Mandelbrot set
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Please contribute relevant news items to be posted below - send links to peter.caplan@yahoo.com

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see our Newsletter for original articles by DC Metro Science for the People members

NEW SECTION: Drug test abuse. This section brings to light mounting evidence of widespread misuse and distortion of the findings of modern chemistry in an effort tocontinue filling the nation's jails with casualties of the "War on Drugs". To visit this section, click at left.

Science for the People on cable radio. Listen to Jane Zara's interview of John Kelly, author and investigative researcher and DC Metro Science for the People member on the subject of incompetence and corruption at the FBI laboratories and abuses of forensic science. (may take up to a minute to download - be patient!)

Science for the People in the community:
We submitted grant proposals for funding under the Advisory Neighborhood Commission 1D Small Grants program for 2009. These three proposals have been funded:
   * Is My Neighborhood Hazardous to My Health?
   * Urban Gardening in Mt Pleasant
   * Forensic/Legal Counseling for Indigent Arrestees
At the left is a photo of David Schwartzman and Jane Zara explaining the effects of air pollution on lichen growth to summer school students at Bancroft School.(Aug, 2009)

FEATURED VIDEO: In Schools Everywhere: The Story of Stuff. Annie Leonard's simple, cheerful and brutal 2007 video about consumption, waste, the environment and capitalism has become a hit among teachers and students nationwide, according to this front-page Times article.Watch the video HERE. [Leslie Kaufman, NY Times, May 10]

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LATEST POSTS

Posted Jan 22: The Radioactive Waste Crisis. By the end of this month, DOE will release the result of a 2-year study on how to manage 70 years of nuclear waste. The solution is not yet known -either reprocessing or remote storage for an indeterminate time, but hardened on-site storage is not under discussion and neither is stopping the ongoing production of radioactive waste until a solution is found. [Linda Penz Gunter Counterpunch, Jan20-22]

Posted Jan 22: Blood on Whose Hands?: Bradley Manning, Wikileaks, and the Blood of Civilians. The high-tech US strikes on Afghanistan constantly claim civilian lives, but the details were usually hidden or at best distorted - until this high-tech counter-strike: the hundreds of thousands of sensitive douments released via Wikileaks by the soon-to-be-court-martialed Army private Bradley Manning. [Chase Madar, Tom Dispatch (via Commondreams), Jan 20]

Posted Jan 22: Open Climate 101 Online: The most popular undergraduate science course at the U of Chicago is "Global Warming: Understanding the Forecast". The professors have just made the course available on-line and free of charge.[Ray Pierrehumbert and David Archer, RealClimate, Jan 16]

Posted Jan 22: Study raises new concerns about safety of genetically modified food. A new Chinese study, published in Atlantic, has indicated that a certain type of RNA when ingested from food can alter the functioning of cells in the human body. This may have serious implications for genetically altered food products. [Ari Levaux, Atlantic (via Xeni Jardin, BoingBoing.net),Jan 09]

Posted Jan 11: Iran Accuses Israel, US of Assassinating Nuclear Scientist According to an AP report "Two assailants on a motorcycle attached magnetic bombs to the car of an Iranian university professor [Mostafa Ahmadi Roshan] working at a key nuclear facility, killing him and another person Wednesday, state TV reported. The slayings suggest a widening covert effort to set back Iran's atomic program.The attack in Tehran bore a strong resemblance to earlier killings of scientists working on the Iranian nuclear program." The US has denied commmiting the crime; Israel has not commented.[Common Dreams staff report, Jan 11]

Posted Jan 11: NY Times Readers Complain About Biased Coverage on IAEA Iran Report; Times Public Editor Rules for the Plaintiffs. The New York Times along with most major public media ran misleading headlines about the content of the recent International Atomic Energy Agency report on Iran's nuclear capabilities, exactly when certain presidential hopefuls are openly calling for regime change or military attacks against Iran. The Public Editor of the NYT, responding to a storm of reader protest against the article's bias, sided with the readers. The Times removed part of the article from its online edition but published no correction. Was it by any chance the same NYT whose biased reporting lent respectability to lies about Iraq's nukes in 2003? [Robert Naiman, CommonDreams, Jan 11]

Posted Jan 5: Canaries in the Data Mines - civil libertarians raise alarm over America’s national surveillance network. Fueled by the 9/11 attack, a "vast and intricate system" of data collection and sharing has been steadily growing over the last decade. Disparate bits of information are assembled together in an array of 72 state and urban "fusion centers", which are secretive and resistant to efforts to determine what information exists and how much of it is accurate. The human effort to feed these fusion centers involves "at least 800,000 local and state law enforcement officials".[Nan Levinson, In These Times, jan 5]

Posted Jan 5: Memo to Obama. A letter from members of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS) raises questions about a nuclear threat from Iran and warns against going down the same road that has already led in the last few years to U.S. attacks on seven Muslim countries. The letter concludes "...we should not undertake another dumb war against a country almost three times larger than Iraq, that would set off a major regional war and create generations of jihadis. Such a war, contrary to what some argue, would not make Israel or the U.S. safer. [Coleen Rowley, Common Dreams, Jan 5]

Posted Jan 5, 2012: Iraq, Afghanistan and the End of US Supremacy. The immensity of the US's tragic eight-year fiasco in Iraq can be grasped not only through looking at the near-trillion-dollar price tagand the hundreds of thousands of Iraqis killed and millions displaced but at the fact that 505 bases are being dismantled and 20,000 truckloads of materiel exported. What remains behind is still impressive: an ëmbassy"to be staffed by over 15,000 people and guarded by another 5000 mercenaries. And now the worldest greatest superpower - having concluded, in the words of Secretary of Defense Panett, that "the price was worth it" - is free to concentrate on finding ways of declaring the ongoing 10-year debacle in Afganhistan was also "worth it" as we once more leave the patient in worse shape than she was before the operation. An important reality that has been exposed is that "we no longer live on a planet where it's obvious how to leverage staggering advantages in military technology into any other kind of power. [Tom Englehart, Common Dreams, Jan 3]

----------Stuck in the sand in Afghanistan----------------

====================== 2011 =============================

Posted Dec 31, 2011: World Pays Ecuador Not to Extract Oil from Rainforest. Governments and film starsjoined an alliance to compensate Ecuador for lost revenue from 900 million barrelsof oil."According to the UN, the 'crowdfunding' initiative had [Dec 29]raised $116m (£75m), enough to temporarily halt the exploitation of the 722 square miles of "core" Amazonian rainforest known as Yasuní national park in Ecuador.[John Vidal, The Guardian(via Common Dreams, Dec 30]

Posted Dec 31: Contractors' Role Grows in Drone Missions, Worrying Some in the Military. Drones employ people, too. The Global Hawk surveillance drone requires 300 people to keep it in the air for 300 hours. the Air Force flies more than 50 drones around the clock over Afghanistan and other target areas. To save money, they hire relatively untrained people through hundreds of civilian contractors, among them SAIC. The recent erroneous air strike that killed civilians in Afghanistan was called in by an SAIC employee.Will future funding cutbacks cause the Pentagon to fight less wars or will it replace more aircraft with drones?[David Cloud, McClatchey Newspapers(via Common Dreams), Dec 30]

Posted Dec 31: Hysteria Reconsidered: Iran’s Nuclear Program and the Latest IAEA Report. The November report by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) once more focused international concern on Iran's possible covert nuclear weapons development. The US has reacted by attempting to isolate Iran and ratchet up international pressure. Is this justified by what the IAEA presented and by what is known about the history of Iran's nuclear research?[David Szydloski, In These Times,Dec 19]

Posted Dec 31: Science controversies past and present. Today's widespread resistance to scientific findings about global warming and its sources has interesting historical parallels to the resistance encountered to the findings of Galileo and Einstein [Steven Sherwood,Physics Today,Oct 11]

Posted Dec 23: Too Late to Contain Killer Flu Science, say Experts. "Attempts to censor details of controversial influenza experiments that created a highly infectious form of bird-flu virus are unlikely to stop the information from leaking out, according to scientists familiar with the research."The virus was deliberately mutated by two teams of researchers into a form that could easily be transmitted through the air. [Steve Connor, The Independent(via Common Dreams), Dec 22]

Posted Dec 23: Occupy Wall Street's 'occucopter' – Who's Watching Whom? - or Drones for the People. Tim Pool, an Occupy Wall Street protester has bought is own remotely piloted mini-helicopter (from Amazon) that is outfitted with a video-equipped cell phone that he has equipped with software to beam live video to the internet. But there are problems raised by its use for spying on police activities: will the police justify it to amplify their own ambitions for widespread spying on the public? Can criminals use it to case targets for crimes? Is the cat already out of the bag? [Noel Sharkey and Sarah Knuckey, The Guardian (via Truthdig), Dec 21]

Posted Dec 23: Income inequality in the Roman Empire. This blog post cites historical evidence that may show that wealth inequality in the US is growing rapidly enough to have surpassed its level in imperial Rome. The author provides neat explanation of the Gini coefficient which measures inequality across all income levels on a scale of zero to one. [Tim De Chant, persquaremile.com blog(via Truthdig), Dec 16]

Posted Dec 18: As Permafrost Thaws, Scientists Study the Risks. Another possible tipping point in the gallery of possible triggers for runaway climate change has come in for renewed study - the very large quantities of methane trapped in the permafrost of the Northern Hemispheres. With the rapid arctic warming predicted by the latest scenarios, ", the gases from permafrost alone "could eventually equal 35 percent of todays annual human emissions.[Justin Gillis, NY Times,Dec 16]

Posted Dec 13: Canada First Nation to Pull Out of Kyoto Protocol. One of the US's main enables inits drive to fry the world, our neighbor Canada who is providing access to the Alberta tar sands, has now dropped all pretense about trying to cut back on carbonbizing the atmosphere. The Conservative government of Stephen Harper announced, just after the Durban meeting (at which it remained silent) that Canada was abandoning Kyoto. [David Ljunggren and Randall Palmer,Common Dreams (from Reuters, Dec 13]

Posted Dec 13: Protests Boost Sales and Fears of Sonic Blaster. The eruption of the nation-wide Occupy protests may have provided a boost to the economy - at least in the police/military weapons sector, where the tools of "nation-building" abroad are coming increasingly into the hands of the guardianss of the 1% and their banks at home. This AP release discusses the ongoing experiments with the use in the streets of "sound cannons", which the police say are "only to broadcast messages". This is presumably more humane than pepper spray, tear gas and rubber bullets (which of course also at the ready), and maybe more cool than disrupting speakers with low-hovering helicopters. [David Dishneau, AP, via Common Dreams, Dec 12]

Posted Dec 13: Deal Reached in Durban But Scientists Say it Won't Avert Catastrophic Climate Change. Under the Durban agreement, governments will now spend four years negotiating how far and how fast each country should cut carbon emissions.Time is running out but "governments have reopened the door to a legally binding global agreement involving the world's major emitters, a door which many thought had been shut at the Copenhagen conference in 2009," said Bill Hare, director at Climate Action Tracker.[Fiona Harvey and john Vidal, The Guardian (via AlterNet, Dec 22]

Posted Dec 13: Healers, Torture and National Security. A retired brigadier general and Army psychiatrist decries the current permissive attitude toward torture that follows by only two generations the prosecution of Nazi torturers. A Human Rights First convocation concluded that "Torture Is Damaging. "... a person who is tortured is damaged, but so are the torturer, the nation and the military." [Stephen Xenakis, Truthout Op-Ed, Dec 10]

Posted Dec 13: Today's Severe Drought, Tomorrow's Normal. A new co-operative study examining the effect of the ongoing global warming on precipitation showed that regardless of the model(19 models were testedd), global warming is always associated with reduction of mean rainfall and thus more severe droughts in drought-prone areas. The results are to be published in the December 2011 issue of the American Meteorological Society’s Journal of Hydrometerology. [Environmental Protection, Dec 7]

