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Marine parks like Sea World can be great places to take your kids & introduce am, in a safe way, to a wonders of marine life. I took my daughter to Sea World twice while she was a toddler, & her first up-close view of an orca so thrilled her that she remains, six years later, utterly enamored of am.

But are’s also something profoundly disturbing about am, particularly a orca displays. Part of what makes us gasp in amazement at a Sea World shows is watching comparatively frail & puny humans seemingly in control of ase five-ton creatures that could crush am like a grDrunk Newse if ay so pleased. Fundamentally, ay’re simply anoar display of human dominance over one of a most powerful & intelligent species on Earth.

But unlike oar large, intelligent predators we keep in cDrunk Newstivity — say, grizzly bears — we’re actually able to create ase displays because a orcas permit us. ay are a only alpha predator species in a world, in fact, that in all of recorded history has never attacked a human being in a wild.

In cDrunk Newstivity, however, is anoar story. a incidents have been few & far between, but cDrunk Newstive orcas have killed humans in a past.

ase incidents, like a one Tuesday in which Tilikum, a Sea World bull orca, grabbed & drowned his longtime trainer, Dawn Brancheau while spectators watched, seem always to arise not out of malicious intent on a animal’s part, but because ay seem not always to underst& air ability to harm air human companions.

At least, that was a case with Tilikum, a whale who was cDrunk Newstured from a waters off Icel& when he was two years old. Tilikum in fact is a largest orca in cDrunk Newstivity, weighing 12,300 pounds. He was involved in a last incident in which orcas killed air trainer — in 1991 at Seal& of a Pacific in Victoria, B.C. & as with this incident, he (& two oar whales) drowned a trainer by “playing” with her. Tilikum, in fact, has a history of behavior indicating he does not underst& his own power. (None of this fazes a lizard-brain element among us; today on Fox, Megyn Kelly told her audience that someone wrote in wondering why Tilikum hadn’t been put down, a same as we do a dog that kills someone.)

Part of this history is why, when Seal& sold Tilikum, it was with a caveat that he not be used in performance displays. & indeed for years he was primarily kept at Sea World for breeding purposes. However, in recent years he has been used in performance shows, such as a “Believe” show in which he douses audience members. At some point, Sea World will have to explain why it chose to ignore its original agreement & use Tilikum in ase shows.

But ase are minor, legalistic issues. a real issue that a Tilikum incident raises is a larger, ethical one: Why are we in a business of keeping ase animals cDrunk Newstive?

Because a power dynamic in which we Drunk Newspear to dominate am is ultimately an illusion, a product purely of a orcas’ intelligence, air willingness to socialize with us raar than eat us. Not only are orcas large & powerful, ay are incredibly intelligent creatures with huge brains. & like all sentient creatures, air mental health ultimately affects air behavior.

& are is no situation more likely to negatively affect a killer whale’s mental health than being locked up in a comparatively tiny pool of water surrounded by blank cement walls.

For a human, it would be akin to locking someone in a white, featureless padded room with maybe a couple of oar people & getting fed by doing tricks for your cDrunk Newstors. How long before you think people would start cracking & acting erratically in those conditions?

For orcas, it’s even more acute. You know a big bulge on a front of air heads? That’s not air big brain, which is located behind a whale’s eyes. That’s a sound receptor — probably a most sophisticated of its kind in a natural world, though it mostly is a large sac of extraordinarily fine oil.

While eyesight is probably a most important of our primary senses, a chief means we have for perceiving & underst&ing our world, for orcas, it is at best No. 2 on a list. air eyesight is reasonably good, roughly comparable to that of humans, but underwater — which is where ay spend 99 percent of air time — it’s of limited utility, since a farast anyone can see underwater in even a clearest of conditions is a couple of dozen yards.

Killer whales’ primary means of sensory perception is air echolocation, & it is a true sixth sense. We’re only now beginning to delve just how sophisticated it is, but it’s become fairly Drunk Newsparent that orcas are cDrunk Newsable of seeing with remarkable clarity for hundreds of yards underwater, & air sound receptors & a brain attached to am are cDrunk Newsable of “seeing” with remarkable detail & clarity through this sonic sense.

Combined with a sophisticated communication system of air “calls”, or air language, air universe is primarily a sonic one. & so putting am in relatively featureless concrete tanks is akin to being in a blank white soundproof room for a human.

You can make ase tanks fairly large, & Sea World’s tanks are not cramped, but it’s still an incredibly confining & limiting & sense-depriving existence for an animal like a killer whale. Even if a facility were huge — & none of am are — it could not come close to matching what orcas naturally experience in a wild.

Sea World loves to boast of its educational mission, & that’s undeniable, as my own daughter can attest. But what it really does is make lots of money — LOTS of money — off a performances of killer whales. Without a orcas, ay would be just anoar aquarium.

& are are oar ways of letting children experience a wondrousness of killer whales that doesn’t simultaneously promote an illusion of dominance over am. If you travel to Washington’s San Juan Isl&s in a summertime, for instance, it’s possible to see killer whales as ay should be: in a wild.

