Odds and ends, 9/24/07

Winds of Change, the newsletter of the Ohio Valley Environmental Coalition, arrived in today's mail. As I thumbed through it quickly before deciding what I wanted to read first, a little box caught my eye.

The topic is mountaintop removal mining. Someone asks how much electricity we get out of one mountain of coal. Mike McKinney a geology professor at the University of Tennessee, is quoted as saying an entire mountain of coal provides enough electricity to power the entire United States for one hour.

Of course, after that hour, both the electricity and the mountain are gone.

Last week I posted a photo of a tree growing in the tracks of a rail bed that has not seen a locomotive in years. The track is in southern West Virginia, and it goes to what I believe is a deep mine that has been closed. But next to the deep mine (or in place of it) is what looks like a large mountaintop removal mine. Naturally, the public road is at the bottom of the mountain and the active mine is at the top. For a long ways along that road, you can look up hollows and see where the top of the mountain is being dumped into valleys.

I took my 13-year-old son up one of those hollows to get a better look. We found ourselves at the foot of one of those valley fills. My son loves mountains and trees. He for sure didn't like what he saw there.

Before I forget, part of that old rail line now services the mountaintop removal site. There's what looks like a coal-loading facility at the end of the maintained part of the track.

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From a news release issued last week by NASA:


In a new NASA study, researchers using 20 years of data from space-based sensors have confirmed that Antarctic snow is melting farther inland from the coast over time, melting at higher altitudes than ever and increasingly melting on Antarctica's largest ice shelf.

Read the whole thing. This is why I maintain that talking about overall global warming or climate change is not as significant as talking about climate change in specific locations and how that affects the rest of us.