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Global Warming And Primary Education – What shall we tell the little children

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This could become a heated and useless discussion. One that goes back centuries. To be blunt – Are we molly coddling the little beggars. Lets face it, on one level life has improved immeasurably. Life expectancies, just as an example, show how less brutal life is; and total global populations show how plentiful general life support is. I guess the real question here is, do you believe that global warming will make Earth uninhabitable for humans? If the answer is YES to that question, AND something could be done to change that – then you have an obligations to say something. If the answer is No and NO then I guess – Shut Up. But is it that easy?

https://www.wired.co.uk/article/climate-crisis-doom?utm_source=digg

Hannah Ritchie

Ideas

Stop Telling Kids They’ll Die From Climate Change

Many young people feel like their future is in peril. To make progress on climate change, we must move past doomsday scenarios.

Is climate change the biggest threat to humanity? Many people would say so. Young people in particular feel hopeless. A recent survey asked 10,000 16- to 25-year-olds in 10 countries about their attitudes about climate change. The results were damning. More than half said “humanity was doomed”; three-quarters said the future was frightening; 55 percent said they would have less opportunities than their parents; 52 percent said family security would be threatened; and 39 percent were hesitant to have children as a result. These attitudes were consistent across countries rich and poor, big and small: from the United States and the United Kingdom to Brazil, the Philippines, India, and Nigeria.

It’s totally legitimate that young people feel this way. I’ve been there. Today, much of my work focuses on researching, writing, and thinking about climate change. But it’s a field I very nearly walked away from. Fresh out of university with a degree in environmental science and climate change, it was hard to see that I could contribute anything at all. I flipped back and forth between anger and hopelessness. Any effort seemed futile, and I nearly quit. Thankfully my perspective shifted. I’m glad it did. Not only did I continue working on climate, I’m also sure that my work has had many times the positive impact it would have if I’d been stuck in my previous mindset. And that’s why I’m convinced that if we’re to make progress on climate, we need to lift this cloak of pessimism.

Let’s be clear: Climate change is one of the biggest problems we face. It comes with many risks—some certain, some uncertain—and we’re not moving anywhere near fast enough to reduce emissions. But there seems to have been a breakdown in communication of what our future entails. None of the climate scientists I know and trust—who surely know the risks better than almost anyone—are resigned to a future of oblivion. Most of them have children. In fact, they often have several. Young ones, too. Now, having kids is no automatic qualification for rational decision-making. But it signals that those who spend day after day studying climate change are optimistic that their children will have a life worth living.

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Go there and read. More next week.

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Do Carbon Credits Work – In some cases, NOT

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Mitigation efforts always sound sensible to sensible people. There are always people who have a knee jerk, industry involved NO WAY reaction. Just like with cigarettes: doesn’t cause it -you can’t prove it, to ok maybe it exists but there is nothing you can do about it, to those methods won’t work, to if you outlaw it you will put people out of work. But most people (as far as the carbon economy goes) Carbon Taxes, Carbon Trading and Carbon Reduction methods all seem OK. But how can you tell if they work, or in this case DON’T?

https://www.propublica.org/article/the-climate-solution-actually-adding-millions-of-tons-of-co2-into-the-atmosphere?utm_source=pocket-newtab

Environment

The Climate Solution Actually Adding Millions of Tons of CO2 Into the Atmosphere

by Lisa Song, ProPublica, and James Temple, MIT Technology Review
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New research shows that California’s climate policy created up to 39 million carbon credits that aren’t achieving real carbon savings. But companies can buy these forest offsets to justify polluting more anyway.

This story was co-published with MIT Technology Review.

Along the coast of Northern California near the Oregon border, the cool, moist air off the Pacific sustains a strip of temperate rainforests. Soaring redwoods and Douglas firs dominate these thick, wet woodlands, creating a canopy hundreds of feet high.

But if you travel inland the mix of trees gradually shifts.

Beyond the crest of the Klamath Mountains, you descend into an evergreen medley of sugar pines, incense cedars and still more Douglas firs. As you continue into the Cascade Range, you pass through sparser forests dominated by Ponderosa pines. These tall, slender trees with prickly cones thrive in the hotter, drier conditions on the eastern side of the state.

All trees consume carbon dioxide, releasing the oxygen and storing the carbon in their trunks, branches and roots. Every ton of carbon sequestered in a living tree is a ton that isn’t contributing to climate change. And that thick coastal forest can easily store twice as much carbon per acre as the trees deeper inland.

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Go there and read probably a gazillion words. Take a weekend. More next week.

