That's the pretty interesting, if simplistic, question posed by The Atlantic:

Not everyone is thrilled by the prospect of radical life extension. As funding for anti-aging research has exploded, bioethicists have expressed alarm, reasoning that extreme longevity could have disastrous social effects. Some argue that longer life spans will mean stiffer competition for resources, or a wider gap between rich and poor. Others insist that the aging process is important because it gives death a kind of time release effect, which eases us into accepting it. These concerns are well founded. Life spans of several hundred years are bound to be socially disruptive in one way or another; if we're headed in that direction, it's best to start teasing out the difficulties now.

Montpelier, VT | May 17

CNN - Vermont's governor has signed a bill making it the first U.S. state to ban fracking, the controversial practice to extract natural gas from the ground.

"This is a big deal," Gov. Peter Shumlin said Wednesday. "This bill will ensure that we do not inject chemicals into groundwater in a desperate pursuit for energy."

Shumlin said fracking contaminates groundwater and the science behind it is "uncertain at best." He said he hopes other states will follow Vermont's lead in banning it.

ProPublica, By Abrahm Lustgarten, May 1

A new study has raised fresh concerns about the safety of gas drilling in the Marcellus Shale, concluding that fracking chemicals injected into the ground could migrate toward drinking water supplies far more quickly than experts have previously predicted.

More than 5,000 wells were drilled in the Marcellus between mid-2009 and mid-2010, according to the study, which was published in the journal Ground Water two weeks ago. Operators inject up to 4 million gallons of fluid, under more than 10,000 pounds of pressure, to drill and frack each well.

Stacey Leasca | Hong Kong | May 15

Global Post - Humans are using a planet and a half worth of natural resources.

Humans are using a planet and a half worth of natural resources, according to the World Wildlife Fund's annual Living Planet report.

The report said, "During the 1970s, humanity as a whole passed the point at which the annual Ecological Footprint matched the Earth’s annual biocapacity. This situation is called “ecological overshoot”, and has continued since then. An overshoot of 50 percent means it would take 1.5 years for the Earth to regenerate the renewable resources that people used in 2007 and absorb CO2 waste."

Wendy Koch | May 4

USA TODAY - As oil and gas drilling explodes nationwide, the Obama administration today proposed rules requiring the disclosure of chemicals used to extract these deposits on public and Indian lands. Environmentalists say the rules don't go far enough but an industry group says they may stifle job growth with "bureaucratic red tape."

The proposed rules require companies to disclose the chemicals used during hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, but do so after (not before) they finish operations. About 90% of wells drilled on federal and Indian lands use this drilling process, which blasts chemical-laced water and sand deep below ground to release oil and natural gas trapped in rock formations.

ouuu scary,could hurt job growth.

WaPo

TransCanada expected to reapply for Keystone pipeline permit as soon as Friday

“With Nebraska now on board and the application being re-filed, the president has lost his always-flimsy excuse for blocking this job-creating project,” the statement said. “With energy security at stake and jobs on the line, and he should listen to the American people, not just his political base, and approve it immediately.”(Boehner)

“The fundamental facts remain; Americans are being asked to put clean water at risk for an extreme form of energy that will add nothing to our energy security,” Kleeb wrote in an e-mail. “We are subsidizing this extreme form of energy to boot with over 1 billion of our tax payer dollars used to retrofit a Saudi-owned refinery for their tarsands headed straight to the export market. A transparent process will show TransCanada’s risky pipeline is not in our national interest.”

Rob Edwards | May 2

The Guardian - Hundreds of sites across England and Wales could be contaminated with radioactive waste from old military bases and factories, according to a new government report.

Up to 1,000 sites could be polluted, though the best guess is that between 150 and 250 are, says a report on contaminated land by the Department of Energy and Climate Change (Decc), released last month, but previously unreported.

This is far higher than previous official estimates, with evidence from the Ministry of Defence (MoD) last December suggesting that there were just 15 sites in the UK contaminated with radium from old planes and other equipment.

