The environment thread

[StrangeSox]

There's a really good/depressing documentary on this on Netflix called Vanishing of the Bees.

[Balta1701]

Link. 2nd lowest ice cover on the Great Lakes in recorded history this year, after 2002. Lots of economic consequences to that...you get more evaporation when there is no ice cover, so you're strengthening the ungodly "Lake Effect", you decrease lake level so you lose effectiveness at hydropower plants and you can't load cargo boats as much....every inch of water is apparently worth somewhere between $10k and $20k more cargo per day that can be loaded.

[StrangeSox]

I need to stop watching environmental documentaries on netflix

[Balta1701]

Record sales of the Volt in March lead to re-starting of the production line a week early. Yay.

[StrangeSox]

Still seriously overpriced.

[Balta1701]

Still seriously overpriced.

Correct, but this is at least an understandable business decision. They're still at the early adopter stage now, and those people are often willing to spend more for the symbol of it. The big problem will be making the jump from early adopters to ramping up, but that's still a year or so away, and it's difficult to predict either gas prices or technology costs that far out once the line really gets going.

[iamshack]

Still seriously overpriced.

Ugly too.

[mr_genius]

Ugly too.

 

i think they look pretty good from what i've seen in pictures. haven't seen a Volt in person yet though.

Edited April 4, 2012 by mr_genius

[Balta1701]

i think they look pretty good from what i've seen in pictures. haven't seen one in person yet

Seen a few. Cheered for each one.

[iamshack]

i think they look pretty good from what i've seen in pictures. haven't seen a Volt in person yet though.

Our company has one since that's what we do...it looks like a crappy remake of a DeLorean, if you ask me.

 

And that new ad with the dorky guy explaining that he "thinks about the future every morning" is horrible.

[StrangeSox]

Seen a few. Cheered for each one.

I see a bunch in cali when I've been there recently for work

[Balta1701]

US recorded temperature records in March..."record high temperatures" outpace "Record low temperatures" by a whopping ratio of 35-1. There hasn't been a single month with as many record low temperatures as record high temperatures since January of 2011.

 

[StrangeSox]

 

http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2012/02/17/...great-delusion/

 

And recently in the Wall Street Journal 16 prominent scientists, including physicists, meteorologists and climatologists, came forward to express solidarity with Giaever, writing:

“…large numbers of scientists, many very prominent, share the opinions of Dr. Giaever. And the number of scientific “heretics” is growing with each passing year. The reason is a collection of stubborn scientific facts. Perhaps the most inconvenient fact is the lack of global warming for well over 10 years now. This is known to the warming establishment, as one can see from the 2009 “Climategate” email of climate scientist Kevin Trenberth: ‘The fact is that we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can’t.’”

So why do so many still cling to the hope of climate change catastrophe?

 

 

Read more: http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2012/02/17/.../#ixzz1r6nx2FGQ

 

16 guys said something in a WSJ editorial, Balta. Refute that.

[Y2HH]

 

http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2012/02/17/...great-delusion/

 

 

 

16 guys said something in a WSJ editorial, Balta. Refute that.

 

You guys still having this same conversation from 3 years ago? Move on already. Seriously.

[Balta1701]

You guys still having this same conversation from 3 years ago? Move on already. Seriously.

As soon as we pass the law we should have passed 8 years ago, then we will.

[Y2HH]

As soon as we pass the law we should have passed 8 years ago, then we will.

 

What law? You want to outlaw global warming climate change?

[Balta1701]

What law? You want to outlaw global warming climate change?

Yeah, that would be ideal.

[Y2HH]

Yeah, that would be ideal.

 

My sarcastic impression of Dr. House aside, what law?

[Balta1701]

My sarcastic impression of Dr. House aside, what law?

Some sort of plan that puts a price on carbon. The Republican concept was Cap & Trade before they realized they could just argue for doing nothing. I'd be content with a working version of that (key word: working, not just designed so that GS rakes in a fortune). Something that prices in the damage that emissions are doing.

[StrangeSox]

Not just argue for doing nothing from a "free market will sort it out" standpoint but actively deny that the problem even exists.

[StrangeSox]

CO2 "drove end to last ice age":

 

A new, detailed record of past climate change provides compelling evidence that the last ice age was ended by a rise in temperature driven by an increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide.

 

The finding is based on a very broad range of data, including even the shells of ancient tiny ocean animals.

 

Details of the research have been reported in Nature journal.

 

The paper:

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v484/...ature10929.html

 

Shakun, J.D. et al. (2012) Past extreme warming events linked to massive carbon release from thawing permafrost. Nature, 484, 49-54.

