More global alarming

(originally posted July 10, 2008)

Antarctic ice shelf 'hanging by thread': European scientists

AFP Thu Jul 10, 1:57 PM ET
PARIS (AFP) - New evidence has emerged that a large plate of floating ice shelf attached to Antarctica is breaking up, in a troubling sign of global warming, the European Space Agency (ESA) said on Thursday.

Images taken by its Envisat remote-sensing satellite show that Wilkins Ice Shelf is "hanging by its last thread" to Charcot Island, one of the plate's key anchors to the Antarctic peninsula, ESA said in a press release.

"Since the connection to the island... helps stabilise the ice shelf, it is likely the breakup of the bridge will put the remainder of the ice shelf at risk," it said.
Wilkins Ice Shelf had been stable for most of the last century, covering around 16,000 square kilometres (6,000 square miles), or about the size of Northern Ireland, before it began to retreat in the 1990s.

Since then several large areas have broken away, and two big breakoffs this year left only a narrow ice bridge about 2.7 kilometres (1.7 miles) wide to connect the shelf to Charcot and nearby Latady Island.

The latest images, taken by Envisat's radar, say fractures have now opened up in this bridge and adjacent areas of the plate are disintegrating, creating large icebergs.

Scientists are puzzled and concerned by the event, ESA added.

The Antarctic peninsula -- the tongue of land that juts northward from the white continent towards South America -- has had one of the highest rates of warming anywhere in the world in recent decades.

But this latest stage of the breakup occurred during the Southern Hemisphere's winter, when atmospheric temperatures are at their lowest.

One idea is that warmer water from the Southern Ocean is reaching the underside of the ice shelf and thinning it rapidly from underneath.

"Wilkins Ice Shelf is the most recent in a long, and growing, list of ice shelves on the Antarctic Peninsula that are responding to the rapid warming that has occurred in this area over the last fifty years," researcher David Vaughan of the British Antarctic Survey (BAS) said.

"Current events are showing that we were being too conservative, when we made the prediction in the early 1990s that Wilkins Ice Shelf would be lost within 30 years. The truth is, it is going more quickly than we guessed."

In the past three decades, six Antarctic ice shelves have collapsed completely -- Prince Gustav Channel, Larsen Inlet, Larsen A, Larsen B, Wordie, Muller and the Jones Ice Shelf.

This is what makes Global Warming so great... maybe I am so ardent about pointing out how it is all made up fantasies because I'm not the one getting rich off of it. I love science fiction, Star Wars, Star Trek, Battlestar Galactica, but when it comes to the real world, I like sustainable proof. In this case the story obviously misconstrues the facts or they interviewed people who know nothing about the earth, weather, geology, physics, oceanography...

Now anyone who has a basic understanding of any of the sciences mentioned above probably understands why the ice shelves are breaking off, and they most equally understand those pushing the fictional Global Warming rely on bad science such as explained in the article being fed to the masses. And it dovetails nicely with last years record melting of the Arctic ice cap which received tons of media play about the north pole melting. Except it is a false conclusion.

The south pole has accumulated record amounts of ice and snow in the past decades. The current station at the south pole sits at about 9300 feet above sea level, the original station at the south pole sits at about 9100 feet above sea level, about 200 feet of now has accumulated in 50 years.

The weight of the fresh snow compacts the snow below it into hardpack ice, it also forces it outward and off the continent and over the ocean. The hardpack ice has a slight positive buoyancy, so it just barely floats, but eventually it grows out so far off the land that the buoyancy causes a fissure somewhere between the outer most edge and land. These giant shelves have not been observed to float away, they usually get caught on an island or underwater feature such as a sand bar, where the warmer water of the convection current hammers away at it until it starts to calve ice bergs and it eventually disappears. During this stage the fissure between the main glacier and the shelf may freeze, melt, and refreeze, but eventually it will succumb to the sea.

