NewsTrust - Sci/Tech - Most Recent Stories: Opinion (Independent)

Everything Americans Think They Know About Drugs Is Wrong: A Scientist Explodes the Myths

Sun, 16 Jun 2013 00:00:00 -0700

AlterNet - By Kristen Gwynne - Jun. 16 (Interview) - There are multiple false conclusions. There is a belief, for example, that crack cocaine is so addictive it only took one hit to get hooked, and that it is impossible to use heroin without becoming addicted. There was another belief that methamphetamine users are cognitively impaired. All of these are myths that have have been perpetuated primarily by law enforcement, and law enforcement deals with a limited, select group of people—people who are, in many cases, behaving badly. But to generalize that to all drug users is not only shortsighted and naive, it’s also irresponsible. The impact of that irresponsible behavior has been borne primarily by black communities.

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TV Weathermen and Climate Scientists Kiss and Make Up

Wed, 12 Jun 2013 00:00:00 -0700

Mother Jones - By Chris Mooney - Jun. 12 (Opinion) - Weather forecasters and climate scientists aren't exactly known for being the best of buds. Several surveys have shown that among members of the American Meteorological Society — and especially among professional TV forecasters — there"s a substantial degree of global warming skepticism. Indeed, more than half of AMS members perceive conflict within the organization over the issue of climate change. Meanwhile, members of the climate science community are sometimes accused of speaking down to their weather geek brethren. Given this tense history, what happened at the most recent Climate Desk Live event , featuring Rutgers University climate scientist Jennifer Francis and Stu Ostro , senior meteorologist at the Weather Channel, might be considered fairly remarkable. "Jennifer's coming at it from a different direction than I am," said Ostro after he and Francis delivered complementary analyses of how global warming is upending our weather. "But what"s interesting is ...

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Pandora's False Promise

Tue, 11 Jun 2013 00:00:00 -0700

thebulletin.org - By Kennette Benedict - Jun. 11 (Review) - Rather, Stone and his subjects seem as intent on promoting nuclear power as the one clear solution as they once were in denying that it had any place in responsible energy planning. Since they've now "seen the light," viewers are expected to join their new-found cause.

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NSA Spying: An Obama Scandal?

Thu, 06 Jun 2013 00:00:00 -0700

Mother Jones - By David Corn - Jun. 06 (Opinion) - In recent months, the Republicans have been desperately hunting for an Obama scandal—with little success. A Benghazi cover-up? Oops, the emails released by the White House (at the urging of the GOPers) showed nothing improper. A Nixonian scheme to use the IRS to punish political enemies? The Treasury Department inspector general who investigated the IRS targeting of tea party-ish groups seeking nonprofit status declared there was no evidence this political profiling was prompted by anyone outside the IRS division. With the revelation that the National Security Agency is sweeping up the telephone records of Americans suspected of no wrongdoing, though, the Obama gang may finally have a real scandal on its hand—not a scandal of wrongdoing or unethical conduct, but one of government overreach.

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NSA Whistleblowers: Why Are You Surprised at the Verizon News? - They've Been Highlighting Surveillance Program For Years

Thu, 06 Jun 2013 00:00:00 -0700

dslreports.com - Jun. 06 (Opinion) -

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Errata Security: Welcome to Echelon 2.0

Thu, 06 Jun 2013 00:00:00 -0700

erratasec.blogspot.com - Jun. 06 (Opinion) -

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In the Era of Climate Change, Poets Can't Write About the "Eternal Sea"

Tue, 04 Jun 2013 00:00:00 -0700

Mother Jones - By Lewis Lapham - Jun. 04 (Comment) - This story first appeared on the TomDispatch website. In heavy fog on the night of October 7, 1936, the SS Ohioan ran aground three miles south and west of San Francisco's Golden Gate Bridge, and by noon on October 8th, I was among a crowd of spectators come to pay its respects to the no small terror of the sea.

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This Alaskan Gold Mine Makes Arctic Drilling Look Good

Wed, 29 May 2013 00:00:00 -0700

Mother Jones - By Kate Sheppard - May. 29 (Opinion) - What's the greatest threat to Alaska's pristine wilderness? Drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge is up there, as is climate change. But if you ask people who live in the state, many will tell you that Pebble Mine—a proposed open-pit copper and gold mine that would be as much as two miles long, a mile and a half wide, and 1,700 feet deep—is their biggest environmental concern. It's also one that the Obama administration Environmental Protection Agency could actually stop. If built, Pebble Mine would be the largest mine of its type in North America.

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Engineers And Tech Workers Announce Opposition To Gang Of Eight Immigration Bill

Wed, 29 May 2013 00:00:00 -0700

senate.gov - By Jeff Sessions - May. 29 (Press Release) - The engineers’ union explains that under the current proposal ‘[h]undreds of thousands of foreign STEM workers—engineers, scientists, and others—will enter the United States each year for the sole purpose of working in jobs that Americans would normally do. These are jobs that are currently being performed by highly educated and skilled workers, and jobs on the horizon that millions of American STEM students attending our colleges and universities plan to fill.’ The union says that the legislation ‘sold these workers and students down the river, in favor of catering to the high-tech industry’s interest in gaining unfettered access to cheap labor from all across the globe.

