Also: Japan’s Nuclear Exclusion Zone Shows Few Signs of Life

The temperature of Reactor #2 at Japan’s stricken Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant has soared overnight and remained mysteriously high Monday, despite more water being pumped through it.

On January 27th, the reactor’s internal temperature was 113º F, Monday the temperature soared to 164º F.  Japanese authorities require that the reactor temperature remain below 176º F.

* * *

Japan’s NHK TV reports:

The operator of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant says the temperature in the No.2 reactor remains high despite the injection of additional water.

A thermometer at the bottom of the reactor showed 73.3 degrees Celsius on Monday morning. It was around 45 degrees on January 27th and 71.7 degrees at 4 PM on Sunday.

Tokyo Electric Power Company began injecting 10.6 tons of water per hour from around 1:30 AM on Monday. That’s one ton more per hour than before.

Full Story Here: Temperature Soars Mysteriously Inside Fukushima Nuclear Reactor | Common Dreams.

In a scathing letter to the editor, thirty-eight of the world’s top climatologists have rebuked Rupert Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal for its publication of a “scientist” op-ed denying the threat of manmade global warming. The letter, authored by climate scientist Kevin Trenberth and colleagues from the world’s top science institutions, tells the Wall Street Journal editors to “Check With Climate Scientists for Views on Climate“:

You published “No Need to Panic About Global Warming” (op-ed, Jan. 27) on climate change by the climate-science equivalent of dentists practicing cardiology. While accomplished in their own fields, most of these authors have no expertise in climate science. The few authors who have such expertise are known to have extreme views that are out of step with nearly every other climate expert. This happens in nearly every field of science. For example, there is a retrovirus expert who does not accept that HIV causes AIDS. And it is instructive to recall that a few scientists continued to state that smoking did not cause cancer, long after that was settled science.

Full Story Here: Climate Scientists Rebuke Rupert Murdoch: WSJ Denier Op-Ed Like ‘Dentists Practicing Cardiology’ | ThinkProgress.

In response to an op-ed printed late last week in the Wall Street Journal, signed by sixteen ‘scientists’ and entitled, ‘No Need to Panic About Global Warming,’ thirty-nine climate scientists have penned a letter, printed in today’s WSJ, arguing that taking advice on climate change from scientists who have either “no expertise in climate science” or “extreme views that are out of step with nearly every other climate expert” is akin to allowing dentists perform heart surgery.

Suzanne Goldenberg reports for The Guardian:

The Wall Street Journal has received a dressing down from a large group of leading scientists for promoting retrograde and out-of-date views on climate change.

In an opinion piece run by the Journal on Wednesday, nearly 40 scientists, including acknowledged climate change experts, take on the paper for publishing an article disputing the evidence on global warming.

The offending article, No Need to Panic About Global Warming, which appeared last week, argued that climate change was a cunning ploy deployed by governments to raise taxes and by non-profit organisations to solicit donations to save the planet.

Full Story Here: Wall Street Journal Slammed for Giving Platform to Climate Change Deniers | Common Dreams.

For decades Monsanto used Snow Creek, a small local waterway that flowed past its plant, to dispose of PCBs. The company claims that they just didn’t know any better – that as soon as they became aware that PCBs were a human and environmental health problem, they took steps to stop the dumping and to protect local residents and workers. But as documents that the company was forced to turn over during a series of lawsuits that began in the late 1990’s show, their claimed ignorance of the harmful impacts of PCBs is just another in a long, ongoing list of Monsanto’s endless lies.

As early as 1938 Monsanto knew from researchers that PCBs caused liver damage in rats. In the 50’s they started to tell their own workers to wear protective clothing and respirators when working around PCBs, while at the same time they continued to dump their poisons out into the West Anniston community. In 1966, Monsanto hired a Mississippi State University biologist to dunk fish into Snow Creek. The study found that “all 25 fish lost equilibrium and turned on their sides in 10 seconds and all were dead in 3 ½ minutes,” their skin broken and bleeding. The fact the Creek was lethal didn’t stop Monsanto. By 1969 the company was pouring 250 pounds of PCBs a day into the creek that feed into the area’s drinking water supply and which many local residents, including children, used for fishing, playing and recreating. That year, Monsanto researchers found fish in the local community fishing spot with PCB levels 7,500 times the legal limit. A company memo concluded, “there is little object in going to expensive extremes in limiting discharges.” Instead, Monsanto executives enlisted state officials to try and “handle the problem quietly without release of the information to the public.”

Full Story Here: Monsanto Returns to the Scene of the Crime | Food & Water Watch.

“The science is now clear, bees poisoned by neonicotinoid pesticides are much more likely to die from disease, gather less food and produce fewer new bees.”

Bayer-produced imidacloprid harmful to bees even at very low levels

A new study published in Naturwissenschaften – The Science of Nature by a leading bee expert provides damning evidence that a widely used pesticide, even at low levels, is responsible for the recent catastrophic decline in honey bees. Dr. Jeff Pettis of the USDA’s Bee Research Laboratory in Beltsville, MD led the study.

Colony collapse disorder, as this phenomenon is known, has been getting worse since 2006.

The news has brought renewed calls for these pesticides, which only became widely used in the 1990s, to be banned as honey bees are key to human’s survival – pollinating 70 per cent of the crops which produce most of the world’s food.

The pesticide that the study (pdf) looked at was imidacloprid, one of the most widely used pesticides worldwide. It is neonicotinoid insecticide produced by Bayer CropScience.

Full Story Here: More Damning Evidence Points to Pesticide as Cause of Mass Bee Deaths | Common Dreams.

OPS: is this really a surprise to anyone?!  Really?

“It’s Madison Avenue hell”

“Hydraulic fracturing” is more commonly known as “fracking.”

During this week’s State of the Union address, President Obama said:

“It was public research dollars, over the course of thirty years, that helped develop the technologies to extract all this natural gas out of shale rock, reminding us that Government support is critical in helping businesses get new energy ideas off the ground.”

But he never said the F-word, no doubt pleasing industry lobbyists.

Full Story Here: No Fracking Way! Industry Says Word ‘Frack’ Has Been Co-Opted | Common Dreams.

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.<br>

THIRTY-NINE YEARS AGO, CONGRESS SIGNED INTO LAW A HISTORIC PIECE OF LEGISLATION THAT WOULD, FOR MORE THAN THREE DECADES, TURN THE TIDE OF OUR POLLUTED WATERWAYS AND HOLD BIG POLLUTERS ACCOUNTABLE FOR THEIR ACTIONS.

When the Clean Water Act was enacted, the Cuyahoga River was so polluted that it literally caught fire, the majestic Hudson River’s fishery was gone and Lake Erie was declared all but dead. This bold legislation put forward by visionaries in Congress returned control of our nation’s waterways to the citizens of the United States as part of the public trust. However, today the concept of the public trust, the commons, is being quickly eroded by corporate polluters and their cronies in Congress who are determined to return to the era of using out nation’s waterways as open sewers, toxic dumps and landfills.

Despite the fact that the Clean Water Act has been responsible for providing millions of Americans with opportunities to swim, drink and fish in clean water, every branch of our federal government—the legislative, executive and judicial—have taken aim at the Act. The courts have worked to narrow the definition of “waters of the United States,” the Bush Administration used its power to narrow that definition even further, and Congress made efforts to chip away at the Act. Even the states have joined the party, cutting clean-water enforcement budgets every time they face a fiscal challenge. Now, however, our Congress is launching the most aggressive, nefarious attacks on our right to clean water in the nation’s history.

Full Story Here: Clean Water Safeguards Headed Down the Drain? « EcoWatch: Uniting the Voice of the Grassroots Environmental Movement.

America’s television meteorologists are the primary source of climate information for most Americans, and are second only to scientists — who have much less access to the general public — in the level of trust they are given. Yet more than half of TV weather reporters don’t believe in human-induced climate change, even as our poisoned weather grows more extreme.

Forecast the Facts, a new campaign of 350.org, the League of Conservation Voters, and the new Citizen Engagement Lab, aims to turn the tide. The first call to action challenges the American Meteorological Society to vote next week for a strong climate change statement that rejects science denial:

It’s a big problem: weather reporters reach millions of people every night, and right now they’re not telling their viewers the full story. We can change that. Meteorologists are meeting this month at the annual conference of the American Meteorological Society, where the AMS Council will vote on a new official statement on climate change. Denier meteorologists don’t want the statement to pass, and are doing everything they can to derail the process. We can’t let that happen.

Full Story Here: Forecast The Facts Exposes America’s Climate-Denier TV Weathermen | ThinkProgress.

Bill McKibben: “This is a victory for Americans who testified in record numbers”

The White House has rejected the proposal for the tar sands carrying Keystone XL pipeline today, news sources are reporting.

The Toronto Star reports:

U.S. President Barack Obama denied TransCanada Corp.’s application to build the pipeline, citing a “rushed and arbitrary deadline” imposed by Congress to review the project.

“This announcement is not a judgment on the merits of the pipeline, but the arbitrary nature of a deadline that prevented the State Department from gathering the information necessary to approve the project and protect the American people,” Obama said in a statement Wednesday afternoon.

350.org founder and Keystone XL protest leader Bill McKibben reacting to expected news of pipeline rejection stated:

Full Story Here: Obama Administration Rejects Keystone XL Pipeline | Common Dreams.

Study: Rising CO2 affecting brains, central nervous systems of sea fish

New research shows the disastrous consequences the world’s rising carbon dioxide levels are having on ocean life.

A team of researchers from the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies and James Cook University published their findings in the journal Nature Climate Change. They document how elevated CO2 is “driving fish crazy.”

