Photo by Edible Office.

“In the course of getting a plate of food to our table, we’re paying a lot of attention to the farmer, the chef, the farmers market -- all of that is as it should be, but we pay very little attention to the thing that starts it all, the seed.” That sentiment comes from Janisse Ray, farmer and author of the new book The Seed Underground: A Growing Revolution to Save Food.

And it’s true; for many of us, seeds are a mysterious, invisible piece of the food puzzle. While we’re busy thinking about how to fix our food economies, seeds often slip through the cracks. And we’ve lost an almost unfathomable amount of genetic diversity as a result; depending on whom you ask, anywhere between 75 to 95 percent of our fruit and vegetable varieties have been lost for good. Highly functional, often bland, hybridized and genetically engineered varieties have taken over the commercial market -- as opposed to the more delicate, complex heirloom varieties with stories and names attached, such as Dragon Tongue beans, Country Gentleman sweet corn, and May Queen lettuce -- and Monsanto, Dupont, and Syngenta now own over half of the world’s seeds.

God, we missed you so much, fall. Don't ever leave* us again. (* Ugh.)

Today is the last day of summer in these United States. It has been a crappy one.

Not, like, your summer. I'm sure your summer was great: ice cream and swimming and lots of time at the arcade, or whatever you do for fun. I mean it's been crappy for these United States.

For one thing, it was hot. 2012 is on track to easily be the hottest year in America's recorded history:

Since January, year-to-date temperatures for the continental US have consistently run well above the 20th-century average with each passing month – reaching a maximum of 6 degrees Fahrenheit above average for the period ending March 31, then declining steadily to 4 degrees F above the 20th-century average for the period ending August 31. …

Still, that 4 degrees is at least a full degree higher than January-to-August averages in any of the five warmest years on record.

Yaaaaaay.

Taxes on cigarettes are considered "sin taxes," costs intended, in part, to punish bad behavior. One bad behavior that cigarette taxes in New York punish: being poor.

Photo by DucDigital.

From the AP:

Low-income smokers in New York spend 25 percent of their income on cigarettes, according to a new study, which led advocates for smokers’ rights to say it proved high taxes were regressive and ineffective. …

In New York, which has the nation’s highest cigarette taxes, a pack of cigarettes can cost $12, though many smokers have turned to buying cheaper cigarettes online or to using roll-your-own devices.

Wealthier smokers -- those earning $60,000 or more -- spend 2 percent on cigarettes, according to the study. ...

[The American Cancer Society's Russ] Sciandra said state statistics showed that smokers earning less than $30,000 a year paid 39 percent of state and city taxes on cigarettes. He added that more of the cigarette tax revenue should be used to finance smoking-cessation programs.

To some extent, this is a function of percentages. If you only have $100, $25 will seem much more dear than if you have $1 million. But the impact is real. The Atlantic's Derek Thompson wrote about how people at various income levels spend their money. For an average low-income household, housing, utilities, and transportation alone generally eat up almost three-quarters of the budget.

Not satisfied with already being known as the most anti-environmental House of Representatives in history, this week House Republicans are again attempting to gut fundamental health and environmental laws to please polluters -- specifically, the coal industry. In a new package of bills, House leadership is taking aim at a staggering array of basic laws that hold polluters accountable and ensure Americans have access to clean air and drinkable water; it fundamentally weakens the Clean Air Act and eviscerates the protections of the Clean Water Act. It will increase disease and deaths of tens of thousands of Americans, not to …

The Food and Environmental Reporting Network released a striking report this week (Sept. 18) describing how industrial agriculture and climate change are fueling massive blooms of toxic algae: Blooms have closed lake beaches or led to swimming advisories from Vermont’s Lake Champlain to Dorena Reservoir in Oregon and from Florida’s Caloosahatchee River to Wisconsin’s Lake Menomin. In addition to the health risks, the blooms take an economic toll. An estimate by Walter Dodds of Kansas State University conservatively puts the annual cost of freshwater algal blooms at more than $1 billion from lost recreation and depressed property values. A slide show of horrific images of water tainted by agriculture …

Residents of Alaska, the state once governed by conservative firebrand Sarah Palin, will each receive $878 from the state's Permanent Fund this year. The Permanent Fund was created in 1976 to collect and distribute revenues Alaska generates from publicly owned resources: sales of oil and natural gas, etc. In other words, it's an example of the government holding a resource and distributing the proceeds from that resource to the entire population. It's like -- what's a good example? -- it's like how some entire nations used to maintain ownership of businesses and then distribute goods and services from those businesses to the citizenry. There's a name for that sort of government that escapes me.

