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What A Week It Was: Apocadocuments from

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This Week's Top Ten Very Scary Tags:
ecosystem interrelationships ~ anthropogenic change ~ oil issues ~ economic myopia ~ global warming ~ massive die-off ~ contamination ~ stupid humans ~ death spiral ~ sixth extinction ~ toxic water

ApocaDocuments (30) gathered this week:
Sun, May 9, 2010 from New Northwest Passage: Apocadesk: 'Doc Michael channels Stan Rogers Last weekend I went to a Transition Towns training (which I'll be writing about soon). It's probably the best bottom-up community approach to changing the world, in the face of predictable climate chaos, peak oil, and economic carnage, that I've ever seen. Resilience through community and creativity gives me a ray of hope. What does that have to do with Stan Rogers and the Northwest Passage? The only thing missing from the Transition Towns movement was great music. Any great revolution must have its music. Since we must make revolution together to save our world, we also need to sing together. So I recast the lyrics of Northwest Passage -- a rousing song known to all Canada -- to explore the music of the new evolution. ...	What, is kumbaya next? ApocaDoc permalink
Sun, May 9, 2010 from The Gillette News-Record: Barrasso: Finding cleaner ways to use coal is best way to cut greenhouse gases U.S. Sen. John Barrasso, R-Wyo., says his efforts to pass carbon capture legislation are all part of a plan to make energy as clean as possible, as fast as possible and as cheap as possible. Barrasso believes that finding cleaner ways to use coal is one of the most viable methods to reduce greenhouse gas emissions while still meeting the energy demands that continue to grow around the world. "We need the renewables," Barrasso told The News-Record on Saturday. "But (renewable energy development) is not keeping up with the overall demand for energy." ...	The quest for the Great Albino Coal continues... ApocaDoc permalink
Sun, May 9, 2010 from Reuters: U.S. schools add fresh food without busting budgets Thousands of U.S. public school districts are teaming up with local farmers to put more fresh fruits and vegetables on lunchroom menus, without breaking budgets or getting any help from celebrity chefs. The schools are taking early steps toward adding more fresh and homemade foods as advocated by British chef Jamie Oliver, who led a campaign to improve school lunch in his country. But inexpensive, processed foods still dominate U.S. school menus. Proponents including U.S. President Barack Obama are pushing for a bigger investment in school meals that feed some of the country's neediest children. The aim is to establish healthier eating habits and curb obesity rates that are driving nearly $150 billion in medical costs each year. Nearly a third of U.S. children are obese or overweight and public health experts are warning that this generation of youth may be the first to live shorter lives than their parents. The problem is so severe it has caught the attention of the U.S. military. Last month, two retired generals said in a Washington Post column that being overweight or obese was now the top medical reason recruits were turned down for military service, and that obesity rates were threatening the future strength of the military. ...	How skinny do you have to be to push a button and launch a drone missile? ApocaDoc permalink
Sun, May 9, 2010 from AP, via PhysOrg.com: Montana, Idaho consider tripling wolf hunt quotas Hunters in Montana would be allowed to kill nearly three times as many gray wolves this fall compared with last year's inaugural hunt, under a proposal announced Friday by state wildlife officials. Wolves in neighboring Idaho also face a potentially higher quota. And hunters there could be allowed to use traps, electronic calls and, in some regions, bait to increase their odds of a successful kill. Final details are pending.... "We've learned a lot over the past year," [Montana Chief of Wildlife] McDonald said. "It's our responsibility to address the fact that more than 200 sheep and about 100 head of cattle were killed by wolves last year and that wolves have depressed deer and elk populations in some areas." ...	Killing 200 wolves to save 200 sheep and 100 cows seems a fair compromise. ApocaDoc permalink
