"Big shifts in summer heat tied to death risk" April 10, 2012|David Abel, Globe Staff
Large daily temperature swings during the summer may shorten life expectancy for elderly people with chronic medical conditions, potentially causing thousands of deaths each year, a study by researchers at the Harvard School of Public Health has found.
While extended heat waves are known to be dangerous for senior citizens, new research found that big changes in average temperatures from one day to the next can be harmful, too. For each increase of 1 degree Celsius in summer temperature variability, the death rate for infirm elderly residents rose between 2.8 percent and 4 percent, depending on the ailment, the study found.
That's why the elderly move to Florida seeking warm weather.
The researchers estimated that greater summer temperature variability, a predicted consequence of climate change, is causing 10,000 additional deaths per year in the United States, a figure that is likely to rise along with the mercury....
Yup, GLOBAL WARMING KILLS OLD PEOPLE!
I'm SORRY for the ANGER, dear readers, but I'M REALLY GETTING HOT UNDER the COLLAR because of the ENDLESS, AGENDA-PUSHING FART MIST on this issue!
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"Ultra-warm temperatures have scientists puzzled - and worried" April 09, 2012|Seth Borenstein, Associated Press
WASHINGTON - It has been so warm in the United States this year, especially in March, that national records were not just broken, they were deep-fried.
Temperatures in the lower 48 states were 8.6 degrees above normal for March and 6 degrees higher than average for the first three months of the year, according to calculations by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. That far exceeds the old records.
Whadda you mean "old records?"
Related: Climategate: NOAA and NASA Complicit in Data Manipulation
Yeah, they lied. It's becoming damn tiresome.
The magnitude of how unusual the year has been in the United States has alarmed some meteorologists who have warned about global warming. One climate scientist said it is the weather equivalent of a baseball player on steroids, with old records obliterated.
“Everybody has this uneasy feeling. This is weird. This is not good,’’ said Jerry Meehl, a climate scientist who specializes in extreme weather at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo. “It’s a guilty pleasure. You’re out enjoying this nice March weather, but you know it’s not a good thing.’’
Sorry, but I tend to differ.
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Meteorologists say an unusual confluence of several weather patterns, including La Nina, was the direct cause of the warm start to 2012. Although individual events cannot be blamed on global warming, Couch said this is like the extremes that are supposed to get more frequent because of manmade climate change from the burning of fossil fuels such as coal and oil.
And THERE IT IS, your AGENDA-PUSHING LIE!! It's NOT MAN-MADE, it's more likely due to the sun and other factors.
Oh, right, and NEVER YOU MIND the LIES YOU WERE TOLD EARLIER!
It is important to note that this unusual winter heat is mostly a North American phenomenon. Much of the rest of the Northern Hemisphere has been cold, said Martin Hoerling, a NOAA meteorologist....
The atypical heat goes back even further. The US winter of 2010-2011 was slightly cooler than normal and one of the snowiest in recent years, but after that things started heating up. The summer of 2011 was the second-warmest summer on record.
BULLSHIT! You think just because you say it we are going to believe it anymore? Start telling the truth about something, anything, and maybe, maybe, you can win back a small modicum of belief, pos media. Then again, probably not. They are not heading that direction as their self-implosion as an industry proves.
The winter that just ended, which in some places was called the year without winter, was the fourth-warmest on record. Since last April, it has been the hottest 12-month stretch on record, said Jake Crouch, a climate scientist at NOAA’s National Climatic Data Center in Ashville, N.C....
I'm sorry, but I no longer believe your records.
Gabriel Vecchi, a NOAA climate scientist, compared the increase in weather extremes to baseball players on steroids: You can’t say an individual homer is because of steroids, but they are hit more often and the long-held records for home runs fall.
And just like the temperatures they have dipped over the last ten years, sigh.
They seem to be falling far more often because of global warming, said NASA’s top climate scientist, James Hansen. In a paper he submitted to the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and posted on a physics research archive, Hansen shows that heat extremes are not just increasing but happening far more often than scientists thought.
What used to be a 1-in-400 hot-temperature record is now a 1 in 10 occurrence, essentially 40 times more likely, said Hansen. The warmth in March is an ideal illustration of this, said Hansen, who also has become an activist in fighting fossil fuels.
Andrew Weaver, a University of Victoria climate scientist who reviewed the Hansen paper, called it “one of the most stunning examples of evidence of global warming.’’
Whatever. He the only one allowed to review it?
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Related:
"Two different weather phenomena — La Nina and its northern cousin the Arctic Oscillation — are mostly to blame, meteorologists say. Global warming could also be a factor because it is supposed to increase weather extremes, according to climate scientists....
See: At the Ends of the Earth
I'm at the end of wits with you-know-who.
