Star Trek Into Darkness Movie Review

Friend and fellow blogger, Jihaan Karjeker, just published her review of the new Star Trek Into Darkness movie. Click over to her Oh My Stars blog and read her review. Go ahead and bookmark her site and like her FaceBook page, too.


Star Trek Into Darkness trailer - Release Date: May 17th, 2013

Food Supply Under Assault By Climate Change

NBC News: Bill Briggs, NBC News contributor ~ The U.S. food supply is under unprecedented siege from a blitz of man-made hazards, meaning some of your favorite treats someday may vanish from your plate, experts say.

Warmer and moister air ringing much of the planet – punctuated by droughts in other locales – is threatening the prime ingredients in many daily meals, including the maple syrup on your morning pancakes and the salmon on your evening grill as well as the wine in your glass and the chocolate on your dessert tray, according to four recent studies.

[Corn from last year's harvest lies in a wet field on Iowa farms,while fields remain too wet to plant this year's crop]. The USDA's weekly crop progress report showed that just 12 percent of the nation's cornfields have been sown.  [Like your Cheetos and Doritos, while you got'em!]

At the same time, an unappetizing bacterial outbreak in Florida citrus droves, largely affecting orange trees, is causing fruit to turn bitter. Elsewhere, unappealing fungi strains are curtailing certain coffee yields and devastating some banana plantations, researchers report.

Now, mix in the atmospheric misfortunes sapping two mainstays of American farming — corn and cows. Heavier than normal spring rains have put the corn crop far behind schedule: Only 28 percent of corn fields have been planted this year compared with 85 percent at this time in 2012, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

Meanwhile, drought in the Southeastern plains and a poor hay yield have culled the U.S. cattle and calf herd [especially in Texas] to its lowest level since 1952, propelling the wholesale price of a USDA cut of choice beef to a new high on May 3 — $201.68 per 100 pounds, eclipsing the old mark of $201.18 from October 2003, the USDA reports.

“We are in the midst of dramatic assault on the security of the food supply,” said Dr. Robert S. Lawrence, director of the Center for a Livable Future, part of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. The group promotes ecological research into the nexus of diet, food production, environment and human health.

Read the full Bill Briggs article @ NBC News:

Climate Change Denial Conspiracy

Some downplay and deny that there is organized climate change denial in U.S. politics. But what the deniers have accomplished in this country is unique in the world, going far beyond the spread of disinformation. They have convinced more than half of America that there is no climate change and that there is no consensus among scientists that global warming is happening. They have also allowed fossil fuel interests to “capture” almost an entire political party.

National Journal: “The GOP is stampeding toward an absolutist rejection of climate science that appears unmatched among major political parties around the globe, even conservative ones.”

More than 97% of 4,000 international scientific papers analyzed in a peer-reviewed study, published in the journal Environmental Research Letters, were found to acknowledge human-caused global warming.  [Full text PDF (501 KB) - Video]

A recent Yale study found that only 42 percent of Americans believe that most scientists think global warming is happening. A full 33 percent of respondents are convinced that there remains "widespread disagreement" among scientists on this question. Among the 10,000 individual climate scientists worldwide who have expressed a position on human caused global warming in peer-reviewed literature, 98.4 percent endorsed the consensus that humanity dumping CO2 into the atmosphere continue to accelerate global warming and climate change.

Riley E. Dunlap, a sociology professor at Oklahoma State, and Aaron M. McCright of Michigan State call it the “climate change denial machine” in their book chapter, “Organized Climate Change Denial,” for the Oxford Handbook of Climate Change and Society.

In a note, the authors explain: The actions of those who consistently seek to deny the seriousness of climate change make the terms “denial” and “denier” more accurate than “skepticism” and “skeptic,” particularly since all scientists tend to be skeptics.

On page 147 of their book the authors chart key components of the climate change denial machine that together work to feed the American public misinformation that climate science is “all one contrived phony mess," as Texas Gov. Perry puts it.

Here is the conclusion of “Organized Climate Change Denial:”:

Earth Under Water, Hell On Earth Or Both?

by Michael Handley

Human civilization has pushed atmospheric CO2 levels to near 400 parts per million (ppm) for the first time in human existence. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) revised its May 9, 2013 reading at the Mauna Loa observatory in Hawaii, saying it remained fractions of a point below the level of 400 ppm, at 399.89 ppm.