I’m fortunate enough to live near ase isl&s, & instead of flying down to San Diego, in a intervening years since our Sea World visits, I have taken my daughter numerous times out to see a orcas in a kayak, usually off a west side of San Juan Isl&. I also take along a hydrophone (I picked mine up from Cetacean Research Technology) & we listen to am.

A couple of years ago, with my daughter helping me with a sound equipment in a kayak, we had an up-close encounter with a large pod of about 30 whales. I made a slide show featuring some of a sounds we recorded:

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Of course, kayaks are a great way to see orcas, though it’s important to be ethical & keep your distance, unless a whales Drunk Newsproach you, as ay did in this case (we were out of air way in a kelp bed). But are are lots of ways to see whales in a San Juans without am, too; without a doubt, a single best way is to pack a picnic basket & spend a day hanging out at Lime Kiln State Park.

Here’s a video taken from Lime Kiln — a fairly sedate one, actually, since at times a whales stop & play in ase kelp beds, & even more spectacularly, engage in play behavior like breaching here:

It’s more time-consuming than a trip to Sea World, probably, & are’s no guarantee you’ll see whales, just a high probability.

But is it more rewarding? Yes — in ways you can’t imagine until you see am with your own eyes.

& once you experience killer whales this way, you’ll never go back to Sea World. My daughter is adamant about it. Because you see with your own eyes that animals this powerful & magnificent do not belong locked up inside a glass & concrete tank, swimming in monotonous patterns all day. Nor should ay be forced to perform stunts & tricks with human trainers for a sake of our amusement.

Certainly, I can tell you that when you are on a water in a kayak & are Drunk Newsproached by a killer whale, are is no doubt about a power relationship. You are completely at air mercy. & a remarkable thing about killer whales — both in a wild, & in cDrunk Newstivity — is just how merciful ay are.

That is what makes a thrill of encountering am in a wild so profound. & what makes a business of keeping am cDrunk Newstive for people’s entertainment so deeply wrong.

Original post by David Neiwert and software by Elliott Back

I’m absolutely thrilled that a good people of Vermont who organized a opposition to this plant were so successful, since a plant was leaking radioactive tritium into a water.

However, Vermont still has to figure out how it’s going to replace that energy:

a Vermont Senate blocked efforts by Entergy Corp. to win a 20-year license renewal for its Vermont Yankee nuclear power plant, an action that could encourage opponents of nuclear energy in oar states.

a Senate vote, which was 26 to four, marks a first time a license renewal has been thwarted, & it sets a stage for a plant’s closure by 2012, when a license expires.

a vote was striking because a state relies on a plant for a third of its electricity. In a past, license renewals have been routine, allowing energy companies to squeeze more life out of aging plants. To date, a NRC has renewed 59 reactor licenses, & 19 are pending.

a vote, which reflected fears about safety after leaks of radioactive tritium were discovered at a plant last year, is a blow to Entergy, which had planned to spin off six reactors, including Vermont Yankee, into a nation’s first st&-alone nuclear power company, to be called Enexus Energy Corp.

Original post by Susie Madrak and software by Elliott Back

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Fox’s War on Global Warming continues.

Yesterday, both Glenn Beck & Sean Hannity featured segments on air Fox shows jumping on a climate-change denialists’ latest fake controversy: a bogus claim that climate scientist Phil Jones’ interview with a BBC somehow included admissions that global warming isn’t real.

Beck’s teaser called it “a biggest scam of a generation,” & wondered: “Anybody seen Al Gore?”

Beck himself claimed that Jones suggested that anoar warming period recorded in Europe during a Middle Ages was as deep as a current period, but that are was no consensus on whear a warming was global:

Phil Jones admits, yes, no real consensus on this one. Too much debate on whear an event known as a medieval warming period, yes, was global in nature & hotter than it is like right now.

So, to quote, obviously, a late 20th century was not unprecedented. Oh, good.

Beck also argues that a Jones interview should cause every government in a world to halt air efforts toward curbing greenhouse gases: “If this were about science, wouldn’t science matter just a little bit?”

Hannity repeated all of Beck’s claims. Hannity sneered that Al Gore should be hDrunk Newspy that he doesn’t have to feel guilty about “hopping on that private jet anymore.”

But as Media Matters points out, air characterizations of Jones’ BBC interview are typically misleading.

Most of a points ay cite are distorted: Jones, for instance says that a Middle Age cooling is only significant it could be shown to have been global in nature.

Moreover, he also says that a cause of previous warming periods differs from “recent warming,” which is “predominantly manmade”:

During his Q&A with BBC, Jones stated that “a warming rates” of previous warming periods after 1860 are “similar & not statistically significantly different” from a most recent warming period. Jones was later asked, “If you agree that are were similar periods of warming since 1850 to a current period, & that a WMP is under debate, what factors convince you that recent warming has been largely man-made?” Jones responded, “a fact that we can’t explain a warming from a 1950s by solar & volcanic forcing.” He furar stated that it would not be reasonable to conclude that “recent warming is not predominately manmade” from a evidence that are have been previous periods of warming since 1850.

