Topic: Capitalism vs. the Climate: Naomi Klein

[LF]

This isn't the thread to air your aggressive frustrations. Please stay on topic or send me a PM. Thank you

i will just leave this one for you then have fun 

[RojoLeón]

http://usnews.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2012/07/05/12579687-drought-hits-56-percent-of-continental-us-significant-toll-on-crops?lite

Drought hits 56 percent of continental US; 'significant toll' on crops



The prolonged heat across the Midwest has not only set temperature records, it is also expanding and intensifying drought conditions -- and relief isn't on the horizon for most areas, the National Weather Service reported Thursday.

Drought conditions are present in 56 percent of the continental U.S., according to the weekly Drought Monitor.

That's the most in the 12 years that the data have been compiled, topping the previous record of 55 percent set on Aug. 26, 2003. It's also up five percentage points from the previous week.

The drought hasn't been long enough to rank up there with the 1930s Dust Bowl or a bad stretch in the 1950s, David Miskus, a meteorologist at the weather service's Climate Prediction Center, told msnbc.com.

"We don't have that here yet," he said. "This has really only started this year."

But for a single year it's still pretty significant, not far behind an extremely dry 1988.

While 1988 saw much drier conditions and an earlier start to the drought than this year, said Brad Rippey, a meteorologist with the U.S. Department of Agriculture, 2012 has its own interesting qualities.

"This year the high temperatures have certainly played into this drought," he told msnbc.com. "There's a lot more evaporation ... and crop demands for water."

The Drought Monitor noted that the drought is starting to "take a significant toll" on food supplies. "In the primary growing states for corn and soybeans, 22 percent of the crop is in poor or very poor condition, as are 43 percent of the nation’s pastures and rangelands and 24 percent of the sorghum crop."

[kopitecrash]

That's really interesting. Looking at your post history, what percentage are about ocean acidification and what percentage are football related? (which to many people will be about as important in the grand scheme of things as the Kardashians).

You know what, that's true. Generally we are all hypocrites like this - we all wear clothes made by poorly paid people and we all benefit in some way from companies who choose to screw people for their profit. Change has to come from everyone, not just big companies. I'm pretty sure that climate change would be much reduced if people in the richer countries conserved more energy - people don't need government or companies to tell them that.

But at the same time change has also to come from the top - the media point perfectly demonstrates it. They're perfectly happy to roll out complete drivel while major issues are being ignored - and that in turn affects peoples viewpoint on the climate.

It's not just the big boys who are at fault - (I read today that British forests have grown by seven times in the last century, I think?) but equally, the big boys have a massive role in how the people act. The acts of the two are intertwined.

[RojoLeón]

http://www.startribune.com/lifestyle/161771375.html

US official: Higher ocean acidity is climate change's 'evil twin,' major threat to coral reefs

SYDNEY - Oceans' rising acid levels have emerged as one of the biggest threats to coral reefs, acting as the "osteoporosis of the sea" and threatening everything from food security to tourism to livelihoods, the head of a U.S. scientific agency said Monday.

The speed by which the oceans' acid levels has risen caught scientists off-guard, with the problem now considered to be climate change's "equally evil twin," National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration chief Jane Lubchenco told The Associated Press.

"We've got sort of the perfect storm of stressors from multiple places really hammering reefs around the world," said Lubchenco, who was in Australia to speak at the International Coral Reef Symposium in the northeast city of Cairns, near the Great Barrier Reef. "It's a very serious situation."

Oceans absorb excess carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, increasing sea acidity. Scientists are worried about how that increase will affect sea life, particularly reefs, as higher acid levels make it tough for coral skeletons to form. Lubchenco likened ocean acidification to osteoporosis — a bone-thinning disease — because researchers are concerned it will lead to the deterioration of reefs.

Scientists initially assumed that the carbon dioxide absorbed by the water would be sufficiently diluted as the oceans mixed shallow and deeper waters. But most of the carbon dioxide and the subsequent chemical changes are being concentrated in surface waters, Lubchenco said.

"And those surface waters are changing much more rapidly than initial calculations have suggested," she said. "It's yet another reason to be very seriously concerned about the amount of carbon dioxide that is in the atmosphere now and the additional amount we continue to put out."

Higher acidity levels are especially problematic for creatures such as oysters, because acid slows the growth of their shells. Experiments have shown other animals, such as clown fish, also suffer. In a study that mimicked the level of acidity scientists expect by the end of the century, clown fish began swimming toward predators, instead of away from them, because their sense of smell had been dulled.

"We're just beginning to uncover many of the ways in which the changing chemistry of oceans affects lots of behaviors," Lubchenco said. "So salmon not being able to find their natal streams because their sense of smell was impaired, that's a very real possibility."

The potential impact of all of this is huge, Lubchenco said. Coral reefs attract critical tourism dollars and protect fragile coastlines from threats such as tsunamis. Seafood is the primary source of protein for many people around the world. Already, some oyster farmers have blamed higher acidity levels for a decrease in stocks.

Some attempts to address the problem are already under way. Instruments that measure changing acid levels in the water have been installed in some areas to warn oyster growers when to stop the flow of ocean water to their hatcheries.

But that is only a short-term solution, Lubchenco said. The most critical element, she said, is reducing carbon emissions.

"The carbon dioxide that we have put in the atmosphere will continue to be absorbed by oceans for decades," she said. "It is going to be a long time before we can stabilize and turn around the direction of change simply because it's a big atmosphere and it's a big ocean."

[RojoLeón]

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-wales-politics-18876880

Inactivity 'killing as many as smoking'

A lack of exercise is now causing as many deaths as smoking across the world, a study suggests.

The report, published in the Lancet to coincide with the build-up to the Olympics, estimates that about a third of adults are not doing enough physical activity, causing 5.3m deaths a year.

That equates to about one in 10 deaths from diseases such as heart disease, diabetes and breast and colon cancer.

Researchers said the problem was now so bad it should be treated as a pandemic.

And they said tackling it required a new way of thinking, suggesting the public needed to be warned about the dangers of inactivity rather than just reminded of the benefits of being active.

The team of 33 researchers drawn from centres across the world also said governments needed to look at ways to make physical activity more convenient, affordable and safer.

It is recommended that adults do 150 minutes of moderate exercise, such as brisk walking, cycling or gardening, each week.

The Lancet study found people in higher income countries were the least active with those in the UK among the worst, as nearly two-thirds of adults were judged not to be doing enough.
Continue reading the main story
Case study
Bogota

From Monday to Saturday, the streets of the Colombian capital of Bogota are packed with cars.

The city - one of the largest in South America - is a teeming metropolis, home to more than seven million people.

But on a Sunday vehicles are nowhere to be seen. Instead, the streets are taken over by pedestrians and cyclists, thanks to Ciclovia, a traffic-free streets initiative run by the city authorities.

The scheme, backed by successive mayors, has been running in one guise or another since the mid-1970s.

It now covers nearly 100km of roads in the centre of the city on Sundays and public holidays.

But as well as making Bogota a quieter place to roam, the ban on cars also has a health benefit.

Research has shown about a million residents regularly walk around on a Sunday, a fifth of whom say they would be inactive if it were not for the ban on vehicles.

Dr Michael Pratt, who was involved in the Lancet research on physical inactivity, said the Bogota scheme was a "wonderful example" of how governments could be encouraging more exercise.

    Sedentary lifestyle can kill

The researchers admitted comparisons between countries were difficult because the way activity was estimated may have differed from place to place.

Nonetheless, they said they remained confident that their overall conclusion was valid.

Pedro Hallal, one of the lead researchers, said: "With the upcoming 2012 Olympic Games, sport and physical activity will attract tremendous worldwide attention.

"Although the world will be watching elite athletes from many countries compete in sporting events... most spectators will be quite inactive.

"The global challenge is clear - make physical activity a public health priority throughout the world to improve health and reduce the burden of disease."

Prof Lindsey Davies, president of the UK Faculty of Public Health, agreed.

"We need to do all we can to make it easy for people to look after their health and get active as part of their daily lives," she said.

"Our environment has a significant part to play. For example, people who feel unsafe in their local park will be less likely to use it."

But others questioned equating smoking with inactivity.

While smoking and inactivity kill a similar number of people, smoking rates are much lower than the number of inactive people, making smoking more risky to the individual.

Dr Claire Knight, of Cancer Research UK, said: "When it comes to preventing cancer, stopping smoking is by far the most important thing you can do."

[RojoLeón]

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2012/07/13-2

In Canada's Tar Sands, a Dante's Hell Threatens People Nearby and Across the Globe

In Canada's western province of Alberta, Melina Laboucan-Massimo’s community—the Lubicon Lake Nation—has endured a withering toxic tar sands oil assault, an Armageddon against nature few Americans are fully aware of. Here in the once pristine sub-Arctic, tar sands mining operations level vast swaths of boreal forests near native lands, as pipelines burst and spew corrosive chemical-laced tar sands oil into rivers and lakes.

The Lubicon are used to living in harmony with nature. But tar sands mining has brought a deadly discordance to their environment. Melina has watched family and friends battle unheard of cancers and respiratory ailments; she's listened to local fishermen and hunters complain about unusual lesions and tumors festering in their catches and prey. She's reacted in disbelief as her government has sponsored airborne sharpshooters to gun down mighty Canadian wolf packs—a zero sum game that is killing one species to try to save another—as dwindling herds of caribou flee their disappearing forest homes and may be gone  forever in the not so distant future.

For members of the Lubicon Lake Nation, it is a nightmare of Kafkaesque proportions. Their verdant land of abundant wildlife is metastasizing into pock-marketed battlefields of a thousand Verduns. Melina and other community leaders have not sat idly by as the environmental carnage unfolds around them. She has testified before Congress, spearheaded Greenpeace protest actions, and worked tirelessly to get the word out about the devastation in her community.

According to one report, at least seven million gallons of oil has been spilled in Alberta since 2006—much of it tar sands oil—and there have been thousands of pipeline accidents since the 1990s.

Just in the past few months there have been several major pipeline spills in the province, including one spilled millions of gallons of crude near Melina’s community a little over a year ago. This is how Melina describes it when she along with others impacted by one of the largest tar sands spills in history during a rare opportunity to testify before Congress last March:

    Last spring I returned home to where I was born to witness the aftermath of one of the largest oil spills in Alberta’s history. What I saw was a landscape forever changed by oil that had consumed a vast stretch of the traditional territory where my family had once hunted, trapped and picked berries and medicines for generations. Days before the federal or provincial government admitted that this had happened my family was sending me text messages telling me of headaches, burning eyes, nausea and dizziness asking me if I could find out more information as to if it was an oil spill and how big it might be…. It wasn’t until the day after the federal election that the information was released of the magnitude of the spill – 28, 000 barrels or 4.5 million litres of oil had soaked the land – this is 50 per cent larger than the tar sands oil spill in the Kalamazoo River in Michigan the year before. Soon afterward the story was swept under the carpet away from the eyes of the public yet it took until the end of the year for the official clean up to be done, but just like in Michigan we know that the land and water in that area will never be the same.

The poisons that infest these tar sands mining operations are some of the nastiest in the petrochemical world, including highly dangerous compounds like mercury, arsenic and lead. As they are dumped into rivers that flow toward the Arctic and are spewed into the cold north winds that deposit them far and wide across the remote region—thanks to powerful wind and water currents that already make it a natural sink for global toxic emissions.

A seminal study published in the National Academy of Sciences in 2010, led by renowned Alberta biologist David Schindler, found toxic pollutants from tar sands oil operations leaching into the Athabasca River, which flows north and feeds into the vast MacKenzie River Basin system that empties into the Arctic Ocean. The study poked holes in the Canadian government’s environmental monitoring system—long decried as inadequate and industry-biased by environmentalists and health activists—forcing the government to implement a new environmental monitoring plan this year.

But it’s not just the river of poisons being unleashed into the environment that concerns scientists. Huge areas of boreal forests are being transformed into open-pit mining operations, decimating critical carbon-storing forests and habitat and adding massive amounts of greenhouse gas emissions to the world’s increasingly polluted skies. Those losses are not being recovered and factored into the overall environmental impacts of tar sands mining, according to a paper Schindler and others published last year:

    Claims by industry that they will “return the land we use – including reclaiming tailings ponds - to a sustainable landscape that is equal to or better than how we found it” (33) and that it “will be replanted with the same trees and plants and formed into habitat for the same species” (34) are clearly greenwashing.

    The postmining landscape will support >65% less peatland. One consequence of this transformation is a dramatic loss of carbon storage and sequestration potential, the cost of which has not been factored into land-use decisions. To fairly evaluate the costs and benefits of oil sands mining in Alberta, impacts on natural capital and ecosystem services must be rigorously assessed.

For people like the Lubicon, it’s been a frustrating exercise, a battle against Big Oil and powerful political interests bent on maximizing profits . Already, the province of Alberta has the highest per capita green house emissions compared to any country in the world, and emissions from tar sands are estimated to be four times as energy-intensive as conventional oil production in the U.S. and Canada. That has permanently altered not only the landscape but the livelihoods of a people who for centuries lived in harmony with the land, a land that now is being altered from a bountiful paradise into Dante's Hell. This is how Melina described it to Congress:

    As we see the landscape change, my father who is a Cree hunter has more and more difficulty in finding moose to feed our family and community. A couple of years ago, he found 3 tumours in the carcass of a moose while hunting in our traditional territory. Pristine forest, wetlands, bogs and fens are torn up and destroyed which will be replaced by acidic soil, end cap lakes and tree farms – a mere shadow of what once was. Currently we have toxic tailing ponds sitting on the land in northern Alberta that span over 170 square kilometers which is equivalent to 42,000 acres – this is not including the toxic waste that is produced by In Situ projects which are either injected back into the earth or taken away to sit in landfills. These tailing ponds contain a whole slew of toxic chemicals from arsenic, cyanide, mercury, lead, benzene, ammonia, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbon and naphthenic acids some of which are known carcinogens. These tailing ponds are leeching into the Athabasca watershed. It has been estimated that every day over 11 million litres or almost 3 million gallons leeched into the watershed.

Stories like Melina's are heart-breaking, but they remain a hard sell to politicians who benefit from the profit-driven largess of Big Oil’s billions—profits that may doom the people and wildlife inhabiting an area the size of Florida to a poisonous demise. Already Alberta has the highest per capita green house emissions compared to emissions in any country in the world, and tar sands mining operations are estimated to be about four times as energy intensive as conventional oil production in the U.S. and Canada.

James Hansen, the director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, has famously said, it’s “game over” for the planet if the 170 billion barrels of tar sands oil estimated to be stored in Canada is developed and processed. His op-ed this year of the potential impacts reads like something out of a Stephen King novel:

    Canada’s tar sands, deposits of sand saturated with bitumen, contain twice the amount of carbon dioxide emitted by global oil use in our entire history. If we were to fully exploit this new oil source, and continue to burn our conventional oil, gas and coal supplies, concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere eventually would reach levels higher than in the Pliocene era, more than 2.5 million years ago, when sea level was at least 50 feet higher than it is now. That level of heat-trapping gases would assure that the disintegration of the ice sheets would accelerate out of control. Sea levels would rise and destroy coastal cities. Global temperatures would become intolerable. Twenty to 50 percent of the planet’s species would be driven to extinction. Civilization would be at risk.

The bottom line is we are all at risk if tar sands mining operations poisoning First Nation lands in Canada continue to be developed unabated. As Melina has testified before Congress, it's more than a matter of life and death. “What kind of air, what kind of water will we be left with, so it’s a scary scenario to think about how much worse it could get,” she pleaded with members of the most powerful government on earth.

Unfortunately it likely will get worse, much worse. The Keystone pipeline—and a host of other tar sands pipelines on the drawing boards—are poised to bring rivers of poisonous bitumen crude to the U.S., where it's likely most of it will be refined and shipped to international consumers. The heat and violent storms plaguing the U.S. and the world will only get more deadly as mammoth deposits of dirty tar sands oil are processed, refined and burned to support the world’s ever-growing oil addiction.

Meanwhile, if nothing is done to rapidly transform our energy needs to more sustainable, renewable energy sources, the caribou, wolves and birds of the Alberta boreal forests will disappear into the Arctic night, never to return. It will be a sad ending to the environment and traditions the Lubicon people are fighting to protect, traditions that in the end will protect us all.

[RojoLeón]

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/global-warmings-terrifying-new-math-20120719#ixzz2165rwnFk

(long article)

Global Warming's Terrifying New Math
Three simple numbers that add up to global catastrophe - and that make clear who the real enemy is

If the pictures of those towering wildfires in Colorado haven't convinced you, or the size of your AC bill this summer, here are some hard numbers about climate change: June broke or tied 3,215 high-temperature records across the United States. That followed the warmest May on record for the Northern Hemisphere – the 327th consecutive month in which the temperature of the entire globe exceeded the 20th-century average, the odds of which occurring by simple chance were 3.7 x 10-99, a number considerably larger than the number of stars in the universe.

Meteorologists reported that this spring was the warmest ever recorded for our nation – in fact, it crushed the old record by so much that it represented the "largest temperature departure from average of any season on record." The same week, Saudi authorities reported that it had rained in Mecca despite a temperature of 109 degrees, the hottest downpour in the planet's history.

Not that our leaders seemed to notice. Last month the world's nations, meeting in Rio for the 20th-anniversary reprise of a massive 1992 environmental summit, accomplished nothing. Unlike George H.W. Bush, who flew in for the first conclave, Barack Obama didn't even attend. It was "a ghost of the glad, confident meeting 20 years ago," the British journalist George Monbiot wrote; no one paid it much attention, footsteps echoing through the halls "once thronged by multitudes." Since I wrote one of the first books for a general audience about global warming way back in 1989, and since I've spent the intervening decades working ineffectively to slow that warming, I can say with some confidence that we're losing the fight, badly and quickly – losing it because, most of all, we remain in denial about the peril that human civilization is in.

When we think about global warming at all, the arguments tend to be ideological, theological and economic. But to grasp the seriousness of our predicament, you just need to do a little math. For the past year, an easy and powerful bit of arithmetical analysis first published by financial analysts in the U.K. has been making the rounds of environmental conferences and journals, but it hasn't yet broken through to the larger public. This analysis upends most of the conventional political thinking about climate change. And it allows us to understand our precarious – our almost-but-not-quite-finally hopeless – position with three simple numbers.

The First Number: 2° Celsius

If the movie had ended in Hollywood fashion, the Copenhagen climate conference in 2009 would have marked the culmination of the global fight to slow a changing climate. The world's nations had gathered in the December gloom of the Danish capital for what a leading climate economist, Sir Nicholas Stern of Britain, called the "most important gathering since the Second World War, given what is at stake." As Danish energy minister Connie Hedegaard, who presided over the conference, declared at the time: "This is our chance. If we miss it, it could take years before we get a new and better one. If ever."

In the event, of course, we missed it. Copenhagen failed spectacularly. Neither China nor the United States, which between them are responsible for 40 percent of global carbon emissions, was prepared to offer dramatic concessions, and so the conference drifted aimlessly for two weeks until world leaders jetted in for the final day. Amid considerable chaos, President Obama took the lead in drafting a face-saving "Copenhagen Accord" that fooled very few. Its purely voluntary agreements committed no one to anything, and even if countries signaled their intentions to cut carbon emissions, there was no enforcement mechanism. "Copenhagen is a crime scene tonight," an angry Greenpeace official declared, "with the guilty men and women fleeing to the airport." Headline writers were equally brutal: COPENHAGEN: THE MUNICH OF OUR TIMES? asked one.

The accord did contain one important number, however. In Paragraph 1, it formally recognized "the scientific view that the increase in global temperature should be below two degrees Celsius." And in the very next paragraph, it declared that "we agree that deep cuts in global emissions are required... so as to hold the increase in global temperature below two degrees Celsius." By insisting on two degrees – about 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit – the accord ratified positions taken earlier in 2009 by the G8, and the so-called Major Economies Forum. It was as conventional as conventional wisdom gets. The number first gained prominence, in fact, at a 1995 climate conference chaired by Angela Merkel, then the German minister of the environment and now the center-right chancellor of the nation.

Some context: So far, we've raised the average temperature of the planet just under 0.8 degrees Celsius, and that has caused far more damage than most scientists expected. (A third of summer sea ice in the Arctic is gone, the oceans are 30 percent more acidic, and since warm air holds more water vapor than cold, the atmosphere over the oceans is a shocking five percent wetter, loading the dice for devastating floods.) Given those impacts, in fact, many scientists have come to think that two degrees is far too lenient a target. "Any number much above one degree involves a gamble," writes Kerry Emanuel of MIT, a leading authority on hurricanes, "and the odds become less and less favorable as the temperature goes up." Thomas Lovejoy, once the World Bank's chief biodiversity adviser, puts it like this: "If we're seeing what we're seeing today at 0.8 degrees Celsius, two degrees is simply too much." NASA scientist James Hansen, the planet's most prominent climatologist, is even blunter: "The target that has been talked about in international negotiations for two degrees of warming is actually a prescription for long-term disaster." At the Copenhagen summit, a spokesman for small island nations warned that many would not survive a two-degree rise: "Some countries will flat-out disappear." When delegates from developing nations were warned that two degrees would represent a "suicide pact" for drought-stricken Africa, many of them started chanting, "One degree, one Africa."

Despite such well-founded misgivings, political realism bested scientific data, and the world settled on the two-degree target – indeed, it's fair to say that it's the only thing about climate change the world has settled on. All told, 167 countries responsible for more than 87 percent of the world's carbon emissions have signed on to the Copenhagen Accord, endorsing the two-degree target. Only a few dozen countries have rejected it, including Kuwait, Nicaragua and Venezuela. Even the United Arab Emirates, which makes most of its money exporting oil and gas, signed on. The official position of planet Earth at the moment is that we can't raise the temperature more than two degrees Celsius – it's become the bottomest of bottom lines. Two degrees.

The Second Number: 565 Gigatons

Scientists estimate that humans can pour roughly 565 more gigatons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere by midcentury and still have some reasonable hope of staying below two degrees. ("Reasonable," in this case, means four chances in five, or somewhat worse odds than playing Russian roulette with a six-shooter.)

This idea of a global "carbon budget" emerged about a decade ago, as scientists began to calculate how much oil, coal and gas could still safely be burned. Since we've increased the Earth's temperature by 0.8 degrees so far, we're currently less than halfway to the target. But, in fact, computer models calculate that even if we stopped increasing CO2 now, the temperature would likely still rise another 0.8 degrees, as previously released carbon continues to overheat the atmosphere. That means we're already three-quarters of the way to the two-degree target.

How good are these numbers? No one is insisting that they're exact, but few dispute that they're generally right. The 565-gigaton figure was derived from one of the most sophisticated computer-simulation models that have been built by climate scientists around the world over the past few decades. And the number is being further confirmed by the latest climate-simulation models currently being finalized in advance of the next report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. "Looking at them as they come in, they hardly differ at all," says Tom Wigley, an Australian climatologist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research. "There's maybe 40 models in the data set now, compared with 20 before. But so far the numbers are pretty much the same. We're just fine-tuning things. I don't think much has changed over the last decade." William Collins, a senior climate scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, agrees. "I think the results of this round of simulations will be quite similar," he says. "We're not getting any free lunch from additional understanding of the climate system."

We're not getting any free lunch from the world's economies, either. With only a single year's lull in 2009 at the height of the financial crisis, we've continued to pour record amounts of carbon into the atmosphere, year after year. In late May, the International Energy Agency published its latest figures – CO2 emissions last year rose to 31.6 gigatons, up 3.2 percent from the year before. America had a warm winter and converted more coal-fired power plants to natural gas, so its emissions fell slightly; China kept booming, so its carbon output (which recently surpassed the U.S.) rose 9.3 percent; the Japanese shut down their fleet of nukes post-Fukushima, so their emissions edged up 2.4 percent. "There have been efforts to use more renewable energy and improve energy efficiency," said Corinne Le Quéré, who runs England's Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research. "But what this shows is that so far the effects have been marginal." In fact, study after study predicts that carbon emissions will keep growing by roughly three percent a year – and at that rate, we'll blow through our 565-gigaton allowance in 16 years, around the time today's preschoolers will be graduating from high school. "The new data provide further evidence that the door to a two-degree trajectory is about to close," said Fatih Birol, the IEA's chief economist. In fact, he continued, "When I look at this data, the trend is perfectly in line with a temperature increase of about six degrees." That's almost 11 degrees Fahrenheit, which would create a planet straight out of science fiction.

So, new data in hand, everyone at the Rio conference renewed their ritual calls for serious international action to move us back to a two-degree trajectory. The charade will continue in November, when the next Conference of the Parties (COP) of the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change convenes in Qatar. This will be COP 18 – COP 1 was held in Berlin in 1995, and since then the process has accomplished essentially nothing. Even scientists, who are notoriously reluctant to speak out, are slowly overcoming their natural preference to simply provide data. "The message has been consistent for close to 30 years now," Collins says with a wry laugh, "and we have the instrumentation and the computer power required to present the evidence in detail. If we choose to continue on our present course of action, it should be done with a full evaluation of the evidence the scientific community has presented." He pauses, suddenly conscious of being on the record. "I should say, a fuller evaluation of the evidence."

So far, though, such calls have had little effect. We're in the same position we've been in for a quarter-century: scientific warning followed by political inaction. Among scientists speaking off the record, disgusted candor is the rule. One senior scientist told me, "You know those new cigarette packs, where governments make them put a picture of someone with a hole in their throats? Gas pumps should have something like that."

The Third Number: 2,795 Gigatons

This number is the scariest of all – one that, for the first time, meshes the political and scientific dimensions of our dilemma. It was highlighted last summer by the Carbon Tracker Initiative, a team of London financial analysts and environmentalists who published a report in an effort to educate investors about the possible risks that climate change poses to their stock portfolios. The number describes the amount of carbon already contained in the proven coal and oil and gas reserves of the fossil-fuel companies, and the countries (think Venezuela or Kuwait) that act like fossil-fuel companies. In short, it's the fossil fuel we're currently planning to burn. And the key point is that this new number – 2,795 – is higher than 565. Five times higher.

The Carbon Tracker Initiative – led by James Leaton, an environmentalist who served as an adviser at the accounting giant PricewaterhouseCoopers – combed through proprietary databases to figure out how much oil, gas and coal the world's major energy companies hold in reserve. The numbers aren't perfect – they don't fully reflect the recent surge in unconventional energy sources like shale gas, and they don't accurately reflect coal reserves, which are subject to less stringent reporting requirements than oil and gas. But for the biggest companies, the figures are quite exact: If you burned everything in the inventories of Russia's Lukoil and America's ExxonMobil, for instance, which lead the list of oil and gas companies, each would release more than 40 gigatons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.

Which is exactly why this new number, 2,795 gigatons, is such a big deal. Think of two degrees Celsius as the legal drinking limit – equivalent to the 0.08 blood-alcohol level below which you might get away with driving home. The 565 gigatons is how many drinks you could have and still stay below that limit – the six beers, say, you might consume in an evening. And the 2,795 gigatons? That's the three 12-packs the fossil-fuel industry has on the table, already opened and ready to pour.

We have five times as much oil and coal and gas on the books as climate scientists think is safe to burn. We'd have to keep 80 percent of those reserves locked away underground to avoid that fate. Before we knew those numbers, our fate had been likely. Now, barring some massive intervention, it seems certain.

Yes, this coal and gas and oil is still technically in the soil. But it's already economically aboveground – it's figured into share prices, companies are borrowing money against it, nations are basing their budgets on the presumed returns from their patrimony. It explains why the big fossil-fuel companies have fought so hard to prevent the regulation of carbon dioxide – those reserves are their primary asset, the holding that gives their companies their value. It's why they've worked so hard these past years to figure out how to unlock the oil in Canada's tar sands, or how to drill miles beneath the sea, or how to frack the Appalachians.

If you told Exxon or Lukoil that, in order to avoid wrecking the climate, they couldn't pump out their reserves, the value of their companies would plummet. John Fullerton, a former managing director at JP Morgan who now runs the Capital Institute, calculates that at today's market value, those 2,795 gigatons of carbon emissions are worth about $27 trillion. Which is to say, if you paid attention to the scientists and kept 80 percent of it underground, you'd be writing off $20 trillion in assets. The numbers aren't exact, of course, but that carbon bubble makes the housing bubble look small by comparison. It won't necessarily burst – we might well burn all that carbon, in which case investors will do fine. But if we do, the planet will crater. You can have a healthy fossil-fuel balance sheet, or a relatively healthy planet – but now that we know the numbers, it looks like you can't have both. Do the math: 2,795 is five times 565. That's how the story ends.

