S
sparkjumper
I think if Grat3ful and Hoosier spent less time farting out of their mouths the earths co2 level would fall dramatically lol
What can we do about Climate Change?
- Thread starter MarquisBlack
- Start date
- Status
Obstructionists and liars? You mean heretics and blasphemes.
A common negative trait of the progressive liberal, is for them to find themselves above others both intellectually as well as philosophically. Most always found too smart by half and lacking clear direction.
A common negative trait of the progressive liberal, is for them to find themselves above others both intellectually as well as philosophically. Most always found too smart by half and lacking clear direction.
I applaud the agility with which you move from misstating facts to ad hominem irrelevancies.
nice juggling.
nice juggling.
yep, always figured Shultz was a half wit
Maine is now home to the "largest ocean energy device ever installed in U.S. waters," the Ocean Renewable Power Company (ORPC) announced Wednesday.
That device is the company's Beta Power System, which was installed in Cobscook Bay off of Eastport, Maine, and includes a submerged Turbine Generator Unit with a capacity of 60 kilowatts.
The TGU works in similar principle to a wind turbine, but with a horizontal turbine propelled by tidal currents instead of wind. The turbine is built from composite materials resistant to corrosion and, being gearless, requires no lubricants that could make their way into the ocean environment.
ORPC announced Wednesday that the installation and testing of its pilot system have been a success in terms of power generated.
"Performance test results show that the TGU's electrical output meets or exceeds expectations for the full range of current velocities encountered," ORPC said in a statement.
Because of the success of this initial installation, the company predicts it can install its TidGen Power System, the commercial version of its Beta Power System, and be hooked in to the Bangor Hydro Electric Company grid as soon as 2011.
The TidGen turbines installed will make up a 150-kilowatt system and generate enough electricity to power between 50 and 75 Maine homes annually, ORPC CEO Chris Sauer told the Associated Press.
ORPC has licenses for three separate sites off the coast of Eastport, Maine, where it may install turbines. The area is an ideal spot for harnessing tidal energy since it has extremely strong tidal currents.
The company is in the process of obtaining licenses for tidal energy sites off the coast of Alaska, another area known for its rough tidal currents. It also has its sights set on Florida and makes some strong claims as to why it wants to install a system there.
"Experts estimate that the Gulf Stream currents are capable of generating between 4 and 10 gigawatts of power--the same amount of energy produced by 4 to 10 new nuclear power plants. If ocean energy technology harnessed just 1/1,000 of the Gulf Stream's available energy, we could power up to 7 million homes and businesses in the state of Florida with renewable, reliable, emission-free electricity," ORPC says on its company Web site.
ORPC has received funding from the U.S. Department of Energy and the Maine Technology Institute, and will soon be partnering with the U.S. Coast Guard.
A project is under way to use ORPC's turbines to generate power for the Coast Guard's Eastport station, though in a different manner. Instead of transferring the electricity to a grid on land, the turbine will supply power to a battery system aboard its Energy Tide 2 boat, and then transfer the batteries to the Coast Guard station.
The Ocean Renewable Power Company (ORPC) should not be confused with Ocean Power Technologies, another company harnessing ocean waves for power. Ocean Power Technologies makes the PowerBuoy, which has garnered attention for its projects currently going on in Oregon and Hawaii, and for its collaboration with the U.S. Navy. That company makes something resembling an ordinary ocean buoy on the surface, but holds within it a piston-like device that extends far below the buoy and moves with the buoy's jostle from ocean waves. The buoy contains sensors and communication tools that allow the company to remotely adjust it to attune to the ocean's changing behavior. The electricity generated from the buoy's turbine is transmitted to shore via underwater cable.
That device is the company's Beta Power System, which was installed in Cobscook Bay off of Eastport, Maine, and includes a submerged Turbine Generator Unit with a capacity of 60 kilowatts.
The TGU works in similar principle to a wind turbine, but with a horizontal turbine propelled by tidal currents instead of wind. The turbine is built from composite materials resistant to corrosion and, being gearless, requires no lubricants that could make their way into the ocean environment.
ORPC announced Wednesday that the installation and testing of its pilot system have been a success in terms of power generated.
"Performance test results show that the TGU's electrical output meets or exceeds expectations for the full range of current velocities encountered," ORPC said in a statement.
Because of the success of this initial installation, the company predicts it can install its TidGen Power System, the commercial version of its Beta Power System, and be hooked in to the Bangor Hydro Electric Company grid as soon as 2011.
The TidGen turbines installed will make up a 150-kilowatt system and generate enough electricity to power between 50 and 75 Maine homes annually, ORPC CEO Chris Sauer told the Associated Press.
ORPC has licenses for three separate sites off the coast of Eastport, Maine, where it may install turbines. The area is an ideal spot for harnessing tidal energy since it has extremely strong tidal currents.
The company is in the process of obtaining licenses for tidal energy sites off the coast of Alaska, another area known for its rough tidal currents. It also has its sights set on Florida and makes some strong claims as to why it wants to install a system there.
