American Idiot

Where the US government pretends that water does not flow. So, if you pollute a stream, the pollution will not reach the lake the stream flows into.

U.S. adopts limits on clean water law enforcement | U.S. | Reuters

The landmark U.S. law to fight water pollution will now apply only to bodies of water large enough for boats to use, and their adjacent wetlands, and will not automatically protect streams, the U.S. government said on Tuesday.

Environmental groups said they fear the new policy will muddy the purpose of the federal Clean Water Act and put many smaller bodies of water at risk. Democrats in Congress have introduced legislation mandating protection of creeks, estuaries and other watersheds.

This is the right approach, the word “navigable” needs to struck from the legislation. Pollution control has nothing to do with navigation, it is about watershed protection.

Hansen, the grandfather of all climate research has an essay today in the open access journal Environmental Research Letters arguing that scientists are not communicating the seriousness of sea level rise. And, it is open access, so, no kidney sale required!

Scientific reticence and sea level rise

I suggest that a `scientific reticence’ is inhibiting the communication of a threat of a potentially large sea level rise. Delay is dangerous because of system inertias that could create a situation with future sea level changes out of our control. I argue for calling together a panel of scientific leaders to hear evidence and issue a prompt plain-written report on current understanding of the sea level change issue.

In this paper, Hansen reviews a number of recent studies that point to positive feedback in ice melting (remember, poitive feedback, good for morale, not good for climate change). Hansen then points out that due to these feedback mechanisms, sea level rise is non-linear. His thesis is that all this information is known to most climate scientists, and to a lot of people who maintain even a cursory interest in the matter.

He finishes with a call to action.

There is, in my opinion, a huge gap between what is understood about human-made global warming and its consequences, and what is known by the people who most need to know, the public and policy makers. The IPCC is doing a commendable job, but we need something more. Given the reticence that the IPCC necessarily exhibits, there need to be supplementary mechanisms. The onus, it seems to me, falls on us scientists as a community.

Important decisions are being made now and in the near future. An example is the large number of new efforts to make liquid fuels from coal, and a resurgence of plans for energy-intensive `cooking’ of tar-shale mountains to squeeze out liquid hydrocarbon fuels. These are just the sort of actions needed to preserve a BAU greenhouse gas path indefinitely. We know enough about the carbon cycle to say that at least of the order of a quarter of the CO2 emitted in burning fossil fuels under a BAU scenario will stay in the air for an eternity, the latter defined practically as more than 500 years. Readily available conventional oil and gas are enough to take atmospheric CO2 to a level of the order of 450 ppm.

In this circumstance it seems vital that we provide the best information we can about the threat to the great ice sheets posed by human-made climate change. This information, and appropriate caveats, should be provided publicly, and in plain language. The best suggestion I can think of is for the National Academy of Sciences to carry out a study, in the tradition of the Charney and Cicerone reports on global warming. I would be glad to hear alternative suggestions.

Do we need another study? As we wait for the National Academy of Sciences to conduct a study on how best to communicate the danger of sea level rise, many more villages in India and Bangladesh will go under the sea. Apparently, the sea cannot wait for the best communication strategies. It communicates the only way it can, directly!!

Technorati Tags: environment, climate change

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?

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!

Chemical & Engineering News: Latest News – Cigarettes’ Smoking Gun?

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!