So far, as I said at the start, environmental efforts to tackle global warming have failed. The planet's emissions of carbon dioxide continue to soar, especially as developing countries emulate (and supplant) the industries of the West. Even in rich countries, small reductions in emissions offer no sign of the real break with the status quo we'd need to upend the iron logic of these three numbers. Germany is one of the only big countries that has actually tried hard to change its energy mix; on one sunny Saturday in late May, that northern-latitude nation generated nearly half its power from solar panels within its borders. That's a small miracle – and it demonstrates that we have the technology to solve our problems. But we lack the will. So far, Germany's the exception; the rule is ever more carbon.

This record of failure means we know a lot about what strategies don't work. Green groups, for instance, have spent a lot of time trying to change individual lifestyles: the iconic twisty light bulb has been installed by the millions, but so have a new generation of energy-sucking flatscreen TVs. Most of us are fundamentally ambivalent about going green: We like cheap flights to warm places, and we're certainly not going to give them up if everyone else is still taking them. Since all of us are in some way the beneficiaries of cheap fossil fuel, tackling climate change has been like trying to build a movement against yourself – it's as if the gay-rights movement had to be constructed entirely from evangelical preachers, or the abolition movement from slaveholders.

People perceive – correctly – that their individual actions will not make a decisive difference in the atmospheric concentration of CO2; by 2010, a poll found that "while recycling is widespread in America and 73 percent of those polled are paying bills online in order to save paper," only four percent had reduced their utility use and only three percent had purchased hybrid cars. Given a hundred years, you could conceivably change lifestyles enough to matter – but time is precisely what we lack.

A more efficient method, of course, would be to work through the political system, and environmentalists have tried that, too, with the same limited success. They've patiently lobbied leaders, trying to convince them of our peril and assuming that politicians would heed the warnings. Sometimes it has seemed to work. Barack Obama, for instance, campaigned more aggressively about climate change than any president before him – the night he won the nomination, he told supporters that his election would mark the moment "the rise of the oceans began to slow and the planet began to heal." And he has achieved one significant change: a steady increase in the fuel efficiency mandated for automobiles. It's the kind of measure, adopted a quarter-century ago, that would have helped enormously. But in light of the numbers I've just described, it's obviously a very small start indeed.

At this point, effective action would require actually keeping most of the carbon the fossil-fuel industry wants to burn safely in the soil, not just changing slightly the speed at which it's burned. And there the president, apparently haunted by the still-echoing cry of "Drill, baby, drill," has gone out of his way to frack and mine. His secretary of interior, for instance, opened up a huge swath of the Powder River Basin in Wyoming for coal extraction: The total basin contains some 67.5 gigatons worth of carbon (or more than 10 percent of the available atmospheric space). He's doing the same thing with Arctic and offshore drilling; in fact, as he explained on the stump in March, "You have my word that we will keep drilling everywhere we can... That's a commitment that I make." The next day, in a yard full of oil pipe in Cushing, Oklahoma, the president promised to work on wind and solar energy but, at the same time, to speed up fossil-fuel development: "Producing more oil and gas here at home has been, and will continue to be, a critical part of an all-of-the-above energy strategy." That is, he's committed to finding even more stock to add to the 2,795-gigaton inventory of unburned carbon.

Sometimes the irony is almost Borat-scale obvious: In early June, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton traveled on a Norwegian research trawler to see firsthand the growing damage from climate change. "Many of the predictions about warming in the Arctic are being surpassed by the actual data," she said, describing the sight as "sobering." But the discussions she traveled to Scandinavia to have with other foreign ministers were mostly about how to make sure Western nations get their share of the estimated $9 trillion in oil (that's more than 90 billion barrels, or 37 gigatons of carbon) that will become accessible as the Arctic ice melts. Last month, the Obama administration indicated that it would give Shell permission to start drilling in sections of the Arctic.

Almost every government with deposits of hydrocarbons straddles the same divide. Canada, for instance, is a liberal democracy renowned for its internationalism – no wonder, then, that it signed on to the Kyoto treaty, promising to cut its carbon emissions substantially by 2012. But the rising price of oil suddenly made the tar sands of Alberta economically attractive – and since, as NASA climatologist James Hansen pointed out in May, they contain as much as 240 gigatons of carbon (or almost half of the available space if we take the 565 limit seriously), that meant Canada's commitment to Kyoto was nonsense. In December, the Canadian government withdrew from the treaty before it faced fines for failing to meet its commitments.

The same kind of hypocrisy applies across the ideological board: In his speech to the Copenhagen conference, Venezuela's Hugo Chavez quoted Rosa Luxemburg, Jean-Jacques Rousseau and "Christ the Redeemer," insisting that "climate change is undoubtedly the most devastating environmental problem of this century." But the next spring, in the Simon Bolivar Hall of the state-run oil company, he signed an agreement with a consortium of international players to develop the vast Orinoco tar sands as "the most significant engine for a comprehensive development of the entire territory and Venezuelan population." The Orinoco deposits are larger than Alberta's – taken together, they'd fill up the whole available atmospheric space.

So: the paths we have tried to tackle global warming have so far produced only gradual, halting shifts. A rapid, transformative change would require building a movement, and movements require enemies. As John F. Kennedy put it, "The civil rights movement should thank God for Bull Connor. He's helped it as much as Abraham Lincoln." And enemies are what climate change has lacked.

But what all these climate numbers make painfully, usefully clear is that the planet does indeed have an enemy – one far more committed to action than governments or individuals. Given this hard math, we need to view the fossil-fuel industry in a new light. It has become a rogue industry, reckless like no other force on Earth. It is Public Enemy Number One to the survival of our planetary civilization. "Lots of companies do rotten things in the course of their business – pay terrible wages, make people work in sweatshops – and we pressure them to change those practices," says veteran anti-corporate leader Naomi Klein, who is at work on a book about the climate crisis. "But these numbers make clear that with the fossil-fuel industry, wrecking the planet is their business model. It's what they do."

According to the Carbon Tracker report, if Exxon burns its current reserves, it would use up more than seven percent of the available atmospheric space between us and the risk of two degrees. BP is just behind, followed by the Russian firm Gazprom, then Chevron, ConocoPhillips and Shell, each of which would fill between three and four percent. Taken together, just these six firms, of the 200 listed in the Carbon Tracker report, would use up more than a quarter of the remaining two-degree budget. Severstal, the Russian mining giant, leads the list of coal companies, followed by firms like BHP Billiton and Peabody. The numbers are simply staggering – this industry, and this industry alone, holds the power to change the physics and chemistry of our planet, and they're planning to use it.

They're clearly cognizant of global warming – they employ some of the world's best scientists, after all, and they're bidding on all those oil leases made possible by the staggering melt of Arctic ice. And yet they relentlessly search for more hydrocarbons – in early March, Exxon CEO Rex Tillerson told Wall Street analysts that the company plans to spend $37 billion a year through 2016 (about $100 million a day) searching for yet more oil and gas.

There's not a more reckless man on the planet than Tillerson. Late last month, on the same day the Colorado fires reached their height, he told a New York audience that global warming is real, but dismissed it as an "engineering problem" that has "engineering solutions." Such as? "Changes to weather patterns that move crop-production areas around – we'll adapt to that." This in a week when Kentucky farmers were reporting that corn kernels were "aborting" in record heat, threatening a spike in global food prices. "The fear factor that people want to throw out there to say, 'We just have to stop this,' I do not accept," Tillerson said. Of course not – if he did accept it, he'd have to keep his reserves in the ground. Which would cost him money. It's not an engineering problem, in other words – it's a greed problem.

You could argue that this is simply in the nature of these companies – that having found a profitable vein, they're compelled to keep mining it, more like efficient automatons than people with free will. But as the Supreme Court has made clear, they are people of a sort. In fact, thanks to the size of its bankroll, the fossil-fuel industry has far more free will than the rest of us. These companies don't simply exist in a world whose hungers they fulfill – they help create the boundaries of that world.

Left to our own devices, citizens might decide to regulate carbon and stop short of the brink; according to a recent poll, nearly two-thirds of Americans would back an international agreement that cut carbon emissions 90 percent by 2050. But we aren't left to our own devices. The Koch brothers, for instance, have a combined wealth of $50 billion, meaning they trail only Bill Gates on the list of richest Americans. They've made most of their money in hydrocarbons, they know any system to regulate carbon would cut those profits, and they reportedly plan to lavish as much as $200 million on this year's elections. In 2009, for the first time, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce surpassed both the Republican and Democratic National Committees on political spending; the following year, more than 90 percent of the Chamber's cash went to GOP candidates, many of whom deny the existence of global warming. Not long ago, the Chamber even filed a brief with the EPA urging the agency not to regulate carbon – should the world's scientists turn out to be right and the planet heats up, the Chamber advised, "populations can acclimatize to warmer climates via a range of behavioral, physiological and technological adaptations." As radical goes, demanding that we change our physiology seems right up there.

Environmentalists, understandably, have been loath to make the fossil-fuel industry their enemy, respecting its political power and hoping instead to convince these giants that they should turn away from coal, oil and gas and transform themselves more broadly into "energy companies." Sometimes that strategy appeared to be working – emphasis on appeared. Around the turn of the century, for instance, BP made a brief attempt to restyle itself as "Beyond Petroleum," adapting a logo that looked like the sun and sticking solar panels on some of its gas stations. But its investments in alternative energy were never more than a tiny fraction of its budget for hydrocarbon exploration, and after a few years, many of those were wound down as new CEOs insisted on returning to the company's "core business." In December, BP finally closed its solar division. Shell shut down its solar and wind efforts in 2009. The five biggest oil companies have made more than $1 trillion in profits since the millennium – there's simply too much money to be made on oil and gas and coal to go chasing after zephyrs and sunbeams.

Much of that profit stems from a single historical accident: Alone among businesses, the fossil-fuel industry is allowed to dump its main waste, carbon dioxide, for free. Nobody else gets that break – if you own a restaurant, you have to pay someone to cart away your trash, since piling it in the street would breed rats. But the fossil-fuel industry is different, and for sound historical reasons: Until a quarter-century ago, almost no one knew that CO2 was dangerous. But now that we understand that carbon is heating the planet and acidifying the oceans, its price becomes the central issue.

If you put a price on carbon, through a direct tax or other methods, it would enlist markets in the fight against global warming. Once Exxon has to pay for the damage its carbon is doing to the atmosphere, the price of its products would rise. Consumers would get a strong signal to use less fossil fuel – every time they stopped at the pump, they'd be reminded that you don't need a semimilitary vehicle to go to the grocery store. The economic playing field would now be a level one for nonpolluting energy sources. And you could do it all without bankrupting citizens – a so-called "fee-and-dividend" scheme would put a hefty tax on coal and gas and oil, then simply divide up the proceeds, sending everyone in the country a check each month for their share of the added costs of carbon. By switching to cleaner energy sources, most people would actually come out ahead.

There's only one problem: Putting a price on carbon would reduce the profitability of the fossil-fuel industry. After all, the answer to the question "How high should the price of carbon be?" is "High enough to keep those carbon reserves that would take us past two degrees safely in the ground." The higher the price on carbon, the more of those reserves would be worthless. The fight, in the end, is about whether the industry will succeed in its fight to keep its special pollution break alive past the point of climate catastrophe, or whether, in the economists' parlance, we'll make them internalize those externalities.

It's not clear, of course, that the power of the fossil-fuel industry can be broken. The U.K. analysts who wrote the Carbon Tracker report and drew attention to these numbers had a relatively modest goal – they simply wanted to remind investors that climate change poses a very real risk to the stock prices of energy companies. Say something so big finally happens (a giant hurricane swamps Manhattan, a megadrought wipes out Midwest agriculture) that even the political power of the industry is inadequate to restrain legislators, who manage to regulate carbon. Suddenly those Chevron reserves would be a lot less valuable, and the stock would tank. Given that risk, the Carbon Tracker report warned investors to lessen their exposure, hedge it with some big plays in alternative energy.

"The regular process of economic evolution is that businesses are left with stranded assets all the time," says Nick Robins, who runs HSBC's Climate Change Centre. "Think of film cameras, or typewriters. The question is not whether this will happen. It will. Pension systems have been hit by the dot-com and credit crunch. They'll be hit by this." Still, it hasn't been easy to convince investors, who have shared in the oil industry's record profits. "The reason you get bubbles," sighs Leaton, "is that everyone thinks they're the best analyst – that they'll go to the edge of the cliff and then jump back when everyone else goes over."

So pure self-interest probably won't spark a transformative challenge to fossil fuel. But moral outrage just might – and that's the real meaning of this new math. It could, plausibly, give rise to a real movement.

Once, in recent corporate history, anger forced an industry to make basic changes. That was the campaign in the 1980s demanding divestment from companies doing business in South Africa. It rose first on college campuses and then spread to municipal and state governments; 155 campuses eventually divested, and by the end of the decade, more than 80 cities, 25 states and 19 counties had taken some form of binding economic action against companies connected to the apartheid regime. "The end of apartheid stands as one of the crowning accomplishments of the past century," as Archbishop Desmond Tutu put it, "but we would not have succeeded without the help of international pressure," especially from "the divestment movement of the 1980s."

The fossil-fuel industry is obviously a tougher opponent, and even if you could force the hand of particular companies, you'd still have to figure out a strategy for dealing with all the sovereign nations that, in effect, act as fossil-fuel companies. But the link for college students is even more obvious in this case. If their college's endowment portfolio has fossil-fuel stock, then their educations are being subsidized by investments that guarantee they won't have much of a planet on which to make use of their degree. (The same logic applies to the world's largest investors, pension funds, which are also theoretically interested in the future – that's when their members will "enjoy their retirement.") "Given the severity of the climate crisis, a comparable demand that our institutions dump stock from companies that are destroying the planet would not only be appropriate but effective," says Bob Massie, a former anti-apartheid activist who helped found the Investor Network on Climate Risk. "The message is simple: We have had enough. We must sever the ties with those who profit from climate change – now."

Movements rarely have predictable outcomes. But any campaign that weakens the fossil-fuel industry's political standing clearly increases the chances of retiring its special breaks. Consider President Obama's signal achievement in the climate fight, the large increase he won in mileage requirements for cars. Scientists, environmentalists and engineers had advocated such policies for decades, but until Detroit came under severe financial pressure, it was politically powerful enough to fend them off. If people come to understand the cold, mathematical truth – that the fossil-fuel industry is systematically undermining the planet's physical systems – it might weaken it enough to matter politically. Exxon and their ilk might drop their opposition to a fee-and-dividend solution; they might even decide to become true energy companies, this time for real.

Even if such a campaign is possible, however, we may have waited too long to start it. To make a real difference – to keep us under a temperature increase of two degrees – you'd need to change carbon pricing in Washington, and then use that victory to leverage similar shifts around the world. At this point, what happens in the U.S. is most important for how it will influence China and India, where emissions are growing fastest. (In early June, researchers concluded that China has probably under-reported its emissions by up to 20 percent.) The three numbers I've described are daunting – they may define an essentially impossible future. But at least they provide intellectual clarity about the greatest challenge humans have ever faced. We know how much we can burn, and we know who's planning to burn more. Climate change operates on a geological scale and time frame, but it's not an impersonal force of nature; the more carefully you do the math, the more thoroughly you realize that this is, at bottom, a moral issue; we have met the enemy and they is Shell.

Meanwhile the tide of numbers continues. The week after the Rio conference limped to its conclusion, Arctic sea ice hit the lowest level ever recorded for that date. Last month, on a single weekend, Tropical Storm Debby dumped more than 20 inches of rain on Florida – the earliest the season's fourth-named cyclone has ever arrived. At the same time, the largest fire in New Mexico history burned on, and the most destructive fire in Colorado's annals claimed 346 homes in Colorado Springs – breaking a record set the week before in Fort Collins. This month, scientists issued a new study concluding that global warming has dramatically increased the likelihood of severe heat and drought – days after a heat wave across the Plains and Midwest broke records that had stood since the Dust Bowl, threatening this year's harvest. You want a big number? In the course of this month, a quadrillion kernels of corn need to pollinate across the grain belt, something they can't do if temperatures remain off the charts. Just like us, our crops are adapted to the Holocene, the 11,000-year period of climatic stability we're now leaving... in the dust.

This story is from the August 2nd, 2012 issue of Rolling Stone.

[RojoLeón]

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/sunita-narain/extreme-weather-climate-change_b_1670592.html

One Swallow Does Make a Summer: Extreme Weather Events Are Linked to Climate Change

During my weekly conversation with my sister I told her about the unusual searing heat this June, the problems of power cuts and how we are coping in Delhi. She, in turn, told me that in Washington, D.C., where she lives, there was a terrible storm that damaged her roof and uprooted trees in her garden. She was fortunate that she still had electricity, because most houses in the city were in the dark. She also said it was unbearably hot because the region was in the grip of an unprecedented heat wave. Both of us, living across the oceans, in different countries, with vastly different circumstances, were similarly placed.

Is this, then, what the future holds for us -- a changing weather that has no boundaries or preferences? And why are we still so reluctant to make the connection between weather events and a changing climate?

This year, like most others, has seen unusual and extreme weather events. In Britain, where weather is always the subject of conversation, it became even more so. The Diamond Jubilee celebrations for the queen were an almost washout, while the Olympic torch's journey through Britain has been hit by rain and storms. West Yorkshire has been flooded and its people evacuated (this is the third flood in a month). This time it has had one month's rain in three hours. The country's Met Office says rainfall records have been broken. This June is the wettest since 1910. In Russia, flash floods have claimed the lives of 174 people. In Colorado, as I write, wildfires are ravaging land.

One swallow does not make a summer. But when unusual, extreme weather events begin to happen with increased intensity and frequency, they should make us ponder. In the U.S., for instance, more than 4,000 heat records have been broken this year. The rate at which these extreme events are striking is not normal.

One may ask: How does the world measure the "increased" frequency of extreme weather? After all, weather is always variable. Meteorological departments across the world keep records of changing weather events and patterns. Their records can point out similar events in the past when there was a similar cloudburst or frost or cyclone or freak snow. How does all this add to climate change? The fact is, change will happen in our present and our future. Since the world is only now beginning to see the impacts of rising temperature, data over several years does not exist to establish a trend in extreme weather events. Science, at best, can use a model to predict impacts of global temperature rise on climate.

Then there is the next set of questions. Even if extreme events are now being seen and recorded, how does one know this relates to human-made emissions? All this is further complicated by the fact that multiple factors affect weather and another set of multiple factors affects its severity and impact. In other words, the causes of devastation following extreme events -- like droughts or floods -- are often complicated and involve mismanagement of resources and poor planning.

For instance, we know floods -- currently ravaging parts of Assam and Bihar in India -- are caused by unusually high rainfall. But it is also clear we have destroyed drainage in floodplains through utter mismanagement. We built embankments believing we can control the river only to find the protection broken. Worse, we built habitations in floodplains.

This complication hurts people but helps climate deniers. They have a field day saying there is no link between variations in weather and climate change. For instance, when Washington, D.C., which is burning in heat today, had an equally extreme winter this year, a Republican senator known for his strong views against climate change built an igloo in a shopping mall. This was to mock climate change believers because it was cold, not hot. He clearly could not read the signs. And he is not alone. U.S. media has been squeamish about making the connection between extreme weather events and climate change. It is difficult to say whether this is because the climate skeptics have got to them, or because they are unable to unravel the nuances of scientific messages. This when there is more evidence now that the events of today are confirming the predictions of scientific models. In other words, what we had dreaded is coming true.

Therefore, we know that human influence has loaded the weather dice to make a particular event more likely. The deck is stacked against us. We will see more impacts of a changing climate in extreme, variable and devastating weather events. Science is now certain. Why are we still hedging our bets?

(it is very warm here at the moment - almost uncomfortably so. Temperature records are falling here also)

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/lanow/2012/07/warm-weather-southern-california.html

Record high set at LAX as warm weather grips Southern California

Record high temperatures for the day were recorded Thursday in Los Angeles and Ventura counties as warm weather settled over the region.

Above-normal temperatures will continue on Friday and into the weekend as a high pressure builds across Southern California, according to the National Weather Service.

On Thursday, Los Angeles International Airport recorded a daily high of 86 degrees, breaking a record of 84 degrees set in 1951. Camarillo Airport topped out at 82 degrees, tying a record for the day set in 1974, the Weather Service said.

Downtown Los Angeles reached 92 degrees, topping the 90-degree mark for the first time since October 2011.

The high pressure will be accompanied by a surge in monsoonal moisture, which could trigger showers and thunderstorms in the mountains and deserts.

[RojoLeón]

http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2012/07/17/geoengineers-to-release-planet-cooling-gas-into-new-mexico-atmosphere/


Geoengineers to release planet-cooling gas into New Mexico atmosphere

Two Harvard engineers are planning to spray thousands of tonnes of sun-reflecting chemical particles into the atmosphere to artificially cool the planet, using a balloon flying 80,000 feet over Fort Sumner, New Mexico.

The field experiment in solar geoengineering aims to ultimately create a technology to replicate the observed effects of volcanoes that spew sulphates into the stratosphere, using sulphate aerosols to bounce sunlight back to space and decrease the temperature of the Earth.

David Keith, one of the investigators, has argued that solar geoengineering could be an inexpensive method to slow down global warming, but other scientists warn that it could have unpredictable, disastrous consequences for the Earth’s weather systems and food supplies. Environmental groups fear that the push to make geoengineering a “plan B” for climate change will undermine efforts to reduce carbon emissions.

Keith, who manages a multimillion dollar geoengineering research fund provided by Microsoft founder Bill Gates, previously commissioned a study by a US aerospace company that made the case for the feasibility of large-scale deployment of solar geoengineering technologies.

His US experiment, conducted with American James Anderson, will take place within a year and involve the release of tens or hundreds of kilograms of particles to measure the impacts on ozone chemistry, and to test ways to make sulphate aerosols the appropriate size. Since it is impossible to simulate the complexity of the stratosphere in a laboratory, Keith says the experiment will provide an opportunity to improve models of how the ozone layer could be altered by much larger-scale sulphate spraying.

“The objective is not to alter the climate, but simply to probe the processes at a micro scale,” said Keith. “The direct risk is very small.”

While the experiment may not harm the climate, environmental groups say that the global environmental risks of solar geoengineering have been amply identified through modelling and the study of the impacts of sulphuric dust emitted by volcanoes.

“Impacts include the potential for further damage to the ozone layer, and disruption of rainfall, particularly in tropical and subtropical regions – potentially threatening the food supplies of billions of people,” said Pat Mooney, executive director of the Canadian-based technology watchdog ETC Group. “It will do nothing to decrease levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere or halt ocean acidification. And solar geoengineering is likely to increase the risk of climate-related international conflict – given that the modelling to date shows it poses greater risks to the global south.”

A scientific study published last month concluded that solar radiation management could decrease rainfall by 15% in areas of North America and northern Eurasia and by more than 20% in central South America.

Last autumn, a British field test of a balloon-and-hosepipe device that would have pumped water into the sky generated controversy. The government-funded project – Stratospheric Particle Injection for Climate Engineering (Spice) – was cancelled after a row over patents and a public outcry by global NGOs, some of whom argued the project was a “Trojan horse” that would open the door to full-scale deployment of the technology.

Keith said he opposed Spice from the outset because it would not have improved knowledge of the risks or effectiveness of solar geoengineering, unlike his own experiment.

“I salute the British government for getting out and trying something,” he said. “But I wish they’d had a better process, because those opposed to any such experiments will see it as a victory and try to stop other experiments as well.”

The Guardian understands that Keith is planning to use the Gates-backed fund to organise a meeting to study the lessons of Spice.

[RojoLeón]

Video of interview at link

Journalist Chris Hedges on Capitalism's "Sacrifice Zones": Communities Destroyed for Profit

http://truth-out.org/news/item/10494-journalist-chris-hedges-on-capitalisms-sacrifice-zones-communities-destroyed-for-profit

There are forgotten corners of this country where Americans are trapped in endless cycles of poverty, powerlessness, and despair as a direct result of capitalistic greed. Journalist Chris Hedges calls these places "sacrifice zones," and joins Bill this week on Moyers & Company to explore how areas like Camden, New Jersey; Immokalee, Florida; and parts of West Virginia suffer while the corporations that plundered them thrive.

These are areas that have been destroyed for quarterly profit. We're talking about environmentally destroyed, communities destroyed, human beings destroyed, families destroyed," Hedges tells Bill.

"It's the willingness on the part of people who seek personal enrichment to destroy other human beings... And because the mechanisms of governance can no longer control them, there is nothing now within the formal mechanisms of power to stop them from creating essentially a corporate oligarchic state."

The broadcast includes a visit with comics artist and journalist Joe Sacco, who collaborated with Hedges on Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt, an illustrated account of their travels through America's sacrifice zones. Kirkus Reviews calls it an "unabashedly polemic, angry manifesto that is certain to open eyes, intensify outrage and incite argument about corporate greed."

A columnist for Truthdig, Hedges also describes the difference between truth and news. "The really great reporters — and I've seen them in all sorts of news organizations — are management headaches because they care about truth at the expense of their own career," Hedges says.

TRANSCRIPT

Exploring parts of America "that have been destroyed for quarterly profit."

Bill Moyers: Welcome. Here we are, barely halfway through the summer, and Barack Obama and Mitt Romney have stepped up their cage match, each attacking the other, throwing insults and accusations back and forth like folding chairs hurled across the wrestling ring.

Governor Romney pummels away at the economy; President Obama pummels away at Mr. Romney—when he was or wasn't at his company Bain Capital, his tax returns and his offshore accounts. All the while, as they bob and weave their way through this quadrennial competition, punching wildly, the real story of what's happening to ordinary people as capitalism runs amok is largely ignored by each of them. But not in this book "Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt"—an unusual account of poverty and desolation across contemporary America. It's a collaboration between graphic artist and journalist Joe Sacco, about whom more later, and my guest on this week's broadcast, Chris Hedges.

Chris Hedges: All of the true correctives to American democracy came through movements that never achieved formal political power.

Bill Moyers: This is just the latest battle cry from Hedges, who, angry at what he sees in the world, expresses his outrage in thoughtful prose that never fails to inform and provoke. As a correspondent and bureau chief for "The New York Times," he covered wars in North Africa, the Balkans and the Middle East—leaving the paper after a reprimand for publicly denouncing the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

In such books as "War Is a Force that Gives Us Meaning," his weekly column for the website "Truthdig" and freelance articles for a variety of other publications, Chris Hedges has taken his life's experience covering the brutality of combat and shaped a worldview in which morality and faith, and the importance of truth-telling, dissent and social activism take precedence, even if it means going to jail.

Welcome, Chris Hedges.

Chris Hedges: Thank you.

Bill Moyers: Tell me about Joe Sacco. He was your companion on this trip. And he was your, in effect, coauthor. Although he was sketching instead of writing.

Chris Hedges: I've known Joe since the war in Bosnia. We met when he was working on his book, "Gorazde." And I was not a reader of graphic novels. But I watched him work. And I certainly know a brilliant journalist when I see one. And he is one of the most brilliant journalists I've ever met.

He reports it out with such depth and integrity and power, and then he draws it out. And I realized that an extremely important component of this book was making visible these invisible communities, because we don't see them. They're shut out. They're frightening, they're depressing. And they're virtually off the radar screen in terms of the commercial media.

Bill Moyers: This is a tough book. It's not dispatches from Disneyworld. It paints a very stark portrait of poverty, despair, destructive behavior. What makes you think people want to read that sort of thing these days?

Chris Hedges: That wasn't a question that Joe Sacco and I ever asked. It's absolutely imperative that we begin to understand what unfettered, unregulated capitalism does, the violence of that system, which is portrayed in all of the places that we visited.

These are sacrifice zones, areas that have been destroyed for quarterly profit. And we're talking about environmentally destroyed, communities destroyed, human beings destroyed, families destroyed. And because there are no impediments left, these sacrifice zones are just going to spread outward.

Bill Moyers: What do you mean, there are no impediments left?

Chris Hedges: There's no way to control corporate power. The system has broken down, whether it's Democrat or Republican. And because of that, we've all become commodities. Just as the natural world has become a commodity that is being exploited until it is exhausted, or it collapses.

Bill Moyers: You call them sacrifice zones.

Chris Hedges: Right.

Bill Moyers: Explain what you mean by that.

Chris Hedges: Well, they have the individuals who live within those areas have no power. The political system is bought off, the judicial system is bought off, the law enforcement system services the interests of power, they have been rendered powerless. You see that in the coal fields of Southern West Virginia.

Now here, in terms of national resources is one of the richest areas of the United States. And yet these harbor the poorest pockets of community, the poorest communities in the United States. Because those resources are extracted. And that money is not funneled back into the communities that are sitting on top of, or next to those resources.

Not only that, but they're extracted in such a way that the communities themselves are destroyed quite literally because you have not only terrible problems with erosion, as they cause when they do the mountaintop removal, they'll use these gigantic bulldozers to push off all the trees and then burn them.

And when we flew over the Appalachians, and it's a terrifying experience, because you realize only then do you realize how vast the devastation is. Just as when we were both in the war in Bosnia, you couldn't grasp the destruction of ethnic cleansing until you actually flew over Bosnia, and village after village after village had been razed and destroyed.