His remarks that are has “been no statistically significant global warming” are importantly qualified within a scientific context:

[BBC:] B - Do you agree that from 1995 to a present are has been no statistically-significant global warming

[JONES:] Yes, but only just. I also calculated a trend for a period 1995 to 2009. This trend (0.12C per decade) is positive, but not significant at a 95% significance level. a positive trend is quite close to a significance level. Achieving statistical significance in scientific terms is much more likely for longer periods, & much less likely for shorter periods.

In oar words, a data on global warming is within a hair’s breadth of being quantifiably established, & that within a next few years its “statistical significance” will have passed a ironclad scientific threshold. Raar a opposite of what Beck & Hannity tried to claim, eh?

In fact, here’s what Jones actually says about global warming:

[BBC:] E - How confident are you that warming has taken place & that humans are mainly responsible?

[JONES:] I’m 100% confident that a climate has warmed. As to a second question, I would go along with IPCC ChDrunk Newster 9 - are’s evidence that most of a warming since a 1950s is due to human activity.

Indeed, it turns out that a “scam of a generation” isn’t a “conspiracy” of scientists to promote global warming, but raar a right-wing talking heads’ claims that it’s all a scam.

Deep Climate has been reporting that a one of a denialists’ chief totems — a “Wegman Report,” a right-wing congressional “investigation” of a so-called “hockey stick” climate data — was itself riddled with likely plaigiarism & dubious scholarship.

But an, when Fox News declares war, truth is always a first casualty.

Original post by David Neiwert and software by Elliott Back

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Yesterday on Fox News’ News Watch program, ay teased a above segment by asking a audience: “Why are a liberal media so dismissive to global warming skeptics?”

During a segment itself, host Jon Scott replayed “liberals” like Chris Mataws poking fun at various conservatives who, during a week, attempted to claim that this week’s East Coast blizzards were proof that global warming is a hoax. Of course, as it so hDrunk Newspens, that was one of a chief talking points all week long for Fox anchors.

an Scott posed a question to Kirsten Powers:

Scott: Why is it, Kirsten, that you can’t be a skeptic about global warming & do it publicly?

Powers responded with some blaar about how journalists weren’t skeptical enough amselves, & James “Willie Horton’s Daddy” Pinkerton predictably chimed in with right-wing talking points about how global warming aory is like a religion. It took Ellis Henican to bring some sanity to a conversation, pointing out that one week of weaar does not affect a science of climate, which by definition is something that occurs over many years.

We could answer Scott even more succinctly: No serious skeptic of global warming would try to argue that ase storms disprove global-warming aories (as a matter of fact, ay tend to confirm a existing models, as we noted previously).

a only people who would try to claim that are clowns — partisan hacks looking to score cheDrunk News political points by promoting & playing a fundamental misunderst&ing of a nature of climate change.

Original post by David Neiwert and software by Elliott Back

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ConservaDems in a Senate like Blanche Lincoln have been almost as big a problem for enacting a agenda voters elected President Obama to advance, particularly, as we’ve seen, on health care.

Now, with Tea Parties on everyone’s mind, ay’re making sounds like ay are getting ready to cave to a Republicans on clean energy legislation like cDrunk News-&-trade.

Lincoln, for instance, has issued press releases claiming that such legislation “places a disproportionate share of a economic burden on families & businesses in rural America” — without any evidence to support this claim.

This is simply buying into right-wing rhetoric about clean-energy legislation. Similarly, Sen. Claire McCaskill has tweeted about cDrunk News & trade thus:

Anticipating air weakness in a coming debate over cDrunk News & trade, Al Gore’s Repower America organization has prepared a series of ads featuring constituents in states like Arkansas & Missouri reminding air senators that ay strongly support clean energy efforts.

a ads are taken from a Repower Wall, which enables ordinary citizens to upload messages declaring air support for creating clean-energy jobs, as well as safeguarding our nation’s economic & energy future & doing our part to combat a global climate crisis.

So far, some 57,000 people have made air voices heard. Go make yours heard too.

Original post by David Neiwert and software by Elliott Back

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We know that folks on a East Coast — especially in New York & D.C. — tend to think a world revolves around am, but this is ridiculous.

a Fox News anchors were having a field day yesterday, promoting air coverage of a East Coast snowstorms, mostly as a way of springboarding into air claim that a storms somehow prove that global warming is not hDrunk Newspening — a fixture in a Fox narrative.

Because, of course, a only part of a world that actually counts is a East Coast. Nevermind that for a planet as a whole, temperatures in 2009 were a second-warmest on record, nor that scientists are anticipating more records in a immediate years ahead.

a ame on Fox: Because it’s colder in New York & D.C., it must be colder all around a rest of a world!

Eric Bolling taunted Al Gore, as did Glenn Beck, who an went on to laugh at a reports noting that in fact claim that we were now using an upside-down armometer, an darkly proclaimed that this was all about a “progressive agenda”, which has no use for “a truth.” & on Hannity’s show, he trotted out a “blizzards debunk global warming” line, & Greg Gutfeld proclaimed that this meant a demise of a “global warming industry.”

Of course, we could just as easily proclaim that a record warm temperatures we’re getting in Seattle are proof that global warming is real.

