Individual and Community

http://www.ewg.org/tap-water/welcome

Since 2004, testing by water utilities has found 315 pollutants in the tap water Americans drink, according to an Environmental Working Group (EWG) drinking water quality analysis of almost 20 million records obtained from state water officials.

More than half of the chemicals detected are not subject to health or safety regulations and can legally be present in any amount. The federal government does have health guidelines for others, but 49 of these contaminants have been found in one place or another at levels above those guidelines, polluting the tap water for 53.6 million Americans. The government has not set a single new drinking water standard since 2001.

Water utilities spend 19 times more on water treatment chemicals every year than the federal government invests in protecting lakes and rivers from pollution in the first place.

Based on these data, EWG believes the federal government has a responsibility to do a national assessment of drinking water quality. It should establish new safety standards, set priorities for pollution prevention projects, and tell consumers about the full range of pollutants in their water.

Because it has not, EWG launched a 3-year project to create the largest drinking water quality database in existence. This user-friendly, interactive resource covers 48,000 communities in 45 states and the District of Columbia.

Mount Vernon Iowa Water Quality can be found here

Exceeds National Health Guidelines in 7 chemicals

including radium, arsenic , lead

to be continued.

Saturday’s Chile earthquake was so powerful that it likely shifted an Earth axis and shortened the length of a day, NASA announced Monday.

By speeding up Earth’s rotation, the magnitude 8.8 earthquake—the fifth strongest ever recorded, according to the USGS—should have shortened an Earth day by 1.26 millionths of a second, according to new computer-model calculations by geophysicist Richard Gross of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California.

For comparison, the same model estimated that the magnitude 9 Sumatra earthquake in December 2004 shortened the length of a day by 6.8 millionths of a second.

(See Chile earthquake pictures.)

Gross also estimates that the Chile earthquake shifted Earth’s figure axis by about three inches (eight centimeters).

Deviating roughly 33 feet (10 meters) from the north-south axis around which Earth revolves, the figure axis is the imaginary line around which the world’s unevenly distributed mass is balanced.

To explain the difference, Keith Sverdrup, a seismologist at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, likened Earth to a spinning figure skater holding a rock in one hand. The rotational axis of the skater is still down the middle of the body, he said, but the skater’s figure axis is shifted slightly in the direction of the hand holding the rock.

(Chile Tsunami Pictures: Earthquake’s Other Aftermath.)

How Chile Earthquake Shortened Day

Just how did the Chile earthquake give Earth a bit of a turbo boost?

To explain, Sverdrup, who wan’t involved in the NASA calculation, turned again to the image of a spinning figure skater. “As she pulls her arms in, she starts rotating faster.”

Likewise, as a portion of Earth’s mass drew in ever so slightly and quickly during the Chile earthquake, the planet began spinning a bit quicker.

The Chilean quake was a so-called thrust earthquake, which occurs when a large section of the Earth’s surface—in this case, the Nasca tectonic plate—dives beneath an adjacent plate. This process, called subduction, can cause earthquakes and volcanic eruptions (learn about plate tectonics).

“The layer of rock on the [Nasca plate] dove down into the Earth’s interior, and that’s like the skater pulling her arms in toward her body,” Sverdrup said.

Only thrust earthquakes, with their inward motion, can shorten Earth days. Other types of earthquakes, such as horizontal strike-slip quakes, in which two plates slide horizontally past one another, don’t affect Earth’s rotation.

(Video: Earthquake 101.)

Currently, scientists can measure the length of an Earth day with an accuracy of only about 20 millionths of a second, so the shortened day caused by the Chile earthquake can be estimated but not measured.

But “that doesn’t mean that the effect isn’t real,” Sverdrup said—though it is ephemeral. The shortening of Earth’s day caused by the Chilean earthquake won’t be permanent, although exact duration of the effect can’t be measured.

Thrust earthquakes aren’t the only phenomena that can shorten, or lengthen, Earth days. Volcanic eruptions or tidal effects from the moon can also cause such effects.

2010 Chile Earthquake Born in 1960?

The recent Earth-axis jolt may have been the result of stress buildup from a magnitude 9.5 quake that struck Chile in 1960, scientists announced in a separate study yesterday.