And the same was true in the Appalachian Mountains. And these people are poisoned. The water is poisoned, it smells, the soil is poisoned. And the people who are making tremendous profits from this don't even live in West Virginia--

Bill Moyers: You said something like, "While the laws are West Virginia are written by the coal companies, 95 percent of those coal companies--"

Chris Hedges: Right.

Bill Moyers: "--are not in West Virginia."

Chris Hedges: That's right. They no longer want to dig down for the coal, and so they're blowing the top 400 feet off of mountains poisoning the air, poisoning the soil, poisoning the water.

They use some of the largest machines on earth. These draglines, 25-stories tall that are very efficient in terms of ripping out coal seams. But by the time they left, there's just a wasteland. Nothing grows. Some of the richest soil, some of the purest water, and these are the headwaters for much of the East Coast, You are rendering the area moonscape. It becomes inhabitable. And you're destroying you know, these are the lungs of the Eastern seaboard. It's all destroyed and it's not coming back.

And that violence is visited on these communities. And you see it played out. I mean, Camden, New Jersey, which is the poorest city per capita in the United States and always, the one or two in terms of the most dangerous, it's a dead city. There's nothing left. There is no employment. Whole blocks are abandoned. The only thing functioning are open-air drug markets, of which there are about a hundred.

And you're talking third or fourth generation of people trapped in these internal colonies. They can't get out, they can't get credit. And what that does to your dignity, your self-esteem, your sense of self-worth.

BILL MOYERS I was struck by your saying Camden is "beset with the corruption and brutal police repression reminiscent of the despotic regimes that you covered as a correspondent for the New York Times in Africa, the Middle East, and Latin America." You describe a city where the per capital income is $ll,967. Large swaths of the city, as Joe Sacco Shows us, are abandoned, windowless brick factories, forlorn warehouses.

Chris Hedges: At one point in the 50s, it was a huge shipyard that employed 36,000 people. Campbell's Soup was made there, RCA used to be there. But there were a variety of businesses it attracted in that great migration a lot of unskilled labor from the South, as well as immigrants from New York

Because without an education, it was a place that you could find a job. It was unionized, of course, so people had adequate wages and some protection. And then it just-- everything went down. With the flight of manufacturing overseas.

It's all gone. Nothing remains. And that's why it's such a stark example of what we've done to ourselves, without realizing that the manufacturing base of any country is absolutely vital to its health. Not only in terms of its economic, but in terms of its, you know, the cohesion of a society because it gives employment.

Bill Moyers: But give me a thumbnail sketch of Pine Ridge, South Dakota, the Pine Ridge Reservation.

Chris Hedges: Well, Pine Ridge is where it began, Western exploitation. And it was the railroad companies that did it. They wanted the land, they took the land, the government gave them the land. It either gave it to them or sold it to them very cheaply. They slaughtered the buffalo herds, they broke these people. Forcing a people that had not been part of a wage economy to become part of a wage economy, upending the traditional values.

And it really is about the maximization of profit, it really is about the commodification of everything, including human beings. And this was certainly true in the western wars.

And it's appalling. You know, the average life expectancy for a male in Pine Ridge is 48. That is the lowest in the Western Hemisphere outside of Haiti. At any one time, 60 percent of the dwellings do not have electricity or water.

Bill Moyers: You write of one tiny village, tiny village, with four liquor stores. And that dispense the equivalent of 13,500--

Chris Hedges: Right.

Bill Moyers: --cans of beer a day. And with devastating results.

Chris Hedges: Yes. And they start young and some estimates run that, you know, alcoholism is as high as 80 percent. This contributes, of course, to early death. That's in Whiteclay, Nebraska. There is no liquor that is legally sold on the reservation, itself. But Whiteclay is about two miles from Pine Ridge. And that's where people go. They call it "going south." And that's all they do, is sell liquor.

That's true everywhere. You build a kind of dependency which destroys self-efficiency. I mean, that's what the old Indian agencies were set up to do. You take away the livelihood, you take away the buffalo herds, you make it impossible to sustain yourself, and then you have lines of people waiting for lard, flour, and you know, whisky.

And that has been true in West Virginia. That's certainly true in Camden. And it is a form of disempowerment. It is a form of keeping people essentially, at a subsistence level, and yet dependent on the very structures of power that are destroying them.

Bill Moyers: One of the most forlorn portraits is in your description of Immokalee, Florida. You describe Immokalee as a town filled with desperately poor single men.

Chris Hedges: Most of them have come across the border illegally. Come up from Central America and Mexico, especially after the passage of NAFTA. Because this destroyed subsistence farms in Mexico, the big agro businesses were able to flood the Mexican market with cheap corn. Estimates run as high as three million farmers were bankrupt, and where did they go? They crossed the border into the United States and in desperate search for work. They were lured into the produce fields. And they send what money they can, usually about $100 a month home to support their wives and children.

Bill Moyers: And they make $11,000, $12,000--

Chris Hedges: At best.

Chris Hedges: It's brutal work, physically.

Bill Moyers: Yeah.

Chris Hedges: But they're also exposed to all sorts of chemicals and pesticides. And it's very hard to show the effects because as these workers age, you know, they're bent over eight, ten hours a day. So they have tremendous back problems. And by the time they're in their thirties, the crew leaders, they'll actually line up in these big parking lots at about 4:00 in the morning, the busses will come.

They just won't pick the older men. And so they become destitute. And they go back home physically broken. And it's hard to tell, you know, how poisoned they've become, because they're hard to trace. But clearly that is a big issue. They talk about rashes, respiratory, you know, not being able to breathe, coughing, it's really, you know, a frightening window into the primacy of profit over human dignity and human life.

Bill Moyers: Fit this all together for me. What does the suffering of the Native American on the Pine Ridge Reservation have to do with the unemployed coal miner in West Virginia have to do with the inner-city African American in Camden have to do with the single man working for minimum wage or less in Immokalee, Florida? What ties that all together?

Chris Hedges: Greed. It's greed over human life. And it's the willingness on the part of people who seek personal enrichment to destroy other human beings. That's a common thread. We, in that biblical term, we forgot our neighbor. And because we forgot our neighbor in Pine Ridge, because we forgot our neighbor in Camden, in Southern West Virginia, in the produce fields, these forces have now turned on us. They went first, and we're next. And that's--

Bill Moyers: What do you mean we're next?

Chris Hedges: Well, the--

Bill Moyers: We being—

Chris Hedges: Two-thirds of this country. We are rapidly replicating that totalitarian vision of George Orwell in "1984." We have an inner sanctum, inner party of 2 percent or 3 percent, an outer party of corporate managers, of 12 percent, and the rest of us are proles. I mean--

Bill Moyers: Proles being?

Chris Hedges: Being an underclass that is hanging on by their fingertips. And this is already very far advanced. I mean, numbers, I mean, 47 million Americans depending on food stamps, six million exclusively on food stamps, one million people a year going filing for personal bankruptcy because they can't pay their medical bills, six million people pushed out of their houses.

Long-term unemployment or underemployment-- you know, probably being 17 to 20 percent. This is an estimate by "The L.A. Times" rather than the official nine percent. I mean, the average worker at Wal-Mart works 28 hours a week, but their wages put them below the poverty line. Which is why when you work at Wal-Mart, they'll give you applications for food stamps, so we can help as a government subsidize the family fortune of the Walton family.

It's, you know these corporations know only one word, and that's more. And because the mechanisms of governance can no longer control them, there is nothing now within the formal mechanisms of power to stop them from the creating, essentially, a corporate oligarchic state

Bill Moyers: And you say, though, we are accomplices in our own demise. Explain that paradox. That corporations are causing this, but we are cooperating with them.

Chris Hedges: This sort of notion that the corporate value of greed is good. I mean, these deformed values have sort of seeped down within the society at large. And they're corporate values, they're not American values.

I mean, American values were effectively destroyed by Madison Avenue when, after world war one, it began to instill consumption as a kind of inner compulsion. But old values of thrift, of self-effacement, or hard work were replaced with this cult of the "self", this hedonism.

And in that sense, you know, we have become complicit, because we've accepted this as a kind of natural law. And the acceptance of this kind of behavior, and even the celebration of it is going to ultimately trigger our demise. Not only as a culture, not only as a country, but finally as a species that exists, you know, on planet Earth.

Bill Moyers: As we came here, I pulled an article published in "Nature" magazine by a group of rather accomplished and credible scientists who have done all the technical studies they need to do, who come to the conclusion that our planet's ecosystems are careening towards an imminent, irreversible collapse. Once these things happen, planet's ecosystems as we know them, could irreversibly collapse in the proverbial blink of an eye. Connect that to what you've been reporting.

Chris Hedges: Well, because the exploitation of human beings is always accompanied by the exploitation of natural resources, without any thought given to sustainability. I mean, the amount of chemicals and pesticides that are used on the produce in Florida is just terrifying.

And that, you know, migrates from those fields directly to the shelves of our supermarkets and we're consuming it. And corporations have the kind of political clout that they can prevent any kind of investigation or control or regulation of this. And it's, again, it's all for short-term profit at long-term expense.

So the, you know, the very forces that we document in this book are the same forces that are responsible for destroying the ecosystem itself. We are watching these corporate forces, which are supranational. They have no loyalty to the nation state at all, reconfigure the global economy into a form of neo-feudalism. We are rapidly becoming an oligarchic state with an incredibly wealthy class of overlords.

Sheldon Wolin writes about this in "Democracy Incorporated" into what I would call, what he calls inverted totalitarianism, whereby it's not classical totalitarianism, it doesn't find its expression through a demagogue or a charismatic leader, but through the anonymity of the corporate state that purports to pay fealty to electoral politics, the Constitution, the iconography and language of American patriotism, and yet internally have seized all of the levers of power. This is what it means when lobbyists write all of our legislation, or when they stack the Supreme Court with people who serve the interests of corporations. And it's to render the citizen impotent.

Bill Moyers: And what is it, you think, led us to this point of this mind-boggling inequality, mind-boggling consumption, which obviously many of us like, or we wouldn't be participating? And the grip that money has on politics? What are the forces that got us to this?

Chris Hedges: I think it began after World War I. You know, Dwight McDonald writes about how after World War I, American society became enveloped in what he called the psychosis of permanent war, where in the name of anti-Communism, we could effectively banish anyone within the society who questioned power in a serious kind of way.

And of course, we destroyed populist and radical movements, which have always broadened democracy within American society, it's something Howard Zinn wrote quite powerfully about in "A People's History of the United States." It has been a long struggle, whether it's the abolitionist movement that fought slavery, whether it's the suffragists for women's rights, the labor movement, or the civil rights movement. And these forces have the ability to essentially destroy those movements, including labor unions, which made the middle class possible in this country. And have rendered us powerless. And--

Bill Moyers: Except for the power of the pen. You keep writing, you keep speaking, you keep agitating.

Chris Hedges: I do, but, you know, things aren't getting better. And I think, you know, like you, I come out of the seminary, and I look less on my ability to effect change and understand it more as a kind of moral responsibility to resist these forces. Which I think in theological terms are forces of death. And to fight to protect, preserve, and nurture life.

But you know, as my friend, Father Daniel Berrigan says, you know, "We're called to do the good, or at least the good insofar as we can determine it. And then we have to let it go." Faith is the belief that it goes somewhere.

Bill Moyers: So let's talk about you. You've been showing up in the news as well as well as just reporting the news, you took part in that mock trial down at Goldman Sachs.

Chris Hedges: Goldman Sachs is an institution that worships death, the forces of Thanatos, of greed, of exploitation, of destruction.

Bill Moyers: And I still remember the picture of you and the others sitting down, locking arms, and blocking the interests of the company. What was that about?

Chris Hedges: That was personal for me. Goldman Sachs runs one of the largest commodities index in the world. And I've spent 20 years in places like Africa, and I know what happens when wheat prices increase by 100 percent. Children starve. And I knew I was going to get arrested because, you know, I was, I covered the famine in Sudan and was in these huge U.N. tents and feeding stations trying to save.

And you know, the people who die in famines were usually elderly and children. The place was, I mean, everyone had tuberculosis. I have scars in my lungs from tuberculosis, which I successfully fought off. And those are sort of the whispers of the dead. All those children and others who couldn't didn't have the ability to go in front of a place like Goldman Sachs and condemn them.

Bill Moyers: But surely those people, as you were arrested, there were people working for Goldman Sachs looking down from the windows--

Chris Hedges: They were taking pictures--

Bill Moyers: Taking pictures, laughing. Surely you don't think they would wish that outcome in Africa or anywhere else, right?

Chris Hedges: Well, it's moral fragmentation. I mean, they blind themselves to what they do all day long, and they define themselves as good human beings by other criteria, because they're a good father or a good husband or because they go to church. But it is that human trait to engage in what I would have to describe as a system of evil. And yet, look at it as just a job.

Bill Moyers: But are we all then therefore, and I come back to this, aren't we all part of this system that in some way produces Pine Ridge, Immokalee, the coal fields, the inner-cities, and the starving children in Africa? Aren't we all who have jobs and participate in the culture and are in the economic game, aren't we all, in a way, as complicit as those people looking down on you from those windows at Goldman Sachs?

Chris Hedges: No. Because you know, the people who actually run the commodities index are very tiny, elite, and extremely wealthy group. And they're highly compensated. These people make hundreds of thousands, often millions of dollars a year. And most of us don't make that. And that personal enrichment, I think, is a powerful inducement to ignore their complicity in what is clearly a crime against other human beings.

Bill Moyers: But do you think what you did made any difference? Goldman Sachs hasn't changed.

Chris Hedges: Well, that doesn't matter. I did what I had to do. I did what I believed I should've done. And faith is a belief that it does make a difference, even if all of the empirical signs around you point otherwise. I think that fundamentally is what faith is about. And I'm not a very good Christian anymore. But I retain enough of my Christian heritage and my seminary training to still believe that.

Bill Moyers: What are you?

Chris Hedges: A, you know, a sinner.

Bill Moyers: Welcome to the clan.

Chris Hedges: You know, a doubter.

Bill Moyers: But you're driven by something. I mean, I talked to you when you wrote your first and remarkable book "War is the Force that Gives Us Meaning." I haven't seen anyone as affected in their life after their experience as a journalist as you had been. I mean, there have been others, I just don't know them. But somehow what you're doing today goes back to what you saw and did and felt and experienced in all those years you were overseas and on the frontiers of trouble.

Chris Hedges: Well, because when you spend that long on the outer reaches of empire, you understand the cruelty of empire, what Conrad calls, "The horror, the horror." And the lies that we tell ourselves about what is done in our name. Whether that's in Gaza, whether that's in Iraq, whether that's in Afghanistan, Yemen, Somalia, El Salvador, I mean, there's a long list.

And when you come back from the outer reaches of empire, you are, and I think, you know, many combat veterans feel this who come back, you're forever alienated. And you to speak a very unpleasant truth about who we are, a truth that most people don't want to hear. And yet I think to hold that truth in and to remain silent and not to speak that truth destroys you.

That it's better to get up and speak it even as you correctly point out, you know that Goldman Sachs, you know, everyone at Goldman Sachs gets up the next morning and does it. I mean, this was also true as a war correspondent. I mean, the Serbs would kill.

They'd block all the roads into the village, we'd walk in with our satellite phones, we'd file it, we never believe they weren't going to do it again the next day. But somehow not to chronicle it, not to take the risks to report it, was to be complicit in that killing. And I think that same kind of thought goes into what's happening here.

Bill Moyers: But do you think taking sides marginalizes your journalism? I mean, when you were being arrested, and some businessman was quoted in the paper passing by and looking at those of you being carried away and said, "Bunch of idiots." He needs to hear what you, read what you say. Do you think he will once he knows you've taken sides?

Chris Hedges: Well, I think that in life we always have to take sides.

Bill Moyers: Do journalists always have to take sides?

Chris Hedges: Yes. Journalists always do take sides. You know, you've been a journalist a long time. The idea that there's something objective and impartial is just a lie. We sell it. But I can take the same set of facts-- I was a newspaper reporter for a long time, and I can spin that story one way or another. We manipulate facts. That's what we do. And I think that the really great journalists--

Bill Moyers: Not necessarily to deceive though. Some do, I know, but--

Chris Hedges: Right, but we do.

Bill Moyers: We choose the facts we want to organize--

Chris Hedges: Of course, it's selective. And it's what facts we choose, how we place, where we put the quotes. And I think the really great journalists, like the great preachers, care fundamentally about truth. And truth and news are not the same thing.

And the really great reporters, and I've seen them, you know, in all sorts of news organizations, are management headaches because they care about truth at the expense of their own career.

Bill Moyers: What do you mean truth as opposed to news?

Chris Hedges: Well, let's take the Israel occupation of Gaza. You know, if I had a dinner with any Middle East correspondent who covered Gaza, none of us would have any disagreements about the Israeli behavior in Gaza, which is a collective war crime. And yet to get up and write it and say it within American society is not a career enhancer.

Because there's a powerful Israeli lobby, and it's a lobby that I don't think represents Israel, it represents the right wing of Israel. And you know it. But, the great reporters don't care. And they're there.

But you know, large institutions like "The New York Times" attract huge numbers of careerists like any other large institutions, the Church of course, being no exception. And those are the people who are willing to take moral shortcuts to promote themselves within that institution.

And when somebody becomes a headache, even if they may agree with them, even if they may know that they are speaking a truth, and it puts their career in jeopardy-- they will push them out or silence them.

So I think that one can take sides, and Orwell becomes the kind of model for this. But one can never not tell the truth. And I've often written stories that are not particularly flattering. And there's much in this book about people in Pine Ridge or Camden, you know, that is not flattering. I mean, we're interviewing people that are drug addicts and this kind of stuff. And--

Bill Moyers: Drug dealers--

Chris Hedges: --prostitutes and--

Bill Moyers: Yeah, drug dealers--

Chris Hedges: Yeah.

Bill Moyers: --prostitutes.

Chris Hedges: So we're not, you know, the lie of omission is still a lie. But I don't think any foreign correspondent who covers war, whether it was in Bosnia or whether it was in Sarajevo can be indifferent to the tremendous human suffering before them and not want that human suffering to stop.

Bill Moyers: But there is a price, as you have said, to be paid for stepping outside of the system that enabled your name and reputation and becoming a critic of that system. I mean, what price do you think you've paid?

Chris Hedges: I don't think I paid a price, I think I would've paid a price for staying in. I wouldn't have been able to live with myself. You know, I was pushed out of "The New York Times" because I was publicly denouncing the invasion of Iraq. And again, it comes down to that necessity to speak a truth, or at least the truth as far as you can discern it.

I've spent months of my life in Iraq. I knew the instrument of war. I understood in all the ways that this was going be a disaster-- including upsetting the power balance in the Middle East. It's one of the great strategic blunders of the United States, it's empowered Iran. And to remain silent would've been the price. Was it good for my career? Well, of course not.

But my career was never the point. I didn't drive down Mount Igman into Sarajevo when it was being hit with 2,000 shells a day because it was good for my career. I went there because what was happening was a crime against humanity. And as a reporter, I wanted to be there to chronicle it.

Bill Moyers: Well, you should. But, so you don't think journalism is futile?

Chris Hedges: I think journalism is essential. I think it's essential. And we're watching its destruction. You know, journalism, the power of journalism is that it is rooted in verifiable fact. You go out as a reporter, you seek to find out what is factually correct. You crosscheck it with other sources. It's sent to an editor. It's fact-checked, you put it out. That's all vanishing.

That's what we're really losing with journalism. Yes, you know, commercial journalism, there were things they wouldn't write about. You know, as Schanberg says, "The power of great newspapers like "The Times" is that at least it's stopped things from getting worse." I think that's right.

Bill Moyers: But can it make things better? I mean, do you think you can accomplish more as a dissenter, and I look up on you now, when I ask you what's your faith, I think your faith is in dissent, if I may say so. It's in "This far and no further." But do you think you can accomplish as much as a dissenter than as a journalist?

Chris Hedges: Yeah, it's not a question that I've asked. Because the question is, "What do you have to do?" I certainly knew after 15 years at "The New York Times" that running around on national television shows denouncing the war in Iraq was, as a news reporter, tantamount to career suicide. I mean, I was aware of that.

And yet, you know, as Paul Tillich writes about, you know, "Institutions are always inherently demonic, including the Church." And you cannot finally serve the interests of those institutions. That for those who seek the moral life, there will always come a time in which they have to defy even institutions they care about if they are able to retain that moral core. And in essence, what, you know, "The New York Times," or other institutions were asking is that I muzzle myself.

Bill Moyers: But all institutions do that, don't they?

Chris Hedges: All institutions do.

Bill Moyers: Intuitively or explicitly.

Chris Hedges: That's right. And I think for those of us who care about speaking, you know, the truth, you know, or if you want to call it dissent, we are going to have to accept that at one day, there's going probably mean a clash with the very institutions that have nurtured and supported us. And I have been nurtured and supported by these institutions.

Bill Moyers: But your columns, your essays, your recent book, this book, contained repeated calls for uprisings, for civil disobedience. You even say in here, quote, "Revolt is all we have. It is our only hope. It is our only hope." Unpack that from our viewers who are sitting there thinking, "What is he asking me to do? What does he mean by revolt? What's he talking about?"

Chris Hedges: Nonviolence civil disobedience. And accepting the fact that engaging in that process will mean arrest. I've lived in societies that are rent and torn by violence, and I don't want us to go there. And I think that we don't have a lot of time left. And that for those of us who care about veering off into another course, a course that's rational and sane and makes possible the perpetuation of not only the human species but the planet itself, we have to take this kind of radical action. And if we don't, then as things disintegrate and as the paralysis within the centers of power become more and more apparent, then we will fuel very frightening extremes.

You know, again, which I saw in places like Central America or Bosnia. And I look at this as many ways, a kind of, a preventive action. A way to respond peacefully. A way to respond, in a Democratic fashion, to the problems in front of us before it's too late.

Bill Moyers: Bear with me as I explore this, 'cause there's a paradox at two levels. One at a conceptual level, and the other at a practical level. You write in here, "Either you join the revolt or you stand on the wrong side of history. You either obstruct through civil disobedience, or become the passive enabler of a monstrous evil." But in an early book, "Death of the Liberal Class," which I think is one of your best, you wrote that, "The fantasy of widespread popular revolts and mass movements breaking the hegemony of the corporate state is just that, a fantasy."

Chris Hedges: I wrote that before Occupy. And I was writing out of a kind of belief that this was what was absolutely necessary and yet I saw no signs within the wider society that was happening. And then suddenly, on September 17th, Zuccotti Park appears. And mostly fueled by the young. And I was writing out of a present reality. And I didn't see Zuccotti coming. I was writing out of a kind of despair, for all of the reasons that I said.

Bill Moyers: Why did you take hope from that? Because after you'd been down there? You subsequently write that "By the end, even the most dedicated of the Occupiers in Zuccotti Park burned out."

Chris Hedges: Yeah.

Bill Moyers: "They lost control of the park. The arrival in cold weather of individual tents, along with the numerous street people with mental impairment and addictions," that you're nothing if not honest in what you write, even about those people you support, "tore apart the community. Drug use as well as assaults and altercations became common." So how is that square with what you said earlier that the Occupy Movement gave us a blueprint for how to fight back?

Chris Hedges: Because this is the trajectory of all movements. You know, it's not a linear progression upwards. And the civil rights movement is a perfect example of that. All sorts of failures, whether it's in Albany, Mississippi or anywhere else. You know, there were all sorts of moments within the civil rights movement where King wasn't even sure he was going to be able to hold it together. And what happened in Zuccotti is like what happened in 1765 when they rose up against the Stamp Act.

That became the kind of dress rehearsal for the rebellion of 1775, 1776, 1905. The uprising in Russia became again the kind of dress rehearsal. These movements, this process, it takes a very long time. I think the Occupy was movement and I was there.

I mean, I certainly understand why it imploded and its many faults and how at that size, consensus doesn't work, everything else. And yet it triggered something. It triggered a kind of understanding of systems of power. It, I think, gave people a sense of their own personal power. Once we step out into a group and articulate these injustices and these grievances to a wider public, and of course they resonated with a mainstream. I don't think it's over. I don't know how it's going to mutate and change, one never knows. But, I think that it's imperative that we keep that narrative alive by being out there because things are not getting better.

The state is not responding in a rational way to what's happening. If they really wanted to break the back of the opposition movement, rather than sort of eradicating the 18 encampments, they would've gone back and looked at Roosevelt. There would've been forgiveness of all student debt, $1 trillion, there would've been a massive jobs program targeted at those under the age of 25, and there would've been a moratorium on more closures and bank repossessions of homes.

That would've been a rational response. Instead, the state has decided to speak exclusively in the language of force and violence to try and crush this movement while people continue this dissent.

Bill Moyers: In one of your earlier books, you wrote that, quote, "We stand on the verge of one of the bleakest periods in human history, when the bright lights of civilization blink out, and we will descend for decades, if not centuries, into barbarity." Do you really think that's ahead?

Chris Hedges: If there's not a radical change in the way we relate to the ecosystem that sustains life, yes. And I see, if you ask me to put my money down, I see nothing that indicates that we're preparing to make that change.

Bill Moyers: But here's another paradox then, you present us with a lot of paradoxes. You just-- you and your wife a year and a half ago had your fourth child. How can you introduce another life into so forlorn a future?

Chris Hedges: That's not an easy question to answer. I look at my youngest son, and his favorite book is "Out of the Blue," which are pictures of narwhales and porpoises and dolphins. And I think, "It is most probable that within your lifetime, every single one of those sea creatures will be dead." And in so many ways, I feel that I have to fight for them.

That even if I fail, they'll say, "You know, at least my dad tried." We've deeply betrayed this next generation on so many levels. And I can't argue finally, you know, given the empirical facts in front of us that hope is rational. And I retreat, like so many people in my book, into faith. And a belief that resistance and fighting for life is meaningful even if all of the outward signs around us deny that possibility.

Bill Moyers: That faith in human beings?

Chris Hedges: Faith in that fighting for the sanctity of life is always worth it. Because you know, if we don't fight, then we are finished. Then we signed our own death sentence. And Camus writes about this in "The Rebel," that I think resistance becomes a kind of way of protecting our own worth as an individual, our own dignity, our own self-respect. And I think resistance does always leave open the possibility of change. And if we don't resist, then we've essentially extinguished that hope.

Bill Moyers: H. L. Mencken, the celebrated iconoclast of the early part of the last century once wrote, "The notion that a radical is one who hates his country is naïve and usually idiotic. He is more likely one who likes his country more than the rest of us and is those more disturbed than the rest of us when he sees it debouched. He is not a bad citizen turning to crime, he is a good citizen, driven to despair." Is that you?

Chris Hedges: Yeah--

Bill Moyers: A good citizen driven to despair?

Chris Hedges: Yes. And a good citizen driven to despair who will not remain apathetic and passive. And, you know, in every single place that we went to, Camden, West Virginia, Pine Ridge, we found these utterly magnificent human beings. I mean, this woman Lolly in Camden, African American woman, who you know, raised her own children. And I think by the time she was done, 19 others.

Her fiancé was shot and killed, one of her little seven-year-old daughters died of an asthma attack because they didn't have the right medicine. And I said, "Lolly, how do you do it?" And she said, "I never ask why." And when you spend time in the presence of people like that, and they were everywhere you know, they understood what they were up against.

It is deeply empowering. Because not to resist, not to fight back is on a very personal level to betray these people. And when you build relationships, as over the two years Joe and I did, with figures like that, it really, you know, almost comes down to something that simplistic. You can't betray Lolly. You can't betray any of these great figures who've stood up. Because their fight is our fight. And oftentimes they've endured far, far more-- well, they have endured far, far more than I have endured or ever will endure.

Bill Moyers: The Book is, "Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt." Chris Hedges and Joe Sacco. Thank you very much Chris for being with me.

Chris Hedges: Thanks Bill.

Bill Moyers: For all his power of expression, sometimes words fail even Chris Hedges, and a picture can say more in a single frame, well-drawn, than paragraphs of explanation. That's what makes his partnership with graphic artist Joe Sacco on their book, "Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt," so potent and so effective. Joe Sacco has traveled all over the world, using the techniques of the comic book illustrator as a tool of journalism, telling stories with insight and humanity.

Joe Sacco: My name's Joe Sacco and I'm a comics journalist. Drawing really often provides mood and atmosphere, and writing is that sort of precision. The facts. And you can put those two things together with comics, which I think is what makes the medium very powerful.

When I'm in the field, I meet people who are really in hard situations. I'm not interested in tears. I'm not even interested in sentimentality. But I am interested in telling people's stories as well as possible who are oppressed or are poor.

Chris and I had already worked on a magazine piece about Camden and we decided we would expand that. You can read about poverty. You can read about despair. Or you can read about resignation. But to see it is really, it's eye-opening.

