President elect Barack Obama 's speech via video to the bi-partisan Governors Global Climate Summit in Los Angeles this morning renews his stand against global warming, giving it to us correctly as a national security and economic issue.

This is in sharp contrast with the Bush administration's attempts to manipulate and censor the science in order to justify inaction.

"Refreshing to have an adult as incoming president," writes Greg Sargent in his coverage of the speech at TPM.

              

I was born legally blind. My first sharply focused view of the stars was through my maternal grandfather's binoculars as he cradled me in his arms. From him I first learned which of those stars were planets; which suns. From both grandfathers I acquired the yearning to see and visit the planets we agreed must orbit those other suns.

My overwhelming impulse Thursday when I learned astronomers using NASA's Hubble Space Telescope have taken the first visible-light snapshot of a planet orbiting another star, was to call Grandaddy Hinnant.

HR 8799 and planets

A group led by astronomer Christian Marois of the Herzberg Institute of Astrophysics in Victoria, British Columbia, used infrared to image a family of three planets orbiting HR 8799, a star some 130 light-years away.

This is a caption version of one of those infrared images.

B.L. Hinnant has been gone more than four decades, but seeing the images of Fomalhaut b, a tiny point source of light orbiting the nearby, bright southern star Fomalhaut, was somehow no less the realization of a shared dream.

The team which discovered Fomalhaut B was led by astronomer Paul Kalas of the University of California, Berkeley.

Later I learned another group, led by astronomer Christian Marois of the Herzberg Institute of Astrophysics in Victoria, British Columbia, used ground-based, infrared to image a family of three planets orbiting the start HR 8799. And I yearned to somehow sit down and talk this over with both grandfathers, as I would while they were lived.

Of course it is impossible for me to visit either of those planetary systems. Fomalhaut is 25 light-years away in the constellation Piscis Australis, and the cloud you see in the false-color image above is a debris disk about 21.5 billion miles across.

Fomalhaut b is orbiting 1.8 billion miles inside the debris disk's sharp inner edge.

Indeed, the images in which Fomalhaut b was discovered were made in October 2004 and July 2006, and scientists were not able to pick out the planet until the end of May of this year.

HR 8799 is some 130 light-years away and the final images of the orbiting objects were captured this year. There are questions about whether all of the orbiting objects are even small enough to be properly called planets, and they are all apparently huge by planetary standards.

Still, it was Grandaddy George Frink who taught me to accept the impossible. Accept it as impossible, and find a way around it. So I remain confident that in defiance of current capabilities and current understanding of physics, the sons of men will yet walk on the surface of extrasolar planets.

Making and interpreting the images reproduced here was itself impossible all those years ago when a child who could see nothing clearly that was more than a few inches from his eyes, first looked up in wonder through his grandfather's field glasses and saw the field of stars.

              

My affair with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration began when while I was a pre-teen, Honey Hill Road farm boy, launching small rockets over the heads of Baptist, Methodist and other friends.

This data visualization of global temperature differences from 1880 to 2007. Dark blue areas show regions where the temperature was cooler then the average temperature. Red areas show regions where the temperature was warmer then the average.

It was natural for me to seek global warming information at the Goddard Scientific Visualization Studio, where an animation of the Five-Year Average Global Temperature Anomalies from 1880 to 2007 awaited.

That's global warming in animated color -- the phenomenon an influential group of Southern Baptists addressed recently, to the considerable displeasure of their Republican-enthralled brethren.

              

Finding little humor where there may be none, David Goldstein surveys USDA/FDA pronouncements on our national food-contamination problem, and finds The Faith-Based Dining Administration.

After reading Goldstein's compilation, please pause to consider that dubbing the issue a "pet-food contamination" problem is, and was from the beginning, use of a conveniently miscoined phrase.

It is unlikely that anyone acquainted with the livestock feed industry was startled to learn that materials turned away from the pet food market fell right into the feed-for-slaughter market.

The fact that the death-dealing contaminants had not yet been identified, and apparently still have not been identified, did not perturb that market adjustment.

Whether poison was really pushed off your pet's plate and right onto yours, perhaps we may yet see.

On that, I bestride no waves and prefer instead to dig and dig.

              

I was a Fayetteville, NC, journalist in 1984, when Velma Barfield was executed.

Her serial betrayal of love relationships did not rattled my lifelong opposition to the death penalty. Yet accounts of Ms. Barfield's mixture of arsenic with nursing care did leave me shuddering.

Those unwanted memories haunted my day again Monday as I read a New York Times story detailing for-profit substitution of anti-freeze for digestible syrups in medication for children.

Those of us who care about animals know what the sweet-tasting diethylene glycol in antifreeze will do to a dog or cat -- destroying the kidneys, making a pain-seared cacophony of the nervous system which once sang with life's joy, inducing coma and finally death.

China, whose additives recently brought death to so many pets in this country, is also the principal source of the toxic syrup which has brought and continues to bring death to children around the world.

Times reporters Walt Bogdanich and Jake Hooker wrote:

Toxic syrup has figured in at least eight mass poisonings around the world in the past two decades. Researchers estimate that thousands have died. In many cases, the precise origin of the poison has never been determined. But records and interviews show that in three of the last four cases it was made in China, a major source of counterfeit drugs.

The damage done those who survive diethylene glycol poisoning is probably best characterized as irreversible.

Our trade policies with China can be corrected, however, assuming we value the lives and health of either children or pets.

The same negligent Chinese regulatory environment has killed and is killing both, worldwide.

Our own domestic regulatory negligence walks hand-in-hand with the brutal Chinese policies. Only last week, at least a decade late, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration warned U.S. suppliers ?to be especially vigilant? in watching for diethylene glycol. Nothing was said about China, nor were other problem sources identified.

After the fashion of some of the early comment on the pet food contamination, there was also reassuring mumbling which suggested that the problem is either nonexistent (in this country) or limited in scope.

This came from an agency that Congress and the Bush administration have not equipped to do the job, as was explained by Michael Doyle, director of the Center for Food Safety at the University of Georgia:

The FDA does not have the resources or the up-to-date surveillance system that's needed. This is the Achilles' heel in our system.

With just 1.3% of imported food inspected, and imports from identified sources of abuse still not well-restrained, I am reduced to mere courtesy:

"Thanks for the tea, Velma. I feel so much better now."

Cough.

Technorati Tags: FDA, anti-freeze, poison, China, food_safety, children, food_safety, medication

              

Somewhat like evolution, bird flu just keeps grinding away, regardless of whether we believe in it.

For a brief, clear, ever so slightly terrifying update, read No news doesn't mean good news.

You will find it over at the epidemiology-focused, multi-author blog called Effect Measure.