Year: 2009

Published on Wednesday, December 31, 2008 by the Fort Mill Times (South Carolina)
Idaho Miners Won’t Have to Restore Groundwater

by John Miller

BOISE, Idaho – Monsanto Co., Agrium Inc., and J.R. Simplot Co. will be able to mine phosphate without being forced to restore groundwater beneath their operations to its natural condition, according to a new rule awaiting approval by the 2009 Legislature.

The rule is backed by industry but opposed by environmentalists including the Greater Yellowstone Coalition and Idaho Conservation League, who say it gives mining companies near the Idaho-Wyoming border license to pollute forever.

It stops short of a 2007 draft proposal developed by the Idaho Department of Environmental Quality but never formalized. That would have required companies to clean up groundwater below their mines within eight years of ceasing activities.

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Move to Increase Logging on Oregon Land

By FELICITY BARRINGER
Published: December 31, 2008

The Interior Department announced a controversial decision late Wednesday to double the rate of logging on 2.6 million acres of federally owned forests in southwestern Oregon. In doing so, it brushed aside the objections of the governor and two federal agencies charged with guarding the quality of the area’s water and the health of the fish that depend on it.

The decision, which was posted on the Web sites of the Bureau of Land Management’s Oregon offices, has revived the battle lines formed during the fight over the extensive logging of old-growth timber in the 1980s, a practice blamed for the rapid decline in populations of the northern spotted owl.

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“Hong’s work doesn’t prove that the contrails have no effect on temperature, just that they are unlikely to have a major role, says Ulrich Schumann, director of the Institute of Atmospheric Physics at the German Aerospace Center in Oberpfaffenhofen, near Munich.”

“Because Hong’s analysis studied high-level clouds in general-and not contrails in particular-Travis says that specific conclusions cannot be drawn about the role of contrails from the survey.”
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Nature 31 December 2008
doi:10.1038/news.2008.1335

Can aircraft trails affect climate?

Grounding planes after the 11 September attacks may not have caused unusual temperature effects.

Anna Barnett

When all commercial air traffic in the United States was grounded after the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001, scientists got an unexpected opportunity to test ideas about the climate effects of the condensation trails left behind by jets.

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