Instead of global warming, some experts are now warning that the world may soon plunge into the next Ice Age. They predict most of Scotland, Northern Ireland and England to be covered in ice 3,000 feet thick. These same experts blame global warming on falling greenhouse gas levels. Read more…
The long and short of this story is scientists can now grow diamonds that are bigger and better than natural ones. If you’d like to read about the scientific processes used for this feat, I suggest you read this. Otherwise, just sit back and wait for diamond prices to drop dramatically.
Greenland, the world’s largest island, holds enough ice to raise global sea levels by 23 feet. Add the ice sheets of Antarctica and the oceans would deepen more than 200 feet!
Satellite measurements from space confirm that global warming is making an impact and turning ice into water. As glaciers begin to melt, the question everyone asks is how much and how long?
If Greenland alone was to raise sea level by just six feet (two meters)? “The answer turned out to be huge: about 49 kilometers [30 miles] per year, 70 times faster than those glaciers move today,” Pfeffer says, “and three times faster than we’ve ever observed an outlet glacier to move.”
Given that Greenland’s glaciers are not presently moving anywhere close to that pace—Kangerdlugssuaq Glacier, the fastest, reached speeds above nine miles (14 kilometers) per year in 2005—the researchers also looked at ice that could contribute from the rest of the world. Assuming that the largest remaining ice shelves in East Antarctica—Filchner-Ronne and Ross—will remain intact, sea level rise from all other melting ice and the expansion of seawater as the weather gets warmer over the next century would be somewhere between 2.6 feet (0.8 meter) and six feet (two meters)—or nearly twice as much as projected last year by the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
These numbers are not even taking into account how much sea level might swell from the meltdown of the numerous small glaciers in Alaska, Argentina, Canada and Russia, which already contribute 60 percent of sea level rise from glacial melt.
Continue here to read more about the deep thaw.
An image of Titan’s surface shows what scientists believe are bodies of liquid, shown in blue.
PASADENA, California (AP) — At least one of many large, lake-like features on Saturn’s moon Titan contains liquid hydrocarbons, making it the only body in the solar system besides Earth known to have liquid on its surface, NASA said Wednesday.
Scientists positively identified the presence of ethane, according to a statement from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, which manages the international Cassini spacecraft mission exploring Saturn, its rings and moons.
Liquid ethane is a component of crude oil.
Cassini has made more than 40 close flybys of Titan, a giant planet-sized satellite of the ringed world. Read more…
According to NASA
Pavilion Lake in Marble Canyon, British Columbia, is considered a “spiritual place” by the native Tskwaylaxw people of Pavilion. Overlooking the lake is a limestone formation that they believe is a “Transformer Stone” meaning that in First Nations legend it was created by the actions of the “Transformers”, a group of supernatural beings who traveled around the country putting things to right by changing things into stone. Read more…
According to Rebecca Sato
The red area northwest of Chengdu and Mianyang—the two largest cities in Sichuan Province—indicates where China’s May 12 earthquake was most intense in this map.
Two geoscientists who identified Sichuan’s seismic hazard zone ten months before a massive earthquake tore through the region now say that rebuilding should be banned along these tectonic faults.
According to Kevin Holden Platt
The Ice is melting, the ice is melting!
Some 220 square miles of ice has collapsed in Antarctica and an ice shelf about seven times the size of Manhattan is “hanging by a thread,” the British Antarctic Survey said Tuesday, blaming global warming.
“We are in for a lot more events like this,” said professor Ted Scambos, a glaciologist at the National Snow and Ice Data Center at the University of Colorado at Boulder.
Really? Read more.
Let’s hope this doesn’t happen:
ST. AUGUSTINE, Fla., Dec 7 /PRNewswire/ — Pure Zing, publisher of PureZing.com, a natural products review website catering to health-conscious consumers, offers the following Letterman-style “TOP TEN REASONS” to give environmentally-friendly gifts.
Top Ten Reasons to Give Green Gifts this Holiday Season
10. If the gift recipient throws it away, at least it’s biodegradable.
9. You can replace not knowing the chemistry of parabens, with your not
knowing the chemistry of rainforest botanicals.
