September 2, 2010 by mike.

Initial reports say the crew got off and all are accounted for. Hopefully, this will not turn out to be another runaway well.

clipped from news.yahoo.com Gulf oil platform explodes, burning off La. coast GRAND ISLE, La. – An offshore petroleum platform exploded and was burning Thursday in the Gulf of Mexico about 80 miles off the Louisiana coast, west of the site where BP’s undersea well spilled after a rig explosion. The Coast Guard says no one was killed in the blast, which was reported by a commercial helicopter flying over the area Thursday morning. All 13 people aboard the rig have been accounted for, with one injury. The extent of the injury was not known. The Department of Homeland Security said the platform was in about 2,500 feet of water and owned by Mariner Energy of Houston. DHS said it was not producing oil and gas.

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August 29, 2010 by mike.

I think that covers our options.

clipped from climateprogress.org Real adaptation is as politically tough as real mitigation, but much more expensive and not as effective in reducing future misery Rhetorical adaptation, however, is a political winner. Too bad it means preventable suffering for billions. clipped from climateprogress.org We basically have three choices: mitigation, adaptation and suffering. We’re going to do some of each. The question is what the mix is going to be. The more mitigation we do, the less adaptation will be required and the less suffering there will be. clipped from climateprogress.org August 27, 2010

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August 28, 2010 by mike.

I guess we should sing Happy Birthday.   But it’s a little discouraging really.

Real Climate remembers climatologist Wally Broecker’s 1975 article in Science where he laid out the problem of CO2 accumulated heat on the planet.

Real Climate is for climate wonks. Always worth keeping an eye on the discussion there.

clipped from www.realclimate.org Happy 35th birthday, global warming! Global warming is turning 35! Not only has the current spate of global warming been going on for about 35 years now, but also the term “global warming” will have its 35th anniversary next week. On 8 August 1975, Wally Broecker published his paper “Are we on the brink of a pronounced global warming?” in the journal Science. That appears to be the first use of the term “global warming” in the scientific literature (at least it’s the first of over 10,000 papers for this search term according to the ISI database of journal articles). To those who even today claim that global warming is not predictable, the anniversary of Broecker’s paper is a reminder that global warming was actually predicted before it became evident in the global temperature records over a decade later (when Jim Hansen in 1988 famously stated that “global warming is here”).

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August 27, 2010 by mike.

Two stories that are in the news caught my attention.  The massive egg recall story reminds me why I buy my eggs from the Egg Lady in South Olympia.  She has a pretty big operation, hundreds of chickens, but the chickens are free to run in a fairly large space.  They look like happy chickens, if chickens experience joy walking around pecking at the ground.  It’s not an industrial scene where the chickens are trapped in very tight spaces with lots of other chickens.  This small farm operation looks good to me.  The industrialization of farming has some risks as the recent massive egg recall suggests.

The other story that caught my attention was the judicial decision that has effectively stopped embryonic stem cell research again.   There are lots of ways to look at this story, but I was thinking about the inconsistency of our political positions on the sanctity of life.  Dvorak Uncensored was also contemplating the sharia law implications of the debate.

Folks who are emphatically opposed to stem cell research because they believe a fertilized egg is a human being don’t seem to get up in arms over genetically modified crops and animals.  That upset is left to more liberal, tree hugging types who are not impressed with the inherent humanity of an embryonic stem cell line. And it continues down the line, progressives often don’t like the death penalty or drone attacks that take human life, but the conservatives who get apoplectic over human embryos seem less distressed by collateral damage, you know, children maimed and killed by proximity to our war on terror.

I am uneasy about the use of embryos as basic fuel for scientific research, but then I am uneasy about embryos in general.  I have a sense there are too many of us walking and pecking on this small blue planet and I don’t see how this species can collectively sort out the question of how, when, why we can decide who gets to carry a human embryo to term, and as the environment degrades, we face the demand to feel compassion over and over again for large numbers of human beings displaced by extreme weather, flooding, by drought, by food shortage, and sea rise displacement is on the horizon.  We are in this together, whether we are the folks displaced or the temporarily comfortable worrying about the folks dealing with flooding in Pakistan, or Tennessee or wherever.

Store owner Richard Dorer in the Tennessee link mentions that this is the second thousand year flood that has brought water into his store.  I don’t know if he has his stats down quite right, but I am willing to wager that Mr. Dorer believes that something is different about weather patterns on the planet.

Connect the dots.

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August 15, 2010 by mike.

Well, it sounds better than tree burning for electricity.

The industry types got biomass included in the green energy tax credits and it’s off and running, but is it green?

