The Environment Thread

[McParadigm]

"I've got a clever retort," he muttered, his fingers flying fast. "Boy this one will really zing them."

[Bi_3]

[McParadigm]

Well now I find it to be an insightful and articulate point.

[spike]

that polar bear

[E.H. Ruddock]

that polar bear

Jesus, that was fucking hard to watch. Ugh. I was upset after that.

[spike]

that polar bear

Jesus, that was fucking hard to watch. Ugh. I was upset after that.

i don't usually "like" stuff like that on facebook, but i did with that one in hopes that more would watch.

[bart]

that polar bear

Jesus, that was fucking hard to watch. Ugh. I was upset after that.

i don't usually "like" stuff like that on facebook, but i did with that one in hopes that more would watch.

you should have shared it.

[Green Habit]

More of this, please.

[Bi_3]

Ugh.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/arti ... l-warming/

[B]

Looks like we're almost out of rhinos.

[Stickman]

Nature's 'alarming' decline threatens food, water, energy: U.N.
Alister Doyle
MARCH 23, 2018

OSLO (Reuters) - Human activities are causing an alarming decline in the variety of plant and animal life on Earth and jeopardizing food, clean water and energy supplies, a U.N.-backed study of biodiversity said on Friday.

Climate change will become a steadily bigger threat to biodiversity by 2050, adding to damage from pollution and forest clearance to make way for agriculture, according to more than 550 experts in a set of reports approved by 129 governments.

“Biodiversity, the essential variety of life-forms on earth, continues to decline in every region of the world,” the authors wrote after talks in Colombia. “This alarming trend endangers the quality of life of people everywhere.”

Four regional reports covered the Americas, Asia and the Pacific, Africa, Europe and Central Asia - all areas of the planet except the poles and the high seas.

For the Americas, the report estimated that the value of nature to people - such as crops, wood, water purification or tourism - was at least $24.3 trillion a year, equivalent to the region’s gross domestic product from Alaska to Argentina.

Almost two-thirds of those natural contributions were in decline in the Americas, it said.

Robert Watson, chair of the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES), said biodiversity was not only about saving rare butterflies, trees, birds or rhinos.

While that was important, he told Reuters a key message was: “Please stop thinking of biodiversity just as an environmental issue. It’s way more important than that”.

ELEPHANTS AND MOSSES

Among other economic estimates, the Africa report said the absorption of greenhouse gases by a hectare (2.5 acres) of forest in Central Africa was worth $14,000 a year.

Unless governments take strong action to limit greenhouse gas emissions, “climate change may be the biggest threat to biodiversity” by mid-century, Watson said.

He said U.S. delegates had not challenged findings about man-made climate change, although U.S. President Donald Trump doubts mainstream scientific opinion and plans to pull out of the 2015 Paris climate agreement.

For pollution, eight of 10 rivers around the world with most plastic waste were in Asia. On current trends, overfishing meant there could be no exploitable fish stocks in the Asia-Pacific region by mid-century.

Around the world, ever more animals and plants were under threat from human activities, ranging from elephants in Africa to rare mosses and snails in Europe, the study said.

“By 2100, climate change could ... result in the loss of more than half of African bird and mammal species,” said Emma Archer of South Africa, the co-chair of the African assessment.

Rising human populations in many developing nations would require new policies, both to protect nature and to meet U.N. goals of eradicating poverty and hunger by 2030.

In Europe and Central Asia, wetlands have declined by half since 1970, threatening many species.

Amid the gloom, there were some bright spots.

Forest cover had risen by 22.9 percent in China and other nations in northeast Asia between 1990 and 2015. Parks and other protected areas were expanding in many regions, including the Americas and Asia-Pacific.

And populations of animals such as the Iberian lynx, Amur tiger and far eastern leopard were coming back from the brink of extinction thanks to conservation.

Reporting by Alister Doyle; Editing by Andrew Roche

[Stickman]

Graphic: Global warming from 1880 to 2017

Earth’s global surface temperatures in 2017 were the second warmest since modern recordkeeping began in 1880, according to an analysis by NASA.

Continuing the planet’s long-term warming trend, globally averaged temperatures in 2017 were 1.62 degrees Fahrenheit (0.90 degrees Celsius) warmer than the 1951 to 1980 mean, according to scientists at NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) in New York. That is second only to global temperatures in 2016. Last year was the third consecutive year in which temperatures were more than 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit (1 degree Celsius) above late nineteenth-century levels.

NASA’s temperature analyses incorporate surface temperature measurements from 6,300 weather stations, ship- and buoy-based observations of sea surface temperatures, and temperature measurements from Antarctic research stations.

These raw measurements are analyzed using an algorithm that considers the varied spacing of temperature stations around the globe and urban heating effects that could skew the conclusions. These calculations produce the global average temperature deviations from the baseline period of 1951 to 1980.

