet a few minutes ago, so their server is probably getting hammered. I’ll try again in a day or two and let you know how it goes. If you try it and have any info to report, please put it in the comments.

This would be good if it works. But first, it has to …. well, work.

UPDATE:

I was able to join this evening, but the join up process took a long time, presumably because of the developer’s server still being overwhelmed (or attacked by nefarious forces, perhaps?). Then things were still a little glitchy. When I went into the app I was told that I needed to join before I could use it, but Ignored that and signed in using the info I had given it when I had joined earlier, and then I was told that I’d have to Join, the, I was allowed to use the app as though I had joined.

This all happened because the app seems to reset to some prior level when my iPhone does its partial sleep power down thing it does after several seconds of no activity, and everything the app does is so slow that this happens all the time.

Lawry's Salt is OK! Yay!
Lawry’s Salt is OK! Yay!
I tried scanning a book ISBN code and it was smart enough to tell me it couldn’t do that. Then I scanned the bar code on my lens cleaning solution. The app correctly identified it as Flents Wipe-n CLear Lens Cleaner! But there was no information on the company, which probably means it is not made by the Koch Brothers or Satan or anyone like that. I then checked out my Lexar Jump Drive, recently purchased (so the empty cardboard container was still sitting on my desk). It seems to have recognized the manufacturer but did not know what the product was, but asked me to enter information about the product in order to “earn points.” I entered the data and got an error.

I then checked All Free an Clear laundry soap, a container of little tomatoes, and a container of Laqwry’s seasoned salt. The first two returned errors, the third returned data on the product that was accurate and information about the company. I was told that there were “no campaign conflicts.”

Lawry Salt is OK!

So the bottom line is that the app works but there are glitches that hopefully will be ironed out.

The amount of time it takes to get the information back from the scan is fairly long … tens of seconds … but that is probably because their server is still working too hard.

Photo Credit: frankhg via Compfight cc

Who is the richest person in the world?

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This came up the other day, so I figured I’d note the answer(s) down and share it with you so we don’t have to look this up in the internet again until 2013 is over. The, I think they get new richest people. Most of these answers come from Forbes, which appears to be in charge of knowing these things. Or even, perhaps, determining these things!

Who is the richest person in the world?

The richest person in the world is Carlos Slim Helu and his family, with a net wort of 73 billion dollars. He’s in Mexico, and in the telecom business. But since this includes “his family” we may want to note that the number two perso on the list is Bill Gates, of Microsoft fame, who is worth 67 billion dollars. I will note that the fifth richest person in the world is a guy who is the brother of someone I know. Fat lot of good that does me, I know, but still.

Who is the richest woman in the world?

We have to go down the list pretty far to find the richest woman in the world. Liliane Bettencourt and family are listed by forbes as the 9th richest “person” in the world, she’s in france and is the “L’Oreal Bettencourt. Christy Walton and Family are at number 11. We have to go down to number 16 before we find a woman who is not “and family” rich, and that’s Alice Walton of Wal-Mart. Note that CHristy Walton and Family and Alice Walton (sans family) are both Wal-Mart. We can add Jim Walton and S. Robson Walton to that list and the Wal-Mart family, extended, appears to be worth a total of 107.3 billion dollars. Ironically, that makes the value of at least this part of the Wal-Mart family worth about the same as Bangladesh. If they were a country they’d be about 57th.

Who is the richest person in America?

The richest person in America is obviously Bill Gates (see above)

Who is the richest woman in America?

The richest woman in America is the Wal-Mart lady mentioned above.

The average number of offspring (we can use this as an estimate of fertility rate) among the top richest people is 3.0. The fertility rate of the average American at the moment is about 2.03.

A lot of people assume, because they’ve been told this and accepted it uncritically, or for other reasons, that the poor and dark skinned have more babies than the rich and the light skinned. Apparently not.

