The whaling lie

Well, the Japanese whaling fleet has left port to go slaughter some whales. This is bad policy for several reasons.

  • Killing endangered animals is always a bad idea, and the Japanese don’t even do it humanely. This is bloody slaughter for the sake of bloody slaughter, and it’s going to harm large species that are easily tipped over the brink into extinction.

  • It’s basically done as a subsidy for the whalers. This is not really a profitable business. I get irritated by the local farmers who are raising corn for ethanol, an exercise in inefficiency and waste that gets them government money…but getting money for killing large rare animals is more vividly worse.

  • The biggest reason I despise Japanese whaling is a bit selfish and narrow, I have to confess. It’s because of this:

    Japan kills more than 1000 whales a year in the Antarctic and also the Pacific Ocean using a loophole in an international moratorium that allows catching whales for research.

    That is such a lie. It demeans science. Japan is not throwing money into their whaling fleet as a research tool; I know what marine biological research looks like, and it rarely involves harpoons, flensing knives, and a cannery. Give university marine mammalogists the money to equip boats to pursue whales, and they won’t look like this:

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    Note the big “RESEARCH” stenciled across the hull. It’s a lie. It ought to say “BUTCHERY”. The research done by whalers is miniscule, and could be better done without the associated killing.

New boss same as the old boss

Kentucky, you’re on notice.

The chairman of the joint Agricultural and Natural Resources Committee is holding hearings to promote ignorance and denialism. This is appalling.

Chairman Jim Gooch, D-Providence, a longtime ally of the coal industry, said he purposefully did not invite anyone who believes in global warming to testify.

“You can only hear that the sky is falling so many times,” said Gooch, whose post makes him the House Democrats’ chief environmental strategist. “We hear it every day from the news media, from the colleges, from Hollywood.”

Neither of Gooch’s invited panelists was a scientist.

What he is saying is idiotic enough, but look at the letter after his name: “D”. Isn’t it nice that we now have bipartisan inanity? How do these mouth-breathing ninnyhammers get elected into positions of power, anyway?

Tasmanian devils need your help

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We had a seminar from Marco Restani of St Cloud State University yesterday — he’s a wildlife biologist who talked about Tasmanian Devils. Just a little tip: don’t ever invite wildlife biologists or conservation ecologists to give talks. They are the most depressing people in the world, and they really make it hard to hide away from the ugly realities. This talk was no exception: the Tasmanian Devil is in big trouble, and is facing at least two major threats, each of which may be sufficient to wipe them out. And just looke at that guy! He’s adorable! How can you let them go extinct?

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Cyclone Sidr … have you heard about it?

Try checking the major American news sites: CNN, Fox, MSNBC, the New York Times, you can even try the BBC. There’s a major news story missing.

You’ll have to read Chris Mooney’s blog to find it. There’s a potential Category 5 cyclone, Cyclone Sidr, on its way to smash Bangladesh.

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It’s going to hit sometime tomorrow. While Sonny Perdue prays for a little rain, maybe we should be urging our news networks to pay attention to the important news, our government should be getting ready for emergency assistance, and we should all be preparing to loosen those checkbooks and possibly offer what aid we can.

Green UMM

One of the goals of my university is to go green: we’re working on wind and biomass power, we support local foods, we’re making a major initiative to add environmental studies to our curriculum, and we’re about to build a green dorm on campus. One interesting tack the green dormies are taking is to keep the public informed with a Green Dorm blog. So far, it’s awfully dry reading and its not really taking advantage of the medium well — each post is little more than a link to a pdf document from the planning process — but they are open to comment, at least.

Maybe they should consult someone who knows better ways of putting information on the web, though.

Larry Craig’s real crime

I wrote of my fondness for salmon the other day, and now I learn of a strange and rather satisfying coincidence: Larry Craig was an enemy of the salmon.

The surprising fall of Sen. Larry Craig, R-Idaho, removes a longtime obstacle to efforts by Democrats and environmentalists to promote salmon recovery on Northwest rivers.

Craig, who was removed from leadership posts on the Senate Appropriations and Energy committees after a sex scandal, is known as one the most powerful voices in Congress on behalf of the timber and power industries. Environmentalists have fought him for years on issues from endangered salmon to public land grazing.

I don’t think he should have resigned over stupid sexual behavior, but that he was one of those rats who fought to destroy the environment…that ought to be a hanging offense. It’s not an entirely happy story, though. I find myself a bit peeved that in this country you can lose your job for waving your hand under a toilet stall divider, but accepting money from industry to allow them to poison the land and circumvent reasonable ecological restrictions…pish. That’s nothin’.

Oreskes smacks down Shulte

This sounds so familiar. A few years ago, a historian of science, Naomi Oreskes, reviewed the literature on climate change and concluded that there is a unanimous consensus in the published work that anthropogenic carbon is a major contributor to global warming. Now a denialist has re-analyzed those papers and is saying that Oreskes was wrong : almost half of the papers are “neutral”, neither supporting nor refuting anthropogenic change, while 6% do reject the idea.

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