TV News LIES

Sea ice in the Arctic Ocean is likely to shrink to a record small size sometime next week, and then keep on melting, a scientist at the U.S. National Snow and Ice Data Center said on Monday.

"A new daily record ... would be likely by the end of August," said Ted Scambos, lead scientist at the data center, which monitors ice in the Arctic and elsewhere. "Chances are it will cross the previous record while we're still in sea ice retreat."

After two years of collecting global data and developing models, scientists have a new, comprehensive way to measure the health of the world's oceans that recognizes humans as a part of an integrated marine ecosystem.

The scientists' report, published this week in the journal Nature, gave the oceans an overall score of 60 on a scale of 0 to 100. Among the world's 133 countries with ocean coastlines, scores ranged from 36 to 86; the United States scored slightly above average at 63.

On March 17, 2011 Greene County resident Robert Allan Shipman and his company, Allan’s Waste Water Service Inc., were charged with illegally dumping millions of gallons of natural gas drilling wastewater, along with restaurant grease and sewer sludge across six counties in Pennsylvania from 2003-2009.

Pennsylvania is one of several states that sit atop the gas-rich underground rock formation the Marcellus Shale. Hydraulic fracturing, the process used for retrieving the gas, is a water-intensive drilling method that not only requires massive volumes of water to unlock the gas, but also generates millions of gallons of wastewater when the drilling is done.

In a recent post here, I described an event that I produced in Syracuse, New York, which brought together disparate anti-fracking groups for a screening of Josh Fox's documentary film Gasland.

As one would expect, among the readers who posted here there was a strong level of both support for the event (and any anti-fracking advocacy) and critiques of our effort, typically from gas industry functionaries or labor that supports hydraulic fracturing on behalf of jobs.

Residents in a Cumberland County community were left wondering Tuesday morning what caused dozens of birds to drop dead from the sky.

Residents along Peach Drive in Millville found at least 80 birds -- mostly red-winged blackbirds -- on the ground dead having fallen from trees and the sky.

Cumberland County Public Information Officer Troy Ferus said Tuesday claiming that it wasn't something environmental that killed the birds but rather something they ate -- a granular pesticide put down legally by nearby Ingraldi Farms.

Damning evidence about the environmental consequences of hydraulic fracturing (fracking) of shale gas continues to pile up. And the process is acquiring more enemies with big guns, the latest being the Sierra Club.

In its July-August 2012 issue of SIERRA magazine, the organization explains in detail the reasons for its hardening stand. At first the Sierra Club took a fairly hopeful wait-and-see attitude, based on the fact that shale gas burns much cleaner than other fossil fuels.