Posted Dec 7: The Most Important News Story of the Day/Millennium. A no doubt soon-to-be-famous statement from Bill McKibben: "You think OWS is radical? You think 350.org was radical for helping organize mass civil disobedience in DC in August against the Keystone Pipeline? We’re not radical. Radicals work for oil companies. The CEO of Exxon gets up every morning and goes to work changing the chemical composition of the atmosphere. No one has ever done anything as radical as that, not in all of human history". Twelve years after the signing of the Kyoto treaty, has the world succeeded in reducing the rate of carbon emissions to the atmosphere? Has it at least succeeded in slowing it? No and no. Even in the middle of a global economic slowdown, the rate of carbon emission increasde last year by 6% - a new record.[Bill McKibben, Common Dreams, Dec 5]

Posted Dec 7: The New Digital Divide. In a 1995 report, the Department of Commerce was already calling attention to the class-based difference in internet access. The gap has rapidly widened - "High-speed access is a superhighway for those who can afford it, while racial minorities and poorer and rural Americans must make do with a bike path." "Millions are still offline completely, while others can afford only connections over their phone lines or via wireless smartphones. They can thus expect even lower-quality health services, career opportunities, education and entertainment options than they already receive. [Susan Crawford, NY Times, Dec 3] But, be sure and read this commentary on some questionable assumptions (downplaying the importance of wireless technology, for one) that Crawford makes in the article [Ev Ehrlich's Everyday Economics, evehrlich.net, Dec 5]

Posted Nov 25: Iran and the IAEA. Investigative reporter Seymour Hersh has come up with another expose of the continued ballyhooing of a nuclear threat from Iran. In this piece he highlights the compromised role of the new IAEA head, Yukiya Amano of Japan, who under heavy US pressure was appointed in the wake of Mohammed ElBaradei's retirment.This piece received wide circulation and appeared in the TehranTimes website. Democracy Now conducted an interview of Hersh on Nov 21.[Seymour Hersh, New Yorker blog, Nov 18]

Posted Nov 25: Debate over Iran nukes is a farce. Toronto Star editorial page editor emeritus Haroon Siddiqui writes that Iran "may be violating the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty but it’s a signatory that must open up its nuclear facilities to international inspection. Israel, India and Pakistan, which also developed the bomb on the sly, refuse to sign the treaty and don’t show a thing to the International Atomic Energy Agency. Yet they get rewarded by the U.S. while Iran is subjected to illegal covert actions — contamination of its nuclear computers with viruses and assassination of its scientists."[Haroon Siddiqui, Toronto Star, Nov 23]

Posted Nov 22: Capitalism vs. the Climate. Naomi Klein attended a conference of the core of the climate denialist crowd - the Heartland Institute - and came away with a sober analysis of the connection between their "science" and their political analysis: They're right - a serious effort to reverse the loading of the atmosphere with greenhouse gases can only be done by "radically re-ordering our political and economic system"; liberal environmentalists are in denial about this. [Naomi Klein, The Nation, Nov 28]

Posted Nov 22: More Vegetables Evolving Chocolate-Sauce-Filled Centers As Evolutionary Imperative. Late-breaking news from The Onion! "A crop must adapt to changes in the food-consumption environment and develop traits that encourage the plant's cultivation and consumption," said Professor...". Eat your heart out, Intelligent Design-ers.[The Onion, News In Brief, Nov 18]

 Posted Nov 22: Threshold Sea Surface Temperature for Hurricanes and Tropical Thunderstorms Is Rising. The good news: more doubt is cast on global warming's role in stimulating more frequent and/or severe hurricanes. The bad news: More support for observations of a strong rise in tropical tropospheric temperatures. The study cite was published by Johnson and Xie in Nature Geoscience a year ago. [ScienceDaily.com, Nov 8]

 Posted Nov 15: Nukes in Space. It's called "Curiosity". What a charming name for a plutonium-powered Mars rover, the updated version of the old solar-powered rover.And only a one-in-220 chance of a cloud of plutonium particles being release to the atmosphere and surface, says its environmental impact statement. And all this for only $2.5 billion. Florida residents are protesting, but no complaints have been heard yet from residents of Mars. [Karl Grossman, Counterpunch, Nov 9]

 Posted Nov 15: "Deadly Monopolies": Medical Ethicist Harriet Washington on her book, subtitled, How Firms are Taking Over Life Itself. In the past 30 years, more than 40,000 patents have been granted on genes alone and many more patents are pending. Harriet Washington argues that the biotechnology and pharmaceutical companies patenting these genes are more concerned with profit than with the health or medical needs of patients.[Democracy Now, Oct 30]

 Posted Nov 15: Who Owns Federally Funded Research? The Supreme Court and the Bayh–Dole Act. [Aaron S. Kesselheim, and Rahul Rajkumar, New Engl J. Med, Sep 29]

 Posted Nov 15: Race Against the Machine: The Book and the Blurbs. Quoted by the author from a blurb by Tim O'Reilly:”We’re entering unknown territory in the quest to reduce labor costs. The AI revolution is doing to white collar jobs what robotics did to blue collar jobs. Race Against the Machine is a bold effort to make sense of the future of work." [Andrew Mcafee blog]

 Posted Nov 15: Our Unpaid, Extra Shadow Work. While you're happily checking out and bagging your own groceries and pumping your own gas, looking for an item in Home Depot, dealing with your latest computer virus - do you sometimes wonder what happened to all your spare time - and to all those employees displaced by automation that was supposed to liberate you?(BTW, how many books have you read this year?)[Craig Lambert,NY Times,Oct 29]

 Posted Oct 31: The Twittersphere Unmasked. Is Twitter a force for conformity or social change? A mere distraction? "The collective appropriation of information makes the Twittosphere a forum for debate, which brings out the best as well as the worst in a crowd — taunts, emotional dictatorship and a lack of distance — but also a critical vision and a different analysis from traditional media."[Mona Chollet, Counterpunch. Oct 28-30]

 Posted Oct 31:.The Politics of Obesity. With 74% of the U.S. adults overweight and 40% obese as of 2008, "an obesity-industrial complex can be identified. Like its military compatriots, its influence on America’s body politic is no less consequential." Have we suddenly become suicidal gluttons or are other forces at work?[David Rosen,Counterpunch, Oct 28-30]

 Posted Oct 31: Crop Scientists Now Fret about Heat Not Just Water. To farmers, the most worrisome part of the changing climate has been the apparent alterations in the timing and intensity of seasonal rains. But the direct impact of increased temperatures, especially at night may have comparable consequences for crops. [Christine Stebbins, Scientific American, Oct 24]

 Posted Oct 31: Arctic Ice Cover Hits Historic Low, Due to Global Warming Say Scientists. The area of the Ar ctic covered by sea ice has declined to a level not seen since the beginning of staellite observations in 1972 according to a statement released by the University of Bremen. The coverage is now down to about 50% of its original value. "The [remaining]Arctic ice cover has also become significantly thinner in recent decades, though it is not possible to measure the shrinkage in thickness as precisely as for surface area, the statement said." [Agence France-Presse(via Common Dreams), Sep 11] See also the article in RealClimate.

 Posted Oct 31: 'Coral Reefs Will be Gone by the End of the Century.' Top UN scientist. Professor Peter Sale in his new book "Our Dying Planet", predicts that the first-ever destruction of an entire ecosystem will occur by the end of this century under the combined pressure of climate change and ocean acidification, amplified by local activities such as overfishing, pollution and coastal development[Andrew Marszal,The Independent (via Common Dreams), Sep 11]

 Posted Oct 31: Al Gore: Obama Isn't "Relying On Science". Tired of faith-based science and economics? How about corporation-based science. Gore has criticized Obama's undercutting of his own EPA chief Lisa Jackson as he appeared to cave in to pressure from polluting corporations and Big Oil, echoed in the Wall Street Journal. Obama has thus opted to keep in effect the pollution levels permitted by Bush-Cheney. [Brian Montopoli,CBS News (via CommonDreams,Sep8]

 Posted Aug 17: Canada's PR Work for Tar Sands: Dirty, Crude and Oily. How to accelerate both global warming and environmental destruction: "TransCanada's 1,700-mile Keystone XL pipeline will carry as many as 1.1m barrels of crude a day to the Gulf of Mexico. It will cut through the sensitive heartland of the country. It will massively enrich big corporations. And it is certain to spill: the only question is when and how often and with what kind of human and environmental toll."[Martin Lukacs, Guardian, via Common Dreams, Aug 15]

 Posted Aug 17: Why Bottled Water Companies Target Blacks and Latinos. Why do Black and Latino households spend more than twice as much (15%) as whites(6%) of their household income on bottled water? Clever advertising or contaminated public water supplies in poor communities? [Jaeah Lee, Mother Jones, Aug 15]

 Posted Aug 17: Obama and the Tar Sands Pipeline. Under pressure from the oil interests in both US and Canada, Obama is expected to sign an agreement that will open the Keystine XL pipeline, stretcching from Alberta, through Oklahoma to the Gulf of Mexico, to carry 700,00 barrels per day of tar sands oil, "the most costly and toxic oil on earth".[Brian Horejsi,Counterpunch,Aug 9]

 Posted Aug 17: The Decision to Bomb Hiroshima. The evidence accumulated in this well-researched summary clearly points yet again to the lack of any compelling reason for the US to drop even one nuclear bomb on a defeated Japan on Aug 6, 1945 - except the anticipated entry that week of the USSR into the war.[Gar Alperovitz, Counterpunch, Aug 5-7]

 Posted Aug 17: Atomic Cover-Up: The Hidden Story Behind the U.S. Bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. This broadcast was made on the 66th anniversary of the Hiroshima bombing. According to Japanese sources, over 300,000 people died in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, including those who died of after-effects in ensuing years.[Interview of Greg Mitchell, Democracy Now, Aug 6]

 Posted Aug 17: Mobile Biometrics to Hit US Streets. Caught driving without ID? Not to worry, MORIS (Mobile Offender Recognition and Information System) will soon be arriving at police departments to help you: "A gadget attached to a mobile phone can photograph and plot key points and features on your face (breaking the numbers down into biometric data), scan your iris and take your fingerprints on the spot."And, of course, match them against a national data base.[D. Parvaz, Al-Jazeera English, via Common Dreams]

 Posted Aug 17: The Indoctrination of Missile Launch Officers. It's reassuring that the Air Force has to provide some moral self-justification to fortify the tender young officers whose job it will be to push the button should a launch order be issued. Here are some of the questions provided by the US Air Force and answers provided by the writer.[David Krieger, CommonDreams,Aug 2]

 Posted Aug 17: Extreme Weather Link 'Can No Longer Be Ignored' Scientists to end 20-year reluctance with study into global warming and exceptional weather events.[Steve O' Connor,Independent (via Common Dreams),July 1]

 Posted May 7: Al Gore Invents a Showpiece E-Book. ”The United States is still borrowing money from China to buy oil from the Persian Gulf to burn in ways that destroy the planet. Every bit of that’s got to change,” says Gore in "Our Choice". The writer of of an Inconvenient Choice now turns from describing the problem to suggesting solutions. And Pogue (The NYT tech reviewer) reviews it because of a panoply of state-of-the-art multi-media interactive features on this iphone/ipad/ipod Touch -compatible app. [David Pogue, NY Times, May 5]

 Posted May 7: Drumbeat of Nuclear Fallout Fear Doesn’t Resound With Experts. "The fear is unwarranted, experts say." Hmm, sounds familiar. But actually, Broad is referring to fallout outside of Japan from the accidents and comparing the radiation to natural background and X-rays. He claims that in the world's oceans "thousands of decomposing drums of radioactive waste pose bigger dangers than the relatively small amounts of radioactive water released from the Fukushima Daiichi plant." [William Broad, NY Times, May2]

 Posted May 7: Despite Bipartisan Support, Nuclear Reactor Projects Falter. Even though Congress under Bush and now Obama has made available tens of billions in loans, there has been little sign of substantial revival revival of the nuclear power industry. Even before the Fukushima disasters, the projected renaissance of nuclear power was faltering from the combined effects of low natural gas prices and declining demand for electricity.[Matthew Wald, NYTimes, apr30]

 Posted May 7: Unsafe at any Dose. Caldicott points out that it's too early to draw conclusions oabout the consequences of Fukushima when we still don't know the full effects of Chernobyl. Cancers other than leukemia take 15-50 years to develop and radiation-induced mutations are recessive and can take generations to appear. [Helen Caldicott, NY Times, Apr 30]

