Tit for Tat

May 16, 2008 8:47 AM

The picture that accompanies this post is not of a polar bear, it's of a political football.  Wednesday's decision to list the bears as a threatened species, everyone involved seems to agree, did very little to affect their well-being for now.

So Reps. Jay Inslee (D-Wash.) and Maurice Hinchey (D-N.Y.) have now introduced The Polar Bear Seas Protection Act of 2008, intended to protect against oil and gas drilling in the Beaufort Sea (off the northeast coast of Alaska) and the Chukchi Sea (off to the northwest).

The environmental groups that sued in 2006 to protect the bears under the Endangered Species Act were up-front in their motives: they wanted to use the bears as a legal weapon against the production of greenhouse gases.  Take a look at the release, HERE, from the Center for Biological Diversity, which has pursued the issue for four years with polar bears and other species.

Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne made it clear that he -- and the White House -- would not fall for it.  "Listing the polar bear as threatened can reduce avoidable losses of polar bears.  But it should not open the door to use the ESA to regulate greenhouse gas emissions from automobiles, power plants, and other sources," he said.  Read his prepared remarks HERE.

Now come Reps. Inslee and Hinchey.  Sen. John Kerry has introduced a similar bill in the Senate.

"While the listing was a long overdue recognition of scientific reality, the administration included a poison pill by ruling out the one thing that would make it meaningful: an effective policy on stopping global warming.  It’ll be business as usual for oil and gas development, which will put polar bears at greater risk from potential spills, onshore infrastructure and disturbances, not to mention, will continue emissions of greenhouse gases that are causing the melting of sea ice in the first place,” said Inslee in a statement to accompany the bill.  “This bill will help fill the vacuum of administration leadership by providing important protections for polar bears and their habitat."

Will the tactic work?  Should it? 

May 16, 2008 | Permalink | User Comments (84) | TrackBack (0)

Polar Bear Ruling: Nobody's Happy

May 14, 2008 4:38 PM

Interior Secretary Kempthorne has now ruled to give polar bears "threatened" status.  But it's clear that nobody -- not he, not environmentalists, not conservative groups that oppose the environmentalists -- is pleased with the decision.

If you haven't seen our piece, it's HERE.  A few extra quotes:

Secretary Kempthorne: "While the legal standards under the ESA compel me to list the polar bear as threatened, I want to make clear that this listing will not stop global climate change or prevent any sea ice from melting.  Any real solution requires action by all major economies for it to be effective.  That is why I am taking administrative and regulatory action to make certain the ESA isn’t abused to make global warming policies."

John Kostyack of the National Wildlife Federation: "They said that they can't say any single coal plant or any other polluter is responsible for the decline of sea ice.  And that's simply incorrect.

"They said that the endangered species act would do nothing to help the polar bear from the threat of oil and gas activities in the Arctic.  And that's a big problem."

On the other side, Robin Rivett, president of the Pacific Legal Foundation: "We're prepared to sue, quite frankly.

"There were 5,000 bears in the 1960s.  There are 25,000 now.  The only basis for this decision is computer modeling that shows polar ice might thin in the middle of the century.  That's pretty flimsy science."

One more comment, of a sort: we're told these are two members of the Alaska Wilderness League, who sat in the back row of Kempthorne's news conference.

See you in court?

May 14, 2008 | Permalink | User Comments (36) | TrackBack (0)

Pitched Battle over the Polar Bear

May 14, 2008 12:28 PM

What is to become of this iconic creature -- not in the Arctic where it lives, but in Washington, where it is the object of a spirited debate?

Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne is to make an announcement this afternoon on whether the bears are to be listed as "threatened" under the Endangered Species Act.  Environmental groups had sought this status for them on grounds rarely used before: that the bears are losing habitat because of the Earth's warming climate.

The Interior Department had fought making a decision, and lost.  The court-imposed deadline is tomorrow.  Environmentalists from Alaska to Washington are abuzz over what's going to be said.

There are two schools of thought:

--Mr. Kempthorne will announce that he is not going to invoke the Endangered Species Act, with all the restrictions it implies.  Instead, he will cite a Memorandum of Understanding with the Canadian Wildlife Service, in which the two countries pledge to protect the bears.  Find the text HERE.