Sun, May 9, 2010 from Times Online: Third of all plants and animals face extinction ANIMAL and plant species are being killed off faster than ever before as human populations surge and people consume more, a United Nations report is expected to say this week. It will warn that the expansion of countries such as China, India and Brazil is adding hugely to the environmental threats already generated by developed western nations, and that a third of species could face extinction this century. The report is one of the starkest issued by the UN and the decision to draw an explicit link between extinction rates and economic growth makes it politically sensitive. It will point out that the extinction threat extends across all main ecosystems, affecting living things as diverse as tree frogs, coral reefs and river dolphins.... "The magnitude of the damage [to ecosystems] is much bigger than previously thought," said Djoghlaf. "The rate of extinction is currently running at 1,000 times the natural historical background rate of extinction." ...	That sounds a little alarmist. How about "only three orders of magnitude greater"? ApocaDoc permalink
Sat, May 8, 2010 from ThinkProgress: Gulf Coast Wildlife: 'All Bets Are Off' As Nancy Rabalais, a scientist who heads the Louisiana Universities Marine Consortium, said, "The magnitude and the potential for ecological damage is probably more great than anything we've ever seen in the Gulf of Mexico."... ThinkProgress' Brad Johnson was blogging from the Gulf Coast and spoke with Gulf Coast marine scientists who all agreed that the "unfolding oil disaster could mean devastation beyond human comprehension" and "all bets are off."... "I can't imagine we're not going to have some mass casualties" among birds in the Gulf region, predicted Michael Parr of the American Bird Conservancy.... At least 38 endangered sea turtles "have washed up dead on beaches along the Gulf of Mexico,"... Comyns told Johnson that he found blue fin tuna larvae "right in the vicinity" of the oil rig's discharge. Even the dispersant BP is using -- Corexit 9500 -- has a "toxicity to early life stages of fish, crustaceans and mollusks" four times greater than petroleum.... Officials shut down additional fishing grounds, effectively putting out of work hundreds more in an industry that is the lifeblood of the region, as well as the Breton National Wildlife Sanctuary. Out in the gulf, birds dove into oily water, dolphins coughed and sharks swam in weird patterns, said marine specialists who have been out on the water tracking the disaster." ...	Thank you, BP, for using the lowest bidder and thereby saving each of us a trillionth of a cent. ApocaDoc permalink
Sat, May 8, 2010 from ABC (Australia): Alternative Reality Geoengineering Game Moving Forward [Story note: billionaire founds alternative reality game which is in fact a cover for a real geoengineering project to spray sulfur dioxide particulates unilaterally into the atmosphere. The "whistleblower" has online presence, leaves clues, links to other possibly-fictional sites.... In many ways related to Walter Jon Williams' novel This Is Not A Game. -- 'Doc Michael] Lots has unfolded in ABC's Alternate Reality game, Bluebird, this week...with a big code break this morning by one of you (someone called 'GirlWhoRuled'). Players are cracking codes, sleuthing locations, and on the chase in the race to find out what eco-entrepreneur & billionaire, Harrison Wyld, might be up to with a certain Mr Kruger. A campaign has been launched, and a rival one by Wyld too. Meanwhile, the young whistleblower scientist, Kyle Vandercamp, has woken up today to find that none of his plastic works. Catch up on the story so far at http://abc.net.au/bluebird (with links to the key blogs and websites involved). ...	I've longed for an alternative reality for quite a while. ApocaDoc permalink
Sat, May 8, 2010 from New York Times: EPA Backed Off 'Hazardous' Label for Coal Ash After White House Review U.S. EPA's proposed regulation of coal ash as a hazardous waste was changed at the White House to give equal standing to an alternative favored by the coal industry and coal-burning electric utilities. The Obama administration is now considering two competing rules for regulating the ash that contains toxins that include arsenic, lead and mercury. The first would set binding federal disposal requirements for the ash, and the second would label the ash nonhazardous and leave enforcement to the states (E&ENews PM, May 4). EPA released the two-headed proposal Tuesday for public comments.... What changed in the six months that the proposal was in OMB's hands? Says EPA: Its administrator, Lisa Jackson, changed her mind about the hazardous-waste designation. "After extensive discussions, the Administrator decided that both the [hazardous and nonhazardous] options merited consideration for addressing the formidable challenge of safely managing coal ash disposal," EPA said in a statement. ...	I had no idea Obama's middle initial was "W." ApocaDoc permalink
