While I may feel like posting in the beginning, I hear the treatment in the 6 and 7th weeks can be brutal and i need to concentrate on getting better anyway. So no blog for at least until the end of June. Recovery can take several months as well.But I will come back in June and let you know what is going on….Wish Me Luck.
Laryngeal cancer is cancer of the larynx, or voice box. Laryngeal cancer symptoms include voice changes, such as hoarseness, and a sore throat or cough that doesn’t go away. Treatment may include surgery to remove part or all of the larynx, called a laryngectomy. You can reduce your risk of laryngeal cancer by avoiding tobacco products.
Laryngeal cancer is cancer of the larynx, part of the throat. Cancer happens when specific cells grow uncontrollably. As the cells multiply, they invade and damage the body. In laryngeal cancer, these cancerous (malignant) cells start in the larynx (voice box).
How common is laryngeal cancer?
Laryngeal cancer is part of a group of head and neck cancers. Every year, approximately 13,000 people in the U.S. are diagnosed with laryngeal cancer. About 3,700 people die from it each year.
I have come to despise Joe Machin. The entire Senate turns on whether he will vote for something. He has derailed the stringent Climate Change provisions of Built Back Better bill, and acted like it was a boon that he voted for a Black Woman to the Supreme Court. He is a waste of human space. Joe Manchin helped a West Virginia power plant that is the sole customer of his private coal business. Along the way, he blocked ambitious climate action.
This article is from the NY Times but its tagline would not load up so I used the one above. from politico. I think if you click on the author you may get through. In fact I clicked on the active author link and it took me right through so you get 2 articles for the nonprice of 1.
How Joe Manchin Aided Coal, and Earned Millions
At every step of his political career, Joe Manchin helped a West Virginia power plant that is the sole customer of his private coal business. Along the way, he blocked ambitious climate action.
GRANT TOWN, W.Va. — On a hilltop overlooking Paw Paw Creek, 15 miles south of the Pennsylvania border, looms a fortresslike structure with a single smokestack, the only viable business in a dying Appalachian town.
The Grant Town power plant is also the link between the coal industry and the personal finances of Joe Manchin III, the Democrat who rose through state politics to reach the United States Senate, where, through the vagaries of electoral politics, he is now the single most important figure shaping the nation’s energy and climate policy.
Mr. Manchin’s ties to the Grant Town plant date to 1987, when he had just been elected to the West Virginia Senate, a part-time job with base pay of $6,500. His family’s carpet business was struggling.
Opportunity arrived in the form of two developers who wanted to build a power plant in Grant Town, just outside Mr. Manchin’s district. Mr. Manchin, whose grandfather went to work in the mines at age 9 and whose uncle died in a mining accident, helped the developers clear bureaucratic hurdles.
What genius decided to put Hanford Nuclear Site so close to the Columbia River that it is about to ruin it for good? Actually whose idea was it to put in a river valley in the first place? They really could have done a much better job. I mean look at the other World War II sites like Tennessee and New Mexico. It is almost collectively like they said, ” Heh’ lets do something like Rocky Mountain Flats in Denver. But we well do it better”. And now after 80 years and one 12 story failed attempt, they are “excited to get going” with the attempted clean up. Sometimes I do not want to admit I am part of the Human race. sigh.
Hanford officials say that will be a historic moment.
“Being on the verge of the first use of large scale tank waste treatment on the Hanford site is pretty doggone exciting,” said John Eschenberg, president of Hanford’s tank waste contractor, Washington River Protection Solution.
The Department of Energy announced on Tuesday that construction and the readiness assessment of the Tank-Side Cesium Removal. or TSCR, system at Hanford had been completed.
“What a lot of people don’t recognize is the start of tank waste treatment actually starts when TSCR operations begin, so we will be actually treating waste on the industrial scale in just a few months for the first time in the history of the site,” said Brian Vance, the DOE Hanford manager.
The system, placed next to a Hanford underground waste storage tank, was developed in three years as a workaround to the Pretreatment Facility, which stands 12 stories high and covers an area larger than a football field at the vitrification plant.
The Pretreatment Facility was planned to separate waste into low-activity and high-level radioactive waste streams for treatment, but after possible technical issues related to high level waste were identified in 2012, construction on the building stopped.
DOE changed course, deciding to start treating just low activity radioactive waste first and delay treatment of high level radioactive waste for more than a decade.
It estimates that about 90% of the waste in underground tanks could be treated and disposed of in a lined landfill at Hanford as low activity waste.
That a nonprofit organization would help clean up Big Gas and Oil’s mess is not as good as THEM cleaning up and paying for their own messes, but is better than nothing. The fact that they are organizing other such Foundations in other effected States is great news as well. Support these people would you?