Just in time for earth day. Another post that shows how our totalitarian agriculture gives us the peace of mind that we're doing the right thing while destroying our planet. Just wait until I get to GMO... that's when things get REALLY nasty.

One thing I just recalled as I was reading through responses is that when I say intensive agriculture it doesn’t sound right to some folks. I agree and I think I’ll adopt the phrase totalitarian agriculture which Quinn uses. Also henceforth when I use the term savage I’ll be referring to somebody or a group that does not practice totalitarian agriculture.

If something isn’t true but we believe it is, then it boils down to lack of knowledge. It could be we simply don’t have the appropriate knowledge required to correctly perceive it or that illusions are preventing us from recognizing the truth. It seems a bit confusing to say this, but not recognizing the illusion is in itself a lack of knowledge. If we know the illusion exists and we have the cognitive ability to overcome it, then we can correctly perceive the original fallacy that we believed was truth.

Any number of optical illusions show two objects of identical size and create a way to alter our perception so that we think they are not the same size. One object really looks bigger than the other. Of course, the solution when somebody asks which is bigger is that we take out a ruler and measure. The ruler shows that they are in fact the same size. I’m sure you’ve seen it but just in case http://www.coolopticalillusions.com/eye-tricks/which-arch-is-bigger.htm

Gethin Chamberlain | Apr 21

The Observer - Logging companies keen to exploit Brazil's rainforest have been accused by human rights organisations of using gunmen to wipe out the Awá, a tribe of just 355. Survival International, with backing from Colin Firth, is campaigning to stop what a judge referred to as 'genocide'

The story of the seed was a foundation. It was meant to reveal a bit about nature. In nature things serve their purpose and would never deviate from it. What allows nature to work, which I believe works without question, is that each thing serves its purpose and follows the law of nature. What occurs to me as I think back through a number of portions of the Tao Te Ching is that even when that text was written some 2,500 or so years ago somebody realized something just wasn’t right. Perhaps at the time they didn’t have the understanding of biology and ecology to see what was happening to the world around them. There are plenty that, with exponentially more knowledge than we had even 200 years ago, still don’t see what’s happening to the world around them.

Apr 20

CSM - The late Sen. Gaylord Nelson (D) of Wisconsin organized the first Earth Day in 1970 after the devastating oil spill off the coast of Santa Barbara, Calif. The event started as an environmental teach-in, with some 20 million Americans taking part on college campuses across the United States. Today, 500 million people in 175 countries observe Earth Day on April 22 as a way to celebrate the natural world and raise awareness of the environment. How much do humans affect the earth?

I was seven years old living at the Great Lakes Naval Base when I participated in the first Earth Day activities, and been happily labeled a enviromentalist ever since. Where were you?

Blamed for Bee Collapse, Monsanto Buys Leading Bee Research Firm

I recently posted some things on climate change and how to solve it. It was suggested that I should do a diary to encapsulate my core beliefs. I'm going to start with a few stories. Suspend disbelief and come along with me. I'm a Taoist so my stories will have a somewhat eastern theme. Before I can start talking about the details I have to set the stage with some of the underlying foundation. I hope that, no matter what you might believe, you can see some universal truths here. Forgive any errors in tense... I tend to throw past tense and present into my writing. I offer up first the story of the maple seed.

"Climate dice", describing the chance of unusually warm or cool seasons relative to climatology, have become progressively "loaded" in the past 30 years, coincident with rapid global warming. The distribution of seasonal mean temperature anomalies has shifted toward higher temperatures and the range of anomalies has increased. An important change is the emergence of a category of summertime extremely hot outliers, more than three standard deviations (3{\sigma}) warmer than climatology. This hot extreme, which covered much less than 1% of Earth's surface in the period of climatology, now typically covers about 10% of the land area. It follows that we can state, with a high degree of confidence, that extreme anomalies such as those in Texas and Oklahoma in 2011 and Moscow in 2010 were a consequence of global warming, because their likelihood in the absence of global warming was exceedingly small. We discuss practical implications of this substantial, growing, climate change.