Fri, May 7, 2010 from Inter Press Service: Small Islands Urge Action at UN Oceans Meet Faced with rising sea levels, dying coral reefs and decreasing fish stocks, small island developing states (SIDS) are feeling the effects of ocean decline, and they want wealthier countries to do more to ensure the survival of the world's seas and other waterways. "We are seeing the threat that fisheries will collapse, the threat of tourism-collapse and the loss of biodiversity," said Rolph Payet, special advisor to the President of the Seychelles. "Some people think that this is just a simple matter to be brushed aside, and to continue with business as usual, emitting greenhouse gases (GhGs) as usual,'' Payet said. "The data shows us that we should be worried, and we should be acting. In fact we should have acted yesterday," he said. ...	An unfortunate acronym. ApocaDoc permalink
Fri, May 7, 2010 from Agence France-Press: World needs 'bailout plan' to protect endangered species Facing what many scientists say is the sixth mass extinction in half-a-billion years, our planet urgently needs a "bailout plan" to protect its biodiversity, a top conservation group said Thursday. Failure to stem the loss of animal and plant species will have dire consequences on human well-being, the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) warned... A fifth of mammals, 30 per cent of amphibians, 12 per cent of known birds, and more than a quarter of reef-building corals -- the livelihood cornerstone for 500 million people in coastal areas -- face extinction, according to the IUCN's benchmark Red List of Threatened Species. ...	Perhaps... on some level ... we're just trying to winnow life down -- back to that original organism. ApocaDoc permalink
Fri, May 7, 2010 from TIME Magazine: Still Under Attack, Climate Scientists Fight Back ...Thanks in part to the events of Climategate last November -- when someone hacked into and released thousands of e-mails and documents from the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at Britain's East Anglia University -- climate scientists now find themselves under fire... In the face of that dwindling in public confidence -- and a renewed surge in attacks from global-warming skeptics -- climate scientists are finally fighting back. In the May 7 edition of Science, 255 members of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, including 11 Nobel laureates, signed a letter decrying what they call the "political assaults on scientists and climate scientists in particular." ...	That'll fix 'em because we know climate deniers always read 'Science.' ApocaDoc permalink
Fri, May 7, 2010 from Associated Press: Maker of film 'Crude' ordered to turn over footage A federal judge ordered a documentary filmmaker Thursday to turn over about 600 hours of raw footage from a film about a court fight over whether Chevron Corp. owes billions of dollars in damages for oil contamination in Ecuador. U.S. District Judge Lewis A. Kaplan said filmmaker Joseph Berlinger must turn over the outtakes from the film "Crude," which was released last year, to lawyers for Chevron. Kaplan said Berlinger could not use the First Amendment to shield himself from Chevron's effort to get the raw footage because Berlinger had not demonstrated he was entitled to a journalist's privilege of confidentiality... Maura Wogan, a lawyer for Berlinger, said Berlinger will ask Kaplan to delay the effect of his order so he has time to appeal to the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Manhattan. The ruling threatens "great harm to documentary filmmakers and investigative reporters everywhere," she said. ...	This means Metallica gets to ask for their spare footage! ApocaDoc permalink
Fri, May 7, 2010 from Channel 4 News: Concern over impact of rising ocean acidity Five yeas ago, no one outside a very small group of ocean scientists had heard of ocean acidification. Now, it's one of the most worrying phenomena confronting those who care about the radical changes that seem to be happening on our planet. Worrying enough to compel a team of three UK scientists to camp on the sea ice floating on top of the Arctic Ocean for 35 days in conditions as tough as anywhere on the planet.... Their initial findings may suggest this pristine ocean is already more acidic than others, and that the chemical balance of the ocean may already be becoming unfavourable for the tiny plankton that live there.... Acidified oceans become worse at soaking up planet warming carbon dioxide. And that's a big deal-- like giant liquid rainforests-- they currently mop up half of the carbon dioxide we churn out. When it comes to the Arctic, it couldn't happen in a worse place. Because it's so cold, the Arctic Ocean absorbs more than its fair share of carbon dioxide. Even though it's a small ocean compared to many, this makes it disproportionally important in cooling our planet. If you want to get a picture of how grave the problem of ocean acidification may be -- the Arctic is a smart place to start. ...	See? More proof that the scientific establishment is anti-progress! ApocaDoc permalink
Want more context? Try reading our book FREE online: Humoring the Horror of the Converging Emergencies! More fun than a barrel of jellyfish!
