The methane time bomb

September 24th, 2008

Arctic scientists discover new global warming threat as melting permafrost releases millions of tons of a gas 20 times more damaging than carbon dioxide.

The first evidence that millions of tons of a greenhouse gas 20 times more potent than carbon dioxide is being released into the atmosphere from beneath the Arctic seabed has been discovered by scientists.

The Independent has been passed details of preliminary findings suggesting that massive deposits of sub-sea methane are bubbling to the surface as the Arctic region becomes warmer and its ice retreats.

Underground stores of methane are important because scientists believe their sudden release has in the past been responsible for rapid increases in global temperatures, dramatic changes to the climate, and even the mass extinction of species. Scientists aboard a research ship that has sailed the entire length of Russia’s northern coast have discovered intense concentrations of methane – sometimes at up to 100 times background levels – over several areas covering thousands of square miles of the Siberian continental shelf.

In the past few days, the researchers have seen areas of sea foaming with gas bubbling up through “methane chimneys” rising from the sea floor. They believe that the sub-sea layer of permafrost, which has acted like a “lid” to prevent the gas from escaping, has melted away to allow methane to rise from underground deposits formed before the last ice age.

More… ➡

– None of this is new.  But, it is getting closer.

– See: ➡, ➡, ➡, ➡, and ➡

Posted in Climate Change, CrashBlogging, Rising Ocean Levels, Social Breakdown, The Perfect Storm, Weather deterioration | No Comments »

Long-term Global Food Crisis Looms: Experts Urge Immediate Action

September 24th, 2008

Declining agricultural productivity and continued growing demand have brought the world food situation to a crossroads. Failure to act now through a wholesale reinvestment in agriculture—including research into improved technologies, infrastructure development, and training and education of agricultural scientists and trainers—could lead to a long-term crisis that makes the price spikes of 2008 seem a mere blip.

This stark warning, in line with calls from organizations such as the World Bank, the World Food Program, and Asian Development Bank (ADB), was issued by members of the Board of Trustees (BOT) of the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) following their meeting on 16-19 September at Institute headquarters in Los Baños, Philippines.

The global community needs to remember two key things,” said BOT Chair Elizabeth Woods. “First, that growth in agricultural productivity is the only way to ensure that people have access to enough affordable food. Second, that achieving this is a long-term effort. A year or two of extra funding for agricultural research is not enough. To ensure that improved technologies flow from the research and development pipeline, a sustained re-investment in agriculture is crucial.”

More… ➡

Posted in CrashBlogging, Food Shortages, Social Breakdown, The Perfect Storm | No Comments »

Political Views Affect Firms’ Corporate Social Responsibility, Study Finds

September 20th, 2008

A new study in The Financial Review establishes a relationship between political beliefs of corporate stakeholders and the corporate social responsibility (CSR) of their firms. Companies with a high CSR rating tend to be located in Democratic states, while companies with a low CSR rating tend to be located in Republican states.

Amir Rubin of Simon Fraser University analyzed the 2004 presidential election results of communities in which corporate headquarters are located. The results from the election provide relevant data to analyze the correlation between political views of individual communities and the CSR ratings of firms located in those communities.

Results show that firms with high CSR ratings are more likely to be located in states with Democratic majorities, and firms with low CSR ratings are more likely to be located in states with Republican majorities.

Corporate executives tend to reside near a firm’s headquarters. It seems logical that corporate decision makers would align their policies with the views of their stakeholders in order to reduce conflict and create value for the firm.

“The study provides evidence that is consistent with political views playing a role in corporate decision making,” Rubin concludes. “Even though political views affect corporate decisions, they represent an important part of the drive to maximize firm value.”

To the original… ➡

Posted in Capitalism & Corporations | No Comments »

Political views ‘all in the mind’

September 20th, 2008

Scientists studying voters in the US say our political views may be an integral part of our physical makeup.

Their research, published in the journal Science, indicates that people who are sensitive to fear or threat are likely to support a right wing agenda.

Those who perceived less danger in a series of images and sounds were more inclined to support liberal policies.

The authors believe their findings may help to explain why voters’ minds are so hard to change.

In the study, conducted in Nebraska, 46 volunteers were first asked about their political views on issues ranging from foreign aid and the Iraq war to capital punishment and patriotism.

Those with strong opinions were invited to take part in the second part of the experiment, which involved recording their physiological responses to a series of images and sounds.

The images included pictures of a frightened man with a large spider on his face and an open wound with maggots in it. The subjects were also startled with loud noises on occasion.

Conducting experiments

By measuring the electrical conductance of the volunteers’ skin and their blink responses, the scientists were able to work out the degree of fear they were experiencing – how sensitive they were to the images and sounds.

They found that subjects who were more easily startled tended to have political views that would be classified as more right wing, being more in favour of capital punishment and higher defence spending, but opposed to abortion rights.