 Posted May 7: America’s Nuclear Nightmare: The U.S. has 31 reactors just like Japan’s — but regulators are ignoring the risks and boosting industry profits. When the news of Fukushima hit, "...officials in Germany moved swiftly to shut down old plants for inspection, and China put licensing of new plants on hold. But Gregory Jaczko, the chairman of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, reassured lawmakers that nothing at the Fukushima Daiichi reactors warranted any immediate changes at U.S. nuclear plants. [Jeff Goodell, Rolling Stone, Apr 27]

 Posted May 7: The Obama-Gates Scam on Military Spending. Porter's analysis shows how a mixture of creative accounting methods "verging on chicanery" have left an impression of large ewductions in military spending where in reality they represent small cuts in a grossly inflated projection of spending over the next ten years. [Gareth Porter, Counterpunch,Apr 21]

: Posted May 7: Nuclear Power: Adequate Insurance Too Expensive. Only because nuclear plants all over the world are either grossly underinsured or not insured at all, has it been possible for nuclear utilities to stay in business. [AP (via Common Dreams), Apr 21]

 Posted May 7: Obama's Dirty Energy Fixation. "Just days after a 9.0 earthquake and tsunami unleashed a nuclear disaster in Fukushima, President Barack Obama signed a nuclear power cooperation agreement with Chilean President Sebastián Piñera. Like Japan, Chile is seismically active. It suffered the sixth-most powerful earthquake--8.8--ever recorded on a seismograph only last year."[Daphne Wysham, Other Words (via Common Dreams), Apr 21]

 Posted May 7: Is the World Too Big to Fail? The fate of the species as just another externality that is dismissed by market systems; one need only "...have a look at the new Congress in the U.S., propelled into power by business funding and propaganda. Almost all are climate deniers. They have already begun to cut funding for measures that might mitigate environmental catastrophe. Worse, some are true believers; for example, the new head of a subcommittee on the environment who explained that global warming cannot be a problem because God promised Noah that there will not be another flood."[Noam Chomsky, Tom Dispatch (via Common Dreams), Apr 21]

 Posted May 7: Japan's Biggest Problem: Melted fuel, radioactive water puring into the sea, cesium-137 releases, cracks in the spent fuel pool, the ongoing aftershocks? More than likely, Hoffman writes, it is the ongoing lies and secrecy as government and the nuclear establishment continue to work together to downplay the seriousness of the situation. [Russell Hoffman, Counterpunch, Apr 18]

 Posted May 7: We Need a Serious Critique of Net Activism. "... technology isn't necessarily good for freedom – but how else can the oppressed have a voice?" This review of Evgeny Morozov's "The Net Delusion" will appear soon in the dcmetro sftp Newsletter, but is highlighted here as well because of its ongoing relevance to on going discussions in sftp about advances in science and their relevance to social progress. [Cory Doctorow,Guardian-UK,Jan 25]

 Posted May 7: Left Forum 2011:
Interview with David Schwartzman.
On the concept of de-growth and its relation to capitalism, eco-sociological movements. [The Mantle, Mar 19] 

Posted Mar 19: The "Green" Nuclear Cabal - How Global Warming Rescued the Atomic Lobby. - an excerpt from Jeffrey St. Clair's environmental history, Born Under a Bad Sky. The "nuclear renaissance" that has quietly developed over the last decades has had allies all over the world, in the highest places, and has fed on concerns over global warming.[Jeffrey St. Clair, Counterpunch, Mar 18]

 Posted Mar 19: From Hiroshima to Fukushima. "The chain of events at the reactors now running out of control provides a case history of the underlying mismatch between human nature and the force we imagine we can control. Nuclear power is a complex, high technology. But the things that endemically malfunction are of a humble kind. The art of nuclear power is to boil water..."[Jonathan Schell, Nation, Mar 15]

 Posted Mar 19: Meltdowns Grow More Likely at the Fukushima Reactors. "The boiling-water reactors at Fukushima - 40 years old and designed by General Electric - have spent fuel pools several stories above ground adjacent to the top of the reactor."[Robert Alvarez, Znet, Mar 14]

 Posted Mar 19: Japan’s Long Nuclear Disaster Film. A review of the Japanese monster-movie genre and how it relates to its national psyche in the postwar period. The monster movies were inspired not only by Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but by the out-of-control H-bomb test on Bikini atoll in 1954 that detonated with about 2.5 times greater force than anticipated. The unexpectedly vast fallout from the bomb enveloped a distant Japanese tuna trawler named the Lucky Dragon No. 5 in a blizzard of radioactive ash.[Peter W Kirby, NYT, Mar14]

 Posted Mar 19:Fukushima crisis: Anatomy of a meltdown - March 13, 2011. Why the explosions? Where did the hydrogen come from? What went wrong in Japan?[ Geoff Brumfiel, Nature blog, Mar 14]

 Posted Mar 19: “My Fear is that Climate Change is the Biggest Crisis of All”: Naomi Klein warns that global warming could be exploited by capitalism and militarism. Amy Goodman interviews Naomi Klein, activist and author of The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. "in 2007, 71—this is a Harris poll—71 percent of Americans believed climate change was real, and two years later, 51 percent of Americans believed it."[DemocracyNow, Mar 9]

 Posted Mar 19: Regulation Lax as Gas Wells’ Tainted Water Hits Rivers. Hydrofracking, a new technique for extracting natural gas trapped in rock formations, using high-pressure injection of water is coming under increasing criticism for the consequent release of wastewater that is contaminated with toxic metals and radioactivity into sources of drinking water.[Ian Urbina, NYT, 2/26]

 Posted Feb 21: Human contribution to more-intense precipitation extremes. (abstract only on-line) Models with and without the extra greenhouse gases produced by humans have successfully isolated the human contribution to the observed increase in extreme precipitation events over land in the Northern Hemisphere from 1950-2000[Seung-Ki Min, et al.,Nature,Feb 17] (See also summary in RealClimate)

 Posted Feb 21: Building a Perfect Machine of Perpetual War: The Mexico-to-Colombia Security Corridor Advances. In the face of drastically diminishing power throughout most of South America, the U.S. has been steadily building a "security corridor" , stretching from Mexico through Central America into Colombia, consisting of military bases and/or bilateral trade treaties and police/military training programs. [Greg Grandin, The Nation, Feb 11,2011]

 Posted Feb 21: Wendell Berry Joins Retired Coal Miners and Residents in Kentucky Capitol Sit-in. More than six years after Kentucky became the first state in the nation to introduce a bill that would halt the dumping of toxic coal mining wastes into headwater streams and effectively rein in the devastating fallout of mountaintop removal operations, a group of affected coalfield residents, retired coal miners and bestselling authors... launched a sit-in in the office of Kentucky Governor Steve Beshear [Jeff Biggers, Huffington Post (via Common Dreams),Feb 12,2011]

 Posted Feb 21: US Chamber’s Lobbyists Hired Hackers To Sabotage Unions, Smear Chamber’s Political Opponents. "The U.S. Chamber of Commerce [which represents] ExxonMobil, AIG, and other major international corporations, is working with set of 'private security' companies and lobbying firms to undermine their political opponents". One of the techiques exposed was leaking false documents to progressive organizations to try to entrap them into publishing the fictitious material and thus damaging their credibility.[Lee Fang, ThinkProgress.org (via Common Dreams), Feb 10,2011]

 Posted Feb 21: Virtual Warfare Escalates on US-Mexico Border.. Wind Zero, a private outfit with a $100million budget and 1000 acreas of land east of San Diego is building a law-enforcement and military-training facility.( Think Blackwater) There is to be a heavy emphasis on drones and other unmanned aerial systems.[Kanya D'Almeida, Inter Press Service (via Common Dreams), Feb 7,2011]

 Posted Feb 21: Confronting the Climate Cranks. An additional 40% of the amount of CO2 emitted by humanity since the Industrial Revolution has been dumped into the atmosphere since 1988, the year James Hansen delivered his warning to the US Senate. Hertsgaard asks that we replace the term "climate skeptics" with "climate cranks" and is launching a campaign, Confront the Climate Cranks. See also Feb 27 interview with Mark Hertsgaard by the Real News.[Mark Hertsgaard, The Nation, Feb 7,2011]

 Posted Feb 21:Why Minnesota should maintain its moratorium on new nuclear reactors - Testimony of Arjun Makhijani before a Committee of the Minnesota State Senate, January 25, 2011. Makhijani presents strong testimony on the continued lack of economic viability, the environmental hazards and the net loss of jobs that will come with new nuclear plants. See also the Factsheet on nuclear power compiled by the IEER (Institute for Energy and Environmental Research)

 Posted Feb 21: To cut emissions, cut parking spots. "Because every vehicle trip must end in a parking space, limiting parking through economic and policy changes has significantly reduced miles driven in 10 European cities, according to "Europe's Parking U-Turn: from Accommodation to Regulation," published by the New York City-based Institute for Transportation and Development Policy ( document loads slowly) [Tiffany Stecker, Sci. American,Jan 24,2011]

 Posted Feb 21: BP Targets One of the World's Last Unspoilt Wildernesses. BP (in a joint project with Russian state-owned oil giant Rosneft) has decided to set up rigs in the Kara Sea, an area of great biodiversity and treacherous weather conditions. The region, an extension of the Arctic Ocean, located off the coastline of Siberia in far northwestern Russia, is one of the few remaining havens left for a number of endangered species. [Mark Leftly and Chris Stevenson, The Independent (via CommonDreams),Jan16,2011]

 Posted Feb 21:. Israel Tests on Worm Called Crucial in Iran Nuclear Delay. An in-depth look at the U.S.-Israeli operation that unleashed "Stuxnet", a computer worm specifically targeted to Iran's centriguge program. Is this a first step in the legitimation of cyber warfare? [William Broad,John Markoff and David Sanger, NY Times, Jan 15,2011]

 Posted Feb 21: Why the CIA is spying on a changing climate. Even the CIA has been duped into believing in climate change? It's now worrying that "the U.S. government is ill-prepared to act on climate changes that are coming faster than anticipated and threaten to bring instability to places of U.S. national interest, interviews with several dozen current and former officials and outside experts and a review of two decades' worth of government reports indicate."[Charles Mead and Annie Snider, Mcclatchy,Jan10,2011]

 Posted Feb 21: I Am Not a Gadget. In this review of Jaron Lanier's "You Are Not a Gadget", Justin Podur presents some interesting speculations on the hidden effects and social consequences of today's internet. Concerning the connection between innovation and wealth, he suggests that "Today, those who have accumulated wealth are able to seize and control other people's innovations."[Justin Podur, zcommunications,Jan 9, 2011]

 Posted Feb 21:Computers That See You and Keep Watch Over You. "...machines do not blink or forget. They are tireless assistants. " said about the latest developments in prisoner-monitoring devices. As always, advances in resolution, miniaturization, data storage and image recognition, coupled with declining costs are sharpening the tools of repression - but perhaps also the opportunities for resistance and revolution? [Steve Lohr,NY Times,Dec 31]

 Posted Feb 21, 2011: Research links rise in Falluja birth defects and cancers to US assault. According to a report soon to be published in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, Fallujah, Iraq, the scene of a major US assaults in 2004 is seeing increasing levels of birth defects. No other city in Iraq has anywhere near the same levels of reported abnormalities. Falluja has at least 11 times as many major defects in newborns as the world average, the research has shown. One of the suspected causes is depleted uranium used in artillery shells. [Martin Chulov,The Guardian,Dec 30]

Posted Dec 24, 2010: Assange: US pushing "Digital McCarthyism" in assault on Wikileaks. Wikileaks founder Julian Assange in an interview with msnbc's Cenk Uygur: "Well, let's look at the definition of terrorism. The definition of terrorism is a group that uses violence or the threat of violence for political ends...But we see constant threats from people in the ... Senate trying to make a name for themselves, the people like Sarah Palin, top shock jocks on Fox and, unfortunately, some members, also, of the Democratic Party, calling for my assassination, calling for the illegal kidnapping of my staff." [(with video link)Xeni Jardin,BoingBoing.net,Dec 22]