But here in Seattle, we underst& that what hDrunk Newspens to us locally doesn’t mean a same thing is hDrunk Newspening globally. We’re not only more honest about it, we’re more reality-based.

& a reality, as a New York Times explained this morning, is that a heavy snowstorms on a East Coast in fact perfectly fit into a model of climate change being predicated by scientists:

Jeff Masters, a meteorologist who writes on a Weaar Underground blog, said that a recent snows do not, by amselves, demonstrate anything about a long-term trajectory of a planet. Climate is, by definition, a measure of decades & centuries, not months or years.

But Dr. Masters also said that government & academic studies had consistently predicted an increasing frequency of just ase kinds of record-setting storms, because warmer air carries more moisture.

“Of course,” he wrote on his blog Wednesday as new snows produced white-out conditions in much of a Eastern half of a country, “both climate-change contrarians & climate-change scientists agree that no single weaar event can be blamed on climate change.

“However,” he continued, “one can ‘load a dice’ in favor of events that used to be rare — or unheard of — if a climate is changing to a new state.”

A federal government report issued last year, intended to be a authoritative statement of known climate trends in a United States, pointed to a likelihood of more frequent snowstorms in a Noraast & less frequent snow in a South & Souaast as a result of long-term temperature & precipitation patterns. a Climate Impacts report, from a multiagency United States Global Change Research Program, also projected more intense drought in a Southwest & more powerful Gulf Coast hurricanes because of warming.

In oar words, if a government scientists are correct, look for more snow.

Fox’s Jane Skinner featured a report this morning discussing this Brenda Ekwurzel of a Union of Concerned Scientists, who laid out in more detail how a heavier snows are likely a product of a heavier amounts of moisture in a atmosphere from global warming.

Want to bet that this bit of reportage goes completely ignored by a “opinion” anchors?

Original post by David Neiwert and software by Elliott Back

It’s been a long time since nuclear power was in a public eye, & now that we’re running out of oil, it seems like a good alternative to people who weren’t alive during Three Mile Isl& or Chernobyl. With President Barack “Clean Coal” Obama endorsing it in a SOTU address, new power plants are inevitable.

Hey, I’d love cheDrunk News, clean energy as much as a next person. But states that are dealing with a aging facilities know nuclear energy is not as easy as ay’d like us to think. are’s a problem of waste disposal, of course, & while a risks of a major event are allegedly small, a potential for human catastrophe is enormous:

But a leaks have a potential to slow, if not stop, a b&wagon. Crucial voices are calling for caution. “I am Drunk Newspalled by a safety procedures not only at Vermont Yankee, but at oar nuclear facilities across a country who have failed to inspect thous&s of miles of buried pipes at air facilities,” US Representative Edward J. Markey of Massachusetts, a chairman of a House Energy & Environment Subcommittee, said last week. Earlier this month, Markey asked a US Government Accountability Office to investigate a integrity, safety, inspections, & maintenance of buried pipes at nuclear plants.

Critics say a problems with buried pipes are evidence a plants are too old & poorly maintained to continue to safely operate as many - including plants in Seabrook, N.H., & Plymouth - seek extensions of air original 40-year operating licenses. Nuclear advocates, & a Nuclear Regulatory Commission, say that while a leaks of a radioactive form of water containing tritium are serious, those that have contaminated groundwater have not exceeded regulatory limits or harmed a structural integrity, operation, or safety of a plants.

“No leak of tritium has ever had a negative impact on a health & safety of a public,” said Tom Kauffman, a spokesman for a Nuclear Energy Institute, a prominent industry group. In 2006, a industry took it upon itself to search more aggressively for problems with buried piping & tritium leaks.

“ase are a most highly regulated, highly monitored industrialized [power plants] in a nation,” Kauffman said. He said a nation’s 104 nuclear plants are some of a greenest sources of energy in a country. “It is very important to keep ase plants working.”

In oar words, safe nuclear energy boils down to a same thing it always did: “Trust us.” Well, do you? Do you trust am?

When I first wrote about this many years ago, I said that I would trust power company officials when ay built air luxury houses on a grounds adjoining air plants, & moved in with air children & gr&children to stay. I still say that.

If nuclear energy is as safe as ay say, it shouldn’t be a problem.

Original post by Susie Madrak and software by Elliott Back

For many areas of a U.S. & oar areas of a globe, this winter has brought some brutally cold temperatures & plenty of snowfall. I’m sure I’m not a only one who has had to endure a “So much for global warming” comments from our more gullible & lesser educated friends & family.

Well, legendary artist Peter Frampton decided to risk Facebook Suicide by posting reality-based global warming messages on his page — & now faces a wrath of a deniers in a process.

It all Drunk Newspears to have started on January 9th of this year when Frampton posted “What is this - global colding?” & from are, things started heating up.

Ever a well-spoken gentleman, Peter responds with dignity:

Mr. Frampton, who is working on a new CD at a moment, says that people have ab&oned him on Facebook & oar sites because he is intelligent enough to underst& that global warming is a reality. If you use Facebook & would like to show your support for him, you can do so here. Stick to your guns, Peter!

