NASA’s EO-1 is a new breed of satellite with AI programming to notice things that change (like the plume of a volcano) and take appropriate action, such as monitoring that specific location.
EO-1 can re-organize its own priorities to study volcanic eruptions, flash floods, forest fires, disintegrating sea-ice, and other unexpected events. It can also use sensors on other satellites or on the ground as a “sensorweb.”
Light pollution would be the first to go, followed by fields, buildings and cities
IF MAN were to vanish from the face of the Earth today, his footprint on the planet would linger for the mere blink of an eye in geological terms.
Within hours, nature would begin to eradicate its impact. In 50,000 years all that would remain would be archaeological traces. Only radioactive materials and a few man-made chemical contaminants would last longer — an invisible legacy.
“Further global warming of 1 °C defines a critical threshold. Beyond that we will likely see changes that make Earth a different planet than the one we know.”
So says Jim Hansen, director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York. Hansen and colleagues have analysed global temperature records and found that surface temperatures have been increasing by an average of 0.2 °C every decade for the past 30 years. Warming is greatest in the high latitudes of the northern hemisphere, particularly in the sub-Arctic boreal forests of Siberia and North America. Here the melting of ice and snow is exposing darker surfaces that absorb more sunlight and increase warming, creating a positive feedback.
Earth is already as warm as at any time in the last 10,000 years, and is within 1 °C of being its hottest for a million years, says Hansen’s team. Another decade of business-as-usual carbon emissions will probably make it too late to prevent the ecosystems of the north from triggering runaway climate change, the study concludes (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, vol 103, p 14288).
A Nasa satellite has documented startling changes in Arctic sea ice cover between 2004 and 2005.
The extent of “perennial” ice – thick ice which remains all year round – declined by 14%, losing an area the size of Pakistan or Turkey.
The last few decades have seen summer ice shrink by about 0.7% per year.
The Arctic is warming about twice as fast as the global average; and recent studies have shown that the area of the Arctic covered by ice each summer, and the ice thickness, have been shrinking.The research is reported in the journal Geophysical Research Letters.
In another article on the topic, Jim Hansen, leading climatologist and director of the Goddard Institute for Space Studies, issues now-or-never warning: we only have a decade to save the planet.
What has been termed, “positively Orwellian”, by PEER Executive Director Jeff Ruch, is indeed frightening. It seems that the self-appointed “Decider”, George W. Bush, has decided to “end public access to research materials” at EPA Regional libraries without Congressional consent. In an all out effort to impede research and public access, Bush has implemented a loosely covert operation to close down 26 technical libraries under the guise of a budgetary constraint move. Scientists are protesting, but at least 15 of the libraries will be closed by Sept. 30, 2006.
“Public access to EPA libraries and collections will end as soon as possible”, according to a report found online at PEER, an acronym for Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility. All total, nearly 80,000 documents, not in digital format, are being boxed up and placed in infinite limbo status by the Bush Administration. The scene from the Raiders of the Lost Ark, where the Ark of the Covenant was wheeled into a massive sea of identical box crates, inside an enormous warehouse, comes vividly to mind.
According to this news release by Nature, The American Association for the Advancement of Science has finally begun to believe, and thus make it a science fact, that culture actually exists in non-Human ape species.
The evidence is mounting that great apes are a cultured lot, researchers heard at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in St. Louis this week.It is well established that apes are clever: gorillas lift electric wires with sticks to slip underneath; orang-utans can crack nuts open with rocks; and chimpanzees have been spotted elegantly sipping water from a sponge of crumpled leaves.
But these tool-using apes also show signs of cultural traditions that vary from group to group, just as some customs are passed down from one generation to another in human societies. According to a trio of researchers at the AAAS, recent work has underscored the rich cultures of our nearest relatives.
This acceptance comes at glacial speed compared to anthropological, ethological and post/trans humanist theory, as well as a heap of field data well over two decades old.