The Australian Associated Press reports that the new research point to ocean problems beyond acidification.  From Professor Phillip Munday, one of the researchers:

Full Story Here: Goodbye, Fish: Rising CO2 Direct Threat to Sea Life | Common Dreams.

Prominent MIT researcher Kerry Emanuel has been receiving an unprecedented “frenzy of hate” after a video featuring an interview with him was published last week by Climate Desk.

Emails contained “veiled threats against my wife,” and other “tangible threats,” Emanuel, a highly regarded atmospheric scientist and director of MIT’s Atmospheres, Oceans and Climate program, said in an interview. “They were vile, these emails. They were the kind of emails nobody would like to receive.”

“What was a little bit new about it was dragging family members into it and feeling that my family might be under threat, so naturally I didn’t feel very good about that at all,” Emanuel said. “I thought it was low to drag somebody’s spouse into arguments like this.”

Full Story Here: MIT Climate Scientist’s Wife Threatened In A “Frenzy of Hate” | Mother Jones.

Fueled by billions of tons of greenhouse pollution, a surge of record warmth has flooded the United States, shattering records from southern California to North Dakota. “Temperatures have reached up to 40 degrees above early January averages in North Dakota,” the Weather Channel reports. Cities are seeing late-April temperatures at the start of January — Minot, ND hit 61 degrees, Aberdeen, SD hit 63 degrees, and Williston, ND hit 58 degrees, all-time record highs for the month of January.

Daily record highs have been set in Des Moines, Iowa (65 degrees), Rapid City, S.D. (73 degrees), International Falls, Minn. (46 degrees), St. Louis, Mo. (66 degrees) and Fargo, N.D. (55 degrees), to name a few locations. Although the record warmth subsides on Friday for the Plains, the mild air mass will bully its way eastward. We’re talking temperatures in cities such as Minneapolis, Milwaukee, Chicago, St. Louis, Indianapolis, Detroit and Cincinnati enjoying highs on the order of 10-to-20 degrees above average. High temperatures around 5-to-15 degrees above average will make it all the way to the East Coast including New York City, Washington, D.C. and Charlotte, N.C.

“There has never been a 60 degree temperature recorded during the first week of January in Minnesota’s modern climate record.” Southwestern Minnesota reached the lower 60s.

Full Story Here: Record Heat Floods America With Temperatures 40 Degrees Above Normal | ThinkProgress.

Dean Baker :-:

Deficit hawks try to scare us about the debt we’re leaving. That’s economic nonsense – unlike the costs of global warming

It is remarkable how efforts to reduce the government deficit/debt are often portrayed as a generational issue, while efforts to reduce global warming are almost never framed in this way. This contrast is striking because the issues involved in reducing the deficit or debt have little direct relevance to distribution between generations, whereas global warming is almost entirely a question of distribution between generations.

Seeing the debt as an issue between generations is wrong in almost every dimension. The idea that future generations will somehow be stuck with some huge tab in the form of the national debt suffers from the simple logical problem that we are all going to die. At some point, everyone who owns the debt being issued today, or over the next two decades, will be dead. They will have to pass the ownership of the debt to someone else – in other words, their children or grandchildren. This means that the debt is not money that our children and grandchildren will be paying to someone else. It is money that they will be paying to themselves.

There are certainly issues of intra-generational distribution. If Bill Gates’s grandkids own all the debt, then there will be a serious issue of income inequality 50 or 60 years out – but that is not an intra-generational issue

Full Story Here: Climate change – our real bequest to future generations | Dean Baker | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk.

Fish are the last wild food that most of us will eat.

A few days from now, a single bluefin tuna will make international headlines when it sells for an ungodly amount of money — perhaps more than $100,000 – at Tokyo’s Tsukiji market. And while the high price of the first bluefin of the year will be extraordinary, the rarity, and thus the prestige and high pricetag of bluefin in general, provides a clue to humans’ dietary history. Once upon a time, wild foods were a regular and beloved part of the American diet. Today, the American epicure might dine on foraged mushrooms and ramps, but for many of us, fish are the last wild food we eat. What happened? And what are we missing?

Georgia Pellegrini, a chef who has worked in elite restaurants in New York and France, decided to answer this question for herself when she set out to hunt her own food. As her new book’s title implies – Girl Hunter: Revolutionizing the Way We Eat, One Hunt at a Time – she entered into a masculine realm in which she was often the only woman. Pellegrini traveled across the United States and even England, hunting everything from squirrel to elk. As much as she stands out as a woman, she also stands out among the local and sustainable food movement. (An anthropologist recently pointed out that the local food movement “has been reticent to embrace hunting as an integral part of sustainable eating.”)

Full Story Here: We’ve Lost Nearly All of Our Wild Foods — What Happened? And What Are We Missing? | Food | AlterNet.

The headlines of 2011 were driven by global warming disasters and the popular uprising against the powers-that-be who have accumulated profit at the expense of the future of humanity. The United States faced the most billion-dollar climate disasters ever, with 14 distinct disasters costing at least $53 billion to the U.S. economy. Stymied by the election of the science-denying Tea Party Congress, the Obama administration failed to pass climate pollution or oil and coal safety legislation in response to the disasters of 2010. The administration fought back attacks on investment in renewable energy and stopped the rush to build the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline, spurred by mass protests.

Full Story Here: Poisoned Weather: Year 2011 In Photos | ThinkProgress.

The year 2011 brought the most billion-dollar climate disasters to the United States ever, piling history-making events on top of each other to catastrophic results. The litany of disaster included a scorching drought that rivaled the Dust Bowl summer of 1936, a tornado season twice as bad as the great 1974 tornado outbreak, and flooding worse than the the great 1927 flood on the Mississippi River. This year of disaster was the result of the unlimited burning of fossil fuels, which has trapped increasing amounts of heat in the atmosphere, disrupting our climate system.

In an interview with PBS News Hour, Weather Underground’s Jeff Masters described the effect of the hundreds of billions of tons of global warming pollution as being like “steroids for the atmosphere,” intensifying extreme weather to unprecedented results:

We look at heat waves, droughts, and flooding events. They all tend to get increased when you have this extra energy in the atmosphere. I call it being on steroids for the atmosphere. Normally, you have the everyday ups and downs of the weather, but if you pack a little bit of extra punch in there, it’s like a baseball hitter who’s on steroids. You expect to see a big home run total maybe from this slugger, but if you add a little bit of extra oomph to his swing by putting him on steroids, now we can have an unprecedented season, a 70 home run season. And that’s the way I look at this year. We had an unprecedented weather year that I don’t think would have happened unless we had had an extra bit of energy in the atmosphere due to climate change and global warming.

Watch the program:

Full Story Here: Our Weather On Steroids: The Mind-Boggling Climate Disasters Of 2011 | ThinkProgress.

Today marks one week to go before the holiday frenzy kicks into its highest gear. By next Friday, people will be so focused on holiday logistics that many consumers wouldn’t notice if the FDA green lighted AquaBounty Technology’s Genetically Engineered (GE) salmon, a scientific experiment they’ve been reviewing for close to two decades.

Although that will make for a nervous week around here, we are heartened by this past week’s latest round of criticism for GE salmon, as scientists lined up in the halls of Congress and on a National Public Radio debate to discredit a dodgy environmental risk-assessment of GE salmon. With so many concerns raised about its environmental impact, and given the FDA’s history of making controversial announcements right before a holiday, could this be the year the agency approves GE salmon?

When the FDA announced16 months ago that GE salmon was safe, many of us worried that regulatory approval was imminent. But in the intervening months, the agency has suffered slings and arrows from scientists and legislators alike, unhappy with the agency’s inadequate risk assessment of GE salmon, which, if approved, would be the first genetically engineered animal to enter the U.S. food supply.

Full Story Here: Will a Bad Week for AquaBounty and the FDA be Enough to Keep GE Salmon Off Our Plates? | Food & Water Watch.

If Santa is ever in need of some replacement reindeer, he will have considerably less to choose from than he would have 10 years ago.

The world’s largest reindeer population has plummeted up to 92 percent in the last few decades. Once standing at 900,000, the George River herd now stands at 74,000, according to Survival International.

Important to the Innu and Cree people of Quebec and Labrador in eastern Canada, iron-ore mining, hydro-power flooding and road building are reportedly to blame for the depleting numbers of reindeer.

Full Story Here: Georgia River Reindeer Population Dramatically Dropping (PHOTOS).

A Shell deepwater drilling site off the Nigerian coast that the company reported leaking on Wednesday may have spilled up to 2.4 million gallons, according to nonprofit environmental satellite monitoring group SkyTruth.

If so, that’s far worse than indicated in statements made so far by Royal Dutch Shell, which has put the amount of oil leaked at the Bonga offshore site at “less than 40,000 barrels,” (1.7 million gallons).

“That could mean anything from 1 gallon to 1.7 million gallons,” John Amos, founder and president of satellite-imaging nonprofit SkyTruth told TPM.

Full Story Here: Satellite Imagery Indicates Shell Spill May Be Worse Than Reported | TPM Idea Lab.

With this new and arbitrary deadline, the punditocracy is relitigating the question of whether it should be built. The DC political elite assumed that the pipeline was an inevitability, dismissive or ignorant of the popular opposition to a risky, foreign tar sands pipeline cutting across the center of the nation. Most were blindsided when the State Department announced it needed to review its obviously flawed assessment of the project, and when the state of Nebraska held an emergency legislative session against the pipeline.

Full Story Here: The Fight Over Keystone XL Now Has A 60-Day Deadline | ThinkProgress.

Fukushima Prefecture — As bitter winds blow around cesium and other radioactive particles spewed from the nearby Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant’s reactors, Naoto Matsumura lights a cigarette, which he considers relatively good for his health.

