As much benzene, isobenzene, mercury, chromium and only god knows what else goes in some of their rivers, it's a suprise that the chinese people who drink the water are not going extinct..
Well, it gives the chinese army a job of sorts. Distributing bottled water..
I guess my "shark-like" appetite will just have to rely on Tuna....
Tuna, eh? You might want to rethink that. We've reduced the fish population by about 90% worldwide, so while tuna isn't yet endangered, I wouldn't count on it too much. Except for that horrible-tasting farm-raised garbage, perhaps.
Tuna, eh? You might want to rethink that. We've reduced the fish population by about 90% worldwide, so while tuna isn't yet endangered, I wouldn't count on it too much. Except for that horrible-tasting farm-raised garbage, perhaps.
Well I was actually making a pun on the whole tuna/dolphin mix up a few years ago....
But you are correct many large animals are making it to the endagered list now days. The more little ones that go the fast the larger ones will follow. That's just the way it works in an ecosystem.
Personally I absolutely hate Tuna. I feed it to my cats. As of yet they haven't started to put harmful ingredients into that "pet" food.
A steady diet of tuna is not a good idea. Pregnant women have been advised to limit tuna to one small portion every week or one larger portion every other week. It seems many of them contain large quantities of lead. you can blame the process of bio-accumulation for that.
We would do well to look for animals who are not the top predators. If we do that, we consume fewer toxins and we can keep the top predators from going extinct. There are lots of things they will eat that I'd rather not have around.....hawks and eagles and owls will eat mice and rats...I don't like rats...mice are ok....but not rats. (jk about the mice)
Vegetable and fruit production uses about 1/12 of the energy resources as meat production. Which means if your lost in the woods you'd be better off digging for roots and gathering berries nuts than fashioning a wabbit twap. If you think the Yangtzee is bad, apparantly their latest project the Three Gorges Dam (the worlds largest) will alter earths rotation once it's filled and lord knows what might happen should the dam fail (this is China after all)
Re:" Three Gorges Dam (the worlds largest) will alter earths rotation once it's filled "
Not trying to be obnoxious (well, any more than usual anyway) but I've got a tough time buying that. Yeah, it's a big dam, but it's a freaking ginormous world.
Could ya give us a source for that prediction? I'd kinda like to check it out a bit closer afore I sign up for their weekly newsbulletin.
If you think the water pollution in China must be bad, try breathing their AIR. It's the only place I've been where the air had taste. Uh, not a good taste either...
If you think the water pollution in China must be bad, try breathing their AIR. It's the only place I've been where the air had taste. Uh, not a good taste either...
I am not an expert on measuring air quality, but I heard an interview with a coach of a soccer team that was training in China for the Olympics. The team has had major breathing problems and is unable to really push themselves to the limits because they have problems breathing and their lungs start burning very easily.
The coach said something to the effect of that the pollution index in Washington D.C. is about 30 on average. When it gets to 60 or 70 in the U.S., they issue pollution warnings for people with asthma or other illnesses. When it gets to 90, they issue a warning to everyone. In Bejing for the time they were training, the average was around 170. They couldn't train for long, and when they did they had them drink fluids to generate phlegm so they could spit it out. The air is so horrible there that their mouths were full of some sort of grit from the pollution.
China really has it out for us and they've adopted a "let's be the richest even if we kill everyone on the planet including ourselves" point of view lately. I know some people that do business in China and have lived in China, and things are changing too rapidly for the Chinese people to keep up. I have a feeling that they will be involved with a major war within the next 10 years.
If you think the water pollution in China must be bad, try breathing their AIR. It's the only place I've been where the air had taste. Uh, not a good taste either...
So now we have to buy bottled air too?
I was just reading that soot emissions from China are detected in the NW US. Also the article suggested that soot was a likely cause of arctic warming, threatening our dear polar bears.
Though alarmists attribute that warming trend to increased atmospheric CO2, this argument seems easily batted aside by the
that there is little correlation between atmospheric CO2 and temperature in the Arctic region.
