From Tuesday’s New York Times:
“It clearly evokes a visceral response because we’re the only industry that has our prices in two-foot-high letters on the street corner,” said John Felmy, chief economist at the American Petroleum Institute. “We’ve seen other things go up in prices, like milk, but if you ask 10 people on the street what’s the price of milk they may not know. All of them will know the price of gas.”
In a sort of grand convergence of anti-environmental flypaper, a souffle of red meat, New Scientist just sent out this news flash: Penguins exposed to DDT from melting glaciers
Decades after most countries stopped using the insecticide DDT, frozen stores of the chemical are now dripping out of melting Antarctic glaciers – and into penguins.
This is going to be so entertaining.
Tim Haab’s graph of the day really needs no comment. (But this is the Internet, so I know that won’t stop you.)
According to Fred Pearce, ((When the Rivers Run Dry
Al Zelicoff and Troy Simpson have their latest video up in a series the Albuquerque Journal is doing on stuff you can do to save energy and money. My favorite bit is the fact that Al fills up so rarely that he forgets which side of the car the gas tank is on.
update: I was suspicious, but Troy swears Al really didn’t remember which side the gas tank was on.
There is not much to see on this windy scrap of desert south of Albuquerque, which is probably a good thing.
On the eastern edge of the planned Mesa del Sol community south of Albuquerque, this is the site of one of the United States’ most notorious nuclear weapons accidents.
A plane on approach to Kirtland Air Force Base in 1957, 1,700 feet above ground, accidentally dropped what was, at the time, the largest hydrogen bomb in the U.S. arsenal.
The weapon’s dangerously radioactive plutonium core had been removed before it fell from the plane, and there was no nuclear blast. But the high explosives used to trigger a nuclear weapon’s explosion did go off on impact, creating a crater 25 feet wide and 15 feet deep in the desert scrub.
There’s been some confusion over the years about the exact location, so I took the liberty of making a map:
View Larger Map
So it turns out the Google satellite image is not live, so you’ll have to take my word for it that I saw an elephant down by the Rio Grande on my bike ride today. The Google Mapness is a little bit squirrelly, but I think I’ve got this working:
Scroll in really tight to see me riding around in circles:
It took a little bit of jigging to get the 49 miles in in honor of my 49th birthday tomorrow, but there you have it. I am easily amused.
Next to Al Gore, William Connolley may be the world’s most influential person in the global warming debate.
I’ll just point out that my Connolley number is 1. I am one degree of separation from greatness.
California’s snowpack is collapsing, according to the LA Times:
California communities face a strong possibility of water shortages and even mandatory rationing this summer because of record dry weather in March and April, a fast-shrinking snowpack and below-normal reservoir levels, state officials said Thursday.
