NASA and NOAA Announce Ozone Hole is a Double Record Breaker: "From September 21 to 30, the average area of the ozone hole was the largest ever observed, at 10.6 million square miles," said Paul Newman, atmospheric scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center
Greenland ice sheet on a downward slide: ice losses now far surpass ice gains in the shrinking Greenland ice sheet.
(já agora: Despite popular belief, the world is not running out of oil: "there will always be some oil available at a price, perhaps $10 to $100 a gallon." [...]
Other myths that [economic geologist Eric Cheney] wants to dispel include:
* Only basic extraction and processing costs affect economic geology. That fails to account for such costs as exploration, transportation, taxes and societal and environmental programs.
* Production always damages the environment. Accidents do happen, Cheney said, but much of the perception is based on problems of the past and don't reflect current reality. "It's inevitable that there are going to be oil spills, just like tere are traffic accidents on the freeway," he said. "We hope we can manage them, but nothing is risk free."
* Mineral deposits are excessively profitable. Despite widely reported huge oil company profits in the last year, Cheney notes that as a percentage of company revenues oil profits lag far behind those of some major software and banking companies.
* Transportation costs are trivial. In fact, the retail cost of building materials such as sand and gravel are largely driven by the cost of moving them from one place to another, particularly in crowded urban areas. Moving quarries and pits farther away from where people live only increases those costs.
* Ore deposits are uniform. While a valued ore can be found in a large continuous deposit, often it is mixed with other kinds of minerals and extraction becomes more expensive.
* Resources are randomly distributed and so, if human population encroaches, a mine or quarry should simply be able to relocate.)
