Environment North Carolina is co-sponsoring 2 events featuring Dr. James Hansen, director of NASA’s Goddard Institute and the nation’s foremost climate expert. In the past year, Dr. Hansen has lead the charge in calling for action on global warming, stating, “We have at most ten years-not ten years to decide upon action, but ten years to alter fundamentally the trajectory of global greenhouse gas emissions.”
Well, if I’d been keeping normal bogging hours, this would have been up last week, anyway… Full report on the talk later tonight/tomorrow. It figures to be exciting, always great to see visionary scientists in person.
Canada is expected to formally declare on Saturday that the controversial chemical bisphenol A (BPA) is a hazardous substance.
The move will make Canada the first country in the world to put the chemical on a list of toxic substances that will ban the material from being used in such products as baby bottles.
More from the global warming drumbeat, which has by now reached tipping point proportions. I was trying a few months back to predict when global warming would become a “story” in this country, something to be reported on, rather than a “debate”, I guessed middle of the year, well, I think it arrived in March with Time and Newsweek covers, and personally with at least two friends asking me about it. News coverage of climate change has changed completely in the last few months as observations catch up with the modeling, as they do most of the time. But people like to see proof, not model simulations which can always be explained away, well, here’s more proof…
CNN.com – Caribbean coral suffers record die-off – Mar 31, 2006
The Caribbean is actually better off than areas of the Indian and Pacific ocean where mortality rates — mostly from warming waters — have been in the 90 percent range in past years, said Tom Goreau of the Global Coral Reef Alliance. Goreau called what’s happening worldwide “an underwater holocaust.”
And with global warming, scientists are pessimistic about the future of coral reefs.
“The prognosis is not good,” said biochemistry professor M. James Crabbe of the University of Luton near London. In early April, he will investigate coral reef mortality in Jamaica. “If you want to see a coral reef, go now, because they just won’t survive in their current state.”
For the Caribbean, it all started with hot sea temperatures, first in Panama in the spring and early summer, and it got worse from there.
New NOAA sea surface temperature figures show the sustained heating in the Caribbean last summer and fall was by far the worst in 21 years of satellite monitoring, Eakin said.
“The 2005 event is bigger than all the previous 20 years combined,” he said.
What happened in the Caribbean would be the equivalent of every city in the United States recording a record high temperature at the same time, Eakin said. And it remained hot for weeks, even months, stressing the coral.
Take that, Sharper Image, your air purifiers that you waste tons of paper sending me monthly catalogs for don’t work. The ones that use ozone react with organic compounds in the air, especially your fragrances in cleaning products, air fresheners and perfumes to make fine particles in that crucial 0.1-1 um size range that your lungs don’t clear very effectively.
Not a big deal in the grand scheme of things, especially with other indoor pollutants. But I always thought these air purifiers were a scam, I am glad somebody actually got the NSF to fund this study and get some proof!
Kinetic Analysis of Competition between Aerosol Particle Removal and Generation by Ionization Air Purifiers
Ahmad Alshawa, Ashley R. Russell, and Sergey A. Nizkorodov*
Department of Chemistry, University of California, Irvine, California 92697-2025
Abstract:
Ionization air purifiers are increasingly used to remove aerosol particles from indoor air. However, certain ionization air purifiers also emit ozone. Reactions between the emitted ozone and unsaturated volatile organic compounds (VOC) commonly found in indoor air produce additional respirable aerosol particles in the ultrafine (This model predicts that certain widely used ionization air purifiers may actually increase the mass concentration of fine and ultrafine particulates in the presence of common unsaturated VOC, such as limonene contained in many household cleaning products. This prediction is supported by an explicit observation of ultrafine particle nucleation events caused by the addition of D-limonene to a ventilated office room equipped with a common ionization air purifier.