8. Before green gifts, indigenous tribes of pygmies with access to scarce
jungle herbs never owned Hollywood mansions and drove Porsches.
7. Giving green gifts helps compensate for carbon-spendy office Christmas
parties: According to research carried out by Canon in 2006, over six
million PCs will be left on over Christmas, consuming nearly forty
million kilowatt hours of electricity.
6. Since refusal to play “gifting” is regarded as social deviancy, green
gifting is payback, forcing gift recipients to “face the eco-music”
with you.
5. Compensating for your bad carbon karma in the past, you can trade some
good karma offsets today,
4. Because bling is hipper’ n’ nice if its no-conflict ice.
3. Because some of your girlfriends would really look fab in the skin-
tight animal outfits seen on the PETA eco-activists.
2. Because friends don’t give friends icky chemicals.
1. And the Number One reason to give green gifts: If the nature of a
gift reflects what you think of a friend, then a green gift means you
think they are non-toxic, authentic and socially responsible. Reverse
these qualities for non-green gifts.
In the end, every gift we buy comes with an environmental price tag: CO2 made from the gift’s manufacturing and shipping. So the best gift to the planet is in fact giving no gifts at all.
If you must consume this holiday season, consume thoughtfully. Check out Pure Zing’s Holiday Gifts for some planet-kind gifts, from the divinely decadent, the practical, to personal skin care and makeup (minus parabens and phthalates of course).
About Pure Zing
Founded in 2006, Pure Zing has become a leading consumer-driven Web shopping portal. Hosting over 1000 expert reviews of environmentally-friendly and health-related products, Pure Zing only reviews natural food, skin-care and household products that are free of chemicals, toxins, artificiality and preservatives. For more information, please visit www.purezing.com
BOSTON, MA and DURHAM, NC and HANOVER, NH–(Marketwire - November 28, 2007) - Have you ever wanted to see a picture of the largest polluter in the United States, find out what’s in that smoke from the company down the street, or learn more about what companies near you are doing to protect the environment? If so, your answers can be found on a new website released today and created by faculty at the Fuqua School of Business at Duke University, Harvard Business School, and the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth College, as well as students at Dartmouth.
The site, MapEcos.org, provides a balanced view of the environmental performance of over 20,000 industrial facilities across the US. The map portrays government data on toxic pollution as well as data the site’s developers are collecting from the facilities themselves about the latter’s efforts to protect the environment. Shaped by three faculty members and built by a group of entrepreneurial students, the site uses advanced mapping tools to reveal the pattern of industrial pollution across the entire United States.
“We wanted to move beyond finger pointing,” said Harvard Business School Assistant Professor Michael Toffel. “We believe MapEcos is the first website that presents information about companies’ environmental performance while providing their managers with an opportunity to publicize their environmental practices and awards. By giving managers a voice, we can portray a more accurate picture of what actions are underway and what problems remain.”
Users of MapEcos can view maps or satellite imagery with industrial facilities color-coded according to their emissions levels and marked with a green ring in cases where a representative of the facility has provided data about its environmental management activities. Map users can search for facilities by name, location, corporate owner, industry, and emissions level. The site provides detailed information about the volume and health hazard of each facility’s toxic chemical emissions. It also provides context for this information by providing data about emissions levels and trends for comparable facilities. Where managers have provided data, MapEcos may provide information about operational policies, management systems, activities, staffing, and investment.
For those users more intrigued by pictures than numbers, the site allows users to find startling images of industrial facilities across the US, such as a magnesium facility surrounded by turquoise distillation ponds and a power plant with a huge plume of black smoke (see accompanying map images). Dramatic images such as these can be found for any region of the US by using a tool that lists the largest polluters in each county or state. Clicking a facility name moves the map to a close-up view.