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While we are up north:
"Alaska girl, 3, dies in frigid bedroom" Associated Press March 05, 2012
ANCHORAGE - A 3-year-old girl from America’s northernmost community died and her younger sister suffered hypothermia after their mother and the mother’s boyfriend left them in a locked bedroom with a window open to a temperature of minus-30 degrees to air out the room because the girls wet their beds, authorities said.
The mother, 28-year-old elementary teacher Esther G. Edwards-Gust, apparently fled Saturday, a day after she and 29-year-old Richard Tilden Jr. were indicted in the child’s death. Tilden was in custody.
They shared a home with Edwards-Gust’s 1- and 3-year-old daughters in the Inupiat Eskimo community of Barrow.
Police say the two girls were trapped overnight last month in their bedroom with a window open as temperatures fell to 30 degrees below zero. Both girls had extreme hypothermia and went to an Anchorage hospital, where the 3-year-old died.
Tilden later told authorities he had been drinking the night before and opened the bedroom window to air out the room because the girls wet their beds, according to court data. He also said the door’s latch was broken, making it impossible for anyone inside the room to open it.
A grand jury indicted Tilden and Edwards-Gust on charges including manslaughter and criminally negligent homicide. Tilden faces second-degree murder and assault charges. He was arrested last month.
An arrest warrant has been issued for Edwards-Gust.
Tilden called 911 when he found the 3-year-old was unresponsive Feb. 2.
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"Report details US mishandling of Stevens ethics trial" March 16, 2012|By Charlie Savage and Michael S. Schmidt
WASHINGTON - Federal prosecutors handling the 2008 ethics trial of the late senator Ted Stevens of Alaska never conducted or supervised a comprehensive and effective review for exculpatory information, a court-appointed investigator found in a blistering 514-page report released Thursday.
Prosecutors and investigators never do here in AmeriKa. They get their suspect and they only investigate that which will help a conviction. Anything that might prove innocence is discarded because they only care about the won-loss record. The investigators don't want to investigate innocence because that would just make the job harder and complicate things. How can you tell the public you are effective law enforcement when you can't solve crimes? That's not saying all convictions are bogus. Some are just damn obvious, but there have been so many cases of false convictions and government intransigence on the matters you can no longer believe in AmeriKan justice -- if you ever could.
“The investigation and prosecution of US Senator Ted Stevens were permeated by the systematic concealment of significant exculpatory evidence which would have independently corroborated Senator Stevens’s defense and his testimony, and seriously damaged the testimony and credibility of the government’s key witness,’’ wrote Henry F. Schuelke, the investigator assigned to the case.
Nothing new for the federal government. Hell, it's a habit with them.
The basic findings of Schuelke’s report, released by Judge Emmet G. Sullivan, the federal judge overseeing the case, had been known since November.
See: At the Ends of the Earth
But the full report provides the most detailed look yet at the inner workings of the prosecution of Stevens, a long-serving Republican senator, as well as a series of failures by prosecutors to live up to their obligation to turn over to the defense information that could have resulted in Stevens’s acquittal.
Stevens, who died in a plane crash in 2010, was convicted of failing to disclose gifts and services from an oil services executive.
Dead men tell no tales, and I no longer believe any MSM account of plane crashes. So what did Stevens know that couldn't be told?
In the 2008 election days later, Stevens lost the Senate race, resulting in Senate Democrats gaining a filibuster-proof 60-vote majority. This allowed them enough votes to pass President Obama’s health care legislation.
But it didn't get them to roll back the oil-and-gas subsidies, or alter tax policy, or any of the other arguments we hear spewing forth from the campaign trail. Hell, they extended the Bush tax cuts! All we got was a crappy corporate health plan we have to purchase or face a federal tax.
It should be clear, Americans, that NEITHER PARTY REPRESENTS YOU!
The case against Stevens began to unravel in February 2009, when an FBI agent filed an affidavit alleging that prosecutors had failed to turn over potentially exculpatory evidence to the defense as required by law. In early 2009, Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. asked the judge to set aside that conviction because of the discovery that prosecutors had failed to turn over potentially exculpatory evidence. Both the Justice Department and Sullivan ordered investigations.
In the report, Schuelke expressed disbelief at claims by Justice Department officials that no one remembered a potentially crucial interview with a witness. This was not disclosed to Stevens’s defense team, as required by law. Schuelke said that “the complete, simultaneous, and long-term memory failure by the entire prosecution team, four prosecutors, and the FBI case agent’’ of the statement was “extraordinary,’’ “astonishing,’’ and “difficult to believe.’’
Still, he said, there was nevertheless “no evidence that would establish beyond a reasonable doubt that any one or more of them did in fact recall that information and concealed it.’’