Fri, May 7, 2010 from Popular Science: Cheap New Metal Catalyst Can Split Hydrogen Gas From Water at a Fraction of the Cost But researchers at the DOE's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory have made a substantial leap toward a hydrogen-based future by devising a cheap, metal catalyst that can split hydrogen gas from water. The ability to pull apart H2O molecules into their constituent atoms is, of course, the key to creating a hydrogen-based energy economy. If we can do so in a cheap and energy efficient manner, we could potentially turn Earth's vast supply of water into our own vast supply of cheap, clean power.... What it can't be is cheap; electrolysis requires a catalyst to split water into oxygen and hydrogen gas, the most common of which is platinum, which retails at some $2,000 per ounce.... The catalyst requires no additional organic additives or solvents, can operate in neutral water (even if it's dirty) and works with sea water -- meaning we could literally be looking at oceans of cheap energy. Best of all: Mo-oxo is about 70 times cheaper than platinum.... Don't expect to see Mo-oxo splitting seawater into large volumes of hydrogen gas right away. The research is still preliminary and the Berkeley team is just getting into some of the more exciting chemistry. They're looking for additional similar metals that might generate hydrogen gas at even higher efficiency, so by the time this kind of tech is commercialized we may have found an even better catalyst. ...	No hurry. We have all the time in the world. ApocaDoc permalink
Thu, May 6, 2010 from University of Leeds via ScienceDaily: Organic Farming Shows Limited Benefit to Wildlife, Researchers in UK Find Organic farms may be seen as wildlife friendly, but the benefits to birds, bees and butterflies don't compensate for the lower yields produced, according to new research from the University of Leeds. In the most detailed, like-for-like comparisons of organic and conventional farming to date, researchers from Leeds' Faculty of Biological Science found that the benefits to wildlife and increases in biodiversity from organic farming are much lower than previously thought -- averaging just over 12 percent more than conventional farming. ...	But... aren't WE wildlife, too? ApocaDoc permalink
Thu, May 6, 2010 from Enviromental Science and Technology: Can the U.S. phase out coal's greenhouse gas emissions by 2030? The U.S. could end its global warming emissions from coal in two decades by embracing a collection of proven and promising technologies, according to a new ES&T paper (Environ. Sci. Technol. DOI 10.1021/es903884a). Climate scientists James Hansen and Pushker Kharecha, together with Charles Kutscher of the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) and noted architect Edward Mazria, say their paper targets coal because it is the energy source that is most responsible for accumulated fossil fuel CO2 in today's atmosphere. Kharecha and Hansen, both of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies and the Columbia University Earth Institute, and their coauthors argue that fast action is demanded by recent revelations in the field of climate science. For example, a draft of the Fifth U.S. Climate Action Report released in mid-April says that current effects of climate change include water cycle disruptions, vanishing mountain glaciers, and extreme weather events. In the new paper, the scientists write, "The 'safe' long-term level of atmospheric greenhouse gases is much lower than has been supposed, [and CO2 concentrations are] already into the dangerous zone." ...	Sounds like we better do this ... for our grandparents! ApocaDoc permalink
Thu, May 6, 2010 from Environmental Health News: President's Cancer Panel: Environmentally caused cancers are 'grossly underestimated' and 'needlessly devastate American lives.' The President's Cancer Panel on Thursday reported that "the true burden of environmentally induced cancers has been grossly underestimated" and strongly urged action to reduce people's widespread exposure to carcinogens. The panel advised President Obama "to use the power of your office to remove the carcinogens and other toxins from our food, water, and air that needlessly increase health care costs, cripple our nation's productivity, and devastate American lives." The 240-page report by the President's Cancer Panel is the first to focus on environmental causes of cancer. The panel, created by an act of Congress in 1971, is charged with monitoring the multi-billion-dollar National Cancer Program and reports directly to the President every year. ...	Another report from the Department of Duh. ApocaDoc permalink