I didn't do that many stories in the book, maybe five or six. They all moved me quite a bit. I think the one that was sort of hit me in this way, because it was so unfamiliar to me was the woman who came out from Guatemala, the one that we call Anna in the story.

Her waiting by the phone after her husband had made the long, arduous trip so the United States. Waiting eight days, knowing he had to cross a desert where many people die. And that sort of story really touched me. Because when we think of migrant workers, we can be so dismissive of them. They're just working in a fields. Oh, you see them bent over and they're just doing their job, and you know they're getting minimum wage. And you sort of feel sorry for them in a sense.

But to get a sense of, and to actually hear an individual story like that, for some reason that just really got to me when I was drawing it.

When I was about seven years old. I started drawing stories. Because I liked forms of self-expression and that was just one I never let go of. I never really drew just for the sake of drawing. There always had to be a story to go with it.

A story can be more true if you just let it be told. It's very important for me, with my work, not to create these angelic people. You want to show people as nuts and bolts. Those are the people who seem real. With the Michael Red Cloud's story, a story about his drug dealing days, making big money, partying, having women with him at all times. Now, he wasn't necessarily pleased with how he'd lived his past life, he wasn't. But to me, the idea is just to present the complete human being. You know, he's a real person. I was moved by his story, or I saw the changes that he made through his story. And then you see the hard things in the context of his upbringing, in the context of what was around him, in the context of what he learned from people around him.

You see the commonalities between people who have nothing around them but despair. They are born into a context which simply doesn't provide them opportunities or even the thought of opportunities. To me, it's incumbent upon the journalist to go and see for himself or herself what's actually going on. Journalism to me isn't like a tennis match, where you're just watching the ball, and each side is hitting it, hitting it back and forth to each other.

At some point, you have to arrest where the ball is, and that's where truth is, you know? And like I say, truth doesn't necessarily reside in the middle. And I've always had a problem with journalists who say things like, "Well, I pissed off both sides. I must be doing something right." That is the laziest sort of phrase I've ever heard.

You know, hundreds of stories that still need to be told. I'm interested in sort of answering questions that journalism doesn't really put its finger on.

To me, it's very important to remind ourselves of the costs of what is going on in this world. The human costs.

I feel like I wouldn't be where I need to be for myself if I didn't look to those things, and I didn't face them squarely. I just feel that's who I am, and what I have to do.

DIG DEEPER

[kopitecrash]

Going to take that article and start a new topic with it I think. It's very important.

[RojoLeón]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2012/jul/24/greenland-ice-sheet-thaw-nasa



Greenland ice sheet melted at unprecedented rate during July

Scientists at Nasa admitted they thought satellite readings were a mistake after images showed 97% surface melt over four days

The Greenland ice sheet melted at a faster rate this month than at any other time in recorded history, with virtually the entire ice sheet showing signs of thaw.

The rapid melting over just four days was captured by three satellites. It has stunned and alarmed scientists, and deepened fears about the pace and future consequences of climate change.

In a statement posted on Nasa's website on Tuesday, scientists admitted the satellite data was so striking they thought at first there had to be a mistake.

"This was so extraordinary that at first I questioned the result: was this real or was it due to a data error?" Son Nghiem of Nasa's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena said in the release.

He consulted with several colleagues, who confirmed his findings. Dorothy Hall, who studies the surface temperature of Greenland at Nasa's space flight centre in Greenbelt, Maryland, confirmed that the area experienced unusually high temperatures in mid-July, and that there was widespread melting over the surface of the ice sheet.

Climatologists Thomas Mote, at the University of Georgia, and Marco Tedesco, of the City University of New York, also confirmed the melt recorded by the satellites.

However, scientists were still coming to grips with the shocking images on Tuesday. "I think it's fair to say that this is unprecedented," Jay Zwally, a glaciologist at Nasa's Goddard Space Flight Center, told the Guardian.

The set of images released by Nasa on Tuesday show a rapid thaw between 8 July and 12 July. Within that four-day period, measurements from three satellites showed a swift expansion of the area of melting ice, from about 40% of the ice sheet surface to 97%.

Scientists attributed the sudden melt to a heat dome, or a burst of
unusually warm air, which hovered over Greenland from 8 July until 16
July.

Greenland had returned to more typical summer conditions by 21 or
22 July, Mote told the Guardian.

But he said the event, while exceptional, should be viewed alongside
other compelling evidence of climate change, including on the ground
in Greenland.

"What we are seeing at the highest elevations may be a sort of sign of
what is going on across the ice sheet," he said. "At lower elevations
on the ice sheet, we are seeing earlier melting, melting later in the
season, and more frequent melting over the last 30 years and that is
consistent of what you would expect with a warming climate."

Zwally, who has made almost yearly trips to the Greenland ice sheet for more than three decades, said he had never seen such a rapid melt.

About half of Greenland's surface ice sheet melts during a typical summer, but Zwally said he and other scientists had been recording an acceleration of that melting process over the last few decades. This year his team had to rebuild their camp, at Swiss Station, when the snow and ice supports melted.

He said he had never seen such a rapid melt over his three decades of
nearly yearly trips to the Greenland ice sheet. He was most surprised
to see indications in the images of melting even around the area of
Summit Station, which is about two miles above sea level.

It was the second unusual event in Greenland in a matter of days, after an iceberg the size of Manhattan broke off from the Petermann glacier. But the rapid melt was viewed as more serious.

"If you look at the 8 July image that might be the maximum extent of warming you would see in the summer," Zwally noted. "There have been periods when melting might have occurred at higher elevations briefly – maybe for a day or so – but to have it cover the whole of Greenland like this is unknown, certainly in the time of satellite records."

Jason Box, a glaciologist at Ohio State University who returned on
Tuesday from a research trip to Greenland, had been predicting a big
melt year for 2012, because of earlier melt and a decline in summer
snow flurries.

He said the heat dome was not necessarily a one-off. "This is now the
seventh summer in a row with this pattern of warm air being lifted up
onto the ice sheet on the summer months," he said. "What is surprising
is just how persistent this circulation anomaly is. Here it is back
again for the seventh year in a row in the summer bringing hot, warm
air onto the ice sheet."

He also said surfaces at higher elevation, now re-frozen, could be
more prone to future melting, because of changes in the structure of
the snow crystals. Box expected melting to continue at lower
elevations.

About half of Greenland's surface ice sheet melts during a typical
summer, but Zwally said he and other scientists had been recording an
acceleration of that melting process over the past few decades. This
year his team had to rebuild their camp, at Swiss Station, when the
snow and ice supports melted.

Lora Koenig, another Goddard glaciologist, told Nasa similar rapid melting occurs about every 150 years. But she warned there were wide-ranging potential implications from this year's thaw.

"If we continue to observe melting events like this in upcoming years, it will be worrisome." she told Nasa.

The most immediate consequences are sea level rise and a further warming of the Arctic. In the centre of Greenland, the ice remains up to 3,000 metres deep. On the edges, however, the ice is much, much thinner and has been melting into the sea.

The melting ice sheet is a significant factor in sea level rise. Scientists attribute about one-fifth of the annual sea level rise, which is about 3mm every year, to the melting of the Greenland ice sheet.

In this instance of this month's extreme melting, Mote said there was evidence of a heat dome over Greenland: or an unusually strong ridge of warm air.

The dome is believed to have moved over Greenland on 8 July, lingering until 16 July.

[RojoLeón]

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/lanow/2012/07/cash-strapped-el-monte-wants-to-tax-sugary-soft-drinks.html

L.A. NOW
Southern California -- this just in

Cash-strapped El Monte wants to tax sugary soft drinks

El Monte is moving forward with a plan to seek a tax on sugary sodas to ease its financial problems.

The proposal, one of the first of its kind in California, would add a 1-cent tax per ounce to the price of "sugar sweetened" drinks sold within the city. El Monte's council members voted unanimously to place the measure on the November ballot, saying that it would provide much-needed revenue for the city government and combat the health problems caused by sodas and other sweet beverages.

Business leaders are starting to challenge the sugary drinks tax, arguing that it would hurt El Monte's  economy.

"It is irresponsible for a city with 13.7% unemployment to impose a new business tax on beverages that will threaten local grocers, restaurants and movie theaters and the jobs they provide in the community," said Bob Achermann, executive director of the California/Nevada Soft Drink Assn. "Singling out one item in the grocery cart for an additional tax is discriminatory and regressive, and it makes no sense."

Mayor Andre Quintero, who first introduced the tax plan earlier this year, said he was not surprised by the backlash. A similar plan proposed at the state level by Assemblyman Bill Monning (D-Carmel) failed last year after opposition from the California Chamber of Commerce, California Restaurant Assn. and other food industry advocacy groups.

"Oh, yeah, we anticipate the industries that sell these products to put up a fight," Quintero said. "If this is successful here and it works, then it might be successful in other cities. They're not going to want anything like this to take hold anywhere."

The San Gabriel Valley suburb, which has about 113,000 residents, has been hit hard by the recession. The city has reduced its workforce by more than 100 employees, deferred raises for some workers and cut the benefits received by council members.

But city officials said they still need new revenue to cover a half-cent sales tax that is set to expire in 2014. The sugary drinks tax, they said, would make up for that funding gap, providing as much as $7 million in annual revenue.

The City Council voted to declare a fiscal emergency Tuesday, which allowed it to approve a special election for the tax measure. (El Monte usually holds its city elections in November of odd-numbered years.) However, El Monte officials said they are not yet on the brink of bankruptcy.

"We're taking a precautionary, anticipatory step so we don't have a significant financial event in the future," finance director Julio Morales said.

He was adamant that El Monte would not follow in the footsteps of cities such as Mammoth Lakes, San Bernardino and Stockton, which have filed or are preparing to file for bankruptcy protection this year.

(I don't think it will fix their budgetary problems, but maybe this kind of tax should be brought in more widely: They do it to booze and cigarettes (who cost society economically in days lost to ill health and premature deaths, so why not fizzy drinks? (that have proven links to obesity, diabetes and osteopathic problems))

[RojoLeón]

I saw mention of fluoride in the immunization thread - citing links from that conspiraloon, Icke, doesn't help . Maybe people are unaware of genuine disquiet backed by peer reviewed scientific studies that excess fluoride inhibits specific glandular development, resulting in early onset of puberty and may also have a measured effect in lowering IQ.

http://ehp03.niehs.nih.gov/article/fetchArticle.action?articleURI=info%3Adoi%2F10.1289%2Fehp.1104912

Developmental Fluoride Neurotoxicity: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis

Background: Although fluoride may cause neurotoxicity in animal models and acute fluoride poisoning causes neurotoxicity in adults, very little is known of its effects on children’s neurodevelopment.

Objective: We performed a systematic review and meta-analysis of published studies to investigate the effects of increased fluoride exposure and delayed neurobehavioral development.

Methods: We searched the MEDLINE, EMBASE, Water Resources Abstracts, and TOXNET databases through 2011 for eligible studies. We also searched the China National Knowledge Infrastructure (CNKI) database, as many studies on fluoride neurotoxicity have been published in Chinese journals only. In total, we identified 27 eligible epidemiological studies with high and reference exposures, endpoints of IQ scores or related cognitive function measures with means and variances for the two exposure groups. We estimated the standardized mean difference (SMD) between exposed and reference groups across all studies using random effects models. We conducted sensitivity analyses restricted to studies using the same outcome assessment and having drinking water fluoride as the only exposure. Cochran test for heterogeneity between studies, Begg’s funnel plot and Egger test to assess publication bias were performed. Meta-regressions to explore sources of variation in mean differences among the studies were conducted.

Results: The standardized weighted mean difference in IQ score between exposed and reference populations was -0.45 (95% CI -0.56 to -0.35) using a random-effects model. Thus, children in high fluoride areas had significantly lower IQ scores than those who lived in low fluoride areas. Subgroup and sensitivity analyses also indicated inverse associations, although the substantial heterogeneity did not appear to decrease.

Conclusions: The results support the possibility of an adverse effect of high fluoride exposure on children’s neurodevelopment. Future research should include detailed individual-level information on prenatal exposure, neurobehavioral performance, and covariates for adjustment.


http://www.fluoridealert.org/fluoride-statement.htm

Fluoride: A Statement of Concern
by Paul Connett, PhD

1. I have been researching the literature on fluoride for just over three years. I approached this issue with an open mind. If I had any bias when I set out it was that those who were opposed to fluoridation were `crackpots'.

2. However, the more I have read the more concerned I have become over the dangers posed by fluoride and the very poor science underpinning its supposed efficacy in protecting children's teeth. How we ever allowed such a toxic substance into the drinking water is staggering. Even though fluoride's toxicity is rated higher than lead, the US Environmental Protection Agency's (EPA) maximum contaminant level for lead in water is 15 ppb (parts per billion) whereas the level allowed for fluoride is 4,000 ppb. The recommended level for artificial fluoridation of the drinking water of 1 part per million (1 ppm = 1,000 ppb) was established in 1945, and it hasn't been changed since, even though today we (and our children) are getting fluoride from many other additional sources, including toothpaste, other dental products, mouthwashes, processed food, some vitamin tablets, and beverages.

The benefits to teeth are questionable.

3. The key initial studies which purported to show that fluoride was a benefit to teeth, conducted in Grand Rapids, Michigan (1945), Newburgh, New York (1945), Evanston, Illinois (1947), and Brantford, Ontario, Canada (1945), were of a very dubious scientific quality. This is fully and thoroughly documented by Dr. Philip Sutton in his book, "The Greatest Fraud: Fluoridation" (1). While the science was dubious, the confidence of the US Public Health Service (PHS) was enormous. In April 1951, before any single fluoridation trial had been completed, the US Surgeon General, Leonard Scheele, was telling a Senate Subcommittee on Appropriations, "During the past year our studies progressed to the point where we could announce an unqualified endorsement of the fluoridation of the public water supplies as a mass procedure for reducing tooth decay by two thirds" (2). Subsequent Surgeon Generals have continued to act as cheerleaders for this procedure. Their passionate promotion bears little relation to the quality of the science involved in fluoridation, either to its efficacy or to its safety. Another Surgeon General, Thomas Parran, stated, "I consider water fluoridation to be the greatest single advance in dental health made in our generation" (3). Such an opinion sharply contrasts with that of former US EPA scientist, Dr. Robert Carton, who after he examined the evidence declared, "Fluoridation is a scientific fraud, probably the greatest fraud of the century" (4).

4. According to Dr. John Lee, a bone specialist from California, "Certain crucial errors common to fluoride studies that claim benefit have been identified and, when applied to any or all fluoridation trials claiming to prove benefit, are sufficient to nullify them. I challenge fluoridationists to find just one trial that can stand a critical review in the light of the errors I describe. If they cannot, they should use their authority to help rid our water supply of this useless toxin" (5).

5. Lee continues, "It is important to understand that in health matters, everything is interrelated and multifactorial. This presents a challenge to all health research: the factor being studied is just one factor among many that may confound the study. If the other factors can not be held constant (or their presence be kept equal in all groups being observed), the role of the single factor being studied can be confused... In the case of dental caries, the various factors include oral sugar and other fermentable carbohydrates, lysine and other amino acids, calcium and other minerals, vitamins, fiber, saliva flow and oral pH, dental hygiene, sunlight, genetic or constitutional factors, immune factors, use of antibiotics which may inhibit plague bacteria and others" (5). Lee lists the statistical misinterpretations common to the "fluoridation trials": a) using "percent reductions" instead of "rate of change" of decay; b) selection bias; and c) outright fudging of the data (5).

6. Why were these early studies so poorly designed? In some cases it may simply have been the result of over-zealous promotion. For example, in the Grand Rapids, Michigan, study the control city was dropped six years into the study, supposedly because they wanted the children in this city to get the benefits as well. In the case of Hastings, New Zealand, this study was unmistakably fraudulent. Here the control city of Napier was dropped after only two years and the method of diagnosing tooth decay was changed during the course of the study, which quite artificially inflated the drop in decay. This change in diagnosis was made without this being stated in the final report (6). I am not aware of any double blind examination to investigate the efficacy of water fluoridation (i.e. one in which neither investigator nor subject is aware of which subjects have been exposed and which have not).

7. Meanwhile, considerable evidence has accumulated that the state of children's permanent teeth in non-fluoridated communities, as measured by their DMFT (decayed, missing and filled teeth) values, is just as good as (if not better than) those in fluoridated communities. For example, in 1995 the teeth of the children in fluoridated Newburgh were again compared to those in still unfluoridated Kingston (this study started in 1945) and there was little difference in the DMFT values across the 7-14 years age range. If an average is taken the children in unfluoridated Kingston had slightly better DMFT values. However, there was one big difference: the average levels of dental fluorosis was about twice as high in fluoridated Newburgh as it was in unfluoridated Kingston (7). Dental fluorosis is a mottling of the teeth. In its mildest form it consists of white patches or streaks. As the severity increases the color of the patches changes from white to yellow, to orange and then to brown. In its severest form dental fluorosis results in loss of tooth enamel and extreme brittleness. The only known cause of dental fluorosis is exposure to fluoride and the rates are increasing. The argument used by the pro-fluoride authors of the Newburgh-Kingston study is that the improvement in DMFTs in non-fluoridated Kingston is due to exposure to fluoride from other sources: fluoridated toothpaste, beverages and processed food. If we accept this argument at face value then it completely undermines the need to add fluoride to the drinking water since a better result (i.e. slightly better DMFTs and less dental fluorosis) was achieved in Kingston without fluoridation.

8. In 1986-87 a survey was conducted by the National Institute for Dental Research (NIDR) at a cost of $3.6 million to the US taxpayer. The raw data from this study had to be pried out of this institution by Dr. John Yiamouyiannis using the Freedom of Information Act. From this data he was able to show that there was little difference in the DMFT values for approximately 40,000 children, whether they grew up in fluoridated, non-fluoridated or partially fluoridated communities (. Pro-fluoridationists have argued that this data (or a sub-set of it) indicates 25% lower DMFT in fluoridated communities. Even if we take this argument at face value, with current DMFT values (about 2.0 or less) this represents less than half a tooth. Hardly an achievement to compensate for the increase in dental fluorosis which goes hand in hand with the measure and possibly other more serious health effects discussed below. According to Dr. Hardy Limeback, the Head of Preventive Dentistry at the University of Toronto, fluoridation of water, "has contributed to the birth of a multi-billion dollar industry of tooth bleaching and cosmetic dentistry. More money is being spent now on the treatment of dental fluorosis than what would be spent on dental decay if water fluoridation were halted" (9).

9. Another large and important study was carried out in New Zealand. What makes this work important is that under the New Zealand National Health Service plan every child between the ages of 12 and 13 years has his or her teeth examined, so here we are looking at a complete set of data, not a selected sample. Again, it was found that the teeth of children in non-fluoridated cities were slightly better than those in the fluoridated cities, and again the levels of dental fluorosis was much higher in the fluoridated cities (10).

10. In Europe, where nearly all the countries remain unfluoridated, the average DMFTs for the children are actually lower (i.e. better) than those for children in the US. Moreover, Ireland, the only country in Europe with significant fluoridation (about 73% of the population drink fluoridated water), rates sixth in a table of national average DMFTs in Europe (11).

11. How can this be? People in the US have been told again and again that children drinking fluoridated water have far better teeth than those who don't. What explains this conflict between claim and reality? What emerges from impartial study is that the quality of children's teeth in industrialized countries has been steadily improving from the 1930s to the 1990s, independent of whether fluoride has been added to the water supply or not. Thus, unless a control community was chosen extremely carefully–which they were not–improvements were erroneously assigned to fluoride addition rather than to the overall improvement that was taking place in both fluoridated and non-fluoridated communities.

12. Proponents of water fluoridation argue that these overall improvements in children's teeth in non-flouridated communities have been caused by the introduction of fluoridized toothpaste and other sources (see paragraph 7). However, these improvements (i.e. lower DMFT scores) occurred before the introduction of fluoridized toothpaste and other dental products, and they have continued long after the supposed benefits of both the use of water fluoridation and dental products would have been maximized (12,13). John Colquhoun, using a simple but very elegant graph (see Figure), has shown that there has been little change in the steady downward movement in DMFTs over the period 1930-1990 in New Zealand's 5-year olds as a consequence of the addition of fluoride or the introduction of fluoridized toothpaste (14). As Lee observes, "A decline in the rate of decay rates after fluoridation is relatively meaningless unless one knows the rate of change prior to fluoridation" (5).

13. John Colquhoun's work is both revealing and inspiring. In the 1960's and 1970's in New Zealand as both local councilor and Principal Dental Officer for the city of Auckland (New Zealand's largest city) he had been an avid promoter of fluoridation. He was so successful in fact that in 1980 he was asked by his superiors to take a 4-month sabbatical and tour the world in order to collect supporting evidence for the efficacy of water fluoridation. He did so. He visited Australia, the US, Canada, the UK, and several other countries in Europe and Asia. From talking behind the scenes with dental researchers he found, to his chagrin, that the evidence was not there. When he returned to New Zealand and examined the national statistics the evidence was not there either. He might have left the issue to rest at this point had it not been for the fact that his colleagues were discovering high levels of dental fluorosis in the fluoridated cities. He had the courage to change his mind on the issue and began publicly working for a halt to fluoridation. His position is well summarized in his paper, "Why I Changed My Mind on Fluoridation" (14). He later joined Mark Diesendorf and several other authors, including a former Minister of Health from Australia, to write another important paper, "New Evidence on Fluoridation" (15).

14. In May 1998, I had the privilege of making a videotaped interview with Dr. Colquhoun in his Auckland home less than a year before he died. Seldom have I been so impressed with the integrity of anyone as I was with Dr. Colquhoun. I simply cannot believe that any dentist or scientist who watches this taped interview with an open mind could continue to promote fluoridation. (This taped interview can be obtained from GG Video, 82 Judson Street, Canton, NY 13617).

15. Some of the reasons offered for the decline in tooth decay have included: a) a better standard of living; b) better education; c) better dental hygiene; d) more refrigeration; e) more fresh fruits and vegetables in diet; f) more cheese in diet; g) exposure to antibiotics in processed food; and h) less exposure to environmental lead.

16. The theory behind fluoride's purported benefit to teeth is that the fluoride ion displaces the hydroxide ion from the calcium hydroxyapatite in the tooth enamel, forming the substance calcium fluorapatite, which is more resistant to acid attack. A second suggestion is that fluoride kills some of the decay causing bacteria in the mouth by poisoning their enzymes (16). However, these mechanisms pose three huge questions, which have plagued this matter for over 50 years.

    1) Can you poison the enzymes in the oral bacteria, without poisoning some of the enzymes in the rest of the body? Nearly every single chemical reaction in the body is steered by enzymes (enzymes are biological catalysts).

    2) As far as the tooth is concerned, can you strengthen the enamel on the outside of the tooth without damaging the tooth cells on the inside? In other words, will chemical intervention with the enamel on the surface of the tooth be accompanied by biological interference with the enzymes which lay down that enamel?

    3) What will this constant exposure to fluoride do to our bones? They, too, contain calcium hydroxyapatite. Will the formation of calcium fluorapatite in our bones make them more or less vulnerable to fracture? Does fluoride poison the enzymes involved in bone growth and turnover? Are there any other ways fluoride could damage bone growth and structure?

Some of these questions will be addressed below.

17. The large increase in dental fluorosis in both fluoridated and non-fluoridated communities testifies to the fact that an unacceptably high number of children are now being overdosed on fluoride. In a NIDR study of nearly 40,000 children in the US it was found that the incidence of dental fluorosis increased in a dose-related fashion with the level of fluoride in the drinking water. It was found that

    at less than 0.3 ppm, 13.5% of the children had dental fluorosis,
    between 0.3 to 0.7 ppm, 21.7% had fluorosis,
    between 0.7 to 1.2 ppm, 29.9 % had fluorosis,
    and above 1.2 ppm, 41.4 % had fluorosis.

It was also found that each category of severity (based on Dean's classification) increased in a similar dose related fashion (17). Putting these numbers into perspective, it means that for every three children who might have their tooth enamel strengthened by the addition of fluoride to drinking water at 0.7 to 1.2 ppm, approximately one child will have its tooth enamel damaged by dental fluorosis.

18. Moreover, the fact that children today are getting dental fluorosis in non-fluoridated areas means other exposures to fluoride can also cause this same damage. Pendrys et al (18) have shown that there is a significant difference in the incidence of dental fluorosis in non-fluoridated areas, between children who brush their teeth twice a day with fluoridated toothpaste and those who brush just once a day. Thus, in conjunction with efforts to eliminate fluoridation of the drinking water, a major effort has to be made to force toothpaste manufacturers to make available non-fluoridated versions of each of their major brands. In Canada, there is a non-fluoridated version of Pepsodent, and Boots, the largest chain of pharmacies in the UK, also has a brand which contains no fluoride. In the US, one usually has to go to health food stores or to catalogs to find a brand without fluoride.

19. To argue that dental fluorosis is merely a "cosmetic effect," as some US government agencies do, is a blatant example of "linguistic detoxification" (19). In actual fact, dental fluorosis indicates that fluoride has interfered with the enzymes laying down the tooth enamel. Thus dental fluorosis is the visible flag of fluoride's toxicity. This observation should raise the question, what other enzymes and processes in the body are being affected by fluoride for which we do not have a visible flag? Up until 1983 dental fluorosis was defined as an adverse health effect due to overexposure to fluoride. It was redefined as a "cosmetic effect" to accommodate the US EPA's Recommended Maximum Contaminant Level [RMCL] of 4 .0 mg/L for fluoride in drinking water. According to Bette Hileman,

    RCML's are set to "prevent known or anticipated adverse health effects with an adequate margin of safety... A special committee convened by the Surgeon General in 1983 to guide EPA in setting its fluoride standard wrote in the first draft of its report that moderate to severe dental fluorosis per se is a health effect. The second draft, presented to the Surgeon General in September 1983, said that moderate to severe dental fluorosis is only a cosmetic effect–the position long held by political advocates of fluoridation. This rationale allowed EPA to ignore dental fluorosis in setting the RMCL for fluoride" (20, p 34).

20. Many researchers now agree that fluoride's benefits (if they exist) come largely from topical application and not from systemic exposure (i.e. ingestion) (21). Despite this recognition of the primacy of topical application, and the knowledge of a marked increase in dental fluorosis, there are still many doctors who are prescribing fluoride tablets for pregnant women and young babies, i.e. before the baby's teeth have erupted. Another concern is that women who bottle feed their babies and who live in fluoridated communities are not being adequately warned that they should be using non-fluoridated bottled water, not tap water, to make up the formula.

21. Underlining the concerns in paragraph 20, is the fact that fluoride levels in mothers' milk is naturally very low, averaging approximately 0.01 ppm (22, p 301), which is one hundred times lower than fluoridated tap water. Even when the mother herself is drinking fluoridated water, very little of it gets passed on in her breast milk. One has to wonder then, if fluoride is necessary for healthy tooth development, how it was that God (or evolutionary forces) "failed" in this important development by limiting the supply of fluoride to the newly born baby. Why is it that human milk provides the baby with such low levels of fluoride if much higher levels are deemed necessary for healthy teeth? Who is correct: "God" or the US Public Health Service?

The threat to our bones.

22. If we now turn from teeth to bones, it is shocking to see how little investigation of the long term effect of fluoride on bones has been undertaken. For example, there has been no comprehensive attempt to determine the levels of fluoride in the bones of people living in the US. This, despite the fact that we know the following:

    1) fluoridation has continued for over 50 years;

    2) approximately half of the fluoride we ingest each day is deposited in our bones;

    3) there is a steady accumulation of fluoride in our bones over our lifetime;

    4) serious bone diseases have occurred to people with excessive exposure, especially in workers in the aluminum industry and in areas of countries like India and China; and

    5) we are being exposed to more sources of fluoride today than we were in the 1940s and 1950s.

By now, if American health authorities had done their job properly we should have had a wealth of data. We should know the bone levels as a function of many variables: location, fluoridation, hardness of water supply, diet, disease status, smoking, etc. We have practically nothing. Instead, when American agencies consider what levels may cause bone damage they go back to studies carried out with cryolite (the mineral used in the smelting of aluminum) workers in Denmark in 1937. Even though Kaj Roholm's study is a classic (23), it should not substitute today for a comprehensive study of the bones of the American people. According toa 1993 report from the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry (ATSDR),

    "Fluoride is found in all bone, with the concentration depending on total fluoride exposure. The amount varies among different bones. Levels of fluoride in human bone are generally determined by biopsy of the iliac crest bone, and are generally reported as ppm of bone ash. Normal bone contains 500-1,000 ppm fluoride... Bone from people with preclinical skeletal fluorosis... contains 3,500-5,500 ppm... The fluoride concentration in bone increases with age. In a group of five people ages 64-85 who had lived for at least 10 years in an area with water containing 1 ppm fluoride, the average fluoride concentration of the iliac crest bone was 2,250 ppm of bone ash" (24, pp. 53-54).

