"A goal without a plan is just a wish." --Antoine de Saint Exupery, French writer and aviator
Look Who's Talking
March 2009 Tenth Warmest On Record For Global Temperatures
Climate Change Complicates Ozone Recovery
Kansas Governor Again Vetoes Coal-Fired Power Plants
South Carolina Court Asked to Deny Coal Plant Air Permit
Pavement Sealcoat A Source Of Toxins In Stormwater Runoff
Facebook Use Linked To Lower Grades In College
Toshiba batteries promise 90-second recharges
Fight Water Pollution in Your Own Backyard
Study: 98% of Products' Green Claims Are Misleading
Pesticide Industry Is Offended by Michelle Obama's Organic Garden at the White House
Webinar: Designing a LEED Certified, State-of-the-Art Data Center
Wind Tower Manufacturing Plant To Be World's Largest
Wilkins Ice Bridge Collapse - more photos
Remake of the classic Ten Years After song, "I'd Love To Change The World"
Hotter temps and more intense dust storms are propelling an endemic disease across the Southwest United States.
Did lead cause global cooling?
Critical Turning Point Can Trigger Abrupt Climate Change
Carbon Dioxide Transformed Into Methanol
Look Who's Talking
In an effort to plug his new book, multiple websites and blogs, Steven Milloy spoke Monday at the conservative Heritage Foundation. His message: For the love of liberty, pollute, pollute, pollute.
Milloy's book, Green Hell: How Environmentalists Plan to Ruin your life and What You Can Do to Stop Them, describes members of the green movement as communists who are creating and exaggerating environmental problems in order to scare the public into allowing the government to take control of and regulate all aspects of Americans' lives. Of course all of this freedom to pollute and destroy the planet may ensure that in the years to come our environment will no longer be able to sustain life thus preventing future generations of Americans from enjoying the beauty of American freedom.
But Milloy doesn't seem too concerned. Refusing to admit that science and facts are not on their side, Milloy and fellow conservatives have resorted to a bizarre assortment of scare tactics and propaganda in a last ditch effort to convince Americans that the right to pollute and destroy the planet must be preserved in order to maintain our freedoms.
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March 2009 Tenth Warmest On Record For Global Temperatures
ScienceDaily (Apr. 20, 2009) -- The combined global land and ocean surface average temperature for March 2009 was the 10th warmest since records began in 1880, according to an analysis by NOAA's National Climatic Data Center in Asheville, N.C.
The analyses in NCDC's global reports are based on preliminary data, which are subject to revision. Additional quality control is applied to the data when late reports are received several weeks after the end of the month and as increased scientific methods improve NCDC's processing algorithms.
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Climate Change Complicates Ozone Recovery
BALTIMORE, Maryland, April 10, 2009 (ENS) - Increasing greenhouse gases would delay or even postpone the recovery of ozone levels in the lower stratosphere over some parts of the planet, according to new research by scientists from NASA and Johns Hopkins University.
Earth's ozone layer is predicted to recover from the destruction caused by the use of refrigerants and other ozone-depleting chemicals in the 20th century. But the studies find that the ozone layer of the future will be different from the ozone layer of the past because greenhouse gases are changing the dynamics of the atmosphere.
While the buildup of greenhouse gases warms the atmosphere from Earth's surface up six miles high, it cools the upper stratosphere - the atmospheric layer between 18 and 31 miles up.
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Kansas Governor Again Vetoes Coal-Fired Power Plants
TOPEKA, Kansas, April 13, 2009 (ENS) - Kansas Governor Kathleen Sebelius today again vetoed a bill that would permit construction of two coal-fired power plants in southwest Kansas.
The measure was the fourth bill the governor has rejected in the past two years for the two power plants near Holcomb in Finney County.
"Last year, I vetoed legislation that forced the Secretary of the Kansas Department of Health and Environment to issue air quality permits for two new coal fired plants which would produce 11 million tons of carbon dioxide each year," the governor said in her veto message.
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South Carolina Court Asked to Deny Coal Plant Air Permit
COLUMBIA, South Carolina, April 13, 2009 (ENS) - A lawsuit filed today by the Southern Environmental Law Center on behalf of state and national advocacy groups claims that South Carolina's environmental agency illegally permitted an unneeded coal-fired power plant on the Great Pee Dee River that would emit 31 times more toxic mercury than the legal limit and millions of tons of greenhouse gases.