"Experts estimate that the Gulf Stream currents are capable of generating between 4 and 10 gigawatts of power--the same amount of energy produced by 4 to 10 new nuclear power plants. If ocean energy technology harnessed just 1/1,000 of the Gulf Stream's available energy, we could power up to 7 million homes and businesses in the state of Florida with renewable, reliable, emission-free electricity," ORPC says on its company Web site.
ORPC has received funding from the U.S. Department of Energy and the Maine Technology Institute, and will soon be partnering with the U.S. Coast Guard.
A project is under way to use ORPC's turbines to generate power for the Coast Guard's Eastport station, though in a different manner. Instead of transferring the electricity to a grid on land, the turbine will supply power to a battery system aboard its Energy Tide 2 boat, and then transfer the batteries to the Coast Guard station.
The Ocean Renewable Power Company (ORPC) should not be confused with Ocean Power Technologies, another company harnessing ocean waves for power. Ocean Power Technologies makes the PowerBuoy, which has garnered attention for its projects currently going on in Oregon and Hawaii, and for its collaboration with the U.S. Navy. That company makes something resembling an ordinary ocean buoy on the surface, but holds within it a piston-like device that extends far below the buoy and moves with the buoy's jostle from ocean waves. The buoy contains sensors and communication tools that allow the company to remotely adjust it to attune to the ocean's changing behavior. The electricity generated from the buoy's turbine is transmitted to shore via underwater cable.
One month after it started pouring rain, a fifth of Pakistan is under water. About 20 million people - close to the entire Australian population - have been washed from their homes, their life's labours with them. About half remain in desperate need - camped on levees, lacking food, drinking water, shelter, medicine. Foreign governments have been slow to rouse in response, finding urgency only now, world citizens trailing meanly in their wake.
The loss of property is catastrophic. ''It is as if a neutron bomb exploded overhead but, instead of killing the people and leaving their houses intact, it piled trees upon the houses and swept away the villages and crops and animals, leaving the people alive,'' said a Punjab farmer and writer, Daniyal Mueenuddin, in The New York Times.
There are 1600 dead, not so many in the statistics of disasters. But with disease brewing in the filthy water, the toll will grow - probably not spectacularly enough to garner headlines. In the long-term, there are fears the fragile nation's entire economy may be beyond salvage.
In aid parlance, they call this a slow-onset disaster, which makes it difficult to ''market'' to potential donors. Just another in the series of unfortunate, unprecedented events conspiring to shape this catastrophe, which climate modellers have been forewarning in the abstract for years, and which meteorologists could see brewing in reality for weeks. It was no surprise.
Against this backdrop, it is instructive to absorb a couple of figures from an analysis produced by Oxfam International last year. In the past decade, each year about 250 million people around the world have been hit by climate-related disasters.
Within five years, by 2015, environmental degradation and an increasingly volatile climate are expected to inflate casualties by 50 per cent. Each year an average of 375 million men, women and children will have their lives or their livelihoods taken by a change in the weather. Modelling to imagine the future is never an exact science - the numbers are fluid but the trajectory is unequivocal.
Now apply another layer of numbers. The total the world spent on humanitarian aid was $14.2 billion in 2006. By 2015, three times that figure will be required to come close to answering the escalating need.
Where do you find the money to answer such need? You probably don't, admits Andrew Hewett, the executive director of Oxfam Australia. ''We will not be able to cope - the system is under huge stress and strain even now.''
Pakistan is the nightmare, the harbinger of a raw, new reality, compelling governments and agencies with humanitarian missions to rethink how they operate in a needier, more temperamental world.
In the international media and science communities there is vigorous debate over the claim - by a growing chorus of climate experts - that the floods in Pakistan will be distinguished in history not just as possibly the worst humanitarian crisis of the age, but as the first great ''natural'' disaster attributable to rising greenhouse gases. ''There's no doubt that clearly the climate change is … a major contributing factor,'' declared Dr Ghassem Asrar, the director of the World Climate Research Program and the World Meteorological Organisation.
Scientists are usually more comfortable with trends and prognostications than with cause and effect - most would never ascribe a single weather event to climate change. Which makes the declarations of Asrar and similar ones from other experts all the more remarkable.
But in a sense this debate is a sideshow. What is clear, the scientists say, is that the floods in Pakistan - and the fires in Russia, the mudslides in China, the droughts in sub-Saharan Africa - are enunciations of scenarios climate forecasters have long predicted. The ''unprecedented sequence of extreme weather'' over the past month match climate projections, the WMO says. This is what global warming looks like, say climate experts at NASA.
For years the apocryphal warnings have been laid out in the scientific journals and in sober economic analyses. Global warming would super-saturate monsoons, extend droughts, breathe fury into wildfires and frenzy into hurricanes and cyclones. A study published in Science in 2006 found the level of heavy rainfall in the monsoon over India had more than doubled in the past 50 years, and the authors predicted increased disaster potential from heavy flooding. The human consequences of such events have also been explicitly spelt out. Drought, floods, violent winds, crop failures and the like all loom as triggers for massive human migration and ''extended conflict, social disruption, war, essentially, over much of the world for many decades'', in the words of Lord Nicholas Stern, the former World Bank chief economist who laid out the social and economic costs of warming in his report for the British government in 2006.