It is extraordinary to me that a leading US agency should be relying on measurements made on "five people". The sad truth of the matter is that the US PHS has spent many more millions of dollars promoting fluoridation than it has on investigating the effect that fluoridation has had on the American people.

23. Belatedly, an investigation has been carried out comparing the fluoride levels in the iliac crest bone in citizens in Montreal (non-fluoridated) and Toronto (fluoridated). The initial results of this study by Dr. Limeback and colleagues have been reported to the annual meeting of the International Association for Dental Research in 1999. These results indicate that the levels are about twice as high in the bones of the Toronto residents. This is a disturbing finding, since Toronto was only fluoridated in 1963. We have yet to have any human being on this planet exposed to artificially fluoridated water for a lifetime. We have little idea what levels of fluoride will be in the bones of someone who lives into their 60s, 70s, 80s or 90s who has had lifetime exposure to fluoridated water as well as all the other sources we are exposed to today. It is incredible that despite the importance of this Canadian study its funding has been discontinued. If governmental authorities in fluoridated countries wish to retain any semblance of credibility on this issue, these type of studies need to be carried out with greater intensity, not less. The fear is that the increases in dental fluorosis in our children today may foreshadow the damage to their bones that will come in the future.

24. Meanwhile, there are numerous studies in the published literature (four published in the Journal of the American Medical Association alone) which demonstrate an association between water fluoridation, or naturally occurring fluoride, and increased hip fractures in the elderly, particularly women who were exposed to fluoride prior to menopause (25-30). In 1993 the ATSDR made the following comment on the published studies on hip fractures:

    "The weight of evidence from these experiments suggests that fluoride added to water can increase the risk of hip fractures in both elderly women and men... If this effect is confirmed, it would mean that hip fracture in the elderly replaces dental fluorosis in children as the most sensitive endpoint of fluoride exposure" (24, pp. 56-57).

Yet another study (this one from Finland) has just been published which demonstrates a correlation between increased hip fracture rates in elderly women and naturally occurring fluoride (31). While there are other smaller studies which have not found this correlation (32-34), and some critics have stressed the weaknesses inherent in the "ecological" methodology used (study group and control are distinguished by geographical location and not by the actual doses received by individuals), the weight of evidence indicates an association between hip fracture and exposure to fluoride. Does it make sense to protect our teeth (possibly) when we are young, and then break our bones (possibly) when we are old? By whom should such a trade-off be made? This is not a trivial issue. According to Harold Slavkin, Director of the National Institute of Dental and Cranofacial Research (formerly the NIDR), "About one-half of the people with hip fractures end up in nursing homes, and in the year following the fracture, 20 per cent of them die" (35).

25. Another set of findings which has been outrageously downplayed in my view is a possible association between water fluoridation (or fluoride exposure) and osteosarcoma (bone cancer) in young males. Of particular interest in this matter is a little known comment which was made by an early reviewer of the medical examinations of the children studied during the Newburgh-Kingston fluoridation trial (36). This comment was picked up by the authors of a National Academy of Sciences report in 1977, and further amplified:

    "There was an observation in the Kingston-Newburgh (Ast et al, 1956) study that was considered spurious and has never been followed up. There was a 13.5% incidence of cortical defects in bone in the fluoridated community but only 7.5% in the non-fluoridated community... Caffey (1955) noted that the age, sex, and anatomical distribution of these bone defects are `strikingly' similar to that of osteogenic sarcoma. While progression of cortical defects to malignancies has not been observed clinically, it would be important to have direct evidence that osteogenic sarcoma rates in males under 30 have not increased with fluoridation" (my emphasis) (37).

26. Surely, if objective government scientists had been aware of this concern or prediction, they might have taken far more seriously the studies that followed. For example, in 1990 the National Toxicology Program (NTP) published the results of a 2-year study of rats and mice treated with fluoride in their drinking water performed by scientists at Battelle laboratories (38). Even though a peer review of this Battelle study removed some of the other cancers found (erroneously according to Dr. William Marcus at the US EPA) (39), it still showed a dose-related increase in osteosarcoma in the male but not the female rats. Rather than taking this result as a serious red flag, government scientists seemed to have done everything they could to downplay it. According to Dr. William Marcus, who was the senior scientist at US EPA's Office of Drinking Water in 1990, the NTP studies done by Battelle

    "showed that there was an increased level of bone cancer and other kinds of cancer in the animals. When I got a hold of the contractor report and reviewed it very carefully and not only was it reporting cancers in the animals, osteosarcomas, which bothered me a lot because I've been trying to produce osteosarcomas in animals for almost 20 years and the only luck I ever had was with an experiment in dogs and monkeys and the osteosarcomas took nearly the lifetime of the animals and we were using radium which specifically produces that in bones and here we have a compound commonly available (fluoride) that did it in rats in two years or less. That was upsetting to begin with. Secondarily, there was a study of, in that same study, there were cancers of the liver that are very rare according to the board certified veterinary pathologist at the contractor, Battelle, and those really were very upsetting because they were hepatocholangiocar-cinoma, a very rare, rare, liver cancer and when that occurs, something similar to that occurred with vinyl chloride in a far less well conducted study and it was determined that it was carcinogenic, highly carcinogenic. Then there were several other kinds of cancers found in the jaw and other places and I felt at the time that the report was very, very interesting. It showed that the levels of the fluoride that caused the cancers in the animals were actually lower than those levels seen in people who are ingesting lower amounts but for longer periods of time and that was very very worrisome. It meant that the general population could be exposed to fluoride known to cause cancer in animals and have levels near the cancer being produced in the bones... I went to a meeting that was held in Research Triangle Park in April 1990, the latter part of April, in which the NTP was presenting their review of the study and I went with several colleagues of mine one of whom was a board certified veterinary pathologist who had originally reported hepatocholangiocarcinoma as a separate entity in rats and mice and I asked him if he would have an opportunity to look at the slides to see if that really was a tumor or the pathologist at Battelle had made an error and he told me after looking at the slide that in fact it was correct and at the meeting every one of the cancers that was reported by the contractor had been down-graded by the NTP. Now I've been in the toxicology business looking at studies of this nature for nearly 25 years and I've never seen that, never ever seen where every single endpoint that was a cancer endpoint had been down-graded. I'd seen one or two endpoints argued over, usually on a definition what is a cancer in that particular tissue but I've never seen every one of them down-graded. I found that very suspicious and I went to see an investigator in the Congress at the suggestion of my friend Bob Carton and this gentleman and his staff investigated very thoroughly and found out that the scientists at the NTP down at Research Triangle Park had been coerced to change their findings." (40)

Some said the results were equivocal. Others said the doses were so high that they weren't relevant, and yet it is standard toxicological practice to treat a small group of animals to a large dose of a toxicant if you are to have a statistical chance of observing any change in the small sample size. The alternative is to treat a very large number of animals to a lower dose, which is prohibitively expensive. The National Research Council (NRC) in a 1993 report (41) described the result as follows: "The equivocal result of osteosarcoma in male rats was not supported by results in females in the same study" (page 122). This is an extraordinary statement in the context of the concerns raised by the NAS in 1977 (see paragraph 25) because it is precisely the result the authors had feared. The NRC further downplayed the result based upon a study by Proctor and Gamble (42) (hardly a disinterested party in these matters) which hadn't found any osteosarcomas in their rat studies (they had found osteomas in mice, but they were considered not important because they were non-malignant). Dr. John Yiamouyiannis used the Freedom of Information Act to take a closer look at the P&G studies and found that they had found cancers in their rats as well as lesions which could lead to cancers (43).

27. A suspicious person might wonder if the US government was maneuvering around the Delaney Clause, which was operating at that time. This clause introduced by Congressman Delaney required that no chemical found to cause cancer in animal studies be added to food. Thus, if a link had been found between fluoride and cancer in these animal studies it would have scuttled the whole fluoridation program then and there.

28. In 1992, a report was published by the New Jersey Department of Health (44) which indicated that in three fluoridated counties in NJ, there was a seven-fold increase in osteosarcomas in young males, compared to non-fluoridated counties. There was no increase in the females. Again, this is precisely the result feared/anticipated by the NAS commentators in 1977.

29. In an earlier national survey under the SEER program (45) increases in osteosarcomas in young males were further correlated with fluoridation in two other states. However, a study in New York, published in 1991, had not found any increase they could relate to water fluoridation (46). Three other studies have failed to find a relationship between bone cancer rates and fluoridation. These are discussed by Dr. John Yiamouyiannis in an excellent review of the osteosarcoma data for the journal Fluoride (43). Dr. Yiamouyiannis has pursued the fluoride-cancer connection more thoroughly than any other scientist alive. For some, the positive and negative results on osteosarcoma incidence in fluoridated communities neatly cancel one another out. For me this is too serious an issue to be so lightly dismissed. In an interview I had with the late Dr. John Colquhoun he posed the question: "How many cavities would have to be saved to justify the death of one young man from osteosarcoma?" (Video interview identified in paragraph 14).

Fluoride's impact on enzymes, soft tissues, the endocrine system, and the brain.

30. Some of the earliest opponents of fluoridation were biochemists. One of those early opponents was one of the world's leading authorities on enzyme chemistry, Nobel laureate Dr. James Sumner at Cornell University. He said:

    "We ought to go slowly. Everybody knows fluorine and fluorides are very poisonous substances...We use them in enzyme chemistry to poison enzymes, those vital agents in the body. That is the reason things are poisoned; because the enzymes are poisoned and that is why animals and plants die."

31. Dr. James Sumner was one of at least 12 Nobel Prize winners in Chemistry and Medicine, who have either opposed fluoridation or expressed reservations about it. These include Giulio Natta (1963 Nobel Prize in Chemistry), Nikolai Semenov (Chemistry, 1956), Sir Cyril Norman Hinshelwood (Chemistry, 1956), Hugo Theorell (Medicine, 1955), Walter Rudolf Hess (Medicine, 1949), Sir Robert Robinson (Chemistry, 1947), James B. Sumner (Chemistry, 1946), Artturi Virtanen (Chemistry, 1945), Adolf Butenandt (Chemistry, 1939), Corneille Jean-François Heymans (Medicine, 1938), William P. Murphy (Medicine, 1934), and Hans von Euler-Chelpin (Chemistry, 1929). This listing makes absurd the ADA's claim that there is "no scientific debate" over this issue and that the only people who oppose it are `crackpots'.

32. It is known that many enzymes are inhibited (poisoned) in test tubes (in vitro) at the levels at which water is fluoridated (1 ppm) or less (47). One early explanation given for these observations was that many of the enzymes inhibited had magnesium ion as a co-factor, and that the fluoride ion interfered with the enzyme's interaction with the magnesium. A second explanation from Dr. John Emsley throws more light on how the "humble" fluoride ion, which is inert from a chemical point of view, can be so active and so toxic from a biological point of view.

33. In an article published in the Journal of the American Chemical Society in 1981, Emsley (48) and co-workers showed that fluoride could form a strong hydrogen bond with the amide function. This particular function appears throughout proteins and nucleic acids. The hydrogen bond is the "velcro strip" of biology. It is a weak bond compared to regular chemical bonds (ionic and covalent), but when they act in consort they are able to provide the shape of vitally important molecules and in biochemistry, shape is exquisitely tied to function. Like the velcro strip when the shape has to be changed in some important maneuver, like the opening of the two DNA chains or the interaction between an enzyme and its substrate (the chemical changed by the enzyme), these bonds can easily be broken and reformed with little energy input. Thus, fluoride's interference with hydrogen bonds could cause all sorts of problems at the very heart of biological functioning. The counter-argument from those promoting fluoridation is that at 1 ppm fluoride in our drinking water, fluoride would not reach these concentrations in the soft tissues. Such statements are usually accompanied with a reference to the father of toxicology, Paracelsus, who said, " 'tis the dose that makes the poison." While this ancient observation remains valid to this day the argument that a concentration of 1 ppm for fluoride (i.e. 1,000 parts per billion) is "harmless" is extremely arrogant, and I define arrogance as ignorance backed with over-confidence. We should note that today we are concerned about very much lower levels of lead in childrens' blood than we were in the late 1970s. Scientists and government officials were wrong about lead then, could they be wrong about what constitutes a safe level of fluoride now?

34. It is interesting to note what the Swedish Nobel Prize winner Dr. Hugo Theorell said about these concerns in 1958. He wrote:

    "Even if with respect to caries fluoride may be a good prophylactic, it is in larger doses, none the less a poison. In principle this signifies nothing; in sufficiently large doses all substances are toxic for the human organism. What is important is the distance between the therapeutic and the toxic dose... it may be said that even if the risks from the viewpoint of enzyme chemistry connected with water fluoridation up to 1 ppm should not be exaggerated, yet the distance to toxic doses is none the less so short as to justify some hesitation" (49).

Recognizing that fluoride's target in tooth protection is the "surface layer of the dental enamel" he suggests that water fluoridation is "a roundabout way" of delivering it, because "on its Odyssey through the body fluids most of the fluoride will be lost in other organs, where it will probably not do any good, but possibly do damage to enzymes" (49).

35. Recent work from Dr. Jennifer Luke (50-51) indicates that fluoride reaches one very important gland in the body–the pineal gland–at very much higher concentrations than 1 ppm. This small gland is almost at the geometrical center of the brain, between the two hemispheres. However, it is outside the blood brain barrier. It also has a very high supply of blood (a perfusion rate second only to the kidney) and it is a calcifying tissue, laying down crystals of calcium hydroxyapatite like the teeth and the bone. Because of these observations Luke argued that one would expect the pineal gland to concentrate fluoride. When she had the pineal gland from 11 human corpses analyzed she indeed found this to be the case. The levels of fluoride in the apatite crystals averaged about 9,000 ppm (and went as high as 21,000 ppm). The average level is as high as you would expect in the bones of someone afflicted with skeletal fluorosis. The average projected by Luke for the whole tissue was 300 ppm, well over the 1 ppm found to inhibit many enzymes.

36. Luke next examined the effect of dosing Mongolian gerbils (the animal of choice for studying the pineal gland) with fluoride. She found that animals fed higher doses of fluoride had a significant decrease in their excretion of melatonin metabolite in their urine. She also found that the high dose fluoride animals took a shorter time to reach puberty. This is exactly what you would expect if melatonin production was lowered. If this result is confirmed by others it would make fluoride an environmental hormone or endocrine disrupter, a topic of intense discussion (52) and review by regulatory agencies in the US and around the world.

37. Another line of evidence which indicates that fluoride is an endocrine disrupter is the number of studies that indicate the fluoride may inhibit the functioning of the thyroid gland. Andreas Schuld, president of a group called Parents of Fluoride Poisoned Children, has prepared an excellent summary of the evidence that points in this direction (53, 54). To put the matter as simply as I can, his group has been able to show that areas of endemic fluorosis are also areas designated as being endemic with iodine deficiency disorders (IDD). The group rediscovered studies and documentation from the European medical literature spanning over 30 years of research testifying to fluoride's pharmacological effectiveness in the treatment of hyperthyroidism (the term used to describe an over-functioning thyroid gland). Thyroid hormones are absolutely essential for normal growth and development. Hyperthyroidism means that the thyroid gland is producing too much of the thyroid hormones, T3 and T4. These two hormones have 3 and 4 iodine atoms respectively. Schuld's group has also shown that there is a remarkable similarity between the symptoms listed for hypothyroidism (underactive thyroid gland) and those reported for fluoride poisoning (55). Putting these two conditions together, it appears that fluoride decreases the production of thyroid hormones. If you are suffering from hyperthyroidism, fluoride might be of some benefit. But for a normal person if you are exposed to too much fluoride it could result in reducing thyroid hormone production below normal and necessary levels (i.e., hypothyroidism).

38. It is not clear just how fluoride reduces thyroid hormone production. It may be that fluoride competes with iodine uptake into this gland. Alternatively, fluoride might inhibit the enzymes inside the gland which assemble the hormones from its chemical precursor, the amino acid tyrosine.

39. Schuld also points to research that fluoride can also stimulate the thyroid glands, which seems contradictory to the discussion above. However, stimulation may not lead to production of the hormones if iodide is in short supply. Such a situation (overstimulation coupled with iodide shortage) might explain the condition known as goiter. Here the gland grows and grows producing a swelling in the neck. The gland grows because it is being stimulated, but because there are no thyroid hormones produced, there is nothing to switch off the stimulating signal. In other words, the normal feedback mechanism is not working. This signal is the hormone (thyrotropin or thyroid stimulating hormone) which is produced by the pituitary gland–the master gland as far as hormonal control is concerned.

40. Now this is where the story gets very disturbing. It appears that fluoride forms a complex with the aluminum ion, in which 4 fluoride ions tightly surround an aluminum ion [AlF4]- and that this complex looks to the body just like the phosphate ion (PO43-). Moreover, this [AlF4]- complex is able to bind to G-proteins, which are part of the signaling mechanism of all water soluble hormones and many neurotransmitters.

41. To appreciate the significance of this we need first to understand what hormones are and how they function. Hormones are messengers that regulate body chemistry. They are produced at specific times and in specific glands, for example the adrenal glands produce adrenaline when we experience a sudden shock. Once they are produced they are injected into the bloodstream where they circulate the body until they find their target tissue: i.e. the tissue which they will regulate. At this point in our discussion we need to divide hormones into two groups: those which are soluble in fat and those which are soluble in water. The fat soluble ones like the steroid hormones (e.g. estrogen and testosterone) can freely enter the cells of the tissues they regulate, because the membranes of the cell are made of fat and these hormones can pass straight through. Once inside the cell they bind with a protein receptor and change the cell's activity in a very fundamental way. Water-soluble hormones, on the other hand, cannot cross the cell membrane and their effect has to be instigated outside the cell, and this is where the G-proteins play their important intermediary role. The hormone first combines with a receptor protein on the outside membrane of the cell. When this event has taken place, it triggers a response from the G-proteins. The G-proteins have to take the signal, delivered by the hormone or neurotransmitter, the so-called "first messenger", across the membrane (transduction), and excite (or release) a "second messenger", on the internal surface of the membrane. Once excited (or released) this second messenger can excite various target molecules like enzymes inside the cell. Examples of these "second or intracellular messengers" are cyclic AMP (cAMP) and the Ca2+ion.

42. We will now concentrate on the action of water soluble hormones and the important role played by the G-proteins in the transduction process (getting the signal from outside the cell to the inside). The mechanism of action of the G-proteins is complicated but fully described in the literature (56,57). For our purposes we need only examine the key moment when [AlF4]- interferes with the sequence of events.

43. When the water soluble hormone attaches to its receptor it triggers a change in the G-protein which allows a phosphate group to bind to a molecule called guanosine diphosphate (GDP) which sits in a crevice of the surface of the G-protein. This incoming phosphate changes the GDP to guanosine triphosphate (GTP). If we envisage the G-protein as a switch when GDP occupies the crevice the switch is off, but when the GTP sits in the crevice the switch is on. In the on position the signal is sent to activate the cell. [AlF4]- not only performs exactly the same function as the phosphate but it also does it without the participation of the hormone. Thus in the absence of the hormone, [AlF4]- is capable of switching on the signaling mechanism which activates the cell.

44. The possible interference of [AlF4]- is, in my view, one of the most important developments in fluoride research for many years. Indications are that the aluminum levels needed for the formation of [AlF4]- are almost certainly present in our `industrial' diets, however it may also be that high calcium (Ca2+) and magnesium (Mg2+) levels may prevent its formation. If this is the case it underlines the fear that those suffering malnutrition may be especially vulnerable to fluoride. This point needs urgent recognition by those who advocate fluoridation to provide dental care for the poor, because it is the poor who are most likely to be malnourished.

45. The role of G-proteins as intermediaries in signaling by water soluble hormones (eg insulin, adrenalin, glucogon, thyroid stimulating hormone, and many others) as well as neurotransmitters is so fundamental to the proper growth and functioning of mammals that any interference by aluminum fluoride complexes would be extremely serious indeed. Interference here would go a long way to explain health problems associated with fluoride not explained by fluoride's direct inhibition of enzymes. Anna Strunecká & Jirí Patocka have produced an excellent review of the potential pathological consequences of human exposure to [AlF4]- (58).

46. Schuld points out that since the 1994 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine was awarded to Alfred Gilman and Martin Rodbell for the discovery of G-proteins and their role in cellular signal transduction, much attention has been focused on the manifold functions of these ubiquitous molecules and on the ways in which they can become disordered in human diseases. Entire data banks have now been established listing G-protein-coupled receptor mutations or gene rearrangements, and human diseases caused by such (precocious puberty, neonatal severe hyperparathyroidism, etc.). The effects of fluorides on these can be witnessed in hundreds of studies available on Medline and elsewhere. Schuld's group is providing the key links to these studies via their website (54).

47. Returning to the pineal gland, Luke postulates a mechanism which doesn't involve the functioning of the hormone, but its production. In the production of melatonin in this gland there are four chemical changes between the amino acid tryptophan (a nutrient) and melatonin. All four steps are catalyzed by enzymes. The first two steps yield serotonin, a neurotransmitter, and the next two convert serotonin into melatonin. Luke argues that one or more of these enzymes which catalyze these four steps are inhibited by fluoride (51). Interfering with either the production of serotonin or melatonin is of extreme significance. A huge amount of research is ongoing in the attempt to elucidate all the subtle influences that melatonin has on regulatory mechanisms throughout the body, including the timing of puberty.

48. Of particular interest, is the knowledge that in the US there is an earlier onset of puberty, especially in girls, and no one knows what is causing this (59). There are many possible candidates, but based upon Luke's work on the pineal gland, fluoride should be added to the list.

49. Also of interest is the fact that when children were examined in the Newburgh-Kingston study (already cited) in 1955 (ten years after fluoridation was begun) they found that the girls in fluoridated Newburgh reached menstruation five months earlier, on average, than the girls in non-fluoridated Kingston (36).

50. Our discussion now moves from the pineal gland, which is outside the blood brain barrier, to the inside of the brain. There have been several studies which indicate that fluoride can impact mental behavior. In the 1940s, US scientists working on the Manhattan Project (the making of the Atomic bomb) were concerned that exposure to fluoride could threaten the behavior and concentration of the workers in nuclear plants which were using huge quantities of fluoride in the separation of uranium isotopes. A request was made by Harold Hodge, the chief toxicologist of the project, to do a study on the impact of fluoride on rat behavior. His request was first accepted and later canceled (60). While discovering this information from formerly classified documents, researchers Cliff Honicker, Joel Griffiths and Chris Bryson, also unearthed the fact that one of the earliest and most important trials of fluoridation, the 1945-55 Newburgh-Kingston study (discussed above), was partially organized by, and closely watched by, scientists from the Manhattan Project. Apparently, there was a concern that the government would be facing lawsuits from communities impacted by fluoride emissions from the facilities which had manufactured the atomic bomb (60). Among those concerned was Harold Hodge and in one memo with respect to how to deal with impacted citizens and farmers, he asked, "Would there be any use in attempts to counteract the local fear of fluoride... through lectures on F toxicology and perhaps the usefulness of F in tooth health?" (60). While the impact of fluoride on teeth was studied early, Hodge had to wait nearly 50 years before he saw the rat-behavior experiment performed by Dr. Phyllis Mullenix at the Forsyth Dental Center in Boston.

51. In 1995, Dr. Phyllis Mullenix resisted an enormous amount of political pressure to publish her investigation of the impact of fluoride on rat behavior (61). In her work she found that fluoride concentrated in the brain and that when the animals were exposed to fluoride before birth they exhibited behavior characterized as hyperactive, and when they were dosed after birth they became hypoactive ("couch potatoes"). In a non peer-reviewed critique by Gary Whitford, circulated by the Centers for Disease Control, Division of Oral Health (62), but not submitted to Mullenix for rebuttal (where are the professional ethics here?), her work was attacked because of the high levels of fluoride she had used.

52. When Mullenix finally received a copy of Whitford's critique from a third party she was quickly able to respond. She pointed out, "These criticisms are without merit because our doses in rats produce a level of fluoride in the plasma equivalent to that found in humans drinking 5-10 ppm fluoride in water, or humans receiving some treatments for osteoporosis. This plasma level is exceeded ten times over one hour after children receive topical applications of some dental fluoride gels. Thus, humans are being exposed to levels of fluoride that we know alter behavior in rats" (63). Mullenix also pointed out that it is standard toxicological practice to treat animals with large doses over short periods of time, in order to tease out an effect with the small number of the animals being tested. However, before she could administer small doses over a longer period of time, she was dismissed from the Forsyth Dental Center. She was told her work had little relevance to dentistry! While agencies of the US government had shown a lot of interest in this work (one suspects in order to discredit it) they have not found it necessary to fund more work in this area. Another example of politics ruling over science: a sickening thread that runs throughout this sorrowful 50-year history of fluoride promotion by agencies of the US Public Health Service.

53. An impartial observer is forced to ask, if the promotion of fluoride is an honorable cause, why it is that the tactics behind it have been so despicable? Mullenix is not the only scientist who has suffered reprisals because of her work on fluoride. In 1992 US EPA fired Dr. William Marcus, the Senior Scientist at EPA's Office of Drinking Water, for questioning the erroneous downgrading of cancers in the 1990 NTP fluoride rat study (see paragraph 26). According to a February 10, 1994, press release from the National Whistleblower Center in Washington, DC:

    "In a precedent-setting ruling, U.S. Department of Labor (DOL) Secretary Robert B. Reich has ordered the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to reinstate toxicologist Dr. William L. Marcus. Labor found the EPA guilty of falsifying employment records, discrimination, and retaliation against an employee whistleblower. It also granted Marcus, the largest compensatory damage award ever upheld under the federal environment employee protection statues... The case marks the first time that EPA federal employees were held to be protected from discrimination under federal environmental laws. The ruling establishes that all federal employees are covered under these laws... The decision upheld an earlier order by a DOL Administrative Law Judge (ALJ) issued December 3, 1992, supporting Marcus' claim that he was fired for protected activity... The EPA dismissed the 52-year-old toxicologist on May 13, 1992 after a four-year investigation of Marcus' outside activities as an expert trial witness. EPA accused Marcus of improper use of agency information for private gain, being improperly absent from work, and engaging in outside employment which appeared to pose a conflict of interest... Both the ALJ and Reich found many of the charges to be `unsubstantiated,' and based on apparently falsified time records and other testimony. Reich disputed the EPA's position stating, `I agree with the ALJ that this rationale is pretextual and that the true reason for the discharge was retaliation.' Both Reich and the ALJ found that Marcus was actually fired for publicly criticizing and opposing EPA's policy on fluoride in drinking water."

Dr. Marc Diesendorf describes a similar situation to Mullenix with respect to the paper he published in Nature (12). He wrote,

    "an unpublished covert critique of my paper... written by a senior member of the Australian Dental Association, is apparently being circulated to health departments, politicians, and newspaper editors in several countries, including the U.S. Recently an overseas newspaper editor sent me a copy, and it was immediately clear that the critique was easily answered and was of such a low scientific standard that it would be very difficult to publish, except perhaps in certain dental journals" (64).

I, myself, have received letters from dentists who have been threatened because they had the integrity to speak out on this issue. What makes this kind of bullying even more unacceptable is that it is supported at the highest levels of government. Mullenix has described her work and the trouble it sparked in a videotaped interview (65). Bette Hileman cites several other disturbing incidents encountered by fluoride researchers, including:

    "Phillipe Grandjean, professor of environmental medicine at Odense University in Denmark, wrote to the Environmental Protection Agency in June 1985 about a World Health Organization study on fluorine and fluorides: `Information which could cast any doubt on the advantage of fluoride supplements was left out by the Task Group. Unless I had been present myself, I would have found it hard to believe'" (20, p 36).

54. Meanwhile, Isaacson and his co-workers at SUNY Binghamton, were conducting low-dose, long-term rat fluoride studies (66). They found that fluoride administered daily at 1 ppm, either as aluminum fluoride or sodium fluoride in doubly distilled de-ionized water, for a period of one year, produced morphological changes to kidney and brain cells and an increased uptake of aluminum into the brain. This striking finding has been largely ignored by US authorities, as have been the studies by Guan et al on the impact of fluoride on membrane lipids in rat brain (67), and the studies from China which indicate a lowering of IQ of children as a function of their exposure to fluoride (68, 69). While it is possible that these Chinese studies may have not accounted for some potentially confounding variables, they again wave another very serious red flag? Are we going to risk damaging our childrens' brains for the sake of, at most, half a tooth? What would those who believe in the precautionary principle have to say about that?

