The environment thread

[StrangeSox]

You joke, but I actually think it may be the best eventual model to go with. The technology is there now to do it. Its expensive to set up, but way, way, way, way cheaper than any rocket launch to operate.

 

The technical challenges are pretty daunting. I think the only material that would work for the cabling that we know of is carbon nanotube-like construction.

[NorthSideSox72]

The technical challenges are pretty daunting. I think the only material that would work for the cabling that we know of is carbon nanotube-like construction.

I actually can't remember the material cited, but one of the major science rags looked at this a year or two ago, and said the materials were there to make it doable now. Getting it set up is, as you said, a huge challenge. But the thing is, once its up, its cheap as hell to use.

 

[Balta1701]

The USA today

Scientists on the research ship Cape Hatteras found oil in samples dug up from the seafloor in a 140-mile radius around the site of the Macondo well, said Kevin Yeager, a University of Southern Mississippi assistant professor of marine sciences. He was the chief scientist on the research trip, which ended last week.

 

Oil found in samples ranged from light degraded oil to thick raw crude, Yeager said.

 

A research team on a ship called the Arctic Sunrise, sponsored by the environmental activist group Greenpeace, also turned up traces of oil in sediment samples as well as evidence of chemical dispersants in blue crab larvae and long plumes of oxygen-depleted water emanating from the well site 50 miles off Louisiana's coast.

 

Greenpeace was scheduled to announce its findings at a news conference today. Its trip also ended last week.

 

"Clearly, there appears to be vast volumes of oil present on the seafloor," Yeager said. "We saw considerable evidence of it."

 

Yeager said his team still needs to "fingerprint" the samples in labs to determine definitively that the oil came from the runaway well. The sheer abundance of oil and its proximity to the well site, though, makes it "highly likely" that the oil is from the Macondo well, he said.

 

The findings add to an ongoing debate between academic researchers and federal scientists, who have differed on the oil spill's impact on the Gulf. The Deepwater Horizon rig exploded and sank in April, killing 11 crewmembers and releasing more than 100 million gallons of oil before it was sealed Sept. 18. BP leased the rig and is responsible for the spill's cleanup, while the U.S. Coast Guard is overseeing response and cleanup work.

 

Federal officials have said that most of the oil has evaporated or been devoured by oil-eating microbes. Last week, Steve Lehmann, a scientist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and a top science adviser to the Coast Guard, told the New Orleans Times-Picayune that his agency has not found any oil on the seafloor.

 

"The concept of a big slick of oil sinking to the bottom is kind of an anathema," he said. "We have not found anything that we would consider actionable at 5,000 feet or 5 feet."

 

Debbie Payton, a NOAA oceanographer leading the agency's subsurface oil monitoring, said NOAA scientists have detected an oily sheen in some of the sediments samples they've taken near the well site, but early results from lab analysis so far have not shown any oil particles.

 

Part of the discrepancy between federal and academic scientists may come from how NOAA scientists lower the multi-ton machinery used to collect the samples, known as a "multiple corer," into the sea, said Samantha Joye, a University of Georgia marine sciences professor who was one of the first to discover oily sediment in the seafloor.

 

Lowering the multiple corer too fast could disrupt the fine sediment on the seafloor and disperse oil particles, she said.

 

"These are really fine layers," Joye said. "If you don't know what you're doing, you're not going to find oil."

 

The three-month Greenpeace research trip aboard the Arctic Sunrise included scientists from Tulane University and Texas A&M University at Galveston, said John Hocevar, Greenpeace's oceans campaign director who participated in the expedition.

 

The Tulane scientists found traces of what appeared to be the dispersant Clorexit, used to break up the gush of oil during the spill, in blue crab larvae, Hocevar said. A third team of scientists took whale recordings in the deep Gulf and will study them to see if the mammal's numbers have dwindled and, if so, what role the oil might have played, he said.

 

Clif Nunnally, a doctoral student and manager of the deep sea biology lab at Texas A&M who was on the Arctic Sunrise, said he gathered sediment samples 6 miles north of the well site that clearly had oil in them.

 

"There's definitely oil there," Nunnally said. "Now it's a matter of getting all the samples up and determining what the impact is on the animals there."

 

Yeager said the next step is to try to determine what lasting effects the oil in the sediment may have on the worms, plankton and other invertebrates burrowed in the seafloor muck and what ripple effects that could trigger up the food chain to humans.

[EvilMonkey]

I actually can't remember the material cited, but one of the major science rags looked at this a year or two ago, and said the materials were there to make it doable now. Getting it set up is, as you said, a huge challenge. But the thing is, once its up, its cheap as hell to use.

Can you imagin if something were to happen to one of those and it fell to earth? How about electromagnetic railgun-like launcher?

[StrangeSox]

Can you imagin if something were to happen to one of those and it fell to earth? How about electromagnetic railgun-like launcher?

 

Delicate satellites and scientific instruments, not to mention people, couldn't handle those accelerations.

[Balta1701]

Delicate satellites and scientific instruments, not to mention people, couldn't handle those accelerations.

And yet, we're managing to pull data from the Genesis mission.

[StrangeSox]

And yet, we're managing to pull data from the Genesis mission.

 

Extracting data from a crash is a bit different than having a functional satellite.

[NorthSideSox72]

And yet, we're managing to pull data from the Genesis mission.

Genesis was sent into space with a Gauss gun?

 

[Balta1701]

Genesis was sent into space with a Gauss gun?

No, but it fell back to Earth pretty darn hard.

[BigSqwert]

The LA Times just ran a good -- if frightening and totally unsurprising -- piece about the GOP's post-election plans in the environmental arena. Mostly, it plans to try to burn that entire arena to the ground. Republican party leaders say that they plan on attacking not only the EPA and its plan to regulate the nation's largest greenhouse gas polluters, but also climate scientists who say that global warming is a problem.

