I have deleted 31 posts. Some posts just because they were part of the argument that got out of hand. Those members who have "opinionated" too much about others have been made aware to the other Moderators. Stay on topic please.
'Listening To The Planets' To Understand Our Changing Climate 'Listening To The Planets' To Understand Our Changing Climate
while there is a natural cycle thats moderately documented, i believe we're currently messing with it to a significant degree. when it took the planet a few million years to condense carbon somewhere in the ground where it wouldn't cause much trouble, putting most of that back out again should have some short and long term consequences. not to mention all the methane the meat industry is adding.
Poll is deceptive, global warming has always been happening for as long as measurements have been recorded, the problem is at the/what pace which mankind has been accelerating it with the reliance on fossil fuels and the production of green house gasses. Both option 1 and 3 are correct in a sense, call it splitting hairs, perhaps OP isn't aware, but some might try and use that argument to deny the results of either section of the pole. Code: http://corporate.exxonmobil.com/en/current-issues/climate-policy/climate-perspectives/our-position (exxonmobils actual site) they are also being investigated for having publicly denied it for years but internally allegedly having been taking measurements and been certain of a competent model to measure it. They have released a letter about this, it was featured recently in a vice episode a bit ago. Code: https://www.statoil.com/en/how-and-why/climate-change.html There's more examples, I'm too tired to hunt them all down, but suffice to say that these companies do believe, now weather or not they want real change, evidence points to no.
You do know those articles are complete BS - right? Those articles are like this was: "Apple Juice will kill you because it has arsenic." Apples have always had arsenic in them (so do humans) but the levels are insignificant. Don't be duped by National Enquirer grade science and BS stories. ~~~~~ Becoming suddenly aware of something after Fukushima doesn't mean Fukushima has anything to do with it. Many of those wildlife -this/that- trends predate Fukushima, some by decades. The "Melting Starfish" thing is called Starfish Wasting Syndrome. It was first documented in 1972 on the US East coast and it's now known to be due to a virus. Birds, fish, plankton, sea mammals populations off the coasts of North America (both coasts) has been declining since the 1950's. Some bird species populations were down 90% from the 1950's levels by the 80's and 90's. Probable causes are air pollution, loss of habitat, general industrial pollution and removing unnatural food sources from the bottom of the food chain by cessation of dumping sewage and garbage (that bacteria feed on) into the ocean. If you artificially 'fertilize' an ecosystem for 100-200 years what happens to the artificially raised plant/animal populations when you stop? Correlation of two events only because the time lines loosely match is pure speculation, BS and bad science. (That's exactly what the CO2 alarmists did in their public hysteria program.) Those mysterious sores, bleeding gills and animal infant mortality rates might just as well have been caused by general pollution or biological epidemic (bacteria/virus/fungus). Lacking any actual study they are just throwing out wild speculative 'popular' guesses. Tie it to Fukushima somehow and you'll get more $$ for (or more hits on) your story. If I toss a teaspoon of table salt into the ocean I raised the salt content of the ocean. If I toss in 10 more my impact went up 10 times. - That is still trace. The impact is not significant. If I toss in 1000 more my impact went up 1000 times and it is still not significant. 