Tuesdays with Turtles – Hiatus Edition

Well, I guess if Gore had become president of the US, this would not have happened (among other things that would not have happened). On the other hand, the U.S would have conceivably taken a leadership role in the issue (if the senate and congress would have cooperated).

Gore and U.N. Panel Win Peace Prize – New York Times

Former Vice President Al Gore and the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change won the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize Friday for their efforts to spread awareness of man-made climate change and lay the foundations for counteracting it.

”I am deeply honored to receive the Nobel Peace Prize,” Gore said. ”We face a true planetary emergency. The climate crisis is not a political issue, it is a moral and spiritual challenge to all of humanity.”

Gore’s film ”An Inconvenient Truth,” a documentary on global warming, won an Academy Award this year and he had been widely expected to win the prize.

What does this do for climate change? Well, nothing! Unfortunately! Good for the IPCC, though. And, good for Gore. I thought at the beginning of 2007 that this was the year that worldwide perceptions about the threat of global warming would change, Gore’s movie and the IPCC report had a big hand in making that happen.

Horrible story coming out of California.
Pot farms ravaging park land / Big raid in Marin County only hints at the extent of erosive techniques by growers

The discovery of 22,740 marijuana plants growing in and around Point Reyes National Seashore last week wasn’t only the biggest pot seizure ever made in Marin County. It was an environmental mess that will take several months and tens of thousands of dollars to clean up. The crops seized on the steep hillsides overlooking Highway 1 were planted by sophisticated growers who cleared vegetation, terraced land, drew water from streams through miles of irrigation hoses and doused acres of land with hundreds of pounds of fertilizer and pesticides.

To avoid the obvious “Pot Legalization” questions and flip it, consider a world where cigarettes have been banned/regulated to the extent that black market growing became viable, would this happen with tobacco? Obviously, the nature of the growing (Tobacco – plains, easy plant to spot, Cannabis – Hill sides, easy to hide), make it an operation question in addition to an economics question. But as the above report states, the operation was obviously not hard to spot, nor was it low impact.

Something to consider as actions widely prevalent in populations are made illegal, how well does prohibition ever work?

As part of blog action day, today’s a day when every blog features a post about the environment. Turns out that this is an environmental blog where most of the posts are about the environment. But nothing like a deadline for a noble cause to make me blog, so here goes…

What the rich use and throw away, the poor are reduced to scavenging to earn a meager living. Yes, while climate change rightly takes up a lot of attention, more mundane problems including landfills in poor communities, the export of waste from the first world to the third world, and the “shocking” poverty that drives this export of waste all deserve their fair share of attention.

U.N.: ‘Shocking’ conditions at Kenya dump – World Environment – MSNBC.com

“Willis Ochieng, 10, scavenges through smoking refuse piled as high as a house at one of Africa’s biggest rubbish mountains, his friends sitting nearby sucking on dirty plastic bottles of noxious yellow glue.

Located near slums in the east of the Kenyan capital Nairobi, the open dump receives some 2,000 tons of garbage daily. A U.N. study published on Friday says it is seriously harming the health of children and polluting the city.”

And boy, do the people there suffer. Asthma, anemia, high levels of lead in the blood, chronic cough, and a smorgasbord of other acute and chronic conditions.

This dump is not alone, of course. Landfills are a feature of every country, and in my current home state of North Caroiina, are located with disproportionate frequency in African American communities. the free market advocate would say that this represents an opportunity for the people in the community to gain some employment and make some money. The truth of the matter, however, is that we do not pay the right price for waste generation. The people who live near, and make a living off the “dump” subsidize our profligate selves.

Seriously, I’ve had enough of Bush North up here in Canada, he has to go and luckily, he’s only running a minority government, so it’s not 4 more years…

globeandmail.com: Global warming critics appointed to science boards

Top Canadian scientists are accusing the Harper government of politicizing science funding and jeopardizing climate research by naming global warming critics to key boards that fund science.

The government’s actions are “dreadful,” said Garry Clarke, a leading international glaciologist at the University of British Columbia, and undercut public pledges to tackle climate change.

“Their mouths are doing one thing and their hands are doing something different,” Prof. Clarke said.

Already alarmed over funding cuts to basic research, scientists say two appointments in particular are worrisome. Mark Mullins, the executive director of the conservative-leaning Fraser Institute – and a former adviser to the Canadian Alliance Party – was recently appointed to the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC), which funds university research projects that have included studies on climate change.

Desmogblog has more, including choice quotes from the economists and oil geologists that run this country’s science.

Mullins: “It strikes me that the science is not settled,” he said in a 2007
interview posted at BCbusinessonline. “‘Put caps on global emitters’ is
not the natural conclusion I would come to.”

Weissenberger: “To those who doubt the scientific basis of global warming theory, we
say: Don’t let a cabal of government-funded scientists, environmental
activists and journalists convince us they’re the mainstream.” — April
28, 2006″

These are the people who will be deciding who gets science money in Canada.

This has probably been the most unscientific administrations in Canada’s recent history.

I think it is time to throw the bums out, it’s time for another election!

The White House in December refused to accept the Environmental Protection Agency’s conclusion that greenhouse gases are pollutants that must be controlled, telling agency officials that an e-mail message containing the document would not be opened, senior E.P.A. officials said last week.

White House Refused to Open Pollutants E-Mail – NYTimes.com

No, this headline is not from the Onion, I repeat, this is an accurate account of the workings of the world’s most powerful government as it delays action on climate change!