 

Here's the Times: (emphasis mine)

 

If the GOP win

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enior congre

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ional Republican

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plan to launch a bli

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environmental policie

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well a

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air pollution to climate change.

 

The GOP'

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fire will be concentrated e

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effort

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to u

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e the Environmental Protection Agency'

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authority over air pollution to tighten emi

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ion

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control

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on coal, oil and other carbon fuel

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that

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cienti

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ay contribute to global warming.

 

In addition, GOP leader

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ay, they will focu

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on what they

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ee a

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di

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tortion

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cientific evidence regarding climate change and on Obama admini

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ing what it failed to win from Congre

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.

 

The gist of this plan is pretty straightforward:

 

First, ignore the general issue of climate change, or deny that it's an issue at all. Then, continue embracing status-quo policies that favor the fossil fuel industry. Finally, attack the EPA in the name of deregulation, and attack climate scientists in the name of an event that has been cleared of any wrongdoing by 5 independent investigations. Yes, the GOP plans on going after the long-exonerated scientists associated with the so-called Climate Gate affair.

 

By attacking the EPA and climate scientists simultaneously, the GOP can continue to conflate both the politics and science of global climate change, and attempt to discredit both in one fell, misinformation-stuffed swoop.

 

The attacks on the EPA could have been attributed to a difference in opinion on how to handle policy, but not so much with what amounts to an attack on the scientific process. And talk about beating a dead horse -- these climate scientists have been exonerated so many times now that I'm losing count.

 

The GOP's stance seems to be solidifying around a pretty frightening ideology: That climate change isn't being caused by man, and even if it was, that we shouldn't attempt to address it. Decades worth of scientific evidence, of course, points to the contrary -- and a consensus of 97% of the world's climate scientists see things differently.

 

via

[StrangeSox]

I honestly don't get how anyone votes Republican.

[NorthSideSox72]

I honestly don't get how anyone votes Republican.

Because the Dems have some equally idiotic policies.

 

I'm voting for some R's this election. I don't like some of what they stand for, but in some cases, they are the better choice.

 

It does drive me insane though, the GOP's complete head-in-the-sand approach to environmental issues. Its one thing to say that you cannot just go full-boat on alternative energy because of the up front costs... which I may not agree with but can at least understand. Its entirely another thing to look at literally thousands of scientists in a chorus about climate change, and further to simply ignore common sense that pollution is bad, while grasping onto NO scientific evidence whatsoever to refute the idea of climate change. Its chosen ignorance and I agree that it is baffling.

 

[Balta1701]

Its chosen ignorance and I agree that it is baffling.

A wise man once said...it is very hard to get a person to believe a thing when his salary depends on him believing the opposite.

[southsider2k5]

A wise man once said...it is very hard to get a person to believe a thing when his salary depends on him believing the opposite.

 

Al Gore?

[NorthSideSox72]

Al Gore?

Yeah, I was going to say, that is only part of the issue here. Furthermore, it works both ways, as SS points out.

 

So yes, the big business lobby is partly at work with the GOP here. That's one of the things that is laughable about the big GOP wave being bolstered (sort of) by the Tea Party - these people want independent control and individual freedoms, yet the candidates they are screaming to have in office are completely in the pockets of big business.

 

There more here though, that is motivating it. Base things, just like money... fear being most primary among them. Religion, or the contorted view of it, being another. Which of course is another irony - the hatred that some on the far right spew towards Islam, is exactly what motivates their enemy. They are becoming their own enemy.

 

[BigSqwert]

Al Gore?

False equivalency

[NorthSideSox72]

False equivalency

I think that Al Gore is probably a true believer, but he's ALSO making money from it. And I think there are GOP'er climate change deniers who are also true believers, and also make money off of it. The key difference, to me, is that one is willing to acknowledge the value of science and evidence, while the other wants to make modern decisions based on beliefs not founded in one iota of fact.

 

And by the way, neither represents the entirety of either party.

 

[lostfan]

Link

I wonder, shouldn't Transocean and Halliburton have to pay some kind of damages too?

[Balta1701]

Al Gore?

Without disputing the point that Gore currently has lots of green energy investments...you do realize that the large majority of his family's funds came from being an early investor in something called "The Google", right?

[Cknolls]

Without disputing the point that Gore currently has lots of green energy investments...you do realize that the large majority of his family's funds came from being an early investor in something called "The Google", right?

 

 

Didn't his "family money come from oil?

[Balta1701]

Didn't his "family money come from oil?

Yes. However, the funds he got from his family are, as far as I can tell from public disclosures, dwarfed by the sum he got from investing in Google right after the 2000 elections. For a couple years prior to Google's IPO, he was flying coach with no security when he'd go around giving his climate change lecture.

[StrangeSox]

A positive note from last night: Prop 23 failed in California.

http://www.nytimes.com/cwire/2010/11/03/03...-law-13439.html

[BigSqwert]

A positive note from last night: Prop 23 failed in California.

http://www.nytimes.com/cwire/2010/11/03/03...-law-13439.html

[NorthSideSox72]

A positive note from last night: Prop 23 failed in California.

http://www.nytimes.com/cwire/2010/11/03/03...-law-13439.html

Excellent.

 

[southsider2k5]

Without disputing the point that Gore currently has lots of green energy investments...you do realize that the large majority of his family's funds came from being an early investor in something called "The Google", right?

 

The Gores got rich off of oil. It is what put his dad into the Senate and put Al Gore in the position that anyone gave a s*** what he thought in the first place. It is also an undeniable fact that he has gotten massively rich by pushing green companies.