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Cats are the canaries of PBDEs

This is my cat, George. He is fat and grouchy, but I love him. He likes to sun himself on the patio.

This is a link to Sightline's research on PBDEs, toxic flame retardants. A couple of years ago, we conducted a study of PBDEs and found high concentrations in the breast milk of nursing mothers throughout the Pacific Northwest. It was bad news.

And what's the connection to George? Well, new scientific research shows that PBDEs are making house cats sick. (Major hat tip here to Lisa Stiffler, ace environmental reporter at the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, who covers the story in her blog today.)

From a summary of the study:

PBDE concentrations in blood serum of the 23 house cats participating in the study were 20-100 times higher than the median levels of PBDEs in people living in North America, who have been shown to have the world's highest human PBDE levels.

PBDEs are long-lived. They're found in foam cushions, TVs, computers, carpet pads, curtains, you name it. It's thought that we humans get our exposure to PBDEs through house dust, which often includes crumbled bits of foam and other goodies. Same goes for cats: researchers believe that felines, with their obsessive-compulsive grooming, are literally lapping up the toxic compound. And many cats (George included) eat a lot of fish, which tends to have high concentrations of toxics, too.

Wikipedia Scanner reveals orgs that edit Wikipedia articles

Ah, Wikipedia. Many of us at Grist frequently use this resource, but we do so knowing that just about anyone can edit a Wikipedia article at anytime. So, can we really trust the information contained within?

Fear not! As Wired reports, there is a new tool that sheds some light on who is editing what:

On November 17th, 2005, an anonymous Wikipedia user deleted 15 paragraphs from an article on e-voting machine-vendor Diebold, excising an entire section critical of the company's machines. While anonymous, such changes typically leave behind digital fingerprints offering hints about the contributor, such as the location of the computer used to make the edits.

In this case, the changes came from an IP address reserved for the corporate offices of Diebold itself. And it is far from an isolated case. A new data-mining service launched Monday traces millions of Wikipedia entries to their corporate sources, and for the first time puts comprehensive data behind longstanding suspicions of manipulation, which until now have surfaced only piecemeal in investigations of specific allegations.

Wikipedia Scanner -- the brainchild of Cal Tech computation and neural-systems graduate student Virgil Griffith -- offers users a searchable database that ties millions of anonymous Wikipedia edits to organizations where those edits apparently originated, by cross-referencing the edits with data on who owns the associated block of internet IP addresses.

Yet another one

As a physicist, I have never been a big fan of Freeman Dyson. He was, after all, one of the "geniuses" pushing Project Orion -- the absurdly impractical idea of creating a rocket ship powered by detonating nuclear bombs -- I kid you not!

Dyson has written a new book, A Many Colored Glass, that you shouldn't waste your time and money on -- as this extract on global warming makes clear. Dyson has basically joined the famous-crackpot camp with Michael Crichton and Bill Gray. You can read a good debunking of Dyson here. I'll add my two cents.

A tip from Leonardo DiCaprio

Start talking about global warming.

Subsidizing drivers needs to end

This article in the NYT highlights the absurdity of current transportation policy. While New York City is trying to get federal funding to help it pay for a congestion pricing and traffic congestion policy, the federal government is, at the same time, handing out large tax breaks to help people reduce the costs of driving to work. It's yet another example of government policy gone awry, badly.

The solution isn't sexy, won't get you on TV, and doesn't make for great headlines that will earn prestige: eliminate all government subsidies, and either cap pollution or tax it. It's not rocket science.

Making money cutting carbon

DR: There hasn’t been any public pressure to change the electricity system. Most people don’t even know how electricity is made. It comes out of the wall like magic. TC: You are so right. In Ontario, they did a massive peer-reviewed study to identify the health and environmental effects of making power with coal, and […]

If buying locally isn’t the answer, then what is?

Is long-distance better than local? Photo: Sheila Steele Attention farmers’ market shoppers: Put that heirloom tomato down and rush to the nearest supermarket. By seeking local food, you’re wantonly spewing carbon into the atmosphere. That’s the message of a budding backlash against the eat-local movement. The Economist fired a shotgun-style opening salvo last December, peppering […]

Against climate polluters

From The New York Times's Nicholas Kristof ($ub req'd):

I ran into Al Gore at a climate/energy conference this month, and he vibrates with passion about this issue -- recognizing that we should confront mortal threats even when they don't emanate from Al Qaeda.

"We are now treating the Earth's atmosphere as an open sewer," he said, and (perhaps because my teenage son was beside me) he encouraged young people to engage in peaceful protests to block major new carbon sources.

"I can't understand why there aren't rings of young people blocking bulldozers," Mr. Gore said, "and preventing them from constructing coal-fired power plants."

Say it, Al! But it's not just young people who need to do it -- everyone needs to join in, starting with you. Shutting down coal plants, blockading palm-oil importers like Imperium Renewables and other rainforest destroyers, and stopping work at oil refineries could move the climate debate beyond just personal action and put the spotlight squarely on the big polluters who are the real culprits behind the problem.

This could be Al Gore's Gandhi moment (especially appropriate for a Nobel Peace Prize nominee). It would be great if you (in conjunction with say, Greenpeace, Rainforest Action Network, and other civil disobedience-oriented environmental groups) announced a day of civil disobedience to confront polluters -- and were the first one to get arrested. You'll find thousands of people, myself included, to back you up.

If you're interested in being one of those people, click here to send Al Gore a fax letting him know you're ready to participate in civil disobedience on behalf of the planet.

More high-tech solutions for low-tech ideas

I first mentioned “neighborrow” a few weeks ago, in a column on the virtues of sharing. This week, we’ve got an interview with neighborrow founder Adam Berk, who gives us some background on how and why he started the site in his New York apartment building. The basic premise of neighborrow is that it makes […]

Twice the Grist with half the pain: Netvibes and Twitter

For all of you tech-savvy Grist readers, we've added two more methods of getting yer Grist:

Twitter is "a free social networking and micro-blogging service that allows users to send 'updates' (text-based posts, up to 140 characters long) via SMS, instant messaging, email, the Twitter website, or an application such as Twitterrific." In other words, it's Facebook statuses mashed up with RSS and IM. In nontechnical terms, it's everyone in the same room together yelling out what they're doing every so often. You can follow what Grist is shouting about here.

Netvibes, along somewhat similar lines, is "a multi-lingual Ajax-based personalized start page ... [which] includes an RSS/Atom feed reader, local weather forecasts, a calendar supporting iCal, bookmarks, notes, to-do lists, multiple searches, support for POP3, IMAP4 email as well as several webmail providers including Gmail, Yahoo Mail, Hotmail, and AOL, Box.net web storage, del.icio.us, Meebo, Flickr photos, podcast support with a built in audio player," among other features. Basically, it's the kitchen sink for the Web you always wanted, and now there's Grist-flavored water in the tap. You can access Grist via Netvibes in one of two ways: the Grist Universe, or the Grist Tab.