Yeah...No. Per multiple news sources: When the iceberg does break free and sail into the Southern Ocean, it should not contribute to sea level rise, since it's already on the water. But if the full Larsen C ice shelf collapses, the land-based glaciers that it is holding back could have a significant impact on sea level.
Largest Ice berg in modern times is about to break from Antarctica. This berg alone can raise the sea level 3.9 inches.
Yeah...No. Per multiple news sources: When the iceberg does break free and sail into the Southern Ocean, it should not contribute to sea level rise, since it's already on the water. But if the full Larsen C ice shelf collapses, the land-based glaciers that it is holding back could have a significant impact on sea level.
Largest Ice berg in modern times is about to break from Antarctica. This berg alone can raise the sea level 3.9 inches. More than all increases in the last twenty years. Current teenagers will see the results of the heavy warming trend. Cities under water. Mass extinction. The history books will list the current Republicans in congress as some of the greatest fools in history.
I know this was discussed in a thread a couple months back (dont recall which), and poo pooed by some, but here's another take...like the discussion on the alternatives. But if industry isnt forced to absorb the cost of the pollution, what incentive do they have to convert to better alternatives?
Dirty laundry: Are your clothes polluting the ocean?
By Victoria GillScience reporter, BBC News
6 July 2017
In an indoor "Manchester-drizzle-simulating" rain room at the University of Leeds, and in a laundry lab in Plymouth, research is revealing the unexpected environmental cost of the very clothes on our backs.
"Not many people know that lots of our clothes are made of plastic," says Imogen Napper, a PhD student at Plymouth University, "polyester, acrylic."
Ms Napper and Prof Richard Thompson study marine microplastics - fragments and fibres found in the ocean surface, the deep sea and the marine food chain.
And in a recent lab study, they found that polyester and acrylic clothing shed thousands of plastic fibres each time it was washed- sending another source of plastic pollution down the drain and, eventually, into the ocean.
"My friends always make fun of me because they think of marine biology as such a sexy science - it's all turtles, hot countries and bikinis," says Ms Napper.
"But I've been spending hours washing clothes and counting the fibres."
It might not be exotic, but this painstaking "laundry-science" has revealed that an average UK washing load - 6kg (13lb) of fabric - can release:
I don't recall if I was one of those poo pooing the impact, but I'd still be that this is pretty inconsequential vs. the other pollutants we throw out. Sure it adds up over a billion or two people, but so does all the other plastic we toss away. That this is smaller pieces certainly would make it harder to clean up, but we aren't really cleaning up much of the big stuff yet. So: bad-yeah, as bad as everything else we do-maybe, but let's knock off a couple of the bigger hitters before spending a lot of resource on keeping our clothes dirty (good news, Hipsters are already refusing to wash their jeans).
I know this was discussed in a thread a couple months back (dont recall which), and poo pooed by some, but here's another take...like the discussion on the alternatives. But if industry isnt forced to absorb the cost of the pollution, what incentive do they have to convert to better alternatives?
Dirty laundry: Are your clothes polluting the ocean?
By Victoria GillScience reporter, BBC News
6 July 2017
In an indoor "Manchester-drizzle-simulating" rain room at the University of Leeds, and in a laundry lab in Plymouth, research is revealing the unexpected environmental cost of the very clothes on our backs.
"Not many people know that lots of our clothes are made of plastic," says Imogen Napper, a PhD student at Plymouth University, "polyester, acrylic."
Ms Napper and Prof Richard Thompson study marine microplastics - fragments and fibres found in the ocean surface, the deep sea and the marine food chain.
And in a recent lab study, they found that polyester and acrylic clothing shed thousands of plastic fibres each time it was washed- sending another source of plastic pollution down the drain and, eventually, into the ocean.
"My friends always make fun of me because they think of marine biology as such a sexy science - it's all turtles, hot countries and bikinis," says Ms Napper.
"But I've been spending hours washing clothes and counting the fibres."
It might not be exotic, but this painstaking "laundry-science" has revealed that an average UK washing load - 6kg (13lb) of fabric - can release:
I've always said that Green energy is about greenbacks. When we installed a very large cooling system at our old building, I spent an extra $250,000 on super efficient chillers. We got a rebate from the energy company that covered about half of that, and I could show a savings of about $40K a year in energy costs right away and more as energy costs rise in the future. When I showed the project to the board of directors I didn't say anything about green tech, I said "4 year ROI on a piece of equipment with a 20 year life, we'll make an extra million dollars by spending $125K now". There wasn't even a discussion about cheaper alternatives.
edit: I'm much more concerned about a sudden release of methane as the permafrost heats up. It looks like the PT extinction was caused by a runaway greenhouse effect as the Siberian Traps erupted releasing vast amounts of methane. CO2 levels went up by as much as 2000 ppm. We gotta stop burning fossil fuels so we don't accidentally cause the same thing to happen again.
edit edit: though the whole thing is kind of complicated. When North America and South America joined, this apparently ramped up the Gulf Stream, leading to more heat pumped northwards, which counter-intuitively, led to greater precipitation and the formation of the Greenland icecap. The same thing might be happening today in Antarctica. Global warming leading to more precipitation in Antarctica. Kind of like a self-correcting climate mechanism.
Fingers crossed. But, given the dramatic rate of warming, it doesn't look like we can rely on this.
In a sweeping synthesis of global data, the United Nations Environment Programme has intensively catalogued environmental assaults across the six different major regions of the globe. And it finds that, overall, damage to the planet is happening more rapidly than before, through slights ranging from air pollution, to the proliferation of human and toxic waste, to water scarcity and climate change.
“The kinds of problems are recognizable. They’re just happening much more frequently,” said Jacqueline McGlade, UNEP’s chief scientist. The agency is calling it “the most authoritative study that UNEP has ever published on the state of the global environment.” The report (consisting of six large regional studies) was released late last week, leading into the second United Nations Environment Assembly, which kicked off Monday in Nairobi.
“The world shares a host of common environmental threats that are rapidly intensifying in many parts of the world,” said a UNEP news release accompanying the report’s release.
The root causes, McGlade said, basically boil down to two major systemic occurrences with multiple ramifying consequences: a changing climate and an intense trend toward greater urbanization. The warming of the planet threatens ecosystems and the humans who depend on them for food, water and services, even as the push into expanding cities clusters people in more closely, creating water shortages, waste disposal problems, more deleterious contacts with wildlife and more.
The study examined the globe by dividing it into six regions: North America, Latin American and the Caribbean, Africa, West Asia, Asia and the Pacific, and Europe. And while it found many differences, it also found key common themes. One was worsening air pollution problems, driven, again, by large populations and the swelling of urban cores. Another was widespread water scarcity problems, exacerbated by climate change but also greater demand in growing cities.
“Every region, regardless of how it might be perceived from the outside, is suffering from water scarcity,” McGlade said.
Major international bodies, the World Bank and the World Health Organization, have recently sounded very similar notes, with the former suggesting that water scarcity may be one of the most sweeping impacts of a changing climate, even as the global health body documented a worsening of deadly air pollution trends across global cities. The latter naturally goes hand in hand with increasing urbanization, which pushes more polluting vehicles into cities even as it also increases energy demand — both of which feed the air pollution problem. (...)
