March 29, 2009 by admin.

Today I found a March 7, 2009 article about a train derailment in Louisiana.  It is a prime example of serious misconceptions about the environmental dangers of sulphur.

The article is mostly comprised of statements that describe unreasonable concerns or actions based on misconceptions about the dangers of a sulphur spill.  It is not that sulphur, especially in liquid form, doesn’t pose dangers, but the reactions described in connection with the spill of liquid sulphur in the train derailment in Louisiana are excessive and irrational.  Those reactions are about as irrational as is the decision by someone who fears accidents and as a result of that decides to remain in bed, so as not to have to face the dangers of life — while the reality of that is that most people die in bed.

Those comments do not mean that sulphur spills do not pollute the environment.  They do, but unless spilled sulphur contains a large portion of hydrogen-suphide gas (that is deadly in very small concentrations), or unless it became ignited and produces sulphur-dioxide gas (also deadly in very small concentrations), spilled sulphur does not pose much of an immediate and imminent danger to anyone.

In the case of the derailment at Plaquemine, Louisiana,

1. Emergency responders from the Department of Environmental Quality continue to take air and water samples at the site of a train derailment at the Bayou Plaquemine bridge in Plaquemine. Air monitors have been stationed at several areas around the derailment and there have been no readings to indicate any issues with air quality. (Note by folc.ca: It was a good thing that air quality was being measured when the sulphur began to flowfrom the leaking rail car into the bayou, but if there were no readings of hydrogen sulfide tobegin with, those readings will not very likely show up any time later.)
2. DEQ responders continue to take water samples at various points along the bayou. Real-time water samples and field analysis show no ill effects to the environment as a result of the incident at this time. However, DEQ will take additional water samples for further analysis. (Note by folc.ca: There is no way to tell from that what a field analysis would be, but to take water samples right now was and is a waste of time and effort, not unless the sulphur that flowed into the bayou would be left to deteriorate there without any further action.  If that is done, then the water in the bayou will without a doubt turn acidic over time.)
3. The department also brought in its Mobile Air Monitoring Laboratory to take additional samples. The MAML has the capability to take real-time samples as well as take readings from air canisters used at the site. The emergency responders are headquartered at the DEQ Mobile Command Center which has been deployed for this incident. (Note by folc.ca: It does not matter how or by whom air samples are taken in this case, a waste of time remains a waste of time.)
4. Early Saturday morning, five railcars derailed near the bayou. One railcar, containing molten sulfur, is leaking. The molten sulfur is leaking into the bayou where is solidifies and sinks. Presently, releases to the environment and any potential impacts are being contained at the site of the accident. There is little flow in the bayou and cleanup contractors have set out booms. (Note by folc.ca: Of course the molten sulphur solidifies and sinks when it comes into contact with the water.  It is heavier than water and will therefore not float, for which reason there is nothing to catch by the booms set up by the clean-up contractors (which contractors are nevertheless being paid handsomely for their useless efforts), but the sulphur will of course also be cooled down to the water temperature and therefore solidify.)
5. A Best Western hotel in Plaquemine has been evacuated. There is a limited shelter-in-place for residents near the scene of the derailment. Louisiana Highway 1 is closed near the bridge over Bayou Plaquemine. (Note by folc.ca: Those measures are overkill. Unles the escaped sulphur would have begun to burn, none of those measures were required.)
6. LDEQ, GOSHEP, Louisiana State Police, Iberville Fire Department, Plaquemine Parish Sheriff’s Office, Louisiana National Guard, Union Pacific Railroad, Dow Emergency Services and Plaquemine Parish OEP are all currently at the incident site. (Note by folc.ca: What did they all do there, other than stare, talk and twiddle their thumbs?)
7. The State Police, National Guard and local law enforcement are directing traffic to alternate routes around Plaquemine. (Note by folc.ca: Why? There was no reason for doing so, unless the liquid sulphur was covering the road.)

Why was all of that done?  Was it to put on a show, to hide something, or do the officials in Louisiana truly not know any better?  What would they do if there would ever be a real emergency involving a sulphur fire?

Posted in Derailments, Community & Industry, Emission Incidents & Issues | Print | No Comments »

March 22, 2009 by admin.

