The story of how the White House refused to read email from the EPA that included a report on climate change might be the most hilariously tragic incident of the last seven years. Of course, the EPA -- rather than do anything so drastic as deliver the report by courier -- revised it to avoid the non-winger spam filter at the White House. Which makes the story simply tragic.
As it turns out, it wasn't just their eyes that the Bush administration was covering. Dick Cheney was making sure that the royal ears were protected as well.
Members of Vice President's Dick Cheney's staff censored congressional testimony by a top federal official on the health threats posed by global warming, a former Environmental Protection Agency official said today.
In a letter to Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.), who chairs the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, former EPA deputy associate administrator Jason K. Burnett said an official from Cheney's office edited out six pages from the testimony of Julie Gerberding, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, last October.
The White House insists that it's common to go over testimony, and that there's "nothing nefarious" going on here. Naturally.
What could be nefarious about excising scientific facts and covering up threats to public health?
Oh you didn't know? Well neither did I, until early today when I took my sons to our local travel clinic.
I thought my lack of knowledge may have been due to being on vacation visiting my parents in Denver at the end of June. When does one really stay as attuned to all the news that affects them when they are visitng family?
So I came home from the tavel clinic today and checked on Dailykos. The result, searching with the keyword either "rabies" or "Rabies" was zero. Nothing, nada, goose egg.
So I went to google news and searched using the words "Rabies Vaccine Shortage." There are, as of this writing, 38 stories written on this subect for the past month.
G-8 leaders got together today and pledged to cut "greenhouse" gas emissions by half by the year 2050.
but [they] did not specify whether the starting point would be current levels or 1990 levels, and refused to set a short-term target for reducing the gases that scientists agree are warming the planet.
42 years from now. In 42 years they want to see half the problem of today? But of course, global warming doesn't work that easily. You can't stop a problem by doing it 50% less 42 years from now.
How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love Lab-Grown Meat
Earlier today, in the comment section of another diary, I was musing about the Tleilaxu (a/k/a Bene Tleilax) and their ability to create, among other things, a lab-grown meat (a slug-pig combo) loved by many and known throughout the vast Imperium as "slig." But that's all fairy-tales and sci-fi and until recently, I didn't think it existed outside of that realm. Some months (maybe a year?) ago, I read in the Findings section of Harper's Magazine, a tidbit about lab grown meat. I decided to look into it today and thought it was definitely a diary-worthy topic in that it touches on quite a few wide-ranging topics of interest to us Kossacks, such as global warming, the health of the environment in general, feeding the poor, and the ethical treatment of animals.
Follow me into the lab for more discussion and links.
You can find more posts on climate change science, policy, and news at Climate 411.
Coral reefs aren’t just pretty places for scuba divers (although they do bring in billions of tourist dollars). These rich ecosystems also provide habitat for about a million species, including many important commercial fish. Since a billion or more people depend on fish as their main source of protein, human wellbeing is closely tied to coral health.
That’s why 2008 has been designated the International Year of the Reef (IYOR 2008), and why marine biologists, reef managers, fishermen and divers are gathering in Fort Lauderdale this week for the 11th International Coral Reef Symposium.
On the symposium’s opening day, NOAA scientists released a report on the state of coral reef ecosystems in the U.S. The entire document is a dense 569 pages, but the summary is straightforward: Coral reefs are in trouble, and climate change is an increasing threat.
This is just breaking from the AP and I pulled the clip below from C-Span.
"Vice President Dick Cheney’s office pushed for major deletions in congressional testimony on the public health consequences of climate change, fearing the presentation by a leading health official might make it harder to avoid regulating greenhouse gases."
What on earth? Maybe I just shouldn't be shocked anymore but its times like these that the phrase "reality based community" comes to mind and I'm happy to be a part of it. See, we in the reality based community make our decisions based on judicious study of discernible reality. People like Dick Cheney try to bury scientific study to suit their political/economic agenda. Thats the difference.
Watch the clip and weigh in with your thoughts on this breaking story:
We at Daily Kos are well-informed about the impacts of anthropogenic global warming, or AGW for those who love acronyms. Well, a colleague of mine here at work sent me a web cam picture (NOAA Arctic NetCam XL #1) of the North Pole taken at 03:48 UTC 7 July 2008. Note the weather is quite pleasant and sunny; 3.5°C (about 38°F) with a relative humidity of 84% (the dew point is probably at 32°F, the freezing point). That it is sunny is an important point I'll get to shortly.
The picture and some ruminations based on last summer's record minimum in polar ice cover can be seen below the fold.
Home is an invention on which no one has yet improved.
A man defending his home is worth 10 invaders.
There is no place like home.
Home is home, be it ever so humble.
These phrases may have graced our ears 3,592 times, but ponderings on the meaning of home mean a little bit more to those of us in Appalachia these days.
Mountain Mondays will be a weekly celebration of our mountain home in Appalachia.