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Comic XKCD Nails Google Glass Critics (Especially Congress)

Mon, 27 May 2013 00:00:00 -0700

TechCrunch - By Gregory Ferenstein - May. 27 (Opinion) - By far the worst offender of question-only criticism has come from the U.S. Congress Privacy Caucus, which sent a passive-aggressive list of queries directly to CEO, Larry Page. “Because Google Glass has not yet been released and we are uncertain of Google’s plans to incorporate privacy protections into the device, there are still a number of unanswered questions that we share,” wrote eight congressmen. Some of the questions were already publically answered (which, ironically, could have been found out with a simple Google search).

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Paying for the great urbanization of China | Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists

Fri, 24 May 2013 00:00:00 -0700

thebulletin.org - By Hal Harvey - May. 24 (Opinion) - Second, the global climate is indifferent to the source of carbon dioxide emissions, so an efficient China will benefit the entire world. And, finally, China's legendary particulate air pollution actually travels across the Pacific, affecting the air in the West coast. A recent study found that more than three-fourths of "black carbon" -- basically, unburned hydrocarbons -- on the West coast comes in airborne plumes from China.

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Rooftop Revolution: How Solar Energy Is Putting Power Back in the Hands of the People

Thu, 23 May 2013 00:00:00 -0700

AlterNet - By Heeten Kalan - May. 23 (Interview) - Danny Kennedy, Greenpeace activist, Project Underground founder and long-time campaigner, decided to apply his organizing skills to harness the sun’s energy. Choosing to do something about our energy crisis and climate change, he founded Sungevity with a small group of trusted friends in 2007. Now, Sungevity is one the world’s leading residential solar-energy companies and is the exclusive residential solar partner for Lowe’s.

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You Need Phosphorous to Live—and We're Running Out

Wed, 22 May 2013 00:00:00 -0700

Mother Jones - By Tom Philpott - May. 22 (Comment) - Western Sahara , a sparsely populated slice of desert on Africa's northwestern coast, doesn't get much ink as a potential crisis point in the global food system. You've probably never heard of the long-standing independence movement in the Morocco-controlled territory—or that the area harbors vast stores of an element critical to contemporary agriculture. Morocco, it is thought, holds up to 85 percent (PDF) of the globe's known phosphate rock reserve—and a lot of it lies in Western Sahara. Morocco's royal family thus controls what Jeremy Grantham, cofounder of the prominent Boston-based global investment firm Grantham, Mayo, Van Otterloo & Co., called the " most important quasi-monopoly in economic history ." Who cares about phosphorus? For starters, every living thing on Earth—including humans—since all the crops we eat depend on it to produce healthy cells. Until the mid-20th century, farmers maintained phosphorus levels in soil by composting plant waste or ...

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The Lost ‘Trifecta of Scandals’

Thu, 16 May 2013 00:00:00 -0700

Consortium News - By Beverly Bandler - May. 16 (Opinion) - the mainstream news media is abuzz about “the trifecta of scandals” besetting the Obama administration, a narrative that fails to assess the actual significance of the three “scandals.” They don’t measure up to the many important scandals that the media neglects

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Dick Cheney, Benghazi, and White House Lies

Wed, 15 May 2013 00:00:00 -0700

Mother Jones - By David Corn - May. 15 (Opinion) - Dick Cheney has never been short on chutzpah. Jumping aboard the GOP scandal-mongering machine, the former vice president appeared on Fox News (where else?) and declared to Sean Hannity (who else?) that President Barack Obama and his aides "lied" about the attack in Benghazi last September that left four Americans dead. "I think it's one of the worst incidents frankly that I can recall in my career," Cheney huffed—as if 9/11 had never happened. The former veep went the full Monty and echoed (discredited) right-wing charges that the Obama administration refused to deploy military forces to help Ambassador Chris Stevens and other Americans when they were assaulted in Benghazi.

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12 Animals We Wish We Could De-Extinct

Wed, 15 May 2013 00:00:00 -0700

Mother Jones - By — By Maggie Severns, the Mother Jones news team - May. 15 (Comment) - Do you miss the mammoth? Dream of dodos? Long for Lycaena dispar dispar ? After centuries of driving species after species to extinction, we're now tantalizingly close to bringing some of them back. Using advances in genetic sequencing and molecular biology, s cientists across the world are mining extinct animal specimens for ancient DNA to try to resurrect disappeared species. The science is complicated— National Geographic has a great rundown—and so are the ethics involved. But who can resist dreaming up a de-extinction "wish list"? With more species nearing the extinction danger zone every dayâ€‹, there's no shortage of candidates, but some are more scientifically suited for resurrection than others. And even if we could bring a species back, should we? We looked to scientists to explain who they'd like to bring back, and which are best left in the past. T. rex , extinct for 65 million years Designed for "maximum bone-crushing action," Tyrannosaurus ...

