environment
gregladen | March 29, 2017A few items that I think you should see:
Trump’s executive order puts the world on the road to climate catastrophe
On Tuesday, President Donald Trump issued a sweeping executive order that effectively guts national efforts to address climate change. If he isn’t stopped, the endpoint of this approach is the ruination of our livable climate and the needless suffering of billions of people for decades to come.
The order starts the process of undoing President Obama’s Clean Power Plan standards for power plants. It also spurs fossil fuel consumption and blocks federal efforts to even prepare for…
gregladen | March 28, 2017Sometimes, when I look at the things the Republicans and their leader, Donald Trump, are doing, I think of that poignant line in so many actual and fictional moments: "You have killed me."
Someone says that because the killing is done, but they are not yet dead. The knife is driven deep, the car is heading for the cliff, the contract killer is closing in. Then the person dies, but not before they get to say, "You killed me."
Today, I look at Donald Trump, the Koch Brothers, Rex Tillerson, the petroleum industry, the Heartland institute. They didn't kill me, but they have killed my daughter,…
esiegel | March 23, 2017“For me, it is far better to grasp the Universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring.” -Carl Sagan
The President of the United States just released his proposed budget for the next fiscal year, and there are some big losers in the scientific world. The EPA, the NIH, NASA Earth Science and many other organizations that exist for the benefit of America and all of humanity are poised to lose a significant amount of federal funding. This doesn't simply affect the scientists who lose their jobs.
A significant fraction of the scientists and engineers…
esiegel | March 15, 2017"Greenhouse gases are the second most important factor for climate, after the Sun." -Syukuro Manabe
In 1967, a groundbreaking paper in climate science was published, detailing the inputs and feedbacks for the first accurate climate model. You don’t have to look far to find contentions that climate models are wrong, inaccurate and unreliable: 8 of the first 10 results on google state it. Yet if you look at the science, the original model, even at age 50, does a remarkable job of getting things right.
The increased emission of greenhouse gases, notably CO2, can have a massive impact on Earth's…
esiegel | February 20, 2017"Before we devised artificial lights and atmospheric pollution and modern forms of nocturnal entertainment we watched the stars. There were practical calendar reasons of course but there was more to it than that. Even today the most jaded city dweller can be unexpectedly moved upon encountering a clear night sky studded with thousands of twinkling stars. When it happens to me after all these years it still takes my breath away." -Carl Sagan
For all of human history, we’ve battled against the limitations of our bodies and the natural world. That’s led to the development of artificial lighting…
esiegel | February 7, 2017"By preventing dangerous asteroid strikes, we can save millions of people, or even our entire species. And, as human beings, we can take responsibility for preserving this amazing evolutionary experiment of which we and all life on Earth are a part." -Rusty Schweickart
Asteroid strikes are among the most destructive natural disasters to ever impact planet Earth. While an extinction-level event, like the one that wiped out the dinosaurs some 65 million years ago, are exceedingly rare, we face city-killer impacts somewhere on Earth's surface every few hundred years.
Meteor (Barringer) crater,…
gregladen | February 6, 2017Representative Mat Gaetz (Republican, Florida) introduced HR 861, "To terminate the Environmental Protection Agency" which is said to defund and remove from existence the Environmental Protection Agency.
Details are unclear, but the idea is to have states and local communities regulate their environmental pollution.
The EPA centralizes research programs, policy guidance, and regulatory procedures. To ask each community to do this amounts to a huge tax increase, because the same effort would have to be repeated many times across the country.
The reason we have a national EPA is because…
gregladen | February 2, 2017Congressional Republicans, voting party line, will end an important provision protecting streams and rivers from coal waste, and a requirement that oil companies report payments to Foreign Governments. The former is blatant hippie punching anti environmental evil. The latter is a fully expected out come if you elect a Russian puppet president, and appoint a Secretary of state whose main job will be to exploit Russian oil fields. So, if that happened, and this happened, then everything is falling nicely into place for the oligarchs, both American and otherwise.
The House has already voted…
gregladen | January 25, 2017This is a press release from the Natural Resources Committee Democrats, US House of Representatives concerning President Trump's decision and actions to push ahead with two highly controversial petroleum pipeline projects.
These projects had previously been stopped because they did not meet environmental standards, or because they violated tribal agreements. It is still quite possible that these reasons still matter, and that President Trump cant' simply wish the projects back into existence. Or maybe he can. It remains to be determined.
Here is the statement:
Washington, D.C. – Ranking…
gregladen | January 24, 2017The solar energy field now produces the larest share of jobs in US Power generation. There are 374,000 jobs i Solar right now, compared to fewer than 190,00 in coal, gas, and oil.
This corresponds to shifts in the amount of electricity produced by these various sources, as indicated in the Department of Energy graph shown above.
The biggest states for this job growth are California followed distantly by Massachusetts, Nevada, New York, New Jersey, Texas, Arizona, Florida, and North Carolina.
