Wednesday, July 31st, 2013
KATE SHEPPARD, - Mother Jones
Stephan: Here is some hard truth of what is coming with climate change, and it is very sad. The idea what we are going to rebuild low lying areas again and again, is madness.
This story is particularly meaningful to me. I grew up in Gloucester County, VA, at Wilson Creek Farm, originally Throckmorton, where my mother's family had been given a land grant in the 1600s. There are more 17th century houses in Gloucester than anywhere else in the state. Most of them are doomed. As is most of lower Manhattan, Washington, D.C., the Eastern Shore, Baltimore, Charleston, and many other cities.
Click through to see the charts.
Two months after Hurricane Sandy pummeled New York City, Battery Park is again humming with tourists and hustlers, guys selling foam Statue of Liberty crowns, and commuters shuffling off the Staten Island Ferry. On a winter day when the bright sun takes the edge off a frigid harbor breeze, it’s hard to imagine all this under water. But if you look closely, there are hints that not everything is back to normal.
Take the boarded-up entrance to the new South Ferry subway station at the end of the No. 1 line. The metal structure covering the stairwell is dotted with rust and streaked with salt, tracing the high-water mark at 13.88 feet above the low-tide line-a level that surpassed all historical floods by nearly four feet. The saltwater submerged the station, turning it into a ‘large fish tank [6],’ as former Metropolitan Transportation Authority Chairman Joseph Lhota put it, corroding the signals and ruining the interior. While the city reopened the old station in early April, the newer one is expected to remain closed to the public for as long as three years [7].
Before the storm, South Ferry was easily one of the more extravagant stations in the city, refurbished to […]
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Wednesday, July 31st, 2013
AJAY MAKAN and ABEER ALLAM, - Financial Times (U.K.)
Stephan: Here you can see what I have been saying since the Fracking trend got underway. There are several things driving Fracking, but one of the major influences is that it offers American and European carbon interests a way to get out from under dependency to Islamic countries, freeing Western governments from having to defer to them.
LONDON and ABU DHABI — Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, the billionaire Saudi Arabian investor, has warned that his country’s oil-dependent economy is increasingly vulnerable to competition from the US shale revolution, setting him at odds with his country’s oil ministry and Opec officials.
In an open letter addressed to Ali Naimi, the Saudi oil minister, the prince called on the government to accelerate plans to diversify the economy.
‘Our country is facing continuous threat because of its almost total dependency on oil,
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Wednesday, July 31st, 2013
Stephan: Here is what we can expect from sea rise. This doesn't happen all at once but it will become increasingly apparent year by year.
A rise in sea levels threatens the viability of more than 1,400 cities and towns, including Miami, Virginia Beach and Jacksonville, unless there are deep cuts in heat-trapping greenhouse gas emissions, says an analysis out Monday.
Prior emissions have already locked in 4 feet of future sea-level rise that will submerge parts of 316 municipalities, but the timing is unclear and could take hundreds of years, according to the paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. If global warming continues at its current rate through the year 2100, at least an additional 1,100 cities and towns will be mostly under water at high tide in the distant future.
‘It’s like this invisible threat,’ says author Benjamin Strauss,a scientist at Climate Central, a non-profit, non-advocacy research group based in Princeton, N.J., that’s funded by foundations, individuals and federal grants. He says these sea levels are much higher than what’s predicted this century - typically 1 to 4 feet - because climate change multiplies their impact over hundreds of years.
He says many people have the mistaken notion that if greenhouse gas emissions stop, the problem of sea levels rising will go away. It won’t, he says, because carbon dioxide stays in […]
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Wednesday, July 31st, 2013
SYLVIA BOOTH HUBBARD, - NewsMax Health
Stephan: The ancient Egyptians fed the workers who built the pyramids a diet rich in garlic, onions and radishes, because the already knew this.
Garlic, the odorous bulb that’s probably in your kitchen right now, has been important in both food and medicine dating back to ancient Egypt, but its most important role may be in fighting one of modern man’s most dreaded diseases - cancer. Recent research has found that compounds in garlic can cut cancer risks by as much as two-thirds.
According to the National Cancer Institute, which is a part of the National Institutes of Health, several studies have shown that garlic cut the risk of several forms of cancer by 50 percent or more. And garlic also helps prevent heart disease and diabetes, and it in addition generally boosts the immune system.
Add generous amounts of garlic to your home-cooked dishes - or take garlic supplements - to fight the following ailments:
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Wednesday, July 31st, 2013
Stephan: Water is destiny. If you have been reading SR for a while you have heard me say this over and over. Corporate media doesn't even discuss this issue, but you will also remember that I have been saying that as the century goes on we are going to see two great migrations -- away from coastal regions because of sea rise, and out of the Southwest because of heat and lack of water. In the internet media this idea is finally beginning to attract some attention.
Several miles from Phantom Ranch, Grand Canyon, Arizona, April 2013 – Down here, at the bottom of the continent’s most spectacular canyon, the Colorado River growls past our sandy beach in a wet monotone. Our group of 24 is one week into a 225-mile, 18-day voyage on inflatable rafts from Lees Ferry to Diamond Creek. We settle in for the night. Above us, the canyon walls part like a pair of maloccluded jaws, and moonlight streams between them, bright enough to read by.
One remarkable feature of the modern Colorado, the great whitewater rollercoaster that carved the Grand Canyon, is that it is a tidal river. Before heading for our sleeping bags, we need to retie our six boats to allow for the ebb.
These days, the tides of the Colorado are not lunar but Phoenician. Yes, I’m talking about Phoenix, Arizona. On this April night, when the air conditioners in America’s least sustainable city merely hum, Glen Canyon Dam, immediately upstream from the canyon, will run about 6,500 cubic feet of water through its turbines every second.
Tomorrow, as the sun begins its daily broiling of Phoenix, Scottsdale, Mesa, Tempe, and the rest of central Arizona, the engineers at Glen Canyon […]
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