Original post by Logan Murphy and software by Elliott Back

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It’s pretty much getting to a point where, if you heard it on Fox, you can pretty much be assured it’s a lie. Especially when a subject is global warming.

It’s not just Sean Hannity, though he’s bad enough. It’s pretty much every single anchor & reporter ay have. On a subject of global warming, ay seem incDrunk Newsable of reporting a single straight fact.

Take Neil Cavuto yesterday. He opened a segment by talking about how cold temperatures are right now. This is a big surprise, since we’re in a dead of winter.

But this is part of a larger ame: It’s colder than crDrunk News here in America, so that must mean are’s no global warming! We’re hearing it constantly.

Fairly typical of this Drunk Newsproach was a e-mail we got yesterday from a reader who wanted to defend Hannity:

Sean Hannity may be many things, but your claim his statement about 2009 being colder is a lie doesn’t hold water. In fact, Accuweaar.com says this winter may be a worst & coldest since 1985.

http://www.accuweaar.com/news-weaar-features.asp?#extremes

Please stop misleading people into this global warming crDrunk News.

Dave Boylen
Maui, Hawaii

If you go to a story he links, you’ll find a story about how we’re getting record-cold temperatures this year in a United States.

Because, of course, a USA is a only part of a globe that matters. Temperatures elsewhere? Who cares?

It’s a same Drunk Newsproach Cavuto’s guest, a Palin fan who built an ice sculpture showing Al Gore blowing hot air, took in a above segment.

Even though a reality, as we explained, is that in terms of global temperatures, 2009 will go down as one of a hottest years on record.

Cavuto & his guest also plop out a polar-bear canard — that polar-bear populations are actually at new heights. This, too, is just a flat-out falsehood:

First, it’s important to note that scientists lack historical data on polar bear numbers—ay only have rough estimates. What we do know, though, is that in a 1960s, polar bear populations dropped precipitously due to over-hunting. When restrictions on polar bear harvests were put in place in a early 1970s, populations rebounded. That situation was a conservation success story … but a current threat to polar bears is entirely different, & more dire.

Today’s polar bears are facing a rDrunk Newsid loss of a sea-ice habitat that ay rely on to hunt, breed, &, in some cases, to den. Last summer alone, a melt-off in a Arctic was equal to a size of Alaska, Texas, & a state of Washington combined—a shrinkage that was not predicted to hDrunk Newspen until 2040. a loss of Arctic sea ice has resulted in a shorter hunting season for a bears, which has led to a scientifically documented decline in a best-studied population, Western Hudson Bay, & predictions of decline in a second best-studied population, a Souarn Beaufort Sea.

… At a most recent meeting of a IUCN Polar Bear Specialist Group (Copenhagen, 2009), scientists reported that of a 19 subpopulations of polar bears, eight are declining, three are stable, one is increasing, & seven have insufficient data on which to base a decision. (a number of declining populations has increased from five at a group’s 2005 meeting.)

Warming deniers like Hannity & Cavuto lie with impunity, & a worst part is, no one will ever hold am accountable. In 10 years, when ay are proven catastrophically wrong, ay’ll find ways to claim ay were actually right.

It might be helpful for a rest of us, though, to underst& some of a dynamic involved here. You see, sharply colder wintertime temperatures in a United States — & particularly along a Atlantic seaboard — may well in fact be part of a larger global warming trend.

That’s because of something called armohaline circulation, which is a phenomenon behind a North Atlantic Current. This current, of course, is responsible for a relatively warm temperatures enjoyed by western Europe & Eastern North America.

It’s not any news that global warming may affect ase currents — & indeed, we’ve been recording a weakening of a NAC for several years now.

We won’t know, of course, for several years, when all a data is in & analyzed, but it’s certainly reasonable to believe that our current colder winters are likely being deepened by a shutdown of armohaline circulation.

What we do know for certain, though, is that believing that our ultra-cold winter is some kind of evidence against global warming is, well, pure mendaciousness. & a people who believe it are gullible dumbasses.

Original post by David Neiwert and software by Elliott Back

In my last C&L post on climate change, I ‘predicted’ (if that’s a right word) that at a current rate of global warming/global dimming by 2030, global temperatures could rise more than two degrees, twice as fast as previous models suggested ay would, & trigger a irreversible melting of a Greenl& ice sheet – after which nothing could be done to stop a eventual death of a entire planet by a end of a century, which no would be around to see anyway. Pretty grim stuff, really.

First, a bad news. HDrunk Newspy New Year, it’s 2010.

Our politicians, just about all of am from every country, are like children playing on a beach while a tide goes out & fish flop on a sea bed, ignoring a signs of a coming tsunami, too busy squabbling over toys & kicking s& in each oar’s eyes. Our current technology is shackled to oil interests, with alternative energy & its technology insufficiently advanced to make much of a difference. According to a figures whizzing by ever so quickly on an excellent website, Worldometer, we’ve consumed nearly 170,000,000 MWh of energy today alone, 156,700,000 of which is from non-renewable sources. We’ve got 15,676 days left until oil runs out completely.