1000+ times some trace amount can still be trace levels. OMFG! "X% of fish have 137-Cs." - If it doesn't say how much 137-Cs then it doesn't mean a thing. Guess what, 100% of humans are radioactive. (I am focusing on potassium-40 because in the body it behaves the same a 137-Cs and they emit the same kinds of radiation.) Humans contain traces of Potassium-40, Carbon-14, Rubidium-87, Lead-210, Tritium-(3H), Uranium-238, Radium-228, Radium-226, et al. If you weigh 70 Kg (~154 lb.) then you contain 4200-5250 Bq of 40-K, plus about 3080 Bq due to 14-C. Accounting for all trace isotopes if you weigh 70 kg (~154 lb.) there is roughly 8050-8400 Bq worth of radioactive material in your body. http://www.physics.isu.edu/radinf/natural.htm https://hps.org/publicinformation/ate/faqs/faqradbods.html In humans the biological half-life of Cesium (Cs) is 70 days. I imagine fish have a similar biological half-life for Cs so any RAD surveys over a year old are too dated to reflect current 137-Cs levels in fish. Several of those articles are calling 10.4 Bq/kg 137-Cs "very high levels" or "huge levels" in fish when in fact it's a very low level. BEER is more radioactive than those fish. The same fish probably have over 115 Bq/kg from naturally occurring trace isotopes (just like YOU do) that aren't even monitored. The following are just considering 40-K. There are also other trace isotopes in food. Some comparable to 40-K amounts. Measurements vary from one lab to another but they are usually in the same ballpark. Beer 14.4 Bq/kg 40-K. (More than those "huge levels" in fish.). Potatoes and Carrots 125-160 Bq/kg 40-K. Bananas, 130 Bq/kg 40-K. Red Meat 111 Bq/kg 40-K. More: http://www.philrutherford.com/K-40.pdf - Forget about serving sizes, use the 40-K Concentration in the next to last column ( pCi/g ). 1 pCi = 0.037 Bq -and- 0.037 Bq/g x 1000 g/kg = 37 Bq/kg (So 1 pCi/g ≈ 37 Bq/kg) The USA & Canadian dietary RDI for potassium is 4.7 g/day. If you meet it you are ingesting 141 Bq/day. The UK dietary RDA for potassium is 3.5 g/day. If you meet it you are ingesting 105 Bq/day. Things like this "300 tons of contaminated water" are meaningless without concentration numbers. All mineral based building materials (stone, mortar, brick, concrete, ceramic tile, sheetrock, metals, asphalt (roof shingles), tar (flat roofs)) are contaminated with trace amounts of naturally occurring radioactive isotopes. So is plain dirt. So is water. ~~ Next is what the alarmist types would do with that. = If you live in 1000 sq-ft 'stick' house on a 8" slab then you have about 50 tons of contaminated radioactive concrete in your house. = Sensational! - And they would be technically correct even though the radiation level is not significant. http://www.euronuclear.org/info/encyclopedia/r/radiation-exposure-building-mat.htm http://www.engineeringtoolbox.com/radiation-constants-d_150.html Similarly: "OMFG! An x-mile wide radioactive floating debris field from Fukushima!" Really? - People are that gullible? - You are aware that the bulk of the debris beached between 2013 and 2015? The post tsunami debris are from the entire country of Japan. A small part of it might be from Fukushima but heavy particulates do not float. They get washed off and sink. Irradiated/activated chunks of reactor plants are metal or concrete. They don't float either. Radiation was never expected to be a problem in the debris and it wasn't. Invasive non-native species hitching rides on the debris is a problem. They have found many. I saw one 2013 report where 165 non-native species had been found in the Japanese debris. - Not hearing much about that. - Where are all these alarmists when it comes to actual problems? https://www.rt.com/usa/fukushima-debris-island-texas-266/ http://www.sanctuarysimon.org/news/2015/01/noaa-tracks-tsunami-debris-updated-6712/ #28 is particularly annoying because it's BS and dead wrong and they try to pump it up by saying it comes from a Yale Professor. If you look him up he's professor of Social Science. The implication is that if the fuel gets too hot the fission could become self sustaining and go supercritical. Fukushima used NEGATIVE temperature and void coefficients so that is the EXACT OPPOSITE of what happens. With those negative coefficients when the temp goes up (or if the water boils off) the reaction rate goes down. The heat source is decay heat which has nothing at all to do with chain reactions. (In layman terms decay heat is the atom chunks left over from fission breaking down further because they are unstable.) The actual threat from overheating is that it could melt the fuel cells releasing contamination. Decay Heat burns out exponentially with time and the majority is short lived.. This being 6 years later I doubt decay heat melting anything is still a major concern. ~~~~~~ I'm not saying there is nothing to worry about, there is, but be wary of the media sensationalism, hype and plain stupidity. There is A LOT of that going on in those articles just as there are for CO2 scare stories. If there was a valid article in that lot of 28 in your