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The Most Controversial Chart in History, Explained

Thu, 09 May 2013 00:00:00 -0700

Mother Jones - By Chris Mooney - May. 09 (Opinion) - Back in 1998, a little known climate scientist named Michael Mann and two colleagues published a paper that sought to reconstruct the planet's past temperatures going back half a millennium before the era of thermometers—thereby showing just how out of whack recent warming has been. The finding: Recent northern hemisphere temperatures had been "warmer than any other year since (at least) AD 1400." The graph depicting this result looked rather like a hockey stick: After a long period of relatively minor temperature variations (the "shaft"), it showed a sharp mercury upswing during the last century or so ("the blade"). The report moved quickly through climate science circles. Mann and a colleague soon lengthened the shaft of the hockey stick back to the year 1000 AD—and then, in 2001, the UN's ...

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Who Am I? Why Everything You Know about Your “Self” Is Wrong

Thu, 09 May 2013 00:00:00 -0700

Psychology Today - May. 09 (Opinion) -

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In Gasland sequel, fracking saga’s pressure ratchets up

Sat, 27 Apr 2013 00:00:00 -0700

Grist - By Sarah Laskow - Apr. 27 (Review) - Gasland Part II shows how much higher the stakes have grown in the battle over fracking since Josh Fox made its predecessor.

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GOP Goes Hunting For EPA Emails About Turducken

Fri, 19 Apr 2013 00:00:00 -0700

Mother Jones - By Tim McDonnell - Apr. 19 (Opinion) - Earlier this month, when a burst pipe spilled thousands of gallons of heavy oil into an Arkansas suburb, the message from the White House went something like: "Everybody chill, the EPA has it under control." But reporters on the scene found the cleanup orchestrated by the same company, ExxonMobil, that allowed the spill, and heard only crickets when they asked the EPA about its involvement. Turns out, on some of the nation's most pressing environmental health issues, the EPA's transparency record isn't exactly crystal-clear. So with a vote on President Obama's new pick to head the EPA, Gina McCarthy, coming up as soon as next week , it perhaps isn't a surprise that Congressional scrutiny of her nomination has centered more on the agency's secret-keeping habits than on its environmental enforcement goals. At a hearing last Thursday before the Senate's Environment and Public Works Committee, McCarthy got grilled on EPA's transparency record by Republican members, led by Louisiana's David Vitter. ...

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Saving Our Ravaged Planet ... and Ourselves

Wed, 17 Apr 2013 00:00:00 -0700

nationofchange.org - By Jim Hightower - Apr. 17 (Opinion) - Earth Day cometh — the 43rd year of this national focus on the state of our globe. So, how is Earth doing? Should we be weeping ... or cheering? Both.

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How Science Can Predict Where You Stand on Keystone XL

Wed, 17 Apr 2013 00:00:00 -0700

Mother Jones - By Chris Mooney - Apr. 17 (Comment) - On February 17, more than 40,000 climate change activists—many of them quite young—rallied in Washington, DC, to oppose the Keystone XL pipeline, which will transport dirty tar sands oil from Canada across the heartland. The scornful response from media centrists was predictable. Joe Nocera of the New York Times , for one, quickly went on the attack.

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Keystone XL Would Increase Gas Prices, Reduce National Energy Security, New Public Citizen Report Finds

Mon, 15 Apr 2013 00:00:00 -0700

citizen.org - Apr. 15 (Opinion) -

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WATCH: Tar Sands Timmy Needs a Pipeline [Fiore Cartoon]

Thu, 11 Apr 2013 00:00:00 -0700

Mother Jones - By Mark Fiore - Apr. 11 () - Mark Fiore is a Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial cartoonist and animator whose work has appeared in the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, the San Francisco Examiner, and dozens of other publications. He is an active member of the American Association of Editorial Cartoonists, and has a website featuring his work.

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Al Gore Is Fat, Therefore Global Warming Doesn't Exist

Thu, 11 Apr 2013 00:00:00 -0700

Mother Jones - By Chris Mooney - Apr. 11 (Comment) - Ever notice that when conservatives want to attack the science of global warming—or the idea that we ought to do something about it—they almost always find a way to rope in Al Gore? Occasionally, they even try to debunk the science by denigrating Gore personally, in a kind of guilt-by-association gambit. One of the most striking examples came from Ann Coulter, who wrote in a column in early 2007: The only place Al Gore conserves energy these days is on the treadmill. I don't want to suggest that Al's getting big, but the last time I saw him on TV I thought, "That reminds me—we have to do something about saving the polar bears." Never mind his carbon footprint—have you seen the size of Al Gore's regular footprint lately? It's almost as deep as Janet Reno's. Funny stuff, huh? Coulter's attacks on the former vice president's weight were extreme—but new academic research on conservative syndicated columnists and their writings on global warming suggests that ...

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