From the April 18, 2009, Guardian:

A British team sets sail tomorrow from Plymouth to attempt the first ever carbon-neutral crossing of the Greenland ice cap.

The physiotherapist Richard Spink, landscape gardener Raoul Surcouf and skipper Ben Stoddart hope to complete a three-week, 2,000-mile crossing of the north Atlantic to the port of Nuuk on the west coast of Greenland....

"Expeditions often achieve impressive objectives and carry out vital research, but few take into account their environmental impacts," said Surcouf, 40, from London. "By making our expedition carbon-neutral, we wanted to show that it is possible to visit incredible places and preserve them for future generations."

The expedition boat, a 40-foot Island Packet yacht, has been fitted with a wind generator and solar panels to reduce reliance on the battery and motor. Much of the expedition food has been donated by FareShare, a charity that collects out-of-date but edible food that would otherwise end up in landfill and distributes it to vulnerable people across the country.

From the May 5, 2009, Guardian:

The British crew of a polar expedition have been rescued after their yacht was caught in a hurricane-force storm and capsized three times in towering north Atlantic swells....

Their relief was tinged with a sense of irony as the rescue craft sent by Falmouth coastguard was the Overseas Yellowstone, a 113,000-tonne oil tanker....

In a statement from the tanker after the rescue, [expedition member Richard] Spink said: "We regret to inform you that the CNE Greenland expedition 2009 has been abandoned due to repeated, irreparable storm damage to our sailing vessel Fleur; in the north Atlantic we experienced some of the harshest conditions known, over a period of 36 hours, with winds gusting hurricane force 12. At 10.00hrs on 1st May 2009 the decision was made that the risk to our own personal safety was too great to continue and a rescue was co-ordinated with Falmouth coastguard. The team are now safely and ironically aboard the oil tanker Overseas Yellowstone."

Credits: The above pictures are from Carbon Neutral Expeditions and Overseas Yellowstone, respectively. I first heard about the story on Wait Wait...Don't Tell Me!

I added The Art of the Prank to "Links we like" on the right side of the page. Some recent stories:

• Eunicure, "a loosely affiliated group of “board-certified urological surgeons” that offers hope—in the form of castration—to homosexuals that have failed to control their desires through prayer, meditation" (originally from Dan Savage in The Stranger)
• Obay: a drug to prevent children from having ideas of their own (from Alma's Soulfood)
• Penn and Teller get environmentalists to sign a petition to ban water (originally posted by Lew Rockwell)

I saw the headline "Scientists discover, kill oldest creature" not in The Onion but in the newspaper. From The Guardian Online (Oct. 29):

A clam that lived on the seabed in the frigid waters off Iceland's north coast has been hailed as the longest-lived animal ever discovered.

The mollusc, which is thought to have lurked beneath the waves until at least the age of 405, would have been a juvenile when Galileo picked up his first telescope, Hamlet was first staged and the gunpowder plot failed to blow up King James I....

The clam was alive when it was brought to the surface, but at that point, the researchers had no idea how old it was. Only after cutting through the shell and counting annual growth rings under a microscope did they date the mollusc to between 405 to 410 years old.

This reminds me of Terry Pratchett's fictional counting pines:

Counting pines are one of the few known examples of 'borrowed evolution'. A counting pine seed coming to rest anywhere on the Disc picks up the most effective genetic code, and grows into whatever best suits the climate, usually usurping the local plants.

The other notable feature of this remarkable plant is that it produces, at eye-height, numbers detailing its precise age. Its chain of reasoning is as follows; being dimly aware that humans can tell a tree's age by counting its rings, it has reasoned this must be why humans cut trees down.

Unfortunately, within a year they were driven almost to extinction by the house number-plate industry.

It also brings to mind this joke:

A couple of New Jersey hunters are out in the woods when one of them falls to the ground. He doesn't seem to be breathing, his eyes are rolled back in his head. The other guy whips out his cell phone and calls the emergency services. He gasps to the operator: "My friend is dead! What can I do?" The operator, in a calm soothing voice says: "Just take it easy. I can help. First, let's make sure he's dead." There is a silence, then a shot is heard. The guy's voice comes back on the line. He says: "OK, now what?"