As Sullivan had disclosed in November, Schuelke also said the officials connected to the case should not be prosecuted for disobeying a court order because the judge had not ordered them to hand over exculpatory evidence to Stevens, as the law calls for.
The judge said at the time that he planned to release the report in January, giving lawyers for the government and defense the opportunity to review the report and make arguments to keep parts of it sealed.
Indeed, lawyers for several of the government prosecutors filed motions to keep the report sealed, which Sullivan rejected. On Wednesday, an appeals court in Washington rejected a motion by lawyers for one of the prosecutors, paving the way for the release of the report....
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Back in the lower 48:
"EPA postpones rules on emissions from oil, gas wells" by Juliet Eilperin and Steven Mufson | Washington Post, April 19, 2012
WASHINGTON - The move represents a victory for firms that use hydraulic fracturing to tap natural gas resources trapped in shale rock....
Related: What the Frack?
Boston Globe Bathroom Break
Yeah, who cares if it causes earthquakes and the water taste like shit.
And how many times is the EPA going to back down in the face of industry, huh?
Half a dozen environmental groups also praised the new regulations,
which they said would “result in major reductions’’ of volatile organic
compounds, toxic benzene, and natural gas, or methane, a potent
contributor to climate change.
The issue of whether to regulate drilling emissions has become a political football in an election year and amid the boom in shale gas drilling over the past three years.
I'm sorry, readers; I no longer have the energy for this s***.
Obama has talked about the need to tap shale gas in an environmentally responsible way. The oil and gas industry has pressed him to open up federal lands for even more drilling and to keep EPA out of fracking regulation.
Environmental groups have urged EPA to step in to prevent water pollution and natural gas leaks from pipelines or during drilling that could undermine the climate benefits that gas has over coal....
Isn't amazing how pollution -- a REAL environmental threat -- is so CASUALLY DISMISSED?
Assistant EPA administrator Gina McCarthy said Wednesday the agency delayed requirements for gas capture because of concerns about the availability and cost of equipment needed and the worker training needed on that equipment....
About a month ago, senior oil and gas company executives on the board of the Petroleum Institute met with Obama adviser Valerie Jarrett about the hydraulic fracturing proposal and other energy issues. Howard Feldman, director of regulatory and scientific affairs for the American Petroleum Institute, would not speculate on whether the meeting helped shape the new requirements, but he said the industry made “cogent and technically supported arguments for our position’’ in the course of conversations with White House and EPA officials....
So when do I get my meeting at the White House to discuss my going concerns?
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UPDATE: 40 years later, EPA fighting to prove its worth
And now I'm told climate change could be good?
"Climate shift could help struggling N.E. species" by David Abel | Globe Staff, April 19, 2012
Warm winters like the one that just passed are likely to become more frequent as the planet heats up, scientists predict, and many of the consequences could be dire, from rising sea levels to droughts to the spread of pests and diseases.
They seem to have forgotten last winter's record snowfall, but whatever.
But in the lesser-noted ledger of global warming, there are also potential benefits for wildlife.
Among the potential beneficiaries is the New England cottontail, an endangered brown rabbit that, in a typical winter, stands out against the snow, making it an easy target for predators. Not so this nearly snowless year.
There are a few running around here, folks.
Warm winters can mean more vegetation, which in turn can provide a greater food supply for a range of herbivores in New England. That could benefit white-tailed deer, fishers, opossums, and bobcats, scientists say....
And ALL THE HUNGRY PEOPLE, too!! Seems like a GOOD THING to ME!!
Last month, the US Departments of Agriculture and the Interior announced they would spend $33 million to restore and protect the habitats of seven at-risk species around the country, including the New England cottontail.
Is this really money you have to spare, American taxpayer?
And not to be cruel to the bunnies, but extinction is part of nature -- and that is from someone who is now extinct. I miss him.
Some of the money will be spent over the next five years to remove invasive plants and improve about 2,500 acres of land throughout the region to provide a more natural habitat for the rabbit, which thrives on munching twigs in shrub lands and regenerating forests.
How about the habitats for humans these days? How many foreclosed upon and homeless?
What could $33 million have done for them?
But it will be a challenge to save a species that is elusive, has already fallen to such low numbers, and faces many predators, including raptors, owls, bobcats, and foxes.
Scientists are hoping rising temperatures and more low-snow winters will allow the rabbits to blend in better and be less visible to their prey....
Also see: Tick explosion is the price of mild weather
I'm pretty ticked at the Boston Globe these days.
UPDATES: Ambitious Mass. emissions plan called lagging
Social activists find cause as urban ‘guerrilla gardeners’
Diverse BC High group heads to Harvard
Harvard Law student overcomes abuse, gives back
I'm sorry, readers; I'm truly sick and tired of the agenda, and am not reading them. Sorry.
