WASHINGTON — BP’s runaway Deepwater Horizon well may be spewing what the company once-called its worst case scenario – 100,000 barrels a day, a member of the government panel told McClatchy Monday. ‘In the data I’ve seen, there’s nothing inconsistent with BP’s worst case scenario,’ Ira Leifer, an associate researcher at the Marine Science Institute of the University of California, Santa Barbara, and a member of the government’s Flow Rate Technical Group, told McClatchy. Leifer said that based on satellite data he’s examined, the rate of flow from the well has been increasing over time, especially since BP’s ‘top kill’ effort failed last month to stanch the flow. The decision last week to sever the well’s damaged riser pipe from the its blowout preventer in order to install a ‘top hat’ containment device has increased the flow still more _ far more, Leifer said, than the 20 percent that BP and the Obama administration predicted. Leifer noted that BP had estimated before the April 20 explosion that caused the leak that a freely flowing pipe from the well would release 100,000 barrels of oil a day in the worst-case scenario. The oil was not freely flowing […]
Don’t worry about the oil spilling into the Gulf, Rep. Don Young (R-Alaska) says, because the worst spill in U.S. history is ‘not an environmental disaster,’ just nature taking its course. ‘This is not an environmental disaster, and I will say that again and again because it is a natural phenomenon,’ Young said after Congressional hearings last week. ‘Oil has seeped into this ocean for centuries, will continue to do it. During World War II there was over 10 million barrels of oil spilt from ships, and no natural catastrophe. … We will lose some birds, we will lose some fixed sealife, but overall it will recover.’ Young, of course, has notoriously close and longstanding ties with oil companies, and went on to criticize the Obama administration’s stated moratorium on new offshore drilling permits in the wake of the Gulf spill. The Alaska Republican has already taken heat for those comments from his challengers on both sides of the aisle. ‘The man is an ostrich,’ Democrat Harry Crawford said. ‘He has his head in the sand if he can’t see that this is one of the biggest, if not the biggest, man-made disaster in history.’ Republican […]
Earth and space are about to come into contact in a way that’s new to human history. To make preparations, authorities in Washington DC are holding a meeting: The Space Weather Enterprise Forum at the National Press Club on June 8th. Richard Fisher, head of NASA’s Heliophysics Division, explains what it’s all about: ‘The sun is waking up from a deep slumber, and in the next few years we expect to see much higher levels of solar activity. At the same time, our technological society has developed an unprecedented sensitivity to solar storms. The intersection of these two issues is what we’re getting together to discuss.’ The National Academy of Sciences framed the problem two years ago in a landmark report entitled ‘Severe Space Weather Events-Societal and Economic Impacts.’ It noted how people of the 21st-century rely on high-tech systems for the basics of daily life. Smart power grids, GPS navigation, air travel, financial services and emergency radio communications can all be knocked out by intense solar activity. A century-class solar storm, the Academy warned, could cause twenty times more economic damage than Hurricane Katrina. Much of the damage can be mitigated if managers know a […]
About one in five women are obese when they become pregnant, meaning they have a body mass index of at least 30, as would a 5-foot-5 woman weighing 180 pounds, according to researchers with the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. And medical evidence suggests that obesity might be contributing to record-high rates of Caesarean sections and leading to more birth defects and deaths for mothers and babies. Hospitals, especially in poor neighborhoods, have been forced to adjust. They are buying longer surgical instruments, more sophisticated fetal testing machines and bigger beds. They are holding sensitivity training for staff members and counseling women about losing weight, or even having bariatric surgery, before they become pregnant. At Maimonides Medical Center in Brooklyn, where 38 percent of women giving birth are obese, Patricia Garcia had to be admitted after she had a stroke, part of a constellation of illnesses related to her weight, including diabetes and weak kidneys. At seven months pregnant, she should have been feeling the thump of tiny feet against her belly. But as she lay flat in her hospital bed, doctors buzzing about, trying to stretch out her pregnancy day by precious day, Ms. […]
Did you know that the best way to reclaim arid land is to let animals graze on it? Or that the hottest new things on wheels may be motorless cars and folding scooters that operate only with power generated by batteries in their wheel hubs? Or that to clean up toxic wastewater you needn’t go the expense of gigantic waste purification plants—-you can do it with a mix of bacteria, plants and other environmentally sound eco-systems costing far less and much more ecologically friendly? If you didn’t know these things you haven’t been following the tracks of the Buckinster Fuller Challenge grants. The past three winners of the Challenge are at work, today, doing all these things. And even the losers in this year’s competition are hard at it with jaw dropping projects. One honorable mention went to a Chicago group that’s developed a system to capture, clean and return 100% of the city’s wastewater and storm-water to its nearby lakes. Now all that water is dumped into the Mississippi and goes down to the Gulf of Mexico. Another honorable mention went to a group called Barefoot College, aptly named because it teaches illiterate, rural […]
Remote Viewing the Year 2060