From the April 20 Chronicle of Higher Education:

Two months ago, the American Enterprise Institute staged a nifty contest, offering $10,000 for articles "that emphasize the shortcomings" of the landmark report by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (The Chronicle, March 2). We, too, love contests, so we held one of our own: Send us your silliest arguments against the findings of the IPCC's report, we told readers. And the readers responded.

Here are a few of the top entries:

Mother Earth is middle-aged. This is not global warming; she is merely experiencing hot flashes. Give her a few hundred thousand years and she will get over it.

Lisa Roetzel
Associate director
Campuswide Honors Program
U. of California at Irvine

The IPCC report about global warming has to be wrong because students and others are catching more and more colds.

Allen Zimmerman,
Professor of engineering technology and technical physics
Ohio State University

If humans are responsible for global warming, then how did the Ice Age end?

Anonymous

The Chronicle article can be read online temporarily, after which it will only be accessible to subscribers.

From Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility via YubaNet and our valuable contributor Ron Avitzur:

Grand Canyon National Park is not permitted to give an official estimate of the geologic age of its principal feature, due to pressure from Bush administration appointees. Despite promising a prompt review of its approval for a book claiming the Grand Canyon was created by Noah's flood rather than by geologic forces, more than three years later no review has ever been done and the book remains on sale at the park, according to documents released today by Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER)....

"As one park geologist said, this is equivalent of Yellowstone National Park selling a book entitled Geysers of Old Faithful: Nostrils of Satan," [PEER Executive Director Jeff] Ruch added, pointing to the fact that previous NPS leadership ignored strong protests from both its own scientists and leading geological societies against the agency approval of the creationist book.

This reminds me of the controversy about Bush's NASA appointee.

Via fark:

'Green' arms the new killing trend

British arms manufacturer BAE Systems is designing "environmentally friendly" weapons, including "reduced lead" bullets, "reduced smoke" grenades and rockets with fewer toxins, The Sunday Times said.

Other initiatives include developing armoured vehicles with lower carbon emissions, safer and more sustainable artillery and even recycling or composting waste explosives, the newspaper added.

"Weapons are going to be used and when they are, we try to make them as safe for the user as possible, to limit the collateral damage and to impact as little as possible on the environment," Debbie Allen, BAE Systems' director of corporate social responsibility, was quoted as saying.

But Symon Hill, from Campaign Against Arms Trade, described the policy as "laughable".

"BAE is determined to try to make itself look ethical but they make weapons to kill people and it's utterly ridiculous to suggest they are environmentally friendly," he told the newspaper.

BAE Systems' policy is reportedly endorsed by Britain's Ministry of Defence, which defended the concept of "green munitions" as not a contradiction in terms. The US Army already has its own sustainability website.

For more details, see The (London) Times.

People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals has launched a new campaign: Avian Flu: It's Your Fault. The website text begins:

If you haven’t gone vegetarian yet, you need to read this now. When we asked nicely, you didn’t listen. We spent years exposing the cruelty of factory farms and the dangers of eating fat-, cholesterol- and drug-laden animal flesh. We appealed to your sense of compassion, but you didn’t care enough to make the switch to a cruelty-free diet. And most of you ignored the warnings about animal-borne diseases such as mad cow and SARS.

Now we face a new threat, avian flu, which seems likely to make mad cow and SARS look like a head cold. The World Health Organisation (WHO) warns that the deadly H5N1 virus that causes “bird flu” is in danger of mutating into a form that will spread easily from person to person. If this happens, humans will have no immunity to the new bug, and we will face a global pandemic that could kill more than 7 million people. This is a conservative estimate. Other experts fear the number of dead could be as many as a billion.

I agree with PETA that factory farming contributes to disease (although doesn't bird flu arise in rural areas?), but I think this campaign is in poor taste and beyond satire.

Ron Avitzur pointed me to this item from Bob Park:

The American Association of Petroleum Geologists is presenting its annual journalism award to novelist Michael Crichton for "State of Fear," a fictional story in which global warming is not for real. AAPG was presumably unable to find a journalist sufficiently divorced from reality to meet oil company standards.

From a New York Times article:

"It is fiction," conceded Larry Nation, communications director for the association. "But it has the absolute ring of truth."

I've added a new category: truthiness. I think this qualifies.