Category: interesting

Climate Olympics And The Industrial Age!

Attempting to tackle climate change by trapping carbon dioxide or switching to nuclear power will not solve the problem of global warming, according to energy calculations published in the July issue of the International Journal of Global Warming.

Total Energy Emissions during the industrial revolution circa 1880 and the modern era at 2000 adds up to almost three quarters of the earth’s accumulated heat.

Although we outgas billions of tons, CO2 is a minor culprit, because heat in the atmosphere is causing a mere 6.6% of global warming.

The far, far more important machine factors that are warming our climate are:

1. Heat that’s accumulated in the ground at 31.5%.
2. Melting ice that has absorbed 33.4%.
3. Increased heat in warming sea water holding at 28.5%.
4. And 26% trapped by our old friend, the greenhouse effect.

Switching to nuclear is no help. A nuclear plant produces three times more heat than the use of all the electricity it generates.

Report at Science Daily by Bo Nordell and Bruno Gervet of the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Luleå University of Technology in Sweden.

World’s first fully contained, land-based, indoor production fish farm.

#1) This article in Baltimore Sun summarizes a new way to farm fish and feed the world.

#2) Behind much breakthrough in recent aquaculture science is Yonathan Zohar, director of the University of Maryland’s Center for Marine Biotechnology:

and incidentally, news flash #3) “Commercially, the path is now open to revolutionize the tuna industry and see captive tuna aquaculture grow to a multibillion dollar sector.”

New Scientist reports on two studies released last week that seem to indicate that the real problem in human population isn’t really overpopulation and overuse of the world’s resources- but rather mere politics.

Senate conniving alters one word in the upcoming climate legislation so that forty three new coal plants on American soil in the next five years will escape performance standards.

All will be grandfathered without managing emissions.

“I’d definitely call it a bubble,” said Erik Shuster, the author of the report, who works in NETL’s Office of Systems Analysis and Planning.

A bubble wrapped atmosphere!

Much remains hidden, and if hidden it won’t be fixed.

Michael Lewis put some fine work into this Vanity Fair article, The Man Who Crashed The World.

Almost a year after A.I.G.’s collapse, despite a tidal wave of outrage, there still has been no clear explanation of what toppled the insurance giant. The author decides to ask the people involved—the silent, shell-shocked traders of the A.I.G. Financial Products unit—and finds that the story may have a villain, whose reign of terror over 400 employees brought the company, the U.S. economy, and the global financial system to their knees.

“On A.I.G.,” a journalist asked Obama at a press conference, “why did you wait—why did you wait days to come out and express that outrage? It seems like the action is coming out of New York and the attorney general’s office. It took you days to come public with Secretary Geithner and say, Look, we’re outraged. Why did it take so long?”

“It took us a couple of days because I like to know what I’m talking about before I speak,” Obama said testily. “All right?”

It’s unlikely that he actually did know what he was talking about, except in the broadest outlines. Nor, for that matter, did the people who had engineered the bailout. How could they?

At no point did anyone from the U.S. Treasury or the U.S. Congress, or any of the various New York State authorities that had gotten involved, call them up, much less visit A.I.G. F.P.—as, say, someone might who was genuinely curious to know what, exactly, had happened there. Not even A.I.G. C.E.O. Ed Liddy had bothered to make the drive from Manhattan to Wilton, Connecticut, where many of the offending trades had been done, and most of the offending bonuses were being paid, to ask questions of the people still on the scene—people who could have told him a great deal about what had happened and why.

Everyone seemed to be operating on whatever they read in the newspapers—and the people inside A.I.G. F.P., who had the best view of the action, did not appear to be talking to reporters.

Depending on which account you read, you thought they had lost $40 billion, or $100 billion, or $152 billion. They had done this by selling credit-default swaps on subprime-mortgage bonds—which is to say they had insured Goldman Sachs, Deutsche Bank, Merrill Lynch, and the rest against Americans with weak credit histories defaulting on their mortgages. But why? Apparently, because they were greedy: the premiums they took in from the insurance allowed them to pay themselves big bonuses, which they’d grown so accustomed to that they now were reduced to stealing from the U.S. taxpayer.

And that, it seemed, was that.

Some say we can’t blame one man. Of course. But also say this Vanity Fair piece is an amazing story.

They made bad decisions, they essentially blew up all of AIG, and they required an enormous taxpayer-funded bailout to limit the collateral damage. But holding them responsible for the bad decisions at all the Wall Street investment banks seems a bit much.

Bill Gates puffing about advanced science: “That’s right. We’re going to make the cows that don’t fart. You name it, we’ve got it under control.”

Not so much.

New diets and feedlot management plus enhanced manure controls will be helpful, but breeding a magic hindgut will not help.

