September 5, 2009 by mike.

If you read this article it’s very hard not to conclude that Texas executed an innocent man when it put Cameron Todd Willingham to death for the arson deaths of his children.

This is a horrible story on several levels. The basic event of a housefire with fatalities is awful. The agony of the parents who have lost their children in this way is terrible to consider. Finally, there is the awful matter that the father never should have stood trial in the matter and certainly should not have been put to death.

At this late date I even feel bad for the fire investigators, whose work was describes as more mystic work than science. There’s a good chance that in this case, as in so many where it becomes apparent that the justice system has failed, the prosecutors and experts who pushed prosecution and guilt may deny the facts for the rest of their lives. Who can blame them. Consider their alternative - they could review the facts and say, I made a mistake and I feel terrible about it.

Well, read it if you can stand it. And think about how important it is to have good forensic evidence before we jail and/or execute somebody. Jail house snitches are not to be relied on. Their information is about as reliable as Chalabi’s intelligence on Iraq, and it’s poor evidence for the same reason. The system allows, encourages, rewards folks who will swear to what people in power want to hear.

On a personal note, I got rousted by Texas Public Safety outside Corsicana a few decades  ago.  I had on a pony tail, a cowboy hat, and cutoff jeans and I was cruising though in my TR3 with the top down and I think I must have looked too much like the Austin hippie I was.  Scary hour before the skunks decided not to throw me through a nearby barb wire fence and let me go.  Corsicana is famous for its fruitcakes.  You can look it up.

clipped from www.newyorker.com Trial by Fire The fire moved quickly through the house, a one-story wood-frame structure in a working-class neighborhood of Corsicana, in northeast Texas. Flames spread along the walls, bursting through doorways, blistering paint and tiles and furniture. Smoke pressed against the ceiling, then banked downward, seeping into each room and through crevices in the windows, staining the morning sky.

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April 22, 2009 by mike.

Whew! Just came across this website: The Bad Chemicals

It posts a daily cartoon and pushes the boundaries. Sorry about all the white space, my techie skills can’t make those go away.

clipped from www.thebadchemicals.com   the bad chemicals postcards from amerika March 6th, 2009 Baby Pictures

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November 30, 2008 by mike.

When you bring up drastic measures to address global warming you often get blasted for playing with fire. The problem is that we have been playing with fire since we discovered fire and the build-up of carbon dioxide is the result. One unintended impact of so many human activities is carbon dioxide buildup. It’s too bad that we can get so exorcised with ideas that intend to reduce atmospheric CO2 buildup when we are in such denial about all the activities that create buildup.

Nonetheless, I do understand the warnings inherent in so many “scientific” endeavors that have become famous for their unintended consequences.  You do not want to be the scientist remembered for introducing  Killer bees  to the Americas.

And you probably would not want to remembered for suggesting bringing Cane toads to Australia was the solution to a bug infestation.

So, when scientific thinkers start suggesting large scale geo-engineering projects to keep the small blue planet a congenial place for the kind of life that has evolved here, the discussion that follows has to include some concern that we may be fooling with some systems that operate in ways that we don’t understand and that the long term consequences could be disastrous.  If the cure is worse than the disease you might want to try living with the disease, right?

Despite those reservations and concerns, some folks are starting to suggest that when large scale extinctions are underway,  it may be time to start thinking more about geo-engineering.

I am not keen on this idea of liming the oceans to fix both the increasing acidity of the oceans  and to give the oceans a boost in their capacity as carbon sinks for a number of reasons.  One is that the creating of the lime takes a significant amount of energy, so this approach does not appear to be an elegant solution where some component or facet of the problem itself becomes a solution, this one is simply a means of hitting two problems with one energy-consumptive solution.  It’s a twofer.  I will give it credit for that.  It works on ocean acidification and carbon sequestration at the same time.

Maybe we can figure out how to unring the killer bee and cane toad bell once we come up with the geo-engineering solution to global warming?

clipped from www.cquestrate.com The Idea First, you heat limestone to a very high temperature, until it breaks down into lime and carbon dioxide. Then you put the lime into the sea, where it reacts with carbon dioxide dissolved in the seawater. The important point is that when you put lime into seawater it absorbs almost twice as much carbon dioxide as is produced by the breaking down of the limestone in the first place. This is a brief description of the idea. If you prefer we also have a detailed description and a slideshow presentation on the process for you to see. The idea works like this:

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November 30, 2008 by mike.

It’s difficult to find a silver lining for this impact of global warming. The outlook for the glaciers of the Himalays is grim. They are in retreat. The increase melt is creating runoff disasters and the long term outlook is for the fresh water source for a billion people to wane. There is nothing to do here except stabilize global climate through radical change in the way we live. I think Bill McKibben is correct in setting the target at 350 ppm for CO2. I don’t know how we get there, but I think we are looking at global disaster if we don’t. As Bucky Fuller said, we can afford to do anything that we have to do.

clipped from abcnews.go.com In the Indian Himalayas, You Can Hear Climate Change Before You Can See It CHHOTA SHIGRI GLACIER, INDIAN HIMALAYAS, August 08, 2008 By NICK SCHIFRIN In the Indian Himalayas, you can literally hear the glaciers melting. The river that rushes through the Lahaul-Spiti Valley is fed almost entirely by melt from the surrounding glaciers. The sound of the river’s rapids has never been this loud. The level of the water has never been this high. In other words, the glaciers have never receded this quickly.