In filing today's challenge in South Carolina Administrative Law Court, the SELC represents Environmental Defense Fund, League of Women Voters of South Carolina, the South Carolina Coastal Conservation League, the South Carolina Wildlife Federation, and the Sierra Club. The contested case is filed against the state Department of Health and Environmental Control.
"This plant would add mercury pollution to an already contaminated region of the Pee Dee, but DHEC waived the maximum mercury controls required by law," said SELC attorney Blan Holman.
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Pavement Sealcoat A Source Of Toxins In Stormwater Runoff
ScienceDaily (Apr. 14, 2009) -- Driveways and parking lots may look better with a layer of sealcoat applied to the pavement, but the water running off the surface into nearby streams will be carrying more than just oxygen and hydrogen molecules.
New research conducted at the University of New Hampshire Stormwater Center (UNHSC) indicates that sealcoat may contribute to increasingly significant amounts of polyaromatic hydrocarbons entering waterways from stormwater runoff.
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Facebook Use Linked To Lower Grades In College
ScienceDaily (Apr. 14, 2009) -- College students who use Facebook spend less time studying and have lower grade point averages than students who have not signed up for the social networking website, according to a pilot study at one university.
However, more than three-quarters of Facebook users claimed that their use of the social networking site didn't interfere with their studies.
"We can't say that use of Facebook leads to lower grades and less studying – but we did find a relationship there," said Aryn Karpinski, co-author of the study and a doctoral student in education at Ohio State University.
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Toshiba batteries promise 90-second recharges
Japanese technology company Toshiba has reportedly improved its so-called Super Charge Ion Battery (SCiB) technology to make it even more efficient.
According to reports from Japanese financial daily Nikkei, Toshiba has improved the performance of its lithium-titanate-based SCiB by up to four times. The battery can now be charged in around 90 seconds making it suitable for applications requiring very high energy densities or very short charging delays.
According to Nikkei, Toshiba produces around 150,000 SCiBs a month but plans to increase this by building a facility later this year which could manufacture around 2 million batteries a month, with plans to increase capacity in the future.
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Fight Water Pollution in Your Own Backyard
When rain falls faster than the ground can absorb it, it runs off into storm drains along with any contaminants in its path, such as oil and grease, de-icing salts, heavy metals, pesticides, and bacteria from trash and animal waste. The Environmental Protection Agency reports that urban runoff--in which 77 of 127 key pollutants have been detected--is one of the largest sources of water contamination nationwide.
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Study: 98% of Products' Green Claims Are Misleading
7 Sins of Greenwashing report outlines all the ways marketers deceive us, when we're trying to make responsible purchases.
According to one set of high standards, only 2% of products claiming in some way to be "green" actually measure up. The rest -- a whopping 98% -- are making false claims that mislead consumers into thinking a product is sustainable.
Things are so bad out there that the report's author, TerraChoice Environmental Marketing, had to add a seventh sin of greenwashing to the original six it developed for its first report, in 2007.
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Pesticide Industry Is Offended by Michelle Obama's Organic Garden at the White House
Pesticide makers are upset with Michelle Obama. They are offended. Possibly even scared.
In a letter, Mid America CropLife Association, an industry association representing more than 60 companies, sought to school the First Lady in the history of American agriculture, with a focus on how technology has increased yields:
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Webinar: Designing a LEED Certified, State-of-the-Art Data Center
Tuesday, April 28, 2009
2:00 PM, Eastern Daylight Time
Become an insider on Emerson's soon-to-open 35,000-square-foot, energy optimized data center project. Emerson Network Power advocates best practices in data centers, and when it was called on by corporate parent Emerson to help design and equip a showcase data center that would accommodate the company's 100-facility consolidation project, Emerson Network Power got the chance to practice what it preaches. This Webcast will detail the strategies the company employed to achieve efficiency, scalability and reliability
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Wind Tower Manufacturing Plant To Be World's Largest
Pueblo, CO-- PCL Construction Services Inc. has been awarded the contract to build the Vestas Wind Turbine Tower Manufacturing Campus in Pueblo.