Could ongoing Arctic deposition of soot be a possibility? You might not think so because U.S., Canadian and Western European industries now operate under strict soot control regulations. But what about China? After all, it burns more coal than the U.S., EU and Japan combined – typically without the emissions controls of developed nations
Interesting rhino - I don't know if all those points raised are accurately portrayed AND play a role in climate changes, but the points raised were interesting and to my mind, worthy of further study, or at least paying attention to. Thanks for the article.
I was just reading that soot emissions from China are detected in the NW US. Also the article suggested that soot was a likely cause of arctic warming, threatening our dear polar bears.
Though alarmists attribute that warming trend to increased atmospheric CO2, this argument seems easily batted aside by the
that there is little correlation between atmospheric CO2 and temperature in the Arctic region.
Could ongoing Arctic deposition of soot be a possibility? You might not think so because U.S., Canadian and Western European industries now operate under strict soot control regulations. But what about China? After all, it burns more coal than the U.S., EU and Japan combined – typically without the emissions controls of developed nations
If you've followed the air filter craze that has popped up over the past few years, that could be a logical conclusion, unfortunately.
As far as soot being a cause of global warming, it certainly could be, but that doesn't exclude CO2 which has been proven to be a greenhouse gas. There is a combination of things that lead to climate change, there is no easy answer either way.
Also, despite the fact that China has the fastest growing amount of pollution, the U.S. still is the leading source of pollution. See here for statistics. That also doesn't take into factor of how many U.S. businesses operating overseas are responsible for pollution as well. I've personally seen the largest buildings I've ever seen in Mexico with many factories for U.S. companies that have made a whole lot of pollution over the years, and since the U.S. is China's biggest trading partner, we have a big impact on the amount of pollution they make as well by continuing to buy their products.
As far as soot being a cause of global warming, it certainly could be, but that doesn't exclude CO2 which has been proven to be a greenhouse gas. There is a combination of things that lead to climate change, there is no easy answer either way.
CO2 is proven to be a greenhouse gas? I think CO2 is such a tiny percentage of the atmosphere, that its direct role as a greenhouse gas is not the issue. It is believed that there is some yet only hypothesized role it plays as maybe a catalyst that might increase warming. Which is why the chart (from that nifty source of yours) about percent of GDP spent on pollution control was more interesting to me. It ranked the US number three. China was nowhere to be found.
It seems a little stretch to say we are responsible for China's pollution becasue we buy their products, but OK. It does seem there are many issues with China we will eventually have to confront. Lately it has been inferior quality control. But they also steel our technology and don't respect our patents. Their harm to the environment is just one problem.
I tried to find a copy of this report I guess this will have to do. As you can see the effect of the TRG project on the earths rotation is very minimal, hardly a fly fart in the grand scheme of things.
Title: Co-Seismic Energy Changes Induced by Earthquakes on a Rotating, Gravitating Earth
Author(s): Chao, Benjamin F.; Gross, Richard S.
Abstract: Besides operating its own energy budget, an earthquake acts as an agent transferring a much greater amount of energy among the Earth's rotation, elastic field, gravitational field and internal heat. We compute the co-seismic, globally integrated gravitational and rotation changes induced by some 20,000 large earthquakes that occurred in the last quarter century, according to Chao et al. (1995, GJI, 122,776- 783,784-789) and using the Harvard CMT catalog. The result confirms an extremely strong tendency for the earthquakes to decrease the global gravitational energy and to increase the spin energy. It is found that energy is being extracted from the Earth's gravitational field by the action of earthquakes at an average rate of about approx. 2 TeraW during the studied period, larger by far than the approx. 7 GigaW for the average rate of the earthquake-induced rotational energy increase and the approx. 5 GigaW for the seismic energy release. Based on energetics considerations and assuming the inability of the Earth to build up elastic energy continuously over time, it is argued that earthquakes, by converting gravitational energy, may make a significant contribution to the global hedflow.
