Herbicide Chemical in Drinking Water Could Pose Much Greater Danger to Health Than Previously Thought Posted on March 4th, 2010
by David Gutierrez, NaturalNews
Contamination of drinking water by a common herbicide poses a greater health threat than previously believed, according to a report issued by the nonprofit environmental organization Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC).
The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) monitors average yearly levels of the popular herbicide atrazine in drinking water supplies, based on four tests per year. But the NRDC notes that levels of the toxin in drinking water regularly spike after heavy rains or during the spring when it is being widely applied, and that the four yearly testings may miss these events. The organization’s researchers found several such spikes in its own testing of water supplies in towns in agricultural regions of the South and Midwest.
“Our biggest concern is early-life-stage development,” said Jennifer Sass of the NRDC. “If there’s a disruption during that time, it becomes hard-wired into the system. These endocrine disrupters act in the body at extremely low levels. These spikes matter.”
Because atrazine is compatible with no-till farming, it is popular among farmers seeking to acquire a “green” label by reducing their carbon footprint. It is known to disrupt the hormonal system, and may cause cancers and menstrual problems in adults. It is considered especially dangerous to the developing reproductive systems of fetuses and children. The chemical has been shown to kill aquatic microorganisms and suppress the immune systems of larger animals, and it can cause limb or reproductive deformities in amphibians at levels as low as 0.1 parts per billion.
The EPA has set a threshold of 3 billion parts per billion for permissible atrazine levels, which the NRDC says would be too high even without periodic spikes. The NRDC analysis of 139 different municipal water systems found that 54 of them had a one-time spike higher than 3 parts per billion at some point in 2003 or 2004.
Home or municipal carbon filters can remove atrazine from water, but many municipal treatment plants do not use such procedures.
Sources for this story include: www.washingtonpost.com.
The New Surge Towards Codex Alimentarius Posted on March 3rd, 2010
Several of the latest items in the news are all pointing towards a new surge in the rapid implementation of Codex Alimentarius. John McCain’s Dietary Suplement Safety Act of 2010 (S.3002), Canada’s recent approval of genetically modified pigs, and the huge proliferation of genetically modified foods at market are all spelling total food control, coming fast.
McCain’s bill requires all dietary supplement manufacturers (vitamins, herbs, minerals, etc.) to come under FDA control and registration. Further, everyone in the supplement supply chain, from manufacturers to retail stores, must be registered so they can be monitored.1
Meanwhile, the Canadian government is on the brink of approving genetically modified pigs (called “enviropigs”) for use in the food supply. This is the first step towards pigs that have been crossed with mice being on the dinner plates of Canadians throughout the provinces.2
At the same time, a Canadian regulatory authority has told pharmacies to remove supplements from their shelves unless they have met with Health Canada standards – standards which have a five year backlog, currently.3
The biggest threat to the World Health Organization’s (WHO) Codex Alimentarius implementation is the health supplement market and the well-educated people who tend to purchase those products for their own use. Despite health supplements not being able to list their health benefits on their packaging in America, supplements are one of the fastest-growing markets in the health industry overall.
The enemy of Codex Alimentarius, therefore, is people like you and I and the companies who provide us with the supplements and whole foods we rely on for our own health.
Health Canada, for its part, is good friends with the Codex Alimentarius.4 The United States isn’t far behind, with the USDA having a special task force within the Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS) for the Codex.5 That’s not all, the primary force behind the World Health Organization’s Codex Alimentarius agenda is.. the United States.6
This, of course, is done on behalf of the multi-national pharmaceutical (aka Big Pharma) companies, conglomerate agribusiness, and (as always) the banks that back them. So far, the WHO’s Codex group has been instrumental in insuring the adoption of GMO and GM food crops around the world, especially in many of the world’s major food producers in the second and third worlds.
The ultimate goal of the Codex, once you look past it’s feel-good mission statement, is to remove the real health movement and its supplements and foods, so that they can be replaced with the “well regulated” foods of the huge corporate conglomerates that mass-produce garbage and poison and call it “food.”
We are well on the way towards full implementation of the Codex Alimentarius. Will you stand by and watch it happen?
Resources:
1 – McCain’s Dietary Supplement Bill, by Brandon Turbeville, Black Listed News
2 – Canada to approve GM ‘enviropigs’, UPI
3 – Natural Remedies and Supplements Take Blow in Canada, Brace for One in U.S., by Aaron Turpen, NaturalNews
4 – Health Canada Codex Alimentarius page
5 – USDA FSIS Codex Alimentarius page
6 – Codex Alimentarius: Population Control Under the Guise of Consumer Protection by Dr. Gregory Diamato, PhD, NaturalNews
U.S. government wants farmers to spread toxic powder from coal plant scrubbers on their food crop fields Posted on February 23rd, 2010
The federal government is pushing farmers to use a toxic byproduct of the coal burning industry to fertilize and loosen the soil in their crop fields. Initiated under the Bush administration as a beneficial use for the substance, efforts by the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) in conjunction with the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) continue to advocate for the widespread use of synthetic gypsum in agriculture.