TheRecord.com, Kitchener, Ontario, Canada

French authorities confine thousands indoors over sulphur leak

March 21, 2009
The Associated Press
Web edition

LILLE, France — Authorities warned some 80,000 people in northern France to stay home and close their windows and doors for nearly five hours Saturday after a large cloud of sulphur leaked from a chemicals factory….

Dozens of rescuers and chemicals teams fanned out near the chemicals factory in an industrial suburb of Dunkirk where a fire broke out around 5 am.

The alert was called off nearly six hours later. The site converts liquid sulphur into a solid….(Full Story)

Update 2009 03 22, 10:30 hrs:   According to this Reuters article (in French), “Pollution au soufre à Dunkerque après un incendie” , in L’EXPRESS, 2009 03 21, “Sulphur in suspension is not toxic and does not present a danger to health, but it is irritating, specifies the prefecture.”

That statement is technically correct although very questionable in the context of the Dunkirk sulphur fire.  The cloud of pollution was not a sulphur cloud.  It was a cloud of sulphur dioxide gas, a gas that is deadly in relatively low concentrations.

Anyway, is is not clear from any of the reports on the Dunkirk sulphur fire how much sulphur actually burned and how much sulphur dioxide was produced by the fire. Although the article in L’EXPRESS stated that 250 tonnes of sulphur in storage had been ignited, none of the media reports stated how much sulphur had been consumed in the fire.  Just for the record, when burning, one tonne of sulphur produces three tonnes of deadly sulphur-dioxide gas.

____________
More about sulphur fires (some with catastrophic and deadly consequences)

Posted in Explosions & Fires, Emission Incidents & Issues, Sulphur-Dioxide | Print | No Comments »

March 20, 2009 by admin.

Consumer Reports

March 19, 2009

Chinese-made drywall causing home and health hazards

A gut-turning smell like rotten eggs hit Richard and Partricia Kampf the day they first walked into their new house in Cape Coral, Florida, in July 2007. At first they thought it was some kind of “new home” smell that would go away quickly. Patricia bought some scented candles to help cover the odor.

But the smell didn’t go away and other strange things started happening. The metal coil on the central air conditioner turned black and then became so badly corroded it had to be replaced after just a few months. The mirrors in the bathrooms turned black. The Kampfs had to replace the motherboard on their computer three times and their son’s Xbox stopped working—after two repairs they bought a new one….(Full Story)

See also: Comment by folc.ca at  Chinese drywall in Florida may be causing health problems, re: radioactivity of phosphogypsum.

Posted in Pollution: Health Issues, Emission Incidents & Issues | Print | No Comments »

March 17, 2009 by admin.

Fathers rights activists like Stephen Baskerville, PhD., have advocated for years that to have children is suicidal and recommended to young men — to be able to survive and to avoid being criminalized as fathers:

Do Not Marry, Do Not Have Children

Stephen Baskerville, Ph.D.

2007-11-14 at 11:36 am · Filed under Men and Mating, Vox Populi

Marriage is a foundation of civilized life. No advanced civilization has ever existed without the married, two-parent family. Those who argue that our civilization needs healthy marriages to survive are not exaggerating.

And yet I cannot, in good conscience, urge young men to marry today. For many men (and some women), marriage has become nothing less than a one-way ticket to jail. Even the New York Times has reported on how easily “the divorce court leads to a jail cell,” mostly for men. In fact, if I have one urgent piece of practical advice for young men today it is this: Do not marry and do not have children….(Full Story)

Stephen Baskerville merely points out the circumstance of fathers expunged from their families — collateral damage resulting from current global population policies.  A far less personal issue that universally affects global population trends is the circumstance that populations in all developed nations, and increasingly in ever-increasing numbers of developing nations, are shrinking.

The plan is to reduce the global population to a population level between 300 million to a billion people.   You think that is an alarmist view of demographic trends? Well, think again.

OneNewNow.com

Planting the seeds of a demographic winter

Robert Knight - Guest Columnist - 5/14/2008 2:10:00 PM

Did you know that planting a tree won’t save the earth? You’ve got to plant 483 trees just to offset your household’s carbon footprint. And that’s just for two people.

We know this because the Washington Post Home section on May 8 featured a cover story encouraging folks to plant trees while sternly warning them that this won’t help much because people are a cancer on the planet.

