The initial efforts by NASA headquarters to limit comments
angered some government researchers.

"It's just another attempt to play down anything that might lead to
the conclusion that something must be done" about global warming, one
federal climate scientist said. He, like half a dozen government
employees interviewed on this subject, said he could speak only on
condition of anonymity because of standing orders not to talk to the
news media.

Along with its direct criticisms of a Bush-like administration, the
movie also could draw attention to a proposed Bush budget cut.

The lead character, played by Dennis Quaid, is a paleoclimatologist,
an investigator of past climate shifts, for the National Oceanic and
Atmospheric Administration. President Bush has proposed sharp cuts to
the agency's paleoclimatology program, which began under the first Bush
administration.

On Friday, NOAA officials said they saw the movie mainly as an
opportunity, not a problem.

"Any time anybody can focus on this little agency that nobody ever
pays attention to and talk about what we do, that's a good thing," said
Jordan St. John, the agency's director of public affairs.

Dana Perino, a spokeswoman for the White House Council on
Environmental Quality, which handles policy on environmental issues,
said she was "not aware of any White House discussion about this movie
with anyone — none at all."

Some leaders of nonprofit environmental groups are also distressed
about the movie, though for different reasons. In conference calls and
e-mail exchanges, they have said it so overstates the issue — turning a
decades-long or century-long threat into one that explodes over five
days — that it might cause people to simply laugh off the real
questions.

The film's creators said they were puzzled by the concerns of
environmentalists. "If they can get their act together, all they need
to be saying is the drama of this movie is fictional but the fact is
that global warming is real," said Mark Gordon, the producer of the
movie.

If environmentalists distance themselves from the movie, they will be
squandering a gift, said Dr. Daniel B. Botkin, an emeritus professor of
ecology at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Worried that mercury in fish poses a hazard to youngsters -- while still trying to stress the health benefits of seafood -- the U.S. government has issued new guidelines for eating fish.

Women who are pregnant, nursing or may become pregnant, and young children should not eat certain kinds of fish that tend to be high in mercury, said Lester Crawford, deputy commissioner of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.

While mercury can affect almost any organ in the body, "the most sensitive organ is the brain," said Crawford. "The concern is there could be a mental effect on a young child."

At the same time, the new guidelines emphasize that fish is a good source of protein and other nutrients and "can be important parts of a healthy and balanced diet."

In recent years fish has become increasingly popular because of the omega-3 compounds it contains that can benefit the heart.

The American Heart Association recommends that people eat a variety of fish at least twice a week, even more for those diagnosed with heart disease.

Engineers are trying to build a system to remove the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide from the atmosphere in an effort to reduce climate warming.
Two companies based in Tucson, Arizona, in the US are involved in the project, which aims to complete the first phase of a working unit by early 2005.

Scientists have discussed so-called "wind-scrubbers" in principle but this is the first attempt to build one.

Details of the research are published in Chemistry & Industry magazine.

Allen Wright of Global Research Technologies and his brother Burton Wright of Kelly, Wright Associates decided to use the combined expertise of their firms to build a structure that can capture and store carbon dioxide.

The chemistry and the theory involved in this project shows it can be done

Burton Wright, Kelly, Wright Associates
The system would process large volumes of air with low carbon dioxide (CO2) concentrations.

Unlike current systems to capture plant flue gas from power stations - which remove CO2 at high concentrations - the wind scrubbers would not need to be located near the source of the emissions.

The world's largest maker of computer chips, Intel, is to reduce
the amount of lead in its products.
Intel said it had taken the decision for environmental reasons.

The plans involve microprocessors and chip sets, which handle the flow of data
between the processor and the rest of a computer.

"Lead-free is required for the future. This is the right time for this launch
of the technology," said Michael Garner of Intel.

They believe that if the ice cap melts global average sea level will rise by
about 7 metres. Even if global warming was halted the rise could be
irreversible, they say.

Warming threshold

The researchers estimated that Greenland is likely to pass a threshold of
warming beyond which the ice-sheet - second in size to Antarctica - cannot be
sustained unless much greater reductions are made in emissions of greenhouse
gases.

They believe that over the next 350 years global warming was likely to pass the
critical threshold in 34 out of 35 model calculations they performed.

This past New Year’s Eve the Environmental Protection Agency took advantage of that media blind spot and denied a petition to ban the disposal of sewage sludge as land-based “fertilizer,” but announced that 15 additional toxins found in sludge would be added to its list of nine heavy metals that are currently regulated.

-cut-

The Sierra Club defines sludge this way: “Urban sludges are a highly complex, unpredictable biologically active mixture of organic material and human pathogens that can contain thousands of industrial waste products, including dozens of carcinogens, hormone disrupting chemicals, toxic metals, dioxins, radionuclides and other persistent bioaccumulative poisons.”

Formerly, a lot of sludge was shipped out to the ocean and dumped. When it became apparent that this practice was decimating the ocean’s ecosystem, environmentalists, led by the Natural Resources Defense Council, got the practice banned in 1992. But the problem remained: What is to be done with the mountains of sludge? It couldn’t easily be sent to landfills, given sludge is toxic and dumping it en masse would create a proliferation of industrial waste sites that would then need to be regulated and monitored.

So the EPA came up with a novel solution. In 1993, with the help of a PR firm, the EPA renamed sludge “biosolids,” and then defined biosolids as a fertilizer. Fertilizers, unlike industrial wastes, are only lightly regulated. Consequently, each year more than 3 million tons of sewage sludge—excuse me, “biosolids”—are spread over farms and wilderness areas.

-cut-

Microbiologist David Lewis, the world’s leading sludge researcher and a former EPA scientist, disagrees. He has spent the last eight years studying the health effects of sludge on humans. In testimony in February before the House Mineral and Resources subcommittee, Lewis said:

Growing numbers of people living near sites where the sludge is spread have reported bacterial and viral infections, some fatal, after contacting sewage sludge and breathing dusts blowing from the treated fields. My research at EPA and the University of Georgia showed that chemicals in processed sludge that irritate the skin and respiratory tract may make people susceptible to infections.
An overview of his studies can be found in the current issue of Environmental Health Perspectives, a peer-reviewed journal of the National Institutes of Health.

"Hermetically sealed tunnels developed in the United Kingdom are producing abundant pesticide-free crops in a computer-controlled environment that is rich in carbon dioxide and nutrients..."

"The Greengro system achieves greater productivity than traditional agricultural methods by, among other things, carefully controlling the temperature within the tunnels, which are sealed to isolate the growing environment. Excess heat is trapped and used to maintain warm temperatures in the evening, thus reducing energy usage."

For most of us, our conscious environmental acts begin with paper, by recycling newspaper, cardboard, and perhaps mixed paper. By putting those bits of paper back into the production stream instead of into the waste stream, we put in place one piece of the loop between consumption and production. Unfortunately, the loop doesn't always get completed. The paper we send to recyclers hasn't always gone back into products, and some has ended up in landfills--mainly because the demand for recycled products hasn't been great enough to make it cost-effective to equip mills to handle recycled stock, and then get a competitively-priced paper product on the market. "Recycled" pulp from other sources than consumers, much of which is simply the waste product of lumber milling, has been used much more widely than post-consumer pulp in paper making, largely due to price and availability factors.