NASA Center: Goddard Space Flight Center; Jet Propulsion Laboratory
Publication Date: 2003
Document Source: Other Sources
No Digital Version Available: Go to Tips On Ordering
Available Data: Abstract Only
Document ID: 20040040132
Meeting Information: 8-12 Dec. 2003; American Geophysical Union Meeting; San Francisco, CA; United States
Keywords: SEISMIC ENERGY EARTHQUAKES GRAVITATIONAL FIELDS EARTH ROTATION CATALOGS (PUBLICATIONS) ENERGY BUDGETS
Accessibility: Unclassified; No Copyright; Unlimited; Publicly available;
CO2 is proven to be a greenhouse gas? I think CO2 is such a tiny percentage of the atmosphere, that its direct role as a greenhouse gas is not the issue. It is believed that there is some yet only hypothesized role it plays as maybe a catalyst that might increase warming. Which is why the chart (from that nifty source of yours) about percent of GDP spent on pollution control was more interesting to me. It ranked the US number three. China was nowhere to be found.
It seems a little stretch to say we are responsible for China's pollution becasue we buy their products, but OK. It does seem there are many issues with China we will eventually have to confront. Lately it has been inferior quality control. But they also steel our technology and don't respect our patents. Their harm to the environment is just one problem.
Maybe Krysilis will help on the CO2 thingy.
I didn't know you could use sub tags here. That's interesting. As far as CO2 being a greenhouse gas, it is certainly one. The reason the Bush administration decided to stop calling it a pollutant is because it is a naturally occurring gas. The problem isn't that it's something unusual, but that we release much more than the natural processes of the Earth can absorb via plants, the ocean, etc. Testing the heat retaining properties of CO2 can be done in a lab and has been.
If you'd like some information on this topic in non-jargon check out National Geographic's page on air pollution. Basically, CO2 is the big source blamed for global warming, but there are plenty of other factors too. Still, if you want a quick scientific explanation of why CO2 is a greenhouse gas, I found this explanation to be decent:
Most of the light energy from the sun is emitted in wavelengths shorter than 4,000 nanometers (.000004 meters). The heat energy released from the earth, however, is released in wavelengths longer than 4,000 nanometers. Carbon dioxide doesn't absorb the energy from the sun, but it does absorb some of the heat energy released from the earth. When a molecule of carbon dioxide absorbs heat energy, it goes into an excited unstable state. It can become stable again by releasing the energy it absorbed. Some of the released energy will go back to the earth and some will go out into space.
So in effect, carbon dioxide lets the light energy in, but doesn't let all of the heat energy out, similar to a greenhouse.
Also, a good graph to look at to show a correlation between temperatures and CO2 levels is here, although it doesn't go back far, but I just wanted to make a point:
If you want to see how they are tied going further back, this graph is probably more useful:
It shows the relation between temperature and CO2 levels over time.
Given all the natural sources for global warming, I'm not convinced that we should blame ourselves for it. Yes, we contribute - but it's my belief that what we contribute to the CO2 load of the planet is very small.
Last I remember, the quantity of CO2 in the air is 0.05%- one half of 1%. Now look around at every living thing you can see on the land and in the upper layers of the ocean. We are all carbon based. All of the standing vegetation remains as "fixed" carbon ( remember photosynthesis???) And look at the quantity of it world wide...and all the animals which consume this stuff.
My point is that a little will go a long way over time! Yes it seems there is a trend toward getting warmer but we have only been keeping records for about 150 years so there is no way to know if we are way out of line or not. Meteorologists have measured the CO2 concentration in ice core samples in Antarcrica and have found some instances where it is very nearly as high as present day levels.
There is a corner of my brain where a seed of suspicion is growing. I wonder how much of "this" - is being frothed up for political gain!
As far as CO2 being a greenhouse gas, it is certainly one. The problem isn't that it's something unusual, but that we release much more than the natural processes of the Earth can absorb via plants, the ocean, etc.
I didn't say it was not a greenhouse gas, but that it was a very small portion; but I doubt its role is as significant as National Geographic claims. "Carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas, is the main pollutant that is warming Earth." That is certainly NOT known.