Thu, May 6, 2010 from Associated Press: Deep beneath the Gulf, oil may already be wreaking havoc on sea life, contaminating food chain The oil you can't see could be as bad as the oil you can. While people anxiously wait for the slick in the Gulf of Mexico to wash up along the coast, globules of oil are already falling to the bottom of the sea, where they threaten virtually every link in the ocean food chain, from plankton to fish that are on dinner tables everywhere... Oil has been gushing into the Gulf of Mexico at a rate of at least 200,000 gallons a day since an offshore drilling rig exploded last month and killed 11 people. On Wednesday, workers loaded a 100-ton, concrete-and-steel box the size of a four-story building onto a boat and hope to lower it to the bottom of the sea by week's end to capture some of the oil. Scientists say bacteria, plankton and other tiny, bottom-feeding creatures will consume oil, and will then be eaten by small fish, crabs and shrimp. They, in turn, will be eaten by bigger fish, such as red snapper, and marine mammals like sea turtles. ...	That food chain sure is a slippery slope. ApocaDoc permalink
Wed, May 5, 2010 from Politico: Obama biggest recipient of BP cash While the BP oil geyser pumps millions of gallons of petroleum into the Gulf of Mexico, President Barack Obama and members of Congress may have to answer for the millions in campaign contributions they've taken from the oil and gas giant over the years. BP and its employees have given more than $3.5 million to federal candidates over the past 20 years, with the largest chunk of their money going to Obama, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. Donations come from a mix of employees and the company's political action committees -- $2.89 million flowed to campaigns from BP-related PACs and about $638,000 came from individuals. ...	Say it ain't so, O! ApocaDoc permalink
Wed, May 5, 2010 from Freakanomics author Dubner, in the NYT: Will the Gulf Oil Spill Be This Generation's Three Mile Island? Does anyone have the sense that the recent BP oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico may come to be seen as a Three Mile Island moment, at least for the prospects of U.S. offshore drilling? President Obama has called the spill a "potentially unprecedented environmental disaster" -- just weeks after he endorsed an increase in offshore drilling, to the deep chagrin of a broad swath of his supporters and environmentalists.... That said, could the Gulf disaster be just the kind of tragic, visible, easy-to-comprehend event that crystallizes the already-growing rush to de-petroleum our economy? As with TMI, it won't do much to change the facts on the ground about how energy is made. But as we've seen before, public sentiment can generate an awful lot of energy on its own, for better or worse. ...	I'm afraid TMI will be that generation's "proto-Deepwater Horizon event." ApocaDoc permalink
Wed, May 5, 2010 from BBC: Uganda's highest ice cap splits on Mt Margherita The ice cap on Uganda's highest peak has split because of global warming, Uganda's Wildlife Authority (UWA) says. The glacier is located at an altitude of 5,109m (16,763ft) in the Rwenzori mountain range, near the border with the Democratic Republic of Congo. The authorities say a crevasse has blocked access to the Margherita summit - the third-highest peak in Africa, and a popular destination with climbers. Scientists say glaciers in the Rwenzori range could disappear within 20 years.... According to researchers, the ice cap covered 6 sq km (2 sq miles) 50 years ago. It is now less than 1 sq km. The mountain range, which is one of the few places near the equator to have glaciers, was declared a Unesco World Heritage site in 1994. ...	What's the problem? Now we have two glaciers! ApocaDoc permalink
Wed, May 5, 2010 from BBC: 'Profound' decline in fish stocks shown in UK records Over-fishing means UK trawlers have to work 17 times as hard for the same fish catch as 120 years ago, a study shows. Researchers used port records dating from the late 1800s, when mechanised boats were replacing sailing vessels. In the journal Nature Communications, they say this implies "an extrordinary decline" in fish stocks and "profound" ecosystem changes. Four times more fish were being landed in UK ports 100 years ago than today, and catches peaked in 1938. "Over a century of intensive trawl fishing has severely depleted UK seas of bottom living fish like halibut, turbot, haddock and plaice," said Simon Brockington, head of conservation at the Marine Conservation Society and one of the study's authors.... "If you get a 50 percent increase from 2 percent of a species' former abundance, you get to 3 percent of its former abundance, so you shouldn't celebrate too hard," he said. "That's why this perspective is important." ...	Peak Ocean? How do we geoengineer our way out of that? ApocaDoc permalink