“I would get sick if I stopped smoking; I have a lot to worry about,” says Matsumura, 52, who reckons he is the only person still living within a 20-km radius of the world’s worst atomic disaster since Chernobyl.

According to reports from Japan’s Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency published in August, following the Great East Japan Earthquake on March 11, and subsequent explosions at three reactors about 13 km from Matsumura’s door, the plant operated by Tokyo Electric Power Co. (Tepco) has released 168 times more radiation than the atomic bombs that razed Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945.

Full Story Here: Lone holdout’s first nuclear winter looms in Tohoku | The Japan Times Online.

The Environmental Protection Agency released far-reaching air pollution regulations Wednesday, 21 years after they were first mandated by Congress and six days after they were signed by the agency.

The rules require coal- and oil-fired power plants to lower emissions of 84 different toxic chemicals to levels no higher than those emitted by the cleanest 12% of plants. Companies have three years to achieve the standards, and EPA has made clear a fourth year and perhaps even more time are also available to them.

“We’re delighted,” says Janice Nolen of the American Lung Association. “After waiting 21 years, it looks like we may actually have a rule that will help to save 11,000 lives a year and reduce exposure all across the country to a bunch of really toxic substances.”

“It’s hard to overstate the significance of this rule,” says John Walke of the Natural Resources Defense Council, an environmental group. “This is a generational achievement that marks America cleaning up dirty power plants once and for all.”

Full Story Here: New EPA rules target mercury, gas pollution – USATODAY.com.

Agreements to bail out banks happen in days – but despite some good progress at Durban, we still don’t have a legally binding deal to bail out the planet

They bailed out the banks in days. But even deciding to bail out the planet is taking decades.

Nicholas Stern estimated that capping climate change would cost around 1% of global GDP, while sitting back and letting it hit us would cost between 5 and 20%. One per cent of GDP is, at the moment, $630bn. By March 2009, Bloomberg has revealed, the US Federal Reserve had committed $7.77 trillion to the banks. That is just one government’s contribution: yet it amounts to 12 times the annual global climate change bill. Add the bailouts in other countries, and it rises several more times.

This support was issued on demand: as soon as the banks said they wanted help, they got it. On just one day the Federal Reserve made $1.2tr available – more than the world has committed to tackling climate change in 20 years.

Full Story Here: Why is it so easy to save the banks – but so hard to save the biosphere? | George Monbiot | Environment | guardian.co.uk.

Yesterday President Obama introduced a rule that would finally extend federal minimum wage and overtime protections to two million workers who provide home-based care to the elderly and people with disabilities. For 37 years a loophole that puts home health care workers in the same “companion” category as babysitters has prevented those workers from receiving these key labor rights.

The administration’s action rectifies a longstanding injustice by simply ensuring home care workers are covered by the same protections other workers get under the Fair Labor Standards Act. But Congressional Republicans and their corporate allies are speaking out against the move:

Full Story Here: Congressional Republicans Fight Minimum Wage Protections For Exploited Health Care Workers | ThinkProgress.

On one hand, we have shale gas companies who have been rushing into various regions of the country to extract gas using a dangerous extraction process that involves toxic chemicals potentially contaminating our drinking water. On the other hand, we also have investor-owned water utilities (IOU’s) who are taking a public resource out of the hands of the public and profiting greatly from it. What happens when you put them both together? The results are revealed in the latest Food & Water Watch Report, Why the Water Industry is Promoting Shale Gas Development and they could involve the over-generalization of water quality tests, increased water rates and big profits… for the investors.

Full Story Here: Are Privatized Water Utilities in Cahoots With Shale Gas Companies? | Common Dreams.

High exposure to radiation possible before officials acted

Some residents near the Fukushima No. 1 plant might have been exposed to up to 19 millisieverts of radiation during the first four months of the nuclear crisis, the Fukushima Prefectural Government said Tuesday.

This indicates residents subject to the greatest exposure may have been outside the immediate evacuation area, in locations where radioactive hot spots were later revealed and prompted belated evacuation advisories long after the crisis started March 11.

The radiation estimates are based on atmospheric and other external readings and forecasts and do not include food, water and other means of exposure.

Full Story Here: Fukushima Evacuations Too Late Outside No-Go Zone | Common Dreams.

A new global climate deal has been struck after being brought back from the brink of disaster by three powerful women politicians in a 20-minute “huddle to save the planet”.

A major crisis had been provoked after 3am on Sunday morning when the EU clashed furiously with China and India over the legal form of a potential new treaty. The EU plan to bind all countries to cuts was close to collapse after India inserted the words “legal outcome” at the last minute into the negotiating text.

EU climate commissioner Connie Hedegaard, backed by UK energy secretary Chris Huhne, said it would have made the EU plan legally meaningless and would have forced the EU to walk away, effectively collapsing the negotiations.

Full Story Here: Durban climate deal struck after tense all-night session | Environment | guardian.co.uk.

What it means, in climate terms, is that we’ve all but lost the battle to reduce the damage from global warming. The planet has already warmed about a degree Celsius; it’s clearly going to go well past two degrees. It means, in political terms, that the fossil fuel industry has delayed effective action for the 12 years since the Kyoto treaty was signed. It means, in diplomatic terms, that the endless talks underway in Durban should be more important than ever–they should be the focus of a planetary population desperate to figure out how it’s going to survive the century.

But instead, almost no one is paying attention to the proceedings, at least on this continent. One of our political parties has decided that global warming is a hoax–it’s two leading candidates are busily apologizing for anything they said in the past that might possibly have been construed as backing, you know, science. President Obama hasn’t yet spoken on the Durban talks, and informed international observers like Joss Garman are beginning to despair that he ever will.

Full Story Here: The Most Important News Story of the Day/Millennium | Common Dreams.

Current pledges for curbing carbon emissions will doom the world to global warming of 3.5 C, massively overshooting the UN target of 2 C, researchers reported at the climate talks here on Tuesday.

Output of heat-trapping carbon gases is rising so fast that governments have only four years left to avert a massive extra bill for meeting the two degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) target, they said.

“The current pledges are heading towards a global emissions pathway that will take warming to 3.5 C goal (6.3 F),” according to an estimate issued by a consortium of German researchers.

The world is on a “high-warming, high-cost, high-risk pathway,” they said.

Full Story Here: World ‘Heading for 3.5 C Warming’: Study | Common Dreams.

Nearly nine months after Fukushima Daiichi was ravaged by an earthquake and tsunami, the plant continues to pose a major environmental threat. Before the latest leak, the Fukushima accident had been responsible for the largest single release of radioactivity into the ocean, threatening wildlife and fisheries in the region, experts have said.

The new radioactive water leak called into question the progress that the plant’s operator, Tokyo Electric Power Company, appeared to have made in bringing its reactors under control. The company, known as Tepco, has said that it hopes to bring the plant to a stable state known as a cold shutdown by the end of the year.

Full Story Here: More Radioactive Leaks From Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Plant – NYTimes.com.

Emissions rose 5.9 percent in 2010, according to an analysis released Sunday by the Global Carbon Project, an international collaboration of scientists tracking the numbers. Scientists with the group said the increase, a half-billion extra tons of carbon pumped into the air, was almost certainly the largest absolute jump in any year since the Industrial Revolution, and the largest percentage increase since 2003.

The increase solidified a trend of ever-rising emissions that scientists fear will make it difficult, if not impossible, to forestall severe climate change in coming decades.

The researchers said the high growth rate reflected a bounce-back from the 1.4 percent drop in emissions in 2009, the year the recession had its biggest impact.

Full Story Here: 2010 Carbon Dioxide Output Shows Biggest Jump Ever – NYTimes.com.

During the peak of Ukraine’s Chernobyl cataclysm of 1986, the Black Sea was registering 1,000 becquerels per cubic metre of water; this appears miniscule in comparison to nuclear levels at Fukushima’s peak recorded at 100,000 becquerels.

Scientists first believed the ocean would dilute the radioactivity, but Al Jazeera has learned that dangerous concentrations of radioactive caesium remain.

Al Jazeera’s Steve Chao reports from Fukushima, Japan.

Full Story Here: Fukushima disaster’s marine fallout.flv – YouTube.

Law Would Force Presidential Decision on Controversial, Destructive Pipeline in 60 Days

WASHINGTON – December 2 – The House Subcommittee on Energy and Power held a hearing today on legislation called the “North American Energy Security Act,” which would require President Barack Obama to issue a permit on the controversial Keystone XL Pipeline within 60 days of the law’s enactment or determine the pipeline is not in the national interest. The legislation comes on the heels of a decision by the State Department to delay the pipeline’s approval to allow for more study of its environmental impacts on our land, air, water and climate.

“Once again congressional Republicans are paying more attention to their deep-pocketed campaign contributors in oil and gas than to the American public, which overwhelmingly opposes more tar-sands development, including the Keystone pipeline,” said Noah Greenwald, endangered species director at the Center for Biological Diversity. “If it passes, this law will end careful consideration of the devastating impacts of Keystone, doing terrible damag

Full Story Here: Lawmakers Push Disastrous Legislation on Keystone XL | Common Dreams.

High winds and the beginning stages of snowfall prompted the Chicago Police Department to shut down the lakefront bike path from Olive Park to Fullerton Tuesday morning, as gusts brought waves from Lake Michigan dangerously high and close to shore, Fox Chicago reports. A wind advisory is in place until 9 p.m. Tuesday, and gusts are reportedly moving at up to 50 miles per hour.

Cook County officials believe this foreshadows dangerously severe winter weather this season and have advised the Department of Homeland Security to prepare accordingly.

