The Pleistocene Era began 1.8 million years ago and ended roughly 10,000 years ago. During that period were several Ice Ages. Many giant sized animals and birds that seem familiar to us (because they resemble modern animals) roamed the earth. They became extinct, possibly due to environmental conditions or disease, or possibly because they were hunted by humans.
mental_floss Blog tells about 10 Ice Age Giants.
I must have been bad. Lightning just hit within a few hundred yards.
It actually startled me enough to take my breath away.
If your oldest child is seven, the window slams shut before he or she will be old enough for a driver’s license. If your first grandchild was born this year, cherish your posterity: that grandchild’s likely to be the last of your line. Unless….unless we force action now and over the next 100 months.
The Window Before Climate Change Closes Down Our Kids’ Future: 100 Months, Or Less?
Here’s why:
The concentration of carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere today, the most prevalent greenhouse gas, is the highest it has been for the past 650,000 years. In the space of just 250 years, as a result of the coal-fired Industrial Revolution, and changes to land use such as the growth of cities and the felling of forests, we have released, cumulatively, more than 1,800bn tonnes of CO2 into the atmosphere. Currently, approximately 1,000 tonnes of CO2 are released into the Earth’s atmosphere every second, due to human activity. Greenhouse gases trap incoming solar radiation, warming the atmosphere. When these gases accumulate beyond a certain level – often termed a “tipping point” – global warming will accelerate, potentially beyond control.
It’s a simple equation. There’s this much CO2 in the atmosphere. We add this much more each day. At some point it reaches the tipping point.
There is no credible debate about this among those who study the problem. The debate is when and how bad it becomes. The serious scientists keeping sending stronger and more frightening alarms while we dither.
The carbon industries, and their political cronies, are keeping the sense of doubt alive by getting the media to act as if the question about CO2 was still being debated.
There is, of course, only one time when it is OK to yell fire in a crowded theater — when the theater is on fire.
“The night sky has followed you your whole life. It may be the only thing your distant ancestors would recognize today. How much of it do you recognize? Fifteen minutes from now, you will recognize plenty.”
Identify constellations, stars, planets and how to navigate at night.
NewMexiKen has found that just the slightest knowledge about the night sky impresses people, even people who otherwise are more impressive than me. Try it.
“While there’s a chance that we’ll act against global warming only to find that the danger was overstated, there’s also a chance that we’ll fail to act only to find that the results of inaction were catastrophic. Which risk would you rather run?”
The Story of Stuff with Annie Leonard
From its extraction through sale, use and disposal, all the stuff in our lives affects communities at home and abroad, yet most of this is hidden from view. The Story of Stuff is a 20-minute, fast-paced, fact-filled look at the underside of our production and consumption patterns.
It’s difficult to watch this well-done, if one-sided, video and not question a few personal habits.
And a lot in impersonal ones.
And, as Andrew Tobias puts it, “Chances are that whatever may be exaggerated now will soon be accurate if we don’t act.”
Link via Andrew Tobias.
Of all the things we’ve done to ourselves and this planet, dimming the wonder of the night sky is surely the most aesthetically hurtful. Until 125 years ago people everywhere saw the Milky Way on clear nights. Now it’s just a great photo.
Click the image for a larger version and to learn more.
Spitzer’s M101, a galaxy twice the size of our own Milky Way.
Click image for larger version and to learn more.
Click image for larger version and to learn more.
The New York Times today has an article entitled Federal Agency Proposes a Euthanasia Program for Its Herd of Mustangs. Here’s an excerpt from the beginning:
The champions of wild mustangs have long portrayed them as the victims of ranchers who preferred cattle on the range, middlemen who wanted to make a buck selling them for horsemeat and misfits who shot them for sport. But the wild horse today is no longer automatically considered deserving of extensive protections.
Some environmentalists and scientists have come to see the mustangs, which run wild from Montana to California, as top-of-the-food-chain bullies, invaders whose hooves and teeth disturb the habitats of endangered tortoises and desert birds.
Even the language has shifted. In a 2006 article in Audubon magazine, wild horses lost their poetry and were reduced to “feral equids.”
The mustangs have only been on the range since, at the earliest, 1540. That’s a blink of an eye in ecological terms. It makes almost as much sense to have a herd of zebra in Nevada.
Why are the horses being maintained (at taxpayer expense) at all?
NewMexiKen first posted this from Andrew Tobias two years ago today.
Not everybody uses it, and this is a very important point. Even with just a billion people using it, a few decades back … and some of those billion using roll-on deodorant … the emission of chlorofluorocarbons still made a giant hole in Earth’s ozone layer.
And it was widening.
The global community was alarmed and took action and now three things are true:
* More people than ever use deodorant (praise the Lord)
* None of it emits chlorofluorocarbons (an alternative propellant was found — likewise for refrigerants)
* The hole in the ozone layer gradually disappeared (but you should still use SPF 15 or higher this weekend)
Okay? Do you see my point?
