Amazing…

Judging by the numbers, the scope of China’s environmental degradation is beyond shocking.  Consider:

• The World Bank estimated, in a 2007 report, that pollution caused 5.8% of China’s GDP in premature deaths, healthcare costs, and material damages. Air pollution alone is estimated to kill 700,000 people a year.
• A 2012 MIT study estimated that air pollution in 2005 cost the Chinese economy $112 billion in lost labor and healthcare costs, roughly five times higher than it was in 1975.
• In 2010, airborne microscopic pollutants caused an estimated 8,600 premature deaths in four major Chinese cities: Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, and Xian.
• According to a Chinese vice minister of environmental protection, the water quality in five of the nine bays along China’s coast was “extremely poor.” Results from monitoring stations along 10 major river basins show that 40% of the water is polluted. And 55% of the underground water in 200 cities is polluted. On top of that, about 300 million rural residents do not have access to safe drinking water.
• Soil pollution is endangering China’s food chain. Roughly 10% of the country’s arable land has been contaminated by heavy metal, based on scientific studies conducted in the late 1990s. In 2006, the Chinese government began a nationwide survey of soil pollution. However, it has not released the results, most probably because the findings are too alarming for the government to release.

Given decades of environmental neglect and China’s heavy reliance on coal — which produces 70% of the country’s energy — it would be difficult to produce a dramatic improvement quickly. Nevertheless, the Chinese government can take a comprehensive approach to environmental protection by adopting tougher environmental standards, changing their economic policy, increasing investment in the environment, and mobilizing the press and civil society to take part in these efforts.Via

A couple things immediately stand out.

• This pollution is caused because they are making the worlds cheap crap. This is as much our pollution problem as theirs.
• They are burning coal, one of the filthiest, mercury filled fuels around. They are literally killing themselves with their energy source choices.
• They are creating enough green house gasses to alter the planet in such a way that billions more lives are in danger.
• This thirst for coal, and other natural resources is bound to cause political instability in places like Africa and other regions where China is pushing its weight around (for an example look what happened when America put its fingers into middle east politics for oil over the last 50 years).
• This pollution doesn’t stay in China, elevated mercury levels, and other toxins have been detected in California, putting human lives, and farm/fishing industry in danger.
• Unless we stop ordering cheap crap from china, and help China build a sustainable energy system, billions of human lives including our own could be at risk.

We must ask ourselves, why is the stuff we buy from China so cheap? Is it because the people and environment of China is absorbing extra costs? The cost of the products from China doesn’t include things like “pollution controls” or “clean waste disposal” or “air quality controls” instead those costs are passed on to the people of china, the environment of china, and ultimately to all of us.

So sure, we might pay less for our cheap plastic crap from china, but that doesn’t mean those items are actually cheaper, it just means someone else is picking up part of the tab for us. Increasingly it looks like they are paying that bill with their lives.

Its not just you, its getting warmer, and we are to blame. We must act now.

AMAZING!!

Learn more about NASA: http://www.nasa.gov
Learn more about the International Space Station: http://www.nasa.gov/station
Sign up to get space station sighting information sent to you: http://spotthestation.nasa.gov/

For students interested in NASA Johnson Space Center:
http://www.facebook.com/nasa.jsc.students
http://www.twitter.com/nasajscstudents

NASA Johnson Style is a volunteer outreach video project created by the students of NASA’s Johnson Space Center. It was created as an educational parody of Psy’s Gangnam Style. The lyrics and scenes in the video have been re-imagined in order to inform the public about the amazing work going on at NASA and the Johnson Space Center.

Special thanks to astronauts Tracy Caldwell Dyson, Mike Massimino and Clay Anderson
Special thanks to Mr. Mike Coats, Dr. Ellen Ochoa, and all supporting senior staff members

“NASA Johnson Style” Lyrics:

NASA Johnson Style
Johnson Style

Welcome to NASA’s Johnson Space Center
We are coming in hot so don’t burn up as we enter
We do science everyday that affects your daily life
Throw them up for manned space flight

Science everywhere
As we engineer the marvels
That fly though the air
And take us way beyond earth’s levels

Science everywhere
Because we engineer the marvels
That fly though the air
Flys us through the air

Control the mission out of Johnson
This is ground, hey!
And this is space, hey!
Tell me Houston what’s the problem
It’s okay!
It’s okay!
Because there’s flight controllers on the job today