Tue, May 4, 2010 from 'Doc Michael, at DailyKos: Gulf Gusher -- How Bad Can It Be? The news media, unsurprisingly, generally tell the news, not the implications. They don't want to get hyperventilating -- that's not what journalists do, after all -- they just report. Consequently, the signs of "worse than expected," "faster than expected," or "unbelievably bad" are often sort of after-thoughted, usually down near the end of a story. A few of these are indicators, to me, of how astonishingly bad the Gulf Gusher is likely to turn out to be.... We are complicit in this Chernobyl. We feed the beast of greed with our profligacy; our unwillingness to imagine that "the American Way of Life" -- which is fundamentally unsustainable -- could change in response to the new realities must be called into question. The paradigm is shifting -- and we need to shift it in directions that create a life we are proud of, not one of convenience, at the cost of the rest of the world. ...	I can't wait 'til we try geoengineering! ApocaDoc permalink
Tue, May 4, 2010 from Guardian: Fears for crops as shock figures from America show scale of bee catastrophe Disturbing evidence that honeybees are in terminal decline has emerged from the United States where, for the fourth year in a row, more than a third of colonies have failed to survive the winter. The decline of the country's estimated 2.4 million beehives began in 2006, when a phenomenon dubbed colony collapse disorder (CCD) led to the disappearance of hundreds of thousands of colonies. Since then more than three million colonies in the US and billions of honeybees worldwide have died and scientists are no nearer to knowing what is causing the catastrophic fall in numbers. The number of managed honeybee colonies in the US fell by 33.8 percent last winter, according to the annual survey by the Apiary Inspectors of America and the US government's Agricultural Research Service (ARS). The collapse in the global honeybee population is a major threat to crops. It is estimated that a third of everything we eat depends upon honeybee pollination, which means that bees contribute some £26 billion to the global economy.... The disappearance of so many colonies has also been dubbed "Mary Celeste syndrome" due to the absence of dead bees in many of the empty hives. ...	Mary Celeste stung like a butterfly, right? ApocaDoc permalink
Tue, May 4, 2010 from NOAA, via DesdemonaDespair: Graph of the Day: Projected Gulf Loop Current, Today + 144 Hours This is a map of the magnitude of the horizontal velocity of the seawater at the indicated depth. Units are meters per second. RTOFS (Atlantic) is a basin-scale ocean forecast system based on the HYbrid Coordinate Ocean Model (HYCOM). RTOFS (Atlantic) is described in the following paper (PDF): "A Real Time Ocean Forecast System for the North Atlantic Ocean" by Mehra and Riven, Terr. Atmos. Ocean. Sci., Vol. 21, No. 1, 211-228, February 2010 The model is run once a day, completing at about 1400Z. Each run starts with a 24 hour assimiliation hindcast and produces ocean surface forecasts every hour and full volume forecasts every 24 hours from the 0000Z nowcast out to 120 hours. ...	Is there any way to "hindcast" the Gulf oil back into its bottle? ApocaDoc permalink
Tue, May 4, 2010 from Purdue, via EurekAlert: NASA, Purdue study offers recipe for global warming-free industrial materials Let a bunch of fluorine atoms get together in the molecules of a chemical compound, and they're like a heavy metal band at a chamber music festival. They tend to dominate the proceedings and not always for the better. That's particularly true where the global warming potential of the chemicals is concerned, says a new study by NASA and Purdue University researchers. The study offers at least a partial recipe that industrial chemists could use in developing alternatives with less global warming potential than materials commonly used today.... "What we're hoping is that these additional requirements for minimizing global warming will be used by industry as design constraints for making materials that have, perhaps, the most green chemistry," says Joseph Francisco, a Purdue chemistry and earth and atmospheric sciences professor. The classes of chemicals examined in the study are widely used in air conditioning and the manufacturing of electronics, appliances and carpets. Other uses range from applications as a blood substitute to tracking leaks in natural gas lines.... ...	Hope may be the triumph of imagination over reality! ApocaDoc permalink
You're still reading! Good for you! You really should read our short, funny, frightening book FREE online (or buy a print copy): Humoring the Horror of the Converging Emergencies! We've been quipping this stuff for more than 30 months! Every day! Which might explain why we don't get invited to parties anymore.