More… ➡

Posted in CrashBlogging, Fundamentalism, Mental Irrationality, Science, The Perfect Storm | No Comments »

Republican Government Announces New Socialist Corporate Bailout

September 20th, 2008

– An excellent and sharp edged bit of writing from The Sietch Blog:

– – – – – – – – – – – – –

Thats right, the unthinkable (if you are a free market republican) has happened. The REPUBLICANS after years of steadily chopping away regulation after regulation seem to be super surprised that in a market that has no laws, or rules, or even guide lines….crazy greed induced meltdown has occurred. Let me be the first to say…DUH!

It doesn’t take a mental giant to realize that people will get away with what they can. Because the Bush administration has been so lax in it’s oversight of financial markets (I will lump in the republican congress that went along with him for most of the last 8 years, and even sprinkle a little blame on the Democrats who have only been in power for the last 2) that the fox left to guard the hen house has long since eaten all the chickens.

Here is a two minute history lesson. After the great depression, FDR and a bunch of other “liberals” put into place a bunch of laws to make it impossible for the banking world, and the finacial markets to get too cozy. As soon as the gavel struck on the supreme courts desk giving Bush the win in 2000 those rules began to be attacked (to be fair Regan and Bush 1 did their best to kill as many of them as they could as well). 8 years later, we have no rules, and an economic shit storm.

So in essence, every single splinter of the conservative plank has fallen apart. Economically, ecologically, diplomatically, constitutionally, socially, every single thing they stand for has been proven WRONG by the events on the ground.

More… (and well worth reading) ➡

Posted in Capitalism & Corporations, CrashBlogging, Financial melt-down, Politics - The Wrong Way, The Perfect Storm | No Comments »

Food prices ‘help tip 75 million into hunger’

September 19th, 2008

Rising food prices are partly to blame for adding 75 million more people to the ranks of the world’s hungry in 2007 and lifting the global figure to roughly 925 million, the UN’s food agency says.

Jacques Diouf, head of the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), presented the figure to Italy’s parliament ahead of the release of an official report on Thursday.

The latest data further distances the international community from reaching UN Millennium Development Goals that include halving hunger and poverty by 2015.

Diouf estimated that 850 million people were hungry before the 2007-2008 spike in food prices, which sparked widespread protests and even riots in the most affected nations.

The FAO hosted a food crisis summit in Rome in June to discuss ways to combat high food prices, blamed on poor harvests, high oil costs, biofuels and rising demand for basic staple crops, especially from fast-growing Asian countries.

More… ➡

Posted in Biofuels, Food Shortages, Peak Oil, Social Breakdown, The Perfect Storm | No Comments »

How Financial Madness Overtook Wall Street

September 19th, 2008

– This is a great read from Time Magazine – highly recommended.

= = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = =

If you’re having a little trouble coping with what seems to be the complete unraveling of the world’s financial system, you needn’t feel bad about yourself. It’s horribly confusing, not to say terrifying; even people like us, with a combined 65 years of writing about business, have never seen anything like what’s going on. Some of the smartest, savviest people we know — like the folks running the U.S. Treasury and the Federal Reserve Board — find themselves reacting to problems rather than getting ahead of them. It’s terra incognita, a place no one expected to visit.

More… ➡

-research thanks to John P.

Posted in Capitalism & Corporations, CrashBlogging, Financial melt-down, The Perfect Storm | No Comments »

Mesothelioma & Asbestos Awareness Center

September 18th, 2008
“Every corner of the public psyche is canvassed by some of the most talented citizens to see if the desire for some merchandisable product can be cultivated.”John Kenneth Galbraith

– Beware, Bloggers!

There is some stinky stuff going on with these folks:

The Mesothelioma & Asbestos Awareness Center

– Several days ago, a comment appeared on one of my posts on this Blog.   The commenter asked me to contact him about my Blog.   I wrote him an E-mail back asking “What’s up” and got the following reply:

Hi Dennis,

Thanks for getting back to me so quickly. I represent the Mesothelioma and Asbestos Awareness Center, an asbestos health resource site dedicated to spreading knowledge about mesothelioma and the hazards of asbestos exposure. We have recently begun reaching out to environmental advocacy groups in the interest of spreading awareness of our important topic.

The processing of fossil fuels and our reliance on outdated energy sources is harming our environment and harming the workers of our country. In recent months we have seen a surge of asbestos health complications among those who worked in oil refineries and other energy processing centers, mainly due to the amount of asbestos used in these industries.

Few people realize that our environmental attitudes and behaviors are harming not only the earth for our children but also the workers who toil in these hazardous environments. To this end, I was wondering if you would consider posting an informative article or mesothelioma resource link on your site. It is our hope that through building awareness of the harmful effects (both now and in the future) of our current attitudes towards energy we can save both our planet and lives.

I thank you for your time and look forward to hearing from you soon.

Kindly,

Dave

– I wrote him back saying:

I’d consider posting an informative article.   No promises.   If you send me the article or a link to it on-line, I’ll have a look.

– And he replied:

Hi Dennis,

Take a look at an article and interview of ours that is posted here:

http://www.globalwarmingisreal.com/blog/2008/09/04/reliance-on-fossil-fuel-%E2%80%93-an-environmental-and-health-issue/

Let me know what you think.  Give me suggestions of particular questions you’d like answered in an article for your site.

Thanks!