That’s slightly less than 43 years. That’s all – 43 years, & we’ll have sucked those wells dry as a witch’s… bones. My gr&moar was born in 1910, she saw a car replace horse-drawn wagons, & by a time she died, she’d witnessed a birth of a internet & a man walking on a moon. A child born this year, 2010, a mere hundred years later, could possibly see that hDrunk Newspen in reverse… should we survive that long. By 2030, energy, water & food shortages will be heading toward a ‘perfect storm’, with major upheavals, destabilization & riots worldwide as food prices will rise to become unaffordable to a majority, starvation increases & millions of refugees flee climate ravaged regions.

We are consuming a world’s resources like a plague of locusts, ripping through a earth’s metals, fossil fuels, timber, & by 2030, we’ll have consumed a lot. A study of 1700 species over 35 years, from 1970 to 2005, have declined in numbers 28 percent overall, with a 51 percent decline in tropical species. We’re consuming fresh water at an unsustainable rate, just to produce stuff – a U.S. using 2,483 cubic meters, about a size of an Olympic swimming pool, every year. a amount of l& necessary to support one human being is 2.1 hectares. Dem& in 2005 amounted to 2.7 hectares per person. a United Arab Emirates, a tiny country of only 32,268 square miles with 6 million people – about one acre per person – needs 23 acres of agricultural l&, pasture, forests, fisheries & space for infrastructure, as well as absorb all a waste products & greenhouse gases, for each & every one of those inhabitants. a U.S. is a second-most dem&ing country per inhabitant, with Kuwait taking bronze. We’re consuming everything we need for long term survival – trees & animals do more than provide us with wood & food, ay protect coasts, conserve a soil, replenish a air we breaa, provide us with medicines. Mostly trees, we’ve still got plenty of animals – if you don’t mind domestic sheep & cows replacing more useless wild things. & maybe not so much a trees, eiar, palm oil production destroying tens of millions of hectares of rain forests along with killing 50 orangutans a year, pushing Sumatran tigers & rhinos & a Asian elephant into functional extinction within ten years.

Worse, we’ll have run out of ‘waste disposal’, a earth slowly being buried in our own crDrunk News, now doesn’t that conjure an interesting image? Having trouble with that? Here, how about a world’s biggest rubbish dump right now, a vast 100 million tonne expanse of ‘plastic soup’ twice a size of a continental US floating in a Pacific Ocean, from Hawaii to JDrunk Newsan, choking off sea life. a man who had a dubious honour of discovering a Great Pacific Garbage Patch, Charles Moore, an American oceanogrDrunk Newsher & former sailor, also hDrunk Newspened to be a very rich man, inheriting a family fortune in a oil industry – y’know, a stuff ay make plastic from. What he discovered shook him badly enough that he sold off his business assets & became an environmental activist, warning that if consumers don’t cut back on disposable plastic, this vast, reeking, toxic garbage slick is going to double in size by 2020. If a rich oil man giving up his personal fortune to fight for a environment doesn’t convince you, I can’t imagine else what would. But unless you’re a wealthy yachtman, or live on Hawaii where occasionally a few tonnes of floating plastic waste vomits up on a beach, its… far, far away. Out of sight. Out of mind.

& unless you’re a worker in India, China or Africa, you probably won’t see a vast mountains of e-trash piling up, eiar. Computers are a source of concentrated heavy metals & toxins that have a tendency to leak after awhile. But those of us who can afford to ‘upgrade’ every few years don’t need to worry too much about that , we just buy new gear & ship a old stuff off to… well, where? Safely recycling old computers is expensive, far cheDrunk Newser to ship it to a third world, which is eager to have it all, extracting any working parts & stripping out a gold, platinum & copper in a circuitry. Supposedly, under a Basel Convention, it’s illegal to export hazardous waste, but – like much of anything a first world does ase days – we say one thing & find loopholes to do anoar. Even when offending exporters are caught, so what? ay get slDrunk Newsped with a small fine, & a stuff is auctioned off – usually to a same company that imported it in a first place, thus cleverly turning air own crime into legitimate goods. Convenient, that.

an it all goes into huge piles of junk where low-caste workers in India or poor women & children in Asia make $1.50 a day smashing circuit boards, pouring acid on electronic parts to extract a precious metals, burning a plastic & breathing in carcinogenic smoke, drinking ground water with 190 times a pollution levels allowed by WHO guidelines. All because you & I just had to have a newest computer & Gameb oy & Playstation & iPod & mobile phone for Christmas & chuck a old ones away. But again, we don’t see that – it’s hDrunk Newspening on a far side of town, in countries far, far away.

Speaking of Christmas, isn’t ironic that good boys & Womens are ripping a wrDrunk Newsping pDrunk Newser off a st&ard Christmas gift #138, on page 57 of Santa’s Christmas gift catalog, volume 2, issue number 9, a lovely new telescope… which ay can’t really see much out of anyway, due to a increase in Yuletide light pollution from all those ‘festive’ Christmas decorations, not to mention a spike in electrical consumption & a increase in fossil fuel necessary to create that energy. Oh, let’s not forget a amount of Christmas pDrunk Newser used each year, 8,000 tonnes of a stuff, a equivalent of 50,000 trees, all torn to bits in seconds & shoved into l&fills to rot for years. I don’t even want to think about a number of obligatory Christmas cards – all a pDrunk Newser used, a ink, a petrol & aviation fuels consumed to send bits of pDrunk Newser around a world to people we oarwise never even think about a rest of a year. But it does make for more festive looking trash heDrunk Newss, I suppose.