link - I missed it. I'm a bit more concerned about the Mercury problem in fish than I am the 137-Cs problem. Mercury levels in the northern Pacific Ocean have risen about 30 percent over the past 20 years and are expected to rise 50 percent more by 2050 and, unlike 137-Cs, it does not decay away. It affects both salt and fresh water fish. In some cases even fish farm fish. Mercury in the food chain could also be responsible for some of those wildlife problems your alarmists blame on Fukushima, and it's been around a lot longer than 6 years. Mining, burning coal and agriculture are the major contributors to the Mercury problem. https://www.disabled-world.com/calculators-charts/fish-mercury.php http://www.consumerreports.org/cro/...at-higher-risk-for-mercury-exposure/index.htm ~~~~~~ ITRW matters limit my time here lately, but if enough people want I can collect some information to help with perspective. That might help people tell the BS from valid concerns/stories when it comes to things radioactive I know some people have trouble with the units used and what they really mean. Also with radiation things aren't always as simple as they seem. For example: 1 Bq exposure from one source can cause 20 times the biological dose (biological damage) as 1 Bq exposure from a different source. ~~~~~~ Solar/Wind power - Expensive for output. Not currently practical on a large enough scale Globally the infrastructure growth is not keeping up with demand growth. To replace existing nuclear/fossil infrastructure in a reasonable time (a few decades) would require heavy taxation because the private sector won't invest in it without govt subsidies.. -- The fix is $. Nuclear - Accidents/Incidents poison the environment. Safer plants can be built but it costs more money. -- The fix is $. Fossil Fuels - Operation poisons the environment. (The CO2 driving GW is BS. The other poisons are a problem.) Better emissions controls (better filters and so on) can be used but it costs more money. -- The fix is $. The general public doesn't want to put up the money - that is why things won't get fixed any time soon. ~~~~~~
What concerns me, There is very little reported on Strontium 90, which has a half life of almost 29 years. How much was produced, how much got into the atmosphere and how much leached into the pacific? Not much reported on the leakages of Plutonium-239 either, which is the worst of all radio active materials produced, with a half life of 24,110 years.
@PCBONEZ: Well there is this. http://gawker.com/queens-hottest-new-bar-is-the-most-radioactive-place-i-1713468471 Don't forget the Radium girls: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radium_Girls Also, take a look here http://queenscrap.blogspot.com/2007/03/toxic-sites-in-queens.html There are still a few sites in my neighborhood too. http://nag-brooklyn.org/toxicity-map/ There was a place called "Queens Radiological". It seems to be deliberately scrubbed from the internet, but the owner of that company went to hospitals and illegally collected radioactive waste from them and stored it there. He did it for many years until he was hospitalized for radiation poisioning (His fingers were falling off) I know this because a friend of mine was NYPD, and he was put on watch duty there. He was told not to go any closer than 2 blocks away.
A view from the frozen North: http://business.financialpost.com/f...l-welcome-americas-second-thoughts-on-climate and http://business.financialpost.com/f...what-they-say-but-they-want-your-money-anyway and http://business.financialpost.com/f...rbon-among-the-biggest-climate-experts-around I'm from the government....and I'm here to help http://business.financialpost.com/f...-really-to-blame-for-hydro-ones-soaring-rates ...T
I'm very concern about the environment. I like to work in green planet. But the global warming is being serious day by day
@Mayjoko: If you're talking about the post I made about Queens Radiological, It was greed. Plain and simple. He wasn't even licensed to pick it up, but because of his relationship with doctors, they just allowed him to do it. Sometimes, He'd just take the radioactive waste and carry it out in his pocket. There are protocols for safe movement and storage of radioactive materials. There are facilities designed for safe storage. He just took it and hoarded it. He paid with his life. Serves him right.
That is a dangerous technology! Look what it did with Scotty's accent. Seriously though, Good video MJ, Thanks.