No?
My point is that if a little Right Guard can threaten our atmospheric equilibrium, isn’t it just really dumb to bet that the literally trillions of pounds of carbon dioxide we dump into the air each year will have no effect? Be honest: don’t you use more gasoline than deodorant?
The moon transits the earth as seen in May from far space by the EPOXI mission.
Click image for larger version and to learn more about this 360º panorama. The stars are incredible!
“The Environmental Protection Agency has put the value of a human life at $6.9 million, 11 percent lower than five years ago.”
When drawing up regulations, government agencies put a value on human life and then weigh the costs versus the lifesaving benefits of a proposed rule. The less a life is worth to the government, the less the need for a regulation, such as tighter restrictions on pollution.
It hasn’t reached 90º F. officially in Albuquerque since last Saturday — and not above 81º since Tuesday. No A/C or cooling at Casa NewMexiKen for three days. Cheap. Cheap.
Love the monsoon season — except when the lightning is near.
This year, the world is expected to burn through some thirty-one billion barrels of oil, six billion tons of coal, and a hundred trillion cubic feet of natural gas. The combustion of these fossil fuels will produce, in aggregate, some four hundred quadrillion B.T.U.s of energy. It will also yield around thirty billion tons of carbon dioxide. Next year, global consumption of fossil fuels is expected to grow by about two per cent, meaning that emissions will rise by more than half a billion tons, and the following year consumption is expected to grow by yet another two per cent.
When carbon dioxide is released into the air, about a third ends up, in relatively short order, in the oceans. (CO2 dissolves in water to form a weak acid; this is the cause of the phenomenon known as “ocean acidification.”) A quarter is absorbed by terrestrial ecosystems—no one is quite sure exactly how or where—and the rest remains in the atmosphere. If current trends in emissions continue, then sometime within the next four or five decades the chemistry of the oceans will have been altered to such a degree that many marine organisms—including reef-building corals—will be pushed toward extinction. Meanwhile, atmospheric CO2 levels are projected to reach five hundred and fifty parts per million—twice pre-industrial levels—virtually guaranteeing an eventual global temperature increase of three or more degrees. The consequences of this warming are difficult to predict in detail, but even broad, conservative estimates are terrifying: at least fifteen and possibly as many as thirty per cent of the planet’s plant and animal species will be threatened; sea levels will rise by several feet; yields of crops like wheat and corn will decline significantly in a number of areas where they are now grown as staples; regions that depend on glacial runoff or seasonal snowmelt—currently home to more than a billion people—will face severe water shortages; and what now counts as a hundred-year drought will occur in some parts of the world as frequently as once a decade.
Elizabeth Kolbert summing up in a report on alternatives in the current New Yorker.
You see the sky rocket explode, but the boom doesn’t come for seconds. The lightning flashes, but the thunder is moments behind. The reason, of course, is that sound moves much, much, much slower than light.
Light is so fast — 186,000 miles per second — that everything we can see on Earth, we see almost instantaneously. Sound, however, travels at just 1,125 feet per second (more or less, depending on temperature, altitude, humidity). The source of the sound doesn’t need to be very far away for us to sense the lag.
Rule of thumb, it takes just less than 5 seconds for sound to travel a mile. If lightning flashes, count the seconds until you hear the thunder to calculate how far away it struck.
A bolt of lightning can be over five miles in length, have temperatures of 50,000 degrees F., and contain 100 million volts.
In 2007, 45 people were struck and killed by lightning in the U.S.; hundreds of others were injured. Of the victims who were killed by lightning:
• 98% were outside
• 89% were male
• 30% were males between the ages of 20-25
• 25% were standing under a tree
• 25% occurred on or near the waterThe reported number of injuries is likely far lower than the actual total number because many people do not seek help or doctors do not record it as a lightning injury. People struck by lightning suffer from a variety of long-term, debilitating symptoms, including memory loss, attention deficits, sleep disorders, numbness, dizziness, stiffness in joints, irritability, fatigue, weakness, muscle spasms, depression, and an inability to sit for long.
That’s funny, I don’t remember being struck by lightning and I have all those symptoms. Oh wait, including memory loss.
While my vacation continues, NewMexiKen is mostly recycling older posts. There was a nice mountain rainstorm during the party we attended yesterday, but nothing like this storm that seemed to go biblical on me two years ago today.
An astonishing rainstorm at Casa NewMexiKen this morning around 3. And, by my count, three lightning strikes way too close. You know, “One Mississippi, two Miss … oh damn, that was close.” NewMexiKen really doesn’t like lightning since my house was struck and set on fire in 1995.
Anyway, the rain was falling so fast and furiously I began to wonder if Lowe’s carried gopher wood.1 Then I panicked when I couldn’t remember the conversion from feet and inches to cubits (did we learn that in school?). And would it be OK if I accidentally on purpose forgot to bring two scorpions and two rattlesnakes. (But I did remember I’d only need one New Mexico whiptail.) It was really raining!