“The story is quite similar to the December 26, 2004, magnitude 9.0 Sumatra earthquake, which was followed by a magnitude 8.7 quake on [the Sumatra fault's] southern end on the 28th of March 2005,” geologistJian Lin of Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts said in a statement.

“The only difference is that it took 50 years for the northern neighboring section of the 1960 [Chile] earthquake to rupture, while it took only three months for the southern adjacent segment to rupture in Sumatra.”

It’s unclear why the Chile fault took so much longer than the Sumatra fault to “follow up,” Lin added.

“But even 50 years is short enough [to fall within] a person’s lifetime,” he said. “Thus, we should consider the earthquake-interaction possibility seriously.”

source: http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2010/03/100302-chile-earthquake-earth-axis-shortened-day/

Are there more earthquakes this year?

http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Asia-Pacific/2010/0304/Haiti-Chile-now-Taiwan-earthquake-escalation

But there’s no geological connection between those quakes, and nothing unusual in the number of recent big quakes, says Kuo Kai-wen, director of the Seismology Center of Taiwan’s Central Weather Bureau.

“Because Haiti just happened, everyone’s paying more attention to earthquakes,” says Mr. Kuo. “But the activity is normal – it’s not so scary.”

IN PICTURES: Images from the Taiwan earthquake

About 64 injuries have been reported from Taiwan’s quake, which hit about 250 miles south of Taipei at 8:18 am local time and was followed by several aftershocks. But it triggered power outages, halted high-speed rail service, and caused panic as people ran out of schools and homes.

Kuo says the Taiwan, Chile, and Haiti quakes involved different tectonic plates. Globally, he says, there’s an average of one magnitude 8 or higher earthquake per year, some 17 magnitude 7 or higher quakes, and 170 to 180 of magnitude 6 or larger.

So far this year there’s only been one quake higher than 8 – Chile’s fearsome, 8.8 magnitude temblor. Last year there were 16 magnitude 7 or higher quakes, right at the average. And so far this year there have been three magnitude 7 or higher quakes, including Haiti’s.

“From a global view, that’s not especially a lot,” says Kuo.

American Lung Association

State of the Air 2009 Report
Iowa
http://www.stateoftheair.org/2009/states/iowa/

For Particle Pollution:

Johnson County Gets an F with 11 Orange Days (Unhealthy for Sensitive Populations)

Linn County Gets an F rating with 10 Orange Days

What you can do
Individual citizens can do a great deal to help reduce air pollution outdoors as well. Simple but effective ways include:

• Drive less. Combine trips, walk, bike, carpool or vanpool, and use buses, subways or other alternatives to driving. Vehicle emissions are a major source of air pollution. Support community plans that provide ways to get around that don’t require a car, such as more sidewalks, bike trails and transit systems.
• Don’t burn wood or trash. Burning firewood and trash are among the largest sources of particles in many parts of the country. If you must use a fireplace or stove for heat, convert your woodstoves to natural gas, which has far fewer polluting emissions. Compost and recycle as much as possible and dispose of other waste properly; don’t burn it. Support efforts in your community to ban outdoor burning of construction and yard wastes. Avoid the use of outdoor hydronic heaters, also called outdoor wood boilers, which are often much more polluting than woodstoves.
• Make sure your local school system requires clean school buses, which includes replacing or retrofitting old school buses with filters and other equipment to reduce emissions. Make sure your local schools don’t idle their buses, a step that can immediately reduce the emissions.
• Get involved. Participate in your community’s review of its air pollution plans and support state and local efforts to clean up air pollution.
• Use less electricity. Turn out the lights and use energy-efficient appliances. Generating electricity is one of the biggest sources of pollution, particularly in the eastern United States.
• Send a message to decision makers. Send an email or fax to urge Congress to oppose measures that weaken the Clean Air Act.