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We Are Living in a Climate Emergency – According to the f%$!ing Scientific American

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This according to 13,000 scientists who think it is now or never for things to change. This is a stunning development. One I never thought would happen until the END. And I will be honest here, we are nowhere near the end. I think we have at least 20 years before things are completely out of control. I never thought I hear these kinds of statement until it was too late. Like hearing “the Titanic is sinking” when it is already half way down and there is no going back. But then again – maybe i better rethink. Anway:

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/we-are-living-in-a-climate-emergency-and-were-going-to-say-so/

Climate | Opinion

We Are Living in a Climate Emergency, and We’re Going to Say So

It’s time to use a term that more than 13,000 scientists agree is needed

We Are Living in a Climate Emergency, and We're Going to Say So
Increasingly dangerous wildfires are just one consequence of climate change. Here, a man watches in 2013 as the Springs fire in California approaches. Credit: David McNew Getty Images

An emergency is a serious situation that requires immediate action. When someone calls 911 because they can’t breathe, that’s an emergency. When someone stumbles on the sidewalk because their chest is pounding and their lips are turning blue, that’s an emergency. Both people require help right away. Multiply those individuals by millions of people who have similar symptoms, and it constitutes the biggest global health emergency in a century: the COVID-19 pandemic.

Now consider the following scenarios: A hurricane blasts Florida. A California dam bursts because floods have piled water high up behind it. A sudden, record-setting cold snap cuts power to the entire state of Texas. These are also emergencies that require immediate action. Multiply these situations worldwide, and you have the biggest environmental emergency to beset the earth in millennia: climate change.

Given the circumstances, Scientific American has agreed with major news outlets worldwide to start using the term “climate emergency” in its coverage of climate change. An official statement about this decision, and the impact we hope it can have throughout the media landscape, is below.

The planet is heating up way too fast. It’s time for journalism to recognize that the climate emergency is here

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Go there and read. We will see if it catches on. More next week.

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Tomorrow * NO Cars – What then

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If Schumer could pull this off I would be “dancin in the streets”. It would not be as good and banning Airline Flights, but heh I will take whatever I can get. It would be really good for the lower level atmosphere and especially good for bodies of water, whether flowing bodies like rivers or standing bodies like lakes or oceans. Unfortunately, the upper atmosphere is where the real global warming is taking place. Still – I am not minimizing this. IT be good.

https://www.theverge.com/2021/3/17/22334634/schumer-electric-vehicle-swap-discount-infrastructure-interview

Chuck Schumer wants to replace every gas car in America with an electric vehicle

The Senate majority leader is reviving his plan to give people discounts for swapping their gas car for an electric one

By Andrew J. Hawkins

With the $1.9 trillion COVID relief bill signed into law, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) is ready to tackle the next major challenge: President Joe Biden’s call for a massive infrastructure bill. As part of that package, Schumer said he plans to include his ambitious proposal to get every American to swap their gas-guzzling car for an electric one.

“It’s a bold new plan designed to accelerate America’s transition to all electric vehicles on the road, to developing a charging infrastructure, and to grow American jobs through clean manufacturing,” Schumer told The Verge in a brief interview this week. “And the ultimate goal is to have every car manufactured in America be electric by 2030, and every car on the road be clean by 2040.”

The top-line details of the “cash for clunkers’’-style plan haven’t changed much since Schumer first proposed it in an op-ed in The New York Times in late 2019. But the political landscape has certainly shifted in favor of the Democrats, breathing new life into the idea. Under the proposal, anyone who trades in their gas car for an electric one would get a “substantial” point-of-sale discount, Schumer says. He wouldn’t say how much of a discount, only that it would be “deep.” A spokesperson later confirmed they are eyeing rebates that are “more generous” than the current $7,500 federal EV tax credit.

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Who Pollutes Most? Planes Or Boats – At best it’s a toss up

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But it is a very real question. I think it is Airplanes myself for 2 reasons. 1. Because they pollute at a high altitude (roughly 3 – 30 thousand feet) and, 2. because of an amazingly random accidental experiment after 9/11 that showed with all planes grounded our atmospheric temperature dropped a full degree. With Boats (ok large Ships) they burn something like warm asphalt, and that over water where the output can fall directly into what ever body on which they float. So essentially which is worse? High altitude kerosene or low altitude vaporized warm asphalt? I know – it makes me want to puke.

As a side note – i wish somebody would measure the net effects on global warming between Boats and Plane as opposed to co2 emissions which is awfully easy but not particularly insightful.