NASA Johnson STYLE!
Johnson STYLE!
NA, NA, NA, NA NASA Johnson STYLE!
Johnson STYLE!
NA, NA, NA, NA NASA Johnson STYLE!
EYYYYYY science daily!
NA, NA, NA, NA, NASA STYLE!
EYYYYYY it’s amazing!
NA, NA, NA, NA ey ey ey ey ey ey!!
Orbiting earth, international space station
Where we work and live in space with a crew from several nations
Got Japanese, and Russians, that European charm
Throw them up, like the Canada Arm

Kicking out research
29k cubic feet, revolves around the earth
Science microgravity, revolves around the earth
Columbus, JEM, and Destiny
Kicking out research
Kicking out research

Train the astronauts at Johnson
To go to space, hey!
To go to space, hey!
Cause the missions of tomorrow
Start today, hey!
Start today, hey!
As we engineer the future day by day

NASA Johnson STYLE!
Johnson STYLE!
NA, NA, NA, NA NASA Johnson STYLE!
Johnson STYLE!
NA, NA, NA, NA NASA Johnson STYLE!
EYYYYYY science daily!
NA, NA, NA, NA, NASA STYLE!
EYYYYYY it’s amazing!
NA, NA, NA, NA ey ey ey ey ey ey!!

Orion or SLS, MPCV
We cannot feel the floor, cause the lack gravity
The destinations are an asteroid, mars, or moon
We are blasting off start the countdown soon
[Sound clip: launch countdown]

EYYYYYY science daily!
NA, NA, NA, NA, NASA STYLE!
EYYYYYY it’s amazing!
NA, NA, NA, NA ey ey ey ey ey ey!!
NASA Johnson Style

MATH!

Don’t know what it says about me, but I thought this was fascinating.

From Youtube:

Check these samples. Created solely from sounds recorded in our labs. Music/video by Dave & Adam – check their channel for more creations: http://bit.ly/boyinaband

Behind the scenes (including interview with Dave and Adam and reactions from different angles) is coming soon!

See Brady’s previous collaboration with Dave from Boy in a Band – the Golden Ratio song for numberphile at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nBgQPSUTWVM

More chemistry at http://www.periodicvideos.com/
Follow us on Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/periodicvideos
And on Twitter at http://twitter.com/periodicvideos
From the School of Chemistry at The University of Nottingham: http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/chemistry/index.aspx

Periodic Videos films are by video journalist Brady Haran: http://www.bradyharan.com/

Brady’s other channels include:
http://www.youtube.com/sixtysymbols (Physics and astronomy)
http://www.youtube.com/numberphile (Numbers and maths)

For detailed video about some of the reactions in this video, try these previous periodicvideos.

The “burning ice” at the start: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KQSLpuVZK9Y
Rubber hose frozen in liquid nitrogen: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zmvJ54kRpjg
Bung popping out during prep for barking dog: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mGMR72X8V-U
Hydrogen balloon explosion: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6rdmpx39PRk
Dry ice in sink and bubbling: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fHlrkMILAZs
Screaming jelly baby (pink fire in tube): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mIr4dLGwaVs
C02 canon: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0dSMzg0UPPo
Barking dog (blue flame in big tube): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NdWKj_SFqtE
CO2 in film canisters: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0dSMzg0UPPo

(Note: these are not the clips we recorded specially for the music video – rather they are longer videos in which they appear)

I deeply miss Carl Sagan.

If you’re planning to skate on a frozen lake or river this winter, ski on a snowy slope, or, when spring arrives, depend on snowmelt to refill your water supply, you may need to think twice.

Winter as a “species” may have evolved to be less like the winters we remember. The change has consequences for summer, too, including plants’ flowering times.

Scientists will present results on how winter is changing and why it matters at the American Geophysical Union (AGU) conference, taking place in San Francisco from Dec. 3 to 7, 2012.

When Winter Changes: Hydrological, Ecological, and Biogeochemical Responses (Session B21I) takes place on Tuesday, Dec. 4, 2012.

Session conveners include Heidi Steltzer of Fort Lewis College in Durango, Colo.; Michael Weintraub of the University of Toledo; Molly Brown of NASA; and Mark Williams of the University of Colorado at Boulder.

The National Science Foundation (NSF) funded much of the research results being presented at the session.

Subjects to be addressed include: hydrological and ecological implications of radiative forcing by dust in snow; phenological and ecological consequences of changes in winter snowpack in the Colorado Rocky Mountains; and when snow melts early: unusual alpine plant life histories during the summer of 2012.