Posted Dec 24: Group IQ. A new MIT study shows that teams of people display a collective intelligence that has surprisingly little to do with the intelligence of the team’s individual members. Rather, the most important factors may have to do with group dynamics, including the absence of a strong leader or the presence of women [Carolyn Johnston,Boston Globe,Dec 19]

Posted Dec 24: Astronomer Sues University, Claiming Religion Cost Him a Job. After thousands of years of discrimination, torturing and burning of atheists and other dissenters, it looks like, at least at the University of Kentucky, the shoe may be on the other foot: C. Martin Gaskell, seeking a position at U of K alleges that he was turned down because he is an evangelical Christian. He denied being a creationist, but certain public statements that he has made apparently scared the hiring committee. [Mark Oppenheimer, NY Times,Dec 18]

Posted Dec 24: Dire Development Issues Converge in the Drylands. The recently-launched United Nations Decade for Deserts and the Fight Against Desertification (UNDDD) are scheduled to run from January 2010 to December 2020 to raise awareness and develop action plans to protect the drylands, home to one in every three people on earth. They are "an ancient and natural sanctuary to some of the rarest species of animal, bird and plant life on the planet". According to reports from the UNDDD, "one in every three crops under cultivation today has its origins in the drylands." They also support half of the world's livestock. [Kanya D'Almeida,IPSnews,Dec 17]

Posted Dec 24: Economic Crisis Looms, But Clean Energy Shines On. Portugal, in the midst of one of the worst economic crises of any EU state, is continuing its exemplary progress in renewable energy. Based on 2008 figures, 23.2 percent of the energy consumed in Portugal came from "green" sources, compared to the 10.3 percent average of the rest of the 27- member bloc. In efforts to encourage similar progress abroad, Portugal recently signed an agreement with Brazil "to establish technical, scientific, educational and cultural cooperation" between the two countries, especially in the field of solar energy. [Mario de Queiroz, IPSnews,Dec 16]

Posted Dec 24: Anthropology Group Tries to Soothe Tempers After Dropping the Word ‘Science’. "The American Anthropological Association had caused a stir by dropping the word “science” from its long-range plan". Is anthropology a science? Will political science be next? [Nicholas Wade,NY Times, Dec 13]

Posted Dec 24: Losing Time, not Buying Time. "Control of methane, soot, and other short-lived climate-forcing agents has often been described as a cheap way to "buy time" to get carbon dioxide emissions under control. But is it really?" A very clear and useful comparison of the time scale of CO2 vs methane and other climate-change actors. [Raypierre Humbert, RalClimate, Dec 6, 2010]

Posted Nov 27: New York City Prepares for Nation's Largest Bike Share System. "New York City is preparing to set up the largest bike share system in the nation. The city is issuing a request for proposals for one-way, short-term bike rentals, a system that has augmented the transportation network in dozens of European cities as well as in Denver, Minneapolis, and Washington, DC."[Andrea Bernstein, WNYC News (via CommonDreams),Nov 23]

 Posted Nov 27: None flew over the cuckoo's nest: A world without birds. "According to Henk Tennekes, a researcher at the Experimental Toxicology Services in Zutphen, the Netherlands, the threat of DDT has been superseded by a relatively new class of insecticide, known as the neonicotinoids. In his book The Systemic Insecticides: "A Disaster in the Making", published this month, Tennekes draws all the evidence together to make the case that neonicotinoids are causing a catastrophe in the insect world, which is having a knock-on effect for many of our birds."[Kate Ravilious, The Independent,Nov 15]

 Posted Nov 27: As Glaciers Melt, Scientists Seek New Data on Rising Seas. "Scientists long believed that the collapse of the gigantic ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica would take thousands of years, with sea level possibly rising as little as seven inches in this century, about the same amount as in the 20th century. But researchers have recently been startled to see big changes unfold in both Greenland and Antarctica." See also a set of interesting and informative comments on this article in Real Climate.[Justin Gillis, NY Times, Nov 14]

 Posted Nov 27: Organizing in the Internet Age. Mark Engler asks " 'how do we support and develop the revolutionary potential in the Internet' in the face of efforts by corporations and governments to control and monitor how we operate on this new digital terrain? "[Mark Engler,Yes! Magazine, via Common Dreams, Nov 2]

 Posted Nov 27: Wind Turbine Syndrome. An MD practicing in upstate New York near a wind farm relates an impressive list of increasing health effects generated by windmill-created infrasound, which has hitherto-unknown effects on the inner ear. [Dr. Nina Pierpont, Counterpunch, Oct 31]

 Posted Nov 27: Pennsylvania Township Declares Freedom from Fracking. The small town of Licking, PA has taken a stand against "fracking", a method of extracting natural gas that creates serious groundwater pollution problems. Defying a state law exempting gas-drilling companies from the federal Safe Drinking Water Act, the township council has banned disposal of fracking waste within its boundaries. The city of Pittsburgh is considering a similar and stronger measure. [Mari Margil, Ben Price, Yes! Magazine, Oct 27]

 Posted Nov 27: The Arms Sales Economy. After an alarming plunge from about $36 billion in 2008 to an anemic $22 billion in 2009, the U.S. arms industry, with the help of some new mega-sales to Saudi Arabia, is looking forward to fatter balance sheets in 2010 and even cheerier news in the coming year.[Christopher Brauchli, Counterpunch,Oct 24]

 Posted Nov 27: Latin American Mayors in unanimous support for Nuclear Weapons Convention. FLACMA (Federación Latinamericana de Ciudades, Municipios y Asociaciones de gobiernos locales) signed an agreement with Mayors for Peace in support of the campaign to eliminate all nuclear weapons by 2020. FLACMA is the Latin American branch of the UCLG, the world wide organization of local governments.[2020 Vision Campaign]

 Posted Nov 27: Taking Early Retirement May Retire Memory, Too. Results of a simple memory test seem to back up what everybody already seems to believe - that keeping active keeps the mind functioning better. However no support has been found for the belief that mastering things like memory exercises, crossword puzzles and games like Sudoku carry over into real life, improving overall functioning. [Gina Kolata, NY Times Oct 11]

 Posted Nov 27: Moonlighting as a Conjurer of Chemicals. Isaac Newton, passionate alchemist? Who knew? Looking at this through 21st-century eyes, it seems inconceivable to us that Newton would have wasted any time on this pursuit. But what was happening in the world of 17th century that led this genius down such a road? [Natalie Angier, NY Times, Oct 11]

 Posted Nov 27: American Science’s Racist History Still Haunts the World. Was the infamous Tuskegee experiment (in which uninformed black men were used as experimental subjects for studying syphylis) - was unique, a similar atrocity has been revealed, this time in Guatemala, just 60 years ago. The scientists were again American; this time the innocent subjects were Guatemalans. [Michelle Chen, Colorlines, Oct 6]

 Posted Nov 27: Introduction to Feedbacks. One of the most difficult mechanisms to explain to the public is just how positive and negative feedback processes operate in a normal atmosphere and in an atmosphere undergoing a rapid transition. This article is important to improve our understanding so that we can better answer questions on these subjects. (See also More on Feedbacks, a more in-depth continuation of the subject by the author.)[Chris Colose, RealClimate, Sep 23]

 Posted Sep 11: Weird Weather in a Warming World. To what extent can recent floods droughts, record snows, and heat waves be attributed to global warming. How much is alarmist hype? [Andrew Revkin, NY Times, Sep 7]

Posted Sep 11: Big Oil Rallies to Save Big Oil. A nationwide series of rallies kicked off in Texas this week urging Congress to block legislation proposed in the wake of the BP oil disaster that would regulate the oil and gas industry more strictly and eliminate tax breaks.[Sue Sturgis, Facing South(via Common Dreams), Sep 2]

 Posted Sep 11: Ninth Circuit: The Government Can Use GPS to Track Your Moves (without a Warrant). "That is the bizarre - and scary - rule that now applies in California and eight other Western states." There is a major battle under way in the federal and state courts over this issue, and the stakes are high.[Adam Cohen, Time(via CommonDreams), Aug 19]

 Posted Sep 11: Pain Ray, Rejected by the Military, Ready to Blast L.A. Prisoners. This energy weapon , being used at the Pichess Detention Center in Los Angeles, is a small-scale version of the Active Denial System, the experimental crowd control device tested in Afganhistan but quickly removed after complaints about its use on locals. Proponents praise it as more effective than the taser. Watch out, street demonstrators...[Noah Schachtman, Wired, Aug 24]

 Posted Sep 11: Rising Temperatures Reducing Ability of Plants to Absorb Carbon, Study Warns. One of the favorite fall-back position of discredited climate-change denialists has been that the extra CO2 would promote plant growth. But new satellite measurements indicate that the extra stresses being created by the changing climates is in reality causing a decrease in net plant growth and hence a decrease in carbon absorbed from the atmosphere. But not all plants will suffer; there is evidence that poison ivy will thrive in a warmer world. [Alok Jha, Guardian(via Common Dreams), Aug 20]

 Posted Sep 11: The Persistence of Missile Defense In spite of the fact that it doesn't seem to work, NATO has just proposed to substitute missile defense for missile offense as part of its mission. This may be built on Obama's missile-defense plan proposed last year. "Obama rejected Bush’s plan to install 10 interceptors in Poland and a radar in the Czech Republic. However, Obama’s replacement plan does not significantly differ in magnitude from the Bush vision". [Tom Sauer, Counterpunch, Aug19]

 Posted Sep 11: How the Defense Industry is Hosing Obama and the Taxpayer ... Again. Former Pentagon employee, Franklin Spinney, considers the Pentagon's Quadrennial Defense Review as an essential weapons for "waging [the Military-Industrial-Congressional Complex's] unremitting budget war to extract money from the American people", while unable to account satisfactorily for money already received.[Franklin Spinney, Counterpunch, Aug 16]

 Posted Sep 11: A Battle in Mining Country Pits Coal Against Wind. Surface coal mining in West Virginia and the surrounding mountain states means mountaintop removal, a labor-saving method that has already affected over 500 mountains in this area. Using the land for wind farms would generate far less energy - initally. But when the coal is exhausted, and all that remains is rocky debris and polluted streams, the windmills keep producing - forever.[Tom Zeller, Jr., NY Times, Aug 14]

 Posted Sep 11: Three Digital Myths. An analysis of the Wikileaks furor raises questions about the power of social media in the coverage of war, the idea of the borderless nation-state and the survival of the press (the leaks depended on mass media for dissemination). [Christian Christensen, Le Monde Diplomatique, Aug 9]

 Posted Sep 11: Communicating Science. “The thing about scientists that I find most interesting is the inherent hubris that comes to them with their great knowledge,” A lot of federal scientists take the approach of information pushers, [Margaret] Davidson [of NOAA]says. ”They’re pushing it out there and hoping that somebody picks it up and finds it useful.” “the reality of life is that you’ve got to have a transformation function, to make things accessible and useful.”[ Mason Inman, blog.agu.org, Jun 29]

 Posted Sep 11: Physicist Who Chose China Over Atom Bomb. Joan Hinton, a physicist who worked on the Manhattan Project, which developed the atom bomb, but spent most of her life as a committed Maoist working on dairy farms in China, died on Tuesday in Beijing. She was 88. In 1948, alarmed at the emerging cold war, she gave up physics and left the United States for China [William Grimes, NYTimes, June 11]

 Posted Jun13: The Climate Majority. Notwithstanding the wide publicity given climate change skeptics, a substantial majority in the U.S. believes not only that climate change is real, but also that it is due to human activity. The misleading poll results indicating the contrary are largely due to the way in which the questions were constructed.[Jon Krosnick, op ed, NY Times, Jun 8]

 Posted Jun13:Government Impotence and Corporate Rule. The Gulf catastrophe is "...not merely a human and environmental horror, but also an appalling deterioration in our nation's governance. Just as we saw in Wall Street's devastating economic disaster and in Massey Energy's murderous explosion inside its Upper Big Branch coal mine, the nastiness in the gulf is baring an ugly truth that We the People must finally face: We are living under de facto corporate rule that has rendered our government impotent".[Jim Hightower, truthout, jun 2]