Taxi driver Bakht Zada may never know whether to raise his prayers to God or his fist to polluting human industry. But overwhelmingly scientists, relief agencies and strategic experts tell us to pay close heed to Pakistan's devastation - it is the shape of things to come.
Unlike a tsunami or an earthquake, extreme weather events often send strong warnings of their approach days, weeks, even months in advance. In 2008, the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies looked at the forecasts for a brewing, ugly monsoon over West Africa and launched its first pre-emptive appeal for a flood yet to happen. When the waters came, as predicted, there was at least some readiness for them.
In the same year, with storms brewing through the Caribbean, forewarned Red Cross volunteers in Haiti worked around the clock evacuating people and setting up first aid and relief. As limited as these efforts were, they reflected a shift in thinking about disaster response, with the recognition that pre-emptive action would always be more effective than waiting for the aftermath.
Better disaster preparedness and prevention was crucial, the IFRC said when it released the latest World Disasters Report last year. It calculated that nearly 60 per cent of disaster funds in 2008 went into answering the effects of events linked to climate change - floods, storms, heatwaves and droughts - many of which would have given meteorological notice. ''We can do better if we seek out risks before they happen … capitalise on existing know-how and resources to refocus disaster response onto prevention,'' said Mohammed Omer Mukhier, the head of disaster policy at the IFRC.
This message was powerfully reiterated by Ghassem Asrar this week when he said that researchers had modelled the atmospheric currents that brought the rains to Pakistan and the heat into Russia weeks before they arrived. Climate scientists must urgently look into ways to better read and broadcast the atmospheric signals, he said. Leading scientists gathered in Colorado last week to try to do just that.
''Precise local information on the evolving climate and how it fits into the longer-term picture remains insufficient in many of the most vulnerable parts of the world,'' said the chief of Britain's Met Office, Peter Stott. ''There is no time to waste if we are going to equip societies to better cope with the severity of weather in a changing climate.''
As scientists work to fine-tune their forecasting, governments and agencies must invest an equally urgent effort into both speedier, better co-ordinated response systems, and into the shift to preparedness, says Dr Peter McCawley, a development economist and disaster specialist at the Australian National University. This requires a ''paradigm shift'' - investing in building up local institutions and talking to communities about risks. ''It means moving from international and national response after the event to local action before it. It also involves a shift in power, which is why it will be difficult to persuade people to do it.''
The second critical step, he says, is to streamline response to recognise ''need for speed''. Cash is a powerful first-response tool, but it still gets badly stuck in bureaucratic systems. Six months after the Haiti disaster, only 10 per cent of money pledged by the international community to help had been disbursed.
''What's needed is a range of levers,'' says Hewett, who identifies four key threads to better answering the next emergencies. He echoes McCawley on the need for more resources, increased investment in local preparedness, and reforms to the international system - ''tackling some hard issues about getting better co-ordination, better leadership''. Hewett adds to these ''more risk reduction - all the arguments about reducing greenhouse emissions and investing in climate change adaptations''.
But to achieve this range of responses, aid donors - whether they are governments or citizens - have to also shift their mindset, be persuaded to put their money into programs stockpiling emergency supplies, drawing up disaster plans, educating communities and setting up early warning systems.
Strengthening communities to withstand wild weather will have to be built into the humanitarian groundwork, alongside things like building schools, clinics, water and power supplies. Part of the tragedy of Pakistan is that most of this critical infrastructure will have to be rebuilt from ground zero.
The head of Caritas Australia, Jack de Groot, illustrates with the story of a small community in north-west Pakistan. Caritas and local partners had installed latrines for 70 per cent of households; 75 per cent had access to safe drinking water; 90 per cent could access power through micro-hydro plants. Now it is all pretty much gone, along with 947 homes and six schools.
''It is very grim,'' de Groot says. Once again, the poorest and most vulnerable of communities lose not only their homes and services, but potentially their basic human rights and protections. It's disheartening, but ''what do you do? You recognise that these are human beings, with needs and rights, and you respond.''
The flooding in Pakistan is ''a global disaster, a global challenge. Pakistan is facing a slow-motion tsunami'', the UN Secretary-General, Ban Ki-moon, said yesterday at a meeting in New York. The forum wrung pledges from nations of another $180.5 million, largely leveraged out of fears that a failure to deliver relief would give terrorists more power in the destabilised region.
Four years ago Professor Alan Dupont, now the director of the Centre for International Security Studies at Sydney University, co-authored a paper for the Lowy Institute on climate change and security, Heating Up the Planet. It sought to highlight the devastating security implications of changing climate.
Whether the Pakistan floods can be blamed on rising greenhouse gases, Dupont can't and won't guess. But is this the kind of event he was writing about? ''Absolutely,'' he says. ''One of the concerns now is that perhaps the impact of these events might be even wider than we thought. The science over the past four years is much stronger. It's pretty clear that large swathes of the planet are vulnerable.''
Climate change raises fundamental questions of human security, survival, and the stability of nation states, Dupont argues. It will contribute to destabilising, unregulated population movements through Asia and the Pacific. ''Where climate change coincides with other transnational challenges to security, such as terrorism or pandemic diseases, or adds to pre-existing ethnic and social tensions, then the impact will be magnified.'' Pakistan fits all the flashpoint criteria.