Called flue gas desulfurization gypsum, or FGD gypsum, this synthetic powder is produced by coal plant “scrubbers” that remove sulfur dioxide from plant emissions. Sulfur dioxide is the chemical that causes acid rain to occur. FGD gypsum is a white, powdery substance that some believe will help to enrich crop field soil.
The current administration has been pushing for the agricultural use of FGD gypsum despite the fact that it is known to contain toxic heavy metals such as lead, mercury, and arsenic. According to the EPA, the mercury contained in FGD gypsum does not affect plants and runoff into water supplies at “significant” levels. As far as the other heavy metals are concerned, the EPA is holding to the mantra that the levels are minute, contending that using in in crop fields is perfectly safe.
Last year, a coal ash pond just outside of Knoxville, Tennessee, spilled, flooding about 300 acres of land with ash and killing many fish in the area. The spill damaged many homes as well and cleanup costs are expected to be upwards of $1 billion. This catastrophe has prompted the EPA to draft regulations on how to handle toxic coal waste safely.
The EPA would not comment, however, about its support for FGD gypsum in agricultural use in light of the spill and the damage it caused. If the waste from coal plants is toxic and must be dealt with in a manner that keeps it contained, many are wondering why the EPA would promote the same waste for use on crops.
In 2001, the USDA partnered with the EPA to promote FGD gypsum use. Since that time, the amount of the substance used by farmers on their fields has triple. According to the American Coal Ash Association (ACAA), nearly 280,000 tons of the byproduct was spread on fields last year.
Thomas Adams, executive director of the ACAA indicated that almost nine million tons of the roughly 18 million tons of FGD gypsum produced last year was used to make drywall. He believes that finding new ways to recycle the substance is preferable to dumping it in landfills.
Sources for this story include: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dy…
Climate alarmists feeling more heat Posted on February 22nd, 2010
by Lorne Gunter, Edmonton Journal
The empire has begun to strike back.
It was only a matter of time before the climate alarmists got their feet back under them. There is too much at stake politically, too many careers and reputations on the line, too much grant money for researchers and donations for 
environmental groups, too much green-tax revenue for governments, too much prestige in academic circles at risk for those who have asserted for more than a decade that man is causing damaging climate change to slink away in defeat.
So it is of little surprise that in the past couple of weeks many alarmists have begun asserting that despite all the revelations of the past three months about how key climate scientists and the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) have corrupted the scientific process in an obsessive drive to prove that climate change is real, nothing has undermined the “fact” that the Earth is warming dangerously.
Since late November, the True Believers have watched in stunned silence as the foundation of the climate-change theory has suffered one body blow after another.
First it was the revelation that scientists at the Climate Research Unit (CRU) in England — perhaps the most influential of the three sources the United Nations relies on for most of its climate data — were fudging their data to show more warming in recent decades than had actually occurred.
At the same time, these scientists were doing their best to upend the peer-review process at major scientific journals so scientists who disagreed with them would be unable to get published. And they were withholding their raw data and computer codes from other scientists and government investigators so no one else could validate or debunk their research by attempting to replicate it.
The alarmists have recently begun to rally around Phil Jones, the discredited head of the CRU. Nearly two week ago, Jones gave an interview to the BBC in which he admitted there had been no “statistically significant” global warming in the past 15 years.
Some news sources and global-warming skeptics overplayed Jones’s exact words. Last Sunday’s Daily Mail in Britain, for instance, claimed Jones had performed a “U-turn” in his claims for warming.
Jones, in fact, continues to insist the Earth is warming. But what he now admits is that it is not warming that rapidly (just 0.12 C per decade) and not “at the 95-per-cent significance level,” the level needed to assert statistical certainty.
He also now allows that there may have been other periods in the past 1,000 years that were as warm as or warmer than today.
While this is not a complete about-face, it is hardly business-as-usual, as the alarmist would have us believe. Even if Jones is still insisting that global warming is happening, there is now a measure of doubt in his claims that never existed before. What makes Jones’s words significant is not that they reveal some 180-degree change in his thinking, but that for the first time he admits significant uncertainty in the so-called settled science of climate change.
If leading climate scientists had spent the past 15 years saying the warming they were seeing wasn’t all that significant or that there remained many uncertainties about predictions of future climate or that some pre-industrial periods had been warmer, would there have been a Kyoto accord or a Copenhagen Earth summit? Would Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth have made $100 million? Would environmentalists have been asked to write government policy? Would there be any support at all for green taxes and carbon capture and other measures aimed at curbing carbon dioxide emissions?
Likely not.
Even though alarmists are correct that Jones has not recanted his earlier belief in the warming theory, he has undergone a significant change.
Or take the assertion, recently very common among alarmists, that NASA’s climate scientists are still finding global warming occurring, so it must still be happening.
