Sunday, April 18, 2010

Climategate Claptrap

Climategate Claptrap

At last! The controversy is over. It turns out the "scientific" claims promoted for decades by whiny self-righteous liberals were a lie, a fraud, a con--and we don't need to change after all. The left is humiliated; the conservatives are triumphant and exultant.

The year is 1954, and the "science" that has been exposed as a "sham" by conservatives is the link between smoking and lung cancer. Welcome to Tobaccogate, as Fox News would call it. The conservatives are championing professor Clarence Cook Little, who says he has discovered insurmountable flaws in the use of statistics and clinical data by "anti-tobacco" (and quasi-commie) scientists. The press reports the "controversy," usually without mentioning that Cook Little is being paid by the tobacco industry. A relieved nation lights up--and so, over the next few decades, millions of them die.

It is happening again. The tide of global warming denial is now rising as fast as global sea levels--and with as much credibility as Cook Little. Look at the deniers' greatest moment, Climategate, hailed by them as "the final nail in the coffin" of "the theory of global warming." A patient study by the British House of Commons has pored over every e-mail from the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia and interviewed everyone involved. Its findings? The "evidence patently fails to support" the idea of a fraud; the scientists have "no case to answer"; and all their findings "have been repeated and the conclusions have been verified" by other scientists. That's British for "it was a crock."


Monday, April 12, 2010

What it Means to be Green at a Mario Batali Restaurant

Elizabeth Meltz: What it Means to be Green at a Mario Batali Restaurant

The restaurant industry accounts for 10% of the U.S. economy. Americans spend approximately forty-eight percent of their food budget on food consumed away from home ($1,078 per person annually), dining at over 945,000 restaurants.¹ The average restaurant produces 50,000 pounds of garbage per year, typically close to 95% of which could be recycled or composted.² The Restaurant industry consumes 1/3 of all energy used by the retail sector (in the US, and the average food service facility uses 300,000 gallons of water per year.

In our restaurants, from the more casual Otto Pizzeria to fine dining at Del Posto, we have addressed some of these issues: we have banned bottled water, we have a full scale recycling andcomposting program at each of them and all of our chefs have personal relationships with the local farmers. Our steakhouse, Carnevino, in Las Vegas, NV, the city of excess, is located in the largest LEED-certified silver building in the world. In that restaurant we have introduced water saving measures, recycled paper and toilet paper, energy conservation initiatives, recycling and composting -- you name it. And our restaurants are buried deep within a hotel. Where there is a will, we know there is a way:


Wednesday, April 7, 2010

IBM's New Solar Desalination Tech Could Create Rivers in the Desert

IBM's New Solar Desalination Tech Could Create Rivers in the Desert


solar power, solar energy, water, desalination, ibm, saudi arabia, green design, eco design
Living in the desert comes with major advantages and disadvantages — excess solar power and not enoughwater, to be more specific. Now IBM and Saudi Arabia’s King Abdulaziz City for Science and Technologyare teaming up to solve the water problem with solar-powered desalination technology. Eventually, the two organizations hope to construct a desalination plant in Al Khafji, Saudi Arabia that can harness sunlight to generate 7.9 million gallons of water daily — enough for 100,000 people.