Log on at www.LungUSA.org to see how easy that can be.

source: http://www.stateoftheair.org/2009/key-findings/executive-summary.html

Useful Air Quality Links

Iowa

• Iowa Weather Alerts including Air Quality Alerts from the National Weather Service
• Iowa Air Quality Forecast
• Pollution Rankings in Linn County Iowa
• Iowa Department of Natural Resouces

EPA SuperFund Cleanup Sites List – Locations in Iowa

The 25 Most Ozone-Polluted Regions from 2005 American Lung Association

1. Los Angeles-Long Beach-
   Riverside, CA
2. Bakersfield, CA
3. Fresno-Madera, CA
4. Visalia-Porterville, CA
5. Merced, CA
6. Houston-Baytown-Huntsville, TX
7. Sacramento-Arden-Arcade-
   Truckee, CA-NV
8. Dallas-Fort Worth, TX
9. New York-Newark-Bridgeport,
   NY-NJ-CT-PA
10. Philadelphia-Camden-Vineland,
    PA-NJ-DE-MD
11. Washington-Baltimore-Northern
    Virginia, DC-MD-VA-WV
12. Charlotte-Gastonia-Salisbury, NC-SC
13. Hanford-Corcoran, CA
14. Cleveland-Akron-Elyria, OH
15. Knoxville-Sevierville-La Follette, TN
16. Modesto, CA
17. Pittsburgh-New Castle, PA
18. Youngstown-Warren-East
    Liverpool, OH-PA
19. Columbus-Marion-Chillicothe, OH
20. Detroit-Warren-Flint, MI
21. Buffalo-Niagara-Cattaraugus, NY
22. Sheboygan, WI
23. Chicago-Naperville-Michigan
    City, IL-IN-WI
24. El Centro, CA
25. Lancaster, PA

source: http://www.sixwise.com/newsletters/05/09/07/the-25-most-polluted-regions-in-the-united-states.htm

QI colors

EPA has assigned a specific color to each AQI category to make it easier for people to understand quickly whether air pollution is reaching unhealthy levels in their communities. For example, the color orange means that conditions are “unhealthy for sensitive groups,” while red means that conditions may be “unhealthy for everyone,” and so on.

Understanding the AQI

The purpose of the AQI is to help you understand what local air quality means to your health. To make it easier to understand, the AQI is divided into six categories:

Each category corresponds to a different level of health concern. The six levels of health concern and what they mean are:

• “Good” AQI is 0 – 50. Air quality is considered satisfactory, and air pollution poses little or no risk.
• “Moderate” AQI is 51 – 100. Air quality is acceptable; however, for some pollutants there may be a moderate health concern for a very small number of people. For example, people who are unusually sensitive to ozone may experience respiratory symptoms.
• “Unhealthy for Sensitive Groups” AQI is 101 – 150. Although general public is not likely to be affected at this AQI range, people with lung disease, older adults and children are at a greater risk from exposure to ozone, whereas persons with heart and lung disease, older adults and children are at greater risk from the presence of particles in the air. .
• “Unhealthy” AQI is 151 – 200. Everyone may begin to experience some adverse health effects, and members of the sensitive groups may experience more serious effects. .
• “Very Unhealthy” AQI is 201 – 300. This would trigger a health alert signifying that everyone may experience more serious health effects.

source: http://www.airnow.gov/index.cfm?action=aqibasics.aqi#sens

“Hazardous” AQI greater than 300. This would trigger a health warnings of emergency conditions. The entire population is more likely to be affected.

January 22, 2010
Past Decade Warmest on Record, NASA Data Shows

By JOHN M. BRODER
WASHINGTON — The decade ending in 2009 was the warmest on record, new surface temperature figures released Thursday by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration show.

The agency also found that 2009 was the second warmest year since 1880, when modern temperature measurement began. The warmest year was 2005. The other hottest recorded years have all occurred since 1998, NASA said.

James E. Hansen, director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, said that global temperatures varied because of changes in ocean heating and cooling cycles. “When we average temperature over 5 or 10 years to minimize that variability,” said Dr. Hansen, one of the world’s leading climatologists, “we find global warming is continuing unabated.”

A separate preliminary analysis from the National Climatic Data Center, a unit of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, found that 2009 tied with 2006 as the fifth warmest year on record, based on measurements taken on land and at sea. The data center report, published earlier this week, also cited the years 2000 to 2009 as the warmest decade ever measured. The new temperature figures provide evidence in the scientific discussion of global warming but are not likely to be the last word on whether the planet’s temperature is on a consistent upward path.