55. The work by Isaacson raises a very large issue: the possibility that because fluoride forms complex ions with very many metal ions, including toxic metals like radium, uranium, beryllium, aluminum and lead, it may facilitate the uptake of these elements into places they would not normally be able to enter. This may be particularly relevant if fluoride facilitates their crossing of the blood brain barrier or the placental membrane. Unfortunately, very few studies have pursued the synergistic effects of fluoride and other substances like toxic metal ions. In one of those rare studies that did, it was shown that a combination of lead and fluoride (the salts were dissolved in the drinking water of rats) proved to be "much more severely toxic than either compound alone" and that the fluoride produced significantly higher lead concentrations in the blood and femur (70). Another more recent study which may have inadvertently probed the matter is the extraordinary work of Dr Roger Masters (Professor of Government at Dartmouth) and Myron Coplan, an environmental engineer from Massachusetts (71). They have found a correlation between the uptake of lead into children's blood and the use of hexafluorosilicic acid or its sodium salt to fluoridate municipal water supplies in Massachusetts. They also found a correlation between the use of these same agents and the incidence of violent crime.

56. Masters and Coplan's work also revealed that practically no toxicological work has been performed on these silcofluorides, which are used to fluoridate about 90% (72) of the water fluoridated in the US. Instead, when scientists look at possible problems with fluoridation they examine the effect of the fluoride ion not the hexafluorosilicate ion. The assumption being made is that by the time the hexafluorosilicate ion reaches the tap it will have been completely converted into silica and the free fluoride ion. Coplan argues, during a fascinating videotaped interview that I had with him (and Roger Masters) that this is not likely and that there will be still some silicon fluoride complexes available at the tap and these might be the species which facilitate the uptake of the lead (73).

(much more at link re opposition and scientific fudging to enable water fluoridation to continue)

[Bioluminescence]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2012/jul/24/greenland-ice-sheet-thaw-nasa

The Arctic in general seems to be changing a bit too rapidly for my liking. Still hoping it's a result of unusual weather rather than an acceleration of the effects of global warming.

[scatman]

could it be to do with the weird position the jet stream has been in this summer?

[Bioluminescence]

A bit more info here on what's probably behind the melt. Interesting to see the different factors that have affected events in Greenland recently.

[scatman]

lets hope it doesnt happen next year.

[RojoLeón]

This year is on course for being one of the hottest on record: Seasonal records are falling across the Northern hemisphere. The drought conditions effecting North America are going to be catastrophic for poor people - food prices are going to rise dramatically within the next 6-12 months (as if the bailout/downturn/QE/austerity/depression wasn't enough of a hardship). The conditions in Mexico have been described as some of the worst in the country's history.

As with this, if sea levels rise due to ice pack melts elsewhere, overwhelmingly it will be poor people who are shafted.

[scatman]

This year is on course for being one of the hottest on record: Seasonal records are falling across the Northern hemisphere. The drought conditions effecting North America are going to be catastrophic for poor people - food prices are going to rise dramatically within the next 6-12 months (as if the bailout/downturn/QE/austerity/depression wasn't enough of a hardship). The conditions in Mexico have been described as some of the worst in the country's history.

As with this, if sea levels rise due to ice pack melts elsewhere, overwhelmingly it will be poor people who are shafted.

Yes, europe has suffered a bit due to heat, i went croatia a few weeks back and people there were saying they can't remember it ever being so hot and dry for a long period as they had then

[RojoLeón]

We're getting one of those hot summers we always wanted.

http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2012/07/26/588311/july-26-news-brutal-us-drought-plus-global-extreme-weather-send-corn-and-wheat-prices-skyrocketing/?mobile=nc

A round-up of the top climate and energy news.

The drought affecting much of the continental United States — not to mention the heat and dryness around the globe — has sent corn and wheat prices skyrocketing, scientists said today (July 25). And the current weather could be a taste of what to expect in future decades.[Live Science]

    “Global warming helps make droughts hotter and drier than they would be without human influence,” said Heidi Cullen, the chief climatologist for Climate Central, a non-profit organization dedicated to communicating the science of climate change. Cullen and Stanford University food security expert David Lobell spoke to the media on Wednesday about the effect of the current drought on agriculture.

    The price of corn has risen by 50 percent, to $8 a bushel, from where it was last month. And a U.S. Department of Agriculture report released today suggests that consumers can expect to see the price of meat and dairy products rise as feed for livestock becomes more expensive.

Kansas cattleman Ken Grecian sold 20 pairs of cows and calves a few weeks after drought had sucked his pastures dry and no rain was in the forecast. He sold 20 more pairs Friday. Other cattlemen throughout the middle and western part of the United States also are selling animals they can’t graze or afford to buy feed for. Beef from the animals now flooding livestock auctions will start showing up in grocery stores in November and December, temporarily driving down meat prices. But then prices are expected to rise sharply by January in the wake of dwindling supplies and smaller livestock herds. [Columbia Tribune]

Green technology is the answer to the declining fortunes of France’s auto industry, according to a new government plan to turn the sector around. Francois Hollande’s administration hopes France can carve out a space for its auto industry by driving hard into environmentally friendly cars — a sector the country’s automakers are already prominent in. The plan includes a variety of measures aimed at rewarding companies that invest in green technology and drivers who buy environmentally-friendly cars. [Washington Post]

From highways in Texas to nuclear power plants in Illinois, the concrete, steel and sophisticated engineering that undergird the nation’s infrastructure are being taxed to worrisome degrees by heat, drought and vicious storms. [New York Times]

The news that an unusually widespread melt occurred in Greenland during mid-July, when 97 percent of the Greenland ice sheet — including normally frigid high-elevation areas — experienced some degree of melting, has made international headlines, and for good reason. Such a widespread melt event has not occurred there since at least 1889, and may be yet another sign of the consequences of manmade climate change. [Climate Central]

The European Union moved to shore up the faltering price of carbon dioxide emissions on Wednesday, amid widespread concern that the current low price is failing to encourage companies to reduce their greenhouse gas output. [Guardian]

With monsoon rains late and lackluster, swaths of the India’s most fertile farmlands are parched, including areas in the south and west that grow sugarcane, corn and rice—and parts to the north that grow grain. Out of 36 meteorological subdivisions across India, 21 have received below-normal rains; rainfall for the country as a whole is 22% below average. Rain has been most plentiful on the coasts and in the hills, away from the farming heartland.[Wall Street Journal]

(all links at site)

[Bioluminescence]

This year is on course for being one of the hottest on record: Seasonal records are falling across the Northern hemisphere. The drought conditions effecting North America are going to be catastrophic for poor people - food prices are going to rise dramatically within the next 6-12 months (as if the bailout/downturn/QE/austerity/depression wasn't enough of a hardship). The conditions in Mexico have been described as some of the worst in the country's history.

As with this, if sea levels rise due to ice pack melts elsewhere, overwhelmingly it will be poor people who are shafted.

This for me has always been the crux of the matter - that those who are not historically responsible for CO2 emissions will bear the brunt of the consequences of such emissions.

There's a wee ray of hope following the recent heatwaves and droughts in the US, which have shifted public opinion on the matter. However, this has also led to even more virulent attacks on climate scientists, not least Michael Mann. This just shows how desperate the deniers are getting.

[RojoLeón]

This for me has always been the crux of the matter - that those who are not historically responsible for CO2 emissions will bear the brunt of the consequences of such emissions.

There's a wee ray of hope following the recent heatwaves and droughts in the US, which have shifted public opinion on the matter. However, this has also led to even more virulent attacks on climate scientists, not least Michael Mann. This just shows how desperate the deniers are getting.

Why is it that the majority of attacks of climate science come from 'think tanks' who previously worked with the tobacco industry to hide the links of smoking to associated health damage. All of the above (re Michael Mann and Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI)) is also true for Heartlands Inst (Joe 'Camel' Bast), down to their funding by the Koch brothers.

It's almost as if (as with the tobacco industry), they know fine rightly what the risks and associated damage is, but are intentionally setting up to spoil the debate and misinform the public. Funny how these industries that kill and injure for profit manage to have no qualms about lying to protect their income. 

[Bioluminescence]

Why is it that the majority of attacks of climate science come from 'think tanks' who previously worked with the tobacco industry to hide the links of smoking to associated health damage. All of the above (re Michael Mann and Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI)) is also true for Heartlands Inst (Joe 'Camel' Bast), down to their funding by the Koch brothers.

It's almost as if (as with the tobacco industry), they know fine rightly what the risks and associated damage is, but are intentionally setting up to spoil the debate and misinform the public. Funny how these industries that kill and injure for profit manage to have no qualms about lying to protect their income. 

George Monbiot's Heat - How to Stop the Planet from Burning provides a good place to start to see the strategies used by the likes of Philip Morris to deny that their products are harmful. From early on, there was a concerted effort to misinform and create doubt in the mind of the public. It's all well documented because the tobacco industry had to release all their memos, etc. once class action was taken against them. I'm not surprised that climate change deniers are following in the footsteps of, or indeed are the same people as, those who denied the link between tobacco and cancer. Merchants of Doubt is an excellent book that shows that the same people have used the same techniques to deny all sorts of things, such as the link between CFCs and the hole in the ozone layer, SO2 and acid precipitation, CO2 and climate change, second-hand smoke and cancer, etc. The Union of Concerned Scientists also have a good report entitled Smoke, Mirror & Hot Air - How ExxonMobil Uses Big Tobacco's Tactics to Manufacture Uncertainty on Climate Science. All of this is so well documented, I find it hard to understand why people can't see they're being taken for muppets. I bet the tobacco industry wishes it had had access to the Web because it sure helps in spreading the message.

I came across this recently - have you read it? Some very interesting points being made.

[RojoLeón]

Cheers for the links - will read that pdf later in the week.

Here's one that actually goes against both our posts recently - Koch funded study finds AGW is real! (I imaging their funding is under review as we speak!)

http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2012/07/28/602151/bombshell-koch-funded-study-finds-global-warming-is-real-on-the-high-end-and-essentially-all-due-to-carbon-pollution/

Bombshell: Koch-Funded Study Finds ‘Global Warming Is Real’, ‘On The High End’ And ‘Essentially All’ Due To Carbon Pollution



“The decadal land-surface average temperature using a 10-year moving average of surface temperatures over land. Anomalies are relative to the Jan 1950 – December 1979 mean. The grey band indicates 95% statistical and spatial uncertainty interval.” A Koch-funded reanalysis of 1.6 billion temperature reports finds that “essentially all of this increase results from the human emission of greenhouse gases.”

The Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature Study (BEST) is poised to release its findings next week on the cause of recent global warming.

UPDATE (9 pm, 7/28): A NY Times op-ed by Richard Muller, BEST’s Founder and Scientific Director, has been published, “The Conversion of a Climate-Change Skeptic.”

Here is the money graf:

    CALL me a converted skeptic. Three years ago I identified problems in previous climate studies that, in my mind, threw doubt on the very existence of global warming. Last year, following an intensive research effort involving a dozen scientists, I concluded that global warming was real and that the prior estimates of the rate of warming were correct. I’m now going a step further: Humans are almost entirely the cause.

Yes, yes, I know, the finding itself is “dog bites man.” What makes this “man bites dog” is that Muller has been a skeptic of climate science, and the single biggest funder of this study is the “Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation ($150,000).” The Kochs are the leading funder of climate disinformation in the world!

It gets better:

    Our results show that the average temperature of the earth’s land has risen by two and a half degrees Fahrenheit over the past 250 years, including an increase of one and a half degrees over the most recent 50 years. Moreover, it appears likely that essentially all of this increase results from the human emission of greenhouse gases.

    These findings are stronger than those of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the United Nations group that defines the scientific and diplomatic consensus on global warming.

In short, a Koch-funded study has found that the IPCC “consensus” underestimated both the rate of surface warming and how much could be attributed to human emissions!

UPDATE (9 AM, 7/29): The UK Guardian has a good story up, “Climate change study forces sceptical scientists to change minds: Earth’s land shown to have warmed by 1.5C over past 250 years, with humans being almost entirely responsible.”

And here’s an amusing tweet from a top U.S. climatologist, Michael Mann:

Below is some background on BEST followed by a longer excerpt of the op-ed.

A group of scientists led by one well-known skeptic, Muller — and whose only climatologist listed is Judith Curry, a well-known confusionist [see Schmidt and Annan and Steig andVerheggen, and CP] — decided to reexamine all of the temperature data they could get their hands on. I broke the story of their initial findings in March 2011 (with the help of climatologist Ken Caldeira) – see Exclusive: Berkeley temperature study results “confirm the reality of global warming and support in all essential respects the historical temperature analyses of the NOAA, NASA, and HadCRU.”

The top figure is an updated chart of their findings from March of this year. They found a lot of warming.

Indeed, their key paper from 2011 found:

    … our analysis suggests a degree of global land-surface warming during the anthropogenic era that is consistent with prior work (e.g. NOAA) but on the high end of the existing range of reconstructions.

So the only remaining question for BEST was: What is the cause of that warming? Of course, those who read ClimateProgress or the scientific literature already knew the answer to that question (see the 12/11 post, It’s “Extremely Likely That at Least 74% of Observed Warming Since 1950″ Was Manmade; It’s Highly Likely All of It Was).

BEST is set to release those findings this week. The excellent UK Guardian reporter, Leo Hickman, tweeted earlier today that “Significant climate-related news will be breaking on Guardian website in next 24-36 hours” and then he tweeted an hour ago the link to the excerpt of Muller’s op-ed.

Here is more of the op-ed:

    How definite is the attribution to humans? The carbon dioxide curve gives a better match than anything else we’ve tried. Its magnitude is consistent with the calculated greenhouse effect — extra warming from trapped heat radiation. These facts don’t prove causality and they shouldn’t end skepticism, but they raise the bar: to be considered seriously, an alternative explanation must match the data at least as well as carbon dioxide does.

Well, in fact, to be seriously considered, an alternative explanation must match the data at least as well as does CO2 — and it must offer some mechanism that counteracts the well-known warming effect of CO2. Not bloody likely.

    The careful analysis by our team is laid out in five scientific papers now online at BerkeleyEarth.org. That site also shows our chart of temperature from 1753 to the present, with its clear fingerprint of volcanoes and carbon dioxide, but containing no component that matches solar activity. Four of our papers have undergone extensive scrutiny by the scientific community, and the newest, a paper with the analysis of the human component, is now posted, along with the data and computer programs used. Such transparency is the heart of the scientific method; if you find our conclusions implausible, tell us of any errors of data or analysis.

    What about the future? As carbon dioxide emissions increase, the temperature should continue to rise. I expect the rate of warming to proceed at a steady pace, about one and a half degrees over land in the next 50 years, less if the oceans are included. But if China continues its rapid economic growth (it has averaged 10 percent per year over the last 20 years) and its vast use of coal (it typically adds one new gigawatt per month), then that same warming could take place in less than 20 years.

    Science is that narrow realm of knowledge that, in principle, is universally accepted. I embarked on this analysis to answer questions that, to my mind, had not been answered. I hope that the Berkeley Earth analysis will help settle the scientific debate regarding global warming and its human causes.

Hope springs eternal. Unless, you’re a denier. Then the expression is “nope springs eternal.”

I asked Caldeira for a comment on Muller’s op-ed. He writes:

    I am glad that Muller et al have taken a look at the data and have come to essentially the same conclusion that nearly  everyone else had come to more than a decade ago.

    The basic scientific results have been established for a long time now, so I do not see the results of Muller et al as being scientifically important.  However, their result may be politically important.  It shows that even people who suspect climate scientists of being charlatans, when they take a hard look at the data, see that the climate scientists have been right all along.

Who’d have thunk it? Not the Kochs….

Here's the NYT piece in full

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/30/opinion/the-conversion-of-a-climate-change-skeptic.html?_r=2&pagewanted=all

The Conversion of a Climate-Change Skeptic

CALL me a converted skeptic. Three years ago I identified problems in previous climate studies that, in my mind, threw doubt on the very existence of global warming. Last year, following an intensive research effort involving a dozen scientists, I concluded that global warming was real and that the prior estimates of the rate of warming were correct. I’m now going a step further: Humans are almost entirely the cause.

My total turnaround, in such a short time, is the result of careful and objective analysis by the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature project, which I founded with my daughter Elizabeth. Our results show that the average temperature of the earth’s land has risen by two and a half degrees Fahrenheit over the past 250 years, including an increase of one and a half degrees over the most recent 50 years. Moreover, it appears likely that essentially all of this increase results from the human emission of greenhouse gases.

These findings are stronger than those of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the United Nations group that defines the scientific and diplomatic consensus on global warming. In its 2007 report, the I.P.C.C. concluded only that most of the warming of the prior 50 years could be attributed to humans. It was possible, according to the I.P.C.C. consensus statement, that the warming before 1956 could be because of changes in solar activity, and that even a substantial part of the more recent warming could be natural.

Our Berkeley Earth approach used sophisticated statistical methods developed largely by our lead scientist, Robert Rohde, which allowed us to determine earth land temperature much further back in time. We carefully studied issues raised by skeptics: biases from urban heating (we duplicated our results using rural data alone), from data selection (prior groups selected fewer than 20 percent of the available temperature stations; we used virtually 100 percent), from poor station quality (we separately analyzed good stations and poor ones) and from human intervention and data adjustment (our work is completely automated and hands-off). In our papers we demonstrate that none of these potentially troublesome effects unduly biased our conclusions.

The historic temperature pattern we observed has abrupt dips that match the emissions of known explosive volcanic eruptions; the particulates from such events reflect sunlight, make for beautiful sunsets and cool the earth’s surface for a few years. There are small, rapid variations attributable to El Niño and other ocean currents such as the Gulf Stream; because of such oscillations, the “flattening” of the recent temperature rise that some people claim is not, in our view, statistically significant. What has caused the gradual but systematic rise of two and a half degrees? We tried fitting the shape to simple math functions (exponentials, polynomials), to solar activity and even to rising functions like world population. By far the best match was to the record of atmospheric carbon dioxide, measured from atmospheric samples and air trapped in polar ice.

Just as important, our record is long enough that we could search for the fingerprint of solar variability, based on the historical record of sunspots. That fingerprint is absent. Although the I.P.C.C. allowed for the possibility that variations in sunlight could have ended the “Little Ice Age,” a period of cooling from the 14th century to about 1850, our data argues strongly that the temperature rise of the past 250 years cannot be attributed to solar changes. This conclusion is, in retrospect, not too surprising; we’ve learned from satellite measurements that solar activity changes the brightness of the sun very little.

How definite is the attribution to humans? The carbon dioxide curve gives a better match than anything else we’ve tried. Its magnitude is consistent with the calculated greenhouse effect — extra warming from trapped heat radiation. These facts don’t prove causality and they shouldn’t end skepticism, but they raise the bar: to be considered seriously, an alternative explanation must match the data at least as well as carbon dioxide does. Adding methane, a second greenhouse gas, to our analysis doesn’t change the results. Moreover, our analysis does not depend on large, complex global climate models, the huge computer programs that are notorious for their hidden assumptions and adjustable parameters. Our result is based simply on the close agreement between the shape of the observed temperature rise and the known greenhouse gas increase.

It’s a scientist’s duty to be properly skeptical. I still find that much, if not most, of what is attributed to climate change is speculative, exaggerated or just plain wrong. I’ve analyzed some of the most alarmist claims, and my skepticism about them hasn’t changed.

Hurricane Katrina cannot be attributed to global warming. The number of hurricanes hitting the United States has been going down, not up; likewise for intense tornadoes. Polar bears aren’t dying from receding ice, and the Himalayan glaciers aren’t going to melt by 2035. And it’s possible that we are currently no warmer than we were a thousand years ago, during the “Medieval Warm Period” or “Medieval Optimum,” an interval of warm conditions known from historical records and indirect evidence like tree rings. And the recent warm spell in the United States happens to be more than offset by cooling elsewhere in the world, so its link to “global” warming is weaker than tenuous.

The careful analysis by our team is laid out in five scientific papers now online at BerkeleyEarth.org. That site also shows our chart of temperature from 1753 to the present, with its clear fingerprint of volcanoes and carbon dioxide, but containing no component that matches solar activity. Four of our papers have undergone extensive scrutiny by the scientific community, and the newest, a paper with the analysis of the human component, is now posted, along with the data and computer programs used. Such transparency is the heart of the scientific method; if you find our conclusions implausible, tell us of any errors of data or analysis.

What about the future? As carbon dioxide emissions increase, the temperature should continue to rise. I expect the rate of warming to proceed at a steady pace, about one and a half degrees over land in the next 50 years, less if the oceans are included. But if China continues its rapid economic growth (it has averaged 10 percent per year over the last 20 years) and its vast use of coal (it typically adds one new gigawatt per month), then that same warming could take place in less than 20 years.

Science is that narrow realm of knowledge that, in principle, is universally accepted. I embarked on this analysis to answer questions that, to my mind, had not been answered. I hope that the Berkeley Earth analysis will help settle the scientific debate regarding global warming and its human causes. Then comes the difficult part: agreeing across the political and diplomatic spectrum about what can and should be done.

Richard A. Muller, a professor of physics at the University of California, Berkeley, and a former MacArthur Foundation fellow, is the author, most recently, of “Energy for Future Presidents: The Science Behind the Headlines.”


I've always been curious (in a meta sense) what happens when all of the support for your belief system falls away - when all of the scientific backing, 'evidence' and rationale is disproved and discredited: What is left for the person that held those views; do they hold on tight because they once believed it (and the associated pride/ego confirmation bias - I believed it was a crock of shit, therefore, it's a crock of shit!) or do they accept that they were wrong and reorganize their gestalt reality system to accommodate this new information about the world around them?

I mean, we get this as children frequently and roll with it after a few brief earth shattering moments. But what happens for a grown adult, perhaps learned and successful and very comfortable in their position of 'being right': What for them? I hope they don't take it too hard - we still need people to get involved collectively and we will need all the able minds around to help fix this mess.

What we are doing, collectively, as a planetary species is insanely self destructive (from a long term species survival perspective). Not doing anything will definitely result in others making those decisions for you. Those currently making the meaningful decisions are doing so in their own, narrow self interest. Waiting for someone to take the lead will result in a lot of time wasted. Do what you gotta do, or don't: But don't pretend you had no say or influence in the matter.
 

[Bioluminescence]

I have to say I find Muller slightly irritating - he's simply reinventing the wheel but believes his is the best. And he owes some climate scientists an apology. But it's important work as the data are available for any denier to try and show that BEST and other reconstructions/attribution studies are incorrect. Won't be holding my breath.

Did you see that Watts at WUWT suspended all posts a couple of days ago and an announcement is imminent. What's the bet it's something that will detract from BEST's results? Watts is such a drama queen.

[RojoLeón]

I have to say I find Muller slightly irritating - he's simply reinventing the wheel but believes his is the best. And he owes some climate scientists an apology. But it's important work as the data are available for any denier to try and show that BEST and other reconstructions/attribution studies are incorrect. Won't be holding my breath.

Did you see that Watts at WUWT suspended all posts a couple of days ago and an announcement is imminent. What's the bet it's something that will detract from BEST's results? Watts is such a drama queen.

I have to be honest that (until now) I have never been on the WUWT website - bloody hell. He must be a miserable and cantankerous man to know in real life: The huge amount of energy needed to maintain a skeptic position in the face of overwhelming evidence, must be very draining. No wonder he seems so bitter and fed up.

This isn't entirely related to anything but is relevant as regards how some aspects of how we (humans) behave in groups.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asch_conformity_experiments

Experiments led by Solomon Asch of Swarthmore College asked groups of students to participate in a "vision test." In reality, all but one of the participants were confederates of the experimenter, and the study was really about how the remaining student would react to the confederates' behavior.

Each participant was put into a group with 5 to 7 "confederates" (people who knew the true aims of the experiment, but were introduced as participants to the naive "real" participant). The participants were shown a card with a line on it, followed by another card with 3 lines on it labeled A, B, and C. The participants were then asked to say which line matched the line on the first card in length. Each line question was called a "trial". The "real" participant answered last or next to last. For the first two trials, the participant would feel at ease in the experiment, as he and the confederates gave the obvious, correct answer. On the third trial, the confederates would all give the same wrong answer. There were 18 trials in total and the confederates answered incorrectly for 12 of them. These 12 were known as the "critical trials". The aim was to see whether the real participant would change his answer and respond in the same way as the confederates, despite it being the wrong answer.



One of the pairs of cards used in the experiment. The card on the left has the reference line and the one on the right shows the three comparison lines.

Results

In a control group, with no pressure to conform to an erroneous view, only one participant out of 35 ever gave an incorrect answer. Solomon Asch hypothesized that the majority of participants would not conform to something obviously wrong; however, when surrounded by individuals all voicing an incorrect answer, participants provided incorrect responses on a high proportion of the questions (32%). Seventy-five percent of the participants gave an incorrect answer to at least one question.

Variations of the basic paradigm tested how many cohorts were necessary to induce conformity, examining the influence of just one cohort and as many as fifteen. Results indicate that one cohort has virtually no influence and two cohorts have only a small influence. When three or more cohorts are present, the tendency to conform increases only modestly. The maximum effect occurs with four cohorts. Adding additional cohorts does not produce a stronger effect.

The unanimity of the confederates has also been varied. When the confederates are not unanimous in their judgment, even if only one confederate voices a different opinion, participants are much more likely to resist the urge to conform (only 5-10% conform) than when the confederates all agree. This finding illuminates the power that even a small dissenting minority can have. Interestingly, this finding holds whether or not the dissenting confederate gives the correct answer. As long as the dissenting confederate gives an answer that is different from the majority, participants are more likely to give the correct answer. Men show around half the effect of women (tested in same-sex groups); and conformity is higher among members of an ingroup.[1]

Interpretations
Public conformity vs. social influence

The Asch conformity experiments are often interpreted as evidence for the power of conformity and normative social influence.[2][3] That is, the willingness to conform publicly in order to attain social reward and avoid social punishment. Others have argued that it is rational to use other people's judgments as evidence.[4] Along the lines of the latter perspective, the Asch conformity experiments are cited as evidence for the self-categorization theory account of social influence. From that perspective the Asch results are interpreted as an outcome of depersonalization processes whereby the participants expect to hold the same opinions as similar others.[2][5]
Social comparison theory

The conformity demonstrated in Asch experiments is problematic for social comparison theory,[2][6][5] which predicts that social reality testing, or informational influence, will arise when physical reality testing yields uncertainty. The Asch conformity experiments demonstrated that uncertainty can arise as an outcome of social reality testing. Relatedly, this inconsistency has been used to support the position that the theoretical distinction between social reality testing and physical reality testing is untenable.[5][3]

People, demonstrably, can be manipulated to conform to ideas they know are inherently false: It just takes a few key voices to state the lie and repeat it and the herd will follow, lock step. It creates psychological discomfort (cognitive dissonance) but they will, in the majority of cases, follow the herd, even if that means agreeing to something they know is wrong.

[RojoLeón]

On a lighter note - this one is for any of the denier folk out there. 

[xavidub]

From the point of view of the Kochs, those results must really suck

[RojoLeón]

From the point of view of the Kochs, those results must really suck

I'm sure they'll get over it - the taste of Louis XIII congac and tax haven bank accounts, filled to the brim with cash might take the edge off inconvenient scientific results like this.

What they would like is a US government in the mold of Canadian Prime Minister, Stephen Harper's, Conservative admin. They are throwing money at Romney in the hopes he will undo those horrid, liberal communist pieces of legislation such as the Clean Water Act (brought to life by that yogurt, knitting hippy, er, Richard Nixon).

Lets hope they go senile and leave all their money to one of their pet cats.

[RojoLeón]

http://www.davidstrahan.com/blog/?p=1576

(Fuck Monbiot - plastic, flip-flopping, charlatan - the man has zero integrity)

Monbiot peak oil u-turn based on bad science, worse maths

In his column of July 2nd George Monbiot recanted peak oil, claiming “the facts have changed, now we must change too”. Much of the article was spent regurgitating a recent report by Leonardo Maugeri, a former executive with the Italian oil company Eni, which Monbiot breathlessly reported “provides compelling evidence that a new oil boom has begun”.

Plenty of ink has already been spilled by oil depletion experts exposing some of the wildly optimistic assumptions contained in Maugeri’s report. More damning is that the work is shot through with crass mistakes that render its forecast worthless.

When I interviewed him, Mr Maugeri was forced to admit a mathematical howler that would disgrace the back of an envelope, and it also became clear he did not understand the work of the other forecasters he attacks. It also looks as if he has double or even triple counted a vital component of his predicted oil glut.

Maugeri forecasts the global oil supply will soar by almost 18 million barrels per day to around 111mb/d by 2020, the biggest increase in production since the 1980s, which he claims could lead to prolonged overproduction and “a significant, stable dip of oil prices”. So, arrivederci peak oil.

Maugeri claims this looming glut has three legs: booming upstream investment by the oil industry; the rise and rise of unconventional production such as US shale oil; and a tendency among forecasters to over-estimate massively the rate at which production from existing oil fields declines. The first point is uncontroversial, the second is moot, but the third is the most important; without it, Maugeri’s glut evaporates.

