Keeping Yourself Pale May Also Make Coral Reefs Pale

I love the smell of cocoa butter. It sends me immediately into daydreams of hot, summer beaches and cool water.

If that statement seems odd to you, then you are either old and forgetful or younger than 25, or were too much of a lily to go outdoors.

Back when I was a kid, running around mostly-naked on the beach during summertime, the word "sunscreen" meant a wide-brimmed hat. I would slather Coppertone on myself. That rich, mildly-chocolate smelling yummy lotion infused with cocoa butter seemed an excellent means by which I could sauté rotund little body to a beautiful tan in no time without sizzling to a crisp in the mid-day Southern sun. SPF values were something like 2 or 4, which meant that drenching myself with Coppertone only protected me four times longer from imitating a beet, which I did often. Anytime now I expect skin cancer to crop up and remind me why my grandma carried an umbrella (which she called a "parasol") to shade herself when she went outside (and with good reason – she developed skin cancer in her elder years).

But by the 80's, the term "suntan lotion" was gradually being replaced by "sunblock" or "sunscreen", until now you never hear the term "suntan lotion". HERE is a good discussion about the change in terms.

Is it wrong of me to be wistful? Maybe it's because I live in the Northwest, where it's too testicle-shriveling cold most of the year to lay around nearly naked absorbing photons, but I just don't hear about people trying to get tans anymore. Everyone's too busy coating themselves with sun-repelling chemicals. I miss being brown.

Besides, this picture illustrates how "artistic" you can be with your melanoma-inducing love of sun (see THIS page for information on the artist).

Oh, sure, sure, I know all the arguments. Skin cancer = bad. Pale = good. Love the skin you're in. No one wants to look like an alligator by the time they're 45. Even I use Coppertone Sport sunblock, with SPF 15, and my children, who are dark-complected African-Americans, get coated with Baby Blanket sunscreen, SPF 50+.

But before we pat ourselves on the back for being health-conscious and educated about the potential dangers of UV radiation, let us consider a recent study that shows that sunblock lotions washed off of our sweaty, body-surfing bodies are contributing to the bleaching of coral reefs:

http://www.physorg.com/news130762664.html

Yes, in addition to the effects of global climate changes like increased UV radiation, increasing water temperatures, and rising water levels, plus industrial pollution, which endangers some 60 percent of coral reefs, some 10 percent of reefs are also at danger to being bleached by dangerous by-products produced when sunscreen breaks down. 78 million tourists who visit these reefs each year may gawk at the incredibly diversity of fishes and corals, but they are also releasing some 4000 to 6000 metric tonnes of sunscreen into that water. Researchers demonstrated that even small doses of sunscreen can bleach coral reefs within 96 hours of application, probably by stimulating viral infection of the coral.

No, I'm not advocating giving up the sunscreen. But maybe my grandma had the right idea. Let's not rely completely on painting our bodies with chemical sunscreens. Bring a parasol. Or at least a beach umbrella. But I still recommend getting out from under it enough to get some Vitamin D and maybe darken your skin enough to hide the veins. Ew!


Image taken from HERE.

Happy Earth Day! (Unless You're A Polar Bear)

I’d hate to be a polar bear these days.

My family recently went to the nearest zoo, where my young kids had a great time watching the very large polar bears frolicking in their pool, chewing on things like giant soccer balls, children’s play structures, and even a mannequin (!). The highlight for the kids, though, was watching the bears back up to the pool like a delivery truck and deposit there hot steaming piles of poop or streams of bright yellow pee. Eww! Great fun.

On this glorious Earth Day, where we concern ourselves with the well-being of our environment and animals, and the wild relatives of those two less-than-sanitary zoo animals, let us pause a moment to consider the plight of the polar bear.

In short, they are dying because the arctic ice is receding due to global warming (at a rate that surpasses even the most extreme models that scientists had predicted less than a decade ago). Polar bears require sea ice to hunt for seals, where the bears hang out at seal breathing holes and then ambush the blubbery animals. Yum! Without the sea ice, the bears starve. For the first time in centuries, as you may have heard, polar bears are being found dead due to starvation, and there are even reports of cannibalism.

Since this was discovered, a few years ago, environmental groups have been pressuring the Bush administration to take action to protect the polar bear and to reduce global warming through legislation. Not surprisingly, the President is less than interested, stalling protective status for the bears, moving forward with increasing off-shore drilling rights in polar bear habitat, and doing the usual oil-industry friendly activities that belch forth lots of carbon emissions. This despite his supposed change of stance toward Global warming.

