Environment

The Guardian reports from US State Department cables released by Wikileaks that the oil and gas giant, BP, experienced a platform disaster in the Caspian Sea off Azerbaijan in September, 2008, very similar to last summer’s Deep Water Horizon platform explosion. BP was reported to have covered up the details of the catastrophe even from […]

Environment

Fox Management Ordered Reporters to Spin Global Warming

Juan Cole

Surprise! Management at Fox Cable “News” instructed journalists to spin reporting on climate change by casting doubt on the indisputable fact that the world has warmed over the past 50 years. This according to Media Matters, which got hold of a memo by Bill Sammon, ‘ questioning the “veracity of climate change data” and ordering […]

Environment

Israel’s Mega-Fire and Climate Change’s Drying Mediterranean

Juan Cole

You can’t relate a one-off event like Israel’s massive forest fire near Haifa to climate change, which has to be measured over a long series. It is the worst in Israel’s history. But what is true is that more and more such disasters will be faced by those regions of the earth that become dessicated […]

Environment

Tyger, Tyger, a fire snuffed out

Juan Cole

The Romantic poet William Blake wrote, in the age of European colonial expansion and encounter with Asian fauna: TIGER, tiger, burning bright In the forests of the night, What immortal hand or eye Could frame thy fearful symmetry? Tigers in the wild could be extinct in only 12 years if extreme conservation measures are not […]

Environment

Congressional “Study” Attacking Climate Change Found to be Plagiarized, Error-Ridden

Juan Cole

A USA Today investigation of a 2006 congressional “study” attacking climate change reveals that 35 of the 91 pages are plagiarized from a textbook by Raymond Bradley; but the authors didn’t content themselves with stealing another’s prose– they systematically introduced errors into it! The study was requested by Rep. Joe “I Apologize to BP” Barton […]

Environment

Species Loss Threatens Humankind

Juan Cole

The attempts by the world’s governments 2002-2010 to stem massive loss of species completely failed. So the recent conference on species loss at Nagoya in Japan found. Failed. It doesn’t make a person optimistic about the recently concluded Nagoya agreement. Though, bless the Japanese for pledging $2 billion to fight species loss. A fifth of […]

Environment

Shimkus Pwned on 2 Percent Climate Claims

Juan Cole

Rep. John Shimkus (R-Ill.) says that only 2 percent of the atmosphere is made up of greenhouse gases, and that only 2 percent of those gases are man made. He somehow seems to think that small proportions in such matters are unimportant. But of course, we now know that Shimkus’s real problem is not that […]

Environment

Energy Committee Chairman Candidate Says God Promised no More Catastrophic Climate Change after Noah

Juan Cole

Rep. John Shimkus (R-Ill.), who will seek the Energy and Commerce Committee chairmanship maintains that we do not have to worry about climate change because God promised in the Bible not to destroy the world again after Noah’s flood. The video I posted got pulled by YouTube as ‘spam’, which it isn’t, so I presume […]

al-Qaeda

A North-South Global Climate War?

Juan Cole

This looks to me like a sort of north-south global war, with the North inflicting profound damage on the South: Here are carbon dioxide emissions per capita by country, calculated from data at the US Department of Energy’s Carbon Dioxide Information Analysis Center (CDIAC): and here is the new Maplecroft estimation of the countries most […]