EPA decides to regulate rocket fuel chemical
Just what the new space industry needs, more regulations! The EPA has decided it has the right to regulate perchlorate, a chemical used for rocket fuel as well as fireworks and other explosives.
Tag: environment
Half the Earth covered in snow
Snowball Earth! Or at least, half a snowball: NOAA satellite images show almost the entire northern hemisphere covered in snow.
White nose confirmed on Indiana bats
White nose syndrome, a fungus that is linked to the death of approximately a million bats throughout the eastern United States, has now been confirmed on two Indiana bats. You can read the actual Indiana Department of Natural Resources press release here. [pdf]
The bats are thus finally spreading the fungus north, as has been expected.
New research finds that the Himalayan glaciers are not melting
New research finds that the Himalayan glaciers are not melting. Key quote:
The new study by scientists at the Universities of California and Potsdam has found that half of the glaciers in the Karakoram range, in the northwestern Himlaya, are in fact advancing and that global warming is not the deciding factor in whether a glacier survives or melts.
The last part of the above quote, on global warming, is almost certainly an overstatement of what we do or don’t know. Warming will cause glaciers to melt, but how much and when are factors that are still not understood. Moreover, we are still not sure how much warming has even occurred.
Frogs across Australia and the US may be recovering from a fungal disease
Frogs across Australia and the US appear to be recovering from a fungal disease that had devastated populations.
Climate change study had ‘significant error’: experts
Climate scientists admit that a climate change study which claimed the Earth would warm by more than 4 degrees Fahrenheit in about a decade had “significant errors”. Key quote:
Scientist Scott Mandia forwarded to AFP an email he said he sent to Hisas ahead of publication explaining why her figures did not add up, and noting that it would take “quite a few decades” to reach a warming level of 2.4 degrees Celsius. “Even if we assume the higher end of the current warming rate, we should only be 0.2C warmer by 2020 than today,” Mandia wrote. “To get to +2.4C the current trend would have to immediately increase almost ten-fold.”
Confessions of a Greenpeace founder
The confessions of a Greenpeace founder. Key quote:
The truth is Greenpeace and I had divergent evolutions. I became a sensible environmentalist; Greenpeace became increasingly senseless as it adopted an agenda that is anti-science, anti-business, and downright anti-human.
Other quotes of interest:
The collapse of world communism and the fall of the Berlin Wall during the 1980s added to the trend toward extremism. The Cold War was over and the peace movement was largely disbanded. The peace movement had been mainly Western-based and anti-American in its leanings. Many of its members moved into the environmental movement, bringing with them their neo-Marxist, far-left agendas. To a considerable extent the environmental movement was hijacked by political and social activists who learned to use green language to cloak agendas that had more to do with anti-capitalism and anti-globalization than with science or ecology.
And:
There is no cause for alarm about climate change. The climate is always changing. Some of the proposed “solutions” would be far worse than any imaginable consequence of global warming, which will likely be mostly positive. Cooling is what we should fear.
2010 Sea Level: Largest drop ever recorded?
2010 sea level: The largest drop ever recorded? Key quote:
2006 was the first year to show a drop in the global sea level. 2010 will be the 2nd year to show a decrease in sea level. That is correct, 2 of the past 5 years are going to show a decrease in sea level. 2010 could likely show a significant drop global sea level. By significant I mean it is possible that it will likely drop between 2-3 mm from 2009.
All IPCC predictions insist that increased carbon dioxide will cause sea level rise. All these predictions are now wrong, as carbon dioxide is still increasing in the atmosphere but the sea level has actually been going down.
Penguin tracking bands do harm
The bands that scientists attach to penguins to track them actually do harm. The data also suggests that certain climate research might also be skewed because of this. Key quote:
Overall, the team found, bands were bad for penguins. Banded penguins had a 16% lower survival rate than unbanded birds over the 10 years, the researchers report online today in Nature. Banded birds also arrived later at the breeding grounds and took longer trips to forage for food. As a result, they produced 39% fewer chicks. . . . [The researcher noted] that his team’s results suggest that research using banded penguins may be biased. For example, he says, several high-profile studies have used banded penguins to investigate the impact of climate change on the birds. The findings of those studies aren’t necessarily wrong, but the numbers need to be reconsidered, he says.
Preliminary findings suggest that the Arkansas birds died from impact trauma
Preliminary findings from the USGS National Wildlife Health Center suggest that the mass bird die-off that occurred in Arkansas was from impact trauma. Key quote:
The State concluded that such trauma was probably a result of the birds being startled by loud noises on the night of Dec. 31, arousing them and causing them to fly into objects such as houses or trees. Scientists at the USGS NWHC performed necropsies—the animal version of an autopsy—on the birds and found internal hemorrhaging, while the pesticide tests they conducted were negative. Results from further laboratory tests are expected to be completed in 2-3 weeks.
Three to four Billion Barrels of Oil Assessed in North Dakota and Montana
Black gold! Three to four billion barrels of oil — 25 times more than previously predicted — are now thought to lie under certain geological formations in North Dakota and Montana.
A look at the U.S. government’s planned budget for climate research
The next time someone begins ranting about how the money from “big oil” is used to attack the science of global warming, tell them to take a look at this post, which outlines in detail the more than $2 billion that the U.S. government plans to spend on climate change research in 2011 alone (too much of which is unfortunately used by partisans like James Hansen to try to prove the Earth is warming).