Some of the logic in this scenario: some Interior staffers argued that if the bears were given Endangered-Species protection on global-warming grounds, the department could, in effect, be placed in the position of regulating carbon dioxide emissions -- something the administration had fought.  You'll recall the the Environmental Protection Agency took this issue to the Supreme Court, and lost last year.

--The second school of thought is that the department will give the bears Endangered-Species protection, but with caveats so that oil and gas drilling in the Arctic are not impeded.  That's been a sore point -- oil companies see reserves dwindling elsewhere and want to expand drilling in northern Alaska and the Arctic Ocean nearby, while environmental groups say that's precisely why we have global warming.  Just this month, talking about high gasoline prices, President Bush faulted Congress for refusing to allow oil exploration in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in northeastern Alaska.

"This has been going back and forth by the hour," one person said to me late this morning.  More when we get it.

May 14, 2008 | Permalink | User Comments (14) | TrackBack (0)

The Cell Phone "Rip-Off"

May 13, 2008 1:53 PM

Britain's Channel 4 did a program about the high cost of cell-phone service there, and to make its point, offered a gem: it costs more to send a text message than to download the same amount of data from the Hubble Space Telescope.

Catchy line, no?  Channel 4 says the calculation was done by Nigel Bannister, a lecturer in physics at the University of Leicester.  You can see his calculations in a release HERE.

I wouldn't dare to compare American cell phone bills to British ones (don't they have package deals the way we do?), but quoting the university:

"'The maximum size for a text message is 160 characters, which takes 140 bytes because there are only 7 bits per character in the text messaging system, and we assume the average price for a text message is 5p. There are 1,048,576 bytes in a megabyte,  so that's 1 million/140 = 7490 text messages to transmit one megabyte. At 5p each [about 10 cents in the U.S.], that's £374.49 [about $730 U.S.] per MB - or about 4.4 times more expensive than the ‘most pessimistic’ estimate for Hubble Space Telescope transmission costs.'

"Dr Bannister said it had been difficult to work out exactly how much Hubble data transmission costs. So he contacted NASA who gave him a firm figure of £8.85 [about $17.25] per megabyte (MB) for the transmission of data from HST to the Earth.

"'This doesn't include the cost of the ground stations and the time of the personnel along the way, but it is an unambiguous number for that part of the process. So that's £8.85 to get each MB from Hubble, to the first point of contact on the ground, but no further. Hence we need to go a little bit further to estimate exactly how much it costs to transmit data from Hubble to the end user - i.e. to the data archive which scientists can access. This is difficult, so I had to make some conservative assumptions.'

"Dr Bannister estimated the cost of the data from Hubble could vary between £8.85 and £85 per MB- much cheaper than the £374.49 per MB cost of transmitting one MB of text.

"He concludes: 'Hubble is by no means a cheap mission -- but the mobile phone text costs were pretty astronomical!'"

May 13, 2008 | Permalink | User Comments (5) | TrackBack (0)

By the Light of the Silvery Moons

May 08, 2008 8:05 AM

The Earth had a really bad day about 4.5 billion years ago.  Something about the size of Mars, so the theory goes, hit our still-forming planet, spewing debris in all directions.  Much of that material eventually coalesced to form the Moon.

Or maybe, say two scientists, it formed several moons. 

Jack Lissauer of NASA's Ames Research Center and John Chambers of the Carnegie Institution of Washington have published a paper in the journal Icarus -- read the abstract HERE -- in which they do the math and conclude that debris could stay put for tens of millions of years at two of the so-called Lagrange points, places about a million miles from Earth where the gravity and the Earth and Moon effectively cancel each other out. 

The Lagrange points have proved useful to managers of space missions; the SOHO solar observatory floats in one of them.  But entire moons, even small ones?

Lissauer and Chambers say it's possible -- and given the eons they calculate debris could have stayed put, pieces of debris could have pulled together under the force of gravity to form moonlets. 

Whether this actually happened is conjecture; the Lagrange points are empty now.  The gravity of other planets would have been enough to destabilize objects there over time.