Frankly, NASA’s climate scientists have hardly more credibility than the CRUs or IPCCs.
NASA is another of the three repositories of climate data relied upon by the UN, but three years ago a significant error was found in its records. In the 1990s, NASA had begun keeping temperature records differently, but it had failed to adjust all its pre-1990s records (about 120 years’ worth) to match the new method. When it reconciled its old records to its new method, recent warm years ceased to be as remarkable. For instance, 1934 replaced 1998 as the warmest year. And 1921 became the third-warmest.
In 2008, NASA substituted September’s global temperatures for October’s (they claimed accidentally), thereby distorting upward the worldwide averages for the fall of that year — an otherwise rather cool year.
And most recently, NASA has been shown to be cherry-picking the Earth stations it uses to calculate global average. It has been eliminating stations in colder locations (polar, rural, mountainous) and over-relying on warmer ones (mid-latitudes, urban).
Alarmists may want to believe this changes nothing, but that simply makes them the new deniers.
Hat Tip: ClimateChangeFraud
Climategate 2.0 — The NASA Files: U.S. Climate Science as Corrupt as CRU (PJM Exclusive — Part One) Posted on February 19th, 2010
In August 2007, I submitted two Freedom of Information Act requests to NASA and its Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS), headed by long-time Gore advisor James Hansen and his right-hand man Gavin Schmidt (and RealClimate.org co-founder).
I did this because Canadian businessman Steve McIntyre — a man with professional experience investigating suspect statistical claims in the mining industry and elsewhere, including his exposure of the now-infamous “hockey stick” graph — noticed something unusual with NASA’s claims of an ever-warming first decade of this century. NASA appeared to have inflated its U.S. temperatures beginning in the year 2000. My FOIA request asked NASA about their internal discussions regarding whether and how to correct the temperature error caught by McIntyre.
NASA stonewalled my request for more than two years, until Climategate prompted me to offer notice of intent to sue if NASA did not comply immediately.
On New Year’s Eve, NASA finally provided the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) with the documents I requested in August 2007.
The emails show the hypocrisy, dishonesty, and suspect data management and integrity of NASA, wildly spinning in defense of their enterprise. The emails show NASA making off with enormous sums of taxpayer funding doing precisely what they claim only a “skeptic” would do. The emails show NASA attempting to scrub their website of their own documents, and indeed they quietly pulled down numerous press releases grounded in the proven-wrong data. The emails show NASA claiming that their own temperature errors (which they have been caught making and in uncorrected form aggressively promoting) are merely trivial, after years of hysterically trumpeting much smaller warming anomalies.
As you examine the email excerpts below, as well as those which I will discuss in the upcoming three parts of this series, bear in mind that the contents of these emails were intended to prop up the argument forthe biggest regulatory intervention in history: the restricting of carbon emissions from all human activity. NASA’s activist scientists leave no doubt in their emails that this was indeed their objective. Also, please note that these documents were responsive to a specific FOIA request from two years ago. Recent developments — combined with admissions contained in these documents — beg further requests, which have both been already filed and with more forthcoming.
Furthermore, on January 29, 2010, CEI filed our appeal of NASA continuing to improperly withhold other documents responsive to our FOIA requests. In this appeal we informed NASA that if they do not comply by the twentieth day, as required by law, we shall exercise our appellate rights in court immediately.
________________________________
Under Dr. James Hansen, director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS), NASA shepherds a continuing public campaign claiming clear evidence of anthropogenic global warming (AGW) — climate change induced by human beings. The documents released via the FOIA request, however, contain admissions of data unreliability that are staggering, particularly in light of NASA’s claims to know temperatures and anomalies within hundredths of a degree, and the alarm they helped raise over a mere one degree of claimed warming over more than an entire century.
Dr. Reto Ruedy, a Hansen colleague at GISS, complains in his August 3, 2007, email to his co-worker at GISS and RealClimate blogger Gavin Schmidt:
[The United States Historical Climate Network] data are not routinely kept up-to-date (at this point the (sic) seem to end in 2002).
This lapse led to wild differences in data claimed to be from the same ground stations by USHCN and the Global Climate Network (GHCN). NASA later trumpeted the “adjustments” they made to this data (upward only, of course) in extremely minor amounts — adjustments they are now seen admitting are well within any uncertainty, a fact that received significantly less emphasis in their public media campaign claiming anomalous, man-made warming.
GISS’s Ruedy then wrote:
[NASA’s] assumption that the adjustments made the older data consistent with future data … may not have been correct. … Indeed, in 490 of the 1057 stations the USHCN data were up to 1C colder than the corresponding GHCN data, in 77 stations the data were the same, and in the remaining 490 stations the USHCN data were warmer than the GHCN data.
Ruedy claimed this introduced an estimated warming into the record of 0.1 deg C. Ruedy then described an alternate way of manipulating the temperature data, “a more careful method” they might consider using, instead.