Full Story Here: Cook County Homeland Security Gears Up For Brutal Weather This Season (VIDEO).

The recent loss of sea ice in the Arctic is greater than any natural variation in the past 1½ millennia, a Canadian study shows.

“The recent sea ice decline … appears to be unprecedented,” said Christian Zdanowicz, a glaciologist at Natural Resources Canada, who co-led the study and is a co-author of the paper published Wednesday online in Nature.

“We kind of have to conclude that there’s a strong chance that there’s a human influence embedded in that signal.”

Full Story Here: Arctic Sea Ice Shrinking at ‘Unprecedented’ Levels | Common Dreams.

The Texas town of Groesbeck is on the verge of running dry.

“We have about two weeks of water left,” Groesbeck Mayor Jackie Levingston said. Her central Texas town, population 4,300, is one of the latest victim’s of the state’s ongoing drought.

A lack of rain and the summer’s intense heat — more than 90 days of triple-digit temperatures — combined to dry out the Groesbeck water supply.

“We lost more water to evaporation than we were using this summer,” Levingston said in a telephone interview.

Full Story Here: Texas town still suffers effects of heat, drought; water supply down to two weeks – CNN.com.

Even if the worst nuclear accident in 25 years leads to many people developing cancer, we may never find out.

Looking back on those early days of radiation horror, that may sound implausible.

But the ordinary rate of cancer is so high, and our understanding of the effects of radiation exposure so limited, that any increase in cases from the Fukushima nuclear plant disaster may be undetectable.

Several experts inside and outside Japan told The Associated Press that cancers caused by the radiation may be too few to show up in large population studies, like the long-term survey just getting under way in Fukushima.

Full Story Here: Fukushima Plant Disaster Long Term Effects Still Unknown.

Simulation determines much of east, northeast likely contaminated

Radioactive cesium from the crippled Fukushima No. 1 nuclear plant probably reached as far as Hokkaido, Shikoku and the Chugoku region in the west, according to a recent simulation by an international research team based on data after March 20, a week after the hydrogen explosions.

Large areas of eastern and northeastern Japan were probably contaminated, with concentrations of cesium-137 exceeding 1,000 becquerels per kilogram of soil in some places, says the study, which was posted Monday on the website of the National Academy of Sciences.

Researchers for the U.S.-based organization said the study, based on the partial data readings, is the first to estimate potential cesium contamination across the country. But the scientists also played down the impact of the fallout on the three distant regions.

Full Story Here: Cesium fallout widespread | The Japan Times Online.

Last Friday the Institute of Nuclear Power Operations (INPO) released a detailed timeline of events at Fukushima in the days following the March 11 earthquake and tsunami, titled “Special Report on the Nuclear Accident at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station.”

The report doesn’t seem to break much new ground, but is a nice summary of what is known about those initial days.

INPO is a not-for-profit organization set up by the nuclear industry following recommendations of the Kemeny Commission that investigated the March 1979 Three Mile Island accident.

Full Story Here: All Things Nuclear.

Researchers say tropical regions of richest diversity are most at risk of losing frogs, toads, newts and salamanders

If the current rapid extermination of animals, plants and other species really is the “sixth mass extinction”, then it is the amphibian branch of the tree of life that is undergoing the most drastic pruning.

In research described as “terrifying” by an independent expert, scientists predict the future for frogs, toads, newts and salamanders is even more bleak than conservationists had realised.

Around half of amphibian species are in decline, while a third are already threatened with extinction. But scientists now predict that areas with the highest diversity of amphibian species will be under the most intense threat in the future.

Full Story Here: Amphibians facing ‘terrifying’ rate of extinction | Environment | The Guardian.

KAMPALA – An increase in heat waves is almost certain, while heavier rainfall, more floods, stronger cyclones, landslides and more intense droughts are likely across the globe this century as the Earth’s climate warms, U.N. scientists said on Friday.

The U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) urged countries to come up with disaster management plans to adapt to the growing risk of extreme weather events linked to human-induced climate change, in a report released in Uganda on Friday.

The report gives differing probabilities for extreme weather events based on future greenhouse gas emissions scenarios, but the thrust is that extreme weather is likely to increase.

“It is virtually certain that increases in the frequency and magnitude of warm daily temperature extremes … will occur in the 21st century on the global scale,” the IPCC report said.

Full Story Here: Extreme Weather Set to Worsen With Climate Change: IPCC | Common Dreams.

One fillet of fish a month. That’s about how much seafood a Washington State resident eats, according to the assumptions used to set cleanliness standards for the state’s abundant rivers, streams, lakes and coastal waters. But many experts say that estimate, which influences the safety of the state’s salmon, clams and other edible aquatic life, doesn’t jive with reality.

“It’s a gross underestimate,” says Catherine O’Neill, a law school professor and faculty fellow at the Center for Indian Law and Policy at Seattle University. She said the one-fillet-a-month metric is too low for the general population, and an even worse estimate for the large number of Asian Americans and native tribes in the Pacific Northwest, for whom seafood plays a central dietary role.

“People are recommended to eat more fish than that, irrespective of culture,” O’Neill tells The Huffington Post. The American Health Association advises eating the omega-3-rich food at least twice a week.

‘TEETHING ON SALMON JERKY’

Full Story Here: Water Pollution Regulations Underestimate Fish Consumption, Endangering Public Health.

Federal officials, responding this week to a year-old Freedom of Information Act request filed by environmental activists seeking to shine a light on the State Department’s review of the proposed Keystone XL oil pipeline, withheld or redacted portions of emails, meeting notes, agendas and other items, according to copies of the materials provided to reporters. The environmental group Friends of the Earth filed the information request in December of last year, and two earlier batches of documents were delivered without significant redactions in September and October.

The activists also say that unredacted emails in the latest document release provide further evidence supporting their claim that the State Department has been unduly influenced by representatives of TransCanada, the Calgary-based company behind the pipeline proposal. The State Department has vigorously denied those charges.

The redactions in question primarily involve emails and notes relating to meetings held by State Department staff in January and May of this year. In some cases, agenda items for the meetings have been blanked out. In others, the subject lines, the names of file attachments, or substantial passages in the body of emails are obscured.

Full Story Here: Keystone XL: Activists Ask What State Department Is Hiding.

• Climate change particularly sensitive during presidential race
• BBC says Attenborough features heavily on final episode, and he is not famous outside UK
• Environment groups brand decision ‘unhelpful’

An episode of the BBC’s Frozen Planet documentary series that looks at climate change has been scrapped in the U.S., where many are hostile to the idea of global warming.

British viewers will see all seven episodes of the multi-million-pound nature series throughout the Autumn.

But U.S. audiences will not be shown the last episode, which looks at the threat posed by man to the natural world.

It is feared a show that preaches global warming could upset viewers in the U.S., where around half of people do not believe in climate change.

Full Story Here: Frozen Planet Climate change episode won’t be shown in US | Mail Online.

OPS; Good gawd. Now the Brrits have given up on us, and ignorance trumps.

Full Story Here: Koch-Funded Scientist Who Believes In Global Warming Is Coming To Congress | ThinkProgress.

Yet tuna still aren’t fished sustainably, something that conservationists and big U.S. tuna companies are trying to fix. This illustrates one part of the pressure on the world’s oceans to feed a growing global population, now 7 billion. It also underscores the difficulties people have in balancing what they take against what must be left in order to have enough supplies of healthy wild fish.

“It’s serious. On a global basis, we’ve pretty much found all the fish we’re going to find,” said Mike Hirshfield, chief scientist at the advocacy group Oceana. “There’s not a lot of hidden fish out there. And we’re still heading in the wrong direction, taken as a whole.”

Full Story Here: Can the Oceans Continue to Feed Us? | Truthout.

The ongoing radiation catastrophe stemming from three out-of-control nuclear reactors in Fukushima, Japan, has taken a back seat to far graver news events of late: Michael Jackson’s doctor, fund-raising by presidential hopefuls, the World Series and Netflix stock.

Meanwhile, reporting about the on-going disaster relentlessly repeats the minimization and trivialization of radiation risk that began March 11, with the largest earthquake in Japanese history and the unprecedented tsunami that left over 26,000 people dead or missing and 80,000 still living in shelters.

Radioactive contamination of soil, tap water, rain water, groundwater, beef, fish, vegetables, animal feed and incinerator ash are almost always said to be of little or “no immediate” danger, which helps explain why Fukushima has faded from public consciousness.

Full Story Here: Radiation Reporting: Blind, Idiotic, Corrupt – or All Three | Truthout.

Those pipelines, which now carry slightly more than 1 million barrels a day from Canada’s oil sands to the United States, can be expanded by adding pumping stations. Some companies, notably Enbridge, already have plans to boost the capacity of their lines and speed the journey of crude from Alberta to Texas.

“It’s inevitable that it will get here. This oil will have to find a market,” said Fadel Gheit, oil analyst with Oppenheimer & Co. “All these competing pipelines are going to rethink their strategy.”

Full Story Here: Keystone delay unlikely to stall big oil companies – The Washington Post.

Dilma Rousseff said in a statement that she wants a “rigorous investigation” to determine responsibility for the spill near the well being drilled by Chevron’s Brazilian subsidiary.

The statement says the Mines and Energy Ministry and the National Petroleum Agency will conduct the probe.

The oil spill was detected on Thursday.

In a statement emailed Saturday, the oil company said it was “responding to oil seeps and a subsequent sheen in the vicinity of the Chevron operated Frade project in water depths of approximately 3,800 feet (1,200 metres).” Frade is located 230 miles (370 kilometres) off the northeast coast of Rio de Janeiro state.

Full Story Here: Brazil investigates Chevron oil spill off Rio de Janeiro coast.