Now those environmental groups have taken their appeals to the federal court system:

http://www.truthout.org/issues_06/031108EA.shtml

These groups are now suing the Bush administration to force them to protect polar bears under the Endangered Species Protection Act. From the article:

“The Endangered Species Act listing process for the polar bear due to global warming was initiated with a scientific petition from the Center for Biological Diversity, NRDC, and Greenpeace. In December, 2005, these groups sued the Bush administration for failing to respond to the petition. As a result of that first lawsuit, in February 2006, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service found that protection of polar bears "may be warranted," and commenced a full status review of the species. A settlement agreement in that case committed the Service to make the second of three required findings in the listing process by December 27, 2007, at which time the Service announced the proposal to list the species as "threatened." By law, the Service was required to make a final listing decision within one year of the proposal. The decision is now more than 2 months overdue.”

“To date, the government has received approximately 670,000 comments in support of protecting the polar bear under the Endangered Species Act, including letters from eminent polar bear experts, climate scientists, and more than 60 members of Congress.”

Gee, what’s a polar bear to do? They can’t all live and poop in cushy zoo pools, can they?

Happy Earth Day. Now take a hike, and if you get cold, just think how much polar bears would like it to stay that way.


Image taken from HERE.

Bush's New Stance

I'm shaking my head right now, and that's never a good sign.

Yesterday, President Bush announced in a press conference that halting global warming was a priority for his administration and urged other nations to develop measures to fight climate change:

http://www.comcast.net/news/articles/general/2008/04/15/Bush.Climate/

Please excuse me, I need to run to the other room so that my laughter doesn't shatter the computer monitor and my tears don't short-circuit the keyboard.

Is he feeling okay? Is the prozac finally kicking in, or did another pretzel go down the wrong way?


This is the man who coined the term "junk science" to describe his opinion of years of tedious and well-formulated scientific findings from thousands of researchers all over the world who came to the conclusion that man-made pollutants were changing the world climate. The man who refused to include the United States, the world's worst polluter for carbon emissions, in the Kyoto Treaty. The man who put oil profits ahead of environmental legislation, and even put oil industry notables into key positions overseeing our nation's environment.

So far we've seen seven years of big-ass SUVs on the roads, a war over oil fields, huge cuts in research funding for areas of environmental studies and alternative energy sources, and record-smashing profits for oil companies. When Bush took office, a gallon of regular unleaded cost between $1.40 and $1.60. When I filled up my car a few days ago, at $3.50 a gallon, it cost me nearly $50.

And now, after years of melting glaciers, state-sized chunks of ice breaking off Antarctica and the arctic ice sheets, the opening of the fabled Northwest Passage in the summer for the first time in history, starving polar bears, bleaching coral reefs, and worldwide tours by one notable but very geeky ex-vice-president-turned-Nobel-laureate, our nation's Denier-in-Chief has suddenly changed his tune?

Hell, I'm glad Bush is finally acknowledging what the rest of the world's science community considers obvious, but how could we possibly take him seriously? It's too little, too late, especially for a lame duck who is drowning in scandal and oil.


Image taken from HERE.

Eat A Cow, Kill The Earth

I never liked cows. I grew up next to a cow pasture, and just down the road from a large dairy farm. They’re nasty, smelly, sluggish beasts. Sure, they’re docile animals, they give us milk, they get carved up to give us all sorts of interesting edible meaty bits. That’s cool. I don’t mind a nice thick burger once in a while, dripping with potentially E. coli-infected juice and swarming with mad cow prions. It’s, you know, yummy. You can’t taste the mad cow if you douse the cooked flesh with plenty of A1 sauce.

But then there are all the studies of cow farts.

Yes, you’ve probably heard about it, those jokes made about silly scientific studies, lab rats like myself shoving pipes up a cow’s derrière to measure the methane output from eating a bucket of feed. All those studies about the contribution of cattle fart methane to the ever-alarming global warming problem (like THIS study). Yes, global warming is real. Every scientist knows it. And every politician knows it, at least those whose political party name doesn’t begin with “R” and end with “epublican.” What is a self-respecting carnivore like me to do? Where’s the beef? I needs my cow flesh, thank you. Get in my belly!

A soon-to-be-published paper in Animal Science Journal sheds a little more light on the problem:

Story: http://www.physorg.com/news103983167.html

As the article says, “A kilogram (2.2 pounds) of beef causes more greenhouse-gas and other pollution than driving for three hours while leaving all the lights on back home, according to a Japanese study.”