Full Paper pdf

19 pages, 12 figures; submitted to Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
Atmospheric and Oceanic Physics (physics.ao-ph)
Cite as: arXiv:1204.1286v1 [physics.ao-ph]

Is procreation immoral?

The New Yorker, By Elizabeth Kolbert, April 9

In 1832, Charles Knowlton, a doctor in Ashfield, Massachusetts, published a short book with a long title: “Fruits of Philosophy: The Private Companion of Young Married People, by a Physician.” Knowlton, who was thirty-one, was a “freethinker” and, by the standards of the Berkshires, an unusually adventurous soul. While attending the New Hampshire Medical Institute (now Dartmouth Medical School), he was too poor to pay for a dissecting class and so had liberated a corpse from a cemetery. For this, he was convicted of grave robbing and sentenced to sixty days in jail. In 1829, he wrote up his ideas about agnosticism in a tract and had a thousand copies printed at his own expense. Unable to find buyers in western Massachusetts, he took the copies to New York City, where he was arrested for peddling without a license.

In “Fruits of Philosophy,” Knowlton took up the subject of sex, or population growth, which, at the time, amounted to much the same thing. Like Thomas Malthus, whose work he cited, Knowlton was worried about the hazards of fertility. Using nineteenth-century birth rates, he projected that the number of people on the planet would double three times every century. Unlike Malthus, who saw no remedy except plague or abstinence, Knowlton believed that a more agreeable solution was at hand. What he called the “reproductive instinct” need not actually lead to reproduction. All that was required was some ingenuity. “Heaven has not only given us the capacity of greater enjoyment, but the talent of devising means to prevent the evils that are liable to arise therefrom; and it becomes us, ‘with thanksgiving, to make the most of them,’ ” he wrote.

Ted Thornhill | March 26 | Daily Mail UK

Is this finally proof we're NOT causing global warming? The whole of the Earth heated up in medieval times without human CO2 emissions, says new study

Evidence was found in a rare mineral that records global temperatures

Warming was global and NOT limited to Europe

Throws doubt on orthodoxies around 'global warming'

Risa Maeda & Osamu Tsukimori | Tokyo | March 23

Reuters - Japanese firms are looking at building several geothermal plants in a volcanic zone in the area worst hit by last year's nuclear disaster, a project that could gain momentum after the government eased restrictions on drilling this week.

The head of a group of firms that have studied the potential of a geothermal project in Fukushima said on Friday a consortium of about 10 companies would meet local people by early May to explain their plans to build plants with a total capacity of 270 megawatts, which would be Japan's biggest.

The consortium plans to work with local communities, including those who run hotels and inns at hot springs, to develop geothermal energy, Masaho Adachi, the chairman of Japan Geothermal Developers' Council said.

Fiona Harvey | Mar 9

The Guardian - The United Nations climate chief has warned that US voters risk ceding progress to China and Europe if they opt for a presidential candidate who denies climate change.

Christiana Figueres, the executive secretary of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, told an audience in London: "The one thing [the frontrunners for the Republican candidacy] have in common is saying they do not believe in climate change, so it's very much the decision of the US electorate.

"My concern on this has been: is the US electorate willing to let history progress in such a way that it is China and Europe that are going to produce and benefit from the clean technologies we are going to be using? Is the US electorate willing to let the competitive edge on technology go to China or Europe or would they prefer to be leaders in technology? That is the question they have to answer."

The remarks by Figueres, a self-described "daughter of a revolutionary from Costa Rica", are unlikely to go down well with the Republican candidates, who tend to take a hostile view to the UN as well as climate change. Last year, the Republican-controlled House of Representatives cut funding to the UN climate science body, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

I just went outside to piss (it saves water), but I picked a different spot because my wife complained about the smell (she likes to sit close by that spot in the garden). My new spot just happened to be by one of my orchids; so I made sure I didn't piss on it, because it would have killed it.
That lead to a thought/question; why (always a very bad question); better to ask; what is the reason, we piss on orchids? We all piss on orchids; every day of every week of every year, we piss on them.
Oh? You didn't know that? Sure you did, you just weren't paying attention. I piss on them all the time; but this time it was right there and I actually saw it! So I didn't piss on it!