The last time concentrations of Earth's main greenhouse gas reached this mark, during the Pliocene era 5.3 to 2.6 million years ago, the planet was about 3.6 to 5.4 degrees Fahrenheit warmer. The Arctic was 14°F warmer allowing horses and camels to graze in lush savannas that grew at those ancient high latitudes. The Arctic and West Antarctic ice sheets did not exist and sea levels during the mid-Pliocine were about 82 feet higher than today — levels that today would inundate major cities around the world!

The first decade of the 21st century contained nine of the 10 warmest years on record. A new report from the World Meteorological Organization compares the 2001-2010 decade with the 12 that came before it in a chart that makes it hard to argue that the planet isn’t warming.

Today, with the warming atmosphere, Arctic sea ice is melting much, much faster than even the best climate models had projected. The reason is most likely for faster loss of arctic ice is unmodeled amplifying feed backs in the CO2 cycles, plus recent Paleoclimate research suggests CO2 may have at least twice the effect on global temperatures than currently projected by computer models. “Future warming likely to be on high side of climate projections,” according to a November paper in Science.  On our current emissions path, CO2 levels will continue to rise to as much as 650–970 ppm by the year 2100 -- levels last seen when the Earth was and average 29°F hotter and dinosaurs walked the earth. A 29°F rise in temperature would melt all the ice on earth, even in Antarctica, increasing sea levels by 250 feet over just decades.

More than 97% of 4,000 international scientific papers analyzed in peer-reviewed study, published  in the journal Environmental Research Letters, were found to acknowledge human-caused global warming.  [Full text PDF (501 KB) - Video]  President Obama even tweeted the study to his 31,000,000 followers.

97% global warming consensus meets resistance from scientific denialism - The robust climate change consensus faces resistance from conspiracy theories, cherry picking, and misrepresentations.

Media Still Overlooks 90% Of Global Warming, Washington Post Still Won’t Fact Check Columnists.

A new study led by Clark University and involving the University Colorado Boulder found that all glacial regions lost mass from 2003 to 2009, with the biggest ice losses occurring in Arctic Canada, Alaska, coastal Greenland, the southern Andes and the Himalayas. The glaciers outside of the Greenland and Antarctic sheets lost an average of roughly 260 billion metric tons of ice annually during the study period. "Because the global glacier ice mass is relatively small in comparison with the huge ice sheets covering Greenland and Antarctica, people tend to not worry about it," said CU-Boulder Professor Tad Pfeffer, a study co-author. But Greenland's inland ice sheet is now beginning to melt, too. Greenland's ice sheet saw melting across nearly all of its surface last summer due to higher than normal temperatures.

Most climate scientists don't think that the Antarctica and Greenland icecaps will thaw yet this century. Many studies since 2007, including by the World Bank, the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and a report for the Arctic Council, put the upper limit of sea surface rise at about six feet by the year 2100. However, when 97 percent of Greenland’s ice experienced at least some melting in July 2012, scientists began wondering if it was a one-time phenomenon. Now a new study in Geophysical Research Letters indicates it is a sign of things to come and by 2025, there is a 50-50 chance of it happening annually. Some climate scientists have started to wonder whether Widespread Greenland Melting Is To Become The Norm In Next Two Decades.   Miami, As We Know It Today, Is Doomed by Sea Rise; It’s Not A Question Of If. It’s A Question Of When.

BBC Documentary, "Earth Under Water"

Imagine sea levels rising 82 feet higher, and more, than today... Eminent climatologists think a "Great Flood" is inevitable if current CO2 emission rates continue.

Based on research by NASA astro-biologist and paleontologist Professor Peter Ward and a group of respected American climatologists, the Earth Under Water video is an eye-opening documentary.

This BBC documentary uses scientific evidence past and present, archive footage, location photography and CGI to explore the terrifying consequences should the atmosphere's CO2 levels treble over the next 100 to 300 years, as predicted.

Step by step, the BBC documentary paints a chilling picture of the world as the sea levels rise, unraveling the science behind this cataclysm, revealing when it could strike and what its impact would be on humanity. The film also questions experts and politicians about what measures can be taken now to stop the current rise of CO2 emissions, and explores how extreme engineering will buy us time. But the message of this film is stark, spelling out in graphic detail the Earth's apocalyptic future that we have been avoiding.