Regarding the recent brouhaha that started with the EU banning Canada’s seal products, I confess to being in two minds about Canada’s sealing practices. Of course, clubbing baby seals to death seems barbaric, but so is confining pigs (intelligent and cute in the right circumstances!) to pens where they can barely move and slaughtering them, so is de-beaking chickens and cooping them up in ultra small cages, so is fattening cows with growth hormones, then slaughtering them. If you have any questions, I give you
and this:
and this too:
Okay, now that you have become part of the meatrix, why is industrial animal farming, which is way more destructive on the planet, the people involved and the animals completely and utterly acceptable while the (admittedly barbaric) “culling” of a small proportion of a wild population of seals is banned?
Yes, seals are cute, but so are chickens, baby pigs, calves, you name it, I even think most snakes are cute, it’s all optics anyway.
If you’re against the seal clubbing, you need to be against all current animal farming practiced in all of the Americas, and yes, Europe as well.
Few facts in this debate go unchallenged. All sides agree on where and when. But the answers to how, why, and even how many aren’t as clear.
Even the language is chosen carefully. Hunt or slaughter. Sea mammals or baby seals. Cherished tradition or economic disaster. Cod-eating nuisance or adorable innocent.
The images of the hunt are even more powerful, and seal hunt opponents know it. Most people find the pictures difficult to watch, but supporters say the same kind of thing happens in slaughterhouses — places where cameras aren’t allowed
Acrolein, one of the 4,000 constituents of cigarette smoke, has been found unexpectedly to cause DNA damage in the gene for the infamous tumor-suppressor p53, which is often disrupted by cancer. In particular, the pattern of DNA mutations caused by acrolein mimics what is often found in human lung cancer samples (Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA, DOI: 10.1073/pnas.0607031103).
“If cigarette smoke is the weapon that causes lung cancer, then these mutations are fingerprints on the knife,” says author Moon-shong Tang of New York University School of Medicine, in Tuxedo. Tang was also involved in identifying another cigarette-smoke component that can induce such mutations: a metabolite of a polycyclic hydrocarbon called benzo[a]pyrene. Acrolein is present in cigarette smoke in levels of up to 1,000 times greater than benzo[a]pyrene.
So, if you remove acrolein from tobacco smoke, does that make for a much safer smoking experience? Is this a research question worth answering? FYI, I watched Thank You for Smoking last night, so, fresh on my mind!
An incredible 72 million m3 of debris was created when Hurricane Katrina wreaked havoc in Louisiana and Mississippi in 2005. A survey of this debris now reveals that an estimated 1,740 metric tons of arsenic could leach into groundwater from unlined landfills where the materials are being disposed (Environ. Sci. Technol., DOI: 10.1021/es0622812).
Here’s EPA’s page on arsenic treated wood, and here’s the cheerleader page for same (mmm, industry advocacy websites, delicious!). Note that the EPA is currently working with the manufacturers to “voluntarily” phase out the use of Chromated Copper Arsenate in residential settings. Note that there are several alternatives available, all of them less toxic and equally effective. While this “voluntary” action limits direct exposure for certain types of people, old wood ending up in unlined landfills will overwhelmingly affect people who live near said landfills, namely the poor, and African American.
Even lined landfills leak eventually, and while other organic matter may degrade before the leaking, arsenic and heavy metals are not going anywhere. Unlined landfills, which is a fancy way of saying hole in the ground where you throw trash in, are completely unacceptable in this day and age in a so called developed country like the US of A. On the other hand, it is fashionable to refer to Louisiana as a third world country, so I guess anything goes for those kinds of people, eh.
3 Comments
I was wondering when you were going to post a full report on the talk. I am very interested in what James Hansen had to say.
Here you go. Between job hunting and generally trying to survive my current job, blogging has suffered greatly! Hopefully, the holidays will change that.
I was wondering when you were going to post a full report on the talk. I am very interested in what James Hansen had to say.
Here you go. Between job hunting and generally trying to survive my current job, blogging has suffered greatly! Hopefully, the holidays will change that.
Good post.