The loss of property is catastrophic. ''It is as if a neutron bomb exploded overhead but, instead of killing the people and leaving their houses intact, it piled trees upon the houses and swept away the villages and crops and animals, leaving the people alive,'' said a Punjab farmer and writer, Daniyal Mueenuddin, in The New York Times.
There are 1600 dead, not so many in the statistics of disasters. But with disease brewing in the filthy water, the toll will grow - probably not spectacularly enough to garner headlines. In the long-term, there are fears the fragile nation's entire economy may be beyond salvage.
In aid parlance, they call this a slow-onset disaster, which makes it difficult to ''market'' to potential donors. Just another in the series of unfortunate, unprecedented events conspiring to shape this catastrophe, which climate modellers have been forewarning in the abstract for years, and which meteorologists could see brewing in reality for weeks. It was no surprise.
Against this backdrop, it is instructive to absorb a couple of figures from an analysis produced by Oxfam International last year. In the past decade, each year about 250 million people around the world have been hit by climate-related disasters.
Within five years, by 2015, environmental degradation and an increasingly volatile climate are expected to inflate casualties by 50 per cent. Each year an average of 375 million men, women and children will have their lives or their livelihoods taken by a change in the weather. Modelling to imagine the future is never an exact science - the numbers are fluid but the trajectory is unequivocal.
Now apply another layer of numbers. The total the world spent on humanitarian aid was $14.2 billion in 2006. By 2015, three times that figure will be required to come close to answering the escalating need.
Where do you find the money to answer such need? You probably don't, admits Andrew Hewett, the executive director of Oxfam Australia. ''We will not be able to cope - the system is under huge stress and strain even now.''
Pakistan is the nightmare, the harbinger of a raw, new reality, compelling governments and agencies with humanitarian missions to rethink how they operate in a needier, more temperamental world.
In the international media and science communities there is vigorous debate over the claim - by a growing chorus of climate experts - that the floods in Pakistan will be distinguished in history not just as possibly the worst humanitarian crisis of the age, but as the first great ''natural'' disaster attributable to rising greenhouse gases. ''There's no doubt that clearly the climate change is … a major contributing factor,'' declared Dr Ghassem Asrar, the director of the World Climate Research Program and the World Meteorological Organisation.
Scientists are usually more comfortable with trends and prognostications than with cause and effect - most would never ascribe a single weather event to climate change. Which makes the declarations of Asrar and similar ones from other experts all the more remarkable.
But in a sense this debate is a sideshow. What is clear, the scientists say, is that the floods in Pakistan - and the fires in Russia, the mudslides in China, the droughts in sub-Saharan Africa - are enunciations of scenarios climate forecasters have long predicted. The ''unprecedented sequence of extreme weather'' over the past month match climate projections, the WMO says. This is what global warming looks like, say climate experts at NASA.
For years the apocryphal warnings have been laid out in the scientific journals and in sober economic analyses. Global warming would super-saturate monsoons, extend droughts, breathe fury into wildfires and frenzy into hurricanes and cyclones. A study published in Science in 2006 found the level of heavy rainfall in the monsoon over India had more than doubled in the past 50 years, and the authors predicted increased disaster potential from heavy flooding. The human consequences of such events have also been explicitly spelt out. Drought, floods, violent winds, crop failures and the like all loom as triggers for massive human migration and ''extended conflict, social disruption, war, essentially, over much of the world for many decades'', in the words of Lord Nicholas Stern, the former World Bank chief economist who laid out the social and economic costs of warming in his report for the British government in 2006.
Taxi driver Bakht Zada may never know whether to raise his prayers to God or his fist to polluting human industry. But overwhelmingly scientists, relief agencies and strategic experts tell us to pay close heed to Pakistan's devastation - it is the shape of things to come.
Unlike a tsunami or an earthquake, extreme weather events often send strong warnings of their approach days, weeks, even months in advance. In 2008, the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies looked at the forecasts for a brewing, ugly monsoon over West Africa and launched its first pre-emptive appeal for a flood yet to happen. When the waters came, as predicted, there was at least some readiness for them.
In the same year, with storms brewing through the Caribbean, forewarned Red Cross volunteers in Haiti worked around the clock evacuating people and setting up first aid and relief. As limited as these efforts were, they reflected a shift in thinking about disaster response, with the recognition that pre-emptive action would always be more effective than waiting for the aftermath.
Better disaster preparedness and prevention was crucial, the IFRC said when it released the latest World Disasters Report last year. It calculated that nearly 60 per cent of disaster funds in 2008 went into answering the effects of events linked to climate change - floods, storms, heatwaves and droughts - many of which would have given meteorological notice. ''We can do better if we seek out risks before they happen … capitalise on existing know-how and resources to refocus disaster response onto prevention,'' said Mohammed Omer Mukhier, the head of disaster policy at the IFRC.
This message was powerfully reiterated by Ghassem Asrar this week when he said that researchers had modelled the atmospheric currents that brought the rains to Pakistan and the heat into Russia weeks before they arrived. Climate scientists must urgently look into ways to better read and broadcast the atmospheric signals, he said. Leading scientists gathered in Colorado last week to try to do just that.