Also, a good graph to look at to show a correlation between temperatures and CO2 levels is here, although it doesn't go back far, but I just wanted to make a point:
NASA recently admitted their error . (a Y2K graphing glitch?)... 1998 was not the warmest year, 1934 was. And 5 of the ten warmest were before WW2. That would seem to change the right side of your scary graph.
If you want to see how they are tied going further back, this graph is probably more useful:It shows the relation between temperature and CO2 levels over time.
That graph shows how CO2 increase lags temperature increase, another indication that it results from warming, not that it is the cause. Oceans give up CO2 as they warm, but it takes time for them to warm.Here is a good toutube to watch ... this is just one of eight segments. They are all good.
Edited by rhino
quote: And I thought we were supposed learn the right way to care for the environment from communist countries like China and Cuba !
Yep! I've always felt that ecology is just one more example of socialism in disguise. "A spectre is haunting America--the spectre of extinction. All the powers of politically correct socialist America have entered into a holy alliance to exorcize this spectre." Let me translate...
"Humans are destroying the planet! We've got to do something...and us superior politically correct humans are supposed to be in charge of preventing the planet from being destroyed. This means we will be allowed to take any land, money, and energy sources for ourselves to save humanity from itself. Ain't we honorable?" Ironic that a socialist nation would be the first to be seen as a fraud.
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HAPe4me
maybe we can work on the extinction of that humanoid critter called "Republican"!
Alright, I was just kidding, guys
~HAP
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Mister P-Mosh
They seem to be working on it themselves. ;-)
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Eyesopen
This causes me great sadness. I am fairly certain that it doesn't make God very happy either.
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Sudo
Eyesopen,
Re:"This causes me great sadness. I am fairly certain that it doesn't make God very happy either."
Cheer up! Hap and P-mosh were just kidding! Republicans aren't going extinct! There now.. don't you feel better?
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Ham
As much benzene, isobenzene, mercury, chromium and only god knows what else goes in some of their rivers, it's a suprise that the chinese people who drink the water are not going extinct..
Well, it gives the chinese army a job of sorts. Distributing bottled water..
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Eyesopen
Yes! That gives me great joy!
I guess my "shark-like" appetite will just have to rely on Tuna....
Edited by EyesopenLink to comment
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Mister P-Mosh
Tuna, eh? You might want to rethink that. We've reduced the fish population by about 90% worldwide, so while tuna isn't yet endangered, I wouldn't count on it too much. Except for that horrible-tasting farm-raised garbage, perhaps.
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Eyesopen
Well I was actually making a pun on the whole tuna/dolphin mix up a few years ago....
But you are correct many large animals are making it to the endagered list now days. The more little ones that go the fast the larger ones will follow. That's just the way it works in an ecosystem.
Personally I absolutely hate Tuna. I feed it to my cats. As of yet they haven't started to put harmful ingredients into that "pet" food.
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krys
A steady diet of tuna is not a good idea. Pregnant women have been advised to limit tuna to one small portion every week or one larger portion every other week. It seems many of them contain large quantities of lead. you can blame the process of bio-accumulation for that.
We would do well to look for animals who are not the top predators. If we do that, we consume fewer toxins and we can keep the top predators from going extinct. There are lots of things they will eat that I'd rather not have around.....hawks and eagles and owls will eat mice and rats...I don't like rats...mice are ok....but not rats. (jk about the mice)
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herbiejuan
Vegetable and fruit production uses about 1/12 of the energy resources as meat production. Which means if your lost in the woods you'd be better off digging for roots and gathering berries nuts than fashioning a wabbit twap. If you think the Yangtzee is bad, apparantly their latest project the Three Gorges Dam (the worlds largest) will alter earths rotation once it's filled and lord knows what might happen should the dam fail (this is China after all)
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TOMMYZ
And I thought we were supposed learn the right way to care for the environment from communist countries like China and Cuba !