 Posted Jun13:Nigeria's agony dwarfs the Gulf oil spill. The US and Europe ignore it. The Deepwater Horizon disaster caused headlines around the world, yet the people who live in the Niger delta [which supplies 40% of all the crude the United States imports] have had to live with environmental catastrophes for decades. "...more oil is spilled from the delta's network of terminals, pipes, pumping stations and oil platforms every year than has been lost in the Gulf of Mexico, the site of a major ecological catastrophe caused by oil that has poured from a leak triggered by the explosion that wrecked BP's Deepwater Horizon rig last month".[John Vidal, Guradian,May30]

 Posted Jun13: Stemming the Brain Drain of Health-Care Workers From Developing Countries. "Low-income countries invest significant resources to train health workers. Active recruitment of their doctors and nurses systematically deprives communities and entire populations of their right to health. The loss of these investments equates to a form of reverse foreign aid." Overcoming U.S. efforts to weaken the agreement, international health leaders meeting at the annual World Health Assembly unanimously adopted a voluntary global code to regulate international movement of health care workers.[Amy Hagopian, Eric B. Williams and Emily DeRiel, Seattle Times(via CommonDreams), May 29]

 Posted Jun13: U.S. Defense Spending Far Outpaces Rest of the World. The U.S. budget for fiscal year 2011 is $720B, up 67 percent from 2001's $432B, accounting for inflation. This accounts for 44.32 % of the global total spending of 1.57 trillion dollars, with the rest of NATO and non-NATO Europe accounting for another 22.43 percent. The Middle East and North Africa, account for 7.03 percent, Latin America and the Caribbean for 3.69 percent, and Sub-Saharan Africa a mere 0.77 percent. And, U.S. spending is 73 times that of Iran.[Amanda Bransford, IPSnews, May 28]

 Posted Jun13: UN 'to Seek' End to CIA Drone Raids. The UN Human Rights Council will hear a report June 3 from special special rapporteur Phillip Alston stating that the "life and death power" of drones should be executed by regular armed forces rather than intelligence agencies. This finding is directed at CIA directed remote killing of selected suspects in foreign countries, co-ordinated from CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia [Al Jazeera English, via CommonDreams, May 28]

 Posted Jun13: The noble and ancient tradition of moron-baiting. Martin Gardner, long-time publisher of the a popular and challenging math column in Scientific American, died last week at the age of 95. Gardner was also a prolific author and receives a special tribute here for his classic "Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science", originally published in 1952, but unfortunately still relevant today. [Ben Goldacre, BadScience, The Guardian,May 28]

 Posted Jun13: On Attribution. A clear and timely discussion about the role of experiments, models and statistics in attributing effects to causes. [Gavin Schmidt, RealClimate, May 26]

 Posted Jun13:Struggle Over the Xingú Dams A new system of dams on Brazil's Xingú river "would be the third largest hydroelectric dam complex in the world...requiring the diversion of the water from a 60-mile stretch of the river's channel through canals and underground tunnels to two massive arrays of turbines". Widespread protests are taking place among ndigenous nations of the region, and farmers and environmentalist, who point out that despite its enormous impact, its capacity of 11.2 gigawatts would be attainable only during the rainy four months of the year, the average power generated would be only 4 GW and the expected lifetime quite short, due to silting.[Terence Turner, Counterpunch,May 18]

 Posted Jun13:A Flawed and Dangerous U.S. Missile Defense Plan. As paraphrased by the authors, the Ballistic Missile Defense Review Report, released in February by the U.S. "The technologies now in hand will make it possible for the United States to build a global missile defense system that is so capable, flexible, and reliable that potential adversaries will see that they have no choice but to de-emphasize their efforts to use ballistic missiles as a way to obtain their political goals." However, the Pentagon's own test results point to very different conclssions.[George N. Lewis and Theodore A. Postol, Arms Control Today, May 2010]

 Posted Apr 25: The Open Veins of Climate Change. A noted Uruguayan writer sends a message to the Cochabamba Summit:..."we are fed up with the hypocrisy of the rich countries, which is leaving us without a planet while it delivers pompous discourses to conceal the hijacking." [Eduardo Galeano, YES! Magazine, via Common Dreams, Apr 23]

 Posted Apr 25: Why Is the US Cutting Off Climate Aid to the Poorest Country in South America? In an interview at the World Peoples’ Summit on Climate Change and Rights of Mother Earth, with Bolivia’s lead climate negotiator Angélica Navarro, who calls on the developed world to pay a climate debt to poor nations suffering the impact of climate change. She highlights the lack of input at Copenhagen from the world's poorest countries - those affected most by climate change.[Amy Goodman, Democracy Now, Apr 21]

 Posted Apr 25: Inventing Disorders. On the dangers of inventing behavioral disorders and the over-diagnosis and over-medication of young children. According to British pharmacology expert, Dr David Healy, author of the book, "Mania: A Short History of Bipolar Disorder," some of these drugs "are known to cause a range of neurological syndromes, diabetes, cardiovascular problems, and other problems."[Evelyn Pringle, Counterpunch, Apr 21]

 Posted Apr 25: Years of Regulated Manslaughter in the Coalfields. In the wake of the recent disaster in West Vriginia, the worst in 40 years of mining in the U.S., the author gives a recent history of similar disasters, which have claimed a total of over 100,00 lives in thed mines ; to this must be added the tens of thousands more from black lung disease and the environmental damage due to the extraction (from mines or mountains) and of course the large percentage of global warming due to the burning of coal - to come up with the true price of this "cheap" source of energy. James Hansen's may be right: Stop using coal. [Jeff Biggers, Huffington Post, Apr 12]

 Posted Apr 25: Building a Green Economy. Krugman, after quickly disposing of the arguments of climate modeling deniers, offers a conventional economic market model-based approaches to estimating costs of slowing down climate change. The link above leads to the RealClimate blog, which has interesting comments on the article.[Paul Krugman, NY Times, Apr 11]

 Posted Apr 19: Floods in Rio:A Tragedy of Local and Global Dimensions. A lethal combination of environmental neglect, extreme poverty and the worst downpours in 40 years, probably amplified by global warming, contributed to over 200 deaths in the state and city of Rio de Janeiro last week.[Fabiana Frayssinet, IPS Apr 9]

 Posted Apr 19: Advice for Eco-germophobes: get rid of antibacterials. In this interview, Dr. Sarah Janssen of NRDC advises egular soap and water is preferable to using so-called “antibacterial” soaps because regular soap and water are just as effective at eliminating “germs”. So called “antibacterials”, like triclosan or triclocarban are no more effective and carry potential health risks, so we advise avoiding their use."[Paul McRandle, NRDC SimpleSteps,Apr 1]

Posted Apr 12: Economists need their own uncertainty principle. "Financial speculation is risky by definition. Yet the danger is not that the risks exist but that the highly developed calculus of risk in economic theory — for which Nobel prizes have been awarded — gives the impression that the risks are under control." Do economists suffer from physics envy? [Philip Ball, NatureNews,Apr 5]

 Posted Apr 12: A TV Show and Congress Tackle School Lunches This Mar 30 article inte the NY Times reported on the tremendous interest in improving school lunches. Local groups are working hard on this issue, as evidenced by this DC blog (see Apr 4 entry) devoted to better food in the schools, maintained by the local organization Parents for Better DC School Food.[Kim Severson, NY Times, Mar 30]

 Posted Apr 12: Landfill or incineration: the climate change dilemma. " Which does less harm when it comes to greenhouse gases isn’t easy to pinpoint". Interesting discussion about tradeoffs in waste disposal. [Catherine Porter, TheStar.com, Apr2]

 Posted Apr 12: I patent your ass. And your leg. And your nostril. "This week the Association for Molecular Pathology, working with the American Civil Liberties Union, won a major victory, overturning just some of the patents owned by a company called Myriad on the BRCA1 gene for breast cancer." - an interesting critique of the patenting of genes.[Ben Goldacre, The Guardian(Bad Science, Apr2]

 Posted Apr 12: Global warming and astrology. South Dakota legislators conclude “that there are a variety of climatological, meteorological, astrological, thermological, cosmological, and ecological dynamics that can effect world weather phenomena…” [Treehugger.com, Feb 26]

 Posted Apr 12: Exposing the dirty money behind fake climate science. Cargill is the largest privately-held U.S. corporation.Can you name the second? (Neither could we). It's Koch Industries, a conglomerate with annual revenue almost $100 billion, co-founder Fred Koch also co-founded the john Birch Society, funder of right-wing causes and which quietly funneled $50 million to the climate denial people between 1997 and 2008, according to a new Greenpeace report. See also the cool interactive version.[Greenpeace International, 3/30]

 Posted Apr 12: Scientists and Weathercasters at Odds on Warming. "A study released on Monday(Mar 29) by researchers at George Mason University and the University of Texas at Austin found that only about half of the 571 television weathercasters surveyed believed that global warming was occurring and less than a third believed that climate change was 'caused mostly by human activities.' The reasons for this widespread ignorance have been debated ( see Hot Air in the Columbia Journalism Review - excellent!), but may boil down to the fact that the TV weatherperson has minmal training in climate modeling - and not much in meteorology either.[Leslie Kaufman ,NY Times,mar 29]

 Posted Mar 29: Secrets of the Tribe. Anthropolgist Barbara Johnston reviews Jose Padilha's film screened at Sundance in January. Critical cultural and political issues were raised by the behavior of a steady stream of anthropologists (the "tribe"in the film's title) that filed into the Amazon to study the Yanomami during the 60's and 70's. The problems raised by these visits and consequent suffering are still unresolved and are the focus of ongoing debates[Barbara Johnston,Counterpunch, Mar 21]

 Posted Mar 29: Dark Matters. "The past 50 years of particle physics has also driven us to realize that for what we see to make sense, a host of new elementary particles quite likely exists." - an update on the quest to identify the nature of "dark matter".[Lawrence Krauss, Scientific American, April 2010]

 Posted Mar 29: Diary of a Wimpy Health Care Bill. Rose Ann Demoro, Executive Director, National Nurses United, AFL-CIO and California Nurses Association gives a brief summary of the pluses and minuses of the bill, the dangers ahead and the need for more much deeper changes.[Rose Ann DeMoro, Huffington Post,Mar23]

 Posted Mar 29: The Five Characteristics of Scientific Denialism. This is a summary by blogger John Cook (interviewed Mar 25 in the NY Times) of an an informative article that appeared in 2009 in the European Journal of Public Health by Diethelm and Mckee, explaining the patterns behind recent campaigns to sabotage public acceptance of critical scientific findings. The five are conspiracy theories, fake experts, cherry picking, insistence on certainty, and logical fallacies. Examples include smoking/cancer, HIV/AIDS vaccinations/autism and of course climate change.[John Cook, Skeptical Science, Mar 17]

 Posted Mar 29: What’s Killing the Great Forests of the American West? "Across western North America, from Mexico to Alaska, forest die-off is occurring on an extraordinary scale, unprecedented in at least the last century-and-a-half — and perhaps much longer. All told, the Rocky Mountains in Canada and the United States have seen nearly 70,000 square miles of forest — an area the size of Washington state — die since 2000." The outbreak is attributed to outbreaks of tree-killing insects, able to survive at higher altitudes due to warming temperatures. [Jim ARobbins, Environment360, Mar 15]

 Posted Mar 29: The Climatic Consequences of Nuclear War. The 'nuclear winter' projections made in the 80's were conservative. According to new research, "...models have shown that even a 'successful' first strike by Washington or Moscow would inflict catastrophic environmental damage that would make agriculture impossible and cause mass starvation."[Steven Starr, Bull. At. Sci. Mar 12]

 Posted Mar 29: Most Believe God Gets Involved. "New research shows that most Americans believe God is directly involved in their personal affairs, and that the good or bad things that happen are “part of God’s plan," according to a report in the March issue of the journal Sociology of Religion." 71% of those surveyed believe that good or bad events are "part of God's plan for them". [Tara Parker-Pope, NY Times, Mar 10]

 Posted Mar 29: “The Rosenfeld” Named After California’s Godfather of Energy Efficiency. A group of Berkely (Lawrence) Lab scientists proposed, in a refereed article in Environmental Research Letters, to define the rosenfeld as electricity savings of 3 billion kilowatt-hours per year, the amount needed to replace the annual generation of a 500 megawatt coal-fired power plant. The proposal was intended to honor Arthur Rosenfeld for his pioneering work in the field.[Julie Chao, News Center, Berkely Lab,
Mar 9]

