Factory Farm Maps

newsobserver.com | Mine plan would erase wetlands

The proposal by PCS Phosphate, if approved, would represent the single largest destruction of wetlands permitted in the state — 2,500 acres including the headwaters of seven creeks near the Pamlico River. The rich deposit of black phosphate rock, left by ancient oceans and buried 100 feet beneath the surface, has been extracted from the site by various companies for about 40 years. PCS has worked the mine since 1995 to get phosphate for fertilizer and for use in food additives. In food, it’s turned into phosphoric acid — a flavor enhancer in such products as Coca-Cola, jellies and vegetable oil.

Yes, this is right, phosphoric acid is a “flavor enhancer”. Well, the mine employs a 1000 people in the area, and is not necessarily an evil that must be stopped at all times, for that, see Hog Factories! But this disturbs me.

Hunter Turnage, 44, a Raleigh cable television salesman, has a house across the river from the PCS mine. He is one of several people who have written letters to the state complaining about the odor when the wind blows from the south.

“If you don’t want to smell it, you shut up the windows and turn on the air conditioner,” Turnage said.
“It’s something you just deal with. … I kept thinking one day they would run out of areas to mine. I think they’ll stay there forever –as long as they get continued rights to destroy the wetlands.”

It’s one thing to use up wetlands, knowing fully well that the law requires you to create wetlands elsewhere to compensate, this smell issue is more problematic, and hard to legislate. Which means that various Environmental Justice issues will also come into play.

BBC NEWS | Science/Nature | Asias brown clouds warm planet

Clouds of pollution over the Indian Ocean appear to cause as much warming as greenhouse gases released by human activity, a study has suggested. US researchers used unmanned aircraft to measure the effects of the “brown clouds” on the surrounding area. Writing in Nature, they said the tiny particles increased the solar heating of the lower atmosphere by about 50%.

The warming could be enough to explain the retreat of glaciers in the Himalayas, the scientists proposed. The clouds contain a mixture of light absorbing aerosols and light scattering aerosols, which cause the atmosphere to warm and the surface of the Earth to cool.

Wow, I’ll have to read the paper later today to confirm, but when I was doing aerosol work in India back in the mid ’90s, the Indian Ocean cloud was unknown. 1995 through 1998, there was an experiment called INDOEX (my thesis advisor in Bombay participated in the later phases) which first observed this brown cloud. At that time, it was assumed that the light scattering (hence “cooling”) effects of this aerosol would dominate the absorbing (or “heating”) effects, and initial model estimates seemed to agree.

Turns out that it has a significant warming effect because the soot particles (dark, therefore heat absorbing) predominate. And, you had to measure it.

For their study, the team of researchers used three unmanned aircraft, fitted with miniaturised instruments that were able to measure aerosol concentrations, soot amounts and the flow of energy from the Sun.

The crafts flew over the polluted region of the Indian Ocean at varying heights between 500m (1,640ft) and 3,000m (9,840ft).

“During 18 flight missions, the three unmanned aerial vehicles were flown with a separation of tens of metres or less and less than 10 seconds (apart), which made it possible to measure the atmospheric solar heating rates directly,” they wrote.

If true, we can reduce the size of this “cloud” by reducing biomass combustion, installing particle controls on power plants, cleaning up other combustion sources, etc, and reduce global warming effects without worrying that this cloud was somehow mitigating temperature rise as previously thought. So, a win-win!

Opus Comics, by Bloom County’s Berkeley Breathed – Salon

A little simplistic, perhaps, but plugin hybrids need to get here soon. I want my next car to be a plugin hybrid. Hell, I would even buy an ugly ass GM car if it turns out to be as good as advertised, 65 km without gas. Note also the cool solar panels and power inverter.

Can I get a compact plugin hybrid instead of this behemoth two door, or is the size due to battery storage?

Photo courtesy Corvair Owner Flickr photstream, used under a creative commons licence.