Okay, they didn’t quite put it that way, but it would be hard to miss the message. A graphic with 483 little green trees illustrates this stat from the EPA: “A two-person household is responsible for releasing 41,500 pounds of CO2 into the atmosphere each year. To offset that, each household would have to plant 483 trees and let them grow for 10 years.”

If a two-person household is that bad, what does that make families with children? Environmental criminals, at the least, and maybe earth wreckers….(Full Story)

Consider this:

How to Take the Chill Out of Demographic Winter

A speech by Don Feder to the New Generation Church, Riga, Latvia, November Nov. 15, 2007

….In half-a-century or less, Europe will be populated by strangers — who will wander by the continent’s cathedrals, museums, statues and battlefield monuments wondering what it all meant.

This catastrophe in the making can be most clearly seen in Russia. What Lenin, Stalin and Hitler failed to accomplish, the Russian people are doing to themselves. You might call it auto-genocide.

In Russia, the fertility rate is 1.17 (down from 2.4 in 1990, a decline of over 50%). Russia is losing three-quarters of a million people a year. Its current population of 145 million is expected to be reduced by a third by 2050. In Russia today, almost as many children are aborted as are born alive (1.5 million to 1.6 million)….

In terms of population replacement, Europe is going out of business. Of the 10 nations with the lowest fertility rates worldwide, 9 are in Europe. No European nation has anything approaching a replacement-level birthrate….(Full Story)

By now you must wonder how we got from the 1960s UN objective of Zero-Population Growth to the present calamity of accelerating population reduction.  It was easy.  It required a motivator that the social engineers in charge and control of global population growth could make palatable and have the masses swallow: Save the Planet — Reduce the Human Population.

Here is how that is made to work:

http://www.co2science.org

Your “Carbon Legacy”
Volume 12, Number 11: 18 March 2009

---

Politicians who bow to the demands of the world’s climate alarmists have long sought various means of reducing anthropogenic CO2 emissions. To date, the measures they have proposed have been rather mundane, focusing primarily on reducing emissions associated with one’s household activities and transportation habits. For example, we have been encouraged to replace our incandescent light bulbs with more energy efficient ones. We’ve also been asked to participate in municipal recycling programs, to drive less, to car pool or to utilize public transportation. But the “rules of the road” will soon be become much more stringent, and you and I may be asked - if not mandated by law - to make an unprecedented lifestyle change that could dramatically curtail one of our most cherished personal freedoms, all in the name of “saving the planet.”

Writing for the scientific journal Global Environmental Change, two academics at Oregon State University - Paul Murtaugh and Michael Schlax - identify this lifestyle change in a paper entitled “Reproduction and the Carbon Legacies of Individuals.” In this treatise they attempt to quantify, in their words, “the carbon legacy of an individual,” and to examine “how it is affected by the individual’s reproductive choices,” based on the premise that “a person is responsible for the carbon emissions of his descendants, weighted by their relatedness to him.”

So what did they find?The two researchers calculated that a woman in the United States would reduce her lifetime CO2 emissions by about 486 tons if she implemented the green-approved household and transportation activities mentioned previously. But they estimate that if she were to have just one child, that child, over its lifetime, would eventually release nearly 20 times more CO2 to the atmosphere than the reductions achieved by its mother via her more mundane green activities.

In light of these calculations, Murtaugh and Schlax conclude that “the potential savings from reduced reproduction are huge compared to the savings that can be achieved by changes in lifestyle,” adding that “enormous [our italics] future benefits can be gained by immediate changes [our italics] in reproductive behavior,” and, therefore, that “an individual’s reproductive choices can have a dramatic effect on the total carbon emissions ultimately attributable to his or her genetic lineage.”

We can only hope, in this regard, that everyone’s future reproductive behavior will continue to be a matter of choice. But in light of the supposedly “enormous” CO2-related “benefits” of curtailing child-bearing - especially in the United States - no one can assume that such will continue to be the case, especially in light of the claims of climate alarmists such as Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid and Barack Obama, who consider CO2-induced global warming to be the greatest threat to the survival of civilization ever to be encountered. Faced with such a unique and unparalleled threat, we could well awake one morning and find ourselves with no choice in the matter, mandated by law to only procreate to the extent deemed ecologically appropriate by those enlightened few who somehow simply “know” what is best for the biosphere.