But it slowed to nothing much after 25-30 minutes. The arroyo2 next to my house is still running deep and fast, but things are returning to normal otherwise.
1 Genesis 6
2 “Arroyo” is Spanish for concrete ditch.
An article on the Hubble Space Telescope with a handful of cool photos. You’ve probably seen them all before, but still . . .
Some descriptive narrative accompanies each image.
100 years ago today, a small chunk of rock or possibly ice was lazily making its way across the inner solar system when a large, blue-green planet got in its way. Traveling roughly westward, it entered the Earth’s atmosphere moving at tens of thousands kilometers per hour. Compressed and battered by tremendous forces, the object got about 5 – 10 kilometers from the ground before it succumbed, exploding like a gigantic multi-megaton bomb.
The air blast flattened trees for hundreds of square kilometers. The ground shook, witnesses felt the hellish heat from kilometers away, and the shock wave circled the world. It happened over the remote Podkammenaya Tungus river, a swampy region in Russia; had it happened over Moscow a million people might have died within minutes.
Now known as the Tunguska Event, it stands today as a shocking reminder that we live in a cosmic shooting gallery, and the Earth sits in the crosshairs of many objects.
The wild part starts Tuesday, when Mars, Saturn and the star Regulus— part of the constellation Leo– loiter together, with Mars and Regulus tightly grouped. On subsequent nights, sky gazers will observe that Mars moves toward Saturn. A new moon joins the trio on the evenings of July 5 and 6.
The following week, look west. Saturn (zero magnitude, bright enough to see in urban skies) and Mars conjunct July 10 above the western horizon. You can spot them after dusk. The ringed planet is the brighter of the two, and Mars (first magnitude) has the rusty, red tint.
DENVER — Faced with a surge in the number of proposed solar power plants, the federal government has placed a moratorium on new solar projects on public land until it studies their environmental impact, which is expected to take about two years.
The Bureau of Land Management says an extensive environmental study is needed to determine how large solar plants might affect millions of acres it oversees in six Western states — Arizona, California, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico and Utah.
Study solar, but drill in ANWR, drill offshore, drill, drill, drill.
Dad, official late dad of NewMexiKen, provided this report on seasonal change in Tucson back in 2004:
Those of you familiar with the desert know that after two or three months of no rain we expect thunderheads to build up every afternoon south east of us. These are the rain clouds from the Gulf of Mexico, pushing up into the Sierra Madres in Mexico. Day by day they creep closer to us.
Yesterday while reading I was surprised by a loud clap of thunder. Glancing out the window it was true….. Rain………
I raced to the kitchen to gather my rain gauges and ruler; ran out the door and proceeded to record the event.
Taking numerous measurements, I concluded the drops averaged two inches apart and the rain had lasted four minutes…..a 2/4 rain.
This is revised from a comment NewMexiKen made last night.
Sea level has already been rising. According to NASA (and many other sources):
Twentieth century sea level trends, however, are substantially higher that those of the last few thousand years. The current phase of accelerated sea level rise appears to have begun in the mid/late 19th century to early 20th century, based on coastal sediments from a number of localities. Twentieth century global sea level, as determined from tide gauges in coastal harbors, has been increasing by 1.7-1.8 mm/yr, apparently related to the recent climatic warming trend. Most of this rise comes from warming of the world’s oceans and melting of mountain glaciers, which have receded dramatically in many places especially during the last few decades. Since 1993, an even higher sea level trend of about 2.8 mm/yr has been measured from the TOPEX/POSEIDON satellite altimeter. Analysis of longer tide-gauge records (1870-2004) also suggests a possible late 20th century acceleration in global sea level.
Here’s an experiment you can do at home. Fill a glass with water to the brim. Pretend the brim is Miami or Santa Monica or Bangladesh. Fill another glass with ice and set it out at room temperature. Pretend the ice is glaciers. As the ice melts, pour the contents of that glass into the glass filled with water. Have paper towel handy.
When glaciers melt, and particularly if the Greenland and Antarctica ice caps melt, the sea will rise. The meltwater has to go somewhere. It will go into the oceans and the oceans will rise.
Scientists only debate how much the glaciers will melt and how soon, not if.
Some big retailers are promoting compact fluorescent light bulbs as a way to save energy. But improper disposal of the bulbs creates a hazard, because they contain small amounts of mercury.
Recycling them is about to get easier. Home Depot, the nation’s second-largest retailer, will announce on Tuesday that it will take back old compact fluorescents in all 1,973 of its stores in the United States, creating the nation’s most widespread recycling program for the bulbs.
It’s IMPORTANT the CFLs be properly disposed. The mercury in them is a hazard. Don’t put them in the trash!
And if you’re still using inefficient 125-year-old incandescent technology, why?
Thanks to Bob Ormond for the link.