The friendly interface of the site was motivated in part by the research objectives of the faculty sponsors. “MapEcos lets us create a kind of natural experiment, where we make information more accessible and then see how people respond,” commented Michael Lenox, an Associate Professor at the Fuqua School and Faculty Director of Duke University’s Corporate Sustainability Initiative. “We plan to examine which facilities, industries, and neighborhoods attract the most attention from MapEcos users. This information may help predict which facilities should develop robust mechanisms to engage their stakeholders.” Professor Toffel explained another line of research the team hopes to pursue, “By observing how the thousands of facilities respond to our invitation to contribute information about their environmental management practices on MapEcos, we will better understand why some types of facilities choose to be more transparent than others.”
The faculty creators of MapEcos hope it provides a model for how academic research and public service can go hand in hand. “The three of us have been conducting research on business and the environment for years, and we wanted to find a way to do high quality research and make a difference at the same time,” commented Andrew King, an Associate Professor at the Tuck School of Business and currently a Marvin Bower Fellow at Harvard Business School.
To build the site, the faculty teamed with a group of young technical entrepreneurs, many of them Dartmouth College students: Evan Tice, Chris Hughes, Loren Sands-Ramshaw, and Jason Reeves. Tice (Dartmouth ‘09) explained, “We built upon familiar Google Maps technology and other mapping software to give the public access to both detailed information about the environmental performance of individual facilities as well as more general information about the broad sweep of industrial activity across the US.” Hughes added, “We also wanted to allow managers to provide information about their environmental protection activities, and this necessitated creating a system for accessing and displaying data from a survey system at the Harvard Business School.”
King noted that the team named the site MapEcos “to emphasize our attempt to integrate information that is relevant both to ecology and economics. In this age of polarization, we wanted to take a stand for telling both sides of the story. The map will keep changing as more companies add information about their environmental improvement efforts.”
“We hope industrial pollution is only the beginning,” commented Lenox. “Most environmental problems come from habitat change, land use change, and distributed sources of pollution. Mapping will be even more powerful in studying and improving those issues.”
The MapEcos website can be found at www.mapecos.org, and a compendium guidebook with additional information about the site and the team is available at www.mapecos.org/about.
Charlotte, NC (PRWEB) November 7, 2007 — Why does one house burn while its neighbor goes untouched?
Firefighters have come to realize that landscaping choices have a lot to do with protecting your home.
They act like a ladder for flames, carrying them right up to your roof-line.
Structures with evergreen trees, which are high in resins, increase the risk of spreading wildfire. Resins are natural oils that burn at intense temperatures. Some of the most dangerous evergreens are pine, cedar, cypress, spruce, hemlock and fir trees.
Generally, trees that are fast growing, drought tolerant, and deciduous do best. They retain moisture, and therefore need less water to survive. Plus they can pull water from deep underground.
Faster growing trees generally have higher moisture contents and watery sap. Other benefits include greater carbon dioxide absorption and quicker shade.
Trees producing fleshy leaves are preferred to evergreens. Green leaves are fire resistant. However, it’s important to remove dead foliage and limbs.
Travis Zboch, Nursery Manager for Fast-Growing-Trees.com, recommends trees with a ground clearance of 10 feet or more, so that foliage stays well above ignited grasses or shrubs.
Zboch says to avoid planting ornamental evergreens next to your home. “They act like a ladder for flames, carrying them right up to your roof-line.” He also recommends mulching around the base of your trees to reduce evaporation.
Top Fire Resistant Picks:
1. Crape Myrtle Trees
2. Maple Trees
3. Poplar Trees
4. Empress Trees
5. Flowering Cherry Trees
6. Dogwood Trees
7. Aspen Trees
8. Weeping Willow Trees
9. Ash Trees
10. Birch Trees
Zboch also points out that having a fire-resistant landscape does not have to mean settling for a dreary landscape. Butterfly Bushes and Forsythia are fire-resistant shrubs known for their beauty, and gardening favorites like Aster, Black Eyed Susan, Geranium, Honeysuckle, Iris, and Shasta Daisies are all fire-resistant perennials.
For more information about fire-resistant trees contact Deborah Bartley, horticultural enthusiast and avid writer at (704) 644-4488.
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