Category: Environment

The 1976 Viking lander would have likely found water ice on Mars if it had probed just 4 inches deeper.

NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter has revealed frozen water hiding just below the surface of mid-latitude Mars. The spacecraft’s observations were obtained from orbit after meteorites excavated fresh craters on the Red Planet.

By FishOutofWater

Water ice, never seen before in Mars’ “temperate” zone, was discovered in a shallow crater that was made in 2008. The ice reveals that Mars was warmer and wetter in the relatively recent past.

The finds indicate water-ice occurs beneath Mars’ surface halfway between the north pole and the equator, a lower latitude than expected in the Martian climate.

This ice is a relic of a more humid climate from perhaps just several thousand years ago.

said Shane Byrne of the University of Arizona, Tucson.

Mars has large variations in its tilt that cause its climate to change even more strongly that the changes from glacial to interglacial on earth. However, Mars lost most of its atmosphere to space because Mars lacks the mass (size) to hold on to its upper atmosphere when it interacts with energetic particles in the solar wind. With only 1% of the atmospheric pressure of the earth, the Martian surface is uninhabitable to humans.

Last week, Sean Hannity broadcast live from San Joaquin Valley an astroturf rally designed to trigger water wars based on lies & transfer the health care memes to eco issues. The new CT is a whopper:  President Obama, extremist environmentalists in his administration, and liberal radicals have planned for decades to turn California into a dust bowl so that the solar industry can use farmland, forcing us to buy our food from China!

The means to implement this CT is compliance with a federal law to provide instream flows to endangered or threatened fisheries. It was this temporary reduction in water availability that was characterized as an “act of domestic terror” by one of Hannity’s guests, Alan Autry (actor/former mayor):

If you would have told me that that water would have stopped, I would have believed maybe al Qaeda struck, not the federal government.

The International Finance Corporation (IFC), the private arm of the World Bank, has decided to suspend funding in the palm oil sector, affecting the world’s top producer, Wilmar International, pending a review of internal procedures on environmental and social standards…

A group of 19 environmental groups, plantation smallholders and local organizations representing indigenous people filed in 2007 a complaint to the IFC ombudsman over Wilmar’s business practices in Sumatra and Kalimantan.

–Jakarta Post

The destruction of rainforests for palm oil plantations in the world’s tropical regions is one of the biggest environmental problems in the world.  This is a huge step forward, and one of the only bits of encouraging news ever received, for those who know of the destruction of palm oil and work against it.

Go below the fold for more detail and some background info.

It’s time, once again, to bring you the news that is not yet news.

For those not yet aware, there will be a climate change conference in New York City next week, conducted under the auspices of the United Nations.

The 100 world leaders who will be participating in the conference will be arriving on Monday, and if you’re in New York City the same day, you have a chance to participate in a not-to-be-forgotten “welcome event” and pranking opportunity.

Follow along and I’ll tell you how to get involved-and if you do, they’ll even send you home with a lovely parting gift.

See Burning the Midnight Oil for Living Energy Independence for crosspost links

On Thursday, djrekluse at the Daily Kos said:

Despite considerable tension and even aversion in green communities to the subject, we cannot talk about “going green” without making it a discussion about growth through various hierarchies of human development.  Really, the subject of growth should come as second nature to “green” thinkers and communities-after all, a blade of grass must grow to two inches before it can grow to six; a tree must grow from acorn to sapling before it can someday become a mighty oak.  In much the same way, our consciousness, our values, and our cultures must also move through several distinct stages of growth before we can even begin to even see the problem, let alone care enough to do anything about it.

In other words, “going green” really means “growing green,” and represents the crux of almost all the global issues we presently face: it’s not a problem of human imagination, technological innovation, or even political will-it’s a problem of human growth

Consciousness, Culture, and Climate: Growing Green

This provides a frame for thinking about growing an energy independent transport system, and about the multiple ways that local, regional, and inter-regional rail systems can help in that growth.

    The Wonk Room (@ ThinkProgress.org) spoke with Perlmutter today, who explained the economic benefit that he hopes the GREEN Act will have for American households, and particularly those with low- to moderate-incomes:

It helps low- and moderate-incomes. It helps all income levels, because utility costs have been going up for, you know, the last umpteen years. And particularly for low- to moderate-income earners, that’s a big part of their discretionary income, what they have left over at the end of the month, after paycheck and groceries and everything else. So if we can help them control or even shrink utility costs, it’s like a pay raise to those people…We’re hoping to shrink energy costs by 30 percent.