 Posted Mar 29: The Unpersuadables: When Facts Are Not Enough. Monbiot reflects on what it feels like to be defending scientists on the issue of climate change, after a career of exposing their biases, narrow-mindedness and dependence on corporate funding.[George Monbiot, The Guardian, via CommonDreams, Mar 9]

 Posted Mar 29: Should Scientists Fight Heat or Stick to Data? Paul Ehrlich says "...we’re in a street fight against well-funded, merciless enemies who play by entirely different rules." Randy Olson says he's tired of "...overly academic analysis of what are the actions of basically thugs." Time to say "no more Mr. Nice Guy"?[Andrew Revkin, NY Times, Mar 9]

 Posted Mar 29: The Fugitive Humanity of City Spaces. The problem of the continuing evictions of the urban poor : "What is likely to happen in cities where informal housing appears to be growing beyond the control of government and state agencies, where the only response of authority still lies in the bulldozer and paramilitary forces to clear those they see as encroachers and trespassers?"[Jeremy Seabrook, Share The World's Resources, via CommonDreams, Mar 8]

 Posted Mar 29: Brain food: does activism make you happy? In a study of700 college students, "subjects who did the brief activist behavior reported significantly higher levels of subjective vitality than did the subjects who engaged in the nonactivist behavior". Activism: Just another cheap high? [Aditya Chakrabortty, The Guardian, Mar 2]

 Posted Mar 29: The Newest Hybrid Model. Florida Power and Light is constructing an experimental solar add-on to a 3800-megawatt natural gas-fueled power plant, the nation's largest. The 75 MW solar booster itself (to be the world's largest, after the 310-MW Mojave Desert plant) will not involve solar cells, but use sunlight essentially to boil water to help drive existing turbines during daytime, when demand peaks in Florida.[Jad Mouawas, NYTimes, Mar 4]

 Posted Feb 15: IPCC errors: facts and spin. Himalayagate, Amazongate, Seagate, Africagate, calls for IPCC director Pauchuri's head - what do these media feeding frenzies have in common? All stem from misreadings or trivial errors found in the 2800-page IPCC Fourth Assessment Report published in 2007. [RealClimate,Feb14]  See also “AmazonGate”: how the denial lobby and a dishonest journalist created a fake scandal. [Tim Holmes, Climate Safety, Feb 9]

 Posted Feb 1:Nuclear Does Not Make Economic Sense Say Studies. . While safety and environmentalmconcerns have not dampened the current enthusiasm for a nuclear-power renaissance, new studies by several independent European organizations and Citibank(!!) asserts that due to the enormous technical and financial risks it will no longer be profitable for private capital to finance new nukes.[Julio Godoy,IPSnews,Feb 12]

 Posted Feb 15:‘Global Weirding’ and Climate Skeptics’ Slushy Logic. Errors by the IPCC and recent snows in DC and Copenhagen have opened opportunities for global warming denialists seeking to distract attention from long-term trends. [sarahlaskow, AlterNet, Feb 12]

 Posted Feb 15: Skeptics Find Fault With U.S. Climate Panel. The erroneous report of melting Himalayan glaciers and the stolen e-mails are still being inflated and echoed through the denialosphere. The NYT stumbles to the rescue with quotes from a Wyoming senator, the yellow press of London and the notorious Lord Monckton, all calling for the decapitation of IPCC chair Pachauri, who the reporter helpfully notes, is a vegetarian. Not a single bona fide researcher in the field was cited. Not a word about the motives of the e-mail hackers.[Elisabeth Rosenthal, NYT,Feb08]

 Posted Feb 15: Biological threats: A matter of balance. The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists took issue with a recent Congressional report (by the Graham-Talent WMD Commission) that "asserted that a life-altering bioterrorist attack is highly likely to take place within the next four years." The BAS called the findings exaggerated and the remedies too narrowly-focused and urged instead that efforts should be made in " improving public health capabilities to respond to any kind of infectious disease threat" [Scientists Working Group on Biological and Chemial Weapons, Bull. Atomic Sci., Feb 02]

 Posted Feb 15:Job Opportunity - Don't Miss. Do you have training in ultamatonic field patterning, quantum singular activity and radio esthetics? Put it to use, now at Maperton Trust. Salary 20,000-24,00 per annum (units not stated) [Ben Goldacre, BadScience, The Guardian,Jan 30]

 Posted Feb 15: Vaccine-Autism Study Is Retracted. The Lancet, a major British medical journal has just "retracted a flawed study linking the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine to autism and bowel disease " Large numbers of British parents had refused the to have their children immunized, leading to a resurgence of measles, and there is still widespread skepticism. "Britain's General Medical Council ruled [that the co-ordinator of the research , Andrew] Wakefield had shown a ''callous disregard'' for the children used in his study and acted unethically [AP, NYT, 2/2]

 Posted Jan 28: World's Glaciers Continue to Melt. Although a lot of publicity was given to the erroneous Indian claim (which appeared in the latest IPCC report) that Himalayan glaciers were retreating, glaciers across the globe are continuing to melt so fast that many will disappear by the middle of this century. Confusion has arisen because glaciers at very high altitudes may continue to grow in the short term because of increased snowfall. [Juliette Jowit, Guardian(via Common Dreams), Jan26]

 Posted Jan 28: If It’s That Warm, How Come It’s So Damned Cold? An Essay on Regional Cold Anomalies With Near-Record Global Temperatures. [James Hansen, et al., RealClimate, jan17; updated Jan 27]

 Posted Jan 28: Who's Afraid of the HPV Vaccine? NSF research into how people decide which scientists to believe indicates that it has to do with cultural credibility, i.e., shared values. [ScienceDaily, Jan14]

 Posted Jan 28: A Rebuttal to a Cool Climate Paper.
A widely circulated June 2009 Geophysical Review Letters paper authored by Richard Lindzen (long-time global-warming-minimizer) and Yong-Sang Choi, attempting to once again challenge the results of climate models, was roundly rebutted in a communication posted at RealClimate on the grounds if misleading use of observed sea surface temperature data and the use of a model lacking an interactive ocean. [Andrew
Revkin, NY Times, Jan 8]

 Posted Jan 28: The Great Pacific Garbage Patch - a chilling 7-minute video. "Capt. Charles Moore of the Algalita Marine Research Foundation first discovered the Great Pacific Garbage Patch -- an endless floating waste of plastic trash. " [Posted on YouTube in April 2009]

 Posted Jan 28: No Gender Gap in Math. More nails have been hammered in the coffin of dead theories about inherent differences in math ability between girls and boys, as seen in this international study. [Christie Nicholson,Sci. Amer., 1/6]

 Posted Jan 28: Climate Change Scepticism Will Increase Hardship for World's Poor. [Adam Vaughan, Guardian,via CommonDreams, Jan 4] Rajendra Pachauri, chair of IPCC, warned of increasing attacks from vested interest via global warming deniers, which could seriously weaken the chances for a strong agreement in Mexico and have further endanger the world's poor.

 Posted Jan 28: On issues like global warming and evolution, scientists need to speak up. Increasing public distrust of scientists suggests that they should get their hands dirty and speak more to the public instead of each other. ' "Why target us? We're the good guys. And if we become more media savvy, we'll risk our credibility." There is only one answer to this objection: "Look all around you -- at Climategate, at the unending evolution wars -- and ask, are your efforts working?" The answer, surely, is no. '[Chris Mooney, Wash Post, 1/3/10]

 Posted Jan 28: The Temperature of Science. James Hansen traces the path from his first historical analyses of global temperature data in 1980 to his present status as a target of hate mail and threats, necessitating an armed escort to a talk he presented in Houston last month. Contains useful charts of temp trends 1880-2010. [James Hansen, e-mail to public, 12/18/09]

------------------------------ 2009 ------------------------------------------------

, Posted Dec 15: U.S. Business Interests Suspected in 'Fabricated' Climate Scandal. "Business interests and US partisan politics are behind the furor over leaked emails that have whipped up a controversy at the Copenhagen climate talks, Canadian according to Canadian IPCC scientist Andrew Weaver and author James Hoggan(writer of "Climategate"). [By Staff , Agence France Presse,Dec 14]

 Posted Dec 15: Water Is the Missing Link in Copenhagen. Global Public Policy Network on Water Management (GPPN), which has been working to raise the profile of water in past climate change negotiations, leading up to Copenhagen, is trying to gain attention for one of its core messages, that water "is the primary medium through which climate change impacts will be felt by populations and the environment." .[Thalif Deen, IPS, Dec 14]

  Posted Dec 15: Deniergate: Turning the tables on climate sceptics. Refutations of some of the more persistent myths about the sources of the global warming still being widely circulated, such as sunspot cycle length and cosmic rays .[Michael Marshall and Michael Le Page, New Scientist, Dec 14]

  Posted Dec 15: Mike Gravel’s Lament: Fighting Another Dumb War. "Barack Obama, who is as mesmerized by the red, white and blue bunting draped around our vast killing machine as the press, the two main political parties and our entertainment industry, will not halt our doomed imperial projects or renege on the $1 trillion in defense-related spending that is hollowing out the country from the inside."[Chris Hedges, TruthDig.com, Dec 13]

  Posted Dec 15: Climate technologies: a leap into the unknown. Geo-engineering to the rescue? "The failure of industrialized countries to offer anything close to the emissions reductions commitments required to avert catastrophic climate change has stimulated a flurry of activity in recent months in the arena of new technologies to "rescue" the planet. [Oscar Reyes, Znet, Dec 12]

  Posted Dec 15: Copenhagen climate change blah blah. Bad Science columnist Ben Goldacre oasks "why do roughly half the people in this country (UK) not believe in man-made climate change, when the vast, overwhelming majority of scientists do? Discussion follows. [Ben Goldacre, The Guardian, Dec 12]

  Posted Dec 15: Small Farmers Can Cool the World. A study presented by Klimaforum09, at an alternative meeting in Copenhagen representing the world's small farmer, finds that industrial agriculture is the largest single contributor to carbon emissions. [Stephen Leahy, IPS, Dec 11]

  Posted Dec 15: The American Health Care Pyramid. The giants in the banking industry get bailouts, but No guarantees for working Americans, who receive very little from their government: unemployment insurance and food stamps, which add up to a poverty existence. Poverty wages or poverty assistance. And now new levels of poverty health care.[Carl, Ginsburg, Counterpunch, Dec 11]

  Posted Dec 15: No Slowdown of Global Warming, Agency Says. According to preliminary analyses released by the World Meteorological Organization, 2009 was the fifth-warmest year on record and the decade 2000-2009 was the warmest on record. The previous warmest was the 90's. [Revkin and Kanter, NY Times, Dec 9]

  Posted Dec 15: Climatologists Under Pressure. "Stolen e-mails have revealed no scientific conspiracy, but do highlight ways in which climate researchers could be better supported in the face of public scrutiny."[Editorial, Nature, Dec 3]

  Posted Dec 15: Agent Orange's lethal legacy: For U.S., a record of neglect. With U.S. veterans seeking compensation for their Agent Orange-caused illnesses facing delays and a slow-moving bureaucracy "...untold numbers of Vietnamese -- including many who weren't even alive during the war -- also suffer from maladies associated with the defoliants. Tens of thousands more are at risk today from dioxin that remains in the environment at dozens of former U.S. military bases."[Chicao Tribune, Jason Grotto and Tim Jones, 5-part series began Dec 4]

  Posted Dec 15: We May Be Born With an Urge to Help. Interesting evidence for apparent helpfulness instinct in toddlers. But, " Sociality, the binding together of members of a group, is the first requirement of defense, since without it people will not put the group’s interests ahead of their own or be willing to sacrifice their lives in battle. Lawrence H. Keeley, an anthropologist who has traced aggression among early peoples, writes in his book “War Before Civilization” that, “Warfare is ultimately not a denial of the human capacity for cooperation, but merely the most destructive expression of it.”[Nicholas Wadw, NYTimes, Nov 30]