Curt Shuck of the Well Done Foundation poses near a oil well capping project in Toole County, Mont., on Nov. 18, 2021. Shuck started the Well Done Foundation to raise money and cap abandoned oil wells to prevent them from continuing to release methane gas into the atmosphere. Methane is a greenhouse gas because it traps heat in the atmosphere, according to the EPA. (Phil Drake/Independent Record via AP)
By PHIL DRAKE, Independent Record
OILMONT, Mont. (AP) — Curtis Shuck remembers a rush of emotions a few years ago when he came across his first “orphaned well” while walking through a field in the Kevin-Sunburst Oilfield.
Shuck, who was no stranger to oilfields, said he was there that day discussing grain with a farmer when they came across a well that had been abandoned.
“I had no idea that this was even a thing,” he said, noting he had more than 30 years of experience in the oil and gas business. “I just thought this was everybody’s dirty little secret.”
He recalls feeling amazed, embarrassed and appalled all at the same time. Shuck said he could not get the image out of his mind and felt it was incumbent upon him to do something about it. Shuck said he learned it’s a huge problem, not only in Montana, but in other parts of the country as well.
He started the Well Done Foundation, a nonprofit group that caps wells across the nation. He said the organization is “making an impact in Montana and across the U.S., one well at a time.”
“Every well is a victory and milestone,” he told the Independent Record newspaper in Helena.
This could become a heated and useless discussion. One that goes back centuries. To be blunt – Are we molly coddling the little beggars. Lets face it, on one level life has improved immeasurably. Life expectancies, just as an example, show how less brutal life is; and total global populations show how plentiful general life support is. I guess the real question here is, do you believe that global warming will make Earth uninhabitable for humans? If the answer is YES to that question, AND something could be done to change that – then you have an obligations to say something. If the answer is No and NO then I guess – Shut Up. But is it that easy?
Many young people feel like their future is in peril. To make progress on climate change, we must move past doomsday scenarios.
Is climate change the biggest threat to humanity? Many people would say so. Young people in particular feel hopeless. A recent survey asked 10,000 16- to 25-year-olds in 10 countries about their attitudes about climate change. The results were damning. More than half said “humanity was doomed”; three-quarters said the future was frightening; 55 percent said they would have less opportunities than their parents; 52 percent said family security would be threatened; and 39 percent were hesitant to have children as a result. These attitudes were consistent across countries rich and poor, big and small: from the United States and the United Kingdom to Brazil, the Philippines, India, and Nigeria.
It’s totally legitimate that young people feel this way. I’ve been there. Today, much of my work focuses on researching, writing, and thinking about climate change. But it’s a field I very nearly walked away from. Fresh out of university with a degree in environmental science and climate change, it was hard to see that I could contribute anything at all. I flipped back and forth between anger and hopelessness. Any effort seemed futile, and I nearly quit. Thankfully my perspective shifted. I’m glad it did. Not only did I continue working on climate, I’m also sure that my work has had many times the positive impact it would have if I’d been stuck in my previous mindset. And that’s why I’m convinced that if we’re to make progress on climate, we need to lift this cloak of pessimism.
Let’s be clear: Climate change is one of the biggest problems we face. It comes with many risks—some certain, some uncertain—and we’re not moving anywhere near fast enough to reduce emissions. But there seems to have been a breakdown in communication of what our future entails. None of the climate scientists I know and trust—who surely know the risks better than almost anyone—are resigned to a future of oblivion. Most of them have children. In fact, they often have several. Young ones, too. Now, having kids is no automatic qualification for rational decision-making. But it signals that those who spend day after day studying climate change are optimistic that their children will have a life worth living.
Let me very quickly say, that I wish no immediate harm to the simpering moron (sigh). I am not urging anybody anywhere to do any harm to the coal toad. All I am say is that after he dies of Black Lung, I hope bad things happen to him.
He is not even a Democrat. He is a DINO: Democrat In Name Only. He knows the majority is thin and thus his power is great. So behind the flag of Fiscal Responsibility he argues for a smaller bill. A Bill that can “get paid for”. What gets dropped out of that smaller bill? Surprise! Surprise! The Climate Change program that his coal sucking buddies hate. I mean this is from Vanity Fair for God’s sake.
Joe Manchin Is About to Make Life Worse for His Own Constituents—And the Planet
The West Virginia senator’s reported opposition to programs aimed at helping working families and combating climate change would dramatically dilute the Democrats’ infrastructure plans.