    More below the fold on some good news

The Guardian is reporting very discouraging news, in the lead up to the United Nations Climate Change Conference, in Copenhagen, in December.

Europe has clashed with the US Obama administration over climate change in a potentially damaging split that comes ahead of crucial political negotiations on a new global deal to regulate greenhouse gas emissions.

The impasse is said to threaten the goal of limiting global temperature increases to no more than 2 degrees celsius, by 2015. Another Guardian article quotes UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon:

“We are deeply concerned that the negotiation is not making much headway. It is absolutely and crucially important for the leaders to demonstrate their political will, leadership, and to give clear political guidelines to the negotiators. They should be responsible for the future of this entire humanity,” Ban told the Guardian.

Ban, newly returned from a trip to the Arctic, sees action on climate change as his personal legacy as UN chief. He said he hoped the unprecedented size of the climate meeting, the high level of representation and an unconventional format would transform the talks.

“Have you ever seen any such international conference at the level of so many leaders coming at one time and one place? In any summit meeting you have not seen such a highly political, highly motivated meeting. That is where we have to find some political strength.”

But as elucidated in the first Guardian article, the problem is this:

The BBC has the summary:

Arctic temperatures are now higher than at any time in the last 2,000 years, research reveals.

Changes to the Earth’s orbit drove centuries of cooling, but temperatures rose fast in the last 100 years as human greenhouse gas emissions rose.

Scientists took evidence from ice cores, tree rings and lake sediments.

Writing in the journal Science, they say this confirms that the Arctic is very sensitive both to changes in solar heating and to greenhouse warming.

The full article is firewalled at Science, but it’s long enough to allow some significant quotes. The lead author is Darrell S. Kaufman of the School of Earth Sciences and Environmental Sustainability at Northern Arizona University.

The World Economic Forum (WEF) issued a report warning that the world may face in less than 20 years a huge and pervasive water bankruptcy of fresh water shortages. The problem is that water is a finite resource, yet management and policies are based on the erroneous assumption that a renewable resource is inexhaustible. We generally have the same quantity of water that was available for dinosaurs. However, water sustainability is not possible unless we address issues of population growth, increased irrigation for food, energy water needs, waste, mismanagement and pollution of water supplies.  Another factor is water barons, hoarders and hunters who work to control and seize our diminishing water supplies for their own financial benefit. If we don’t wake up to our water crisis, we could end up just like the bird, looking for water.

 

We are killing the world’s coral reefs and their situation is virtually hopeless.

“The future is horrific,” says Charlie Veron, an Australian marine biologist who is widely regarded as the world’s foremost expert on coral reefs.

“There is no hope of reefs surviving to even mid-century in any form that we now recognise. If, and when, they go, they will take with them about one-third of the world’s marine biodiversity. Then there is a domino effect, as reefs fail so will other ecosystems. This is the path of a mass extinction event, when most life, especially tropical marine life, goes extinct.”

Or, as David Adam explains in his Guardian article about Why coral reefs face a catastrophic future:

Within just a few decades, experts are warning, the tropical reefs strung around the middle of our planet like a jewelled corset will reduce to rubble. Giant piles of slime-covered rubbish will litter the sea bed and spell in large distressing letters for the rest of foreseeable time: Humans Were Here.

They are not alone in their bleak outlook for the future of the world’s coral reefs.

There are some things, we just shouldn’t “Leave to the Markets” to decide what’s best

For Example:

Infrastructure

Public Schools

the Unemployed and the Uninsured

Left to their own devices, Private Interests will UNDERCUT the Public Interest, most every time!

That’s what the Profit Motive is all about — it cares more about the interests of ME, instead of the well-being of the WE, from which Societies are built.

Welcome to the 19th installment of “Considered Forthwith.”

This weekly series looks at the various committees in the House and the Senate. Committees are the workshops of our democracy. This is where bills are considered, revised, and occasionally advance for consideration by the House and Senate. Most committees also have the authority to exercise oversight of related executive branch agencies.

Even though Congress is out of session and the members are back home getting shouted down and physically assaulted by lobbyist-funded mobs of teabaggers, there are still a few things going on in the committees. This week, I will look at the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, which has two field meetings (in Alaska and Colorado) scheduled this month.