Given current trends inside the beltway, I expect the Department of Energy to make this report…
gregladen | January 24, 2017The science is clear: Human caused global warming is happening and is serious. Building and expanding infrastructure to make it easier to burn fossil fuels is a very bad idea. The Keystone XL pipeline and the Dakota Access pipeline were two such projects, and in recent years, the environmental community, politicians, and others managed to stop these projects.
Today, President Trump signed an executive order that brings these projects back to life and moves them forward.
From Rhea Suh, president of the National Resources Defense Council:
“It’s appalling that Trump wants to throw open our…
esiegel | January 22, 2017“I hope that in this year to come, you make mistakes. Because if you are making mistakes, then you are making new things, trying new things, learning, living, pushing yourself, changing yourself, changing your world. You're doing things you've never done before, and more importantly, you're doing something.” -Neil Gaiman
Here we are, at the end of a momentous week here at Starts With A Bang! The world is changing; the president of the world's most powerful nation has changed; but the quest to learn ever more about the Universe still continues unabated. There's so much coming down the pipeline…
esiegel | January 18, 2017"There are now dozens of hockey sticks and the all come to the same basic conclusion. The recent warming does appear to be unprecedented as far bas as we can go. But even if we didn't have that evidence, we would still know that humans are warming the planet, changing the climate and that represents a threat if we don't do something about it." -Michael Mann
The latest climate science results are out, and 2016 was the hottest year on record. Again. Breaking the previous record... from 2015. Which broke the previous record of 2014. In fact, of the 17 hottest years on record, 16 of them have…
gregladen | January 12, 2017The term "Evangelical" is a bit of a moving goal post. But, there is a strong association between Evangelical and getting climate science totally wrong in a way that is actually materially damaging to our planet and to future generations. So, it is not hard to be angry at Evangelicals because they are ruining it for everyone.
But, within the "Evangelical" movement, there are people who are trying to change that. I wish them luck. One person is Katharine Hayhoe, and here she is talking about that:
Another is my friend Paul Douglas, famous meteorologist. He wrote Caring for Creation: The…
esiegel | December 15, 2016"October extinguished itself in a rush of howling winds and driving rain and November arrived, cold as frozen iron, with hard frosts every morning and icy drafts that bit at exposed hands and faces." -J.K. Rowling
As cold as it gets outside over the coming months, particularly with the effect of a displaced polar vortex in play, there’s another factor that can make it feel even colder: the wind. Coupled with extremely cold temperatures, the Windchill factor can exacerbate this tremendously, stripping the heat from your body and putting you at risk of various cold-related traumas.
Collisions…
gregladen | December 12, 2016UPDATE: The Department of Energy has reportedly refused Donald Trump's request for names of DOE employees and contractors who have been engaged in climate change research. That does not mean that Tump will never get those names. Once he is President, he can get the names. But for now, he'll have to sit it out.
The Donald Trump transition team circulated an eight page questionnaire to the US Department of Energy. Such questionnaires are not normal. This particular questionnaire is deeply disturbing.
There are seventy-four questions. They provide insight into likely Trump administration…
jdupuis | December 2, 2016Somehow this post from News Biscuit seems even more relevant now than when it was intially published back in August. Of course, we all shudder to think who will be under that ghostly costume, orange hair, Alaska plaid, Brietbart ball cap and all.
Scooby Doo Team Expose Climate Change Tricksters
A two-man, two-woman, one-Great Dane team of young Americans has exposed the belief that the Earth is heading towards widespread famine and ecological disaster, as the work of a scheming fraudster. Team leader Fred explained that they were passing through Central London in their VW camper van when a…
milhayser | November 30, 2016The election of Donald Trump to the Presidency of the U.S. caught nearly everyone by surprise, and fingers were immediately pointed in all directions as the election's losers looked to lay blame. Chad Orzel offers one relevant narrative: "There are a lot of people who feel like they’re being screwed by a system run for the benefit of people in big cities on the coasts who sneer at them as ignorant, racist hicks." Ethan Siegel extends an olive branch on Starts With a Bang, saying "we all have our biases, even if we ourselves are scientists," and encourages EVERYONE to accept the responsibility…
esiegel | November 17, 2016"We only have one planet that serves as an example and in science it's not good to derive information from a sample size of one." -David Grinspoon
Although there will never be a shortage of doubters, the scientific evidence is overwhelming that humans have impacted the planet, particularly over the last few millennia, like no other species ever has. It’s not only the climate that’s changed, but the oceans, atmosphere, freshwater, land use and even the plants and animals that can survive and thrive in the environment. We might be averse to thinking of it as such, but we’re already conducting a…
jdupuis | November 11, 2016Update 2017.01.31: First post-inauguration chronology post is done, covering the first week of the Trump administration.
From the point of view of someone sitting North of the Canadian/US border, the results of this week's US Federal election are somewhat terrifying. And honestly and truly as a Canadian and a Torontonian, I say this without a bit of smugness. Been there, done that, if not quite on the same scale.
And by done that, I mean that I've often seen my mission to document important stories in the world. In the past, mostly Canadian or mostly in the library world and all basically…