Jack Dini

Nanny State of EPA and Others

The EPA wants hotels to monitor how much time its guests spend in the shower. The goal of the project is to change the behavior of Americans when they stay at hotels. (1)

Chemicals- Don't Trouble Oneself With The Facts

A few scientists have begun to discover a human tendency deeply discouraging to anyone with faith in the power of information. It's this: Facts don't necessarily have the power to change our minds. In fact, quite the opposite. Researchers at the University of Michigan found that when misinformed people were exposed to corrected facts in news stories, they rarely changed their minds. In fact, they often became even more strongly set in their beliefs. Facts, they found were not curing misinformation. Like an underpowered antibiotic, facts could actually make misinformation even stronger. (1)

Air Pollution And Not-So -Premature-Deaths

Chinese cities have some of the worst air pollution in the world. Two are Xi'an and Shanghai. Yet reports claim life expectancy in both these cities is higher than the US.

Deaths From Heat and Cold

Far more people die in winter than at any other time of year, and not necessarily with snow shovels in their hands.

The Case For Invasive Species

For a long time, veteran environmental journalist Fred Pearce thought in stark terms about invasive species: they were evil interlopers spoiling pristine 'natural' ecosystems. Most conservationists and environmentalists share this view. But what if the traditional view of ecology is wrong--what if true environmentalists should be applauding the invaders?

Tuvalu is Rising, Not Sinking

Tuvalu is a remote island nation consisting of a fringe of atolls covering 25.9 sq km (10 sq miles), with the highest point no more than five meters (17 feet) above sea level midway between Hawaii and Australia. Government officials in Tuvalu claim it is drowning because of global warming. The prime minister has said that Tuvalu was "the world's first victim of climate change," and that "the greenhouse effect and sea level rise threaten the very heart of our existence." (1) Doomsayer Al Gore predicted that residents would have to evacuate their homes because of rising seas.

Volcanoes, Dinosaurs and Climate Change

About 65 million years ago an object about 10 km (6 miles) across impacted the Earth in the Yucatan. The most accepted theory is that this event ended the Cretaceous Period and wiped out the dinosaurs. However, debate over what killed the dinosaurs is heating up anew as a team of UC Berkeley scientists suggests that this asteroid slamming into the Earth must have triggered the eruptions of thousands of volcanoes on the other side of the planet—a combined event that could have helped to doom the beasts. (1)

Dust is a Worldwide Pollutant

What connects Earth's largest, hottest desert to its largest tropical rain forest? For the first time, a NASA satellite has quantified in three dimensions how much Saharan dust makes the trans-Atlantic journey. Scientists have not only measured the volume of the dust, they have also calculated how much phosphorus—remnant in Saharan sands from part of the desert's past as a lake bed—gets carried across the ocean from one of the planet's most desolate places to one of its most fertile. (1)

America's Self-Destructive Energy Policy

Which of the following headlines stand out as contrary to what the rest of the world is doing? If it isn't at first clear to you, they are marked in capital letters.

Cosmetics and Scare Tactics

Protecting water-based cosmetics from microbes that can cause rashes or infections has traditionally been the job of synthetic preservatives. But owing to a combination of toxicity concerns and consumer pressure, some cosmetics makers are eschewing specific preservative molecules such as formaldehyde or parabens or avoiding synthetics entirely reports Marc Reisch. (1)

Worms Adapt to Some Toxins

Hennie Eksteen, an expert on worms, has researched many astonishing features of these humble creatures including this one: "They can encapsulate toxic heavy metals before excreting them, which leaves the metals isolated in a hard shell. This is what happened after Chernobyl nuclear accident, and why the local environment looks so good now." (1)

Antibiotics Overuse And Its Implications

Clinical journals and the media these days are full of reports describing bacterial strains that are resistant to our most powerful antibiotics. Most of this information has focused on the problem of bacterial resistance, but it is only part of the story. Physician Martin J. Blaser, who directs the Human Microbiome Program at New York University, takes a distinctly different approach. For years, his lab has been studying the effects of antibiotic treatment on mice. This work hints at another, less obvious but potentially just as serious consequence of the unfettered application of antibiotics which is covered in his recent book, Missing Microbes. (1)

Solar Growing But Still Heavily Lagging Hydrocarbons

For all its rapid growth, solar isn't even keeping pace wit the growth appetite for hydrocarbons

Utopia Gone Awry

Environmentalist and doomsday-believer Dylan Evans believed he could actually make himself a better life departing the comforts of modern age and getting back to the natural beauty of raw survival with other like-minded persons. Strangely, he and his followers chose the raw climate of northern Scotland of all places (more on this later). (1)

Ozone Regulation and the EPA

The west coast sees rising levels of ozone because of emissions from fast-developing Asian countries while the southeast sees increasing ozone from uncontrolled growth of the invasive species kudzu

Temperature and Carbon Dioxide Revisited

When it comes to climate change, the public's appreciation of uncertainty seems to vanish. This is partly due to intense propaganda from official government bodies such as the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) plus heavy support from the media. For example, in mid-January NOAA headlined their home page, “It's official, 2014 was Earth's warmest year on record.” NASA proclaimed in their January 16th news video, “2014 was the hottest year on record.” But these announcements are effectively lies, argues Tom Harris. (1)

Greenpeace- Shooting Itself in the Foot

Environmentalists often bristle when charged with being addicted to gloom-and-doom messages, but every now and then an environmental group will confirm the stereotype. In April 2006, Greenpeace mistakenly posted an incomplete draft press on its web site that read “In the twenty years since the Chernobyl tragedy, the world's worst nuclear accident, there have been nearly [FILL IN ALARMIST AND ARMAGEDDONIST FACTOID HERE.].” (1)

Greenpeace—Poverty Be Damned

Paul Watson, a co-founder of Greenpeace has written that human overpopulation is “a virus...killing our host the planet Earth, and so the number of people living in the world should be slashed by 85 percent.” “No human community in the world should be larger than 20,000 people,” Watson writes. “We need to radically and intelligently reduce human populations to fewer than one billion.”

Species Extinction Claims Are Overblown

The claim of impending mass extinction of the Earth's species is a never-ending drama. In 1979, the biologist Norman Myers declared that a fifth of all species on the planet would be gone within two decades. Did we really lose that fifth by 1999? Hardly.

Ocean Acidification- A New Climategate?

A good way to excite people is to tell them that something has become more 'acid' as 'the oceans are undergoing acidification and this is a potential environmental catastrophe.'