Dr. Hansen, who has been an outspoken figure in the climate debate for years, has often been attacked by skeptics of global warming for what they charge is selective use of temperature data. The question of whether the planet is heating and how quickly was at the heart of the so-called “climategate” controversy that arose last fall when hundreds of e-mail messages from the climate study unit at the University of East Anglia in England were released without authorization.

Critics seized on the messages as evidence that, in their view, climate scientists were manipulating data and colluding to keep contrary opinion out of scientific journals. But climate scientists and political leaders affirmed what they called a broad-based consensus that the planet was growing warmer, and on a consistent basis, although with measurable year-to-year variations.

The NASA data released Thursday showed an upward temperature trend of about 0.36 degrees Fahrenheit (0.2 degrees Celsius) per decade over the past 30 years. Average global temperatures have risen by about 1.5 degrees Fahrenheit (0.8 degrees Celsius) since 1880.

“That’s the important number to keep in mind,” said Gavin Schmidt, a climatologist at Goddard. “The difference between the second and sixth warmest years is trivial because the known uncertainty in the temperature measurement is larger than some of the differences between the warmest years.”

Policy makers at the United Nations climate change summit conference in Copenhagen last month agreed on a goal of trying to keep the rise in average global temperatures to 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit, or 2 degrees Celsius, to try to forestall the worst effects of global warming.

source: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/22/science/earth/22warming.html

Am looking for online documentation of

the Science of Climate Change & Science of Global Warming

• Union of Concerned Scientists http://www.ucsusa.org/global_warming/science_and_impacts/science/
• The InterGovernmental Panel on Climate Change
• RealClimate “Climate science from climate scientists”
• The New York Times maintains a section
• Pew Center on Global Climate Change has links to reports, Fact Sheets, including “During the twentieth century, the earth’s surface warmed by about 1.4 °F. There are a variety of potential causes for global climate change, including natural and human-induced mechanisms”

The Politics of Global Climate Change

• Google Living Story with the New York Times – “The Politics of Global Warming”
• various attempts to address the Politics and show how science does not support some of the Political claims:
  • Global Warming Science

…. to be continued ….

“I have more respect for people who change their mind after acquiring new information than for those who cling to views they held thirty years ago. The world changes.  Ideologues and zealots don’t”  - Michael Crichton, “State of Fear”

and

http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2004/12/michael-crichtons-state-of-confusion/

Another source publicly saying what has been said before.

Vegetarian Diet Better for Environment, Says UK Climate Change Leader
Damian Robin
EpochTimes Staff Oct 28, 2009
LONDON—One of the UK’s most prominent climate change experts, Lord Stern, has said a vegetarian diet is better for the environment.

Author of the 2006 Stern Review on the cost of tackling global warming, and former chief economist of the World Bank. Lord Stern believes that the Climate change conference in Copenhagen in December should call for prices of meat and other foods that contribute to climate change to increase.

“Meat is a wasteful use of water and creates a lot of greenhouse gases,” he said in an interview with The Times on Tuesday 27th October. “It puts enormous pressure on the world’s resources.”

“I think it’s important that people think about what they are doing and that includes what they are eating.”

Nearly one fifth of the world’s current greenhouse gas emissions are produced by livestock – about 50 per cent higher than the level produced by all the vehicles in the world.

Lord Stern’s comments were welcomed by some environmental and farming groups, but dismissed as over-simplistic and irresponsible by the the farmer’s union in the UK.

“Cutting down on meat is a win-win for healthier people and a healthier planet”, said Friends of the Earth’s senior food campaigner, Clare Oxborrow, “but we also need the Government to make big changes to the way it’s produced.”

National Union of Farmers President Peter Kendall commented: “Livestock production is based on grasland which stores more carbon than other land use in England. Focusing on a single issue as a way of saving the planet is extremely iressponsible and likely to be counterproductive.”

Compassion in World Farming said: “Reducing meat consumption in affluent nations will release land for growing food for people rather than feed for factory farmed animals or fuel crops to power our vehicles and it will reduce the emissions of some of the most noxious greenhouse gases.”