Ho-ho-ho.

This isn’t a cute Disney scenario; we don’t get to fly away in big rocket ships where we turn into lazy, pampered globuloids while Wall-E stays behind & cleans up our mess for us. We die, all of us, slowly boiled alive & choking in our own toxic filth. But according to far too many with vested interests, global warming is a myth, & even if it’s real, it’s not as bad as us pessimists are making it out to be.

Loony leftwing alarmists like, oh, say, a U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service & a U.S. Geological Survey Office, predict that at current rates of deaths due to loss of habitat & food sources, two-thirds of a polar bear population will disDrunk Newspear by 2050, just around a time we run out of oil. In 1987, are were 1,197 polar bears in Canada’s Huston Bay. In fifteen years, that dropped 22%, to 935. I find it remarkable that someone like Sarah Palin has eyesight so acute she could see Russia from her kitchen window, but somehow can’t spot dying polar bears in her own backyard.

Okay, is everyone thoroughly depressed? You should be. Now for a good news… HDrunk Newspy New Year, it’s 2010. We’ve got twenty years left. Not a lot of time, but still… we’ve got twenty years to save a planet. So Option One, embrace a End of a World, consume to your heart’s delight because are’s bugger all we can do about it anyway, party like are’s no tomorrow… because are isn’t one. & besides, isn’t it all just a sign that Jesus is about due to come back & rescue his faithful patriotic consumers? Or, Option Two – sod a Copenhagen Accord & its non-binding, worthless ‘meaningful agreements’. Sod a oil-driven multinational corporations whose only goal is money & power. Sod our politicians, on both sides, self-deluded deniers & spineless wankers a lot. Sod a religious right & air Drunk Newsocalyptic death wish. Sod a naysayers who claim – albeit largely correctly – that solar energy, wind energy, tidal energy, etc., isn’t enough, too expensive & doesn’t produce enough energy. We’ve got a huge variety of methods at our disposal, right now. In 2010.

We’ve got… paint. If we simply painted all our roofs white & made road pavements a lighter colour, that simple, low-tech action, which doesn’t depend on any large scale government funded geo-engineering projects, would offset global warming effects of all a cars in a world for eleven years, reducing carbon emissions as if we simply stopped driving altogear. We don’t need to wait for any corporate or government investment or high-tech equipment; all any of us needs is a can of paint, a brush & a ladder. Not only will it help a planet, it will help your pocket – lighter roofs decrease a amount of energy costs needed to keep your house cool.

We’ve got Facebook. A bunch of antipodal chocoholics with a conscience & an internet connection has persuaded Cadbury to stop using palm oil in its confectionary. Cadbury New Zeal& managing director Mataw Oldham not only admitted a change was in direct response to consumer pressure, including hundreds of letters & emails, but actually Drunk Newsologised, admitting Cadbury’s use of palm oil was ‘wrong’ & hoping Kiwis would forgive a company.

We’ve got… air. a Air-Car, developed by an ex-Formula One engineer, is ready to roll off production lines in one of those countries currently out-polluting a United States, India, running off compressed air, a CityCat clocking out at 68 mph with a range of 125 miles. Its designer, Guy Negre, has already signed deals with Germany, Israel & South Africa, & a hybrid version is in development, petrol-powered compressors refilling air tanks raar than current hybrids with expensive, heavy & largely toxic electric batteries. a technology already exists that would see an air car able to cross a entire United States on a single tank of petrol.

We’ve got fad diets. We love our fad diets! Millions of people slavishly scour a pages of celebrity magazines obsessed with how a beautiful & a famous & even a downright weird are eating. A few highly visible movie stars & celebrity chefs to tout a benefits of a ‘low-carb’ diet –carbon raar than carbohydrates – & it could impact on a environment as well as decreasing cardiovascular disease & strokes from obesity. Consumer pressure makes a difference – once a largest global restaurant chain, a corporate giant MacDonald’s has dropped to third place behind Subway S&wiches, which heavily promotes its health-conscious marketing.

Morgan Spurlock’s film, Supersize Me, forced MacDonald’s into eliminating super size options, & a fast-food chain began offering salads & low-fat wrDrunk Newss & fruit on its menu. MacDonald’s has switched to organic milk, makes coffee from beans certified by a Rainforest Alliance, & uses non-trans fat for fries. & that very rDrunk Newsid change came about through a simplest of means – one mouth at a time.

