Latest News
No KXL -
A U.S. Senate bill to force approval of the Keystone XL tar sands oil pipeline fell one vote short of the 60 required to end debate and send it to the president's desk on Tuesday evening. It's a loss for Louisiana Senator Mary Landrieu, who pushed the bill and reportedly begged her colleagues for support as debate came down to the wire. But it's a major victory for environmental groups that lobbied hard against the measure in its final days (and, you know, for the planet). New York Times
So Sioux Me -
The leader of the Rosebud Sioux tribe in South Dakota is threatening to close the reservation’s borders if the U.S. government approves the Keystone XL pipeline extension, which is slated to run through the tribe’s territory. “Did I declare war on the Keystone XL pipeline? Hell yeah I did,” said Cyril Scott. The Guardian.
Starfish Smoothie -
Pacific coast starfish have been melting mysteriously for more than a year, and marine biologists now think they know why: densovirus. Armed with a Nutribullet (as seen on TV!), they traced the mass melting to a virus by mushing up dead starfish in a blender and injecting the resulting goo into healthy starfish, which then got sick. The finding places sea stars alongside bats and bees on the list of species decimated by pathogens in recent years. Huffington Post.
Shrimp, Lies, and Videotape -
“My name is David, and I am the marine biologist who put a shrimp on a treadmill—a burden I will forever carry. To be clear, the treadmill did not cost millions of taxpayer dollars, the goal of the research was not to exercise shrimp, and the government did not pay me—or anyone else—to work out shrimp on treadmills.” —From “How a $47 Shrimp Treadmill Became a $3-Million Political Plaything,” Professor David Scholnick’s post for The Chronicle of Higher Education
Not Hiring -
You know those big job numbers (thousands! tens of thousands! hundreds of thousands!) that some members of Congress (and the press) are throwing around to tout the proposed Keystone XL tar sands oil pipeline? Yeah, they're bunk, according to both the U.S. State Department and TransCanada's CEO. Russ Girling (reluctantly) told ABC’s This Week that "yes, the actual operating jobs are about 50." Daily Beast
Super Models -
“This whole system of observation, theory, and prediction is tested daily in forecast models and almost continuously in climate models. So if you have no faith in the predictive capability of climate models, you should also discard your faith in weather forecasts and any other predictions based on Newtonian mechanics.” —From “Wobbling on Climate Change,” a New York Times op-ed by NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center’s Piers J. Sellers, explaining that scientists aren’t clueless about climate (even if politicians sometimes are)