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George Aar
Herbiejuan,
Re:" Three Gorges Dam (the worlds largest) will alter earths rotation once it's filled "
Not trying to be obnoxious (well, any more than usual anyway) but I've got a tough time buying that. Yeah, it's a big dam, but it's a freaking ginormous world.
Could ya give us a source for that prediction? I'd kinda like to check it out a bit closer afore I sign up for their weekly newsbulletin.
If you think the water pollution in China must be bad, try breathing their AIR. It's the only place I've been where the air had taste. Uh, not a good taste either...
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krys
If it is going to be that large a body of water, it will have a tide.
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Mister P-Mosh
I am not an expert on measuring air quality, but I heard an interview with a coach of a soccer team that was training in China for the Olympics. The team has had major breathing problems and is unable to really push themselves to the limits because they have problems breathing and their lungs start burning very easily.
The coach said something to the effect of that the pollution index in Washington D.C. is about 30 on average. When it gets to 60 or 70 in the U.S., they issue pollution warnings for people with asthma or other illnesses. When it gets to 90, they issue a warning to everyone. In Bejing for the time they were training, the average was around 170. They couldn't train for long, and when they did they had them drink fluids to generate phlegm so they could spit it out. The air is so horrible there that their mouths were full of some sort of grit from the pollution.
China really has it out for us and they've adopted a "let's be the richest even if we kill everyone on the planet including ourselves" point of view lately. I know some people that do business in China and have lived in China, and things are changing too rapidly for the Chinese people to keep up. I have a feeling that they will be involved with a major war within the next 10 years.
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rhino
So now we have to buy bottled air too?
I was just reading that soot emissions from China are detected in the NW US. Also the article suggested that soot was a likely cause of arctic warming, threatening our dear polar bears.
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krys
Interesting rhino - I don't know if all those points raised are accurately portrayed AND play a role in climate changes, but the points raised were interesting and to my mind, worthy of further study, or at least paying attention to. Thanks for the article.
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Mister P-Mosh
If you've followed the air filter craze that has popped up over the past few years, that could be a logical conclusion, unfortunately.
As far as soot being a cause of global warming, it certainly could be, but that doesn't exclude CO2 which has been proven to be a greenhouse gas. There is a combination of things that lead to climate change, there is no easy answer either way.
Also, despite the fact that China has the fastest growing amount of pollution, the U.S. still is the leading source of pollution. See here for statistics. That also doesn't take into factor of how many U.S. businesses operating overseas are responsible for pollution as well. I've personally seen the largest buildings I've ever seen in Mexico with many factories for U.S. companies that have made a whole lot of pollution over the years, and since the U.S. is China's biggest trading partner, we have a big impact on the amount of pollution they make as well by continuing to buy their products.
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rhino
CO2 is proven to be a greenhouse gas? I think CO2 is such a tiny percentage of the atmosphere, that its direct role as a greenhouse gas is not the issue. It is believed that there is some yet only hypothesized role it plays as maybe a catalyst that might increase warming. Which is why the chart (from that nifty source of yours) about percent of GDP spent on pollution control was more interesting to me. It ranked the US number three. China was nowhere to be found.
It seems a little stretch to say we are responsible for China's pollution becasue we buy their products, but OK. It does seem there are many issues with China we will eventually have to confront. Lately it has been inferior quality control. But they also steel our technology and don't respect our patents. Their harm to the environment is just one problem.
Maybe Krysilis will help on the CO2 thingy.
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excathedra
i'm going to read something else.... this doesn't sound good....
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herbiejuan
I tried to find a copy of this report I guess this will have to do. As you can see the effect of the TRG project on the earths rotation is very minimal, hardly a fly fart in the grand scheme of things.
http://www.newsday.com/news/nationworld/ba...0,5860508.story
Title: Co-Seismic Energy Changes Induced by Earthquakes on a Rotating, Gravitating Earth
Author(s): Chao, Benjamin F.; Gross, Richard S.
