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09 Dec 09

Burst Oil Pipeline Leaks 46,000 Gallons in One of Alaska's 'Worst Ever' Spills : TreeHugger

  • On November 29th, a 24-inch jagged rupture in an oil pipeline in Alaska's North Slope led to one of the worst spills in the region's history. The pipeline was shut off, and the source was discovered on December 3rd. But so far at least 46,000 gallons of crude oil and contaminated water have poured out into the surrounding Alaskan wilderness.

  • 50,000 gallons of crude oil and produced water expected to be released from the spill will still have the potential to be very destructive. Here's how the spill occurred, according to ADN:

    Officials say massive ice plugs had formed inside the pipe, which caused BP Exploration (Alaska) Inc. to stop operating it a few weeks ago. Pressure then built up until the pipeline ruptured, according to BP. "It looks like it was caused by overpressure in the pipe, which we think was linked to ice forming -- the plugs that have formed on either side of the release site," BP spokesman Steve Rinehart said.

Palin's "Boycott Copenhagen" Op-Ed: Annotated - The Atlantic Politics Channel

  • the radical environmental movement appears to face a
    tipping point.
  • The revelation of appalling actions by so-called climate
    change experts allows the American public to finally understand the
    concerns so many of us have articulated on this issue.
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FT.com / UK - Figures turn up heat on sceptics

  • The current decade will be the warmest on record, and this year probably the fifth hottest, meteorologists said yesterday in a blow to one of the central arguments used by climate change sceptics.

Ezra Klein - What about the oyster guy?

  • Here's the thing I wonder. How do people who deny climate change reconcile that with guys like this, who are spending entire careers on teasing out really non-dramatic aspects of climate change? This guy is not measuring carbon concentrations in oyster shells for the glory. There are thousands of these people, dorkily and steadily piecing out the causes and predicting effects.
  • If it is all a conspiracy and nothing is happening, how do denialists conceive of these guys? Do they think these monotonous nerds who talk in jargon (don't take that the wrong way. I'm sexually attracted to every one of them.) are making it up to promote the conspiracy? Like, they spend the morning thinking up esoteric ways of measuring wave energy by sand lost at different gauges across the state and the afternoon faking their data so they can please Al Gore? They've done this now for 10 years and they plan to make an entire career out of making up the detailed groundwork for fake climate change? All of them? On nothing? Imagine the secret conferences they must hold to synchronize their stories and settle on an allowable variance between the made-up river data, the made-up precipitation data and the made-up ocean data. Besides the groupies, WHAT FOR?
08 Dec 09

Which Countries Are Missing From Copenhagen Talks? - The Gaggle Blog - Newsweek.com

  • Taiwan: Much of the world considers Taiwan an independent country, even though some bigger powers (including the U.S.) don’t, mainly for political reasons. Since it’s not a U.N. member state, Taiwan’s interest will be represented by China, which will have prime placement at the conference. But Taiwan remains more willing to make cuts to its emissions than more-industrial China, so the interests of both aren’t perfectly aligned. Taiwanese leaders will still attend the conference, although they’ll be limited in how they can participate. They’re also hoping that face time with other leaders might help boost Taiwan’s standing.
04 Dec 09

The Climate Change Emails: Implications for Public Education and Engagement : Framing Science

  • Not unexpectedly, the storyline offered by these commentators simplistically defines the event as yet another effort by the conservative movement to manufacture doubt and to wage a "war on science."
  • Yet this predictable storyline overlooks the fact that scientists, science reporters, educators, and their institutions may have unintentionally created the conditions that helped a single focusing event turn into a global controversy and media frenzy. Reaction to the content of the East Anglia emails is so intense because it shows scientists talking and behaving in ways that cut against the stereotypical image of impartial, Vulcan-like high priests of reason. For too long in school and in news reporting, we have portrayed a cartoon image of how science is done, its connection to policy debates, and how scientists participate in these debates. This has worked for scientists in the past, but as the types of questions that society faces and as modes of communication change, the public is expecting and demanding greater involvement in science-related decisions and greater accountability on the part of scientists.
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Sen. Byrd to Big Coal: "Let's Speak a Little More Truth" : TreeHugger

  • But one of their protectors, Sen. Robert Byrd, appears to be growing disenchanted with Big Coal, authoring an op-ed called "Coal Must Embrace The Future."
  • While Byrd maintains that coal will be needed well into the future to provide baseload power, he says that the industry needs to rethink its support of mountaintop removal, the devastating technique of leveling mountains to get at the coal buried underneath. And if Byrd jumps ship, other coal supporters might bounce, too.

New Study Finds a Cocktail of Contaminants in Newborns : TreeHugger

  • rocket fuel
  • the "mere presence of a chemical" does not prove harm
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03 Dec 09

What Is The Malkin Clique So Excited About? - The Daily Dish | By Andrew Sullivan

  • The key to these bloggers' mentality is simply to find some tiny thing and focus all attention on that in order to persuade people that the bigger reality is untrue or irrelevant. This is not an argument; it's a technique. It's a technique to persuade people not to examine all the evidence, since the source of the evidence - secular humanist scientists - are evil suspects and against God and in favor of making your gas bill higher.
01 Dec 09

Chinese View of Greatest National Threats | The Progressive Realist

  • The Lowy Institute, in Sydney, today released a poll of Chinese attitudes about their own country
  • Like statistics on almost anything coming out of China, opinion-survey results from there should be considered approximations of reality at best. (For instance, it is just about impossible to get reliable results from the poor, rural majority of China's population. Therefore polls unavoidably make the responding public seem more educated, urbanized, richer, etc than the whole Chinese public is.)
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Conservatism And The Climate - The Daily Dish | By Andrew Sullivan

  • I have never understood why it is conservative to take an attitude toward the natural world of how best to exploit and use it entirely for short term benefit. (My first ever publication was a paper for Thatcher called "Greening The Tories"). The conservative, it seems to me, will not be averse to using the planet to improve our lot, and will not be hostile to the forces of capitalism and self-interest that have generated such amazing wealth and abundance in the last three hundred years.



    But a conservative will surely also want to be sure that he conserves this inheritance, for its own sake and also for his future use. He will want to husband the natural world, not rape it and throw it away. He will see the abandonment of all values to that of immediate gratification as a form of insanity, if not evil.

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