Sunday, August 20, 2017

Respecting the biotic content of the USA is not an option.

This is from the CIA World Fact Book:

Environment - current issues:

large emitter of carbon dioxide from the burning of fossil fuels; air pollution resulting in acid rain in both the US and Canada; water pollution from runoff of pesticides and fertilizers; limited natural freshwater resources in much of the western part of the country require careful management; desertification

Environment - international agreement

party to: Air Pollution, Air Pollution-Nitrogen Oxides, Antarctic-Environmental Protocol, Antarctic-Marine Living Resources, Antarctic Seals, Antarctic Treaty, Climate Change, Desertification, Endangered Species, Environmental Modification, Marine Dumping, Marine Life Conservation, Ozone Layer Protection, Ship Pollution, Tropical Timber 83, Tropical Timber 94, Wetlands, Whaling

signed, but not ratified: Air Pollution-Persistent Organic Pollutants, Air Pollution-Volatile Organic Compounds, Biodiversity, Climate Change-Kyoto Protocol, Hazardous Wastes

Geography - note:

world's third-largest country by size (after Russia and Canada) and by population (after China and India); Denali (Mt. McKinley) is the highest point in North America and Death Valley the lowest point on the continent

The surface of Earth has to be respected. The urbanization that is occurring in the USA is at a record pace and is simply wrong. There is a natural progression to cities and settling into real estate. Urban sprawl is an enemy.

The population of the world is not slowing. Now there is talk about "The Forever Pill." (click here) It is developed for astronauts and child cancer victims. The trials are set to begin in Boston. 

There is a way to responsibly build a city to take care of people and growing up in height is one of them. Pouring concrete cannot simply happen because there is an empty area of land in the forest near a road. Sooner or later, but, it should be sooner Americans have to address the country's responsible use of land.

Deforestation has to end. There are far more responsible methods of forest management. Wildlife management has to be a part of it to insure land preservation.

Mountain top removal has to end. The forest is gone, the rock heats and the effect is no different than a "heat island" to the area. The pollution affiliated with mountain top removal is worse than "Third World."

The contractors engaged in mountain top removal is SUPPOSE to save and store the land and biotic content their mining disturbs. The idea, by the industry, is to reconstruct the forest. Really? The industry has to employ Conservation Biologists to manage these restoration supplies. The mountain ecological system should begin as soon as possible. A return of forests to these lands are vital to returning normal climate to the region.

STOP POURING CONCRETE and focus on life closer to work. Places of work should be closer to the city. City life provides far more efficient use of energy and transportation. Sincere city dwellers do well without a personal car. Vacations into the glorious lands of the USA is a true treasure to the memories of a family.

Protect and extend state and national parks. There is such a thing as a "City Forest." Where there are streams and wetlands, forests can do well. Forests cool the troposphere and provide oxygen.

STOP BUILDING ROADS and MALLS for the sake of crony politics. Refurbish and renovate existing buildings and give them a second life. 

Cooling Earth to make it function in a real way to protect human life and provide quality of life is imperative. Human beings can't live without a planet. Look for and get involved in protecting the natural world and put away the cement mixers.

This is from 2010. The forests are not returning without a sincere effort.

7 April 2010
By Jeremy Hance

Urbanization (click here) could significantly reduce forest cover in the South. Photo credit: Larry Korhnak, courtesy of Interface South.

The United States’ Eastern forests (click here) have suffered a “substantial and sustained net loss” over the past few decades, according to a detailed study appearing in BioScience. From 1973 to 2000, Eastern have declined by 4.1 percent or 3.7 million hectares. Deforestation occurred in all Eastern regions, but the loss was most concentrated in the southeastern plains.

The loss overturns a trend of increasing forest that was sustained for about half a century. During the 19th Century, much of the Eastern forests were felled for agriculture, but that trend turned around by 1920 with forests making a comeback. While the report found that reforestation of abandoned fields and pastures continues in some places, overall forests lost out.