-Dave

– On the surface, this all looked reasonable.  Good people working for a good cause, right?   Why shouldn’t I chip in and help them spread the message?

– But, something didn’t feel right about all of this.   I’ve gotten E-mails in the past from Spammers trying to drum up business for ambulance chasers of one type and another.  Just the other day, I’d gotten one entitled, “Do you or a loved one suffer from Asbestos poisoning?“

-So I started digging.   I didn’t have to dig far.  At the bottom of the  Mesothelioma and Asbestos Awareness Center website is text that asserts, “Thank you for visiting this website which is sponsored by the Law Firm of EARLY, LUDWICK, SWEENEY & STRAUSS, LLC.“

– EARLY, LUDWICK, SWEENEY & STRAUSS, LLC, is a law firm that describes itself on its web site as follows:

“Since April 1980, Early, Ludwick, Sweeney & Strauss has been a leading asbestos law firm in the United States representing plaintiffs in lawsuits against the asbestos industry.“

This was a disappointment.  David hadn’t mentioned that he was associated with a Law firm.

– So, was he really trying to do a public service and increase public awareness of  issues surrounding Mesothelioma & Asbestos – or was he trying to find a cheap way to drive web traffic to the law firm’s web site and hoping to use naive and idealistic Bloggers like myself to help implement an advertising campaign for him on the cheap?

– I decided to dig further by Googling “EARLY, LUDWICK, SWEENEY & STRAUSS, LLC”.   Pages and pages of uninteresting stuff passed until I came across the following:

“Law Firm Caught with Hand in Asbestos Cookie Jar” ➡

– It makes for interesting reading.

– To my idealistic Blogger friends and readers:

– The moral of this story is that there are folks out there who may think us naive.  And they may be snaky enough to try to use our naivety to get free advertising for themselves.  The Internet is a snake pit – so what’s new?  

– These folks may pretend to be idealistically motivated just like us – but it’ll be a ruse to get us to promote their interests – which are focused primarily on putting money in their own pocket by driving web traffic to their sites by using us as cheap advertisers for them.

– Don’t let them sucker you!

19 September 08 – Follow up: 

– I’m frequently annoyed by automated Blogs whose creators setup software to search the web for any content related to a specific subject and then create auto-posts on their own ‘pretend’ Blogs linking to that original content and generate automatically posted comments on the original post referring to their own site. 

-These mind-less automated sites are just attempts to drive traffic by ads so their creators can make a few bucks and they don’t care a whit that they’re clogging the Internet up with their shit and causing folks like me extra work to clear their trash comments off my Blog daily. 

– But I simply had to laugh today when two different auto Blogger websites focused on Mesothelioma and Asbestos picked up links to this article and automatically generated posts and made auto comments on my site referring to their posts.   As if my original post was in support of what they are doing – rather than trashing it.

– I deleted the auto generated comments on my site as I do daily but somewhere out there are two bogus Mesothelioma and Asbestos Blogs with pointers to my article.  And I think that’s hoot!

02 November 2008 Follow up:

– I’ve had some more adventures with regard to this page which you might want to read about here: ➡ 

Tags: ,
Posted in Capitalism & Corporations, The Perfect Storm | 14 Comments »

Conflict fear over Arctic borders

September 17th, 2008

– Not the first time I’ve written on this and I doubt it will be the last.

– – – – – – –

A senior US Coast Guard commander has warned of the risk of conflict in the Arctic, unless disputes over international borders are resolved.

Speaking to the BBC during an Arctic patrol flight, Rear Adm Gene Brooks, in charge of the Coast Guard’s vast Alaska region, appealed for a diplomatic deal.

“The potential is there with undetermined boundaries and great wealth for conflict, or competition.

“There’s always a risk of conflict,” Adm Brookes said.

He added that this was especially the case “where you do not have established, delineated, agreed-upon borders”.

Russia is staking the largest claim to the Arctic, after planting a flag at the North Pole last summer, but Denmark, Norway, Canada and the United States are all involved in border disputes as well.

The admiral’s warning comes as the Arctic sea-ice has, for a second year running, retreated far more dramatically than the long-term average. The latest satellite analysis shows this year’s melt closely following last year’s record thaw.

More… ➡

Posted in Climate Change, CrashBlogging, Peak Oil, Social Breakdown, The Perfect Storm, Weather deterioration | No Comments »

Glaciers shrinking in Southern Alps

September 17th, 2008

New Zealand’s glaciers are showing the lowest total ice mass on record with more than twice the volume of Rangitoto Island melting away in a year.

Research released yesterday by the National Institute of Water & Atmospheric Research showed the Southern Alps glaciers had lost over 2.5cu km (2.2 billion tonnes) of permanent ice from April 2007 to March this year.

That is the fourth highest annual loss since monitoring started, leaving the glaciers with the lowest total ice mass on record of just 44.9cu km.

Niwa principal scientist Jim Salinger told the Herald that was an 18 per cent loss since 1976 when 54cu km was recorded.

The 2.2 billion tonnes loss from last year to the end of March was “very significant”, he said.

More… ➡

Posted in Climate Change, CrashBlogging, Rising Ocean Levels, The Perfect Storm, Water Shortages | No Comments »

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