Although Joe Manchin has been holding up Joe Biden’s infrastructure plans for a while now over the price tag, the West Virginia senator has been somewhat cagey about his actual demands. Not as guarded, perhaps, as Kyrsten Sinema, his fellow Democratic holdout; where she has refused to state her terms to anyone outside the White House, Manchin at least engages with his colleagues and speaks publicly about his objections to the reconciliation bill. But he’s been difficult to pin down nonetheless, adding to the frustrations of Democrats as they seek to deliver on the centerpiece of Biden’s domestic agenda.
Finally, while his terms are coming into clearer view, they’re only casting the future of the infrastructure bills in a thicker cloud of uncertainty. Now, the question isn’t only if the Biden bills will pass. It’s whether the bills will be recognizable if they do. Axios on Sunday reported that Manchin has given something of an ultimatum to the White House: He’ll support the child tax credit that would be one of the package’s biggest boosts to working families, but only if it…well, does less to help working families. Manchin is asking for the credit to include a work requirement and an income cap that would make families earning more than $60,000 ineligible for assistance—a demand that would weaken a key part of the spending bill. He is also, as Axios reported, continuing to rail against provisions of the reconciliation bill that are crucial to addressing climate change, supposedly because of concerns that the shift to clean energy the Biden plan would help usher in could cost jobs in the coal state of West Virginia. The Timesreported Friday that Manchin, who personally has financial ties to the coal industry, opposes “a program to rapidly replace the nation’s coal- and gas-fired power plants with wind, solar and nuclear energy” that’s seen as key to Biden’s climate agenda.
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Go there and get mad; I mean read and get mad. More next week.
Just like CANCER. That was the first thought I had when I read this article. Evidence was gathered 60 years ago. People spoke up, and the oil and gas industry killed any discussion. Now we are stuck with more powerful Hurricanes. We are stuck with the American west being consumed by droughts and fire. The Arctic is gone and the Antarctic going. The world should confiscate their wealth and apply every dime to remediating the effects. Unfortunately the whole world never does anything. I mean the UN could pass a resolution but Pfffhh.
Sixty years of climate change warnings: the signs that were missed (and ignored)
The effects of ‘weird weather’ were already being felt in the 1960s, but scientists linking fossil fuels with climate change were dismissed as prophets of doom
In August 1974, the CIA produced a study on “climatological research as it pertains to intelligence problems”. The diagnosis was dramatic. It warned of the emergence of a new era of weird weather, leading to political unrest and mass migration (which, in turn, would cause more unrest). The new era the agency imagined wasn’t necessarily one of hotter temperatures; the CIA had heard from scientists warning of global cooling as well as warming. But the direction in which the thermometer was traveling wasn’t their immediate concern; it was the political impact. They knew that the so-called “little ice age”, a series of cold snaps between, roughly, 1350 and 1850, had brought not only drought and famine, but also war – and so could these new climatic changes.
“The climate change began in 1960,” the report’s first page informs us, “but no one, including the climatologists, recognized it.” Crop failures in the Soviet Union and India in the early 1960s had been attributed to standard unlucky weather. The US shipped grain to India and the Soviets killed off livestock to eat, “and premier Nikita Khrushchev was quietly deposed”.
But, the report argued, the world ignored this warning, as the global population continued to grow and states made massive investments in energy, technology and medicine.
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Go there and read. More next week (if we are still here)
I am talking Plastics. A friend of mine once remarked to me that he thought he probably would be carrying around a pound of DDT by the time he died. That may be true but think about a pound of plastic by-products circulating around your body. 60 years again the stuff didn’t even exist. Bakelite did exist and other form forms as well. But not the “soft” stuff. The stuff that universally breaks down. Now plastic and it’s by-products are everywhere AND there is more coming. Yum!
Ants are useful creatures. As the most numerous insects on Earth, they have colonized nearly every habitat on land. So when a researcher wants to understand how far a contaminant has spread, they turn to ants.
In 2012, a group of French researchers found phthalates in the body of every ant they sampled. Ants from France, Hungary, Spain, Morocco, the Greek island Egine, and Burkina Faso all had at least some of the common plastic additive embedded in their skin. In the conclusion to the paper announcing their findings, they added a restless-sounding note: “In an attempt to find ants bearing no phthalate on their cuticle,” they wrote, they would next look farther afield. There had to be ants out there not yet full of plastic.
But there were not. Five years later, the team published their follow-up. They had sampled ants from the most remote forests of Guyana, and the areas in the Amazon rainforest farthest from any urban center. Again, phthalates were embedded in their skin. “These findings suggest that there is no such thing as a ‘pristine’ zone,” they wrote in a 2017 paper.
Or, as Pete Myers, an environmental health expert and adjunct professor at Carnegie Mellon University put it, “there is no untouched centimeter.”
