James’s Blog

There’s a change of policy when climbing Mt. Whitney: you must pack out your own poop. New York Times did an article about it, with a riveting video. There goes any chance of Carson climbing Mt. Whitney with me. I thought one only has to do this for glacier crossing and mountaineering, because of a lack of decomposition in that environment, but the trend is coming to backpacking. I only knew about these poop tubes, but apprarently the new Wag Bags work pretty well, and the rangers are handing them out to the hikers.

a Wag Bag in action

The videos prove that the butcher you appear, the queasier you feel about pooping in a bag and taking it with you:

Eww! No way!

No problem. Look.

This is happening in Whiting, IN, 25 miles from where I live. Here is the summary of the excellent Tribune article:

• BP wants to expand their facility to refine heavier Canadian crude oil. This costs 3.8 billion dollars. There will be 80 new jobs.
• BP wants to release 54 percent more ammonia and 35 percent more sludge into Lake Michigan each day, bringing the total to, on average, 1,584 pounds of ammonia and 4,925 pounds of sludge. The total wastewater flow into Lake Michigan will remain at a constant 21 million gallons a day.
• BP says they can’t clean the wastewater because they don’t have room to build additional cleaning facilities. State and federal officials agree.
• The sludge amount matches the maximum amount allowed under federal guideline. Even so, the Clean Water Act prohibits any downgrade in water quality near a pollution source even if discharge limits are met. BP got around this rule by mixing the waste water with fresh water 200 feet offshore. This is actually against Indiana law, but the state officials granted an exception. Federal officials do nothing.

We wouldn’t expect the federal officials under this administration to do anything to improve (or simply stop degrading) our lives. But the Indiana officials don’t have enough foresight to realize that those 80 jobs aren’t going to last if there’s some economic downturn, while the heavy metal in the sludge will probably be around for a few centuries. They apprently learned nothing from the experiences in Michigan, where cities remain broken and polluted after the auto industry left.

BP spends billions on expansion, but has no money to, say, cart off the waste to some remote corner of Indiana hinterland. Instead BP dumps the waste into the lake that is the water source for millions. It’s as if they’re deliberately trying to offset their green image.

The water level at Lake Superior is about 10 inches below normal and near its recorded historical low. At least the NOAA chart above doesn’t look quite like Bush’s approval rating just yet. Who knows if this is due to global warming or some sort of natural cycle, or if this even matters in the long run, but the look of the landscape has already been affected. The effect is probably most pronounced near the Mosquito area.

Mosquito camp, 2004

Mosquito camp, 2007

That’ll reduce the mosquito problem at Mosquito! More comparisons after the jump.

Continue Reading »

Peter Doran is the lead author of this Nature article [UMICH] about how parts of Antarctica is cooling, which skeptics often cites as an evidence against global warming. Doran distances himself from the global warming skeptics in a NY Times article. A lengthier version of the article is on Doran’s website, as well as some links explaining and supporting the claims in his article. He makes the following observations on the skeptics and the debate in general:

1. It has always amazed me that skeptics of climate warming are quite ready to distrust 99% of the scientific community, but they immediately trust me only because I wrote a paper they “thought” supported their argument.

2. My favorite argument from global warming critics is “it’s been warmer than this in the past” or “temperatures fluctuate all the time”. But how do they know this? Because of the scientific evidence. So why do they question everything said by climate scientists concerning modern climate??

3. When did discussing the weather become political?

Well, discussing the weather shouldn’t political, not if we stay away from talking about fixing the weather, even though people often talk about the two topics at the same time. The debate in the future will be whether it’s better to direct resources to fixing global warming or to try adapting to it. I’m in the camp of fixing it, because I don’t like not knowing when that steep slope in the temperature graph is going to end.

For those who may have been abused by science when they were young and have trust issues, Wikipedia has some nice charts that show how the temps are increasing, and they do correspond to increase of carbon dioxide, etc. Now, Wikipedia is something we all can love and trust, right?