You see, these shelves calving are signs of a healthy environment, not one being ravaged by global warming.

Why it is so important to think

(originally posted July 9, 2008)

A 20 year old man’s youthful indiscretion, fueled in part by alcohol, led to a poor decision that in seconds altered the lives of a lot of people.

At approximately 1210 am on a Sunday morning two men were bicycling home along a dark, curving road. About ½ mile ahead a patrol car, that had just passed them, passed a silver Acura. The driver of the Acura, the 20 year old male, made a decision that would have lasting and dire ramifications. The young man, Christopher Hoppe decided to put as much room between him and the patrol car as possible, accelerating his car from about 30 mph to somewhere between 65 and 70. As he was driving through one of those dark corners he saw no oncoming headlights and cut across the oncoming lanes to get away from the patrol car.

How the event occurred is open to speculation, some say he was looking in his rear view instead of where he was driving, looking for that patrol car. There was a report that the 19 year old passenger of his car, or the 20 year old driver of the car behind him, told the police that Hoppe thought it would be funny to buzz the guys on the bicycle. What is known is that while traveling at approximately 68 mph according to a forensic accident investigator the silver Acura struck the bicycle, tossing the men and the bike. Both men were killed instantly from severe head trauma. The Acura left enough parts that even before they finished the fatality investigation they knew the type and color of car they were looking for. Witnesses who stopped to help gave the second car’s description and a partial license plate.

Approximately one hour later Christopher’s mom called the police to report her son had struck a deer a bit earlier that night and wanted a police report to give to their insurance carrier. Three hours after that, when the crime scene investigation was complete, the police came to the house, matched the bagged and labeled parts to the car in the driveway, and knocked on the door until the family answered. He police noted the odor of alcohol on Christopher, now known as the suspect, but due to the length of time between the event and the interview declined to pursue a sobriety test. The police told him of the deaths and that they were conducting an investigation and read him his Miranda rights.

Christopher maintained that he struck a deer but told the police the name of his passenger and the driver of the car that was following him. Sometime Sunday morning the police interviewed the other driver and Christopher’s passenger. Christopher’s mother, a local teacher, was known to the detective investigating the case, so as a courtesy to her he went to the house Sunday afternoon and asked them to bring Christopher to headquarters after dinner for formal questioning, indicating that her son would be arrested and spending the night in the county jail. On Tuesday he was charged in court, he pleaded not guilty, and his parents had to place a $100,000 property bond to secure his release pending a trial.

In the meantime I was fielding calls from friends and acquaintances who, like I, knew the men that were killed. They were Ivan and Carmelo, uncle and nephew and 24 and 23 years old respectively, on the way back to their apartment from work. They are part of one of the invisible classes of people in our society, gainfully employed illegal aliens. They do the work in the restaurants the customers don’t think about… they are the cooks, busboys, dishwashers, prep workers. They work in major chain establishments, so they are not under the table, they have federal and state withholding taken out of their checks, and of course social security, plus the employers pay their share of the taxes. Plus they pay sales taxes on the items they purchase, such as the bicycle. All the same, despite prepping and cooking people’s food, despite cleaning up after them, despite paying taxes, these men, and others like them were invisible. But that is another blog for another time, back to Christopher.

I have been to the scene of a number of fatalities, including those where alcohol is involved. I once tended to a drunk patient who was driving a car that went off the road while others were cutting the body of his best friend out of the car. Almost two years later he was sentenced to 2 years in prison for vehicular homicide of his buddy. They were so close the decedent’s family pleaded with the judge for leniency, saying it would be like losing a second son. There have been several similar outcomes 2 to 5 years sentences for vehicular homicide, alcohol almost always was a factor.

On Tuesday, a week after Christopher was arraigned, the bodies were flown by AeroMexico for another wake by their families and finally their interment. Christopher is facing 2 charges of vehicular manslaughter and one charge of leaving the scene of an accident that resulted in a fatality. Instead of the two to five years drunk drivers have received the aggravating factor of leaving the scene increases the penalty dramatically; he is looking at 30 years in prison.