Gas from cows is the burping of ruminant livestock, not so much back-end emissions. It’s methane created by fermentation bacteria breaking down feed in one of the animal’s stomach chambers.

Treehugger points to capturing burps into tanks connected to the cows’ stomachs through a tube!!

About 32% of agricultural gases is nitrous oxide from fertilizers with cow gases in second place at 27%.

A cow burps 75 gallons per day, but the carbon in this gas is not new carbon.

Our ‘atmospheric challenge’ isn’t the re-releasing of carbon that was already adapted on the earth (livestock, plants and forests), but the unearthing of massive volumes of stored carbon sources (oil, gas and coal) and then adding these to the atmosphere decade upon decade.

p.s. I’m teasing Bill Gates. As you’ll read in the interview, he’s contributing a great deal. Some say the free videos of Richard Feynman lectures are not to be missed. [Silverlight required]

Worldwide, around 11,000 new substances are registered every day.

Almost all these substances find their way into our water.

And water holds tight.

LBL Berkeley reveals a cross section of water around a nanometer particle, in blue. Pink and red indicate the way water molecules layer around it.

Switzerland’s Federal Office for the Environment points out that along with non-toxic titanium dioxide, the color white, paint is preserved with antimicrobial silver nanoparticles that are destroying algae and fungi in our waterways as it seeps from our property.

Studying 37 pesticides that mix together after leaching into water, 30% transform into new products as toxic as or even more toxic than the parent compound.

Our waters are capturing a cocktail of contaminants and our wastewater treatment plants were designed mainly to remove nutrients rather than chemicals – industrial chemicals, pesticides and biocides, medicines and birth control hormones, cleaning agents, flame retardants for furniture and plastics – the list could be extended indefinitely.

Cornell University displays the media news cycle during the 2008 election. Please notice the shallow issues, er, sway of sentiment, er, talking points offered to the American voter. Full size here.

Is Exxon following in the footsteps of Monsanto by developing proprietary algae for fuel processing? Patents as an alternative to oil wells?

A warning about runaway algae by David Haberan at the Biomass ’09 Fuel, Power and Chemicals Workshop:

“Exxon made a recent announcement that they would spend $600 million on the genetic modification of algae in pursuit of biomass-derived biofuels.

“Of that, $300 million is for in-house work, and the other $300 million is intended to go to an industrial team led by a team called Synthetic Genomics. For those who know this, this is run by the gentleman who was credited with decoding the human genome approximately 10 years ago.

“I’d like to remind everybody that algae play a very specific and special role in our environment.

“Algae produce 50 percent of the earth’s oxygen and serve as a primary life interface between the oceans and the atmosphere.

“Algae have an extremely diverse existence on this planet, he added, and scientists have determined there may be up to 50,000 different species.

“The issue is what can you do with naturally occurring algae, or rather, what can’t you do with it? The answer is that nobody knows.

“The rush for genetic modification has very little to do with any real understanding with what the real environment has to offer today.

“There is a complete lack of regulation and information in the genetic modification of algae, and many who are aspirants have no capabilities, experience or resources to mitigate the associated risks.

“There is a distinct lack of knowledge surrounding algae’s role in ecosystems and food chains. Don’t let anyone tell you differently. We don’t know, to a great extent, what algae do in our biosphere.”

Algae Bloom, copyright 1994, Simon Walker

That earth was made for turnin’
And that bush was made for burnin’
Turn them gullies into dumps
Cut that cow up into rumps
Bathe the flats insecticide
Let that topsoil start to slide
And from mother natures womb
We’ll let that blue green algae bloom

Algae Blooooommm
Looks kind of pretty from afar
But them blue green tints of sapphire
Makes the water taste bizarre

A commercial firm is offering a 460 page report which may have required a few years but certainly is oddly described as massive research:

Algae-based biodiesel, biocrude, and biomass-derived green chemicals and plastics will start to enter early-stage commercial production by the end of 2011.

Algae 2020 presents a survey of findings from a massive, multi-year research project based on more than 20 site visits and 50 direct interviews with emerging technology companies and R&D labs, including industry leaders Solazyme, Sapphire Energy, Solix, Algenol, Algae 2 Energy, PetroAlgae, Aquatic Energy, OriginOil, SBAE, and several other innovators now producing algae in pilot and pre-commercial stage demonstration projects.

For an increasing number of private companies, algae is no longer a research project.

As of the summer of 2009, more than $1 billion in private and public investment commitments since 2007 have contributed to the acceleration of a surprising diversity of algae-based biofuels technologies, business models, and product strategies. Oil and gas majors Chevron, Shell, British Petroleum have already demonstrated their commitment to algae for biofuels in research labs and private ventures.