Charles Q. Choi | Mar 5 | National Geographic News

Antarctic tourists and scientists may be inadvertently seeding the icy continent with invasive species, a new study says.

Foreign plants such as annual bluegrass are establishing themselves on Antarctica, whose status as the coldest and driest continent had long made it one of the most pristine environments on Earth.

But a boom in tourism and research activities to the Antarctic Peninsula may be threatening the continent's unique ecosystems, scientists say. (See a high-res Antarctica map.)

For the study, ecologist Steven Chown at the University of Stellenbosch in South Africa and colleagues vacuumed the clothes, footwear, bags, and gear of approximately 2 percent of people who visited during the Antarctic summer from late 2007 to early 2008. That amounted to 853 scientists, tourists, and accompanying support workers and ships' crew members. (Read more about the gear required for Antarctic travel.)

"Endless hours were spent vacuum-cleaning clothes and gear. ... If one is doing so on a ship underway on a rough ocean, it can take a strong stomach," Chown recalled.

The results revealed more than 2,600 seeds and other detachable plant structures, or propagules, had hitched a ride to Antarctica on these visitors.

On average, tourists each carried two to three seeds, while scientists each carried six. However, the annual number of tourists now far outnumbers that of scientists—about 33,000 tourists to about 7,000 scientists in the 2007-2008 Antarctic summer. As a result, tourists and scientists likely pose similar risks overall to Antarctica, Chown said.

Jun Hongo | Tokyo | February 28

Japan Times - Conflicting authority, mistrust, meddling add to poor preparation

The Fukushima No. 1 nuclear plant crisis was caused by Tokyo Electric Power Co.'s lack of preparation for huge tsunami and exacerbated by conflicting levels of authority and downright "distrust and meddling" by high-ranking officials, an independent investigative panel reported Tuesday.

"There were cases of excessive meddling (by the government) toward people working at the site," and such actions did more harm than good, said Koichi Kitazawa, former chief of the Japan Science and Technology Agency.

The investigative group Kitazawa leads, the Rebuild Japan Initiative Foundation, interviewed more than 300 politicians, bureaucrats and workers involved in the Fukushima crisis for its report.

Cain Burdeau | New Orleans | February 25

AP - On the cusp of trial over the catastrophic 2010 oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, phalanxes of lawyers, executives and public officials have spent the waning days in settlement talks. Holed up in small groups inside law offices, war rooms and hotel suites in New Orleans and Washington, they are trying to put a number on what BP and its partners in the doomed Macondo well project should pay to make up for the worst offshore spill in U.S. history.

It is a complex equation, and the answer is proving elusive.

The federal government, Gulf states, plaintiffs' attorneys, BP PLC, rig owner Transocean Ltd. and cementer Halliburton Energy Services Inc. have been in simultaneous and separate negotiations in New Orleans, according to a person with direct knowledge of the talks and others who had been briefed on them.

Feb 23

Alzheimer Research Forum - Air pollution—already tied to asthma and heart attacks—appears also to wreak havoc in the brain.

Particles that enter the body through the nose or lungs may lead to cognitive decline or strokes, suggest a trio of papers that came out in the February 13 Archives of Internal Medicine. Over the long term, exposure to both large and small particulates in the air correlated with cognitive decline, according to a study on more than 20,000 women in the U.S...

Researchers previously linked coarse particulate matter to mild cognitive impairment in women older than 68 (see Ranft et al., 2009), higher ozone levels to lower cognitive scores (see Chen and Schwartz, 2009), and black carbon from traffic to cognitive decline in older men (see Power et al., 2011). In addition, living in areas of poor air quality for up to a decade correlated with decreased cognitive function in older adults in China (see Zeng et al., 2010). Until now, however, no study specifically looked at cognitive effects of fine particulate matter, or tracked cognition and air pollution longitudinally.