WASHINGTON— The Obama administration announced plans today to expand offshore oil drilling in the Gulf of Mexico and offer additional lease sales in the sensitive waters off Alaska. Ramping up offshore drilling raises the risk of disastrous spills, puts wildlife in harm’s way and deepens U.S. dependence on the fossil fuels driving the global climate crisis.

“Last year’s disaster in the Gulf of Mexico was supposed to be a wake-up call about the dangers of offshore drilling, but it looks like President Obama hit the snooze button and slept right through it,” said Miyoko Sakashita, oceans director at the Center for Biological Diversity. “We just can’t keep expanding offshore drilling and not expect to have more disastrous spills.”

The five-year plan announced today will set the stage for 15 lease sales in six offshore areas, including the Arctic’s Beaufort and Chukchi seas and portions of the Gulf of Mexico near areas where development has so far been off-limits.

Full Story Here: Obama’s Offshore Oil Plan a Disaster for Wildlife, Climate | Common Dreams.

A tally of lost lives and health care expenditures arising from just six recent weather-related or epidemiological events suggests that the economic toll of future climate change is likely to be even more staggering than previously thought, according to a study published Monday in the journal Health Affairs.

The analysis, conducted by a team of researchers from the Natural Resources Defense Council, the University of California, Berkeley, and the University of California, San Francisco, represents one of the most ambitious attempts to establish a uniform method for putting a price tag on the health impacts of climate change. Most previous estimates have only looked at costs associated with property losses, damage to infrastructure and other resource forfeitures.

“This is a problem with a human face,” said Kim Knowlton, a senior scientist in the Health and Environment Program at the Natural Resources Defense Council and the lead author of the study. “Our prior notions about climate change damage without these costs included have been vastly underestimated.”

Full Story Here: Climate Change’s Health Costs Projected To Be Enormous.

Thousands of demonstrators, including movie stars and a Nobel laureate, surrounded the White House on Sunday to protest a proposed Canadian pipeline that’s serving as a flashpoint for the U.S. environmental movement while resonating with Americans fed up with corporate interests.

The demonstration is the latest in a series of White House protests aimed at convincing U.S. President Barack Obama to thwart Calgary-based TransCanada’s attempts to build the Keystone XL pipeline that would carry Alberta oilsands crude through six American states to Gulf Coast refineries.

Mark Ruffalo, nominated for an Academy Award last year, and Jody Williams, winner of the 1997 Nobel Peace Prize for her work on banning landmines, were among a sea of protesters who marched along several downtown blocks, including past the U.S. Treasury building, before joining hands in a mammoth circle around the White House.

Police on the scene estimated the crowd at about 5,000-strong while organizers claimed as many as 12,000 people were on hand at the peak of the protest.

Full Story Here: Thousands surround the White House to protest TransCanada pipeline – Winnipeg Free Press.

China led the way with a spike of 212 million metric tons of carbon in 2010 over 2009, compared to 59 million metric tons more from the United States and 48 million metric tons more from India in the same period.

“It’s big,” Tom Boden, director of the Carbon Dioxide Information Analysis Center Environmental Sciences Division at the DOE’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, told AFP in an interview.

Full Story Here: Biggest spike ever in global warming gases: U.S. | The Raw Story.

Full Story Here: Microsoft Funds Koch’s Climate-Denying Tea Party Conference | ThinkProgress.

It is “highly probable” that shale gas test drilling triggered earth tremors in Lancashire, a study has found.

But the report, commissioned by energy firm Cuadrilla, also said the quakes were due to an “unusual combination of geology at the well site”.

It said conditions which caused the minor earthquakes were “unlikely to occur again”.

Protesters against fracking, a gas extraction method, said the report “did not inspire confidence”.

Six protesters from campaign group Frack Off climbed a drilling rig at one of Cuadrilla’s test drilling sites in Hesketh Bank, near Southport, ahead of the report.

Full Story Here: ‘Highly Probable’ Fracking Tests Caused Earthquakes in UK Drill Site | Common Dreams.

The Nebraska legislature, at the urging of the state’s governor, opened a special session Tuesday during which lawmakers were expected to begin introducing myriad bills designed to tweak Nebraska’s pipeline siting and safety authority. For many lawmakers, the overarching goal is to force TransCanada to seek a different route for the pipeline, which as currently conceived would cut through a sensitive region known as the Sand Hills — part of the larger, multi-state Ogallala aquifer.

In a statement late Monday, TransCanada suggested that any law passed during the special session that affects the Keystone XL project would “constitute unconstitutional discrimination against interstate commerce.” Speaking on Tuesday, company spokesman Shawn Howard clarified that TransCanada was not suggesting that Nebraska had no right to govern pipelines that run within its borders, but that it was too late to do so with this project.

Full Story Here: TransCanada To Nebraska: Altering Keystone XL Pipeline Route Would Be Unconstitutional.

The bluff, located just south of the We Energies Oak Creek power plant, collapsed to the lake around 11:18 a.m.

We Energies spokesman Brian Manthey said that all employees who reported to work Monday morning were accounted for, and that there are no injuries in the incident.

“We’ve checked and double-checked,” Manthey said.

Full Story Here: Bluff Collapses At Oak Creek Power Station – Milwaukee News Story – WISN Milwaukee.

Yet, virtually alone, the Center for Biological Diversity is breaking the taboo by directly tying population growth to environmental problems through efforts like giving away condoms in colorful packages depicting endangered animals. The idea is to start a debate about how overpopulation crowds out species and hastens climate change — just when the world is welcoming Baby No.7 Billion.

“Wrap with care, save the polar bear,” reads one of the packages. “Wear a condom now, save the spotted owl,” says another.

Full Story Here: Environmental Group Breaks the Silence on Population Control – NYTimes.com.

A prominent physicist and skeptic of global warming spent two years trying to find out if mainstream climate scientists were wrong. In the end, he determined they were right: Temperatures really are rising rapidly.

The study of the world’s surface temperatures by Richard Muller was partially bankrolled by a foundation connected to global warming deniers. He pursued long-held skeptic theories in analyzing the data. He was spurred to action because of “Climategate,” a British scandal involving hacked emails of scientists.

Yet he found that the land is 1.6 degrees warmer than in the 1950s. Those numbers from Muller, who works at the University of California, Berkeley and Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, match those by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and NASA.

Full Story Here: Richard Muller, Global Warming Skeptic, Now Agrees Climate Change Is Real.

Almost 1000 acres of maize found to have been ground with genetically modified seeds have been destroyed throughout Hungary, deputy state secretary of the Ministry of Rural Development Lajos Bognar said. The GMO maize has been ploughed under, said Lajos Bognar, but pollen has not spread from the maize, he added.

Unlike several EU members, GMO seeds are banned in Hungary. The checks will continue despite the fact that seek traders are obliged to make sure that their products are GMO free, Bognar said.

Full Story Here: Hungary Destroys All Monsanto GMO Corn Fields | Natural Society.

With a helping hand from that invaluable website Environmental Health News, here’s a little ladleful of examples from the chemical soup that could be not just your air, soil, or water, but you. It’s only a few days’ worth of news reports on what’s in our environment and so, for better or mostly worse, in us: In Dallas-Ft. Worth, there’s lead in the blood of children, thanks to leaded gasoline, banned decades ago, but still in the soil. In New York’s Hudson River, “one of the largest toxic cleanups in U.S. history” (for PCBs in river sediments) is ongoing. Researchers now suspect that those chemicals, already linked to low birth weight, thyroid disease, and learning, memory, and immune system disorders,” are also associated with to high blood pressure. Then there’s mercury, that “potent neurotoxin that is especially dangerous to the developing brains of fetuses and children.” If allowed, it will enter the environment via a proposed open-pit gold and copper mine to be built in Alaska near “one of the world’s premier salmon fisheries.”

Full Story Here: Kneecapping the Environment | Common Dreams.

“I think there’s big money in to be made in how to address the water resources needs for our country, particularly when we are going to have population growth, development, the decay of existing infrastructure and climate change.”

Hearing a top government official in charge of protecting one of our most essential shared resources laud a scheme that has been linked to the degradation of municipal water supplies definitely makes us wonder where our government is placing its priorities. Across the U.S., privatization has been linked to deteriorating water quality, rate hikes, job force reductions and poor customer service.

Full Story Here: Is the EPA Selling Out Your Water? | Food & Water Watch.

Up to 20 million tons of tsunami debris floating from Japan could arrive on Hawaii’s shores by early 2013, before reaching the West Coast, according to estimates by University of Hawaii scientists.

A Russian training ship spotted the junk – including a refrigerator, a television set and other appliances – in an area of the Pacific Ocean where the scientists from the university’s International Pacific Research Center predicted it would be. The biggest proof that the debris is from the Japanese tsunami is a fishing boat that’s been traced to the Fukushima Prefecture, the area hardest hit by the March 11 disaster.

Jan Hafner, a scientific computer programmer, told The Associated Press on Tuesday that researchers’ projections show the debris would reach the coasts of Oregon, Washington, Alaska and Canada around 2014.

Full Story Here: Japan Tsunami Debris Floating Toward Hawaii.

The scientist, Brian Baptie, seismic project team leader with the British Geological Survey, said data from the two quakes near Blackpool — one of magnitude 2.3 on April 1, the other of magnitude 1.5 on May 27 — suggested the temblors arose from the same source. Cuadrilla Resources, a British energy company, was conducting hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, operations at a well nearby when the quakes occurred.

In fracking, water, sand and chemicals are injected into a well at high pressure to split shale rock and release trapped gas.

Full Story Here: Expert Says Quakes in England May Be Tied to Gas Extraction – NYTimes.com.