The full 2017 surface temperature data set and the complete methodology used to make the temperature calculation are available at http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/.

GISS is a laboratory within the Earth Sciences Division of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. The laboratory is affiliated with Columbia University’s Earth Institute and School of Engineering and Applied Science in New York.

NASA uses the unique vantage point of space to better understand Earth as an interconnected system. The agency also uses airborne and ground-based monitoring, and develops new ways to observe and study Earth with long-term data records and computer analysis tools to better see how our planet is changing. NASA shares this knowledge with the global community and works with institutions in the United States and around the world that contribute to understanding and protecting our home planet.

[Noangel]

There is no question that a globalized society existed 10~13,000 years ago. There are identical structures, in terms of design, as if the architecture plans were the same, in Cambodia and South America. Both were built using stone the size of many houses today, a common theme on every continent....According to mainstream ideology, these cultures had no contact with each other, none. People don't quarry and move 300 ton stones without some sort of advantage in doing so....to move a stone that size today would require innovation....yet all over the world....it seems the older the stonework, the better the craftsmanship, which defies logic, unless a lost technology was used. it truly was a globalized society, one that was much more capable of quarrying and moving stones on a scale which no one thinks about.


The polar ice caps have melted before (how many times is a good question). Landmass the size of Europe and Asia combined have been lost....



The conclusion here isn't that aliens shaped our past, its the very profound and obvious fact that ancient man was much more capable than conventional ideology gives them credit for.

Human evolution starts 50 million years ago.
A 99% pure iron hammer was found with its wooden handle turned to coal, in England. The process by which organic material turns to coal takes hundreds of millions of years. That puts this tool ONE HUNDRED MILLION years before human beings even existed, if conventional wisdom is to be accepted.

I could list the archaeological finds for pages.....the mapping of Antarctica, by "hunter gatherers". The coast line so precise is would have required no ice.....which dates it to 13000BC or earlier.



The point is....the ice has melted before, at least once....its gonna melt again. Society should be building harbors in Arizona and preparing for the humanitarian crises to come. As they focus on security (as the defense department called the biggest threat to security climate change ten years ago) if security is the focus, security will be the issue.

Perhaps an enlightened view needs to emerge....one where we save what is good, protect what is good...

[Noangel]

They are spending more on security for the tool head of the EPA then on protecting the environment.

[Stickman]

New York Lawyer Burns Himself To Death In Protest

[simple schoolboy]

More of this, please.

California is decommissioning its last nuclear plant (apparently we only had 2). That seems insane to me. The Nimbys in this state.

Simultaneously, environmentalists are suing to reduce solar projects such as this: http://www.panochevalleysolar.com/

I've driven through there, its a large valley, with the solar farm only taking up a tiny portion, and its rather arid.
I can't imagine that the negative impact of the solar farm will be any worse than the normal auto traffic through the area. The varmits might appreciate the shade.

[Noangel]

eastern washington is full of windmills.....thousands maybe.....

there is a coal plant in the United States powered by solar panels.


climate change is irrelevant.....its just cheaper and makes more sense to do it right.

[Bi_3]

eastern washington is full of windmills.....thousands maybe.....

there is a coal plant in the United States powered by solar panels.


climate change is irrelevant.....its just cheaper and makes more sense to do it right.

Solar is not cheaper, but you know what is?

https://www.technologyreview.com/the-do ... r-decades/
http://berc.berkeley.edu/molten-salt-re ... on-future/

[Noangel]

eastern washington is full of windmills.....thousands maybe.....

there is a coal plant in the United States powered by solar panels.


climate change is irrelevant.....its just cheaper and makes more sense to do it right.

Solar is not cheaper, but you know what is?

https://www.technologyreview.com/the-do ... r-decades/
http://berc.berkeley.edu/molten-salt-re ... on-future/

Pretty sure Thorium is an element from World of Warcracft.



But, MIT did put out a report stating that Geothermal energy has more potential than solar, wind, and tidal combined. Clean energy is the goal, or should be.


while the go'vt spends more on fear and security than anything positive for the future.

[Bi_3]

eastern washington is full of windmills.....thousands maybe.....

there is a coal plant in the United States powered by solar panels.


climate change is irrelevant.....its just cheaper and makes more sense to do it right.

Solar is not cheaper, but you know what is?

https://www.technologyreview.com/the-do ... r-decades/
http://berc.berkeley.edu/molten-salt-re ... on-future/

Pretty sure Thorium is an element from World of Warcracft.



But, MIT did put out a report stating that Geothermal energy has more potential than solar, wind, and tidal combined. Clean energy is the goal, or should be.


while the go'vt spends more on fear and security than anything positive for the future.

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/crux/ ... t2_MGf3iXc

We've had climate change solved for decades, but we chose to use Uranium so that we could make weapons with that knowledge.