Yes, feeding your favorite bovine creates a noxious cloud of methane that winds up wafting up into the atmosphere and trapping solar heat in our world, causing accelerated polar ice melts, entire ice shelves to break off of polar ice caps, the destruction of high mountain glaciers, and alarming ice dams cracking, just to name a few outcomes. Think of it this way: every time a cow “gets the flutters” another few inches of coral bleaches, another chunk of glacier melts, and some poor tropical frog kicks the bucket. And it’s all because you and I had to have beef meatballs on our spaghetti.

Additionally, the process of producing and transporting all that feed and meat adds up too, in emissions due to gasoline and other power sources. From the article: “That one kilo (2.2 pounds) of beef also requires energy equivalent to lighting a 100-watt bulb for nearly 20 days. The energy is needed to produce and transport the animals' feed.”

There are all sorts of other crazy global warming solutions, but most aren’t very realistic beyond having our industry-happy government actually put more restrictions on gas-belching factories and trying to change the sorts of fuels we put in our cars away from the extremely-profitable market of war-ravaged crude oil. These things aren’t likely to happen in a speedy way, either. You don’t like paying a day’s take-home wages for a full tank of gas? Tough. Oil industry execs are laughing at you. So what can we do about the cow fart issue? Short of lighting the farts of every bull and heifer in the world, the best solution would be to stop eating meat entirely. That doesn’t sit well with people like, well, ME, who choose to use our canine teeth.

But there’s a solution for people like me. We don’t have to buy our beef or burgers from mass-market outlets like Safeway or McDonald’s, where the beef comes from cows that had been penned up by the hundreds in horrible conditions, fed cheap, “gassy” foods, slaughtered, frozen, and shipped from as far away as Brazil. You can, instead, invest a little bit of your time to find local stores and organic stores that sell meat produced locally, fed on grass and healthy feed, and most likely leaner and better for you anyhow, with no hormones or antibiotics.

As the PhysOrg.com article says, “A Swedish study in 2003 suggested that organic beef emits 40 percent less greenhouse gases and consumes 85 percent less energy because the animal is raised on grass rather than concentrated feed.”

So, to celebrate this, I’m going to consume some Kosher, non-hormone-injected beef hotdogs tonight. I’m not going to ask what parts of the cow went into them, but I can rest assured that the intestines that are now mashed up with other parts and wrapped in a conveniently-edible tube and put on my bun had 40% less cow farts flowing through them than their mass-raised cousins in Texas.

And when I’m done eating, I’ll be sure to hold my farts in.


Addendum (7/24/07): I just realized my last paragraph was inaccurate. Seems “kosher” hot dogs do not include any of the hind parts of a cow, including the intestines, and thus no natural casings, either. HERE is more info on the Hebrew National hot dogs I ate.


Image taken from HERE.

Say No To Crack, Dam It

In a previous post, I reported about a 100-foot deep lake in the Andes mountains of Chile which had mysteriously drained away. After an investigation, geologists have now determined the cause: Crack.

http://www.cnn.com/2007/TECH/science/07/04/missing.lake.reut/index.html

No, not the drug. The lake had apparently been formed by a gigantic ice dam. The dam began melting, then cracked, and the water rushed out into a nearby fjord, then the sea, completely draining the lake (which was about the size of 10 football fields). Now the lake is slowly re-filling.

In my previous post I had hypothesized that the disappearance of the lake couldn’t possibly be blamed on global warming. Alas, though, seeing as how a crack in an ice dam was the cause, global warming IS a possible source for the warming of the dam.

And to think I had thought the problem was incontinence.

Go Hug Mother Earth Today

Yes, fellow Earthlings, today is Earth Day, around the world. Have you hugged Mother Earth today? No? For shame! Love your momma! Go outside and lay on the ground, arms spread out, and hug your planet. Go on, I'll wait . . . .

This year's Earth Day topic is, of course, Global Warming. Every week there are dozens of new research reports, papers, and science organization statements about climate changes and the resultant effects: bleaching of corals, increasing storms and hurricanes, decline of species, rise in sea level, change in the atmosphere and weather, and effects on economy of all these things. Even the Bush administration can no longer ignore the validity and pretend the problem doesn't exist. After 7 years of blatant disregard for the scientific data and a coordinated disinformation campaign, suddenly Bush is an advocate for global warming (though not enough to join the Kyoto Treaty, of course). Consider this article, released today, saying that Bush will be meeting with the Prime Minister of Japan to cooperate in building a zero-emissions coal plant. While I applaud the change in stance, I still have to shake my head, along with every other scientist in the world, and mutter, "What the hell took you so long? Too little too late, Mr. 'Junk Science.'"