The United States, the world’s top exporter of electronic waste, is among nations that have not ratified the original convention

More than 170 countries have agreed to accelerate adoption of a global ban on the export of hazardous wastes, including old electronics, to developing countries.

The environmental group Basel Action Network called Friday’s deal, which was brokered by Switzerland and Indonesia, a major breakthrough.

“I’m ecstatic,” said its executive director, Jim Puckett. “I’ve been working on this since 1989 and it really does look like the shackles are lifted and we’ll see this thing happen in my lifetime.”

The deal seeks to ensure that developing countries no longer become dumping groups for toxic waste including industrial chemicals, discarded computers and mobile phones and obsolete ships laden with asbestos, he said.

Full Story Here: Going Forward: Global Hazardous Waste Ban Advances | Common Dreams.

The Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature study, released on Thursday, analyzed data from fifteen different sources, some going back more than two centuries, to answer doubts raised by climate change skeptics in response to earlier studies.

Previous studies had been able to rule out certain sources of possible error, including the urban heat island effect and poor station quality, but they had been based on a limited number of data sources, and skeptics had continued to claim that the results might have been skewed as a result. The new study, which includes almost all available data, is intended to counter that claim.

Full Story Here: New study confirms reality of global warming | The Raw Story.

BP has won approval to resume drilling in the Gulf of Mexico, 18 months after a well blowout killed 11 workers and caused an environmental disaster

Regulators approved plans for drilling to depths of up to 6,000ft about 200 miles off the coast of New Orleans.

US officials said in a statement: “Our review of BP’s plan included verification of BP’s compliance with the heightened standards.”

The Gulf’s Kaskida oilfield could contain up to 3bn barrels of crude.

The US Bureau of Ocean Energy Management said BP’s exploration plan meets the stringent standards issued by the government after last year’s Deepwater Horizon disaster, as well as the additional self-imposed standards that BP has taken.

Full Story Here: BBC News – BP wins approval to resume drilling in Gulf of Mexico.

OPS: This is the Base definition of INSANITY. And, another sell-out by the Obama Administration.

Genetic engineering has failed to increase the yield of any food crop but has vastly increased the use of chemicals and the growth of “superweeds”, according to a report by 20 Indian, south-east Asian, African and Latin American food and conservation groups representing millions of people.

The so-called miracle crops, which were first sold in the US about 20 years ago and which are now grown in 29 countries on about 1.5bn hectares (3.7bn acres) of land, have been billed as potential solutions to food crises, climate change and soil erosion, but the assessment finds that they have not lived up to their promises.

The report claims that hunger has reached “epic proportions” since the technology was developed. Besides this, only two GM “traits” have been developed on any significant scale, despite investments of tens of billions of dollars, and benefits such as drought resistance and salt tolerance have yet to materialise on any scale.

Full Story Here: GM crops promote superweeds, food insecurity and pesticides, say NGOs | Environment | The Guardian.

Finger-pointing over the Deepwater Horizon disaster resumed recently after the U.S. Department of the Interior and the Coast Guard issued a joint report (pdf) which concluded all three corporate participants in the calamity — BP, Transocean Ltd. and Halliburton — were at fault. The report concluded all three companies violated federal laws and safety regulations by “failing to take necessary precautions to keep the Macondo well under control at all times.” The report also found all three companies were “jointly and severally liable for the failure to comply with all applicable regulations.” That means all three companies are mutually responsible for the accident, and each can be held singly responsible for the entire debacle. The report parsed blame among the companies for sloppy materials and workmanship, inadequate training, failure to properly assess risk and conduct proper testing, failure to abide by stop-work work policies after multiple anomalies were discovered, and so on.

The Blame-Go-Round

Despite the report citing all three companies as equally liable, Transocean now believes it has been vindicated. Brian Kennedy, a Transocean company spokesman, said “The report…finally puts to rest all previous allegations that improper maintenance of the [blowout preventer] contributed to the tragedy.” He characterized the explosion on the Deepwater Horizon as “unavoidable.”

Full Story Here: BP’s Gulf of Mexico PR, One Year Later | Common Dreams.

That’s the view of State Sen. Ken Haar of Malcolm, who questions whether the U.S. State Department has ignored a warning that the Keystone XL pipeline could pollute Nebraska groundwater much worse than predicted.

One line from the government’s environmental impact statement raised the senator’s ire, he said, because it struck him as out of place in a serious analysis.

Referring to the professor’s report, the government document said, “This is simply the latest case of opportunistic fear-mongering, dressed up as an academic study.”

“I am very offended by this unprofessional dismissal of a Nebraska scholar and his important work,” Haar wrote last week to an official with the Environmental Protection Agency.

Full Story Here: Pipeline warning dismissed – Omaha.com.

Dr. John B. Anderson (pictured, left), an oceanographer at Rice University, told Raw Story that his report on the Galveston Bay estuary, and the effects of rising sea levels on its fragile ecosystem, was censored for purely “political” reasons.

“This is a clear-cut case of censorship,” he said in an exclusive interview. “It’s not scientific editing. It was strictly deletion of virtually any information that related to global change.”

Full Story Here: Texas agency censors climate change references in key scientific report | The Raw Story.

Toxic algae is sucking the oxygen out of Lake Erie.

The lake is currently undergoing one of the worst algae blooms in decades, turning the water a scummy bright green. According to NASA, blooms like this did occur in the 1950′s and 60′s, but now phosphorus from farms, sewage, and industry have fertilized the waters.

After the 60′s, increased regulations and improvements in agriculture and sewage treatment limited the phosphorus and helped to control the blooms. However, the shallower Western basin near Detroit has been more susceptible to the algae than other deeper areas.

The exact reason behind the bloom is a bit unclear, but scientists believe it could be linked to increased rainfall and, believe it or not, mussels. It seems the types of mussel, zebra and quagga that have invaded the lake feed on phytoplankton instead of algae, making it even easier for the blooms to occur, according to NASA.

Full Story Here: Lake Erie’s Toxic Algae Bloom Seen From Space: Green Scum Rampant In The Great Lakes (PHOTOS).

Did it stir something in the memory, by any chance, the extraordinary heat of a fortnight ago, when Britain met with its hottest-ever October day, and numerous places experienced their hottest day of the whole year? Did the sheer, seasonal abnormality of its glare give pause, and revive a concern which has faded almost completely, in the face of scepticism and the economic crisis – the concern that the climate might be drastically changing, with potentially deadly consequences?

If so, I suspect that the revival was brief, and that most people have gone back to worrying about their jobs. Global warming is an issue which has dropped off the pubic agenda almost completely. Yet in less than eight weeks’ time it will dominate the headlines once again, when, at the UN climate conference in Durban, South Africa, the gaping split in the world community over how to tackle climate change will come to a crunch.

The essence of this split is simple; developing countries (like India, say) think the rich, developed countries should do it; the rich developed countries (like us) think that everyone should do it. The first position was enshrined in the current climate treaty, the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, in which the rich world agreed to cut its carbon emissions, while the developing countries were obliged to do nothing; and now Kyoto, which in its present version runs out on 31 December 2012, is up for renewal.

Full Story Here: Nature Studies by Michael McCarthy: Are we just going to talk our way to oblivion? – Nature Studies, Nature – The Independent.

Scientists ask for names to be removed after mentions of climate change and sea-level rise taken out by Texas officials

Officials in Rick Perry‘s home state of Texas have set off a scientists’ revolt after purging mentions of climate change and sea-level rise from what was supposed to be a landmark environmental report. The scientists said they were disowning the report on the state of Galveston Bay because of political interference and censorship from Perry appointees at the state’s environmental agency.

By academic standards, the protest amounts to the beginnings of a rebellion: every single scientist associated with the 200-page report has demanded their names be struck from the document. “None of us can be party to scientific censorship so we would all have our names removed,” said Jim Lester, a co-author of the report and vice-president of the Houston Advanced Research Centre.

“To me it is simply a question of maintaining scientific credibility. This is simply antithetical to what a scientist does,” Lester said. “We can’t be censored.” Scientists see Texas as at high risk because of climate change, from the increased exposure to hurricanes and extreme weather on its long coastline to this summer’s season of wildfires and drought.

However, Perry, in his run for the Republican nomination, has elevated denial of science, from climate change to evolution, to an art form. He opposes any regulation of industry, and has repeatedly challenged the authority of the Environmental Protection Agency.

Full Story Here: Rick Perry officials spark revolt after doctoring environment report | Environment | guardian.co.uk.

It’s a particularly choppy morning here in the Central Pacific, and everyone aboard Greenpeace’s flagship, Esperanza, is on high alert. We are here to document, expose, and take action against illegal and unsustainable fishing practices, and only an hour ago, we encountered a Korean longline vessel, Oryong 335, that has refused to let us board their ship and is steaming away from us. It’s too late for them to hide their secret, though: Even from half a mile off, one can see dozens of shark fins hung to dry in the tropical sun.

Out here in the high seas, it’s only too obvious that the barbaric and wasteful practice of shark finning is alive and well. Current estimates on how many sharks are killed every year for their fins vary widely, but the average figure is somewhere around 50 million. Given this level of carnage, it’s no wonder that many shark populations around the world are in severe decline. As I’ve written before, we need sharks in our oceans. Without sharks and other top-level carnivores to keep populations of sub-predators in check, we run the risk of losing productive and well-balanced marine ecosystems to trophic collapse.

Full Story Here: One of the Worst Meals You Can Possibly Eat Has Just Been Banned in California | Food | AlterNet.

BP is making contingency plans to fight the largest oil spill in history, as it prepares to drill more than 4,000 feet down in the Atlantic in wildlife-rich British waters off the Shetland Islands.