Well now it is here. Permafrost covers 24% of the Earth’s surface. It is melting at a quickening pace. Buried in this permafrost are many Dead Bodies. Dead Human’s that carry ancient diseases that we have no defense against. Not just Human bodies but animal bodies and maybe Dinosaur bodies. Who knows what diseases they might contain? What if we had not just one virus to deal with (like now) but several and we had no time for a vaccine? That does not take into account the bacterium and other microbes that may have been harmless in their day, but cause Humans to turn deaf, or blind, or mute?
In August 2019, Iceland held a funeral for the Okjökull Glacier, the first Icelandic glacier lost to climate change. The community commemorated the event with a plaque in recognition of this irreversible change and the grave impacts it represents. Globally, glacier melt rates have nearly doubled in the last five years, with an average loss of 832 mmw.e. (millimeters water equivalent) in 2015, increasing to 1,243 mmw.e. in 2020 (WGMS). This high rate of loss decreases glacial stores of freshwater and changes the structure of the surrounding ecosystem.
In the last 10 years, warming in the Arctic has outpaced projections so rapidly that scientists are now suggesting that the poles are warming four times faster than the rest of the globe. This has led to glacier melt and permafrost thaw levels that weren’t forecast to happen until 2050 or later. In Siberia and northern Canada, this abrupt thaw has created sunken landforms, known as thermokarst, where the oldest and deepest permafrost is exposed to the warm air for the first time in hundreds or even thousands of years.
As the global climate continues to warm, many questions remain about the periglacial environment. Among them: as water infiltration increases, will permafrost thaw more rapidly? And, if so, what long-frozen organisms might “wake up”?
Permafrost covers 24 percent of the Earth’s land surface, and the soil constituents vary with local geology. Arctic lands offer unexplored microbial biodiversity and microbial feedbacks, including the release of carbon to the atmosphere. In some locations, hundreds of millions of years’ worth of carbon is buried. The layers may still contain ancient frozen microbes, Pleistocene megafauna and even buried smallpox victims. As the permafrost thaws with increasing rapidity, scientists’ emerging challenge is to discover and identify the microbes, bacteria and viruses that may be stirring.
Chernobyl symbolized the beginning of the end for me. Man had shown his weakness against forces that he unleashed on the Earth. If that was true then it was only a matter of time before the jinny or jin coalesced and demanded his due. The sum of which men could not produce. So the sword would fall on all our necks. But every once in awhile there is cause for hope.
Researchers thought the site of the 1986 Chernobyl disaster was unable to support life. But a bunch of wolves, deer, wild boars, bears, and foxes disagree.
Three decades after the Chernobyl disaster—the world’s worst nuclear accident—signs of life are returning to the exclusion zone. Wild animals in Chernobyl are flourishing within the contaminated region; puppies roaming the area are capturing the hearts of thousands. Tourists who have watched the critically acclaimed HBO series Chernobyl are taking selfies with the ruins. Once thought to be forever uninhabitable, the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone has become a haven for flora and fauna that prove that life, as they say in Jurassic Park, finds a way.
1. The Animals of Chernobyl Survived Against All Odds
The effects of the radioactive explosion at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant on April 26, 1986 devastated the environment. Around the plant and in the nearby city of Pripyat in Ukraine, the Chernobyl disaster’s radiation caused the leaves of thousands of trees to turn a rust color, giving a new name to the surrounding woods—the Red Forest. Workers eventually bulldozed and buried the radioactive trees. Squads of Soviet conscripts also were ordered to shoot any stray animals within the 1000-square-mile Chernobyl Exclusion Zone. Though experts today believe parts of the zone will remain unsafe for humans for another 20,000 years, numerous animal and plant species not only survived, but thrived.
2. Bears and Wolves Outnumber Humans Around the Chernobyl Disaster Site
While humans are strictly prohibited from living in the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone, many other species have settled there. Brown bears, wolves, lynx, bison, deer, moose, beavers, foxes, badgers, wild boar, raccoon dogs, and more than 200 species of birds have formed their own ecosystem within the Chernobyl disaster area. Along with the larger animals, a variety of amphibians, fish, worms, and bacteria makes the unpopulated environment their home.
The Chernobyl nuclear disaster of 1986 left a ring of ghost villages as residents fled, fearing radiation poisoning.
But now people are choosing to live in the crumbling houses on the edge of the exclusion zone.
On a warm summer’s evening, Maryna Kovalenko is playing football with her two teenage daughters in their backyard.
Iryna and Olena laugh as the family dog attempts to wrestle away the ball, scattering the startled chickens.
But out beyond the family’s back fence, all is silent and still.
Numerous houses, a shop and a library stand vacant in the village of Steshchyna, northern Ukraine. Only the forest is gaining ground as creeping plants explore the cracks in this abandoned village.
