Wow! Finally -- FAA Bans All Samsung Galaxy Note 7 Firephones From All US Flights -- October 15, 2016

From Macrumors. This certainly took a long time. The government stepped in only AFTER Samsung had already told all users to power down, and certainly not use them on aircraft. Talk about the tail wagging the dog.

The language:

Individuals who own or possess a Samsung Galaxy Note7 device may not transport the device on their person, in carry-on baggage, or in checked baggage on flights to, from, or within the United States. This prohibition includes all Samsung Galaxy Note7 devices.

Wow. The FAA says "safety of all passengers" must take priority over "inconvenience of the few."

 We recognize that banning these phones from airlines will inconvenience some passengers, but the safety of all those aboard an aircraft must take priority," said Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx. "We are taking this additional step because even one fire incident inflight poses a high risk of severe personal injury and puts many lives at risk.

I guess for the FAA, at some point, #AllLivesMatter. 

It should be noted that for months, the FAA let folks make their own decision regarding "inconvenience" vs "safety."

Remember this?

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Those Shrinking Pacific Islands Due To Global Warming?

They are actually increasing in size.

Once a year or so, journalists from major news outlets travel to the Marshall Islands, a remote chain of volcanic islands and coral atolls in the Pacific Ocean, to report in panicked tones that the island nation is vanishing because of climate change. Their dispatches are often filled with raw emotion and suggest that residents are fleeing atolls swiftly sinking into the sea.

Yet new research shows that this is not the entire—or even an accurate—picture. Acknowledging this doesn’t mean that global warming isn’t real, or that world leaders and scientists shouldn’t tackle the adverse effects of climate change, but hype and exaggeration serve no one.

Using historic aerial photographs and high-resolution satellite imagery, Auckland University scientists Murray Ford and Paul Kench recently analyzed shoreline changes on six atolls and two mid-ocean reef islands in the Marshall Islands. Their peer-reviewed study, published in the September 2015 issue of Anthropocene, revealed that since the middle of the 20th century the total land area of the islands has actually grown.

How is that possible? It seems self-evident that rising sea levels will reduce land area. However, there is a process of accretion, where coral broken up by the waves washes up on these low-lying islands as sand, counteracting the reduction in land mass. Research shows that this process is overpowering the erosion from sea-level rise, leading to net land-area gain.

This is not only true for the Marshall Islands. The researchers write that within the “recently emerging body of shoreline change studies on atoll islands there is little evidence of widespread reef island erosion. To the contrary, several studies have documented noteworthy shoreline progradation [growth] and positional changes of islands since the mid-20th century, resulting in a net increase in island area.” The most famous of these studies, published in 2010 by Paul Kench and Arthur Webb of the South Pacific Applied Geoscience Commission in Fiji, showed that of 27 Pacific islands, 14% lost area. Yet 43% gained area, with the rest remaining stable.

It was also noted that atmospheric CO2 has decreased month-over-month, and is now back to baseline.

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See How Many Inconsistencies, Omissions, Lies, Examples Of Hyperbole You Can Find In This Story

And then this, the "big story" over at the AP: global deal reached to limit powerful greenhouse gases.

Data points:

• caps and reduces the use of HFCs 
• legally binding unlike the broader  Paris agreement (if legally binding, I would think Congress needs to approve)

But this is what this "treaty" is all about, buried in the story, sending money to from the US to third world countries under the guise of controlling HFCs:

The U.N. says the next meeting in 2017 will determine how much of the billions of dollars needed to finance the reduction of HFCs will be provided by countries.

And that is why the island nations wanted the "treaty" to kick in sooner than later:

Small island states (see story above) and many African countries had pushed for early timeframes, saying they face the biggest threat from climate change.

Now the hyperbole:

• environmentalists wanted an agreement that would reduce global warming by one-half-degree Celsius
• this agreement, they say, gets them 90% of the way there -- I guess a reduction 0.45 degree Celsius in the average global temperature
• this agreement is equal to stopping the entire world's fossil-fuel CO2 emissions for more than two years
• this will cut the global levels of HFCs by 80 to 85% by 2047

Such fluff.

By the way, the HFC deal is the lead story in The WSJ. It will be interesting to see how many billions the US sends a couple of scam artists in the Pacific.