Return to Chernobyl
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oU5yrdofbw0&feature=player_embedded] This is from a site dedicated to developments at Chernobyl....
CONTINUE READINGNo Butts About It
The New York Times has reported on a stealth environmental crisis, one that the public has heretofore regarded as the mere detritus of a serious public health controversy. But discarded cigarette butts constitute a major environmental crisis as well, and public attention to that crisis is long overdue. In its recent story, the Times notes the omnipresent nature of discarded cigarette butts in the human environment. In the U.S., cigarette butts constitute nearly one-...
CONTINUE READINGEntropy to the Max!
I've been learning from my ERG colleague John Harte about a statistical technique called MaxEnt. For many environmental problems -- most notably climate change -- we are not only unable to provide a reliable estimate of harm, but we don't even know the shape of the probability distribution. MaxEnt is a way of constructing a curve that fits whatever we do know (such as the mean or variance of the distribution) without implicitly making any other assumptions about the ...
CONTINUE READINGClimate Refugees
The NY Times had an important article yesterday about the issue of climate refugees. Because climate change poses an existential threat to some nations and a threat to international stability elsewhere, it appears that the U.N. is inching closer to making climate change a security issue under the jurisdiction of the Security Council. Since the Security Council is the only part of the U.N. with any real teeth, this could be a very significant development in the lo...
CONTINUE READINGThe Nuclear Option
In the 1960s, when legendary environmentalist David Brower expressed his opposition to nuclear power, he exposed a rift among his Sierra Club colleagues, many of whom saw “too cheap to meter” nuclear power as the solution to air pollution problems. Brower and others focused on the danger of nuclear accidents, security issues, and the difficulty of securing high-level radioactive waste for long-term storage. The surge in nuclear power development in the 60s and 70...
CONTINUE READINGIdle Chatter
WBUR’s Here and Now radio show recently covered the story of George Pakenham, the self-named “Verdant Vigilante.” Pakenham roams the streets of New York City engaging in citizen enforcement of the city’s anti-idling law. The law, which has been on the books in various forms since 1971, prohibits idling for greater than 3 minutes (1 minute in front of schools). The problem is, according to Pakenham’s informal research, three quarters of the drivers in th...
CONTINUE READINGJudge Sotomayor’s Environmental Record
Now that President Obama has nominated her for a seat on the U.S. Supreme Court, U.S. Court of Appeals Judge Sonia Sotomayor's record as a federal court judge will be under the microscope. Political pundits, legal scholars and advocacy groups from across the political spectrum will all be scrutinizing Sotomayor's extensive record as a federal district court and U.S. Court of Appeals judge, in their understandable efforts to discern what kind of Supreme Court justice sh...
CONTINUE READINGSec. Chu pushes cool roofs – and Fox pushes back
Perhaps not surprisingly, given his long tenure at Lawrence Berkeley National Labs, Energy Secretary Steven Chu is making news for pushing what many think is a "triple play" climate change winner: cool roofs. As LBNL researchers have shown, making roofs more heat-reflective cools the earth dramatically, reduces energy consumption (by reducing air conditioning), and makes cities more healthful by combating the urban heat island effect. Transforming a regular roof in...
CONTINUE READINGGlobal warming winners? (oceans edition)
By now it is widely recognized that ocean warming and acidification caused by rising CO2 levels will adversely affect many organisms, especially those that depend on calcium carbonate shells. But there may be winners as well. Rebecca Gooding and a group from the University of British Columbia report in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that the sea star, Pisaster ochraceus, a keystone species for rocky intertidal communities, grows faster and feeds mo...
CONTINUE READINGSharing the catch
According to Science Insider (subscription required), NOAA Administrator Jane Lubchenco has endorsed broader use of a "catch shares" approach to allocating the available catch in commercial fisheries. The shares strategy (also referred to as "individual transferable quotas" or "limited access privileges") gives individual participants in the fishery a permanent and transferable right to a set proportion of the total allowable catch. In theory, assigning shares should ...
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