interesting things to read

State of the Nations – III The Environment, via Scoop

I didn’t read parts I or II, but part III is quite interesting:

The earth’s resources are finite. They are being fought over and consumed at a rate that is not sustainable. It is a problem that goes well beyond the most publicized problem of climate change. It is interesting that in a supposed free trade world, the military has to be such a big part of the effort to control resources. It is a complete and full contradiction without any gray areas. Even without resource wars, given the artificially created demands of western society, we would rapidly deplete many resources and continue to increase the levels of pollution, environmental damage, species extinction, climate change and other environmental disasters that are occurring. It simply cannot continue.

Has global warming really stopped?, via The New Scientist

(psst… I’ll give you a hint… nope)

We show that the climate over the 21st century can and likely will produce periods of a decade or two where the globally averaged surface air temperature shows no trend or even slight cooling in the presence of longer-term warming.

Lying in Wait, via Chemical and Engineering News

someone has been using the ocean as a trash receptacle…

 

The find earlier this month off the Oahu coast by researchers from theSchool of Ocean & Earth Science & Technology (SOEST) at theUniversity of Hawaii, Manoa, on behalf of the U.S. Army is likely just part of the more than 8,000 tons of chemical agents that the Army reportedly dumped off the Hawaiian shores at the end of World War II. But this cache is only a small fraction of all the munitions and bulk containers holding chemical weapons agents that were routinely scuttled in the ocean.

According to Army documents, large quantities of shells, mines, solid rocket fuels, propellants, radioactive materials, and chemical weapons were dumped into the ocean not only off U.S. shores but all around the world. And on at least 74 occasions, the Army knowingly dumped hazardous chemical agents such as mustard, lewisite, phosgene, and VX off U.S. coastlines. Records of exact locations of such dumps can be hard to find, only partly for security reasons.