Other presentations will look at insects, fires and climate change: implications for snow cover, water resources and ecosystem recovery in western North America; climate effects on groundwater storage, hydrochemistry and residence time in geologically variable, snowmelt-dominated mountain catchments in Colorado’s Front Range; and the response of aboveground plant productivity to earlier snowmelt and summer warming in an arctic ecosystem.

“Wherever winter occurs, it is likely changing now or projected to change in the future,” says Steltzer. “That will affect us all.”

Among the session’s highlights are talks on snowmelt-dependent water supplies, and mountain ecosystems out of sync.

Windborne dust on high peaks dampens Colorado River runoff

[Presentation B21I-01: Thomas Painter, JPL/UCLA]

“More than 80 percent of sunlight falling on fresh snow is reflected back to space,” says atmospheric scientist Tom Painter of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., and the University of California at Los Angeles. “But sprinkle some dark particles on the snow and that number drops dramatically.”

The darker dust absorbs sunlight, reducing the amount of reflected light and in turn warming the now “dirty” snow surface.

The result? Dust-on-snow events. That’s exactly what’s happening in the Colorado River Basin.

When the winds are right and the desert is dry, dust blows eastward from the semi-arid regions of the U.S. Southwest. In a dust-up, Western style, small dark particles fall on the mountains’ white snowfields, ultimately affecting the entire Colorado River watershed.

While dust has always blown into these mountains, the expansion of grazing and other disturbances in the western U.S. in the mid- to late-1800s led to a five- to seven-fold increase in dust loading. The snow cover became darker and lasted for shorter and shorter periods.

Lee’s Ferry, Ariz., is the dividing line between the upper and lower Colorado River Basins.

There, according to Painter, peak spring runoff from the Colorado River occurs an average of three weeks earlier due to the more recent five-fold increase in such dust.

With this effect, total annual runoff at Lee’s Ferry–and the Colorado River Basin as a whole–has been reduced by about five percent per year.

“Earlier melt-out allows for an extra three weeks of snow-free conditions,” says Painter. “Increased transfer of water from snow to the atmosphere from the warmer snowpack, and transpired water from the uncovered vegetation during those three weeks of no-snow in the basin’s mountains, causes the five-percent loss of water from the system.”

“This research lays the foundation for future sound water-resource management of a river that serves 27 million people,” says Anjuli Bamzai, program director in NSF’s Division of Atmospheric and Geospace Sciences, which funded the research.

Runoff from the Colorado River Basin has decreased by more than 35 billion cubic feet due to airborne dust, according to Painter.

“Lake sediments in the mountains indicate that the increased dust load came after the vast increases in grazing and agriculture in the deserts of the southwest U.S. in the late 1800s.”

The snow cover, Painter says, is therefore much darker in spring than it was at that time, and melts away several weeks earlier.

“Runoff comes from the mountains in a more compressed period, which makes water management more difficult than if the water came more slowly out of the mountains.”

More focus on reducing dust could be effective, says Painter, “and in turn sustain the mountain reservoir system of snow cover, potentially increase runoff, and counter the regional effects of climate change.”

If changes are made in the way desert soils are managed and dust emission is reduced, he says, it could ease tensions over water in the entire Colorado River Basin.

Glacier lilies and broad-tailed hummingbirds out of sync

[Presentation B21I-05: David Inouye, University of Maryland]

The glacier lily, a tall, willowy plant that graces mountain meadows throughout western North America, flowers early in spring, when the first bumblebees and hummingbirds appear.

Or did.

The lily, a plant that grows best on subalpine slopes, is fast becoming a hothouse flower. In Earth’s warming temperatures, its first blooms appear some 17 days earlier than they did in the 1970s, ecologist David Inouye of the University of Maryland has found.

The problem is that the glacier lily is no longer synchronized with the arrival of broad-tailed hummingbirds, which depend on the lilies’ flowers for nectar.

By the time hummingbirds fly in, says Inouye, many of the flowers have withered away, taking their nectar-laden blooms with them.

“Long-term records of snowmelt and plant-flowering provide a stark interpretation of current events,” says Saran Twombly, program director in NSF’s Division of Environmental Biology, which funded the research.

“Climate change is disrupting the careful match between organisms and their environments,” she says. “The ecological communities of today are dramatically different than those of the past.”

Broad-tailed hummingbirds migrate north from Central America every spring to high-mountain breeding sites in the western United States. The birds have only a short mountain summer to raise their young. Male hummingbirds scout for territories before the first flowers bloom.

