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 29, 2010 by mike.

Planet Earth’s attic is on fire.

clipped from climateprogress.org Arctic sea ice volume heads toward record low as Northwest Passage melts free fourth year in a row Masters rebukes disinformers: “Diminishing the importance of Arctic sea ice loss by calling attention to Antarctic sea ice gain is like telling someone to ignore the fire smoldering in their attic, and instead go appreciate the coolness of the basement, because there is no fire there. Planet Earth’s attic is on fire.” Arctic sea ice volume heads toward record low as Northwest Passage melts free fourth year in a row Chris Mooney has a good piece in New Scientist, “Arctic ice: Less than meets the eye,” the source of the above figures.  Mooney focuses on the work of Canada’s David Barber — you can find his peer-reviewed work here:  “Where on Earth is it unusually warm? Greenland and the Arctic Ocean, which is full of rotten ice” — New study supports finding that “the amount of [multi-year] sea ice in the northern hemisphere was the lowest on record in 2009.” Mooney also discusses the PIOMAS ice volume model developed by the University of Washington’s Polar Science Center in Seattle, which I have been featuring on CP this year.  Their analysis finds “not only has the total volume of Arctic ice continued to decline since 2007, but that the rate of loss is accelerating” [see also Arctic death spiral: Naval Postgrad School’s Maslowski “projects ice-free* fall by 2016 (+/- 3 yrs)”].

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August 28, 2010 by mike.

Yes, please. Check your hatred. Check your lunacy. Check your bigotry before you go any further.

In NY the conflict, rhetoric and hate crimes are building up in response to the fear-mongering, the wedge-politics of the opposition to the Ground Zero mosque - Cordoba House, a community center blocks away from the Twin Towers.

In Olympia, the home of slain activist Rachel Corrie, the boycott divestment and sanction movement is roiling the community and spilling over around the Northwest Coast. BDS Olympia has made the news for its work to persuade the Olympia Food Co-op to join the BDS movement.

Many folks who feel a special kinship with the State of Israel are in an uproar and the community is engaged in an animated and heated debate about Israel, Palestine, boycotts, two state/one state solutions and more.

clipped from theactivist.org “This Is A Checkpoint!” Posted by Chris Maisano on 8/26/10 • Categorized as Culture,Domestic,International,News and Views When I first read about how Michael Enright nearly murdered New York City cab driver Ahmed Sharif simply because he is Muslim, I immediately assumed that the hysterical campaign against the Park51 “Ground Zero Mosque” had resulted in the kind of violent act it seemed it would inevitably produce. Over the last few weeks, the civic atmosphere here in New York turned poisonous as the conflict over Park51 reached a fever pitch. I have personally overheard numerous people around the city commenting ignorantly on the project, its backers, and Islam itself. Last Sunday, hundreds of people protested against the Park51 project in lower Manhattan in a demonstration inspired by raving Islamophobes like Pam Geller, whose Atlas Shrugs blog provides a glimpse into the terriyfing dreamscape that is the far-right id. Unsurprisigly, video emerged of a rabble of know-nothings accosting a black man falsely assumed to be Muslim and shouting charming epithets like “Muhammad was a pig!” Read the whole post at The Activist.

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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.

Why didn’t I think of that?

clipped from laptopburka.com Laptop Burka, Inc., is an owner-operator company in the Pacific Northwest. Inventor and entrepreneur Marc Johnson devised Laptop Burka after he grew frustrated with ineffective methods of reducing glare on laptop screens. Nothing lived up to the potential claimed by the latest hype from operating systems or clumsy external devices. Laptop Burka does the hard work other antiglare devices just can’t do. And it works with any laptop computer, and with any ordinary hat. Since it’s made from high-quality, breathable, lightweight fabric –you take it anywhere, anytime.

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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 12, 2010 by mike.

Tip of the hat to Chris Hedges, Truth Dig and to Active Stills

and Shalom Aleichem to:

The Palestinian poet Taha Muhammad Ali wrote this in his poem “Revenge”:

At times … I wish

I could meet in a duel

the man who killed my father

and razed our home,

expelling me

into

a narrow country.

Read the rest of this entry »

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August 11, 2010 by Mike.

   ’nuff said?

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