I've somehow always missed this thread until now, so I'm only replying to the OP (as I still have over 50 pages of replies to go through lol). My apologies in advance if any / all of these points have already been covered (and if they have, they're probably covered a lot better than I am doing so here, in the space of 30 minutes lol). A couple of observations on the OP: 1) The Pre-cambrian era as seen in the second diagram, accounts for 89% of the Earth's entire 4.7+ billion year history. It also accounts for a time when there was not a lot of plant life, making use of photosynthesis to convert CO2 to O2. Of course, a lot of people don't know that many plans reverse the process at night, going from respiration (CO2 --> O2) to plant respiration (which oxidizes simple sugars, like glucose, to make CO2 and H2O and releases energy for use by cells). However, during daylight hours, the majority of photosynthetic activity tends to occur early in the morning. So, the age that is added to the smaller, 650M year old graphic, is inconsequential, in that it deals with a time when life wasn't abundantly present upon the surfaces of the Earth. 2) The commentary about setting yourself up to benefit financially applies to just about everything you can think of in the US, arguably the world's leading Capitalistic society, but in terms of specifics, well, I'll post a counter argument: Why was the development of solar energy, wind farming, electric cars 9as a replacement to traditional petroleum-based engines) and other such technologies hindered so much? Cost? or was it, in fact, that fossil fuel-producing nations had set themselves up to reap financial benefits from the export of fossil fuels, and thus there was a large campaign to maintain that fossil fuels were, in fact, the best solution around, and everything else was sub-par. The same applies to the effects that the now collectively called greenhouse gases are having on the atmosphere. 3) Regarding unknown variables, yes, there are many, many many variables, some of which we may not have even counted upon yet, such as our relative position within the Milky Way Galaxy Spiral arm, yet you cannot ignore the empirical evidence of things like the breaking up of ice flows and such at both poles. Studies have shown that an increase in the amount of water in our planet's oceans could occur in a much shorter time frame than what was once thought to be the case just 20 years ago. An excellent read on this is from this page: scienceblogs.com/gregladen/2015/07/27/catastrophic-sea-level-rise/ 4) The biggest thing to remember is that, even just 10 thousand years ago, we didn't have very many megalopolis on the continental seaboards as we do today. The danger from the effect of global warming affects more people now than ever before simply because there are more people on the planet than ever before. and if you look at all the data, even if these levels have been achieved before, they've never been (measurably) reached in such a very short time span, and we really don't know what will happen - but to stick around and say "Oh, well, it's happened before, it'll happen again, nothing we can do" means a threat to life and limb of more people today than it did 5K years ago, or 10K, or back when we were still barely walking. In short, the current increases in greenhouse gases, along with any heretofore undiscovered causes, are all leading up to a catastrophic event on a global scale, and as mentioned in the article I linked to, well, it may well be too late to prevent moderate damage to the planet in the next several centuries. But what we do know is that without the contribution of greenhouse gases by all the various activities that are directly generating these gases, the increase would not have been nearly as poignant and threatening. So, to answer the OP, I cannot agree (with a clear scientific mind) that we are causing global warming. However, I cannot disagree that we are definitely contributing to global warming at an abnormal rate.
@johnlgalt: Thank you for your sensible answer. I'll just add that our respective governments have a financial agenda, hyping up fear and enabling taxes and tariffs on businesses and the average American at large. Should we attempt to lower our carbon-footprint? Absolutely. But how? We can see that Nuclear in its' present form is unsafe and toxic. Hot-Fusion, even though it looks promising, is not ready. Currently, there are no continuous fusion reactors out there, either on the drawing board or in an experimental stage. Why? Because we do not understand how continuous fusion works. I've heard it suggested that we need to investigate proto-stars (i.e. stars being born) to understand the mechanism of continuous fusion; how the reaction starts up, and where it gets its' Hydrogen from. It must come from somewhere. Also, it may take some rethinking to understand the center of a star. It might not be what we think it is. It might be a spinning top made from superconducting Iron with metallic Hydrogen being the source from a subspace matrix (Now I'm starting to sound like a Trekkie... ) In which case, it would be very close to Absolute Zero. Sounds preposterous? Think about a Black-Hole. How preposterous does the concept even sound? Yet they exist. We may also find out that "Dark Matter" is actually Metallic Hydrogen. To Me, LENR makes the most sense right now. I won't call it "Cold Fusion", even though that's exactly what it is. Even though it was called "junk science", much more research has been done which has vindicated Fleischmann and Pons. MIT dropped the ball on the initial results and couldn't reproduce it. LENR is not a bulk effect; it's a surface effect. It's been found that deteurium loading of the surface of the palladium rod was what caused the experiment to be non-repeatable. It will more than likely require vapor deposition of palladium on a suitable substrate to allow the process to reliably work. Perhaps a layer only a few atoms thick. And that can be done. Look at the tremendous strides we've made with ICs in X-ray lithography and vapor deposition. Needless to say, more work needs to be done to understand the phenomena.