You see, in many ways, Appalachia isn't what it used to be. We have lost more than 1 million acres of land, along with 1000+ of miles of our once pristine streams, and 90% of our traditional coal jobs to mountaintop removal mining. This barbaric practice has reduced much of our home to rubble, and further damaged our perennially struggling local economies. The jobs are gone. The people are leaving. The water is toxic. And they are blowing up the mountains themselves.
But the face of Appalachian resistance to "Big Coal" is changing...
Deforestation is not only unabated, it's accelerating around the globe. The problem is growing bigger, yet it is also becoming more concentrated.
Just how concentrated has the problem become? Previously Brazil was thought to account for 27% of worldwide deforestation - per the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO). Now it is understood to be a whopping 48%.
This news comes from a new study in the 7/8/08 issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) by Matthew Hansen - as reported by Mongabay.
Put another way:
...Brazil accounts for nearly half of global deforestation, nearly four times that of the next highest country, Indonesia, which makes up about an eighth of worldwide forest clearing.
Tomorrow the G8 leaders will begin 3 days of meetings in Toyako Japan. Climaticide is one of the topics on the agenda, although analysts are holding out few prospects of any substantive agreements.
The indefatigable and ever optimistic James Hansen of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies has written a letter to Japanese Prime MinisterYasuo Fukuda, who is under pressure at home to set limits on greenhouse gas emissions, stressing the urgent need to cut CO2 emissions and eventuallyroll them back to 350 ppm or less. The key element in Hansen's analysis is that to do this we must quickly phase out coal emissions.
From the Chesapeake Climate Action Network, this stellar video describes how Dominion Resources, with the full support of Virginia governor Timothy Kaine (D), is breaking ground on a $1.8 billion coal-fired plant in Wise County, VA. On June 26, officials recently appointed by Kaine to the Virginia Air Pollution Control Board unanimously granted air quality permits to Dominion Virginia Power, a subsidiary of Dominion Resources.
It would seem that anonymous viral emails are finally catching up technologically with the rest of the world. My Limbaugh-loving father, who normally would never forward to me anything political, forwarded the following link to a You-tube video to me and some other family members, with the comment "This guy has it right."
It shows an actor in a chair claiming to be "Joe American" who has a plan to solve our energy needs and maybe bring peace to the world (seriously). It is my habit to always answer such viral emails when I get them from friends and relatives. But I thought I would post it here first, on the off chance that somebody might set me straight if any of my assertions are glaringly off, since I would be "replying to all," some of whom have never heard my opinions concerning energy, or politics, for that matter.
The Bush Administration's final rush to loot and pillage as much of America's national heritage as it can before leaving office is proceeding full steam ahead. On the heals of its plans to lift the ban on offshore drilling and its refusal to abide by the Supreme Court ruling on EPA's responsibility to regulate greenhouse gases comes this.
The Bush administration is preparing to ease the way for the nation's largest private landowner to convert hundreds of thousands of acres of mountain forestland to residential subdivisions.
I live in Fallbrook, a rural area on the edge of Camp Pendleton. It's ULTRA conservative. We have a local paper called the Village News, and the letters to the editors provide insight into what's going on with the rightwing religious conservatives. This week there was a rant about, "Global warming: a political Doom’s Day religion"
Here is the whole letter:
Instead of believing Al Gore’s big distortion, there are various organizations that study and report on climate using technology rather than hype. Of course there are those who receive grants to distort, and with the help of the willing media, advertise this region for the control and the taxing of corporation and citizens by the heads of this "religion."
I have provided the Village News office (127 West Elder Street in Fallbrook) with a copy of a paper by the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine, distributed by the Heartland Institute of Chicago.
This paper shows that increased atmospheric CO2 does not cause unfavorable changes in global temperatures, weather or landscape. I am a professional engineer, State of California.
I decided to take a few hours and do an exhaustive response, which may be useful for your responses to such letters.
For years, Sarah felt safe as she traveled about. She shielded herself from harm. She placed her faith in science. She listened to the advice of experts. She thought she had been careful with chemicals and creams. This wise woman knew not to trust recommendations without doing a thorough examination of evidence. After an avid assessment, Sarah avowed, "Sunscreens are good." Then one day, as she entered her home after being out and about, she saw what she had never imagined.
Call me an optimist. Coal is king, tar sands oil is booming, the arctic is melting, tropical cyclones keep setting new records, and my own city is still flooded. Yet, in these times, a revolution in both energy and electrified transportation is taking place right beneath our noses, and perhaps nowhere are we seeing the seeds of this being planted more than on the island of Oahu.
Read on to learn more about the world you may be leaving to your grandchildren and the role Hawaii's third largest island may play in bringing it about.
As books go, this one is very short. That, however, is one of it's strengths. By leaving out the details of climate change, which one can find in many other books and reports, and focusing instead on a synthesis of our current knowledge of climate science, Dr. Emanuel has written an extremely useful summary.
I have read many books on global warming, climate change, or, to use the term that I prefer, Climaticide. This volume is one of the most useful for the non-scientist because it presents all the major concepts in a concise, clearly written, yet comprehensive account.
Home is an invention on which no one has yet improved.
