Volcanic Ash Heading Towards North America 338
chocomilko writes "St. John's International Airport, the easternmost airport in Canada, has begun canceling flights due to worries of ash from Iceland's Eyjafjallajokull volcano, leaving travelers stranded after the weekend's Juno awards festival. Early reports stated that there was a 30% chance ash would reach the island by early Monday; Air Canada has issued an all-day travel advisory. A thick blanket of fog currently covering the city isn't helping matters, either."
BBC fluoride warning (Score:1, Interesting)
"The animals are at risk of fluoride poisoning if they inhale or ingest the ash, leading to internal bleeding, long-term bone damage and teeth loss."
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/8629241.stm [bbc.co.uk]
Re:Affects on Europe (Score:3, Interesting)
..., lots of people stuck in other countrys unable to get home and are trying any means available to try and get home.
Exactly. Heard what John Cleese [brisbanetimes.com.au] did?
Re:Affects on Europe (Score:5, Interesting)
Yeah heard that, these people had to buy bikes in order to board a ferry in france
http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/breaking/2010/0418/breaking15.html?via=mr [irishtimes.com]
Re:I'm Tired of Living in Harmony with Nature (Score:5, Interesting)
How 'bout you?
Bet you're feeling real good about driving that Prius designed to be oh-so-gentle on Mother Gaia, ain'tcha?
Meanwhile, the belch from one unpronounceable volcano wipes out the cumulative effort from all of mankind over the past hundred years to purify the water and soil, and dwarfs all of our species' feeble, amateurish efforts to pollute them in the first place.
Gimme a rainforest, a chainsaw, and a case of Red Bull. It's Payback Time!
Bollocks. You overestimate the volcano. The cancelled planes would have belched out 14 times [informatio...utiful.net] more CO2 and SO2 than one pesky little volcano. Nature? Feeble, I say, bah!
Re:bankers take on the grounded flights (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:SIGH (Score:5, Interesting)
What is so odd to me is that many Europeans thought that Americans were laughing at them because the volcano interupted their air travel. I don't know anyone who thought that was funny at all. Do Europeans really think that we are that petty?
Interesting Animation of Dispersal (Score:5, Interesting)
No planes, trains and automobiles (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:I'm Tired of Living in Harmony with Nature (Score:3, Interesting)
Meanwhile, the belch from one unpronounceable volcano wipes out the cumulative effort from all of mankind over the past hundred years to purify the water and soil
In the first place, it was around 1970 before anybody seemed to care about the environment. Perhaps other countries started to care before then, but not long before then. Nixon signed the first US environmental legislation in 1970, forty years ago. The previous 150 years saw mankind spew more pollution than had been spewed in the previous history of man.
Second, the volcano is spewing far less pollutants than the world's cars do every day, except the ash. And it may help alleviate global warming somewhat by reflecting sunlight back into space. As to the ash, men destroyed the ecosystem in Oklahoma and other parts of the plains which resulted in the dist bowl [wikipedia.org] in the 1930s, which rained far more dirt than the Iceland volcano; it spread as far as Europe. It was worse, since it was fertile topsoil that blew away, much or most of it winding up in the Atlantic ocean.
So before you drive your Hummer to the rainforest to cut down trees just for evil spite, you might want to find somewhere besides Fox News to educate yourself.
Re:SIGH (Score:4, Interesting)
What made you think that we here in the Olde Worlde thought you would be laughing about our ashy situation? I have not heard anything even remotely resembling such an accusation. Nothing in the media, nothing from 'real people', zilch, nada, niente, nichts...
Re:Affects on Europe (Score:3, Interesting)
You realize the U.S. possesses three of the world's nine known supervolcanos [tripod.com] right? In particular, Yellowstone park will eventually cover half the U.S. in three feet of ash and debris. Have a nice day. :)
Pronunciation (Score:3, Interesting)
Personally, I'm having fun with the pronunciation [upenn.edu]. Especially since every Icelander seems to have their own way of saying it. I'm going with eya-love-a-jock-itch.
Re:How long till the Tea partiers blame Obama? (Score:5, Interesting)
Kind of like everyone blamed Bush for anything that happened in the previous 8 years? Including a few hurricanes?