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November 23, 2008 by mike.

clipped from www.climatebiz.com Five Reasons You Should Consider Generating Your Own Green Energy Is this really the best time for your company to be thinking about generating renewable energy onsite?

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November 23, 2008 by mike.

clipped from climateprogress.org Solar baseload outshines ‘clean coal’ — and it always will clipped from climateprogress.org Concentrated solar thermal power — aka solar baseload — remains hot. The Daily Climate has a nice update: All told some 60 plants are either under construction or under contract worldwide — with most in either Spain or the United States — for a total capacity just north of 5,700 megawatts

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November 16, 2008 by mike.

At least it is interesting in so far as it is complicated story of rampant pollution with complex impact on the living things here on the small blue planet.

The AP has carried a story this past week about the Asian brown cloud and UN concerns that this toxic cloud of pollutants could cause more problems with our food production on this little world.

This is really an old story.  The smog of Los Angeles a generation ago was probably not very different from the Asian brown cloud.  Brown clouds are also reported with regard to Phoenix and Denver. The Denver link goes into how the brown cloud was reduced and that’s a good story.

The real lesson of the Asian Brown Cloud is that there really is no such thing as my backyard and any attempt to control growth and industry that does not see the world in it’s reality as one ecosystem, an amazing environment that has the capacity to support an amazing diversity of living things, really a Gaia organism of unimaginable complexity, is doomed to failure.

You can’t live in a pristine environment and consume products made in China and not be intimately connected to the Asian Brown Cloud.  There is no free lunch.

The brown cloud is a complex story.  Clouds of soot can offset global warming by letting less sunlight reach the ground and then less heat builds up in our troposphere.  That’s a good thing, right?  Well, maybe.

If the clouds of soot are composed of particles that cause many people to die due to pulmonary and cardiac disease, then maybe this is not the solution to the buildup of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.  It’s just a different paradigm of death and toxicity related to unsustainable human activities.

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November 9, 2008 by mike.

clipped from news.yahoo.com Scientists say a rock can soak up carbon dioxide NEW YORK (Reuters) – A rock found mostly in Oman can be harnessed to soak up the main greenhouse gas carbon dioxide at a rate that could help slow global warming, scientists say.

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November 1, 2008 by mike.

Our solutions to our population and environmental demand problems can be elegant instead of catastrophic.  We don’t have to go to war to control petrol reserves, we could re-tool our fuel economy to run on fuels we can develop, capture, and benefit from without bombing anyone, intelligent or otherwise, on the small blue planet.

Methane Gas Capture

The way that we bring the planet into balance is through elegant thinking, elegant being.  We currently have a problem with the buildup of certain gases in the atmosphere that are causing the planet to heat up with disastrous consequence for many living things.  An elegant approach to this problem is to look at the capture of one of these gases, methane, and it’s use as a relatively clean fuel.  It burns much more cleanly than gasoline or coal in terms of other greenhouse gases, so the capture of methane is a twofer.  We reduce the atmospheric buildup of a powerful greenhouse gas and we burn it in place of less clean fuels, thereby producing less other greenhouse gases as combustion byproduct when we burn methane instead of gas, diesel, or coal.

This is happening.  At various places around the small blue planet methane is being captured as a fuel instead of being emitted as a potent greenhouse gas.  Here are some examples:

•  Environomics - Waste2Profits.com - feedlot waste digesters
•  Great Lakes Biomass Partnership 
• Harvard University study on methane capture from landfills
• San Antonio Waste Water Methane Recapture Contract

The solution to our environmental problems is to find the solution within the problem somehow.    Here is a thought from a great thinker and problem-solver:

When I’m working on a problem, I never think about beauty. I think only how to solve the problem. But when I have finished, if the solution is not beautiful, I know it is wrong.

R. Buckminster Fuller

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November 1, 2008 by mike.

Courtesy of Reuters:

Climate-warming methane levels rose fast in 2007 | Environment | Reuters

Methane is a serious green-house gas.  It has 25 times more impact in terms of global warming than carbon dioxide.  If we were burning fuels that sent clouds of methane out the tailpipe instead of clouds of carbon dioxide we would be cooked already, but methane is not a by-product of combustion generally.

Methane is the primary component of natural gas.  It is essentially a vaporous fuel.  Methane levels in the atmosphere have risen since pre-industrial times.  The level has more than doubled, but the methane levels had been essentially stable until 2007.

In 2007, methane levels in the atmosphere, measures around the small blue planet, took a significant jump.  The mechanism of the jump is currently unknown and the increase does not pose an immediate risk, but if the increase is indicative of a trend for increasing atmospheric methane levels, it is worrisome.

There are at least two ideas currently under study with regard to the methane increase.  The first, that I have posted about before, is that as global warming advances, tundra and permafrost thawing release methane.  This methane release is also occuring from the floor of the Arctic Ocean as the polar ice cap diminishes.   The second potential cause of atmospheric methane increase is the possibility of a change in the atmosphere’s capacity to scrub methane through the hydroxy free radical (like Williams Ayers, I guess,  free radical, get it?  stay with me) known as OH.

Too soon to tell how the methane story will play out, but I am following it here and I will post again as more information develops.

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