Perhaps the most obvious effects of global warming can be seen anywhere there is "permanent" ice. Glaciers are melting and disappearing all over the world. Giant icebergs are breaking off both in the Arctic and Antarctic. And huge changes are happening to the ecology at both poles. Consider a report released last week:

http://www.physorg.com/news95869506.html

According to the report, the sea ice is forming later, freezing thinner, and thawing sooner in the arctic. As a result, more and more Inuit hunters are falling through thin ice and drowning; animals never before seen in those cold waters are now migrating to the region, including finches, robins, and even dolphins, which the Inuit have no words for; cold-climate mammals such as polar bears are migrating further north; and, interestingly, the Inuit in certain regions are unable to build igloos anymore.

Polar bears are starving or drowning from exhaustion. Sea ice is growing thinner and melting away, revealing new islands. What are we to do?

There are many, many things you can do. A simple search on the web will produce action lists - everything from being energy-conscious, taking part in political action, or simply planting a tree. HERE, HERE, and HERE are some sample pages. But the main thing, of course, is to educate yourself, dummy, and pay attention, unless, of course, you don't mind increasing heat waves, hurricanes, and the loss of many species all over the world. Those species were WEAK, anyway! Who needs 'em? Buck up, polar bears! Learn to fish.

Yeah, yeah, I know. You've heard it all, already. Every frickin' day there's some report on Headline News about this stuff. Frickin' "liberal media"! It's becoming wallpaper. But let's not get too used to this wallpaper. It gets an uglier shade every week, and before long you won't be able to ignore it anymore.

You didn't actually go out and hug the ground, did you? I see you, sitting there at your computer. I can read your mind, too. You're thinking about playing computer solitaire, aren't you? Typical. Now go out and hug the planet. Momma Earth loves you.

Clueless Conservatives and Global Warming

I'm always amazed at the depth of scientific ignorance exuded by the conservative Republicans in Washington. Take, for instance, recent comments by the outgoing chairperson of the Senate Environment Committee, James Inhofe. Here's a link to an article heard on NPR:

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=6591614

The not-so-honorable senator from Oklahoma has been a stalwart warrior against science and reason, especially on the issue of global warming. According to Inhofe, the issue of global warming has been "the greatest hoax perpetrated on the American people," echoing views expressed by his leader, President Bush. He then went on to say that the media was at fault for keeping the hoax alive, naming all the great news networks and services (except Fox, of course). The media wasn't given a chance to reply. Go ahead and blame the messenger, James, it's a sign of desperation.

Inhofe dredged up a couple of unknowns to back up his statements, one of whom actually said that, instead of stopping the release of greenhouse gases, we should instead emit as much as possible, to "stop another ice age." Come again!? Never mind that all the great minds of science agree that mankind has been the leading cause of greenhouse gases and that the effects of global warming are being felt everywhere in the environment, including the destruction of Arctic and Antarctic ice shelves and the resulting rise in ocean levels, the death of coral and other sensitive animals, and even the greater strength of hurricanes due to warmer waters, such as was seen with hurricane Katrina. Adversaries of scientific reason used to say global warming was a hoax because there wasn't firm data. When scientists showed firm data, those people claimed it was a natural phenomenon, as seen in eons past. When scientists showed data that current temperature increases and carbon dioxide concentrations were far, far higher than anything in the past, those people now claim it is somehow good for us. Maybe next they'll say it'll be nice to go outside and enjoy a pleasant sauna in the wintertime.

It boggles my mind how conservative Republicans can think this way. We're talking here about nothing less than saving the world. Wouldn't you rather trust the word of thousands of scientists who have dedicated their lives to studying global warming, or would you instead focus on the opinions of a few outside dissenters and help corrupt industries and their lobbyists avoid anti-pollution legislation? Seems like a no-brainer if your goal is safeguarding our people, eh?

For a good treatise on the global warming, see Al Gore's movie, "An Inconvenient Truth." Here's a link evaluating the movie: http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2006/05/060524-global-warming.html

Lucky for us, Democrats now control both houses, and liberal senator Barbara Boxer (who agrees with scientists) will control the committee. Though Inhofe will still sit on the committee, he won't be able to call meetings or block legislation. Go, Barbara!