Climate change is real
Posted on | May 6, 2010 | 5 Comments
Source: NASA. Click on the graphic to be taken to NASA's page outlining key climate change indicators.
It’s a rare letter whose content runs a page and a half and whose signatures take up four and a half more. But that is the scale of consensus about climate change from 255 of the country’s leading scientists, including 11 Nobel laureates, who in today’s Science magazine once again try to drive home the message that Climate Change is Real. To get through to the likes of George Will, they keep it simple:
(i) The planet is warming due to increased concentrations of heat-trapping gases in our atmosphere. A snowy winter in Washington does not alter this fact.
(ii) Most of the increase in the concentration of these gases over the last century is due to human activities, especially the burning of fossil fuels and deforestation.
(iii) Natural causes always play a role in changing Earth’s climate, but are now being overwhelmed by human-induced changes.
(iv) Warming the planet will cause many other climatic patterns to change at speeds unprecedented in modern times, including increasing rates of sea-level rise and alterations in the hydrologic cycle. Rising concentrations of carbon dioxide are making the oceans more acidic.
(v) The combination of these complex climate changes threatens coastal communities and cities, our food and water supplies, marine and freshwater ecosystems, forests, high mountain environments, and far more.
To read the letter, click here. To read what Pacific Institute President Peter Gleick, a signatory of the letter, has to add for climate change deniers today in the San Francisco Chronicle blog “City Brights,” click here.
Review-Journal sues its own source
Posted on | May 5, 2010 | 2 Comments
Anyone who doubts that enforcement of copyright law is out of step with fair play and how journalism is gathered should consider that yesterday representatives for the Las Vegas Review-Journal filed suit against the Progressive Leadership Alliance of Nevada.
The case against the liberal advocacy group joins a growing list of complaints by the R-J’s parent company, Stephens Media, and its legal affiliate, Righthaven LLC, which in recent months have filed suit against a number of organizations as disparate as a Killerfrogs.com, a sports booster website of Texas Christian University, the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws and a realty office based in Henderson, Nevada.
Each suit claims copyright infringement on the grounds that the organizations posted articles by Stephens Media outlets on their websites.
Leaving aside the Killer Frogs, marijuana advocates and the realtor, what makes yesterday’s lawsuit against the Progressive Leadership Alliance of Nevada remarkable is that among the exhibits in the complaint is one for posting a story on its website in which PLAN itself was a subject of the article.
Click here to keep reading
Tags: chance of rain > Las Vegas Review-Journal > Progressive Leadership Alliance of Nevada > Righthaven llc
Badass tats for a good cause
Posted on | May 5, 2010 | 2 Comments
It’s been a long dry spell since the “save water, shower with a friend” campaign from back in the day (when was it? 1970s? 80s?). But finally conservationists are having some fun again. And this time they’re bearing some badass tats. To learn more about a new non-profit, SaveTheColorado.org and a grant program dedicated purely to foment conservation along the river’s nearly 15,000 mile course, click here.
Kay sera sera
Posted on | May 4, 2010 | 1 Comment
Kay Brothers retires this week as Deputy General Manager of the Southern Nevada Water Authority. There will probably be parties and there should be toasts, during which she may be heralded as a force in developing groundwater storage programs for the Las Vegas Valley Water District in the late 1980s and early 1990s.
Even her worst critics would have to raise a glass. The kind of storage of Colorado River water undertaken by Brothers and Terry Katzer, the man who hired her in 1986 at the SNWA seed agency, was a model of progressive water management in a desert where evaporation empties reservoirs with sparkling remorselessness — and in a valley where subsidence is measured in feet, not inches.
However, it is unlikely that she will be remembered for that. Rather, second only to her boss Pat Mulroy, Brothers has been Justifier-in-Chief for the Las Vegas pipeline project unveiled in 1989.
Click here to keep reading
Tags: chance of rain > Emily Green > Kay Brothers > Southern Nevada Water Authority
Beyond the pale
Posted on | May 3, 2010 | No Comments
Oil slick from the British Petroleum spill in the Gulf of Mexico spreads toward the Mississippi Delta. Source: NASA. Click on the image to be taken to its Earth Observatory for the history of this May 1 image and other images of the disaster.
From the New York Times Greenwire: “BP used to stand for ‘British Petroleum.’ Now the company wants people to think ‘Beyond Petroleum.’ But in the eyes of the Obama administration it’s starting to mean ‘blame petroleum.’ They cannot cite a specific complaint beyond a desire that the company work faster to find a solution to the river of crude pouring out of its well. But Obama’s Cabinet secretaries have started poking some verbal kidney punches at the oil giant.” To keep reading, click here.
In fact, BP still stands for British Petroleum. To read its account of the clean up efforts, click here, or for about how its Chief Executive accepts responsibility for mop up, but not the accident, in the Los Angeles Times, here. Or for full news round-ups, print and video links, go to the Huffington Post, whose homepage leads with this image of how the oil spill spread in the two days since the NASA image was taken.
Click on the image to be taken to exhaustive links to oil spill coverage in the Huffington Post.
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