Friday Funny

Jeff L says:
January 21, 2011 at 5:41 am
Anyone who knows anything about fracing will tell you that the concept of groundwater contamination by fracing is simply absurd. Fracs are designed to stay in zone. If a frac goes more than 100 ft out of zone, that would be considered a failure. but to contaminate an aquifer, it would need to go many thousands of feet out of zone. It just doesnt happen. Wellbores are cased with engineered steel & cemented into the ground to prevent communication between aquifers & hydrocarbon bearing zones. There are generally thousands of feet of impermeable beds between target zones & groundwater aquifers. Again, it justy doesn’t happen & that is both by design & by nature.

I agree with your assessment. I’ve always thought that most of the people complaining that their water supply was effected by a frac had contaminated water before the frac was performed.
I’m hearing that PA is now testing water before and after frac jobs. They are finding that many private wells are contaminated before and are unaffected by the frac. We might see concerns settled after a short period of time.

Might be funnier with a CFL over his head.
Josh could make it the new symbol for bad ideas.

Isn’t the light bulb a bit out of place when we are being told to switch off the standby lights on equipment?

ecliptic says:
January 21, 2011 at 7:28 am
Here in Socialist Summit County Colorado my daughter told me a student was punished for doubting global warming
Good grief! They weren’t blown to bits surely? No pressure!

Hey! Did Y’all see that California is considering banning all fishing along its entire coast? The justification, in part, is because of …. climate change!
http://www.breitbart.tv/california-planning-to-outlaw-fishing/
Look for the Marine Life Protection Act to come to a Cali-a-fornia state near you!

California is being sued by the greens to stop solar plant in california…too funny.
http://www.foxnews.com/scitech/2011/01/17/conservation-group-sues-stop-california-solar-plant/

It’s always Marcia, Marcia said on January 21, 2011 at 6:58 pm:

No bong?

And contaminate water with thousands of toxic cancer-causing chemicals, like carbon dioxide?
Sure, it currently appears that carbon dioxide won’t by itself cause cancer, but we’ve never had atmospheric levels this high in recorded history before! Why take the risk?
Besides, there’s already been a casual link demonstrated between CO2 and cancer, as This Intrepid Blogger noted:
http://robertkyriakides.wordpress.com/2008/01/07/carbon-dioxide-in-the-air-cancer-and-death/
He cites the work of the esteemed Professor Mark Z Jacobson of Stanford University, which you know must be true:

In December 2007 Professor Jacobson published his findings which draw on many scientific sources as well as his own original research. He finds that (by modeling) increases in fossil fuel sourced carbon dioxide also increase the ozone levels on the surface of the planet. Ozone is a molecule that consists of there atoms of oxygen; high in the upper atmosphere it shields us from harmful ultraviolet light but at the surface of the earth it is generally thought to be very harmful to human respiratory systems because it harms your breathing apparatus.
He also found that carbon dioxide from fossil fuel increases the volume of carcinogens that we are likely to meet. Burning fossil fuel also (as we know) increases particulates. All this leads to more cancers, more deaths and more people ill in hospitals. In addition if you pump more carbon dioxide in the air, the air becomes more stable, making a better home for particulates which damage health.
He extrapolates that deaths increase with increased carbon dioxide levels and higher temperatures. It is difficult to be precise (and any headline figure will inevitably be misleading) but the effects of the carbon dioxide that we are pumping into the atmosphere are causing deaths which would not have been caused otherwise, quite apart from the deaths that are being caused by extreme climate events caused by increased temperatures. Those deaths are significant enough (every death is of course significant) in number to measure.

Quite Alarming! As the blogger concludes:

Well, if you needed another reason to stop burning fossil fuel you can find it in Professor Jacobson’s work.

Science Daily reported on it:
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/02/080226135421.htm
I found the paper here:
On the causal link between carbon dioxide and air pollution mortality
http://www.fypower.org/pdf/Stanford_CO2_Jacobson.pdf
There’s a presentation based on it:
http://www.ametsoc.org/atmospolicy/documents/2008ESSS/ESSS51608/Jacobson51609.pdf
Peer Reviewed Proof! And as you can tell from the last link, the prestigious American Meteorological Society has archived the results thus you know it’s all Very Important and Exceptionally True.
Sure, that link between CO2 and (global warming; climate change; climatic disruption) got all the press until lately, but now the Greens have an opportunity to get back to this Important Upcoming Tragedy.
Anthropogenic Carbon Dioxide increases lead to Cancer.
Serious Business.
Yup, we might as well shut down all the fossil fuel based heating right now, then the Greens can start adding up the lives saved from cancer…

The regular lightbulb actually works, remember that the Greenies aren’t restircting themselves away from those things in most cases, they just want it to apply to everyone but themselves. Look at Al Gore, flying in his private jet to talk about how everyone must cut back to save the planet. It would be funny if it weren’t true.

From Dave Andrews on January 23, 2011 at 1:38 pm:

Doesn’t everything cause cancer eventually – I mean stick a couple of coins inside somebody’s skin for long enough and they’re likely to develop cancer. So lets ban money.

Oh I agree. Despite all the talk about how great Nature is, how natural it all is, we actually live in a permanently-irritating toxic soup. Every bit of it will kill us in large quantities, and for “essential nutrients” like minerals the threshold for life-impairment is shockingly low.
As to banning money in general, enough people already have what they think are enough reasons to do so, so what’s one more?

Moreover cancer is primarily a disease of ageing, so if we put a limit on how long people can live we will solve the problem.

A certain chunk is just odds, a one in whatever chance every year times how many years lived. Our defensive functions do wear down with age, damage doesn’t get automatically repaired fast enough, increasing the per year odds.
Some of the current advice for avoiding it doesn’t help much either. We are warned about “free radicals,” people load up on antioxidants. Yet those reactive oxygen species (ROS) do perform important functions in the body, too many antioxidants can cause problems. Also I seem to remember a news blurb from a year or so ago, people were taking so much antioxidants it was interfering with their oxygen uptake.
Read the linked Wikipedia piece. Turns out a major source of oxidative damage is leakage from mitochondria. No “external cause” needed, a major source of our eventual downfall is built in.
As to getting rid of people past a certain age in general, enough people already have what they think are enough reasons to do so… ☺