Forests are being lost largely to spreading suburbs and the timber industry. Mountaintop mining, a hot-button issue in the region, has also contributed significantly to forest loss: more than 420,000 hectares of forest (just over 10 percent of the total) have been lost in the Appalachian highlands due to the practice of blowing up mountain peaks for coal extraction. Recently a group of experts called on the Obama Administration to ban mountaintop removal due to environmental and human impacts.

Researchers have theorized that once forests reached a maximum point of recovery, forest cover would stabilize and plateau for the foreseeable future. However, according to the study’s authors these new findings prove otherwise, which, they write, “has important implications for sustainability, future carbon sequestration, and biodiversity.”                   

Humans have changed the way the world works. Now they have to change the way they think about it, too

May 26, 2011

THE Earth is a big thing; (click here) if you divided it up evenly among its 7 billion inhabitants, they would get almost 1 trillion tonnes each. To think that the workings of so vast an entity could be lastingly changed by a species that has been scampering across its surface for less than 1% of 1% of its history seems, on the face of it, absurd. But it is not. Humans have become a force of nature reshaping the planet on a geological scale—but at a far-faster-than-geological speed.

A single engineering project, the Syncrude mine in the Athabasca tar sands, involves moving 30 billion tonnes of earth—twice the amount of sediment that flows down all the rivers in the world in a year. That sediment flow itself, meanwhile, is shrinking; almost 50,000 large dams have over the past half- century cut the flow by nearly a fifth. That is one reason why the Earth's deltas, home to hundreds of millions of people, are eroding away faster than they can be replenished.

Geologists care about sediments, hammering away at them to uncover what they have to say about the past—especially the huge spans of time as the Earth passes from one geological period to another. In the same spirit they look at the distribution of fossils, at the traces of glaciers and sea-level rises, and at other tokens of the forces that have shaped the planet. Now a number of these scientists are arguing that future geologists observing this moment in the Earth's progress will conclude that something very odd was going on.

The carbon cycle (and the global warming debate) is part of this change. So too is the nitrogen cycle, which converts pure nitrogen from the air into useful chemicals, and which mankind has helped speed up by over 150%. They and a host of other previously natural processes have been interrupted, refashioned and, most of all, accelerated (see article). Scientists are increasingly using a new name for this new period. Rather than placing us still in the Holocene, a peculiarly stable era that began only around 10,000 years ago, the geologists say we are already living in the Anthropocene: the age of man....

Because it has a name, doesn't make it okay.
Sep 15, 2015

You have likely heard phrases (click here) such as, “Welcome to the Anthropocene.” More and more we hear the term “anthropocene” used to describe the current epoch of our planet when humankind has had a profound impact on Earth. This month, the U.S. Geological Survey has released a report and dataset on anthropogenic land use trends in the U.S. between 1974 and 2012.

The 60-m raster datasets cover the conterminous U.S. for five time periods: 1974, 1982, 1992, 2002, and 2012. Lead author James Falcone started with the 2011 Landsat-based National Land Cover Dataset (recoded to land uses) and then mapped backward in time how those land uses had changed. The dataset focuses on how humans use the land (which correlates with the land’s economic function). These datasets were compiled using an impressively broad array of existing data sources including:

+ NLCD 2011, April 2014 version, 30 meters (m) (Jin and others, 2013) **Landsat-based**
+ USDA Census of Agriculture, 1974–2012, State and county-level data (U.S. Department of Agriculture, 2014a)
+ U.S. Census 2010 hden, provided by GeoLytics Inc., block group scale (GeoLytics, 2012)
+ Spatial Analysis for Conservation and Sustainability (SILVIS) Lab housing unit density, 1970–2000, partial block group scale (Hammer and others, 2004)
+ History Database of the Global Environment (HYDE) 3.1 1970–2005 decadal cropland and pasture 9-km data (History Database of the Global Environment, 2013)...