Crowdfunding the Dark Snow Project

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New research indicates that the reflectivity of the surface of the Greenland Glacier is decreasing due to the deposition of dark particles from fires on the surface of the ice. This phenomenon is contributing to unprecedented melting of the ice sheet. This is a huge concern. One of the most significant outcomes of global warming will be the melting of large portions of the world’s glaciers, causing the sea level to rise dangerously.

There is a project called The Dark Snow Project which is an effort to measure this newly discovered effect. A large part of this research is being crown-funded, and of course, you can and should contribute to this.

The Dark Snow project is carrying out a major funding initiative right now.

From Leo Hickman’s blog at The Guardian:

Jason Box, a climatologist based at the Byrd Polar Research Center at Ohio State University, is hoping to raise $150,000 over the coming months to pay for an expedition this summer up onto the “ice dome” of Greenland to gather samples of snow. …

The climatic impact of “black carbon” and wildfire smoke is much in the news and yet remains little understood. Last year, Box presented satellite observations (pdf) showing how soot particles drifting from tundra wildfires spread across Greenland. The big as-yet-unanswered question is whether this soot contributed towards the region’s record melt during the summer of 2012. And, if so, by how much.

Here’s a video giving an overview of the project:

You can contribute to the Dark Snow Project by clicking here, where you will find couple of options for making a much needed donation.

Dear [Elected Official] Please Note the 400 ppm benchmark!

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Here’s a template for a letter I hope you will consider sending/emailing to all of your elected representatives at the municipal, state, and federal levels, if you are in the US. Thanks

Dear [elected official]

I am writing to ask you to join the very small but hopefully growing number of elected representatives and executives in noting the important news this week regarding the human contribution to the amount of atmospheric CO2. This week the landmark value of 400 ppm was reached, which is a significant amount more than the pre-industrial baseline level of about 280 ppm. As an elected official, it seems appropriate for you to make a public note using any of your usual outlets that this important event has occurred, in order to bring more focus to the national and regional discussion of climate change.

Here is a link to the NOAA web site giving the details:

http://researchmatters.noaa.gov/news/Pages/CarbonDioxideatMaunaLoareaches400ppm.aspx

Thank you very much,

[your name here]

Women abusing and killing men

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The news for Minnesota today, and over the last few days, is unbelievable. Here in the twin cities, the body of a guy who police think was killed by his girlfriend was found in a swamp. She’s in prison serving time for a different crime but now the investigation may move towards charging her with homicide. Just earlier this week the body of a man who authorities say may have been killed by his wife was found in the Mississippi river. Originally police had been searching a lake near Saint Paul but it turns out his body had been dumped elsewhere, presumably by his homicidal wife. And this weekend there will be a major volunteer effort to expand the search for a young man in Eden Prairie, and I’ll bet we’re going to find out that he was killed by his girlfriend too. And of course, a few weeks ago we heard about the North Saint Paul 17 year old boy who’s body was “found” by his “girlfriend,” but then it turns out that he was killed by that very same girlfriend, who eventually admitted it.

And this all comes at the same time as news of that horrific thing in Cleveland, where three young men were kidnapped nearly 10 years ago by some woman who was a sexual predator, who then raped them again and again and …

…. hey, wait a minute …

And in today’s news….

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We have a big race coming up in the Twin Cities. The local news just reported that “in light of the events that happened in Boston, runners are encouraged to pack light when they go to the race.”

The death toll in Bangladesh has gone to 1,000 as one person was pulled out alive after 17 days.

Today, the atmospheric concentration of CO2, which should be about 280 ppm, reached 400 ppm. It will fluctuate a bit below and above 400 over the next couple of years, then stay above 400 for the long term, certainly over the life time of any infants born today. This is all going to look pretty silly when sea levels rise 9 feet. Which will just be the beginning.

As I write this hipsters are being interviewed about the shooting that just happened in South Minneapolis. They were hyped.

The news reporters can no conceive of an address in the 2700s would be near the corner of 28th street. This is what happens when we let suburbanites handle our news reports. Also, yes, it matters if it is “N” or “S” because almost every avenue in the city has a North and a South part.

That is all for now.