All oilfields eventually peak and go into decline as production is sapped by falling reservoir pressures, and as water increasingly dilutes the flow of oil from the well. Measuring the impact of these declines on aggregate oil production is a complicated business, but vital to predicting the future oil supply. There have been two primary studies of decline rates in recent years: one by the International Energy Agency in its 2008 World Energy Outlook; and another by the oil consultancy IHS-CERA.

Maugeri cherrypicks numbers from the IEA study and misrepresents them to claim that “most forecasters” work on decline rates of 6 to 10 percent. He then argues this is incompatible with the observed growth of the oil supply over the last decade – and therefore must be wrong – and uses this conclusion to justify his inflated oil production forecast. But the whole thing is a straw man; an email he sent me revealed he simply doesn’t understand the IEA numbers. The IEA’s global decline rate is actually 4.1%, and CERA’s broadly agrees, at 4.5% (see here for more detail).

Even if we were to accept his 6 to 10 percent range, Maugeri has got his sums horribly wrong. In the key section of the report, he claims that even the lower end of the range “would involve the almost complete loss of the world’s “old” production in 10 years”. But this is laughable. A 6% annual decline over 10 years leaves you with 54% of your original production, because each year’s 6% decline is smaller volumetrically than the previous one. So over a decade the decline is 46% – and very far from an “almost complete loss”.

When I put this to him, Mr Maugeri seemed genuinely confused, and tried briefly to persuade me the loss was much larger. “If you have a 6% decline each year over a 10 year period, the loss of production is close to 80%”, he said, but then the penny dropped. It looks to me as if he compounded 6% in the wrong direction – for growth, not decline. “Maybe on this you are right”, he conceded sheepishly. So by his own admission, Mr Maugeri has overestimated the alleged overestimation of production decline by almost three-quarters(1).

Nowhere in his report does Mr Maugeri explicitly state his own decline rate assumptions. The closest he gets is the unsupported claim that “I did not find evidence of a global depletion rate of crude production higher than 2-3 percent when correctly adjusted for reserve growth”. And yet his actual assumptions appear to be far lower. By analysing Maugeri’s forecasts, Steven Sorrell of the Sussex Energy Group and Christophe McGlade, a doctoral researcher at UCL Energy Institute, have shown his actual global decline rate for 2011-2020 is just 1.4% – scarcely a third of the established estimates. Replacing this implicit rate with the IEA number eliminates the Maugeri glut entirely, slashing his production forecast for 2020 to below his estimate of current production capacity. Sorrell concludes “Since most analysts expect average decline rates to increase over this period, this projection must be considered optimistic”. So, buongiorno peak oil.

When I challenged Mr Maugeri about the discrepancy between the 2-3% decline rate and the 1.4%, he said the difference was explained by reserves growth – the tendency to squeeze more oil than originally expected from existing fields, through new technology, the exploitation of secondary reservoirs and so on. But in that case he seems to have counted it twice, to judge by his quote in the paragraph above. Or possibly even three times, since the notion of reserves growth is already accounted for in the existing estimates. Both the IEA and IHS-CERA numbers are observed overall decline rates: they reflect the actual loss of production that happened after – or in spite of – all the industry’s investment to boost flagging output at existing fields.

“If Maugeri has adjusted decline rates for future reserves growth, he has either double counted, because it’s already in the existing forecasts, or assumes a massive acceleration in reserves growth in future”, explains Richard Miller, an oil consultant who previously worked for BP, and was the first to spot Maugeri’s dodgy maths. “Either way, it’s not credible”. When I emailed Mr Maugeri to check if he understood the definition of the IHS-CERA decline number he had quoted, I received no reply.

Perhaps it’s not so surprising. Maugeri is a long standing cornucopian, and has form in the slapdash stakes. In a previous article for the journal Science(2), he sought to disprove peak oil modelling using a graph of Egyptian oil production. Sadly, the graph he printed was not for Egyptian oil production. Worse, if it had been, it would have demolished the very point he was trying to make(3).

What is astonishing is that George Monbiot finds Maugeri’s work so “compelling”. How many times have I read Monbiot banging on about the importance of peer review? Strange then that he should gush that this report was “published by Harvard University” but fail to mention it had not appeared in any peer reviewed journal, and worse, had been funded by BP. I suspect both those organizations may live to regret their involvement. What about Monbiot? If he is as intellectually rigorous as he likes to make out, he will perform not one peak oil u-turn this month, but two.

1) (80-46)/46*100 = 74%

2) L. Maugeri, Oil: Never Cry Wolf-Why the Petroleum Age is Far from over, Science, Vol. 304 mo. 5674 pp. 1114-1115, 21 May 2004 http://www.sciencemag.org/content/304/5674/1114.summary

3) Q.Y. Meng and R.W. Bentley, Global oil peaking: Responding to the case for ‘abundant supplies of oil’, Energy, vol.33 pp 1179-1184, 2008
 

[Bioluminescence]

Here's another interesting article on what's been happening in Greenland, which explain quite clearly why some people are worried.

[RojoLeón]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2012/aug/06/papua-new-guinea-deep-sea-mining

Papua New Guinea's seabed to be mined for gold and copper

Government approves world's first commercial deep-sea mining project despite vehement objections over threat to marine life

A "new frontier" in mining is set to be opened up by the underwater extraction of resources from the seabed off the coast of Papua New Guinea, despite vehement objections from environmentalists and local activists.

Canadian firm Nautilus Minerals has been granted a 20-year licence by the PNG government to commence the Solwara 1 project, the world's first commercial deep sea mining operation.

Nautilus will mine an area 1.6km beneath the Bismarck Sea, 50km off the coast of the PNG island of New Britain. The ore extracted contains high-grade copper and gold.

The project is being carefully watched by other mining companies keen to exploit opportunities beneath the waves.

The Deep Sea Mining (DSM) campaign, a coalition of groups opposing the PNG drilling, estimates that 1 million sq km of sea floor in the Asia-Pacific region is under exploration licence. Nautilus alone has around 524,000 sq km under licence, or pending licence, in PNG, Tonga, New Zealand and Fiji.

"PNG is the guinea pig for deep-sea mining," says Helen Rosenbaum, the campaign's co-ordinator. "The mining companies are waiting in the wings ready to pile in. It's a new frontier, which is a worrying development.

"The big question the locals are asking is 'What are the risks?' There is no certain answer to that, which should trigger a precautionary principle.

"But Nautilus has found a place so far away from people that they can get away with any impacts. They've picked an underfunded government without the regulation of developed countries that will have no way of monitoring this properly."

The mining process will involve levelling underwater hydrothermal "chimneys", which spew out vast amounts of minerals. Sediment is then piped to a waiting vessel, which will separate the ore from the water before pumping the remaining liquid back to the seafloor.

The DSM campaign has compiled a report, co-authored by a professor of zoology from University of Oxford, which warns that underwater mining will decimate deep water organisms yet to be discovered by science, while sediment plumes could expose marine life to toxic metals that will work their way up the food chain to tuna, dolphins and even humans.

"There are indirect impacts that could clog the gills of fish, affect photosynthesis and damage reefs," says Rosenbaum.

Activists also claim that an environmental analysis by Nautilus fails to properly address the impact of the mining on ecosystems, nor explains any contingency plan should there be a major accident.

Wenceslaus Magun, a PNG-based activist, told the Guardian that local fishing communities are concerned about the mining and are planning to challenge the exploration licence.

"We are really concerned because the sea is the source of our spirituality and sustenance," he said. "The company has not explained to us the risks of deep sea mining. They haven't responded to my requests for information."

"The government has turned a blind eye to the concern of its own people. We are mobilising people to raise funds to take this to court and retract Nautilus' licence."

However, proponents of deep-sea mining point out that it is potentially far less damaging than land-based extraction.

"The material is very high grade so you have to mine less in order to get the same amount of metal," said Chris Yeats, a geologist at CSIRO, the Australian government's scientific arm. "At those depths there are bacteria, but there's a cut off at around 1,000m where most fish are, so it should have little impact."

"Unlike a terrestrial mine, you don't have to build infrastructure such as roads and you don't displace people. You chop off one of these venting chimneys and another one will grow back, so it's a little like the mining equivalent of cutting grass."

Steve Rogers, the CEO of Nautilus, said the company had gone through a "rigorous" study of environmental impact over the past six years.

"This will be a relatively small footprint compared to a mine on land, on an area about the size of a dozen football pitches," he said. "We've sought out the best scientists in the world. We aren't trying to pull the wool over anyone's eyes."

"This isn't in a fishing area and won't impact coral. Even if it were in a fishing area, it won't affect that upper area where the fish are."

Rogers said that Nautilus had contacted 15,000 local people in PNG to hold workshops on the project. The company estimates that the 30-month first phase of the mining will bring $142m(£92m) in benefits to the PNG economy, with a plan to employ 70% of the project's staff from the country within three years.

Despite these assurances, the project has been delayed by an undisclosed commercial dispute between Nautilus and the PNG government, which is currently under arbitration in Sydney.

The PNG government has come under fire for taking a 30% equity stake in the project, which will require it to contribute about $25m(£16m) towards infrastructure, provoking accusations of a flagrant conflict of interest.

In return, PNG will receive $40.8mn (£26m) in tax from a project estimated to generate $1bn(£642m) although Rogers said revenue would be "a long way short of that") along with a 30% return on what is still a highly experimental mining process.

"It was the government's choice to take a stake, we didn't ask them to do it," says Rogers. "I'd stress that the government isn't threatening any of our mining permits. We're disappointed to be in a dispute with the government but I'm confident we will resolve this."

What isn't in dispute is that the mining industry is starting to eye major opportunities on the seabed.

"A number of governments are exploring for minerals in this way, such as Russia, Japan, China and the UK," said Rogers. "It will take time, it's not a gold rush, but the demand is increasing."

Yeats added: "As the global population increases, we're likely to see large-scale marine mining. How far away that is depends on how successful they are. But we will have to turn to the 70% of the world we currently aren't mining for minerals."


Capitalists are parasitic locusts - picking the planet clean for profit.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/14/opinion/a-world-without-coral-reefs.html?_r=1

A World Without Coral Reefs

IT’S past time to tell the truth about the state of the world’s coral reefs, the nurseries of tropical coastal fish stocks. They have become zombie ecosystems, neither dead nor truly alive in any functional sense, and on a trajectory to collapse within a human generation. There will be remnants here and there, but the global coral reef ecosystem — with its storehouse of biodiversity and fisheries supporting millions of the world’s poor — will cease to be.

Overfishing, ocean acidification and pollution are pushing coral reefs into oblivion. Each of those forces alone is fully capable of causing the global collapse of coral reefs; together, they assure it. The scientific evidence for this is compelling and unequivocal, but there seems to be a collective reluctance to accept the logical conclusion — that there is no hope of saving the global coral reef ecosystem.

What we hear instead is an airbrushed view of the crisis — a view endorsed by coral reef scientists, amplified by environmentalists and accepted by governments. Coral reefs, like rain forests, are a symbol of biodiversity. And, like rain forests, they are portrayed as existentially threatened — but salvageable. The message is: “There is yet hope.”

Indeed, this view is echoed in the “consensus statement” of the just-concluded International Coral Reef Symposium, which called “on all governments to ensure the future of coral reefs.” It was signed by more than 2,000 scientists, officials and conservationists.

This is less a conspiracy than a sort of institutional inertia. Governments don’t want to be blamed for disasters on their watch, conservationists apparently value hope over truth, and scientists often don’t see the reefs for the corals.

But by persisting in the false belief that coral reefs have a future, we grossly misallocate the funds needed to cope with the fallout from their collapse. Money isn’t spent to study what to do after the reefs are gone — on what sort of ecosystems will replace coral reefs and what opportunities there will be to nudge these into providing people with food and other useful ecosystem products and services. Nor is money spent to preserve some of the genetic resources of coral reefs by transferring them into systems that are not coral reefs. And money isn’t spent to make the economic structural adjustment that communities and industries that depend on coral reefs urgently need. We have focused too much on the state of the reefs rather than the rate of the processes killing them.

Overfishing, ocean acidification and pollution have two features in common. First, they are accelerating. They are growing broadly in line with global economic growth, so they can double in size every couple of decades. Second, they have extreme inertia — there is no real prospect of changing their trajectories in less than 20 to 50 years. In short, these forces are unstoppable and irreversible. And it is these two features — acceleration and inertia — that have blindsided us.

Overfishing can bring down reefs because fish are one of the key functional groups that hold reefs together. Detailed forensic studies of the global fish catch by Daniel Pauly’s lab at the University of British Columbia confirm that global fishing pressure is still accelerating even as the global fish catch is declining. Overfishing is already damaging reefs worldwide, and it is set to double and double again over the next few decades.

Ocean acidification can also bring down reefs because it affects the corals themselves. Corals can make their calcareous skeletons only within a special range of temperature and acidity of the surrounding seawater. But the oceans are acidifying as they absorb increasing amounts of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Research led by Ove Hoegh-Guldberg of the University of Queensland shows that corals will be pushed outside their temperature-acidity envelope in the next 20 to 30 years, absent effective international action on emissions.

We have less of a handle on pollution. We do know that nutrients, particularly nitrogenous ones, are increasing not only in coastal waters but also in the open ocean. This change is accelerating. And we know that coral reefs just can’t survive in nutrient-rich waters. These conditions only encourage the microbes and jellyfish that will replace coral reefs in coastal waters. We can say, though, with somewhat less certainty than for overfishing or ocean acidification that unstoppable pollution will force reefs beyond their survival envelope by midcentury.

This is not a story that gives me any pleasure to tell. But it needs to be told urgently and widely because it will be a disaster for the hundreds of millions of people in poor, tropical countries like Indonesia and the Philippines who depend on coral reefs for food. It will also threaten the tourism industry of rich countries with coral reefs, like the United States, Australia and Japan. Countries like Mexico and Thailand will have both their food security and tourism industries badly damaged. And, almost an afterthought, it will be a tragedy for global conservation as hot spots of biodiversity are destroyed.

What we will be left with is an algal-dominated hard ocean bottom, as the remains of the limestone reefs slowly break up, with lots of microbial life soaking up the sun’s energy by photosynthesis, few fish but lots of jellyfish grazing on the microbes. It will be slimy and look a lot like the ecosystems of the Precambrian era, which ended more than 500 million years ago and well before fish evolved.

Coral reefs will be the first, but certainly not the last, major ecosystem to succumb to the Anthropocene — the new geological epoch now emerging. That is why we need an enormous reallocation of research, government and environmental effort to understand what has happened so we can respond the next time we face a disaster of this magnitude. It will be no bad thing to learn how to do such ecological engineering now.

[RojoLeón]

I saw someone in the Standard Chartered thread talking about 'guerrilla farming', or somesuch: Well, if you are that way inclined, now is a good time to start. Food prices are going to rise (globally) during the next 6-12 months at a rate far exceeding normal inflation.

http://www.businessweek.com/news/2012-08-07/sovecon-says-russian-wheat-harvest-may-be-lower-than-in-2010

SovEcon Says Russian Wheat Harvest May Be Lower Than in 2010

Russia, the world’s third biggest wheat exporter last season, may harvest less wheat than in 2010, when the country had the worst drought in at least 50 years and banned exports, SovEcon said.

Russia planted about 2 million hectares (4.9 million acres) less wheat this year than in 2010, and actual average yields are now lower, the Moscow-based researcher said in a statement on its website today. Wheat production this year is estimated at 49 million metric tons, compared with 41.5 million tons in 2010, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

“Seriously incomplete wheat harvest will lead to a reduction of exports and domestic demand,” SovEcon said. Andrei Sizov Jr., managing director at the company, was not able to provide an actual yield number when contacted today. A crop estimate was also not provided.

Wheat prices have climbed 31 percent this year, partly on speculation dry weather will curb supplies from Russia. Deputy Prime Minister Arkady Dvorkovich and Agriculture Minister Nikolai Fedorov are expected to discuss grain supplies tomorrow, according to the government’s press service and Dmitry Bobkov, the Agriculture Ministry spokesman.

Russia was the world’s third-biggest wheat exporter after the U.S. and Australia in 2011-12, according to USDA estimates. This year, it’s forecast to slump to fifth place, with exports of 12 million tons behind the U.S., Australia, Canada and the European Union, USDA data show.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/michael-t-klare/the-hunger-wars-in-our-fu_b_1751968.html?utm_hp_ref=green

The Hunger Wars in Our Future

Heat, Drought, Rising Food Costs, and Global Unrest

Cross-posted with TomDispatch.com

The Great Drought of 2012 has yet to come to an end, but we already know that its consequences will be severe. With more than one-half of America’s counties designated as drought disaster areas, the 2012 harvest of corn, soybeans, and other food staples is guaranteed to fall far short of predictions. This, in turn, will boost food prices domestically and abroad, causing increased misery for farmers and low-income Americans and far greater hardship for poor people in countries that rely on imported U.S. grains.

This, however, is just the beginning of the likely consequences: if history is any guide, rising food prices of this sort will also lead to widespread social unrest and violent conflict.

Food -- affordable food -- is essential to human survival and well-being. Take that away, and people become anxious, desperate, and angry. In the United States, food represents only about 13 percent of the average household budget, a relatively small share, so a boost in food prices in 2013 will probably not prove overly taxing for most middle- and upper-income families.  It could, however, produce considerable hardship for poor and unemployed Americans with limited resources. “You are talking about a real bite out of family budgets,” commented Ernie Gross, an agricultural economist at Omaha’s Creighton University. This could add to the discontent already evident in depressed and high-unemployment areas, perhaps prompting an intensified backlash against incumbent politicians and other forms of dissent and unrest.

It is in the international arena, however, that the Great Drought is likely to have its most devastating effects. Because so many nations depend on grain imports from the U.S. to supplement their own harvests, and because intense drought and floods are damaging crops elsewhere as well, food supplies are expected to shrink and prices to rise across the planet. “What happens to the U.S. supply has immense impact around the world,” says Robert Thompson, a food expert at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs. As the crops most affected by the drought, corn and soybeans, disappear from world markets, he noted, the price of all grains, including wheat, is likely to soar, causing immense hardship to those who already have trouble affording enough food to feed their families.

The Hunger Games, 2007-2011

What happens next is, of course, impossible to predict, but if the recent past is any guide, it could turn ugly. In 2007-2008, when rice, corn, and wheat experienced prices hikes of 100 percent or more, sharply higher prices -- especially for bread -- sparked “food riots” in more than two dozen countries, including Bangladesh, Cameroon, Egypt, Haiti, Indonesia, Senegal, and Yemen. In Haiti, the rioting became so violent and public confidence in the government’s ability to address the problem dropped so precipitously that the Haitian Senate voted to oust the country’s prime minister, Jacques-Édouard Alexis. In other countries, angry protestors clashed with army and police forces, leaving scores dead.

Those price increases of 2007-2008 were largely attributed to the soaring cost of oil, which made food production more expensive. (Oil’s use is widespread in farming operations, irrigation, food delivery, and pesticide manufacture.)  At the same time, increasing amounts of cropland worldwide were being diverted from food crops to the cultivation of plants used in making biofuels.

The next price spike in 2010-11 was, however, closely associated with climate change. An intense drought gripped much of eastern Russia during the summer of 2010, reducing the wheat harvest in that breadbasket region by one-fifth and prompting Moscow to ban all wheat exports. Drought also hurt China’s grain harvest, while intense flooding destroyed much of Australia’s wheat crop. Together with other extreme-weather-related effects, these disasters sent wheat prices soaring by more than 50 percent and the price of most food staples by 32 percent.

Once again, a surge in food prices resulted in widespread social unrest, this time concentrated in North Africa and the Middle East. The earliest protests arose over the cost of staples in Algeria and then Tunisia, where -- no coincidence -- the precipitating event was a young food vendor, Mohamed Bouazizi, setting himself on fire to protest government harassment. Anger over rising food and fuel prices combined with long-simmering resentments about government repression and corruption sparked what became known as the Arab Spring. The rising cost of basic staples, especially a loaf of bread, was also a cause of unrest in Egypt, Jordan, and Sudan. Other factors, notably anger at entrenched autocratic regimes, may have proved more powerful in those places, but as the author of Tropic of Chaos, Christian Parenti, wrote, “The initial trouble was traceable, at least in part, to the price of that loaf of bread.”

As for the current drought, analysts are already warning of instability in Africa, where corn is a major staple, and of increased popular unrest in China, where food prices are expected to rise at a time of growing hardship for that country’s vast pool of low-income, migratory workers and poor peasants. Higher food prices in the U.S. and China could also lead to reduced consumer spending on other goods, further contributing to the slowdown in the global economy and producing yet more worldwide misery, with unpredictable social consequences.

The Hunger Games, 2012-??

If this was just one bad harvest, occurring in only one country, the world would undoubtedly absorb the ensuing hardship and expect to bounce back in the years to come. Unfortunately, it’s becoming evident that the Great Drought of 2012 is not a one-off event in a single heartland nation, but rather an inevitable consequence of global warming which is only going to intensify.  As a result, we can expect not just more bad years of extreme heat, but worse years, hotter and more often, and not just in the United States, but globally for the indefinite future.

Until recently, most scientists were reluctant to blame particular storms or droughts on global warming.  Now, however, a growing number of scientists believe that such links can be demonstrated in certain cases. In one recent study focused on extreme weather events in 2011, for instance, climate specialists at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and Great Britain’s National Weather Service concluded that human-induced climate change has made intense heat waves of the kind experienced in Texas in 2011 more likely than ever before. Published in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, it reported that global warming had ensured that the incidence of that Texas heat wave was 20 times more likely than it would have been in 1960; similarly, abnormally warm temperatures like those experienced in Britain last November were said to be 62 times as likely because of global warming.

It is still too early to apply the methodology used by these scientists to calculating the effect of global warming on the heat waves of 2012, which are proving to be far more severe, but we can assume the level of correlation will be high. And what can we expect in the future, as the warming gains momentum?

When we think about climate change (if we think about it at all), we envision rising temperatures, prolonged droughts, freakish storms, hellish wildfires, and rising sea levels. Among other things, this will result in damaged infrastructure and diminished food supplies.  These are, of course, manifestations of warming in the physical world, not the social world we all inhabit and rely on for so many aspects of our daily well-being and survival. The purely physical effects of climate change will, no doubt, prove catastrophic.  But the social effects including, somewhere down the line, food riots, mass starvation, state collapse, mass migrations, and conflicts of every sort, up to and including full-scale war, could prove even more disruptive and deadly.

In her immensely successful young-adult novel The Hunger Games (and the movie that followed), Suzanne Collins riveted millions with a portrait of a dystopian, resource-scarce, post-apocalyptic future where once-rebellious “districts” in an impoverished North America must supply two teenagers each year for a series of televised gladiatorial games that end in death for all but one of the youthful contestants. These “hunger games” are intended as recompense for the damage inflicted on the victorious capitol of Panem by the rebellious districts during an insurrection. Without specifically mentioning global warming, Collins makes it clear that climate change was significantly responsible for the hunger that shadows the North American continent in this future era. Hence, as the gladiatorial contestants are about to be selected, the mayor of District 12’s principal city describes “the disasters, the droughts, the storms, the fires, the encroaching seas that swallowed up so much of the land [and] the brutal war for what little sustenance remained.”

In this, Collins was prescient, even if her specific vision of the violence on which such a world might be organized is fantasy. While we may never see her version of those hunger games, do not doubt that some version of them will come into existence -- that, in fact, hunger wars of many sorts will fill our future. These could include any combination or permutation of the deadly riots that led to the 2008 collapse of Haiti’s government, the pitched battles between massed protesters and security forces that engulfed parts of Cairo as the Arab Spring developed, the ethnic struggles over disputed croplands and water sources that have made Darfur a recurring headline of horror in our world, or the inequitable distribution of agricultural land that continues to fuel the insurgency of the Maoist-inspired Naxalites of India.

Combine such conflicts with another likelihood: that persistent drought and hunger will force millions of people to abandon their traditional lands and flee to the squalor of shantytowns and expanding slums surrounding large cities, sparking hostility from those already living there. One such eruption, with grisly results, occurred in Johannesburg’s shantytowns in 2008 when desperately poor and hungry migrants from Malawi and Zimbabwe were set upon, beaten, and in some cases burned to death by poor South Africans. One terrified Zimbabwean, cowering in a police station from the raging mobs, said she fled her country because “there is no work and no food.” And count on something else: millions more in the coming decades, pressed by disasters ranging from drought and flood to rising sea levels, will try to migrate to other countries, provoking even greater hostility. And that hardly begins to exhaust the possibilities that lie in our hunger-games future.

At this point, the focus is understandably on the immediate consequences of the still ongoing Great Drought: dying crops, shrunken harvests, and rising food prices. But keep an eye out for the social and political effects that undoubtedly won’t begin to show up here or globally until later this year or 2013.  Better than any academic study, these will offer us a hint of what we can expect in the coming decades from a hunger-games world of rising temperatures, persistent droughts, recurring food shortages, and billions of famished, desperate people.

 

[RojoLeón]

http://www.nature.com/news/demand-for-water-outstrips-supply-1.11143

Demand for water outstrips supply

Groundwater use is unsustainable in many of the world's major agricultural zones.




Almost one-quarter of the world’s population lives in regions where groundwater is being used up faster than it can be replenished, concludes a comprehensive global analysis of groundwater depletion, published this week in Nature1.

Across the world, human civilizations depend largely on tapping vast reservoirs of water that have been stored for up to thousands of years in sand, clay and rock deep underground. These massive aquifers — which in some cases stretch across multiple states and country borders — provide water for drinking and crop irrigation, as well as to support ecosystems such as forests and fisheries.

Yet in most of the world’s major agricultural regions, including the Central Valley in California, the Nile delta region of Egypt, and the Upper Ganges in India and Pakistan, demand exceeds these reservoirs' capacity for renewal.

“This overuse can lead to decreased groundwater availability for both drinking water and growing food,” says Tom Gleeson, a hydrogeologist at McGill University in Montreal, Quebec, and lead author of the study. Eventually, he adds, it “can lead to dried up streams and ecological impacts”.

Gleeson and his colleagues combined a global hydrological model and a data set of groundwater use to estimate how much groundwater is being extracted by countries around the world. They also estimated each aquifer's rate of ‘recharge’ — the speed at which groundwater is being replenished. Using this approach, the researchers were able to determine the groundwater ‘footprint’ for nearly 800 aquifers worldwide (see map above).

In calculating how much stress each source of groundwater is under, Gleeson and colleagues also looked in detail at the water flows needed to sustain the health of ecosystems such as grasses, trees and streams.

“To my knowledge, this is the first water-stress index that actually accounts for preserving the health of the environment,” says Jay Famiglietti, a hydrologist at the University of California, Irvine, who was not involved in the study. “That’s a critical step.”
Overexploitation

The authors found that 20% of the world’s aquifers are being overexploited, some massively so. For example, the groundwater footprint for the Upper Ganges aquifer is more than 50 times the size of its aquifer, “so the rate of extraction is quite unsustainable there”, says Gleeson.

Yet Famiglietti notes that the study, which focuses on quantifying the rate of groundwater tapping versus recharging, underscores the lack of data we have on the amount of water currently in the world's aquifers. “The only way to answer the sustainability question is to answer how much water we actually have,” he says.

He predicts that a comprehensive picture would reveal that many more of the world’s aquifers are being tapped unsustainably. As certain regions face more frequent droughts and population growth, full characterization of aquifers worldwide, although expensive, will be necessary, adds Famiglietti.

But Gleeson adds that there is at least one significant source of hope. As much as 99% of the fresh, unfrozen water on the planet is groundwater. “It’s this huge reservoir that we have the potential to manage sustainably,” he says. “If we choose to.”



Instead we are using frakking the groundwater supply into a state of irreparable poison for a few years of gas, building leaky (1) oil pipelines over them(2) , allowing toxic waste dumps to seep down into or near groundwater currents... Short term gain for long term loss.

[RojoLeón]

http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/keystone-xl-pipeline-may-threaten-aquifer-that-irrigates-much-of-the-central-us/2012/08/06/7bf0215c-d4db-11e1-a9e3-c5249ea531ca_story.html

Keystone XL pipeline may threaten aquifer that irrigates much of the central U.S. (for 'may', read, definitely will leak and contaminate groundwater supply)

LINCOLN, NEB. — Jane Kleeb is a savvy activist who, Nebraska’s Republican governor once said, “has a tendency to shoot her mouth off most days.” A Florida native who moved to Nebraska in 2007 after marrying a rancher active in Democratic politics, she did as much as anyone to bring the massive Keystone XL crude oil pipeline to a halt last year.

James Goecke is a counterpoint to Kleeb. A hydrogeologist and professor emeritus at the University of Nebraska in Lincoln, he has been measuring water tables in Nebraska’s ecologically sensitive Sand Hills region since 1970 and has shunned the political limelight — until now. He recently appeared in an ad for the pipeline’s owner, TransCanada, rebutting some of the arguments against the project and its new route.