Maybe his first bad decision that night was to drive when he wasn’t sober… while there is no proof he was drunk just had been drinking, the fact that he sped away in the opposite direction of the police leads one to believe he may have been. There is no parent that would not gladly pick up their child at a party, regardless of their age, rather than risk them driving while intoxicated. But perhaps he wasn’t that impaired at all, perhaps he just decided that if the police smelled the alcohol on his breath he’d be in trouble (at 20 he was underage to be legally drinking which results in a mandatory one year loss of license in NJ). Perhaps he chose to speed up because there just simply are not that many cops in town, and if he is safely in your rear view mirror he won’t be ahead of you in a radar trap. Or maybe he did decide to buzz the two guys on their bike going home that evening.

Either way it is unlikely he made the conscious decision to kill two men, nor is it likely he considered that he would spend 30 years in prison as a consequence of his actions. But one fleeting lapse in judgment ended two lives, ruined his life, and has changed the lives of three families permanently.

Added: Christopher was tested an found not to have been drinking prior to the accident, and he tested positive for only a trace amount of THC, as if perhaps attained through incidental contact (second hand smoke). Which in a way makes it sadder that he faces more time in jail for a bad decision then people who knowingly get behind the wheel of an auto intoxicated.

Added: Christopher plead to 12 years in jail, six for each of the two men killed that night. He will be eligible for release after 10 years. Meaning when he gets out of jail he would have spent 1/3 of his life behind bars for a fleeting indiscretion.

When less-than-lethal isn't an option

(originally posted July 06, 2008)

On June 26, 2008, a 21 year old local resident who had come back to town for his younger brother's graduation was shot to death by police following a traffic stop.

Over the last two weekends this has been a subject of a few debates concerning the police, the reason for the stop (which has to date never been addressed) and of course deadly force. Some assume he was stopped for the crime of being a latino in a predominanly white town, others have postulated it was because it ocurred around closing time for local bars and he was stopped for suspicion of DWI. What no one will ever know is why he decided to run.

Rumor has it that he was told to turn the car of by an officer at the driver's door, while another officer was at the passenger door serving as back up. When he failed to comply the first officer reached into the car to shut off the ignition and the driver tried to take off in the car. While the circumstances are part speculation and part unofficial leaks, what followed is that the officer on back up fired 5 times before the car crashed through a fence and into an above ground pool. The driver was pronounced dead at the hospital which was located about a mile away.

People are rightfully angry about this event, among other reasons, it is the third officer involed shooting in less than 10 years, for a town that size in the middle of suburbia that is alarming in and of itself.

But what I find most egregious is that New Jersey has made stun guns, TASERS and the such illegal for all purposes, civiian and law enforcement. This ruling was made following a single incident in NYC about 20 years ago where a suspect said the police used a stun gun on him during an interrogation. The New Jersey State Attorney General immediately banned ownership or use of stun guns in the state.

But by removing that less than lethal device from the arsenal of weapons available to police they have reduced police to a simple choice, kill or be killed. Instead of the back up officer being able to point a taser at the driver during the stop "just in case", the officer had his right hand on the butt of his S&W 10mm service weapon. Rather than having a choice of shooting the driver with 50,000 volts delivered by the TASER the officer decided that he had to use deadly force to save his partner.

The law that took less than lethal weapons out of the hands of police officers 2 decades ago continbuted to this situation that ended one life, and permanently affcted the lives of his parents and two younger brohers, his extended family, as well as the life of the police officers involved.

Knee jerk, "feel good" legislation is often passed in response to isolated incidents such as the stun gun torture that may or may not have happened, but the results of the shortsightedness of those laws can be devestating. When you take less than less-than-lethal alternatives out of the hands of the police you have left them only with lethal weapons.