Once complete in mid-2009, the tower manufacturing campus will be the largest of its kind in the world, occupying more than 600,000 square feet in its entirety and representing one of the largest single investments in Vestas history, the company said. When combined with its existing facilities in Windsor and the newly planned facilities in Brighton, Vestas will add a total of 2,500 new jobs to Colorado.
"We are thrilled to participate in a project of such complexity and scale," said Kevin Welch, PCL's senior project manager for the Vestas Towers' project. "We look forward to working closely with Vestas in making Colorado a leader in renewable energy."
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Wilkins Ice Bridge Collapse
The Wilkins Ice Shelf, on the western side of the Antarctic Peninsula, experienced multiple disintegration events in 2008. A rapid retreat started in February, near the end of the Antarctic summer. Another breakup began in May, during the Antarctic winter. And fresh cracks appeared on the shelf in late November 2008. By the beginning of 2009, a narrow ice bridge was all that remained to connect the ice shelf to ice fragments fringing nearby Charcot Island. That bridge gave way in early April 2009.
Days after the ice bridge rupture, on April 12, 2009, the Advanced Spaceborne Thermal Emission and Reflection Radiometer (ASTER) on NASA's Terra satellite captured this image of the southern base of the ice bridge, where it connected with the remnant ice shelf.
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Remake of the classic Ten Years After song, "I'd Love To Change The World"
Justice Through Music, www.jtmp.org, a national non-profit has teamed up with the activist band Op-Critical in a cool music video about how people can "change the world" and save the environment by getting involved.
The video is a remake of the classic Ten Years After song, "I'd Love To Change The World," with updated lyrics and a new arrangement with an added guitar solo at the end. The original 1971 version was made famous by Alvin Lee's scorching guitar, and Op-Critical pays homage to Lee in this remake.
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Hotter temps and more intense dust storms are propelling an endemic disease across the Southwest United States.
PHOENIX - It's high noon, and the 112-degree summer heat – up from a decade ago – stalks Arizona's Sonoran Desert. By late afternoon, dark clouds threaten, and monsoon winds beat the earth into a mass of swirling sand. Thick walls of surface soil blind drivers on the Interstate.
Some health experts believe new weather conditions - hotter temperatures and more intense dust storms fueled by global warming - are creating a perfect storm for the transmission of coccidioidomycosis, also known as valley fever, a fungal disease endemic to the southwestern United States.
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Did lead cause global cooling?
Previous generations unwittingly found a way to cool the Earth, but it's an approach we won't want to reprise. Research suggests that particles of lead from gasoline exhaust may have offset warming in the 20th century.
It's well known that particles in the atmosphere such as mineral dust, pollen, heavy metals and even bacteria can act as seeds for the nucleation of ice crystals. These crystals form clouds that can affect the Earth's energy balance by reflecting the sun's rays back into space, for example.
Dan Cziczo and colleagues of the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Richland, Washington, created artificial clouds in the laboratory to explore the ice nucleation efficiency of various particles. Over a third of the ice nuclei generated contained lead, suggesting it is a highly-efficient nucleator. They found similar proportions of lead in atmospheric mineral dust samples collected in Switzerland.
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Critical Turning Point Can Trigger Abrupt Climate Change
ScienceDaily (Apr. 21, 2009) -- Ice ages are the greatest natural climate changes in recent geological times. Their rise and fall are caused by slight changes in the Earth's orbit around the Sun due to the influence of the other planets. But we do not know the exact relationship between the changes in the Earth's orbit and the changes in climate.
New research from the Niels Bohr Institute indicates that there can be changes in the CO2 levels in the atmosphere that suddenly reach a critical turning point and with that trigger the dramatic climate changes.
The Earth's climate is essentially controlled by three different cycles (Milankovitch). All three cycles are caused by the pull of the other planets in the solar system on the Earth, and one could say that they control the Earth's climate by causing changes in the Sun's radiation.
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Carbon Dioxide Transformed Into Methanol
ScienceDaily (Apr. 17, 2009) -- Scientists at Singapore's Institute of Bioengineering and Nanotechnology (IBN) have succeeded in unlocking the potential of carbon dioxide - a common greenhouse gas - by converting it into a more useful product.
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