Greening Our Shipping: Wind-Powered Cargo Ships Can Change Future of Freight Cutting Emissions By 90%

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In The Race To Despoil The Environment, China Wins – They are First, Second and Third

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This is an article from 8 years ago. Imagine how much worse it has gotten since then. They have no shame. Who will stop this? Not the Central Government. Not the Provencial Government and not the local for surel. This is what we call in the United States call, a National Sacrifice zone. Remove the people and keep on going. Its disgusting and it’s despicable. Big YUCK for everyone to see.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2012/aug/07/china-rare-earth-village-pollution

 

Rare-earth mining in China comes at a heavy cost for local villages

Pollution is poisoning the farms and villages of the region that processes the precious minerals

Health hazard … pipes coming from a rare-earth smelting plant spew into a tailings dam on the outskirts of Baotou in China’s Inner Mongolia autonomous region. Photograph: David Gray/Reuters

From the air it looks like a huge lake, fed by many tributaries, but on the ground it turns out to be a murky expanse of water, in which no fish or algae can survive. The shore is coated with a black crust, so thick you can walk on it. Into this huge, 10 sq km tailings pond nearby factories discharge water loaded with chemicals used to process the 17 most sought after minerals in the world, collectively known as rare earths.

The town of Baotou, in Inner Mongolia, is the largest Chinese source of these strategic elements, essential to advanced technology, from smartphones to GPS receivers, but also to wind farms and, above all, electric cars. The minerals are mined at Bayan Obo, 120km farther north, then brought to Baotou for processing.

The concentration of rare earths in the ore is very low, so they must be separated and purified, using hydro-metallurgical techniques and acid baths. China accounts for 97% of global output of these precious substances, with two-thirds produced in Baotou.

The foul waters of the tailings pond contain all sorts of toxic chemicals, but also radioactive elements such as thorium which, if ingested, cause cancers of the pancreas and lungs, and leukaemia. “Before the factories were built, there were just fields here as far as the eye can see. In the place of this radioactive sludge, there were watermelons, aubergines and tomatoes,” says Li Guirong with a sigh.

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Go there and vomit. More next week.

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Want To See What Climate Change Does To America – You really don’t but you will go look anyway

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As you scroll through this article it shows how climate change effects America. I must say it is pretty cool in a technological way, but it is depressing for an environmentalist like me. Illinois fares OK until about 2070. Just in case you are interested.

https://projects.propublica.org/climate-migration/?utm_source=digg

New Climate Maps Show a Transformed United States

by Al Shaw, Abrahm Lustgarten, ProPublica, and Jeremy W. Goldsmith, Special to ProPublica, September 15, 2020.

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published.

According to new data from the Rhodium Group analyzed by ProPublica and The New York Times Magazine, warming temperatures and changing rainfall will drive agriculture and temperate climates northward, while sea level rise will consume coastlines and dangerous levels of humidity will swamp the Mississippi River valley.

Taken with other recent research showing that the most habitable climate in North America will shift northward and the incidence of large fires will increase across the country, this suggests that the climate crisis will profoundly interrupt the way we live and farm in the United States. See how the North American places where humans have lived for thousands of years will shift and what changes are in store for your county.

In a paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, a team of researchers modeled the human climate “niche”: the regions where temperature and precipitation have been most suitable for humans to live in over the past 6,000 years.

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Go there and read. Go there and play. More next week.

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Attached To An Ice Floe In The Arctic – What a brave way to study Global Warming

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So who are you going to believe? A research vessel attached to Arctic ice or a weasel attached to the Presidency with Leech like suckers.  ie. Trump – it’s a hoax or Science – it’s COMING! Me I trust science. Not Russian science either.

https://earther.gizmodo.com/scientists-made-an-alarmingly-easy-trip-to-the-north-po-1844858358?utm_source=digg

Climate change

Scientists Made an Alarmingly Easy Trip to the North Pole

 

dharnanoor
Dharna Noor

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Filed to:ice ice maybe

 

At Earther, we’ve been following the historic extent of ice melt in the Arctic this summer pretty closely. But not as closely as Gunnar Spreen and his research team, who are literally following the ice.

“We’re attached to an ice floe now,” he said on the phone from a research vessel called the Polarstern, which is currently at the latitude 88 degrees north, just under 150 miles (230 kilometers) from the North Pole. “We’re drifting with the ice. Wherever it goes, we go.”

Spreen, a sea ice and remote sensing scientist at the University of Bremen, is taking part in a research expedition known as the Multidisciplinary drifting Observatory for the Study of Arctic Climate, or MOSAiC. It’s the largest Arctic research campaign in history, with some 500 scientists and staffers rotating on and off of the research vessel for months at a time.

The current cohort boarded the Polarstern on August 12, and in just a week’s time, they made it to the North Pole. To get there, they took an unexpected route, north of Greenland.

