Environment

Rep. John Shimkus (R-Ill.) says that only 2 percent of the atmosphere is made up of greenhouse gases, and that only 2 percent of those gases are man made. He somehow seems to think that small proportions in such matters are unimportant. But of course, we now know that Shimkus’s real problem is not that […]

Rep. John Shimkus (R-Ill.), who will seek the Energy and Commerce Committee chairmanship maintains that we do not have to worry about climate change because God promised in the Bible not to destroy the world again after Noah’s flood. The video I posted got pulled by YouTube as ‘spam’, which it isn’t, so I presume […]

I had the pleasure of hearing biologist David Suzuki lecture at the Sydney Opera House on Sunday night during my recent short trip to Australia. He drew on his recent slight but meaty book, The Legacy: An Elder’s Vision for Our Sustainable Future. I downloaded it and read it on my iPhone via Kindle app […]

The corporate mass media (especially television) did not treat the Chilean mine collapse as a labor story but rather as a feel-good human interest story. It not only avoided asking hard questions about why the near-disaster occurred and why the mine workers could be treated like guinea pigs by their employers, it actively obscured these […]

You know that New York Times story that implicated a ‘tag team’ of virus and fungus in the collapse of American bee colonies? And how it implicitly exonerated pesticides, which are among the prime suspects in the bee plague? CNN reports that it turns out the author of the study on which the NYT depended […]

“Freshwater is flowing into Earth’s oceans in greater amounts every year, a team of researchers has found, thanks to more frequent and extreme storms linked to global warming. All told, 18 percent more water fed into the world’s oceans from rivers and melting polar ice sheets in 2006 than in 1994, with an average annual […]

The other problem with flooding carbon emissions into the atmosphere in such massive amounts, besides the certitude that it will cause the surface temperature of the earth to increase dramatically over time, is that it will also certainly acidify the oceans. Enjoy those scallops while you can. In fact, you can expect a general biological […]