Abstract: Besides operating its own energy budget, an earthquake acts as an agent transferring a much greater amount of energy among the Earth's rotation, elastic field, gravitational field and internal heat. We compute the co-seismic, globally integrated gravitational and rotation changes induced by some 20,000 large earthquakes that occurred in the last quarter century, according to Chao et al. (1995, GJI, 122,776- 783,784-789) and using the Harvard CMT catalog. The result confirms an extremely strong tendency for the earthquakes to decrease the global gravitational energy and to increase the spin energy. It is found that energy is being extracted from the Earth's gravitational field by the action of earthquakes at an average rate of about approx. 2 TeraW during the studied period, larger by far than the approx. 7 GigaW for the average rate of the earthquake-induced rotational energy increase and the approx. 5 GigaW for the seismic energy release. Based on energetics considerations and assuming the inability of the Earth to build up elastic energy continuously over time, it is argued that earthquakes, by converting gravitational energy, may make a significant contribution to the global hedflow.
NASA Center: Goddard Space Flight Center; Jet Propulsion Laboratory
Publication Date: 2003
Document Source: Other Sources
No Digital Version Available: Go to Tips On Ordering
Available Data: Abstract Only
Document ID: 20040040132
Meeting Information: 8-12 Dec. 2003; American Geophysical Union Meeting; San Francisco, CA; United States
Keywords: SEISMIC ENERGY EARTHQUAKES GRAVITATIONAL FIELDS EARTH ROTATION CATALOGS (PUBLICATIONS) ENERGY BUDGETS
Accessibility: Unclassified; No Copyright; Unlimited; Publicly available;
Updated/Added to NTRS: 2004-11-03
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Mister P-Mosh
I didn't know you could use sub tags here. That's interesting. As far as CO2 being a greenhouse gas, it is certainly one. The reason the Bush administration decided to stop calling it a pollutant is because it is a naturally occurring gas. The problem isn't that it's something unusual, but that we release much more than the natural processes of the Earth can absorb via plants, the ocean, etc. Testing the heat retaining properties of CO2 can be done in a lab and has been.
If you'd like some information on this topic in non-jargon check out National Geographic's page on air pollution. Basically, CO2 is the big source blamed for global warming, but there are plenty of other factors too. Still, if you want a quick scientific explanation of why CO2 is a greenhouse gas, I found this explanation to be decent:
Also, a good graph to look at to show a correlation between temperatures and CO2 levels is here, although it doesn't go back far, but I just wanted to make a point:
If you want to see how they are tied going further back, this graph is probably more useful:
It shows the relation between temperature and CO2 levels over time.
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krys
Mister-P did a good job there.
Given all the natural sources for global warming, I'm not convinced that we should blame ourselves for it. Yes, we contribute - but it's my belief that what we contribute to the CO2 load of the planet is very small.
Last I remember, the quantity of CO2 in the air is 0.05%- one half of 1%. Now look around at every living thing you can see on the land and in the upper layers of the ocean. We are all carbon based. All of the standing vegetation remains as "fixed" carbon ( remember photosynthesis???) And look at the quantity of it world wide...and all the animals which consume this stuff.
My point is that a little will go a long way over time! Yes it seems there is a trend toward getting warmer but we have only been keeping records for about 150 years so there is no way to know if we are way out of line or not. Meteorologists have measured the CO2 concentration in ice core samples in Antarcrica and have found some instances where it is very nearly as high as present day levels.
There is a corner of my brain where a seed of suspicion is growing. I wonder how much of "this" - is being frothed up for political gain!
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rhino
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johniam
quote: And I thought we were supposed learn the right way to care for the environment from communist countries like China and Cuba !
Yep! I've always felt that ecology is just one more example of socialism in disguise. "A spectre is haunting America--the spectre of extinction. All the powers of politically correct socialist America have entered into a holy alliance to exorcize this spectre." Let me translate...
"Humans are destroying the planet! We've got to do something...and us superior politically correct humans are supposed to be in charge of preventing the planet from being destroyed. This means we will be allowed to take any land, money, and energy sources for ourselves to save humanity from itself. Ain't we honorable?" Ironic that a socialist nation would be the first to be seen as a fraud.
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