Internal company documents seen by The Independent show that the worst-case scenario for a spill from its North Uist exploratory well, to be sunk next year, would involve a leak of 75,000 barrels a day for 140 days – a total of 10.5 million barrels of oil, comfortably the world’s biggest pollution disaster.

BP is making contingency plans to fight the largest oil spill in history, as it prepares to drill more than 4,000 feet down in the Atlantic in wildlife-rich British waters off the Shetland Islands.

This would be more than double the amount of oil spilled from its Deepwater Horizon well in the Gulf of Mexico last year, which had a maximum leak rate of 62,000 barrels a day in an incident lasting 88 days – and triggered a social, economic and environmental catastrophe in the US which brought the giant multinational to the brink of collapse.

Full Story Here: Exclusive: BP to risk worst ever oil spill in Shetlands drilling – Green Living, Environment – The Independent.

According AccuWeather.com’s forecast, the Chicago area will likely be clobbered by between 50 and 58 inches of snow this winter — approximately the same amount as the 56 inches that fell over the city last year. An average amount of snowfall is approximately half that. The Chicago Sun-Times further reports that average temperatures will be 2 to 3 degrees colder than normal — also on par with last winter’s temperatures, which were 2.4 degrees colder than normal.

“People in Chicago are going to want to move after this winter,” AccuWeather meteorologist John Nagelberg told NBC 5 of the predicted frigidness.

The brutal temperatures are expected to hit hard in December and January, before easing up slightly in February, according to the Chicago Tribune. Snow will be expected to be distributed more evenly throughout the season than last year, when the Groundhog’s Day blizzard crippled the city, trapped hundreds of cars on Lake Shore Drive and provided an endless bevy of dramatically wintry images.

(Scroll down to relive the storm.)

Full Story Here: Chicago’s Upcoming Winter Expected To Be The Nation’s Worst.

The NEB responded to a CEP application last week on the expiry of Order in Council 56 which required that construction of the pipeline commence prior to March 11, 2011. The NEB letter to TCPL can be found on the NEB web site’s regulatory documents section – receipt A31873.

“This is no technicality,” said CEP President Dave Coles. “TCPL missed its construction start deadlines because regulatory approval is more than a year late in the US, and there are still large doubts about whether there will be US federal and state approvals.

Full Story Here: Keystone XL construction permit expires | CEP.

In a blatant disregard of the concerns of affected West Virginia coalfield residents who actually live under the fallout of devastating mountaintop removal operations, a press release summary from the Subcommittee on Energy and Mineral Resources’ field hearing on “Jobs at Risk: Community Impacts of the Obama Administration’s Effort to Rewrite the Stream Buffer Zone Rule” completely deleted any mention of the official testimonies by Appalachian coalfield leaders Maria Gunnoe and Bo Webb. The press release reported exclusively on testimony from coal industry representatives, Big Coal-bankrolled politicians and hired coal industry supporters.

“Yesterday a House Natural Resources subcommittee tried its very hardest not to hear West Virginians’ concerns about the destruction and heartbreak of mountaintop removal in their communities,” noted Natural Resources Defense Council staff Melissa Waage. “Now the subcommittee leadership is trying to pretend these people don’t even exist.”

Makes you wonder: Is such censorship in an official document released by the House committee a violation of Congressional rules? And will Democrats on the subcommittee or Natural Resources Committee follow up with an investigation and hold responsible committee staff and members accountable?

Full Story Here: House Committee Censors Testimony of Appalachian Activists | Common Dreams.

A limited amount of plutonium has been detected in soil outside Japan’s troubled Fukushima nuclear power plant which was crippled by the March 11 quake-tsunami disaster, the government said Friday.

It was the first time plutonium had been found in government tests outside the plant, presumably due to the nuclear accident, the worst since 1986 Chernobyl, the education and science ministry said in a statement.

Plutonium was detected in soil at six places in a survey which was conducted in June in an area within 80 kilometers (50 miles) from the Fukushima Daiichi plant, the ministry said.

Full Story Here: Plutonium ‘Detected Outside Fukushima Plant’ | Common Dreams.

Two ice shelves that existed before Canada was settled by Europeans diminished significantly this northern summer, one nearly disappearing altogether, Canadian scientists say in newly published research.

The loss is important as a marker of global warming, returning the Canadian Arctic to conditions that date back thousands of years, scientists say. Floating icebergs that have broken free as a result pose a risk to offshore oil facilities and potentially to shipping lanes. The breaking apart of the ice shelves also reduces the environment that supports microbial life and changes the look of Canada’s coastline.

Luke Copland is an associate professor in the geography department at the University of Ottawa who co-authored the research published on Carleton University’s website. He said the Serson Ice Shelf shrank from 205 square kilometres to two remnant sections five years ago, and was further diminished this past summer.

Full Story Here: Canadian Arctic loses most of huge ice shelf – World – NZ Herald News.

Few states are as red as Nebraska, which hasn’t supported a Democratic presidential candidate since 1964. But opposition to the Keystone XL pipeline has risen steadily since the project was proposed three years ago.

The reason: Fears of contaminating the Ogallala Aquifer, a vast subterranean reservoir that spans a large swath of the Great Plains and provides water to much of Nebraska, as well as seven other states. Opponents have grown to include Nebraska’s conservative governor and two U.S. senators, a Republican and a conservative Democrat.

Full Story Here: Oil pipeline opponents pin hopes on Nebraska – AP News Wire, Associated Press News – Salon.com.

“Haynesville” is making the indie film circuit, but its director is actually an oil and gas man in disguise.

This weekend, the Texas Tribune will play host to the Texas Tribune Festival. According to the festival’s website, the convening is designed “to bring together the state’s most prominent thinkers, politicians and public servants for a weekend of debate, discussion and dialogue on the subjects that matter most to all Texans.”

Near the top of the agenda will be a slate of policy discussions pertaining to energy and the environment, include the screening of a documentary about natural gas drilling (no, not Gasland). Texas is home to both the Eagle Ford and Barnett Shale basins, as well as a sliver of the Haynesville Shale, under all of which sits vast amounts of natural gas. The Haynesville Shale, mostly located in the northwest corner of Louisiana, as well as bit of southwest Arkansas and east Texas, underlies an area of about 9,000 square miles and possesses some 250 trillion cubic feet of recoverable natural gas. It is the largest natural gas field in the United States.

The festival’s sponsors include some of the most powerful players in the natural gas arena: Apache Corporation, BP, El Paso Corp, Energy Future Holdings Corp, and America’s Natural Gas Alliance (ANGA) — the largest natural gas industry lobbying consortium in the United States. ANGA spent over $3 million lobbying the U.S. Congress in 2010 and has already spent over $1 million lobbying Congress in 2011, according to OpenSecrets.org.

Full Story Here: Exposed: New Documentary About Gas Drilling Hailed as Indie and Balanced, But Here’s Why It’s Neither | Environment | AlterNet.

The ministry said radioactive caesium of 500 becquerels per kg was found in a sample of the pre-harvested rice in Nihonmatsu city, in Fukushima Prefecture, 56 km (35 miles) west of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant which was crippled by the March 11 earthquake and tsunami, triggering the world’s worst nuclear disaster in 25 years.

The ministry said the Fukushima Prefecture will expand the inspection spots nearly ten-fold to around 300 areas.

It is the first case in Japan of rice containing radioactive caesium exceeding 200 becquerels per kg, a level which requires further thorough testing of the area for the harvested rice.

Full Story Here: Radioactive Rice “Far Exceeding” Safe Levels Found in Japan | Common Dreams.

Passage of the bill was expected in the Republican-controlled House, where lawmakers have targeted Environmental Protection Agency air rules, saying they would kill jobs and laden businesses with billions of dollars in additional costs at the worst possible time.

“The Obama administration is moving too fast and showing little regard for the economic consequences of their energy and environmental policies,” said Rep. John Sullivan (R-Okla.), who sponsored the bill.

The vote on the so-called Transparency in Regulatory Analysis of Impacts on the Nation, or TRAIN, was 249 to 169. It was supported by fewer than 20 Democrats.

The bill, which must be passed in the Democratic-controlled Senate and signed by President Obama to become law, would delay certain EPA moves by setting up an interagency panel led by the Commerce Department. The panel would be tasked with assessing the impact of EPA rules on the economy, thus delaying their implementation.

Full Story Here: House passes bill to block broad Environmental Protection Agency rules – The Washington Post.

OPS:  Even a couple of suicidal Dems voted for this. A couple of Repubs voted against it. But 99% the the Rightwing voted FOR.

The Keystone XL pipeline, recently approved by the US State Department and awaiting President Obama’s declaration that it is in the “national interest,” will carry oil that is too dirty for the US government to buy — under legislation signed by George W. Bush!

In 2007, President Bush signed into law Section 526 of the Energy Independence and National Security Act of 2007. It prohibits the US government, which is the largest single fuel purchaser in the U.S., from using taxpayer dollars to purchase fuels that have a higher carbon footprint than conventional oil.

This little-known law is significant because Congress crafted it, in part, with the explicit intent to block the US from buying Canadian tar sands oil — considered the dirtiest oil on the planet. With President Obama currently debating whether to authorize the construction of the Keystone Pipeline — which will funnel tar sands oil from Alberta into the the US — and more than 1000 activists arrested in front of the White House last month in protest the pipeline, the issue has moved to the front and center of the climate debate in recent weeks.

Full Story Here: The Keystone Pipeline: Too Dirty for George W. Bush? | Common Dreams.

