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Archive for October, 2015
Japan Times: “Deadly” radiation levels detected outside Fukushima containment vessel
October 31, 2015I think we should be angry
October 31, 2015
Bill McKibben – 350.org <350@350.org> Unsubscribe
10:41 AM (11 hours ago)
Dear Friends,
Earlier this morning, leaders from a wide variety of environmental and civil rights groups sent a short letter Attorney General Loretta Lynch, asking for a federal investigation of the allegations that Exxon knew that climate change was real decades ago and lied about it.
This is rare and powerful unity—I don’t remember a moment like it since the first days of the Keystone fight, when the same wide spectrum of leaders wrote a very similar letter.
But encouraging as it is to see this solidarity, the reason for it makes me bitter. Ever since I read the first exposés of Exxon’s mendacity in Inside Climate News and the Los Angeles Times, they’ve haunted me.
A corporation may never have done anything bigger and badder; just think how much would be different if Exxon had told the truth. We wouldn’t fully have solved global warming but we’d be well on the way—there would have been no 25 year phony pretend debate. There’d be a lot more solar panels, and a lot less carbon in the air. There’d be a lot more green jobs, and a lot fewer communities, most of them low income and communities of color, dealing with the terrible health impacts of pollution. None of you would have had to fight simply to get climate change taken seriously; instead we’d all be hard at work on solutions.1
I think we should be angry. I don’t think we should be cynical and say ‘of course they knew.’ This behavior should shock us—it’s shocking. So can you please join us in asking the federal government to investigate Exxon?
Click here to sign a petition to call on the Department of Justice to investigate ExxonMobil.
Maybe this will be enough to make sure this industry gets the treatment the tobacco industry got a generation ago. Or maybe Big Oil is so big (Exxon, after all, spent many years as the most profitable company on earth) that it will take more. I’ve already spent an afternoon in jail, charged with “unlawful trespass” at an ExxonMobil station; perhaps, like Keystone, more of us will need to go to jail. (Certainly no responsible person can any longer justify investing in Exxon—this is a potent reminder of why divestment is so key.)
At the very least, please don’t let this story die. If global warming is the biggest thing humans have ever done, then Exxon’s conduct is the single most shameful part of the whole sad story.
So please: sign onto our call to the Department of Justice. If only for the sake of history, let’s stand the hell up.
Bill McKibben for 350.org
1. “Imagine if Exxon had told the truth on climate change.” The Guardian.
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CBS: Fire erupts at another U.S. nuclear site near major city
October 29, 2015ENENews Former WHO Official: Fukushima plant is dumping nuclear waste into ocean on a daily basis; “There’s no foreseeable end to it… and nobody has any good ideas on how to stop it” — Japan gov’t worried that attempts to reduce leakage will cause even more radioactivity to flow into sea (VIDEO) Posted: 27 Oct 2015 04:49 PM PDT
October 28, 2015
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Tony Blair Is Sorry, a Little
October 26, 2015
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If you ordered a WAR! What Is It Good For? Absolutely Nothing! shirt, sweatshirt, or bag, you should have heard by now about when it will arrive.
EPA data shows radiation spike in major US city soon after explosions at nuclear waste facility nearby
October 26, 2015
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15,000 Years Ago, Probably in Asia, the Dog Was Born
October 26, 2015SCIENCE
By JAMES GORMANOCT. 19, 2015
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Farmers playing with their dog in China’s Inner Mongolia. A study says Central Asia is the best candidate as the point of origin for the modern dog. Credit Qiu Pan/European Pressphoto Agency
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Where do dogs come from?
Gray wolves are their ancestors. Scientists are pretty consistent about that. And researchers have suggested that dogs’ origins can be traced to Europe, the Near East, Siberia and South China.
Central Asia is the newest and best candidate, according to a large study of dogs from around the world.
Laura M. Shannon and Adam R. Boyko at Cornell University, and an international group of other scientists, studied not only purebred dogs, but also street or village dogs — the free-ranging scavengers that make up about 75 percent of the planet’s one billion dogs.
Continue reading the main story
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Dr. Shannon analyzed three different kinds of DNA, Dr. Boyko said, the first time this has been done for such a large and diverse group of dogs, more than 4,500 dogs of 161 breeds and 549 village dogs from 38 countries. That allowed the researchers to determine which geographic groups of modern dogs were closest to ancestral populations genetically. And that led them to Central Asia as the place of origin for dogs in much the same way that genetic studies have located the origin of modern humans in East Africa.
The analysis, Dr. Boyko said, pointed to Central Asia, including Mongolia and Nepal, as the place where “all the dogs alive today” come from. The data did not allow precise dating of the origin, he said, but showed it occurred at least 15,000 years ago. They reported their findings Monday in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Greger Larson of Oxford University, who is leading an international effort to analyze ancient DNA from fossilized bones, said he was impressed by the scope of the study. “It’s really great to see not just the sheer number of street dogs, but also the geographic breadth and the number of remote locations where the dogs were sampled,” he said. He also praised the sampling of different kinds of DNA and the analytic methods.
But in the world of dog studies, very little is definitive. The most recent common ancestor of today’s dogs lived in Central Asia, Dr. Boyko said, although he cannot rule out the possibility that some dogs could have been domesticated elsewhere and died out. Or dogs domesticated elsewhere could have gone to Central Asia from somewhere else and then diversified into all the canines alive today, he said.
Dr. Larson, who was not involved with the study, said he thought the Central Asia finding required further testing. He said he suspected that the origins of modern dogs were “extremely messy” and that no amount of sampling of living populations would be definitive. He said a combination of studies of modern and ancient DNA was necessary.
Dr. Boyko said the research for the first time studied three sources of DNA from purebred and village dogs worldwide. The team analyzed DNA from all the chromosomes in the cell nucleus, from the Y chromosome specifically, found only in males, and from mitochondria, cellular energy machines outside the nucleus that are inherited from the mother.
Dr. Boyko traveled to a number of the locations where blood was drawn from village dogs. He said: “The great thing about working with dogs is that if you show up with food you don’t usually have trouble recruiting subjects. Usually.”
He added: “We showed up in Puerto Rico at a fishing village and the dogs turned up their noses at roast beef sandwiches. They were used to eating fish entrails.”
“Nuclear fire” erupts at radioactive facility near major US city
October 26, 2015“Mystery as scores of dead rare sea animals wash up” in Gulf of California
October 23, 2015
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Former US Gov’t Official: “The elephant in the room is Fukushima radiation”
October 23, 2015
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