Ker Than of New Scientist has posted a short musing on the possibility, quoting Matija Cuk of the University of British Columbia, who's done similar modeling.

"They would have looked more like Jupiter or Venus in the sky than a satellite," said Cuk. "They would have resembled very bright stars."

Hat tip to Tuan Nguyen of our staff for noticing this.

May 8, 2008 | Permalink | User Comments (22) | TrackBack (0)

Body Parts for Sale

May 06, 2008 8:29 AM

A kidney specialist in Australia has created a ruckus by suggesting a way to end the shortage in organs for transplant -- let people sell their kidneys for $50,000 (Australian, equal to about $47,300 U.S.), to the government, for use on an open, legal market.

"Being forced to travel overseas and illegally buy an organ from someone who desperately needs the money, with no medical controls over the process and nobody checking whether the kidney is a good match, is what I call unethical," says Dr. Gavin Carney in the Sydney Morning Herald.

"But what is the option? Spending eight hours a day on dialysis for up to seven years? Dying on a wait list?"

The Herald says 1,800 Australians are waiting for kidney transplants, but only 343 were donated last year.

Trading in body parts is something most Americans find horrific, with all its implications of poor people selling their organs -- and well-being -- to those who can afford it.  But there are occasional calls, such as Dr. Carney's, for people to reconsider.  And there is one country -- Iran -- where the sale of organs is legal. 

My old friend Stephen Dubner, co-author with Steven Levitt of "Freakonomics", has written about this lately --find his post HERE -- and he points us to an analysis by Dr. Benjamin Hippen, a kidney transplant surgeon in Charlotte, posted on the website of the Cato Institute.  Take a look HERE.

"Although Iran clearly does not serve as a model for solving most of the world's problems, its method for solving its organ shortage is well worth examining," writes Hippen.

Hippen is quick to say he does not see Americans getting over their repugnance of organ-selling anytime soon, but he calls the shortage of organs for transplant the result of a "terrible policy failure."  He says, "The portion of the National Organ Transplant Act of 1984 which prohibits the sale of organs should be repealed," so that we can explore how a fair market for organs -- better, presumably, than Iran's -- might work.

Would you sell one of your kidneys?  Tuesday's edition of the Sydney Morning Herald carries a follow-up story: a man named Craig Gill called the paper to say he'd readily sell a kidney to secure the future of his two-year-old daughter Petal.

May 6, 2008 | Permalink | User Comments (25) | TrackBack (0)

Here Comes the Sun

May 02, 2008 8:05 AM

A lame joke, from the early days of the Moon race, had a comedian/astronaut cheerfully claiming he was going to fly a mission to the Sun.

But it's too hot, the straight man would reply.  How will you get there?

Simple, came the answer.  We'll go at night.

Groan.

But now, after 30 years of planning and arguing and canceling because it was too hard and too expensive, NASA has finally ordered up a mission that, for now, it calls Solar Probe.  It's asked the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory to work up a plan for a launch in 2015.  The spacecraft will have a carbon-composite heat shield, nine feet in diameter and six inches thick.  The Earth is about 93 million miles away from the Sun on average; Solar Probe would be sent within 4.1 million miles.

This is billed as pure science, but in a technology-driven world, engineers want to know more about the charged particles that come flying our way, as solar wind most of the time, and as giant flares -- Coronal Mass Ejections -- when the Sun is especially active.  Solar radiation has, on occasion, fried the electronics of satellites, and in 1989 a power blackout in Quebec was attributed to solar activity. 

Shield your eyes.

May 2, 2008 | Permalink | User Comments (28) | TrackBack (0)

Death and Your Digital Trail

April 30, 2008 3:30 PM

Someone has posed a heartbreaking question on Slashdot this morning: "A good friend of mine had her younger brother apparently commit suicide last week. He was a young, promising CS major who was close to being accepted into a very prestigious school." 