“By reducing meat consumption and supporting higher welfare farming, we can help to revive the planet, restore dignity to farmers’ livelihoods and enable the animals themselves to lead lives of quality,” said a statement on their website.

The UN Food and Agriculture Organisation in 2006 concluded that worldwide livestock farming, including the destruction of forest land for cattle ranching and the production of animal feeds, generates 18 per cent of the planet’s greenhouse gas emissions. By comparison, it said, all the world’s cars, trains, planes and boats accounted for a combined 13 per cent.

source: http://www.theepochtimes.com/n2/content/view/24455/

An Albuquerque, New Mexico man has developed a device that helps engines run on soda, including the highly-caffeinated Mountain Dew.

Watch the AP story below:

Eating Too Much Red Meat May Shorten Life
Major Study Finds an Effect, but Critics Say Meat Offers Important Nutrients
By Amanda Gardner
HealthDay Reporter

Mar. 23

MONDAY, March 23 (HealthDay News) — Diets high in red meat and in processed meat shorten life span not just from cancer and heart disease but from Alzheimer’s, stomach ulcers and an array of other conditions as well, a U.S. National Cancer Institute study has found.

In fact, reducing meat consumption to the amount eaten by the bottom 20 percent seen in the study would save 11 percent of men’s lives and 16 percent of women’s, according to the study.
Read the rest of this entry »

By ELIANE ENGELER –

GENEVA (AP) — Glaciers in Antarctica are melting faster and across a much wider area than previously thought, a development that threatens to raise sea levels worldwide and force millions of people to flee low-lying areas, scientists said Wednesday.

Researchers once believed that the melting was limited to the Antarctic Peninsula, a narrow tongue of land pointing toward South America. But satellite data and automated weather stations now indicate it is more widespread.

The melting “also extends all the way down to what is called west Antarctica,” said Colin Summerhayes, executive director of the Britain-based Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research.

“That’s unusual and unexpected,” he told The Associated Press in an interview.

By the end of the century, the accelerated melting could cause sea levels to climb by 3 to 5 feet — levels substantially higher than predicted by a major scientific group just two years ago.

original source link

Read the rest of this entry »

As they are saying… here is the real ‘inconvenient truth’….

Nov 2006:
Rearing cattle produces more greenhouse gases than driving cars, UN report warns

29 November 2006 – Cattle-rearing generates more global warming greenhouse gases, as measured in CO2 equivalent, than transportation, and smarter production methods, including improved animal diets to reduce enteric fermentation and consequent methane emissions, are urgently needed, according to a new United Nations report released today.

“Livestock are one of the most significant contributors to today’s most serious environmental problems,” senior UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) official Henning Steinfeld said. “Urgent action is required to remedy the situation.”

Cattle-rearing is also a major source of land and water degradation, according to the FAO report, Livestock’s Long Shadow–Environmental Issues and Options, of which Mr. Steinfeld is the senior author.

“The environmental costs per unit of livestock production must be cut by one half, just to avoid the level of damage worsening beyond its present level,” it warns.

When emissions from land use and land use change are included, the livestock sector accounts for 9 per cent of CO2 deriving from human-related activities, but produces a much larger share of even more harmful greenhouse gases. It generates 65 per cent of human-related nitrous oxide, which has 296 times the Global Warming Potential (GWP) of CO2. Most of this comes from manure.

source: http://www.un.org/apps/news/story.asp?NewsID=20772&Cr=global&Cr1=environment

United Nations: Eat Less Meat
Monday September 8, 2008

To combat global warming, Dr Rajendra Pachauri, head of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, advises, “Give up meat for one day [a week] initially, and decrease it from there.” Pachauri is a vegetarian himself, and points out that greenhouse gas emissions and habitat destruction are associated with animal agriculture. To most animal advocates, this is old news. Even to the United Nations, this is old news.

source: http://animalrights.about.com/b/2008/09/08/united-nations-eat-less-meat.htm

Some links for reasons people are vegetarian

49 REASONS WHY I AM A VEGETARIAN
http://www.britishmeat.com/49.htm

Another:
http://www.ecomall.com/greenshopping/pveg1.htm

Graphic, pointed video, features some slaughterhouse footage:

http://www.goveg.com/feat/chewonthis/