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Since Humanity Is Doomed – Let’s talk about a symptom of that, Chernobyl

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Chernobyl symbolized the beginning of the end for me. Man had shown his weakness against forces that he unleashed on the Earth. If that was true then it was only a matter of time before the jinny or jin coalesced and demanded his due. The sum of which men could not produce. So the sword would fall on all our necks. But every once in awhile there is cause for hope.

https://getpocket.com/explore/item/8-facts-about-the-animals-of-chernobyl?utm_source=pocket-newtab

8 Facts About the Animals of Chernobyl

Researchers thought the site of the 1986 Chernobyl disaster was unable to support life. But a bunch of wolves, deer, wild boars, bears, and foxes disagree.

Mental Floss

  • Claudia Dimuro

Three decades after the Chernobyl disaster—the world’s worst nuclear accident—signs of life are returning to the exclusion zone. Wild animals in Chernobyl are flourishing within the contaminated region; puppies roaming the area are capturing the hearts of thousands. Tourists who have watched the critically acclaimed HBO series Chernobyl are taking selfies with the ruins. Once thought to be forever uninhabitable, the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone has become a haven for flora and fauna that prove that life, as they say in Jurassic Park, finds a way.

1. The Animals of Chernobyl Survived Against All Odds

The effects of the radioactive explosion at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant on April 26, 1986 devastated the environment. Around the plant and in the nearby city of Pripyat in Ukraine, the Chernobyl disaster’s radiation caused the leaves of thousands of trees to turn a rust color, giving a new name to the surrounding woods—the Red Forest. Workers eventually bulldozed and buried the radioactive trees. Squads of Soviet conscripts also were ordered to shoot any stray animals within the 1000-square-mile Chernobyl Exclusion Zone. Though experts today believe parts of the zone will remain unsafe for humans for another 20,000 years, numerous animal and plant species not only survived, but thrived.

2. Bears and Wolves Outnumber Humans Around the Chernobyl Disaster Site

While humans are strictly prohibited from living in the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone, many other species have settled there. Brown bears, wolves, lynx, bison, deer, moose, beavers, foxes, badgers, wild boar, raccoon dogs, and more than 200 species of birds have formed their own ecosystem within the Chernobyl disaster area. Along with the larger animals, a variety of amphibians, fish, worms, and bacteria makes the unpopulated environment their home.

THE PEOPLE have moved back too.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/resources/idt-sh/moving_to_Chernobyl?utm_source=digg

The people who moved to Chernobyl

By Zhanna Bezpiatchuk

The Chernobyl nuclear disaster of 1986 left a ring of ghost villages as residents fled, fearing radiation poisoning.

But now people are choosing to live in the crumbling houses on the edge of the exclusion zone.

On a warm summer’s evening, Maryna Kovalenko is playing football with her two teenage daughters in their backyard.

Iryna and Olena laugh as the family dog attempts to wrestle away the ball, scattering the startled chickens.

But out beyond the family’s back fence, all is silent and still.

Numerous houses, a shop and a library stand vacant in the village of Steshchyna, northern Ukraine. Only the forest is gaining ground as creeping plants explore the cracks in this abandoned village.

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Habitat Destruction Squeezes Diseases Out Of Mammals – Then they invade humans and kill us

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Seriously, how long can it be before HUMANs realize that by killing the world in general they are killing themselves. Squeezing animals out of their habitats squeezes their viruses out into us. We have no immune defenses against them and we die. I mean it is Earth’s ultimate defense system. I have a hunch we are not gonna be around for long. Wonder which one will get us first, Global Warming or Rejection by the Earth.

https://www.npr.org/2020/06/22/875961137/the-worrisome-link-between-deforestation-and-disease?utm_source=digg

‘Like Poking a Beehive’: The Worrisome Link Between Deforestation And Disease

 

In 2013, an 18-month-old boy got sick after playing near a hollow tree in his backyard in a remote West African village. He developed a fever and started vomiting. His stool turned black. Two days later, he died.

Two years and more than 11,000 deaths later, the World Health Organization put out a report saying the Ebola outbreak that likely emanated from that hollow tree may have been caused in part by deforestation led by “foreign mining and timber operations.”

The tree the boy played near was infested with insectivorous bats — bats that may have been pushed into the boy’s village because upward of 80% of their natural habitat had been destroyed.

“When you disturb a forest, it actually upsets, if you want, the balance of nature, the balance between pathogens and people,” says John E. Fa, a professor of biodiversity and human development at Manchester Metropolitan University, who was part of a team of researchers that linked recent forest loss to 25 Ebola outbreaks that have occurred since 1976.

A finding, he says, that showed a strong correlation between recent deforestation and disease outbreaks.

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Go there and Pray.  More next week.

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