Regardless of the slow acceptance (compared to philosophy and theory... political and religious acceptance will come far slower), it is a notable waypoint in the evolution of the group mind towards a post/transhumanist future.
Now how long is it going to take before the bounds of our acceptance grow wider?
Social animals have been studied in the context of complex systems especially in regards to the emergence of collective solutions of problems involving cooperative behavior. The standard example are ant colonies that can exhibit behavioral patterns that are often associated with intelligence of the colony. Individual ants, however, follow simple rules and do not show signs of individual intelligence. Although they have a sophisticated communication system they are not able to learn from each other.This is, however, what takes place among whales and dolphins, whose individual intelligence is, along with us humans and other primates, the most highly developed on our planet. Rendell & Whitehead build a case for the claim that cetaceans (as well as apes) satisfy the defining criteria for forming different cultures that are robust (over several generations) and that can interact.
Meat from whales caught under Japan’s “research” programme is so abundant that it is being sold as pet food, according to a UK conservation group.
In the current hunting season, it launched a programme called JARPA-2 which doubles its annual minke whale catch from Antarctic waters.JARPA-2 will remove 935 minkes and 10 fin whales each year; while its other research programme JARPN takes 100 sei whales, 100 minkes, 50 Bryde’s whales and five sperm whales annually from the north Pacific.
Last year, it initiated a scheme to distribute whale meat to schools, and a fast-food chain began selling whale burgers.
But the latest news suggests demand from Japan’s human population is running some way behind the recently expanded supply.
A company is selling meat on the web as “healthy and safe natural” dog food.
“A quiet whale meat boom is starting,” says the website hakudai.com.
“The number of pet-owners who care about their animals’ health are growing, recognising the nutritious value of whale meat,” it adds.
James Hansen, director of the US space agency’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, said that officials at NASA headquarters had ordered the public affairs staff to review his forthcoming lectures, papers, postings on the Goddard website and requests for media interviews, the New York Times reported Sunday.
“They feel their job is to be this censor of information going out to the public,” said Hansen, who told the paper he would ignore the restrictions.
“Since 1988, (Hansen) has been issuing public warnings about the long-term threat from heat-trapping emissions, dominated by carbon dioxide, that are an unavoidable byproduct of burning coal, oil and other fossil fuels. He has had run-ins with politicians or their appointees in various administrations, including budget watchers in the first Bush administration and Vice President Al Gore,” the Times reported.
Hansen told the Times that “efforts to quiet him” had begun in a series of calls after a lecture he gave on December 6, 2005, at the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco.
“In the talk, he said that significant emission cuts could be achieved with existing technologies, particularly in the case of motor vehicles, and that without leadership by the United States, climate change would eventually leave the earth ‘a different planet’,” the Times said.
An article by University of Pittsburgh Professor of Anthropology Jeffrey H. Schwartz and University of Salerno Professor of Biochemistry Bruno Maresca, published Jan. 30 in the New Anatomist journal, shows that the emerging understanding of cell structure lends strong support to Schwartz’s theory of evolution, originally explained in his seminal work, Sudden Origins: Fossils, Genes, and the Emergence of Species (John Wiley & Sons, 2000).
In that book, Schwartz hearkens back to earlier theories that suggest that the Darwinian model of evolution as continual and gradual adaptation to the environment glosses over gaps in the fossil record by assuming the intervening fossils simply have not been found yet. Rather, Schwartz argues, they have not been found because they don’t exist, since evolution is not necessarily gradual but often sudden, dramatic expressions of change that began on the cellular level because of radical environmental stressors—like extreme heat, cold, or crowding—years earlier.
Determining the mechanism that causes those delayed expressions of change is Schwartz’s major contribution to the evolution of the theory of evolution. The mechanism, the authors explain, is this: Environmental upheaval causes genes to mutate, and those altered genes remain in a recessive state, spreading silently through the population until offspring appear with two copies of the new mutation and change suddenly, seemingly appearing out of thin air. Those changes may be significant and beneficial (like teeth or limbs) or, more likely, kill the organism.
