Mercury Found in Every Fish Tested, Scientists Say
By CORNELIA DEAN
NY Times: August 19, 2009
When government scientists went looking for mercury contamination in fish in
291 streams around the nation, they found it in every fish they tested, the
Interior Department said, even in isolated rural waterways. In a statement,
the department said that some of the streams tested were affected by mining
operations, which can be a source of mercury pollution, so the findings, by
scientists at the United States Geological Survey, do not necessarily
reflect contamination levels nationwide. But Interior Secretary Ken Salazar
said the findings underlined the need to act against mercury pollution.
Emissions from coal-fired power plants are the largest source of mercury
contamination in the United States. A quarter of the fish studied had
mercury levels above safety levels set by the Environmental Protection
Agency for people who eat the fish regularly, the Interior Department said.
***
From: earthactionnetwork@earthlink.net
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2009/08/16-2
Global Warming and the Only Question that Matters
by John Atcheson
Common Dreams: August16, 2009
"...you've got to ask yourself one question: Do I feel lucky?"
You know the question. It's iconic. Asked of a scumbag by Dirty Harry, who
was pointing a .44 magnum at him; the question referring to whether there
was one bullet left in the chamber or whether Harry had fired all six shots.
Our current failure to seriously address climate change raises a similar
question.
Why?
Because the science on climate change is getting increasingly dire. There's
a growing consensus among researchers that we have to get atmospheric
concentrations of greenhouse gasses (GHG) - now at 387 parts per million -
down below 350 ppm as soon as possible, or risk self amplifying feedbacks
that will result in abrupt, catastrophic and irreversible heating of the
Earth.
Let's render that phrase "catastrophic and irreversible" a little less
abstract with a few comparisons to things we now treat as important and
urgent.
Global warming is killing more people right now each year than ten 911s.
Triggering self-reinforcing feedbacks will accelerate this, killing more
people than the worst imaginable terrorist attacks, the worst projections of
H1N1; the most horrific efforts of even the most despicable despots; or
anything else you can imagine short of an all-out nuclear war.
It will create more refugees than the Taliban, and more of the desperate,
hungry and stateless hoards they, and others like them, exploit. It will
destabilize governments and borders more than anything in history. Darfur
may be the opening salvo in this unfolding tragedy. Many experts point out
that land formerly capable of supporting both nomads and farmers can no
longer do so as a result of desertification from climate change,
contributing to the conflicts there.
It will impoverish more people than the current economic woes, or any
economic downturn in recorded history; it will convert vast tracks of land
to useless dust bowls, including much of the US and large parts of Europe;
it will dry up farmland; destroy forests on a planetary scale - including
the boreal belt which surrounds the entire Earth in the northern latitudes;
it will melt glaciers, sources of drinking water and irrigation for more
than 2 billion people; it will extend the range of tropical diseases and
parasites to formerly temperate climates, killing and maiming millions, if
not tens of millions.
It will destroy more species than any but the most severe events in the
geologic record; it will turn the oceans into sterile, acidic crypts; and it
will unleash a global inferno, as forests, savannahs and chaparrals -
crippled by disease and lack of water - ignite across the globe. Indeed,
these increases in wildfires have already begun.
Finally, it will inundate coastal cities and settlements, home to more than
a billion people world-wide, and it will generate fierce storms and local
floods at a scale unprecedented in the history of civilization.
To borrow from Dickens, these are not simply the "shadows of things that
will be," they are happening now. The issue is will we act with enough
conviction to avoid them before we "are past all hope," before we trigger
feedbacks which make them irrevocable and uncontrollable.
There's evidence that the worst of these self-amplifying feedbacks has
already been triggered. For more than four years now, methane - a
greenhouse gas 23 times more powerful than CO2 -- has been bubbling up out
of melting permafrost, peat bogs and clathrates in the northern latitudes.
For the last two years, atmospheric concentrations of this powerful GHG have
been rising rapidly.
Bad stuff happening now, and more likely to accelerate and become self-
perpetuating each year we allow the atmospheric concentrations of GHG to
stay above 350 ppm.
We have the renewable energy technologies and cost-effective energy
efficiency opportunities to reduce the risk of abrupt climate change and it
won't cost us much to get them into the market, as studies from the
Congressional Budget Office, MIT, McKinsey, USGS, the Sterns Report, and
the IPCC show. But we have only a year, perhaps two, to initiate the kind
of action needed to escape it.
There are four impediments to taking such action.
The first is straightforward, and easy to dismiss: Republican and corporate
misinformation campaigns that deliberately lie about the cost of mitigating
climate and intentionally cast doubt on settled science.
Their lies are easily documented. For example, on April 1, 2009, John M.
Reilly, Associate Director of MIT's Joint Program on Global Change, sent a
letter to Republican House Leader John Boehner informing him that he and
other Republicans were misusing his study and grossly overstating the costs
of a cap and trade program. This wasn't Dr. Reilly's first attempt to set
the record straight. He'd issued a verbal warning to a Republican
Congressional staffer earlier. Despite these attempts by the author, Boehner
and other Republicans continued to misrepresent the study, and some still do
to this day.
This brings us to the second impediment. With an unbiased press interested
in accuracy and facts, such transparent buffoonery would be exposed and
neutralized in front page headlines immediately. Unfortunately, much of the
press is more interested in controversy and "balance" than truth, so lies
like this are only reluctantly confronted and often only when a
conscientious blogger has embarrassed them into it. Even then, the MSM
continues to play stenographer, allowing patently false statements by people
such as Sarah Palin to find their way into print in major newspapers in the
name of balance, even when their statements are contradicted by every
credible neutral scientific and economic body. As a result, the public is
left confused, and a "debate" between "sides" that has nothing to do with
reality or science continues long after it should have been put to rest.
The third impediment is less obvious - it is those who champion the Waxman
Markey Bill as a solution. Of course, it is better to have a piece of
climate legislation - even a weak one -- than to have none. But any support
of laws with near term targets as weak as Waxman-Markey must be accompanied
by an acknowledgement that the Bill is little more than a game of Russian
Roulette, exposing us to a significant risk of triggering feedbacks leading
to abrupt and irreversible climate change that would render the more
ambitious out year caps in the Bill completely irrelevant.
And now the last. We the people. We who would rather read about a deceased
pedophile, or yet another fallen Republican hypocrite, or the latest
"reality" show than educate ourselves about the planet we live upon. We who
would rather consume gewgaws and spew carbon than threaten an end to our
global economic Ponzi scheme, a strategy guaranteed to leave our children
and their children a world profoundly diminished.
So given that global warming is the most devastating catastrophe humanity
has ever faced, given that abrupt, irreversible climate change is a clear
and present danger, and given that we are addressing it only halfheartedly
with half measures, there's really only one question left for deniers, the
enabling press, supporters of the politically possible rather than the
scientifically necessary, and for all the rest of us:
"Do I feel lucky?"
Failing to take serious and immediate action to avoid abrupt climate change
puts us in the same position as the scumbag - closing our eyes, crossing our
fingers and cringing, hoping against hope that our moral failings have not
caught up with us - or if the die has been cast and they soon will. And so,
the rest of the question must be asked:
"Well, do ya, punk?"
John Atcheson's writing has appeared in the Washington Post, the Baltimore
Sun, the San Jose Mercury News, the Memphis Commercial Appeal, as well as in
several wonk journals. Email to: atchman@comcast.net
--
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"The most alarming sign of the state of our society now is that the
leaders have to courage to sacrifice the lives of young people in war but
have not the courage to tell us that we must be less greedy and less
wasteful."
--Wendell Berry
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