 

The covariation of carbon dioxide (CO2) concentration and temperature in Antarctic ice-core records suggests a close link between CO2 and climate during the Pleistocene ice ages. The role and relative importance of CO2 in producing these climate changes remains unclear, however, in part because the ice-core deuterium record reflects local rather than global temperature. Here we construct a record of global surface temperature from 80 proxy records and show that temperature is correlated with and generally lags CO2 during the last (that is, the most recent) deglaciation. Differences between the respective temperature changes of the Northern Hemisphere and Southern Hemisphere parallel variations in the strength of the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation recorded in marine sediments. These observations, together with transient global climate model simulations, support the conclusion that an antiphased hemispheric temperature response to ocean circulation changes superimposed on globally in-phase warming driven by increasing CO2 concentrations is an explanation for much of the temperature change at the end of the most recent ice age.

[StrangeSox]

Two years after BP oil spill, sick fish found in gulf

 

Two years after the Deepwater Horizon rig exploded and sank in the Gulf of Mexico, touching off the worst offshore spill in U.S. history, research into the disaster’s environmental effects is turning up ailing fish that bear hallmarks of diseases tied to petroleum and other pollutants.

Those illnesses don’t pose an increased health threat to humans, scientists say, but the problems could be devastating to prized species such as grouper and red snapper, and to the people who make their living catching them.

***

“Bile tells you what a fish’s last meal was,” said Steve Murawski, a marine biologist with the University of South Florida who was chief science adviser for the National Marine Fisheries Service until November 2010 when he began working on oil spill studies for USF. “There was as late as August of last year an oil source out there that some of those animals were consuming.”

Bile in red snapper, yellow-edge grouper and a few other species contained on average 125 parts per million of naphthalene, a compound found in crude oil, Murawski said. Scientists expect to find almost none of the toxin in fish captured in the open ocean.

 

 

Gulf seafood deformities alarm scientists

“The fishermen have never seen anything like this,” Dr Jim Cowan told Al Jazeera. “And in my 20 years working on red snapper, looking at somewhere between 20 and 30,000 fish, I’ve never seen anything like this either.”

Dr Cowan, with Louisiana State University’s Department of Oceanography and Coastal Sciences started hearing about fish with sores and lesions from fishermen in November 2010.

Cowan’s findings replicate those of others living along vast areas of the Gulf Coast that have been impacted by BP’s oil and dispersants.

Gulf of Mexico fishermen, scientists and seafood processors have told Al Jazeera they are finding disturbing numbers of mutated shrimp, crab and fish that they believe are deformed by chemicals released during BP’s 2010 oil disaster.

Along with collapsing fisheries, signs of malignant impact on the regional ecosystem are ominous: horribly mutated shrimp, fish with oozing sores, underdeveloped blue crabs lacking claws, eyeless crabs and shrimp – and interviewees’ fingers point towards BP’s oil pollution disaster as being the cause.

***

“The dispersants used in BP’s draconian experiment contain solvents, such as petroleum distillates and 2-butoxyethanol. Solvents dissolve oil, grease, and rubber,” Dr Riki Ott, a toxicologist, marine biologist and Exxon Valdez survivor told Al Jazeera. “It should be no surprise that solvents are also notoriously toxic to people, something the medical community has long known”.

The dispersants are known to be mutagenic, a disturbing fact that could be evidenced in the seafood deformities. Shrimp, for example, have a life-cycle short enough that two to three generations have existed since BP’s disaster began, giving the chemicals time to enter the genome.

Pathways of exposure to the dispersants are inhalation, ingestion, skin, and eye contact. Health impacts can include headaches, vomiting, diarrhea, abdominal pains, chest pains, respiratory system damage, skin sensitisation, hypertension, central nervous system depression, neurotoxic effects, cardiac arrhythmia and cardiovascular damage. They are also teratogenic – able to disturb the growth and development of an embryo or fetus – and carcinogenic.

Cowan believes chemicals named polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs), released from BP’s submerged oil, are likely to blame for what he is finding, due to the fact that the fish with lesions he is finding are from “a wide spatial distribution that is spatially coordinated with oil from the Deepwater Horizon, both surface oil and subsurface oil. A lot of the oil that impacted Louisiana was also in subsurface plumes, and we think there is a lot of it remaining on the seafloor”.

[StrangeSox]

The first criminal charges over the BP oil spill were filed today.

 

A former engineer for BP BP.LN +1.61% PLC has been arrested and accused of deleting text messages detailing how much oil was gushing into the Gulf of Mexico as BP tried to staunch the Deepwater Horizon spill in the spring of 2010.

 

Kurt Mix, of Katy, Texas, is charged with two counts of obstructing justice for deleting from his iPhone hundreds of text messages he exchanged with a co-worker and a contractor, according to a criminal complaint unsealed Tuesday.

[Y2HH]

The first criminal charges over the BP oil spill were filed today.

 

It's about time. Hopefully there are more to come.

[StrangeSox]

This seems like a pretty low-level guy and it's an obstruction charge for deleting emails. I doubt anyone important will ever face any charges or financial penalties.