''Precise local information on the evolving climate and how it fits into the longer-term picture remains insufficient in many of the most vulnerable parts of the world,'' said the chief of Britain's Met Office, Peter Stott. ''There is no time to waste if we are going to equip societies to better cope with the severity of weather in a changing climate.''
As scientists work to fine-tune their forecasting, governments and agencies must invest an equally urgent effort into both speedier, better co-ordinated response systems, and into the shift to preparedness, says Dr Peter McCawley, a development economist and disaster specialist at the Australian National University. This requires a ''paradigm shift'' - investing in building up local institutions and talking to communities about risks. ''It means moving from international and national response after the event to local action before it. It also involves a shift in power, which is why it will be difficult to persuade people to do it.''
The second critical step, he says, is to streamline response to recognise ''need for speed''. Cash is a powerful first-response tool, but it still gets badly stuck in bureaucratic systems. Six months after the Haiti disaster, only 10 per cent of money pledged by the international community to help had been disbursed.
''What's needed is a range of levers,'' says Hewett, who identifies four key threads to better answering the next emergencies. He echoes McCawley on the need for more resources, increased investment in local preparedness, and reforms to the international system - ''tackling some hard issues about getting better co-ordination, better leadership''. Hewett adds to these ''more risk reduction - all the arguments about reducing greenhouse emissions and investing in climate change adaptations''.
But to achieve this range of responses, aid donors - whether they are governments or citizens - have to also shift their mindset, be persuaded to put their money into programs stockpiling emergency supplies, drawing up disaster plans, educating communities and setting up early warning systems.
Strengthening communities to withstand wild weather will have to be built into the humanitarian groundwork, alongside things like building schools, clinics, water and power supplies. Part of the tragedy of Pakistan is that most of this critical infrastructure will have to be rebuilt from ground zero.
The head of Caritas Australia, Jack de Groot, illustrates with the story of a small community in north-west Pakistan. Caritas and local partners had installed latrines for 70 per cent of households; 75 per cent had access to safe drinking water; 90 per cent could access power through micro-hydro plants. Now it is all pretty much gone, along with 947 homes and six schools.
''It is very grim,'' de Groot says. Once again, the poorest and most vulnerable of communities lose not only their homes and services, but potentially their basic human rights and protections. It's disheartening, but ''what do you do? You recognise that these are human beings, with needs and rights, and you respond.''
The flooding in Pakistan is ''a global disaster, a global challenge. Pakistan is facing a slow-motion tsunami'', the UN Secretary-General, Ban Ki-moon, said yesterday at a meeting in New York. The forum wrung pledges from nations of another $180.5 million, largely leveraged out of fears that a failure to deliver relief would give terrorists more power in the destabilised region.
Four years ago Professor Alan Dupont, now the director of the Centre for International Security Studies at Sydney University, co-authored a paper for the Lowy Institute on climate change and security, Heating Up the Planet. It sought to highlight the devastating security implications of changing climate.
Whether the Pakistan floods can be blamed on rising greenhouse gases, Dupont can't and won't guess. But is this the kind of event he was writing about? ''Absolutely,'' he says. ''One of the concerns now is that perhaps the impact of these events might be even wider than we thought. The science over the past four years is much stronger. It's pretty clear that large swathes of the planet are vulnerable.''
Climate change raises fundamental questions of human security, survival, and the stability of nation states, Dupont argues. It will contribute to destabilising, unregulated population movements through Asia and the Pacific. ''Where climate change coincides with other transnational challenges to security, such as terrorism or pandemic diseases, or adds to pre-existing ethnic and social tensions, then the impact will be magnified.'' Pakistan fits all the flashpoint criteria.
The other night I saw a show called Gasland HOLY SHIT !!!! I feel really sorry for the ppl in the USA for what DICK CHENEY has done to them with Natural gas and trying to get it out of the ground. ppl are turning on their taps and lighting their water on fire!!ffs and they are drinking this!!!! OMG!!!Then they showed a map of how many wells they drilled in the US there are thousands of them all over the US you guys are FUCKED!!!!It's not just the oil companies now it's the gas too. How the hell did they get away with all this right in your own backyard and no one knew all this shit till now??? WTF is going on here . REALLY?? They say as soon as Cheney became Vice Pres he passed a bill to alllow him to do this without being stopped. The man is truely the evil and no one has charged him or Bush yet WTF is that about?? SERIUOSLY?? what is that about? how can they do this and no one say one fucking word about it?? HOW??? Please tell me .. cause I would love to know...Headband707 totally pissed as they are doing it here in Canada now too
yup... fracking causes all sort of problems locally.
The National Academy of Sciences (NAS) was incorporated in 1863 by an act of Congress to serve the nation by providing advice on scientific matters. It consists of approximately 2,100 members (out of approximately 1 million U.S. scientists) and 380 foreign associates. Of the 2,480 members, nearly 200 have won Nobel Prizes. U.S. scientists consider election to the academy one of the greatest honors they can receive.
For 147 years the NAS has jealously guarded its reputation for providing unbiased advice to the nation on scientific matters. This august organization is deeply concerned about the consequences of anthropogenic climate change, and has carried out several detailed technical studies on this matter. You can download free a layman's explanation, Understanding and Responding to Climate Change, from the National Academy's website at http://dels-old.nas.edu/basc/climate-change/ in order to obtain the most authoritative information on the subject.