But the time between the first hummingbird and the first bloom has collapsed by 13 days over the past four decades. In some years, the lilies have already bloomed by the time the first hummingbird lands.

Biologists calculate that if current trends continue, in two decades the hummingbirds will miss the first flowers entirely.

Broad-tailed hummingbirds that breed farther south have fewer challenges.

“In Arizona, for example,” says Inouye, “there’s no obvious narrowing of the timing between the first arriving males and the first blooms of, in that case, the nectar-containing Indian paintbrush.”

Higher latitudes may be more likely to become out of sync ecologically because global warming is happening fastest there.

As snows continue to melt earlier in spring, bringing earlier flowering, the mountains may come alive with glacier lilies long before hummingbirds can complete their journey north.

OCCUPY SANDY from JFOX on Vimeo.

Amazing video from Jfox on how the Occupy movement is trying to rebuild and repair this hard hit area of our country.

Shameful that anyone could run for office (and win) and honestly think that trollop.

In 2010 New York City added 54 million metric tons of carbon dioxide (equivalent) to the atmosphere, but that number means little to most people because few of us have a sense of scale for atmospheric pollution.

Carbon Visuals (http://www.carbonvisuals.com) and Environmental Defense Fund (http://www.edf.org/climate/remaking-energy) wanted to make those emissions feel a bit more real – the total emissions and the rate of emission. Designed to engage the ‘person on the street’, this version is exploratory and still work in progress. Mayor Bloomberg’s office has not been involved in the creation or dissemination of this video.

NYC carbon footprint:

54,349,650 tons a year = 148,903 tons a day = 6,204 tons an hour = 1.72 tons a second

At standard pressure and 59 °F a metric ton of carbon dioxide gas would fill a sphere 33 feet across (density of CO? = 1.87 kg/m³: http://bit.ly/CO2_datasheet). If this is how New York’s emissions actually emerged we would see one of these spheres emerge every 0.58 seconds.

Emissions in 2010 were 12% less than 2005 emissions. The City of New York is on track to reduce emissions by 30% by 2017 – an ambitious target.

For a set of stills from this movie, see: http://www.flickr.com/photos/carbonquilt/sets/72157631827283027/

For more information see:
http://www.carbonvisuals.com/work/new-yorks-carbon-emissions-in-real-time

Stunning.

Watch Episode 1: The Great Plow-Up on PBS. See more from The Dust Bowl.

We rely on our environment to survive, the Dust Bowl was the perfect example of what happens when we don’t take good care of that environment. Global warming is the current example.

From PBS: THE DUST BOWL:

THE DUST BOWL chronicles the worst man-made ecological disaster in American history, in which the frenzied wheat boom of the “Great Plow-Up,” followed by a decade-long drought during the 1930s nearly swept away the breadbasket of the nation. Vivid interviews with twenty-six survivors of those hard times, combined with dramatic photographs and seldom seen movie footage, bring to life stories of incredible human suffering and equally incredible human perseverance. It is also a morality tale about our relationship to the land that sustains us—a lesson we ignore at our peril.

Especially if you are a cat. Insulate, save money, reduce heating costs, save the planet, and the kitties.

Ever wonder how Walmart makes so much money? They pay their workers so little that they are forced to get on food stamps (which your tax dollars pay for), so next time you think you are getting a deal by shopping at Walmart remember that what you are really doing is paying for those savings in some other way.

The combined worth of the 6 Walmart heirs and heiresses is greater than that of the bottom 41% of American families (48.8 million households). How do the grinning kids of Sam Walton stay so rich? By paying their employees slave wages and not providing benefits, forcing them to use food stamps and medicaid. Above, a poster by Miel Macassey that shows how Walmart siphons money from taxpayers so it can pay its workers (which represent 1% of the American workforce) an average of $8.81 an hour without having them and their kids drop dead of starvation.(via)

Seems today is “young kids being awesome at science” day around here.

15-Year-Old Kelvin Doe is an engineering whiz living in Sierra Leone who scours the trash bins for spare parts, which he uses to build batteries, generators and transmitters. Completely self-taught, Kelvin has created his own radio station where he broadcasts news and plays music under the moniker, DJ Focus.

Kelvin became the youngest person in history to be invited to the “Visiting Practitioner’s Program” at MIT. THNKR had exclusive access to Kelvin and his life-changing journey – experiencing the US for the first time, exploring incredible opportunities, contending with homesickness, and mapping out his future.