It may seem unthinkable today that our government - of the people, by the people and for the people - would ever assume the power to tell us how many children we can and cannot have. But much has happened in the past few months that truly was unthinkable, and only a single year ago. And if it’s happened before, it can happen again; for in times of crisis - either real, as in the current economic crisis, or imagined, as in Al Gore’s climate crisis - normally-rational people can do some wildly-irrational things. We must, therefore, maintain the eternal vigilance that is needed to preserve our God-given rights that no one has the authority to rescind. Stand up with us and demand that your elected officials carefully scrutinize both sides of the CO2-climate debate and think for themselves. We need thoughtful men and women of integrity to guide our nation, not mindless lemmings.

Sherwood, Keith and Craig Idso

Reference
Murtaugh, P.A. and Schlax, M.G. 2009. Reproduction and the carbon legacies of individuals. Global Environmental Change: 10.1016/j.gloenvcha.2008.10.007.

That editorial by Sherwood, Keith and Craig Idso is also accessible as a video (4.5 minutes) at YouTube.

Posted in Climate Change | Print | No Comments »

March 13, 2009 by admin.

Executive Intelligence Review

2009 03 10

PRESS RELEASE

Climate Change Conference:
Genocidal Global Warming Policies will Kill Hundreds of Millions

March 10, 2009 (EIRNS)—Yesterday, Dr. Arthur Robinson, Director of the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine and the originator of the petition against Al Gore’s global warming hoax which as of now 32,000 scientists have signed, told the 2nd International Conference on Climate Change, that the people like Al Gore who promote global warming alarmism are committing genocide by the withdrawal of technology from the developing world. Speaking at the conference hosted by the Heartland Institute in New York City, he said, “there is a current example of genocide by the removal of technology, and that is the ban on DDT, and that has resulted in the deaths of 30 to 40 million people and has left half a billion infected with malaria.”…(Full Story)

Posted in Climate Change | Print | No Comments »

March 10, 2009 by admin.

Radio Free Europe

“Human contribution is small, probably not zero, and it’s small compared to these other factors which we cannot change,” such as the sun and ocean currents, said one conference participant.

March 10, 2009
By Nikola Krastev

NEW YORK — These are tough times to be a skeptic about global warming.

Two years ago, an international United Nations panel concluded with near certainty that human activity plays a role in the planet’s rising temperatures. And now, the new U.S. administration has vowed to spearhead international efforts to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions.

But more than 600 people gathered in New York City this week at the International Conference on Climate Change say they are up to the challenge.

Joseph Bast, president of the Heartland Institute, which organized the conference, argues that the extent and causes of global warming are far from proven. The goal of the gathering, he tells RFE/RL, is to provide a forum to challenge people like former U.S. Vice President Al Gore with a healthy dose of skepticism.

“We think we have a great story to tell that more and more prominent scientists are coming out saying global warming is not a crisis, that the question of what causes it and how extensive it’s going to be are wide open in the scientific community,” Bast said….(Full Story)

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March 10, 2009 by admin.

OneNewsNow.com - A Division of American Family News Network
Bucking the media trend on global warming ‘crisis’
Pete Chagnon - OneNewsNow - 3/9/2009 8:15:00

GW conference 2009 smallNEW YORK CITY - Speakers at a conference on climate change are making the case that the alarmism behind the global-warming bandwagon is politically motivated, has nothing to do with science, and could affect the sovereignty of the U.S.

The second annual International Conference on Climate Change hosted by The Heartland Institute is well under way in New York City. More than 700 registrants have gathered in the Big Apple to hear more than 70 scientists — representing the views of tens of thousands of their colleagues — make the argument that media and environmental advocacy groups have it all wrong, that global warming is not a crisis….(Full Story)

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March 10, 2009 by admin.

By Tom DeWeese
March 10, 2009
NewsWithViews.com

No doubt you’ve seen the ads. The music is dramatic. The scene is tragic. The message emotional. Polar Bears, holding on for dear life to bits of ice, their arctic habitat destroyed by Global Warming. And the narration tells you of the tragic fate of the bears, all because of man and his selfish destruction of the earth. And of course, the ad ends with a plea for funds to help the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) protect the bears and stop Global Warming. Cute, fuzzy animals always do the trick….(Full Story)

Posted in Climate Change | Print | No Comments »