The best science concludes that the Earth is getting warmer and that this is caused by human activity. Even if we act decisively now to change our behavior, it will continue to get warmer, leveling off in mid-century to a fairly tolerable global temperature. If we continue on a business-as-usual course, the global average temperature is expected to continue rising, reaching levels by the end of this century far above any previously experienced by humanity.
However, when it comes to being specific about what problems such high temperatures would cause, predictions tend to become much less clear. Thus we (here I mean by "we" all of humanity) are faced with some difficult choices.
No matter what we do, from a major course correction to doing nothing, it will be unpleasant and expensive and the costs will almost certainly not be distributed fairly. Globally and as a nation, we need to work together to find the best way forward.
It is understandable that many people such as Cunningham want to deny that there is a problem. These sobering conclusions about future warming are projections based upon elaborate models of the Earth. It is usually wise to be suspicious of computer models of complex situations. But we are not talking about one scientist's model; a number of programs give similar results.
Many deniers can quote at least a half dozen anecdotes that supposedly prove it is all a hoax. This leads some deniers to conclude that those scientists who persist in insisting that there is a problem must be evil people. They are not; they are human with all the attributes of human behavior, including becoming fixed upon a particular idea. Balancing this tendency of people to keep their minds made up is the fame and glory that would come to the scientist who really found a fatal error that proved global warming did not exist.
For 147 years the NAS has jealously guarded its reputation for providing unbiased advice to the nation on scientific matters. This august organization is deeply concerned about the consequences of anthropogenic climate change, and has carried out several detailed technical studies on this matter. You can download free a layman's explanation, Understanding and Responding to Climate Change, from the National Academy's website at http://dels-old.nas.edu/basc/climate-change/ in order to obtain the most authoritative information on the subject.
The best science concludes that the Earth is getting warmer and that this is caused by human activity. Even if we act decisively now to change our behavior, it will continue to get warmer, leveling off in mid-century to a fairly tolerable global temperature. If we continue on a business-as-usual course, the global average temperature is expected to continue rising, reaching levels by the end of this century far above any previously experienced by humanity.
However, when it comes to being specific about what problems such high temperatures would cause, predictions tend to become much less clear. Thus we (here I mean by "we" all of humanity) are faced with some difficult choices.
No matter what we do, from a major course correction to doing nothing, it will be unpleasant and expensive and the costs will almost certainly not be distributed fairly. Globally and as a nation, we need to work together to find the best way forward.
It is understandable that many people such as Cunningham want to deny that there is a problem. These sobering conclusions about future warming are projections based upon elaborate models of the Earth. It is usually wise to be suspicious of computer models of complex situations. But we are not talking about one scientist's model; a number of programs give similar results.
Many deniers can quote at least a half dozen anecdotes that supposedly prove it is all a hoax. This leads some deniers to conclude that those scientists who persist in insisting that there is a problem must be evil people. They are not; they are human with all the attributes of human behavior, including becoming fixed upon a particular idea. Balancing this tendency of people to keep their minds made up is the fame and glory that would come to the scientist who really found a fatal error that proved global warming did not exist.
I was wondering What the hell are you guys doing with your water and grows?? do you know yet does anyone know yet??? HOLY SHIT they just told a town here in BC that they can't have anymore water for fracking that they were really sorry because the company brought so many jobs and money to the town ,. WHAT FOOLS!!. This was one day after I'd seen this show .. If anyone gets a chance watch this show your going to shit..They actually bitch about bud when they do this shit to ppl,, they have some nerve.. Peace out Headband707
G'day?
Irrigated by one of the world's mightiest river systems, the Murray-Darling Basin yields almost half of Australia's fresh produce. But the basin is ailing and scientists fear that as climate change grips the driest inhabited continent its main food bowl could become a global warming ground zero.
The signs are ominous. In the Riverland, one of the nation's major horticulture areas, dying vines and parched lemon trees attest to critical water shortages.
Farmers have had their water allocations slashed during the recent crippling drought; 200 sold up and many of those who hung on are struggling.
In Renmark, the region's oldest town, some families have spent their life savings, others are drowning in debt.
Since the 1880s, when Europeans settled in the Riverland, fruit and vegetable producers have depended on the broad Murray River. However, the river is in a sorry state, and this once lush area - at the southern end of the sprawling Murray-Darling Basin - faces a bleak future.
The picture is similar across the million-sq m basin, which consists of vast inland plains crisscrossed by the Murray, Darling and numerous other rivers and tributaries.
The past half-century has witnessed an enormous - and officially sanctioned - over-extraction of water. The river system, which straddles four states and one territory, has been badly mismanaged. Falling commodity prices - and a glut of wine grapes - have exacerbated farmers' woes.
But it was the decade-long drought, the worst for more than a century, that tipped the balance. It also brought the basin's plight to public attention, with its images of skeletal cattle in cracked, brown paddocks and broad waterways reduced to muddy trickles.
And such spectacles, scientists say, will become increasingly common in Australia as the planet heats up.