 Posted Nov 14: AHIP (Americas's Health Insurance Plans) Pollster Disrupted by Singing Troupe of Protesters.A health nsurance industry conference was disrupted on its final day by a creative and polished bit of guerilla theater. See the video [Sam Stein, HuffingtonPost, Oct 23]

 Posted Nov 14: Digital Dumping and the Global ‘E-Cycling’ Scam. Where does that old computer go once you think you've recycled it? The 'recycler' may simply "take your electronic items for free, or pocket your recycling fee, and then simply load them onto a sea-going container, and ship them to China, India or Nigeria." "The Basel Action Network investigated Nigeria's e-waste situation and detailed its findings in a shocking report..."[Gbemisola Olujobi,CommonDreams.Nov12]

 Posted Nov 14: Empires and the Sullying of History. A historical description of the use of anthropolgists in the pursuit of colonialism and war, and the notable anthropologists who exposed and resisted this misuse.[Robert Lawless, Counterpunch, Nov 6]

 Posted Nov 14: Is Your Doctor's Continuing Ed Funded by Drug Makers? Doctors maintain their medical credentials by taking Continuing Medical Education courses - heavily funded by the drug giants and larded with drug ads.[Martha Rosenberg, Counterpunch,Nov 4]

 Posted Nov 14:You want the Amazon to survive? Then pay us not to pump the oil, says Ecuador. In a lawsuit that has dragged on for 16 years, Texaco (which Chevron acquired in 1993) is accused of dumping "more than 18 billion gallons of toxic waste into the rainforest between 1964 and 1990, and claim(s) that 1,400 deaths occurred in the region as a result[Huw Hennessy in Quito, CommonDreams, Nov 1]

 Posted Nov 14: Powering a Green Planet: Sustainable Energy, Made Interactive. A special web-only-with graphics piece, arguing the practicality of a massive shift by 2030 to a hydro/wind/solar powered economy. Discussion follows. [M.Z. Jacobson, M.A.Delucchi, Scientific American, Nov 2009]

 Posted Nov 14: Waste heat in solar energy generation - another myth destroyed. The author shows the absurdity of a claim made in the book Superfreakonomics by Levitt , using elementary math and inormation available to everybody [Ray Pierrehumbert, RealClimate, Oct 29]

 Posted Nov 14: Book review of "Climate Cover Up: The Crusade to Deny Global Warming." An exploration of climate change contrarianism...exploring the PR techniques, phony 'think tanks,' and funding used to pervert scientific fact, this book serves as a wake-up call to those who still wish to deny the inconvenient truth." [RealClimate, Oct 20]

 Posted Nov 14: Crisis Has Hurt Investment in Renewables. "Interest in investing in renewable energies seems to have waned as a result of the recession and the drop in oil prices, despite the pressing need to find ways to cut greenhouse gas emissions like carbon dioxide, which are blamed for global warming. " [Emilio Godoy, IPS,Oct 10]

 Posted Nov 14: Spreading Hysteria about Swine Flu "Hysteria". In view of the uncertainties inherent in predicting the spread of any new disease, Soldz criticizes the commentators who promote public distrust of the need for a vaccination program. They use "the common commentator's trick to pose the options as 'hysteria' or forgetting about it, as if those are the only options. Of course, hysteria is never useful. But cautious alertness often is. " [Stephen Soldz, Znet Sep 29]

 Posted Oct 12: Southeast Asia: Back to Traditional Farming to Beat Climate Change.] A perceived increase in the duration and intensity of droughts and floods and decrease in a reliability of the changeover between rainy and dry seasons, together with damage from deforestation and monoculture has led to experimentation with traditional methods and seeds. [Anil Netto, IPS, Oct 9

 Posted Oct 12: Dwindling Fish Catch Could Leave a Billion Hungry. A mega-shift in ocean productivity from south to north over the next three to four decades "[due to climate change]will leave those most reliant on fish for both food and income high and dry. [Stephen Leahy, IPS, Oct 9]

 Posted Oct 12: Boxer-Kerry Climate Bill Greenwashes Nuclear Power. Riccio reviews the dangers, both economical and environmental, of bringing back nukes. [Jim Riccio, CommonDreams, Oct 8]

 Posted Oct 12: Our Love Affair With Our Lawns vs the Water Crisis. According to a 2007 NASA study, "Lawns are America's largest irrigated crop -- we have 63,240 square miles under cultivation -- and we use roughly 19 trillion gallons of water annually to care for them." (Note: This could cover the whole continental U.S. to a depth of a centimeter)[ Dara Colwell, AlterNet, Oct 2]

 Posted Oct 12: IFPRI study highlights future food shortages due to climate change. Using two different models of climate change, the International Food Policy Research Institute predicted large increases in food prices by 2050, especially in South Asia, due to declining yields caused by lack of rain and increased temperatures.[ifpri.org press releases, Oct 2]

 Posted Oct 12: G-20 Protesters Faced New Weapons. In addition to the old standbys tear gas and pepper spray, Pittsburgh police unleashed bean bags fired from shotguns,flash-bang grenades, batons and, for the first time on the streets of America, the Long Range Acoustic Device (LRAD), used basically to screech people off the streets. More advanced weapons are in the pipeline, including heat rays, puke rays and sonic bullets.[Mike Ferner, Consortium News via CommonDreams]

 Posted Oct 12: It's Not Sex, It's Money. Instead of looking at the population growth of the very poor, ii's time to focus on the environmental impacts of the rich, says George Monbiot. [UK Guardian, via CommonDreams, Sep 29]

 Posted Oct 12: How to read articles about health and health care. Would you read an article called “Coffee pretty unlikely to cause cancer, but you never know”? Probably not. But the headlines that do attract your attention are often misleading. Here are some simple questions to ask about mass media science reports. [Alicia White, Bad Science, Sep 16]

  Posted Sept 11: Why Not to Buy a New Computer for College. What portion of those rare elements vital in small quantities for the latest electronic toys originate in genocidal war zones in Africa? Global Witness delineates how multinational companies are "pillaging natural resources and fueling holocaust in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC)." [Deena Guzder, CommonDreams, Sep 10]

  Posted Sept 11: The Mystery of Chernobyl. It has been reported that "it has been reported that the abandoned town of Pripyat has become a wildlife haven." Now, 23 yearsa after the accident, a team of scientists is now investigating the effects of the released radiation on local wildlife.[Sanjida O'Connell,CommonDreams, Sep 9]

  Posted Sept 11: No Flies on S.F.'s New Composting Law. The city of San Francisco is distributing over 100 composting bins daily to speed compliance with its new composting law which mandates that by Oct 21, every home and business will have separate bins for trash, recyclables and compost. [Heather Knight,CommonDreams, Sep 9]

  Posted Sept 11: Whole Foods Fair Trade and Organics. Open letter from Organic Consumers Association blasts Whole Food Markets for greenwashing and threatens a boycott. [Ronnie Cummins, Counterpunch, Sep 9]

  Posted Sept 11: Dr. Pepper's Wet Dream. Water, Government Subsidies and Transfer of Wealth in the Middle of the Desert. " For the past three years, [California]has been in the grip of a devastating drought," with water deliveries cut in half. Yet here in Victorville on the edge of the Mojave Desert, the Dr Pepper Snapple Group, has announced plans a facility that will "suck up hundreds of millions of gallons of water a year from this water-scarce area to supply soft drinks to 20 percent of its domestic market." [Yasha Levine, AlterNet, Sep 8]

  Posted Sept 11: Ending Africa's Hunger. An in-depth look at the dangers of bringing a second edition of a Bill Gates-funded Green Revolution to Africa. [Raj Patel, et al, The Nation, Sep 2 (sep 21 print issue) ]

  Posted Sept 11: Water: the Newest Wave of Corporate "Social Responsibility". A major opportunity for a corporate PR coup, " World Water Week has [attracted]...companies selling water, beverages, and water and sanitation services to grab a seat at the table, as water practices and policies are discussed." [Diane Farsetta, Counterpunch, Sep 2]

  Posted Sept 11: Wall Street's Health Care Takeover. Former flack for the health insurance mega-lobby speaks out: "I'm ashamed that I let myself get caught up in deceitful and dishonest PR campaigns that worked so well, hundreds of thousands of our citizens have died, and millions of others have lost their homes and been forced into bankruptcy, so that a very few corporate executives and their Wall Street masters could become obscenely rich." [Wendell Potter, Common Dreams, Sep/1]

  Posted Sept 11: Ian Plimer’s homework assignment. A detailed response to a new set of questions posed by Ian Plimer, one of Britains most often-quoted climate-change deniers, who is widely quoted on Fox News and other far right meida. [Gavin Schmidt, RealClimate, Aug 24]

  Posted Sept 11: The brutal truth about America’s healthcare. "The LA Forum, the arena that once hosted sell-out Madonna concerts, has been transformed – for eight days only – into a vast field hospital. In America, the offer of free healthcare is so rare, that news of the magical medical kingdom spread rapidly and long lines of prospective patients snaked around the venue for the chance of getting everyday treatments that many British people take for granted. "[Guy Adams, The Independent, Aug 15]

  Posted Sept 11: Protesting at Climate Ground Zero. Accounts of direct action to raise consciousness about global warming, featuring a daring nine-hour ascent of the inside of a 600-foot smokestack at England's Kingsnorth coal-fired power plant. [Tomdispatch.com, Aug 11]

  Posted August 13: G.M. Puts Electric Car’s City Mileage in Triple Digits. 230 miles per gallon - for an electric car? Yes, for an EPA standard 100-mile trip, you run it until the battery quits after 40 miles, then the small gasoline engine kicks in and feeds the battery to get you another 60 miles. That's how this number was calculated. Thus, if you drove only 40 miles, your gas mileage would be infinite. Nissan's Leaf will get 367 "miles per gallon" using the same EPA standard. Just thought we'd clear that one up for our readers. By the way, for non-home owners - sorry, there doesn't yet seem to be any way of re-charging your batteries, which takes 8 hours. But, confusing numbers aside, the development of the Volt may show that GM (now 60% government-owned) may at last be serious about innovation. [Bill Vlasic and Nick Bunkly. NY Times, Aug 12]

  Posted August 13: 10 Questions to Ask If You Find Yourself at an ObamaCare Town Hall Meeting. Or if your in-laws are visiting...[David Lindorff, Counterpunch, Jul 12]

  Posted August 13: Let's Talk About Tasers. "Tasers were sold to the public as a tool for law enforcement to be used in lieu of deadly force", but there is increasing evidence that this weapon "is becoming a barbaric tool of authoritarian, social control."[Digby, CommonDreams, via Salon, Aug 11]

  Posted August 13: Climate Change Seen as Threat to U.S. Security. What's that? National security! The all-purpose justifier is at last being wheeled onto the field of the battle on carbon emissions. Talk about lives lost due to starvation and flooding is turning more and more to talk of threats of political unrest and the need new military interventions. [John M Broder, NY Times, Aug 8]

  Posted August 13: The World's Rubbish Dump: A Garbage Tip that Stretches from Hawaii to Japan. Another story on the vast "trash vortex" in the Northern Hemisphere portion of the Pacific, composed mainly of discarded plastic and foam products, detectable from ships but not dense enough to be seen on satellite imagery. [Kathy Marks, The Independent (via CommonDreams, Aug 6]

  Posted August 13: Jelly Fish and Warm Oceans. This Wash Post blog writer points to accounts of increasing numbers of jellyfish, including the giant jellyfish, reportedly connected with rises in sea surface temperature. One interesting figure from NOAA that he references from a previous article indicates that "June's combined average global land and ocean surface temperature was the second warmest on record since 1880, and world ocean surface temperatures set an all-time record high for the month".[Andrew Freedman, Capital Weather Gang, Washington Post, Aug 5]

  Posted August 13: India: Rural Communities Turn to Traditional Climate Mitigation. In Tamilnadu, southern India, and Uttar Pradesh, northern India, villagers, helped by NGOs including Oxfam, have revived ancient systems of storing surface and groundwater that are putting them in a good position to contend with anticipated increases in monsoon rainfall intensity. [Keya Acharya, IPS news, Aug 5]