There was no suicide note, no explanation for the young man's death, says the writer.  "Some members of the family are hoping to find something, anything, that might explain why this all went down. Since I'm the most computer-skilled person the family knows, they have asked me if I could help them try to find some information. My possible approaches are: his Linux laptop, his university, Gmail And Hotmail email accounts, and a second MySpace profile that apparently has been tagged as private. How ethical would it be to, say, try to crack his root password in a situation like this?"

Read the full post HERE, plus the hundreds of comments that have come in.

It's a sad issue, which has taken on new layers of complexity in the digital age.  Each of us leaves a trail behind -- letters, financial statements, whatever -- and in days gone by they were passed on to our families when we died.  If your uncle passed away, and letters in the attic revealed he'd once had an extramarital affair -- well, there would be extra pain, but no question as to whether the family had the right to see those letters.

Today, though, we have email accounts, and Facebook pages -- and passwords, lots of them, creating the feeling that even in the wide-open world of the Internet, what you leave there is private.  Does it change when you die?

Actually, there is precedent for the case of the young man on Slashdot.  Here's one example.  Three years ago I did a World News piece on Lance Cpl. Justin Ellsworth, a Marine killed on patrol in Iraq.  His family asked Yahoo! if they could have his archived emails, just as a way of remembering him, and Yahoo resisted.

"The commitment we've made to every person who signs-up for a Yahoo! Mail account is to treat their email as a private communication," the company told me.  "Email often involves many individuals who have privacy expectations...."  To this day, when you register at many websites, the fine print will stipulate that your account will be deleted after you die.

Cpl. Ellsworth's family took the case to court, and won.  Yahoo sent them a CD-ROM and paper copies.  They have a website in his memory HERE.  They urged other families to get their loved ones to share their passwords, perhaps in a sealed envelope, just in case.

There's a coda to the story, though.  The email account contained hundreds of spam messages, but it turned out Cpl. Ellsworth had saved almost none of the emails he had written, and his family so much wanted.

April 30, 2008 | Permalink | User Comments (14) | TrackBack (0)

Hit 'em Where it Hurts

April 29, 2008 3:04 PM

The Kaiser Family Foundation is out with a survey on the rising cost of health care, and it's enough to give you a stomach ache.

In tough times there are other things on people's minds -- 44 percent of those surveyed said paying for gasoline was a "serious problem" -- but look at some of their numbers on what medical bills do to people:

--20% said they had been contacted by a collection agency because of unpaid medical bills in the last five years.

--20% said they "had difficulty paying other bills."

--17% said they "used up all or most of [their] savings" because of illness.

--12% said they had "been unable to pay for basic necessities."

The summary is HERE.  The numbers above are from p. 2 of the pdf file.

The Los Angeles Times reacted to one number in particular: "7% of Americans said they or someone in their household decided to marry in the last year so they could get healthcare benefits via their spouse."

A few days ago we did a World News story on a study of robotic heart-bypass surgery; read it HERE or watch it HERE.  The doctors who did the work suggested it may catch on, not because it's less painful for patients, not because it may provide longer-lasting benefits, but because it gets people out of the hospital and back to work more quickly, thus saving their employers money.

Ouch.

April 29, 2008 | Permalink | User Comments (17) | TrackBack (0)

Is God 'Obsolete'?

April 28, 2008 2:27 PM

Often the best part, for me, of writing this page is reading your comments.  After thirteen hundred on natural selection and intelligent design (after the release of Ben Stein's "Expelled"), we're actually crashing that page on some computers.

So let's pick up the conversation here, if you'd like to continue.  And to add some new material, let me offer the following from the John Templeton Foundation: a debate titled  "Does science make belief in God obsolete?"  

"Absolutely not!" writes physicist William D. Phillips.

"No, but it should," writes Christopher Hitchens, author of "God is not Great."

The foundation assembled a diverse group of thinkers for its "conversation," and their answers to the question are both reasoned and passionate.

Click HERE to take a look at their essays.  The foundation took out full-page newspaper ads in Sunday papers to publicize its debate.  Sir John Templeton, who made his fortune in mutual funds, makes it clear that his personal faith is strong, writing that he hopes his foundation will support the work of those who might deepen our "knowledge and love of God." 

April 28, 2008 | Permalink | User Comments (383) | TrackBack (0)