According to the country's Department of Climate Change, global warming will trigger more frequent and severe droughts, as well as more devastating bushfires, cyclones and floods. The Government's main scientific body, the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation, says there is growing evidence that lower rainfall in south-eastern Australia is linked to global climate change.
Anne Henderson-Sellers, a research fellow at Sydney's Macquarie University and a former director of the United Nations' World Climate Research Programme, says: "Global warming is going to have an extraordinarily detrimental effect on us, more than on any other developed nation."
The challenges facing Australia include managing scarce water resources at a time of rapid population growth and ensuring food security in a continent with only six per cent arable land.
The Government's climate change advisers have warned that agricultural production there could fall by 92 per cent by 2100. Now the basin has become a political tug-of-war.
Labor and the Liberal Party have promised millions of dollars to restore the river system - and the wetlands at the mouth of the Murray - to health. Climate change, though, has barely rated a mention.
Garry Hera-Singh lives at Meningie, on the banks of Lake Albert, and has fished commercially all his life.
The area where he catches fish has shrunk by two-thirds. The remaining waters are up to five to seven times saltier than the sea.
"The whole ecosystem is on life support. Salinity is gradually engulfing it, like a cancer," he says.
He is cynical about the latest political promises. "They should have done something a long time ago instead of waiting until communities were brought to their knees."
Irrigated by one of the world's mightiest river systems, the Murray-Darling Basin yields almost half of Australia's fresh produce. But the basin is ailing and scientists fear that as climate change grips the driest inhabited continent its main food bowl could become a global warming ground zero.
The signs are ominous. In the Riverland, one of the nation's major horticulture areas, dying vines and parched lemon trees attest to critical water shortages.
Farmers have had their water allocations slashed during the recent crippling drought; 200 sold up and many of those who hung on are struggling.
In Renmark, the region's oldest town, some families have spent their life savings, others are drowning in debt.
Since the 1880s, when Europeans settled in the Riverland, fruit and vegetable producers have depended on the broad Murray River. However, the river is in a sorry state, and this once lush area - at the southern end of the sprawling Murray-Darling Basin - faces a bleak future.
The picture is similar across the million-sq m basin, which consists of vast inland plains crisscrossed by the Murray, Darling and numerous other rivers and tributaries.
The past half-century has witnessed an enormous - and officially sanctioned - over-extraction of water. The river system, which straddles four states and one territory, has been badly mismanaged. Falling commodity prices - and a glut of wine grapes - have exacerbated farmers' woes.
But it was the decade-long drought, the worst for more than a century, that tipped the balance. It also brought the basin's plight to public attention, with its images of skeletal cattle in cracked, brown paddocks and broad waterways reduced to muddy trickles.
And such spectacles, scientists say, will become increasingly common in Australia as the planet heats up.
According to the country's Department of Climate Change, global warming will trigger more frequent and severe droughts, as well as more devastating bushfires, cyclones and floods. The Government's main scientific body, the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation, says there is growing evidence that lower rainfall in south-eastern Australia is linked to global climate change.
Anne Henderson-Sellers, a research fellow at Sydney's Macquarie University and a former director of the United Nations' World Climate Research Programme, says: "Global warming is going to have an extraordinarily detrimental effect on us, more than on any other developed nation."
The challenges facing Australia include managing scarce water resources at a time of rapid population growth and ensuring food security in a continent with only six per cent arable land.
The Government's climate change advisers have warned that agricultural production there could fall by 92 per cent by 2100. Now the basin has become a political tug-of-war.
Labor and the Liberal Party have promised millions of dollars to restore the river system - and the wetlands at the mouth of the Murray - to health. Climate change, though, has barely rated a mention.
Garry Hera-Singh lives at Meningie, on the banks of Lake Albert, and has fished commercially all his life.
The area where he catches fish has shrunk by two-thirds. The remaining waters are up to five to seven times saltier than the sea.
"The whole ecosystem is on life support. Salinity is gradually engulfing it, like a cancer," he says.
He is cynical about the latest political promises. "They should have done something a long time ago instead of waiting until communities were brought to their knees."
Want to leave a light footprint on this Earth when you die? Perhaps you should consider "aquamation", a new eco-alternative to burial and cremation.
With land for burials in short supply and cremation producing around 150 kilograms of carbon dioxide per body – and as much as 200 micrograms of toxic mercury – aquamation is being touted as the greenest method for disposing of your mortal remains.
The corpse is placed into a steel container and potassium is added, followed by water heated to 93 °C. The flesh and organs are completely decomposed in 4 hours, leaving bones as the only solid remains.
This is similar to what's left after cremation, where the "ashes" are in fact bones hardened in the furnace and then crushed.
Low-energy funeral
Aquamation uses only 10 per cent of the energy of a conventional cremation and releases no toxic emissions, says John Humphries, chief executive of Aquamation Industries in Gold Coast, Queensland, Australia, who developed the technology. The decomposition process, called alkaline hydrolysis, "simply speeds up the natural way that flesh decomposes in soil and water", he says.
Similar methods for decomposing corpses have been developed elsewhere, but they decompose corpses at much higher temperatures. For example, Resomation, based in Glasgow, UK, dissolves bodies in sodium hydroxide at 180 °C.