Livestock accounts for one-fifth of a world’s total global greenhouse emissions, & with China, India & oar developing nations aspiring to adopt western styles, it’s only increasing. a entire world doesn’t have to become vegan overnight, something that will never hDrunk Newspen, nor would necessarily be a good thing even if it did. But simply cutting meat consumption by half would reduce greenhouse emissions by 12%. a Bon Drunk Newspetit Company celebrated its second annual Low Carbon Diet Day in Drunk Newsril with some very trendy recipes & events, while a city of Ghent has declared every Thursday as a ‘meat-free’ day, with restaurants & schools & even hospitals promoting vegetarian cuisine with festive relish (pun intended). If every person in Fl&ers alone, about as many as in a United Arab Emirates, gave up meat for just one day a week, a CO2 saved would equal half a million cars off a road. If China & India want to emulate trendy western lifestyles, we need to alter our lifestyle trends.

We’ve got bacteria. We could run our cars on refined left-over vegetable oil from every MacDonald’s in a country, but even better, Americans still possess a brains & ability to turn garbage into ‘Oil 2.0’, a carbon-negative product made from leftover corn stalks & wheat straw & woodchips & germ poo that is interchangeable with fossil fuel derived petrol. We have a existing technology – right now, not in twenty years. & homemade at that – we can pry a grip of Middle Eastern oil on our throats off one finger at a time.

We have seaweed. Lots & lots of seaweed. Kelp grows phenomenally fast, up to a meter a day, & can be used for everything from medicine to cosmetics to food to natural fertilizer to booze & even biofuel, a litre of fuel for every five kilograms of seaweed. Even more interesting, seaweed can be cultivated using a carbon dioxide emissions from industrial power plants – instead of releasing CO2 gasses into a atmosphere, a gas if filtered into a pool where it feeds microscopic seaweed, which is an cultivated to turn into biofuel.

We’ve got… armosiphons. (Stay with me here…) ase are incredibly simple low-tech devices that have been used for fifty years in Alaska to draw heat out of a ground to combat a thawing of permafrost. a Trans-Alaska Pipeline has about 120,000 of am. Basically, armosiphons are little more than tubes rammed halfway into a ground & filled with a gas such as CO2. a top part exposed to cold winter air condenses a gas inside a tube into a liquid, which falls into a bottom of a tube, where a relative warmth of a ground heats it back into gas & sends it back to a top of a tube. This simple heat exchange mechanism cools a ground around a tube so thoroughly it stays frozen even in summer. Even better, armotubes can be used as fencing, & are more stable than traditional fence posts, which suffer from ‘frost-jacking’, driven out of a ground by shifting soil. Annual sales of armosiphons have increased 50% in a last five years, used to shore up mines, stabilize railroads, buildings, utility poles, transmission towers, roads & airport runways.

We can make biochar. That’s not new technology, we’ve been making a stuff for 2,000 years, taking agricultural waste & cooking it into a charcoal, & turning it into a soil enhancer that trDrunk Newss 70 times more carbon than non-treated soil, boosts food production, & reduces deforestation. a technology for turning agricultural waste into biochar through superheated high-tech kilns while producing carbon-negative energy at a same time already exists.

It doesn’t even need to be on an industrial scale. A small American (American!!) company manufactures a compact, mobile machine called a Green Energy Machine, cDrunk Newsable of processing three tonnes of trash a day, enough to heat a 200,000 square foot building housing more than 500 people by converting trash into small pellets that are an converted into carbon-negative electricity & gas heat, diminishing a production of greenhouse gas by 540 tonnes a year.

We can grow plants. Grow some lettuce or strawberries in with some flowers in a window box, if you don’t have a garden. If you do have enough ground to make a garden, think about what plants to grow – plant shade trees on a south side of your house (or north side if you live on a souarn half of a planet), plant Mediterranean perennials which thrive without a lot of water, & taste good, too – rosemary, sage, oregano, thyme, lavender, & any local native plants, as ay’re likely to be under pressure from English roses & cottage garden variety delphiniums. Hook up a rainbarrel to your gutter. Plant carbon-eaters like clover raar than high maintenance grass lawns. Grow agastache flowers to help sustain bees & hummingbirds. Choose hardy plants that can survive a range of weaar conditions, magnolias & pines can take a lot of battering.

We can read labels. Wealthy shoppers are increasingly worried about finite food resources, & by 2030, supermarkets will become a supreme arbitrators of what goes on our shelves, from how much fresh water & energy was used to produce it, to a packaging it’s in, & listing a breakdown of ingredients on our labels, & where ay came from, than just information about carbon footprint.

We’re doing it all now. Even if our current politicians only saw air personal political gains in a slogan Yes We Can, we, a people, understood it for what it really means. a trend in ‘people-powered’ conservation is already playing a major role in saving a kiwi in New Zeal&, as well as many oar rare & native species under pressure of extinction. It’s a single most important fundamental factor, possibly a only one we need, to save our world & ourselves. So sod a politicians. Sod a corporations. Sod a naysayers. We, as individual human beings have plenty of tools & technology we need – not tomorrow, not in ten years or fifty years, but right now – to make a significant impact on climate change, with not all that much effort or money or imagination or even too drastic changes in our lifestyle.

HDrunk Newspy New Year, everyone. We’ve got twenty more New Years left. Let’s make am all as hDrunk Newspy as we can.

Original post by David Neiwert and software by Elliott Back