As if a portent of runaway algae, a huge blob of Arctic goo was seen floating off Alaska. At this point, no one knows what it could be.

Folks are definitely worrying:

MASS tree planting across Australia’s farmlands could provide feedstock to supply 90% of the nation’s transport fuel by 2030.

via CSIRO, the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation, Australia’s national science agency and one of the largest and most diverse research agencies in the world.

Just jump and evolve:

The part of the brain wanting pleasure is different from the part of the brain experiencing pleasure.

“I love these folks who helped get us in this mess and then suddenly say, ‘Well, this is Obama’s economy,’”

the president said before an overwhelmingly supportive outdoor crowd at Macomb Community College.

“That’s fine — give it to me. My job is to solve problems, not stand on the sidelines and carp and gripe.”

The jab was not included in his prepared remarks, which focused on an announcement that the administration was proposing to spend $12 billion to bolster the nation’s network of community colleges. Community colleges are heavily attended by working adults, some seeking new expertise, others remedial instruction on the way to four-year college.

So the administration’s proposal should have particular resonance:

Commie-in-Chief Obama to give billions to community colleges in effort to make us into Socialist Hippie China Pinkotown.

Study reveals votes are glued to contributors.

“I’m continually surprised by how direct the relationship is between the supporters of the bills, their financial backers and the correlations between campaign contributors and votes.”

I’m not surprised.

Sad.

This is not just an abstract concept – money and politics…

What our analysis suggests is that there’s a good reason these special interests spend thousands of dollars – they get something in return.

My favorite eco- grass-fed cow snippet found via food safety wiz Doug Powell at Kansas.

a crafting of diplomacy:

🙂

Richard Heeks’ exploding last moment of a soap bubble.

In mid-June, Vito Congine, 46, an Iraq war veteran, began flying the flag upside down – an accepted way to signal distress – outside the restaurant he wants to open in Crivitz, a village of about 1,000 people some 65 miles north of Green Bay, Wisconsin.

He said his distress is likely bankruptcy because the village board refused to grant him a liquor license after he spent nearly $200,000 to buy and remodel a downtown building for an Italian supper club.

Congine’s upside-down-flag represents distress to him.

Here’s the rub: Hours before a Fourth of July parade, four police officers went to Congine’s property and removed the flag under the advice of Marinette County District Attorney Allen Brey.

Neighbor Steven Klein watched in disbelief.

“I said, ‘What are you doing?’ They said, ‘It is none of your business.'”

Family member Levi Johnston says a little more on the NBC Today show. Interview and video is here.

“We had tons of offers coming in from everybody out there and just all kinds of ridiculous things.

“There’s been talk about it would be nice to just take the money and run,” anywhere from $7 to $9 million. “It’s up there.”

“She’s very smart, but I just don’t think she can handle the stress level as governor – I don’t think she can handle it as president or vice president.”

Here’s Jolie, Lohan, Theron, Foster, Aniston and Witherspoon. The New York Daily News is wondering which actress should play Sarah Palin in any upcoming biopic.

I have never understood why we haven’t replaced wet porcelain and slippery flooring.

A new national study finds kids are being hurt in bathtubs and showers at a surprising rate.

Experts at Nationwide Children’s Hospital say slips and falls are far too common, sending more than 43,000 kids a year to the emergency department.

That’s an average of 120 kids every day who are hurt in the tub or shower.

In most cases, parents are watching their kids, but it doesn’t matter.

Via the Doc Gurley Institute of Skeptical Paranoia, ‘Is mass drug-company advertising a form of collective placebo?’

http://www.docgurley.com/2009/07/09/embrace-your-placebo-effect/

Oh, the wars for oil go on and on:

The increasing importance of the Muslim-dominated Xinjiang autonomous region as a source of the energy and minerals needed to fuel China’s booming eastern cities is raising the stakes for Beijing in its battle against separatists agitating for an independent state.

“The Chinese didn’t want to let Xinjiang be independent before, but after they built all the oilfields, it became absolutely impossible.”

The desert around the city is punctuated every kilometer or two by oil and gas derricks, each of them topped with the red Chinese national flag, an assertion of sovereignty over every inch of the energy-rich ground. [Financial Times 2008]

In the list for 2009, 140 companies are American, the lowest number on record. Seven of the top 10 firms are oil companies

From the Asia Times:

And this doesn’t even count the inflation in other costs, such as how my health insurance went up by another 8.8%, taking me to over $13,000 a year in premiums, which doesn’t count the $2,000 deductibles that my wife and I must each pay, or the co-pays, which means I am out of pocket over $15,000 a year before they start picking up any of my needed medical costs!