Dr. Tom Termotto and I don’t think so.

clipped from concernedcitizensofflorida.wordpress.com “. . . Biomass incineration is NOT clean and green, it’s not sustainable and renewable; it’s not carbon neutral, not cost effective; and it’s neither environmentally friendly nor ecologically sound.” By Dr. Tom Termotto Shall we begin by stating that biomass incinerators are rarely, if ever, factually represented by the many sales pitches we see issued by the Energy Industry sector that promotes them. In fact, the marketing language that has now become de rigueur is reminiscent of George Orwell’s 1984. “War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.” To the point, biomass incineration is NOT clean and green, sustainable and renewable, carbon neutral and cost effective, or environmentally friendly and ecologically sound. It is quite the opposite of these beautiful and alluring marketing slogans. Biomass incineration is in reality quite polluting, unsustainable to the extreme and, in some cases, less environmentally friendly than coal burning plants.

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August 11, 2010 by mike.

The NYT has a story on the fires in Russia. Sounds a little distressing, but Dr. Onischenko says everything is fine.

That’s the official story.

Ok, but with a lot of folks pushing nuclear as clean, green energy source, maybe we should challenge the industry technicians to show that they can clean up an accident site before we commit to more potential accident sites. I realize that this is a non-starter because for the most part, the industry cannot clean up a site like Chernobyl or Three Mile Island, but what does that tell you?

Of course, the deniers will say no connection between the heat waves stoking fires like these or the ones in Australia because they can find a datapoint somewhere that shows an unusually early or late frost event. There is a connection between these extreme weather events and global warming. It is predicted and documented.

Let’s deal with some big data sets, please.

clipped from www.nytimes.com Russian Fires Raise Fears of Radioactivity MOSCOW — As if things in Russia were not looking sufficiently apocalyptic already, with 100-degree temperatures and noxious fumes rolling in from burning peat bogs and forests, there is growing alarm here that fires in regions coated with fallout from the Chernobyl nuclear disaster 24 years ago could now be emitting plumes of radioactive smoke. “Fires on these territories will without a doubt lead to an increase in radiation,” said Vladimir Chuprov, head of the energy program at Greenpeace Russia. “The smoke will spread and the radioactive traces will spread. The amount depends upon the force of the wind.”Russia’s emergency minister, Sergei K. Shoigu, warned last week that the fires could release radioactive particles. Responding to the Greenpeace statement on Tuesday, Dr. Gennadi G. Onishchenko, Russia’s chief sanitary doctor, played down the danger. “There is no need to sow panic,” he told the Interfax news agency. “Everything is fine.”

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August 5, 2010 by mike.

To some extent this is just another weather story. Dangerous heatwaves are not new, but it’s worth noting that this article makes zero mention of global warming and there is no question that these dangerous heatwaves will be more common, more deadly as our global climate warms.

It seems to me that it is a necessary function of the press to make these connections so that folks can calculate their commitment to addressing their personal commitment to halting global warming. It’s not just about polar bears.

Stay cool.

clipped from www.cnn.com (CNN) — Forecasters have issued advisories for at least 18 states Thursday as dangerous heat continues to scorch parts of the South, Midwest and the North. A combination of sweltering temperatures and high humidity could cause heat-related illnesses, the National Weather Service said. The number of suspected heat-related deaths reported by health officials across the South and Midwest in the past week reached at least nine Wednesday as temperatures continued to hit triple digits. Scorching heat prompts warnings in 18 states the CNN Wire Staff August 5, 2010 9:09 a.m. EDT The heat index — what the temperature feels like when combined with the humidity — is soaring across much of the South. Those at greater risk include infants and young children, people 65 or older and those who are already ill, especially with heart disease or high blood pressure.

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July 29, 2010 by mike.

and the weather is more extreme and we are not taking the steps we need to take to change things.

Remember the folks who were saying it wasn’t real? Who would point to small data points and say, hey, why is this cooler? Those folks fall into two primary categories, tools of industries committed to profits that depend on continuing emission levels and fools. The fools are primarily made up of simple folks who could be manipulated by gun rights or race or abortion to oppose anything that Al Gore or folks on the political left (scientific thinkers?) had to say.