No excuse.

Welcome (click here) to the NASA Land-Cover and Land-Use Change (LCLUC) Program website. LCLUC is an interdisciplinary science program in the Earth Science Division of the Science Mission Directorate. LCLUC is part of the Carbon Cycle and Ecosystems Focus Area with links to some programs in other Focus Areas.

Research (click here)

My research interests lie in the applications of geospatial technologies including remote sensing, GIS, geovisualization, spatial analytic tools, and integrated assessment modeling to understanding the problems of environmental change and their potential solutions for a sustainable environment. Currently, I am working in research areas concerning Sustainability including:

1. Urban mapping and modeling
2. Urban heat island and its environmental impacts
3. High spatiotemporal energy use and emissions inventory
4. Global energy demand and supply
5. Water-Energy Nexus
6. Climate change

NOAA Office of Coastal Management (click here)

Use this quick reference to get descriptions for the land cover classes used within NOAA's regional coastal land cover maps (also known as C-CAP). These classes are important indicators of coastal ecosystems, and these land cover data are consistently and accurately derived primarily through remote-sensing technology.

Well planned land use provides for carbon sinks.

Kyoto Protocol

     Annex A

          Greenhouse Gases

               Sectors/Sources Categories

                    Agriculture

                         Other - Land use

11 April 2014, Rome - New FAO (click here) estimates of greenhouse gas data show that emissions from agriculture, forestry and fisheries have nearly doubled over the past fifty years and could increase an additional 30 percent by 2050, without greater efforts to reduce them.

This is the first time that FAO has released its own global estimates of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from agriculture, forestry and other land use (AFOLU),...

...Meanwhile, net GHG emissions due to land use change and deforestation registered a nearly 10 percent decrease over the 2001-2010 period, averaging some 3 billion tonnes CO2 eq/yr over the decade. This was the result of reduced levels of deforestation and increases in the amount of atmospheric carbon being sequestered in many countries. 

Averaged over the 2001-2010 period, agriculture, forestry and other land uses (AFOLU) emissions break down as follows:
  • 5 billion tonnes CO2 eq/yr from crop and livestock production
  • 4 billion tonnes CO2 eq/yr due to net forest conversion to other lands (a proxy for deforestation)
  • 1 billion tonnes CO2 eq/yr from degraded peatlands
  • 0.2 billion tonnes CO2 eq/yr by biomass fires
In addition to these emissions, some two billion tonnes CO2 eq/yr were removed from the atmosphere during the same time frame as a result of carbon sequestration in forest sinks....
...In 2011,  44 percent of agriculture-related GHG outputs occurred in Asia, followed by the Americas (25%), Africa (15%),  Europe (12%), and Oceania (4%), according to FAO's data. This regional distribution was fairly constant over the last decade. In 1990 however, Asia's contribution to the global total (38%) was smaller than at present, while Europe's was much larger (21%)....
...These emissions (energy, not agriculture) exceeded 785 million tonnes of CO2 eq. in 2010, having increased by 75 percent since 1990...

Don't let the United States of America become the new Third World! No backsliding.

August 3, 2017
By Timothy Cama

The Trump administration (click here) is reversing course on its plan to delay by one year enforcement of the Obama administration’s ozone pollution regulation.

The reversal, announced late Wednesday, came a day after 15 states and the District of Columbia sued the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), saying the delay exceeded the agency’s authority under the Clean Air Act. Environmental groups filed a similar lawsuit last month.

In a statement announcing the decision, the EPA emphasized that it will continue to work with states on implementing the ozone rule, which could include more targeted enforcement delays....

The favorite word in Republican non-compliance is UNATTAINABLE. Unattainable means the state does not want to INVEST in the infrastructure of it's companies to improve emissions while protecting health and jobs. "Unattainable" is a lie and an excuse to prevent investment in eliminating and containing emissions.