Jim Hightower :_:

In the corporate world’s tortured language, workers are no longer fired. They just experience an “employment adjustment.” But the most twisted euphemism I’ve heard in a long time comes from DuPont: “We are investigating the reports of these unfavorable tree symptoms,” the pesticide maker recently stated.

How unfavorable? Finito, flat-lined, the tree is dead. Not just one tree, but hundreds of thousands all across the country are suffering the final “symptom.”

The culprit turns out to be Imprelis, a DuPont weed-killer widely applied to lawns, golf courses, and — ironically — cemeteries.

dupont-imprelis-dead-tree

Rather than just poisoning dandelions and other weeds, the herbicide also seems to be causing spruces, pines, willows, poplars, and other unintended victims to croak.

Full Story Here: DuPont’s Herbicide Goes Rogue – OtherWords.

“On September 8, the extent of the Arctic sea ice was 4.240 million square kilometres (1.637 million square miles). This is a new historic minimum,” said Georg Heygster, head of the Physical Analysis of Remote Sensing Images unit at the University of Bremen’s Institute of Environmental Physics.

The new mark is about half-a-percent under his team’s measurements of the previous record, which occurred on September 16, 2007, he said.

According to the US National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC), the record set on that date was 4.1 million sq km (1.6 sq mi). The discrepancy, Heygster explained by phone, was due to slightly different data sets and algorithms.

Full Story Here: AFP: Arctic ice cover hits historic low: scientists.

Six months after the nuclear meltdowns in Fukushima Prefecture, the public’s awareness of the threat posed by radiation is entering a new phase: the realization that the biggest danger now and in the future is from contaminated soil.

The iodine-131 ejected into the sky by the Fukushima No. 1 power station disaster was quickly detected in vegetables and tap water — even as far away as Tokyo, 220 km south of the plant.

But contamination levels are now so low they are virtually undetectable, thanks to the short half-life of iodine-131 — eight days — and stepped up filtering by water companies.

But cesium is proving to be a tougher foe. The element’s various isotopes have half-lives ranging from two to 30 years, generating concern about the food chain in Fukushima Prefecture, a predominantly agricultural region, as the elements wash fallout into the ground.

The root of the problem is, well — roots.

Full Story Here: Effect of contaminated soil on food chain sparks fears | The Japan Times Online.

The U.S. has experienced its hottest summer in 75 years, according to USA Today and the National Climatic Data Center in Asheville, N.C. This latest summer season, with an average temperature of 74.5 degrees, has also been recorded as the second hottest ever. Only the Dust Bowl year of 1936, at 74.6 degrees, was warmer.

Full Story Here: U.S. endures hottest summer since 1936 | The Raw Story.

In the tortured language of CorporateWorld, workers are no longer fired, they’ve just experienced an “employment adjustment.” But the most twisted euphemism I’d heard in a long time comes from DuPont: “We are investigating the reports of these unfavorable tree symptoms,” the pesticide maker recently stated.

How unfavorable? Finito, flat-lined… the tree is dead. Not just one tree, but hundreds of thousands all across the country are suffering the final “symptom.” The culprit turns out to be Imprelis, a DuPont weed-killer widely applied to lawns, golf courses, and – ironically – cemeteries. Rather than just poisoning dandelions and other weeds, the herbicide also seems to be causing spruces, pines, willows, poplars, and other unintended victims to croak.

“It’s been devastating,” says a Michigan landscaper who applied Imprelis to about a thousand properties this spring and has already had more than a third of them suffer outbreaks of tree deaths. “It looks like someone took a flamethrower to them,” he says. At first, DuPont tried to dodge responsibility, claiming that landscape workers might be applying the herbicide improperly. The corporation even urged customers to be patient and leave the tree corpses on their lawns to see if they come back to life in a few years.

Full Story Here: Jim Hightower | DuPont’s herbicide goes rogue.

Senate Environment and Public Works Chairwoman Barbara Boxer said she hopes green groups sue President Barack Obama over his decision to punt a regulation curbing smog-creating emissions until at least 2013.

Boxer — whose relatively mild reaction to Obama’s surprise announcement Friday was in contrast to heated rebukes by environmental groups — said she will stand by those groups in any litigation to force the administration to issue a final ozone rule that goes beyond what was enacted by President George W. Bush.

Environmental groups charged that Obama made a political calculus by punting on a rule that was a particular target of critics who charge his regulatory agenda has hurt the economy and jobs.

Full Story Here: Barbara Boxer: I hope greens sue President Obama – Darren Goode – POLITICO.com.

Growing piles of contaminated sewage, located hundreds of kilometers from Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi nuclear meltdown, are loaded with high levels of radiactive cesium, and the government has yet to come up with a policy for the country’s latest crisis.

Tons of alarmingly high levels of radioactive cesium are being reported at a sewage treatment facility in Saitama, located more than 150 miles southwest of Fukushima, site of the triple nuclear meltdown last March after a devastating earthquake and tsunami.

According to Al Jazeera English (AJE), workers at the plant have been told to store the sewage, but none are qualified in dealing with the hazardous waste. Under normal conditions, the treated sewage is passed along to fertilizer and cement companies, but the radioactive sewage currently has no takers.

Full Story Here: Tons of radioactive sewage in Japan is latest crisis.

In a flight over the Gulf Tuesday, OnWingsOfCare.org founder and pilot Dr. Bonny Schumaker spotted an oil slick that stretched for nearly 10 miles.

Last week, two Louisiana State University men took a boat into the Gulf and returned with video evidence of large blooms of crude oil swelling up to the water’s surface where the doomed oil rig once hovered.

Full Story Here: New evidence of a massive oil slick near Deepwater Horizon site | Raw Replay.

Greenpeace :-:

Corporate polluters don’t have to worry about dismantling the Clean Air Act, it appears that President Obama is doing it for them.

As Americans prepare for the holiday weekend, President Obama has announced that he doesn’t plan on enforcing a law that would have prevented 12,000 deaths every year by protecting Americans from ozone pollution.

The President, along with Big Oil and the other corporate polluters whose interest he is serving with this decision, are hoping you won’t notice.

Too bad. We’re paying attention and the President needs to know that putting thousands of American lives needlessly at risk is a serious political miscalculation.

Senior members from Obama’s Democratic party were swift in their criticism of the President’s decision. In reaction, Congressman Ed Markey who sits on the House Energy and Commerce committee stated:

Full Story Here: BREAKING: Obama guts pollution, clean air regulations | Greenpeace.

Obama overruled the Environmental Protection Agency — and the unanimous opinion of its independent panel of scientific advisers — and directed administrator Lisa Jackson to withdraw the proposed regulation to reduce concentrations of ground-level ozone, smog’s main ingredient. The decision rests in part on reducing regulatory burdens and uncertainty for businesses at a time of rampant uncertainty about an unsteady economy.

The announcement came shortly after a new government report on private sector employment showed that businesses essentially added no new jobs last month — and that the jobless rate remained stuck at a historically high 9.1 percent.

Full Story Here: Obama halts controversial EPA regulation – Yahoo! News.

OPS: Obama showing more of his true Republican colors

When a 100 mile chunk — an area four times the size of Manhattan — broke off Greenland’s Petermann Glacier in the summer of 2010, scientists knew that it was a historic event. After all, it was the largest known calving in Greenland’s history, and the largest to occur in the Arctic in nearly 50 years.

Over the last year, scientists have only been able to view the extent of the breakup via satellite imagery. Until now.

Photographs taken in July and released on Wednesday offer a new perspective on the August 2010 break, showing before and after images of different areas of Petermann Glacier.

(PHOTOS BELOW)

“Although I knew what to expect in terms of ice loss from satellite imagery, I was still completely unprepared for the gob-smacking scale of the breakup, which rendered me speechless,” Alan Hubbard, the scientist from Aberystwyth University in Wales who took the most recent photograph, said in a statement.

And we can expect more. Hubbard told MSNBC.com that another sheet, about half the size of the 2010 chunk, is poised to break away.

Jason Box, a scientist with the Byrd Polar Research Center at The Ohio State University and photographer of the 2009 image, told HuffPost that the summer of 2010 was Greenland’s warmest on record, and records have been kept since 1873.

“We’re bearing witness to abrupt climate change,” Box told HuffPost. “This isn’t of in the future. It’s very much now.”

Full Story Here: Petermann Glacier Picture: Before And After Images Show Extent Of 2010 Greenland Ice Break (PHOTOS).

Tests on the oil were inconclusive as far as linking it to the now-plugged oil well, but if it is from the Deepwater Horizon spill it could indicate the formation of fissures on the seabed, seeping oil into the ecosystem anew.

If so, that would mean the worst accidental release of oil in human history — a spill so bad, it took five months just to stop crude from flowing — isn’t quite over.

Full Story Here: Fresh oil slicks forming over Deepwater Horizon spill site | Raw Replay.

NISA compares contamination to Hiroshima blast

The amount of radioactive cesium ejected by the Fukushima reactor meltdowns is about 168 times higher than that emitted in the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, the government’s nuclear watchdog said Friday.

The Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency provided the estimate at the request of a Diet panel but noted that making a simple comparison between an instantaneous bomb blast and a long-term accidental leak is problematic and could lead to “irrelevant” results.

The report said the crippled Fukushima No. 1 plant has released 15,000 terabecquerels of cesium-137, which lingers for decades and can cause cancer, compared with the 89 terabecquerels released by the U.S. atomic bombing of Hiroshima.

The report estimated each of the 16 isotopes released by the “Little Boy” bomb and 31 of those detected at the Fukushima plant. NISA has said the radiation released at Fukushima was about one-sixth of that released during the 1986 Chernobyl disaster.

Full Story Here: Cesium leak equal to 168 ’45 A-bombs | The Japan Times Online.