No one blamed bush for Hurricane Katrina. Just for sitting on his ass when it hit, for appointing unqualified and flagrantly incompetent butt-buddies, excuse me, political henchmen to run FEMA, and for deliberately underfunding and eviscerating FEMA and nearly every other non-military federal agency in order to deliberately make them incapable of carrying out their mandate. Which worked brilliantly in his war against "big government", until we actually needed that government to rescue tens of thousands of people.
Then we got our act together, at many times the expense, and with many times the casualties, than it would have entailed if a competent president had appointed a competent leader of FEMA, and not gutted the agency of funds and logistical support.
And yes, everyone (except the hard-core right) quite correctly blames him for that. And the illegal war he started, and the financial implosion that was a direct result of Republican lassaiz-faire bank regulation (and which the Republicans are trying to continue today by filibustering any meaningful bank reform).
It's bad enough they do these things and then try to make us feel bad for pointing out the error of their ways. It's even more disburbing how utterly incapable of learning from their mistakes, and correcting their ways, these idealogues are. They'd rather be stubbornly wrong regardless of the evidence, than have a hint of flip-flopping on an issue(what most of the rest of us would call "correcting a mistake")
Regardless of whether or not the head of FEMA was qualified, what is FEMA's purpose? They are an "emergency" management agency. Louisiana and the city of New Orleans asked them to wait to come down.
The mayor of New Orleans and the governor of Louisiana should take most or all of the blame for damages and injuries incurred during that hurricane. Hurricanes happen. New Orleans is below sea level. Katrina was a hurricane. It was heading towards New Orleans. And yet no one ordered an evacuation of the city until the storm was just hours away?
Likewise, why were out-of-state contractors hired to work on the cleanup and rebuilding? Excluding folks like myself who volunteered to go work there with aid teams like the Red Cross, Samaritan's Purse, etc, why were local folks not hired? Sure, some of them were unqualified to build bridges. But how qualified do you ave to be to take a shovel and muck-out a building?
Re:Affects on Europe (Score:4, Interesting)
It's gotten significantly better over the last 5-6 years. George W Bush actually did something quite useful for Amtrak, by changing the rules to allow Amtrak to sue CSX, Norfolk Southern, etc when they violated their contracts with Amtrak (which of course they used to do regularly because there was no penalty for doing so). Once that rule changed, most trains began to run on schedule or close to it.
And for those who've never done it, it's a fairly pleasant way to travel. I'd recommend spending the extra on a sleeper room if you're going for 24+ hours, but the traveling part is thoroughly pleasant, basically lounging around, chatting with folks you meet, enjoying the view, stuff like that.
Re:Affects on Europe (Score:5, Interesting)
The US train system is excellent if you are coal...
Not so much. I know what you mean - coal plants rely on the railroad system for the delivery of coal, and as a natural consequence, the railroad system is tailored for delivering coal. But, nevertheless, the coal plant owners are not happy with the US railroad system, and it is far from "excellent" to them.
Coal plants are completely hostage to whomever owns the railroad that goes up to their plant. For some plants, the last 10 miles or so is owned by a different railroad company than the one that provides most of the shipping, and the owner of that "last mile" has absolutely no competition in delivering coal to that one plant. And naturally, they charge an enormous premium, as compared to plants that receive their coal from other railways or other delivery methods (barge, or even trucking).
The US train system is like any other network infrastructure, including the internet - a robust "last mile" is just as important as a robust "backbone." And competition at each segment is a good thing, but rare because such capital-heavy infrastructure is extremely prone to consolidation, monopolies, and rent-seeking - all of which lead to stagnation, and all of which need to be regulated for the public (and economic!) good. In some ways, this might be one explanation as to why the airline industry is doing better than passenger trains - they rely on a completely different (almost "peer to peer," as in, airport to airport) infrastructure that allows competition; and despite the heavy capital investment required, its much harder to exclusively own part of the network and lock out competition.
This is all based on some readings I did in college on the American energy infrastructure. I don't still have those books, so I don't guarantee the accuracy of everything said here, but, consider this article [findarticles.com] a citation.
Re:Interesting Animation of Dispersal (Score:1, Interesting)
The Norwegians have a version as well that extends west to Canada:
http://www.mcwetboy.net/maproom/2010/04/eyjafjallajoeku_1.php