Foxconn is facing the same challenges in China and there is no reason to back down from enforcement of the new rules. China is serious about it's people, it's developing and growing Middle Class. 

August 5, 2013
By Tiffany Kaiser

Apple’s suppliers in China (click here) are under the microscope once again, but not for employee working conditions -- rather, for environmental pollution.

Chinese electronics suppliers Foxconn Technology Group and UniMicron Technology Corp. have been criticized by Chinese environmental activist Ma Jun and five nonprofit environmental organizations for polluting nearby rivers with factory chemicals.

According to the environmental groups, water with a black-green color and a chemical odor have been dumped from both Foxconn and UniMicron plants into the Huangcangjing and Hanputang rivers -- which feed into the Yangtze and Huangpu rivers. “Sudsy” water is dumped from Foxconn twice a day....

Foxconn claims it is in compliance in China. 

Well, good. 

It can now be in compliance in the USA, too.

Ground Ozone is a problem with a Foxconn plant in Kenosha, Wisconsin.

Just keeping them honest. This is a real opportunity for Foxconn in many ways. It will have American workers and it can build this plant to combat emissions. Foxconn has an opportunity to become a world class company mired in the best possible emissions record.

No government, in the USA or otherwise, at the local, state or federal level should be allowing more emissions. The time is now to MODERNIZE the companies and their future.

July 25, 2017
By Patrick Marley, Rick Romell and Lee Bergquist

Madison – A plan to bring a massive Foxconn Technology Group (click here) plant to Wisconsin could cost $1 billion to $3 billion in local, state and federal incentives over coming years — a stunning sum for a project that backers say could transform the state’s economy.

An incentive package of that size would be unlike anything Wisconsin has offered in the past and would require approval from state lawmakers. Senate Majority Leader Scott Fitzgerald (R-Juneau) has said he hoped to get bipartisan support for the package.

Fitzgerald did not provide details on the terms of the package, but sources said it would likely top $1 billion and could close in on $3 billion....

...Reeling in the company would take big bucks. One source said Wisconsin's offer would top $1 billion. Three others said it would be closer to $3 billion. A fifth source said the deal at one point was expected to be worth $3 billion but had come down since then.

Two of those citing the $3 billion price tag said the package would be paid over 15 years....

...Some areas in southeastern Wisconsin would exceed that limit, which might require manufacturers to add more pollution controls, or pay other companies for pollution credits that they earned from shutting down or reducing emissions.

Wisconsin official have raised objections to the tougher standards. Attorney General Brad Schimel joined a group of other like-minded states in a federal lawsuit challenging the new limits.

In the suit, the states said the new restrictions would pose harmful economic consequences on companies operating in areas with a history of ozone levels above 70 parts per billion. The states also said that the law ignores the role of pollution transported from other states.

Also, Trump has ordered EPA officials to delay implementation of the ozone rules.  And last week the U.S. House voted to slow the regulatory timeline for compliance.

Ozone is created when heat and sunlight mix with two types of air pollution — nitrogen oxides and volatile organic compounds. Exposure to elevated levels of ozone can lead to reduced lung function and aggravate asthma and other lung diseases.

Tyson Cook, who tracks air emissions for the Clean Wisconsin, said his group — for now — is not commenting on the Foxconn situation.

But he said the public should not lose sight of the fact that the rules were issued after a federal scientific panel determined ozone levels are currently too high and exacerbate health issues.

Cook said that asthma affects about 1 in 13 children in the state. He noted the Department of Health Services has estimated asthma costs at more than $100 million a year.                   

Years 1979 to 2013 shows some success.

A report from Yale. Immense caution was taken in the Montreal Protocol for monitoring to the success of the protocol. Thirty years on, reassessment is needed.

August 14, 2017
By Fred Pearce

...But 30 years on, (click here) some atmospheric chemists are not so sure. The healing is proving painfully slow. And new discoveries about chemicals not covered by the protocol are raising fears that full recovery could be postponed into the 22nd century – or possibly even prevented altogether.

