The Story of Stuff
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gLBE5QAYXp8
Yes, a little American centric, but good anyway! Reposting because it has come back full circle again!
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Factory Farm Maps
Want to know where the factory farms are? Want to see a nice graphical representation of the number of hogs, or cows, or chickens that live next to you in factory conditions? Well, look no further than Factory Farm Map.
You will find, for instance, that Iowa is the hog king at 13 million hogs, followed closely by North Carolina at 9.8 million. However, Iowa has them spread out through the state while North Carolina has them in one part of the state (Down east), exacerbating the concentration of the pollution, and the differential impacts of the pollution with geographical location. There are 2.19 million hogs in Duplin County alone, that is 40+ hogs to every human that lives there, or 25000+ hogs per square mile, nice…
Anyway, words don’t do the site justice, just go and play with it.
Lack of science funding risks brain drain, CMAJ editorial warns
In the Jan. 27 budget, Canada's three research councils collectively had their budgets cut by $147.9 million, or five per cent, the editorial said. Neither Genome Canada nor the Canada Research Chair program, which allows universities and research institutes to attract top scientists from around the world, received any new money.
In contrast, the U.S. government is pledging $11.9 billion–$13 billion US for scientific research, and the United Kingdom is continuing its investment of 1.7 billion pounds $3.1 billion Cdn for applied health research in 2009/2010, although both countries have been hit hard by the economic crisis.
The more I read about the Canadian Budget, the more worried I get. Cutting research funds is the easiest way to completely gut scientific talent and nobble Canada for years to come. What takes years to develop will be gone in one year. Cue all the Canadian scientists taking jobs in the US or anywhere else they are available.
This is disgusting and something must be done. You can read the entire CMAJ editorial here (pdf).
Biofuels are Eviil, Part 233223
The biodiesel boom has a high environmental cost, however. Critics say it’s contributing to global warming. Tropical forests help remove millions of tons of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere every year. Burning and clear-cutting not only eliminates one of the planet’s crucial air-filtration systems, the process also releases even more carbon dioxide into the air, in smoke or as gases released during the decomposition of forest waste. Annual clearing of Indonesia’s carbon-rich peatlands alone releases some 1.8 billion tons of greenhouse gases, according to a Greenpeace report. Indonesia is the world’s third largest emitter of greenhouse gases behind the U.S. and China, says the World Bank. “We liken what’s going on [in Indonesia] to pouring petrol on a fire,” says Martin Baker, a Hong Kong–based communications officer for Greenpeace International. “It’s completely ridiculous to produce green fuels from places like this.”
When Biofuel is Bad for the Environment – TIME
This just makes we want to jit my head against the wall. Tropical forests are some of the most efficient sinks of carbon, and countries that hold these sinks should be paid as well as countries that are sources of carbon. Yes, this means setting a realistic carbon pricing scheme that can eliminate this perverse incentive to destroy tropical rain forests so Western nations can claim to be environmentally friendly.
This is not a bribe, or an incentive, it is recognition of the fact that carbon sinks have a monetary value.
Blogged with Flock
Tags: biofuels, environment
Models underestimate global warming impacts
No, not Tyra Banks and Riyo Mori, climate models that is.
ES&T Online News: Models underestimate global warming impacts
Modelers don’t purposely err on the conservative side, says Marika Holland of the National Center for Atmospheric Research, but some processes “are just not well understood, and because of that have not been incorporated into climate models.” Holland has published model results on the fate of sea ice and coauthored the recent paper showing that ice is melting faster than models predicted. There are many reasons for the underestimates, she says. For example, models don’t fully capture heat transport between ocean and atmosphere, or faster warming as reflective ice gives way to darker, heat-absorbing waters.
But Rahmstorf says that modelers might unwittingly make models more conservative by applying “one-sided filters”, weeding out models that clearly overestimate the changes seen so far, but hanging onto ones “where everything is too well behaved and stable.”
Scientists are human too. The political and social climate in the US have been harsh to people who overestimate the effects of climate change. So, modeling scenarios that deviate significantly from accepted limits or runaway uncontrollably are discarded. Models are sets of assumptions based on underlying theory. If the theory of a particular sub-process is not clearly understood, then the assumptions become subjective. In a social climate that is waiting to pounce on an overestimate as example of negating the entire global warming phenomenon, assumptions made are conservative. This is not necessarily a bad thing, but it comes at a price! As more observations come in, it does become clear that sometimes, things are happening faster and at greater magnitudes than our model predicted.
Vote Strategically for the Environment
via Vote For Environment / Voter Pour l’Environnement.
This site wants you to vote strategically to avoid splitting the anti-conservative vote on the assumption that all things being equal, the conservatives are much worse for the environment than any of the other parties. This is not really how you want an election to be decided, but a party that represents the minority of Canadians should not get a parliamentary majority simply because of a flawed voting system.
I would heartily endorse a preferential ballot system for us. How does this work?
Instant-runoff voting (IRV) is a voting system used for single-winner elections in which voters have one vote and rank candidates in order of preference. If no candidate receives a majority of first preference rankings, the candidate with the fewest number of votes is eliminated and that candidate’s votes redistributed to the voters’ next preferences among the remaining candidates. This process is repeated until one candidate has a majority of votes among candidates not eliminated. The term “instant runoff” is used because IRV is said to simulate a series of run-off elections tallied in rounds, as in an exhaustive ballot election.
Under this system, if you like the Green Party the best because of their environmental policies, but know they cannot win, you can still vote for them. Just have the liberals/NDP as the second choice. It is overwhelmingly likely that if you like the Green Party policies, you like the policies of the conservatives more than the policies of the liberals or the NDP. With our current system, that’s exactly what your vote will say. Your vote for a Green Party candidate in this election is essentially a vote for the Conservatives.
In the absence of the preferential ballot, or instant runoff voting, using web 2.0 methods to vote strategically is the next best thing, and a great idea!
Turning CO2 into plastic?
Interesting stuff…
Sifting the Garbage for a Green Polymer – New York Times
It was here that Dr. Coates discovered the catalyst needed to turn CO2 into a polymer.
With Scott Allen, a former graduate student, Dr. Coates has started a company called Novomer, which has partnered with several companies, including Kodak, on joint projects. Novomer has received money from the Department of Energy, New York State and the National Science Foundation. Dr. Coates imagines CO2 being diverted from factory emissions into an adjacent facility and turned into plastic.
Anthropogenic CO2 emissions = 7 Giga ton per year. So it will take a lot of plastics to take care of that. The promise of biopolymers is that they reduce the need for fossil fuels, and are biodegradable.
Seems to be another case where some funding and regulatory nudging away from the petroleum plastics would really help.