Mon, May 3, 2010 from Agence France-Press: Jordan River could die by 2011: report The once mighty Jordan River, where Christians believe Jesus was baptised, is now little more than a polluted stream that could die next year unless the decay is halted, environmentalists said on Monday. The famed river "has been reduced to a trickle south of the Sea of Galilee, devastated by overexploitation, pollution and lack of regional management," Friends of the Earth, Middle East (FoEME) said in a report. More than 98 percent of the river's flow has been diverted by Israel, Syria and Jordan over the years. "The remaining flow consists primarily of sewage, fish pond water, agricultural run-off and saline water," the environmentalists from Israel, Jordan and the West Bank said in the report to be presented in Amman on Monday. ...	Humans, why have you forsaken your planet? ApocaDoc permalink
Mon, May 3, 2010 from GlobalPost: 10 worst man-made environmental disasters As oil threatens the Gulf Coast, a list of 10 other disasters both forgotten and infamous, from the Dust Bowl to Bhopal... The oil slick in the Gulf of Mexico is now about the size of Puerto Rico. It's already reached the marshes of Louisiana. Oil-covered wildlife are starting to show up along the shores. Shrimp, fish and oyster harvest areas have been closed. Residents of Mississippi and Alabama are just waiting for the oil to hit. As environmental calamity for the Gulf Coast appears imminent, GlobalPost looks at 10 other man-made environmental disasters -- both forgotten and infamous -- that could have been prevented. ...	Strangely, nowhere on the list is Donald Trump's "Celebrity Apprentice." ApocaDoc permalink
Mon, May 3, 2010 from The Daily Climate: Surprising common ground emerges in climate policy The ad was ominous: A stern portrait of Iran President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, with a missile launching skyward behind his right shoulder. Below were the logos of the entire continuum of Jewish organizations in the United States, 17 in all, including all four major denominations. The message was clear - national security and Israel's safety are at risk. The threat? U.S. energy policy. The full page advertisement in Friday's New York Times was simply the latest example of diverse groups rallying together for and against climate policy. Organizations from across the American political spectrum, from hunters to retirees to evangelical Hispanic clergy are finding common ground on an issue that has left the Capitol - and many state legislatures - polarized and paralyzed. ...	As the bed burns hotter, the bedfellows will get stranger. ApocaDoc permalink
Mon, May 3, 2010 from Associated Press: Tenn. officials brace for more flooding, deaths About 1,500 guests of a downtown hotel complex spent the night in a high school to escape the flooding Cumberland River, which was expected to crest Monday following weekend thunderstorms that killed at least 19 people in Tennessee, Mississippi and Kentucky... Tennessee Gov. Phil Bredesen called it an "unprecedented rain event," but that failed to capture the magnitude. More than 13 inches of rain fell in Nashville over two days, nearly doubling the previous record of 6.68 inches that fell in the wake of Hurricane Fredrick in 1979. "That is an astonishing amount of rain in a 24- or 36-hour period," Bredesen said Sunday. At least 11 were dead in Tennessee, six in Mississippi and two in Kentucky. ...	I've seen fire and I've seen rain... but never quite like this! ApocaDoc permalink