Why does it take an environmental drama to cause mutations? Why don’t cells subtly and constantly change in small ways over time, as Darwin suggests?
Cell biologists know the answer: Cells don’t like to change and don’t do so easily. As Schwartz and Maresca explain: Cells in their ordinary states have suites of molecules—various kinds of proteins—whose jobs are to eliminate error that might get introduced and derail the functioning of their cell. For instance, some proteins work to keep the cell membrane intact. Other proteins act as chaperones, bringing molecules to their proper locations in the cell, and so on. In short, with that kind of protection from change, it is very difficult for mutations, of whatever kind, to gain a foothold. But extreme stress pushes cells beyond their capacity to produce protective proteins, and then mutation can occur.
Norway is planning to build a “doomsday vault” inside a mountain on an Arctic island to hold a seed bank of all known varieties of the world’s crops.
The Norwegian government will hollow out a cave on the ice-bound island of Spitsbergen to hold the seed bank.
It will be designed to withstand global catastrophes like nuclear war or natural disasters that would destroy the planet’s sources of food.
Seed collection is being organised by the Global Crop Diversity Trust.
According to this article GM crops under test in the UK have cross pollinated to weeds, giving them the same resistance to herbicide as the GM crops. The article also mentions that this has been reported as occurring in Canada, which like the US is well past the test stage and allows widespread use of GM crops. What’s worse, in Canada crop rotation has conferred multi-herbicide resistance to some of the weeds!
Reasonable people may disagree, but Princeton geology professor emeritus Ken Deffeyes, author of 2001’s Hubbert’s Peak: The Impending World Oil Shortage and 2005’s Beyond Oil: The View from Hubbert’s Peak (sense a theme?), stated on his blog in early 2004:
Although it is a bit silly, we can now pick a day to celebrate passing the top of the mathematically smooth Hubbert curve: Nov 24, 2005. It falls right smack dab on top of Thanksgiving Day 2005. It sounds a little sick to observe a gloomy day, but in San Francisco they still observe April 18 as the anniversary of the 1906 earthquake.
That’s right—according to one of the more preeminent peak oilers, yesterday was the day the world saw its maximum oil production. Probably.
The reality is that oil peaking is not a smooth curve, of course. Unexpected discoveries, technology improvements, and the like will sporadically increase output, even after the decline has truly begun. And, as we’ve noted in the past, peak oil matters most when demand exceeds supply. The best defense against peak oil nightmares is to stop using so damn much of the stuff. We know how to move to a cleaner, greener, higher-efficiency civilization; the time to do so is now.
Current levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere are higher than at any time in the past 650,000 years, say researchers who have finished cataloguing air bubbles trapped for millennia inside Antarctic ice. The record, which extends back over the past eight ice ages, shows that today’s concentrations of carbon dioxide and methane far outstrip those in the past.
Atmospheric carbon dioxide levels have risen 200 times faster over the past 50 years than at any other time during this period, says Thomas Stocker of the University of Bern, Switzerland, who led the analysis.
The Army now admits that it secretly dumped 64 million pounds of nerve and mustard agents into the sea, along with 400,000 chemical-filled bombs, land mines and rockets and more than 500 tons of radioactive waste—either tossed overboard or packed into the holds of scuttled vessels.
The one-two hurricane punch from Katrina and Wilma along with predictions of more severe weather in the future has scientists pondering ways to save lives, protect property and possibly even control the weather.
While efforts to tame storms have so far been clouded by failure, some researchers aren?t willing to give up the fight. And even if changing the weather proves overly challenging, residents and disaster officials can do a better job planning and reacting.
In fact, military officials and weather modification experts could be on the verge of joining forces to better gauge, react to, and possibly nullify future hostile forces churned out by Mother Nature.