In mid-September, the United Nations is celebrating the protocol’s 30th anniversary. It will declare that “we are all ozone heroes.” But are we patting ourselves on the back a bit too soon?...

...But in the past five years, evidence has emerged that potential ozone-eating compounds can reach the ozone layer much faster than previously thought. Under some weather conditions, just a few days may be enough. And that means a wide range of much more short-lived compounds threaten the ozone layer – chemicals not covered by the Montreal Protocol....
                  
Global warming evolution 1979 - 2010 (click here)

By Grant Foster and Stefan Rahmstort, Environmental Research Letters,
Volume 6, Number 4; 6 December 2011

We analyze five prominent time series of global temperature (over land and ocean) for their common time interval since 1979: three surface temperature records (from NASA/GISS, NOAA/NCDC and HadCRU) and two lower-troposphere (LT) temperature records based on satellite microwave sensors (from RSS and UAH). All five series show consistent global warming trends ranging from 0.014 to 0.018 K yr−1. When the data are adjusted to remove the estimated impact of known factors on short-term temperature variations (El Niño/southern oscillation, volcanic aerosols and solar variability), the global warming signal becomes even more evident as noise is reduced. Lower-troposphere temperature responds more strongly to El Niño/southern oscillation and to volcanic forcing than surface temperature data. The adjusted data show warming at very similar rates to the unadjusted data, with smaller probable errors, and the warming rate is steady over the whole time interval. In all adjusted series, the two hottest years are 2009 and 2010.

Just a refresher.

2016 ozone layer over Antarctica.

This video (click here) tracks the behaviour of the ozone layer over Antartica across all of 2016.

It shows clearly the annual “hole” that appears above the South Pole in the austral springtime (September/October), and which last year grew to about 23 million sq km (9 million sq miles) in its maximum extent.
The visualisation comes from a model run by Europe's Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service.
It is based on the data from orbiting sensors, including those operated by Eumetsat - the pan-European organisation that gathers observations from space for use by national weather agencies.

This international agreement was negotiated in what was called "The Montreal Protocol." (click here)                        

Born in 1181 or 1182, in Assisi, Italy. Death was 3 October 1226 at the age of 44.

This song was written by St. Francis before his death. 

The Canticle of the Sun, also known as Laudes Creaturarum (Praise of the Creatures) and Canticle of the Creatures, is a religious song composed by Saint Francis of Assisi. It was written in an Umbrian dialect of Italian but has since been translated into many languages.

Saint Francis rejected material wealth and embraced God's creation. He came to value the elements of Earth such as earth, wind and fire. He realized the world was a place for many of God's creatures and not simply men. He saw the entire picture of the Earth as a very important aspect of God's creation. Sustenance was part of his worship. Where there existed creatures other than people there needed to be reverence to their existence.

St. Francis was probably the first real environmentalist and climatologist.
The Peace Prayer of St. Francis of Assisi (Shrine official website - click here, thank you)

“Make me a channel of your peace,
Where there is hatred let me bring your love,
Where there is injury your pardon Lord,
And where there’s doubt true faith in you.

Make me a channel of your peace,
Where there’s despair in life, let me bring hope,
Where there is darkness, only light,
And where there’s sadness, ever joy.

O Master grant that I may never seek,
So much to be consoled as to console,
To be understood as to understand,
To be loved as to love with all my soul.

Make me a channel of your peace,
It is in pardoning that we are pardoned,
In giving of ourselves that we receive.
And in dying that we’re born to eternal life.

O Master grant that I may never seek,
So much to be consoled as to console,
To be understood as to understand,
And to love as to love with all my soul.

Make me a channel of your peace,
It is in pardoning that we are pardoned,
In giving of ourselves that we receive.
And in dying that we’re born to eternal life.

Make me a channel of your peace.”