By decomposing pig carcasses at different water temperatures, Humphries found that the higher heat was unnecessary and that 93 °C was the most efficient temperature for body decomposition.
Life from death
There are recycling possibilities too. Humphries says that aquamation, unlike cremation, will not destroy artificial implants such as hip replacements, allowing them to be reused. And after the body is decomposed, "the water is a fantastic fertiliser", he says.
Since his company began offering the process last month, 60 people in Australia have nominated aquamation for the disposal of their own corpse.
"This is a great initiative," says Barry Brook, a climate scientist at the University of Adelaide, South Australia. "It's easy to dismiss these small-scale technologies as trivial, but if you add enough small-scale solutions together they can add up to something meaningful."
With land for burials in short supply and cremation producing around 150 kilograms of carbon dioxide per body – and as much as 200 micrograms of toxic mercury – aquamation is being touted as the greenest method for disposing of your mortal remains.
The corpse is placed into a steel container and potassium is added, followed by water heated to 93 °C. The flesh and organs are completely decomposed in 4 hours, leaving bones as the only solid remains.
This is similar to what's left after cremation, where the "ashes" are in fact bones hardened in the furnace and then crushed.
Low-energy funeral
Aquamation uses only 10 per cent of the energy of a conventional cremation and releases no toxic emissions, says John Humphries, chief executive of Aquamation Industries in Gold Coast, Queensland, Australia, who developed the technology. The decomposition process, called alkaline hydrolysis, "simply speeds up the natural way that flesh decomposes in soil and water", he says.
Similar methods for decomposing corpses have been developed elsewhere, but they decompose corpses at much higher temperatures. For example, Resomation, based in Glasgow, UK, dissolves bodies in sodium hydroxide at 180 °C.
By decomposing pig carcasses at different water temperatures, Humphries found that the higher heat was unnecessary and that 93 °C was the most efficient temperature for body decomposition.
Life from death
There are recycling possibilities too. Humphries says that aquamation, unlike cremation, will not destroy artificial implants such as hip replacements, allowing them to be reused. And after the body is decomposed, "the water is a fantastic fertiliser", he says.
Since his company began offering the process last month, 60 people in Australia have nominated aquamation for the disposal of their own corpse.
"This is a great initiative," says Barry Brook, a climate scientist at the University of Adelaide, South Australia. "It's easy to dismiss these small-scale technologies as trivial, but if you add enough small-scale solutions together they can add up to something meaningful."
It adds up to you fuckers having gone completely mad.
fongu
S
sparkjumper
I'm going to have a green funeral which basically means I wont get my guts sucked out and the grave will be dug by hand.I want to have a shroud so someday people might worship me
stink.whistler
Member
Piss goes in... Electricity and clean water come out.
Youtricity is developing the world's first Direct Urea Powered Fuel Cells targeting applications in water treatment/purification and renewable energy where urea is a problem contaminant.
As a major component of urine and mass manufactured, non-toxic easily transported solid, urea offers a freely available alternative to hydrogen or methanol fuels. Building on patent pending technology the first Youtricity has already demonstrated proof of principle using commercially available urea solution (AdBlue® or Greenox®) and urine.
Urea is a rich nitrogen source and its removal from municipal wastewater through de-nitrification is both energy intensive and expensive; by direct removal of urea, Youtricity offers a possible alternative producing both clean water and electricity.
Funded by an EPSRC Follow on Fund Grant (EP/H029400/1) and with a 100cm2 demonstrator planned for early 2011, the team at Heriot-Watt University (Scotland) is optimising the Youtricity cell in preparation for further investment or technology licensing.
Youtricity is developing water treatment solutions: if you have a problem with urea or urine removal in wastewater, or if you would like more information, please contact us:
Youtricity is developing the world's first Direct Urea Powered Fuel Cells targeting applications in water treatment/purification and renewable energy where urea is a problem contaminant.
As a major component of urine and mass manufactured, non-toxic easily transported solid, urea offers a freely available alternative to hydrogen or methanol fuels. Building on patent pending technology the first Youtricity has already demonstrated proof of principle using commercially available urea solution (AdBlue® or Greenox®) and urine.
Urea is a rich nitrogen source and its removal from municipal wastewater through de-nitrification is both energy intensive and expensive; by direct removal of urea, Youtricity offers a possible alternative producing both clean water and electricity.
Funded by an EPSRC Follow on Fund Grant (EP/H029400/1) and with a 100cm2 demonstrator planned for early 2011, the team at Heriot-Watt University (Scotland) is optimising the Youtricity cell in preparation for further investment or technology licensing.
Youtricity is developing water treatment solutions: if you have a problem with urea or urine removal in wastewater, or if you would like more information, please contact us:
i want to be put up in a tree or on a platform like the indians did before europeans ruined this place...
Obviously human beings are the problem.
Lets all melt ourselves into fertiliser for the excellent new Genetically Modified crops that are more water efficient.
Then we can feed the New World Order that much easier and achieve the 95% or so population reduction we all need
Lets all melt ourselves into fertiliser for the excellent new Genetically Modified crops that are more water efficient.
Then we can feed the New World Order that much easier and achieve the 95% or so population reduction we all need
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