Folks are easily manipulated. One of the task of a free press is to reduce the manipulation by getting accurate information out. It’s hard competing with the flash and sizzle of Fox News. But the truth will out.

clipped from news.nationalgeographic.com   Global Warming “Undeniable,” U.S. Government Report Says Past decade hottest on record, NOAA study says. The retreating Iceberg Glacier in Chile’s Bernardo O’Higgins National Park (file). “Global warming is undeniable,” and it’s happening fast, a new U.S. government report says. Published July 28, 2010   An in-depth analysis of ten climate indicators all point to a marked warming over the past three decades, with the most recent decade being the hottest on record, according to the latest of the U.S. National Atmospheric and Oceanic Administration’s annual “State of the Climate” reports, which was released Wednesday. Reliable global climate record-keeping began in the 1880s. And for the first time, scientists put data from climate indicators—such as ocean temperature and sea-ice cover—together in one place. Their consistency “jumps off the page at you,” report co-author Derek Arndt said. “This is like going to the doctor and getting your respiratory test and circulatory test and your neurosystem test,” said Arndt, head of the Climate Monitoring Branch of NOAA’s National Climatic Data Center.”It’s testing all the parts, and they’re all in agreement that the same thing’s going on.” Such climatic shifts are already ushering in extreme weather, which plagued much of the globe in 2009, according to the report. (See a world map of potential global warming impacts.) For instance, Australia experienced its third hottest year on record.On one February 2009 day—labeled “Black Saturday”—in Australia, 400 wildfires swept across the state of Victoria, killing 173 people and destroying 3,500 buildings. (See pictures of the Australian fires.)

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July 20, 2010 by mike.

Good news and bad news. Good news is that BP may have a plan to address the eco-disaster they have created, the bad news is that the BP plan may rely on Photo Shop.

clipped from www.americablog.com clipped from www.americablog.com Monday, July 19, 2010 BP photoshops fake photo of crisis command center, posts on main BP site by John Aravosis (DC)  on 7/19/2010 10:37:00 PM   Bumped UPDATE: 11:14PM Eastern: BP has now posted the “original” photo, they claim. Except - surprise - they are refusing to post the high-resolution version of the new “original” photo. They posted the high-res version of the altered photo earlier, and in fact, that version is still live via a link below the new photo. Why not post the high-res version of the new “original” photo? Afraid someone is going to enlarge it and find out it’s fake too? UPDATE 10:37PM Eastern: The Washington Post has the story now. Oddly, BP is now claiming that the photo is real - but it showed blank screens, and rather than show blank screens at AP’s crisis center, they instead put fake content-filled screens in the photo. Uh, a few questions. 1) Why were the screens in the crisis center blank in the middle of the crisis? Coffee break? 2) The BP spokesman claims that the photographer photoshopped the changes. Really? A professional photographer hired by BP Photoshops so poorly that a 12 year old kid could do a better job. Really? Let me show you what BP said exactly, and then the photo that supposedly this “professional” edited: Scott Dean, a spokesman for BP, said that there was nothing sinister in the photo alteration and provided the original unaltered version. He said that a photographer working for the company had inserted the three images in spots where the video screens were blank. Now here is the Photoshop job that the “professional” photographer did - this is just one part of the photo that he screwed up:

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July 6, 2010 by mike.

So, BP said in their filing to drill the disastrous Gulf well that they could skim more than 490,000 barrels of oil a day in the event of a disaster, but it turns out that in 77 days of skimming they have only been able to collect a little more than 67,000 barrels of oil. According to my math, that’s less than 1,000 barrels per day instead of the 490,000 that BP said they could manage.

This disparity seems beyond belief. I favor criminal investigation of the BP filings to determine if fraud charges should be brought against the company and the individuals responsible for the filings.

clipped from www.washingtonpost.com Recovery effort falls vastly short of BP’s promises By Kimberly Kindy Washington Post Staff Writer Tuesday, July 6, 2010 In the 77 days since oil from the ruptured Deepwater Horizon began to gush into the Gulf of Mexico, BP has skimmed or burned about 60 percent of the amount it promised regulators it could remove in a single day. The disparity between what BP promised in its March 24 filing with federal regulators and the amount of oil recovered since the April 20 explosion underscores what some officials and environmental groups call a misleading numbers game that has led to widespread confusion about the extent of the spill and the progress of the recovery. “It’s clear they overreached,” said John F. Young Jr., council chairman in Louisiana’s Jefferson Parish. “I think the federal government should have at the very least picked up a phone and started asking some questions and challenged them about the accuracy of that number and tested the veracity of that claim.”In a March report that was not questioned by federal officials, BP said it had the capacity to skim and remove 491,721 barrels of oil each day in the event of a major spill. As of Monday, with about 2 million barrels released into the gulf, the skimming operations that were touted as key to preventing environmental disaster have averaged less than 900 barrels a day. Skimming has captured only 67,143 barrels, and BP has relied on burning to remove 238,095 barrels. Most of the oil recovered — about 632,410 barrels — was captured directly at the site of the leaking well.

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