The oil industry wasn't as good to Alaska this year as in years past. The peak of the government's munificence came in 2008, the same year that then-Gov. Sarah Palin ran for vice president while assailing Barack Obama's imaginary predilection for redistributing wealth. In 2008, Alaskans got an extra $1,200 due to windfall oil proceeds. The $1,200 was proposed by Palin, shortly before she hit the campaign trail alongside people like Joe "the Plumber" Wurzelbacher.

Last week, Palin was on Fox News. From Yahoo!:

Fox News contributor and former vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin is urging Mitt Romney to make his criticism of President Barack Obama "personal," and agreed that he should begin using words such as "incompetent, dangerous, socialist" to describe the president.

There's the word I was looking for earlier!

The North Pole, surrounded by pools of water. (Image courtesy of NOAA.)

Cambridge professor Peter Wadhams has a prediction.

Wadhams has spent many years collecting ice thickness data from submarines passing below the arctic ocean. He predicted the imminent break-up of sea ice in summer months in 2007, when the previous lowest extent of 4.17 million square kilometres was set. This year, it has unexpectedly plunged a further 500,000 sq km to less than 3.5m sq km. "I have been predicting [the collapse of sea ice in summer months] for many years. The main cause is simply global warming: as the climate has warmed there has been less ice growth during the winter and more ice melt during the summer.

"At first this didn't [get] noticed; the summer ice limits slowly shrank back, at a rate which suggested that the ice would last another 50 years or so. But in the end the summer melt overtook the winter growth such that the entire ice sheet melts or breaks up during the summer months.

"This collapse, I predicted would occur in 2015-16 at which time the summer Arctic (August to September) would become ice-free. The final collapse towards that state is now happening and will probably be complete by those dates".

Wadhams knows more than I do, so I'll give him the benefit of the doubt on this. Normally, I'd think that this year's record melt is a blip on a longer, slower trend. Here's what the ice loss looks like over time:

Percentage of ice loss, by year.  Click to embiggen. (Image by Jim Pettit.)

It's possible that the black line, indicating the overall trend, could reach 100 percent by 2015, to be sure. 2012 could be an anomaly, or it could be the cliff's edge.

A work crew in Texas would love your help in finding a little gadget they lost. They need it to find good places to frack, so it's kinda urgent. Oh, also, don't go near it because it's radioactive.

The thing that's missing. At bottom. At top is a tape measure. (Photo courtesy of Texas Department of State Health Services.)

From Bloomberg:

FBI officials working with the Texas Department of Transportation questioned three employees who were unable to locate the device this week after it went missing on a 130-mile (209-kilometer) route from Pecos to Odessa, according to a Nuclear Regulatory Commission incident report today.

“The FBI would only say that they believed there was no criminal activity involved with the missing” tool, Halliburton told state officials according to the NRC report. A well near Pecos, where the device was last used, has been searched three times, it said. ...

Oil-field service companies lower the radioactive units into wells to let workers identify places to break apart rock for a drilling process known as hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, which frees oil and natural gas. While the loss of such a probe occurs from time to time, it has been years since a device with americium-241/beryllium, the material in Halliburton’s device, was misplaced in Texas, Van Deusen said.

Oh, did we mention that the crew works for Halliburton? Because of course they do.

A small cod caught near England. (Photo by john47kent.)

The headline in the Telegraph is startling: "Just 100 cod left in North Sea." One hundred fish? Over a massive, 750,000-square-kilometer expanse of the Atlantic near Northern Europe?

Sort of. There are more than 100 cod in the North Sea. The problem isn't that there are almost no cod, the problem is that there are very few cod of a certain age and size. From the article:

Chris Darby, head of the Cefas team, said: “Our latest assessments suggest in 2011 there were 600 cod aged 12 to 13 in the North Sea, of which about 200 were caught.

“None of the catches recorded at North Sea ports around Europe showed any fish aged 13 or over. Analysis of that data suggests there are fewer than 100 such fish in the whole North Sea.”

I spoke with Callum Roberts, professor of marine biology at York University, who is familiar with the report. He explained that the 100-fish number is as much a bad omen as it is an alarming figure.

Georgia, like many other states, is suffering from the drought. Here's Drought Monitor's assessment of the current state of drought in the southeast; Georgia is affected far more than any other state in the region.

Image courtesy of Drought Monitor.

More than half of the state is experiencing at least moderate drought; 17 percent is seeing "exceptional" conditions.

Atlanta, in two weeks.

If you ask state officials, however, you get the real story: Drought? Whatsa drought?