  Posted August 13: Crackdown Against Environmental Criminals Follows Greenpeace Report. Shoe Brands Get Tough on Leather Suppliers to Save Amazon Rainforest. As a result of a 3-year investigation by Greenpeace, "Some of the world's top footwear brands, including Clarks, Adidas, Nike and Timberland, have demanded an immediate moratorium on destruction of the Amazon rainforest from their leather suppliers in Brazil".(see related Alcoa story below)[Damian Carrington and Tom Phillips, The Guardian,(via CommonDreams), Aug 4]

  Posted August 13: Organic food no better than normal food? Ben Goldacre takes a hard look at the PR techniques of the organic food movement and also at issues of faith-based reasoning vs Big Science. Good discussion follows. See also Jun 30 post just below on Huffington Post.[Ben Goldacre, BadScience, The Guardian, Aug 1]

  Posted August 13: The Huffington Post is crazy about your health. Curing swine flu with deep-cleaning enemas? Getting cancer from candida? Autism from vaccinations? De-tox and deep-cleaning therapies for everyone? Parikh criticizes the Huffington Post as being callous in its "lack of substance" and failing to provide citations of controlled experiments to back up claims.[Rahul Parikh, Salon,Jul 30]

  Posted August 13: Alcoa Razes Rain Forest in Court Case Led by Brazil Prosecutors. Detailed and troubling look at how uncertain environmental enforcement by Brazil combined with sustained pressures from powerful multinationals, including Alcoa and Cargill, are combining to continue the destruction of the rain forest through minies, cattle ranches and industrial-scale agriculture. "We are not going to reduce global warming if we don't do something about deforestation in the Amazon," says Doug Boucher [member of DC Metro Science for the People], director of the Tropical Forest and Climate Initiative at Concerned Scientists. "It's that simple, and very alarming. The Amazon is a big part -- if not the key part -- of a solution to deal with global warming."[Michael Smith and Adriana Brasileiro, Bloomberg.com, jul 30]

 Posted July 31: Organic Versus Conventional Food: UK Report Flawed. The review study (see next article below) was criticized by the Soil Association of the UK, citing Michael Hansen of Consumer's Union, [who said that] "including older studies, with crop varieties that no longer are on the market, and which did have more nutrients, only serves to lessen the possibility of finding any significant differences between organic and conventional foods."[Paula Crossfield, Huffington Post, Jul 30]

Posted July 31: Organic has no health benefits. A new review study (by Alan Dangour - see abstract), commissioned by the UK The Food Standards Agency concluded that "There is little difference in nutritional value and no evidence of any extra health benefits from eating organic produce". [BBC News, Jul 29]

 Posted July 31: India's 20 GW solar energy plans. India announced a $19B 20-year "National Solar Mission" which by 2030 is expected to put online 20GW of photo-voltaic-generated solar power (the equivalent of about 15 large nuclear power plants), . This would amount to 10-12% of India's estimated power needs for that year. China has already announced plans of about this scale, sheduled for completion in 2020.[Reuters-India, Jul 28]

 Posted July 31: Rich Nations Vulnerable to Water Disasters. U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon warned yesterday that the state of California, for example, the world's fifth largest economy, "could see prime farmland reduced to a dustbowl, and major cities running out of water by the end of the century". Other areas that can suffer from redistribution of rainfall due to climate change include Spain and Australia.[Thalif Deen, IPS news, Jul 28]

 Posted July 31: The Privatization of Global Health. Large increases in global health aid going from rich to poor countries are serving to spread the for-profit delivery of health care by private entities at the expense of public systems. [Sanjay Basu, Zspace, Jul 28]

 Posted July 31:Foreign Disbelief of Topless America. Big Coal and mountaintop removal are alive and well in Obama's America (two videos included) .[Jeff Biggers, CommonDreams.org, Jul 28]

 Posted July 31: How Eating Steak, Cake and Butter Can Make You Live Longer. Eat more fat??? "Even the American Heart Association (AHA), a leader in the campaign against dietary fat, recently revised its nutritional guidelines, increasing the daily recommendations for fat. 'The science just wasn’t there,' acknowledges Robert Eckel, president of the AHA and a professor of endocrinology, metabolism and diabetes at the University of Colorado Health Sciences Center. [Janet Paskin, Ode,July 27]

 Posted July 31: Why Are Humans Different From All Other Apes? It’s the Cooking, Stupid. Richard Wrangham in his book “Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human” attibutes a central role to cooking in his explanation of the development not only of many aspects of human society, but also many physical attributes, such as uncommonly weak jaws for a carnivore.[Dwight Garner, NY Times, May 26]

 Posted July 31: World Will Warm Faster Than Predicted in Next Five Years, Study Warns. An temporary pause in global warming during the 10 year's since the El Niño peak in1998 (that led to a lot of noise-making by the denialogists) whould come to a quick end according to results just published in thd U.S. A return of El Niño coupled with a cyclic maximum in solar activity should lead to another run of record-high global temperaures in the next few years[Duncan Clark, The Guardian(via CommonDreams, Jul 27]

 Posted July 31: Climate Change to Force 75 Million Pacific Islanders From Their Homes. A new Oxfam Australia report, "The Future is Here" warns of the urgent need for action now to intensify efforts of the people in danger to mitigate the coming destruction and for the richest nations to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. [Bonnie Malkin, Telegraph(UK), via CommonDreams]

 Posted July 31: How the Food Industry Has Made Bacon a Weapon of Mass Destruction. "The confluence of factory farming, the boom in fast food and manipulation of consumer taste created processed foods that can hook us like drugs." From the vertically-integrated livestock monopolies to the manipulation of the public's food preferences to the obesity epidemic and the swine flu epidemic - it's all here.[Arun Gupta, AlterNet, July 23]

 Posted July 12: Missile Defense Yet Again. Exposing a series of Washington Post spins (and lies) on the possibility of missile defense, defense researcher Cirincione quotes a recent letter from leading physicists to Obama: "We assess that the planned European missile defense system would have essentially no capability to defend against a real missile attack. ... This system has not been proven and does not merit deployment. It would offer little or no defensive capability, even in principle. At the same time, its deployment would result in large security, political, and monetary costs."[Joe Cirincione, Huffington Post, Jul 11]

 Posted July 12: Forget Shorter Showers - Why personal change does not equal political change. Is the personal political? "Consumer culture and the capitalist mindset have taught us to substitute acts of personal consumption (or enlightenment) for organized political resistance."[Derrick Jensen, Orion, Jul-Aug]

Posted July 12: The Organic Monopoly and the Myth of 'Natural' Foods: How Industry Giants Are Undermining the Organic Movement. "How natural is the so-called natural food in our local Whole Foods Market, coop, or grocery store? ... [is] it ...disguising unhealthy and unsustainable food and farming practices as alternatives? Is 'natural' just a marketing ploy to sell conventional-unhealthy, energy-intensive, and non-sustainable food and products at a premium price? [Ronnie Cummins, CommonDreams, Jul 9]

Posted July 12: G-8 Failure Reflects U.S. Failure on Climate Change. Jim Hansen blasts the Waxman-Markey bill as the reason for the disappointing result in Italy, pronouncing it "...no more fit to rescue our climate than a V-2 rocket was to land a man on the moon. " Hansen favors, among other measures a carbon fee at the source with a dividend returned to the public according to their success in reducing their own carbon footprint.[James Hansen, HuffingtonPost, Jul 9]

Posted July 12: Meatless Mondays: Do Something Good for the Earth and Your Health. Schools of Public at Johns Hopkins, Columbia Univerity and 27 other institutions have launhed a Meatless Mondays campaign, focused on trying to persuade the world to forego meat on at least one day each week. [Kathy Freston,AlterNet, Jul 6]

Posted July 12: Science at the bleeding edge. In media reports of scientific breakthroughs, the press rushes to bring the latest novelties to its readers, albeit in distorted form, but "...quite often news stories are focused on claims that turn out to be wrong, or if not actually wrong, heavily reduced in importance by the time the dust settles."[Gavin Schmidt, RealClimate, Jul 6] (Also see "Asking for it", just below)

Posted July 12: Asking for it. "Bad Science columnist Ben Goldacre tracks down the "scientists" referred to in a recent headline in the Telegraph, “Women who dress provocativelymore likely to be raped, claim scientists" [the article has since pulled by Telegraph] and finds both it and the article to be false and/or grossly distorted. [Goldacre, BadScience, jul 4]. Apropos of this, check out this cartoon in phdcomics.com

Posted July 12: Eat, Drink, Think, Change. Eric Schlosser is a producer of, and a character in, “Food, Inc.,” in which the director Robert Kenner 'takes a sprawling look at the perils of Big Food. The film is being promoted as an exposé of “the highly mechanized underbelly” of the seemingly benign food people eat every day'. [Kim Severson, NY Times, Jun 3]

Posted July 12: Summer Travel Suggestion: Come and visit the Creation Museum. Conveniently located just 7 miles west of the Cincinatti Airport. This "...state-of-the-art 70,000 square foot museum brings the pages of the Bible to life, casting its characters and animals in dynamic form and placing them in familiar settings. Adam and Eve live in the Garden of Eden. Children play and dinosaurs roam near Eden’s Rivers." Or, you can be lazy, stay home and just read what AlterNet has to say about all this. [July 2 AlterNet post]

Posted July 12: Green Power Takes Root in the Chinese Desert. While the U.S. Congress is still debating proposals that American utilities generate more of their power from renewable sources of energy, China imposed such a requirement almost two years ago. "This year China is on track to pass the United States as the world’s largest market for wind turbines — after doubling wind power capacity in each of the last four years."[Keith Bradsher, NY Times, July 2]

 

 Posted Dec 12: Climate Change:Latin America Could Show the Way. According to a new World Bank report,'Low Carbon, High Growth: Latin American Responses to Climate Change'by Augusto de la Torre, Pablo Fajnzylber and John Nash[link not yet available], "The region is suffering the impact of climate change; however, it is not a main source of emissions that are driving global warming, thanks to its clean energy matrix and its innovative policies to promote low carbon growth." [Ramesh Jaura, IPS, Dec 10]

 Posted Dec 12: Nuclear Weapons Obsolescence Former Lawrence Livermore Lab weapons researcher Manuel Garcia asks why such personages as Henry Kissinger, Sam Nunn, William Perry and Sam Nunn have recently joined the likes of Bertrand Russell, Einstein and Gandhi in calling for nuclear disarmament.[Counterpunch, Dec 10]

 Posted Dec 12: The New Generation of "Non-Lethal" Weapons  20,000 First Brigade Combat Team troops will be assigned inside the U.S.- the first such assignment since Reconstruction. Ostensibly the forces are for use in response to terrorist attacks, but will also be available for "civil unrest and crowd control". Featured is a new package of "non-lethal" weapons, some of which have been tested in Iraq, and may include heat beams, high-intensity sound, biochemical agents, and advanced tasers[Mike Ferner, Counterpunch, Dec 8]

 Posted Dec 12: This Toxic Life On the effects of decades of toxic waste on native pople of southern Ontario living near a concentration of heavy industry.[Wayne Ellwood, New Internationalist, via Counterpunch Dec 9]

 Posted Dec 12: Will $1.81 Gas or Russia Save the Hummer? "Will low gasoline prices put America (and the world) in another fossil-fuel “trance” — as President-elect Barack Obama cautioned — and make us forget the long-term energy and climate challenges ahead?" Check out Comedy Central's National Hummers Club video in this article by Andrew Revkin in the Dec 3 NY Times.

 Posted Dec 12: Small Farmers Key to Combating Climate Change "The agricultural sector, including land use change for agriculture, has been estimated to make up...28-33% of global emissions. Combined with the emissions created transporting food in our increasingly globalized food economy where the average bite to eat travels 1200 miles from field to fork, the industrial food system may be the largest single contributor to global warming. In small-scale organic farming systems however, carbon is actually stored in the soil at a rate of about four tons per hectare. [Annie Shattuck, Common Dreams, Dec 2]

 Posted Dec 12: The NIPCC (Not the IPCC) Report. RealClimate debunks this attempt to discredit the IPCC report and also announces the launch of a powerful Wiki-like tool for exposing the false premises of the climate-change deniers
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Geo-engineering: InVogue-realclimate.org

CARGILL: Eating the Amazon : rainforest to soybeans