Opponents of the proposed Keystone XL pipeline gathered in Spalding, Neb., for a cookout to thank state senator Ken Haar for his work to reroute the pipeline away from Nebraska's Sand Hills and portions of the Ogallala Aquifer. But in spite of this reroute, many of the Nebraskans at this event do not want to see the pipeline built at all.

Under ordinary circumstances, Kleeb and Goecke would be natural allies. Democrats in a red state, they both care about preserving Nebraska’s unique environment. Instead, they are divided over Keystone XL, a 1,700-mile steel pipeline that would carry heavy, low-quality crude from Canada’s oil sands to refineries in Texas.

At the heart of their battle is whether the pipeline would pose a threat to the massive Ogallala Aquifer — one of the world’s largest underground sources of fresh water. By one calculation, it holds enough water to cover the country’s 48 contiguous states two feet deep. The Ogallala stretches beneath most of Nebraska from the Sand Hills in the west to the outskirts of Omaha. And it runs from South Dakota well past Lubbock, Tex.

Named after a Northern Plains tribe, the Ogallala provides water to farms in eight states, accounting for a quarter of the nation’s cropland, as well as municipal drinking wells. Though early white explorers who saw this apparently arid part of the Great Plains called it a “great American desert,” the aquifer has turned it into America’s breadbasket.

The spongelike aquifer formed more than 20 million years ago, when erosions of gravel and sand from the Rocky Mountains were washed downstream. It is replenished by rain and melting snow, but it gets just two to five inches of precipitation a year, according to a ­TransCanada filing to the Nebraska Department of Environmental Quality. Much of the water it holds was absorbed thousands or millions of years ago.

In some places the aquifer is buried 1,200 feet deep, but in many places it is at or very close to the surface, often less than five feet below ground. In these places, you can literally stick a stake in the ground and hit water. Extensive stretches of Nebraska’s plains require no irrigation; to keep cattle watered, ranchers just dig a hole and the water flows in.

That’s where concerns about the Keystone XL came in. Its original route traversed 92 miles of the Sand Hills and the Ogallala. TransCanada, which said it would bury the pipeline at least four feet underground, could in many places be putting it in water.

If the pipeline should spring a leak where it touches the aquifer or even above it, Kleeb and other opponents say, oil could quickly seep into and through the porous, sandy soil. The Ogallala, Kleeb said last year in a television interview, is “a very fragile ecosystem, literally made of sand. . . . To have a pipeline crossing that region is just mind-boggling.”

She cited University of Nebraska civil engineering professor John Stansbury, who drew on pipelines’ history and TransCanada regulatory filings to predict that during the projected 50-year life span of the pipeline, “there would be 91 leaks . . . that could potentially put 6.5 million gallons of tar sands oil in the Ogallala aquifer and essentially contaminate our drinking water.”

He maintained that a worst-case spill in the Sand Hills region could pollute 4.9 billion gallons of groundwater with a “plume” of contaminants 40 feet thick, 500 feet wide and 15 miles long.

The message rallied Nebraskans from ranches to cities, and it was what President Obama pointed to in January when he rejected the initial Keystone XL route. In May, TransCanada submitted a revised route to the State Department, bypassing the Sand Hills but still passing over some parts of the aquifer.

“The Ogallala aquifer is the greatest underground water source, I believe, in the world,” said Gerald E. Happ, whose ranch in Greeley the pipeline originally would have crossed. “And it’s the purest. . . . And we need the water, and maybe the water may be way more precious than the oil sometime in the future.”

Expert is ‘embarrassed’

All this offends Goecke, who even Stansbury calls “the number one expert” on the aquifer. Goecke says that many people have the wrong impression about the danger a pipeline leak would pose to the Ogallala. It’s not like dropping oil into a lake, he says; remember, the aquifer is more like a sponge.

He said people “were concerned that any spill would contaminate and ruin the water in the entire aquifer, and that’s just practically impossible.” To do that, the oil would essentially have to run uphill, he said. “The gradient of the groundwater is from west to east; 75 percent to 80 percent of the aquifer is west of the pipeline, and any contamination can’t move up gradient or up slope,” he said.

“Secondly,” Goecke added, “any leakage would be very localized. . . . A spill wouldn’t be nice, but it would certainly be restricted to within a half-mile of the pipeline.” He predicted that the varied layers of fine-grained seams of silt and clay would contain the flow of oil.

After TransCanada submitted a revised Keystone XL route that veered east of the Sand Hills, Goecke agreed to appear in a television ad for TransCanada.

“I’ve spent my career drilling holes to and through the Ogallala Formation. I’ve probably seen as much of the Ogallala as anybody,” he says on camera. “There’s a misconception that if the aquifer is contaminated, the entire water supply of Nebraska is going to be endangered, and that’s absolutely false. If people recognize the science of the situation, I think that should allay a lot of the fears.”

Kleeb sees the ad as a betrayal.

“Dr. Goecke . . . at one point was raising the same red flags many of us still are today,” said Kleeb. “In his original testimony to our state [legislature] in 2010, he said he actually does not know [the impact on the Ogallala] since he does not know how tar sands and the chemicals mixed with it will affect the aquifer. To say a spill will be ‘localized’ is just spin by TransCanada to try to ease the valid concerns we all have — the unknown risks.”

The full story about Goecke is a bit more complicated.

“I was embarrassed about the ad because I knew I would look like a shill for TransCanada,” said Goecke, who wasn’t paid for appearing in it. “But what I talked about was common sense.”

While Goecke thinks some threats have been exaggerated, he has his own worries about the pipeline. Where the revised route crosses Holt County, he says, the water table is so near the surface that leaks would go into it more quickly and directly “and foul stuff up.” According to TransCanada’s April 18 filing with Nebraska’s environment department, 10.48 miles of the new pipeline route would cross areas where the depth to groundwater is five to 10 feet.

Goecke also worries about the crossing of the broad, shallow Platte River, because if oil leaked there, “that could get downstream and foul the water supply for Omaha and Lincoln.”

But Goecke believes TransCanada has taken precautions. It plans to drill far under the riverbed to avoid the problem other pipelines have encountered when riverbeds change and trees or other debris swept downstream tear holes in the pipe. TransCanada, whose new Nebraska route includes 29 year-round water crossings, has also said it would make the pipeline thicker in sensitive areas.

TransCanada has tried to ease anxieties about leaks. At its Calgary headquarters, the company has a control room that monitors pipeline pressures throughout its network. There are 16,000 data points on the existing Keystone pipeline, completed last year, and they are refreshed every five seconds, the company says.

Quickly detecting a pressure drop that could indicate a leak is essential; the flow rate on the existing pipeline is about 410 barrels a minute, and the capacity of the new line would be about a third bigger. The company says that it can isolate a piece of pipeline and shut off the flow of oil in just 15 minutes.

TransCanada chief executive Russ Girling said in an interview, however, that in the event of a spill in the ground, “the oil doesn’t migrate from that spot. It doesn’t go anywhere. This notion that we have a plume of oil . . . that doesn’t occur.”

In Canada, the company has already drilled deep under the Red Deer River, one of the two biggest Canadian rivers the new line would cross. Using horizontal drilling pioneered in the oil industry, TransCanada has burrowed a 11 / 2-mile-long hole, 230 feet under the riverbed, and pulled the steel pipe through. A small piece of the pipeline, sealed, is visible on either side awaiting the next stage of construction.

But Stansbury says there still isn’t enough known. While he conceded in an interview that his worst-case scenario might be overstated, he added that “an adequate assessment of the risks hasn’t been made” and that TransCanada is required to analyze such a scenario as part of its environmental impact study.

Other environmental threats

Oil isn’t the only threat to the Ogallala.

Pipeline supporters accuse landowners who oppose it of being blind to the damage they themselves have done.

The aquifer has long been drained for irrigation and for industrial uses such as ethanol plants, which turn corn into motor fuel. From the time humans began extracting water from the aquifer through 2000, the volume of water in the aquifer fell by about 6 percent. Since then irrigation and industrial usage has accelerated.

The decline in the aquifer isn’t uniform. From 2007 to 2009, for example, there was an increase in water stored in the aquifer in Nebraska overall, according to Goecke, but in southwest Nebraska water levels are falling; by 2007, there were 41 / 2 times as many irrigation wells in the state as there had been in 1960. In north Texas and west Kansas, the Ogallala water levels are falling precipitously, more than 100 feet in 60 years, according to a University of Texas at Austin study.

And the use of pesticides on cropland has polluted parts of the formerly pristine aquifer.

But many environmentalists say that the pipeline poses special dangers: They say that ingredients of crude from oil sands make pipelines more prone to leaks. They argue that the diluted bitumen, or “dilbit,” from the oil sands can separate under pressure and temperature and create explosive natural gas, heavy compounds and corrosive acids.

Environmentalists also point to Enbridge, another Canadian pipeline company, which two years ago suffered a pipeline rupture that dumped at least 20,000 barrels into Talmadge Creek, ultimately fouling more than 40 miles of the Kalamazoo River near Marshall, Mich.

Unlike conventional crude oil, which floats in water, the bitumen in the oil sands crude sank to the riverbed, making it hard to recover. Higher levels of benzene in the pipeline mixture forced a temporary evacuation of the area.

“Just looking at the Kalamazoo spill, it does scare us as to what a spill could do in our state and water supply,” Kleeb said.

TransCanada has also suffered leaks, though not as dire. The company’s existing Keystone pipeline has had 14 leaks, all at pumping stations where they were controlled. The smallest was “a few drops,” the company says, but the biggest was about 400 barrels. The company has identified a piece of equipment at fault, a fitting that failed aboveground, and replaced them up and down the line.

“When people talk about the 14 spills . . . every one of them was a leak on our pump stations, and they’re minor,” said TransCanada’s Girling. “They are coming through seals. . . . Our pipe has not leaked once. It’s welded. And if it breaks underground, [the oil] doesn’t go anywhere. We shut the pipeline down.”

But Kleeb said: “TransCanada can not say they are building the ‘safest’ pipeline with the ‘best’ technology if . . . their line already had 14 leaks — and I don’t care if it’s only been on the pumping stations: Leaks are leaks, and 14 is not safe.”

“Jane Kleeb’s big political argument was ‘protect the aquifer,’ ” said a longtime Republican Party activist, who asked for anonymity to protect his business relationships. “You’ll get a sympathetic ear for that from people living in Lincoln or Omaha. Now with new route she’s still against it, which means she’s really just against fossil fuels.”

Indeed, the new route has not mollified Kleeb, who says it still runs over ecologically sensitive areas. Kleeb also doubts political arguments that the pipeline will enhance U.S. energy security; she says that much of the crude in the line would be refined in Texas and sold overseas.

“I hate bullies. I hate corporations who think because they have a lot of money and political officials in their pocket they can run all over landowners,” Kleeb said. “I also don’t like politicians saying we have to be ‘energy-independent’ and then allow an export pipeline to cross our land and water while pretending it is helping make our country energy-independent.”



Short term gain (for a very select few) and long to permanent term loss for many:

For the Tar Sand executives: Bonuses, share options, tax free offshore accounts, Vegas blow outs, lapdances with happy endings,..

For the water drinkers: Childhood cancers, Downs Syndrome, genetic deformities, permanent gene mutations, mental illness,..

[RojoLeón]

http://www.propublica.org/article/feds-link-water-contamination-to-fracking-for-first-time

Feds Link Water Contamination to Fracking for the First Time (I mean, who knew? Injecting vast quantities of carcinogens and toxins, mixed with water, deep into the earth would create contamination of the groundwater aquifers down there? What a fucking surprise this is)

In a first, federal environment officials today scientifically linked underground water pollution with hydraulic fracturing, concluding that contaminants found in central Wyoming were likely caused by the gas drilling process.

The findings by the Environmental Protection Agency come partway through a separate national study by the agency to determine whether fracking presents a risk to water resources.

In the 121-page draft report released today, EPA officials said that the contamination near the town of Pavillion, Wyo., had most likely seeped up from gas wells and contained at least 10 compounds known to be used in frack fluids.

“The presence of synthetic compounds such as glycol ethers … and the assortment of other organic components is explained as the result of direct mixing of hydraulic fracturing fluids with ground water in the Pavillion gas field,” the draft report states. “Alternative explanations were carefully considered.”

The agency’s findings could be a turning point in the heated national debate about whether contamination from fracking is happening, and are likely to shape how the country regulates and develops natural gas resources in the Marcellus Shale and across the Eastern Appalachian states.

Some of the findings in the report also directly contradict longstanding arguments by the drilling industry for why the fracking process is safe: that hydrologic pressure would naturally force fluids down, not up; that deep geologic layers provide a watertight barrier preventing the movement of chemicals towards the surface; and that the problems with the cement and steel barriers around gas wells aren’t connected to fracking.

Environmental advocates greeted today’s report with a sense of vindication and seized the opportunity to argue for stronger federal regulation of fracking.

“No one can accurately say that there is ‘no risk’ where fracking is concerned,” wrote Amy Mall, a senior policy analyst at the Natural Resources Defense Council, on her blog. “This draft report makes obvious that there are many factors at play, any one of which can go wrong. Much stronger rules are needed to ensure that well construction standards are stronger and reduce threats to drinking water.”

A spokesman for EnCana, the gas company that owns the Pavillion wells, did not immediately respond to a request for comment. In an email exchange after the EPA released preliminary water test data two weeks ago, the spokesman, Doug Hock, denied that the company’s actions were to blame for the pollution and suggested it was naturally caused.

“Nothing EPA presented suggests anything has changed since August of last year– the science remains inconclusive in terms of data, impact, and source,” Hock wrote. “It is also important to recognize the importance of hydrology and geology with regard to the sampling results in the Pavillion Field. The field consists of gas-bearing zones in the near subsurface, poor general water quality parameters and discontinuous water-bearing zones.”

The EPA’s findings immediately triggered what is sure to become a heated political debate as members of Congress consider afresh proposals to regulate fracking. After a phone call with EPA chief Lisa Jackson this morning, Sen. James Inhofe, R-Okla., told a Senate panel that he found the agency’s report on the Pavillion-area contamination “offensive.” Inhofe’s office had challenged the EPA’s investigation in Wyoming last year, accusing the agency of bias.

Residents began complaining of fouled water near Pavillion in the mid-1990s, and the problems appeared to get worse around 2004. Several residents complained that their well water turned brown shortly after gas wells were fracked nearby, and, for a time, gas companies operating in the area supplied replacement drinking water to residents.

Beginning in 2008, the EPA took water samples from resident’s drinking water wells, finding hydrocarbons and traces of contaminants that seemed like they could be related to fracking. In 2010, another round of sampling confirmed the contamination, and the EPA, along with federal health officials, cautioned residents not to drink their water and to ventilate their homes when they bathed because the methane in the water could cause an explosion.

To confirm their findings, EPA investigators drilled two water monitoring wells to 1,000 feet. The agency released data from these test wells in November that confirmed high levels of carcinogenic chemicals such as benzene, and a chemical compound called 2 Butoxyethanol, which is known to be used in fracking.

Still, the EPA had not drawn conclusions based on the tests and took pains to separate its groundwater investigation in Wyoming from the national controversy around hydraulic fracturing. Agriculture, drilling, and old pollution from waste pits left by the oil and gas industry were all considered possible causes of the contamination.

In the report released today, the EPA said that pollution from 33 abandoned oil and gas waste pits – which are the subject of a separate cleanup program – are indeed responsible for some degree of shallow groundwater pollution in the area. Those pits may be the source of contamination affecting at least 42 private water wells in Pavillion. But the pits could not be blamed for contamination detected in the water monitoring wells 1,000 feet underground.

That contamination, the agency concluded, had to have been caused by fracking.

The EPA’s findings in Wyoming are specific to the region’s geology; the Pavillion-area gas wells were fracked at shallower depths than many of the wells in the Marcellus shale and elsewhere.

Investigators tested the cement and casing of the gas wells and found what they described as “sporadic bonding” of the cement in areas immediately above where fracking took place. The cement barrier meant to protect the well bore and isolate the chemicals in their intended zone had been weakened and separated from the well, the EPA concluded.

The report also found that hydrologic pressure in the Pavillion area had pushed fluids from deeper geologic layers towards the surface. Those layers were not sufficient to provide a reliable barrier to contaminants moving upward, the report says.

Throughout its investigation in Wyoming, The EPA was hamstrung by a lack of disclosure about exactly what chemicals had been used to frack the wells near Pavillion. EnCana declined to give federal officials a detailed breakdown of every compound used underground. The agency relied instead on more general information supplied by the company to protect workers’ health.

Hock would not say whether EnCana had used 2 BE, one of the first chemicals identified in Pavillion and known to be used in fracking, at its wells in Pavillion. But he was dismissive of its importance in the EPA’s findings. “There was a single detection of 2-BE among all the samples collected in the deep monitoring wells. It was found in one sample by only one of three labs,” he wrote in his reply to ProPublica two weeks ago. “Inconsistency in detection and non-repeatability shouldn't be construed as fact.”

The EPA’s draft report will undergo a public review and peer review process, and is expected to be finalized by spring.

[RojoLeón]

http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2008/solar-textiles-0609.html

Getting wrapped up in solar textiles
 
MIT lecturer focuses on flexible photovoltaic materials

Sheila Kennedy, an expert in the integration of solar cell technology in architecture who is now at MIT, creates designs for flexible photovoltaic materials that may change the way buildings receive and distribute energy.

These new materials, known as solar textiles, work like the now-familiar photovoltaic cells in solar panels. Made of semiconductor materials, they absorb sunlight and convert it into electricity.

Kennedy uses 3-D modeling software to design with solar textiles, generating membrane-like surfaces that can become energy-efficient cladding for roofs or walls. Solar textiles may also be draped like curtains.

"Surfaces that define space can also be producers of energy," says Kennedy, a visiting lecturer in architecture. "The boundaries between traditional walls and utilities are shifting."

Principal architect in the Boston firm, Kennedy & Violich Architecture, Ltd., and design director of its materials research group, KVA Matx, Kennedy came to MIT this year. She was inspired, she says, by President Susan Hockfield's plan to make MIT the "energy university" and by MIT's interdisciplinary energy curriculum that integrates research and practice.

This spring, Kennedy taught a new MIT architecture course, Soft Space: Sustainable Strategies for Textile Construction. She challenged the students to design architectural proposals for a new fast train station and public market in Porto, Portugal.

For Mary Hale, graduate student in architecture, Kennedy's Soft Space course was an inspiration to pursue photovoltaic technology in her master's thesis.

"I have always been interested in photovoltaics, but before this studio, I am not sure that I would have felt empowered to integrate them into a personal, self-propelled, project," she says.

Kennedy, for her part, will pursue her research in pushing the envelope of energy-efficiency and architecture. A recent project, "Soft House," exhibited at the Vitra Design Museum in Essen, Germany, illustrates what Kennedy means when she says the boundaries between walls and utilities are changing.

For Soft House, Kennedy transformed household curtains into mobile, flexible energy-harvesting surfaces with integrated solid-state lighting. Soft House curtains move to follow the sun and can generate up to 16,000 watt-hours of electricity--more than half the daily power needs of an average American household.

Although full-scale Soft House prototypes were successfully developed, the project points to a challenge energy innovators and other inventors face, Kennedy says. "Emerging technologies tend to under-perform compared with dominant mainstream technologies."

For example, organic photovoltaics (OPV), an emergent solar nano-technology used by the Soft House design team, are currently less efficient than glass-based solar technologies, Kennedy says.

But that lower efficiency needn't be an insurmountable roadblock to the marketplace, Kennedy says, because Soft House provides an actual application of the unique material advantages of solar nano-technologies without having to compete with the centralized grid.

Which brings her back to the hands-on, prototype-building approach Kennedy hopes to draw from in her teaching and work at MIT.

"Working prototypes are a very important demonstration tool for showing people that there are whole new ways to think about energy," she says.


http://www.asce.org/CEMagazine/ArticleNs.aspx?id=25769810548

UCLA Researchers Develop Transparent Solar Film





By Laurie A. Shuster



Polymer solar cells similar to those already on the market—but smaller, more flexible, and more transparent—have been produced in a lab at the University of California, Los Angeles. Courtesy of Rui Zhu, Ph.D./UCLA


A thin, flexible, transparent film that can be sprayed or painted on almost any surface could generate electricity cleanly and reliably in the very near future

A thin, flexible, transparent film that can be sprayed or painted on almost any surface could generate electricity cleanly and reliably in the very near future.

August 7, 2012—It’s hot, and your car has been sitting in the parking lot all day, absorbing light and—worse—heat. It’s a pipe dream to hope that someday all that light and heat will be converted into energy, lowering your gas bill and powering your vehicle’s air-conditioning system, which now is on full blast.

Maybe not. Researchers at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) have developed a thin, transparent film that can be applied to many surfaces—including windows and windshields—to generate electricity without obstructing views or significantly altering the color of the surface to which it is applied. Unlike other thin-film solar photovoltaics, which absorb the full spectrum of light (including visible light) and thus are dark, the UCLA team’s unique polymer solar cell (PSC) absorbs light almost exclusively from the infrared spectrum, rendering it nearly invisible.

“That is the difference in our technology,” says Yang Yang, Ph.D., a professor of materials science and engineering at UCLA and the holder of the Carol and Lawrence E. Tannas, Jr., Endowed Chair in Engineering. He is also the director of the Nano Renewable Energy Center, which is part of the California NanoSystems Institute, a research facility with operations at UCLA and the University of California, Santa Barbara. Yang, who is leading the research, says that while the human eye sees only the 400 to 700 nm “visible” spectrum of light, his team’s plastic polymer absorbs light in the 650 to 900 nm spectrum, rendering it 70 percent invisible. “It’s essentially transparent,” he says.

The PSC is made from a material that is lightweight and flexible and can be applied to almost any surface, including buildings, bridges, and other exterior infrastructure, as well as the windows and rooftops of homes. Even nonfenestrated building exteriors could be coated with the sprayed- or painted-on film, Yang says. “The biggest impact this concept could have is on where to put solar cells in the future,” he explains. “Right now you think of two places, on the roof of a building or out in big solar farms. What if we can have solar cells that normal people can have and not even know it?” In his California location, he says, more people are driving electric cars, and he would like to be able to see that electricity generated right from the exterior of the cars themselves. “This technology could potentially do that,” he says.

The PSC can be painted or sprayed on surfaces during construction, Yang says, and in theory the material could also be produced in sheet form, much like the films that residents of colder climates attach to their windows in the winter to retain heat. “In principle, I can imagine that we can create invisible solar cells in plastic film, and one could buy them at a place like Home Depot and laminate [them] to the windows. All you need is to connect the wires to plugs.”

The PSC incorporates thousands of silver nanowires, which serve as electrodes, in each square centimeter. These wires are connected by titanium oxide nanoparticles, which replace the opaque metal electrodes used in traditional solar films. “Each nanowire has to connect to each other wire to conduct electricity,” Yang says. “The titanium nanoparticle plays the role of bringing those wires into physical contact.”

The small (0.1 cm2) pieces of PSC that have been created in the lab offer a conversion efficiency of roughly 4 percent, Yang says, and while this is low, it’s not as bad as it sounds in the realm of solar power. While expensive solar panels on satellites, for example, can operate at efficiencies of more than 30 percent, rooftop units generally offer only 15 percent, and other thin films operate at 12 percent or less, Yang says. If his team can bring the efficiency of their transparent films up to 10 percent in the laboratory—which he thinks can be accomplished in three to five years—he believes the product will be marketable. “Imagine if we could turn every window on every high-rise in New York City into a solar generator at 10 percent,” he says. “I could retire.”

But Yang knows that to turn the PSCs from a good idea into a marketable one he will need input and feedback from builders, manufacturers, and government entities. “Our technology alone cannot do it,” he says. “We must work with the builders.”

He also hopes that, once the technology becomes viable, the engineering community can work with the relevant government entities to adapt building codes so that the PSCs can be used immediately, rather than haggle over the rules and regulations for years after the product is released. “They should have people work together so the building code is generated ahead of time,” he says. “I hope when the technology is ready, the builders and the government will be ready.”

[RojoLeón]

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/the-terrible-legacy-of-agent-orange-8034869.html

The terrible legacy of Agent Orange

Forty years after war ended, Washington begins decontamination of worst-affected areas in Vietnam

Tran Thi Hoan, 26, studied medicine only to be told that she couldn't become a doctor because of a war fought 20 years before she was born. The ostensible reason was that she had no legs or left hand, but the main reason, and the cause of so much misery blighting the lives of millions of other Vietnamese, is the 20 million gallons of Agent Orange sprayed in her country by US forces in the Sixties.

She is one of three million Vietnamese affected by the dioxin in Agent Orange – a poison that has caused untold cancers and an estimated 150,000 birth defects – which continue down the generations to this day.

Last week, 40 years after the war ended, the US began a programme to try to decontaminate the worst-affected parts of the country, but even if the belated action grows into something far larger, it can never deal with the dreadful legacy of Agent Orange.

In a museum in the suburbs of Saigon, there is an exhibit where hundreds of photos of deformed adults, children and babies hang next to a copy of a letter which Tran Thi Hoan wrote to Barack Obama in 2009. After describing how doctors discouraged her from starting a family, fearing her children would be born with similar defects, she asked if the President would "spare a little time to resolve this forgotten problem", after decades of quibbling over the issue in Washington.

Between 1962 and 1971, the US air force dropped around 20 million gallons of the herbicide during Operation Ranch Hand. Around 4,000 villages and communes in South Vietnam were sprayed, leaving at least 4.5 million Vietnamese exposed to the substance, according to census reports taken at the time. Five million acres of farmland were destroyed in the process (the size of Yorkshire, Lancashire and Northumberland combined), of which two million remain barren today.

Its claimed purpose was to defoliate the forest canopy that covered the Viet Cong's troop movements and supply lines. Early on in the campaign, US planes dropped pamphlets written in Vietnamese assuring farmers that the chemicals were harmless to humans and animals. In spite of alleged warnings from chemical companies that the herbicide was potentially harmful, the US reportedly dropped the chemical at a higher concentration than what was recommended for destroying foliage.

As a result, the Vietnam Red Cross estimates that three million Vietnamese were left suffering from spina bifida, Parkinson's and heart diseases as a result. Since then, at least 150,000 children have been born with birth defects, a number which the Vietnamese government claims could be as high as half a million.

Various court cases and pleas to the US government by Vietnamese victims have proved fruitless, whereas American veterans exposed to Agent Orange have had their appeals answered. Families of former US soldiers suffering because of dioxin poisoning get up to $1,500 (£956) a month in compensation, while Vietnamese families who have been affected receive around 80,000 dong a month (just over $5) in government support for their disabled children.

In 1984, chemical companies that manufactured the herbicide settled a class-action suit by US veterans for $180m. Then, in 2010, 200,000 veterans filed claims based on a policy change by the Department of Veterans Affairs which gave them easier access to compensation for health problems caused by exposure to the defoliant.

Vietnamese victims filed a similar lawsuit in 2004. The case brought by the Vietnam Association for Victims of Agent Orange against the chemical companies failed, with the court ruling that the herbicide was used to protect US troops against ambush and was not intended to be used against human populations. The manufacturers were also protected by a contract with the US government which employed them to manufacture and supply them with the herbicide during the war.

For years, Washington has avoided discussing the Agent Orange-related health problems among the Vietnamese and the need for more scientific research into the problem. Since 2007 it has given about $60m for environmental restoration and social services in Vietnam, but last week's project is its first direct involvement in decontaminating areas affected by dioxin.

The $43m project, which began last Thursday, is expected to be completed in four years. It covers a 47-acre site in the coastal city of Da Nang, one of many "hot spots" that have been identified on the perimeter of former US bases where Agent Orange was handled; 50 years on, dioxins still into the surrounding soil, posing a risk to the population.

Even though this is a step forward by the US in a relationship with Vietnam that has been hampered by the issue, the lasting legacy of Agent Orange will need a far more substantial input to repair the damage. In 2007, the non-partisan Aspen Institute determined that it would cost the US government $300m over 10 years to eliminate the remaining health threat and improve the lives of disabled people in Vietnam.

[Devon Red]

I saw someone in the Standard Chartered thread talking about 'guerrilla farming', or somesuch: Well, if you are that way inclined, now is a good time to start. Food prices are going to rise (globally) during the next 6-12 months at a rate far exceeding normal inflation.

I started a bit of guerrilla gardening and land share growing because I didn't expect to be able to get any land of my own or an allotment. When I went on the waiting list for an allotment I was told it could be up to 6 years before my number came up. 3 months later I got an allotment. Sometimes the general negativity of anyone involved in bureaucracy is enough to put people off even trying.

If anyone is interested in growing your own food and being slightly less dependent on global agri-business then there are lots of ways to do it. It's also not as much hard work as I was told it was going to be.