The Earth’s past shows the key role of CO₂ on climate for 4.45 billion years, and how human industrial activity has disrupted its cycle at an unprecedented rate over the past 160 years.
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Category: climatology
WASHINGTON: The annual Templeton Prize, which recognizes outstanding contributions to “affirming life’s spiritual dimension,” was awarded Tuesday to Brazilian Marcelo Gleiser-a theoretical physicist dedicated to demonstrating science and religion are not enemies. A physics and astronomy professor whose specializations include cosmology, 60-year-old Gleiser was born in Rio de Janeiro, and has been in the United States since 1986. An agnostic, he doesn’t believe in God-but refuses to write off the possibility of God’s existence completely.
“Atheism is inconsistent with the scientific method,” Gleiser said Monday from Dartmouth College, the New Hampshire university where he has taught since 1991. “Atheism is a belief in non-belief. So you categorically deny something you have no evidence against.” “I’ll keep an open mind because I understand that human knowledge is limited,” he added. The prize is funded by the John Templeton Foundation-a philanthropic organization named after the American Presbyterian who made his fortune on Wall Street, and who set on “seeking proofs of divine agency in every branch of science”, as The Economist put it.
Gleiser joins Desmond Tutu, the Dalai Lama and dissident Soviet author Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn as recipients of the prize, first awarded in 1973. At £1.1 million, the prize money well surpasses that of the Nobels. The physicist focuses on making complex subjects accessible. He has written on climate change, Einstein, hurricanes, black holes, the human conscience-tracing the links between the sciences and the humanities, including philosophy.
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Climate change is a sprawling, complex problem. But there is an astonishingly simple way to make a difference: plant more trees. Trees scrub pollution from the air, reduce erosion, improve water quality, provide homes for animals and insects, and enhance our lives in countless other ways.
It turns out that ecosystem restoration is also an emerging business opportunity. A new report from the World Resources Institute and the Nature Conservancy says governments around the world have committed to reviving nearly 400 million acres of wilderness — an area larger than South Africa. As countries push to regrow forests, startups are dreaming up new, faster ways to plant trees. For some innovators, like NASA veteran Dr. Lauren Fletcher, that means using drones.
Fletcher said his conversion from stargazer to eco-warrior was driven by his worry about climate change, which has been dramatically worsened by deforestation. To tackle the problem, he created BioCarbon Engineering, which he describes as an ecosystem restoration company. Working with colleagues, he came up with a 30-pound unmanned aerial vehicle nicknamed “Robin.” It can fly over the most rugged landscapes on earth, planting trees in precise locations at the rate of 120 per minute.
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A million and a half students, even very young ones, took to the streets Friday March 15th, in two thousand cities around the world, for the climate, responding to a Greta Thunberg’s call. Greta is a 16-year-old student in Stockholm: “I will not stop. Not until greenhouse gas emissions have fallen below the alarm level.” Considering the great support she had, it would seem that students were not waiting for anything else, with great outcry of the ecologists of various tendencies, who have for years repeated the same call, without being able to arouse mass movements of this magnitude.
There is no doubt that we are on the verge of great changes. The automotive industry — by far a leading industry in the world economy — is about to collapse, because it has not been able to innovate in time, and now it does not in fact have ready solutions, to satisfy a market that no longer intends to exchange mobility with health. Such imminent collapse will not do any good to economy. It will also offer vampire rulers new opportunities to increase the taxation, already exorbitant in many countries. And no one seems to realise that if producers die as a social category, consumers will soon die too, as they are the same people. There is no doubt, moreover, that the ruling politicians, more and more void of any basic culture, will find many ways to manage what Serge Latouche (in his essay on the so-called “happy de-growth”) called “inevitable social problems following de-growth”.
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Scientists have revealed the precise molecular mechanisms that cause drops of liquid to combine, in a discovery that could have a range of applications.
Insights into how droplets merge could help make 3D printing technologies more accurate and may help improve the forecasting of thunderstorms and other weather events, the study suggests.
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In 1965, I. J. Good described for the first time the notion of “intelligence explosion”, as it relates to artificial intelligence (AI):
Let an ultraintelligent machine be defined as a machine that can far surpass all the intellectual activities of any man however clever. Since the design of machines is one of these intellectual activities, an ultraintelligent machine could design even better machines; there would then unquestionably be an “intelligence explosion,” and the intelligence of man would be left far behind. Thus the first ultraintelligent machine is the last invention that man need ever make, provided that the machine is docile enough to tell us how to keep it under control.
Decades later, the concept of an “intelligence explosion” — leading to the sudden rise of “superintelligence” and the accidental end of the human race — has taken hold in the AI community. Famous business leaders are casting it as a major risk, greater than nuclear war or climate change. Average graduate students in machine learning are endorsing it. In a 2015 email survey targeting AI researchers, 29% of respondents answered that intelligence explosion was “likely” or “highly likely”. A further 21% considered it a serious possibility.
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“It have. We not learned anything from Jurassic Park. A team of Japanese scientist is attempting to bring back the long extinct, you guessed it, Ernie woolly mammoth the animal has been extinct for nearly four thousand years. I thought it was longer than that. But the scientists have emerged to extract the cells of a twenty eight thousand year old mammoth and transport them into a mouse, the cells show signs of life. We’re gonna have a woolly mouse. Here we go. The cells were taken from a mammoth that scientists call Yuka would have been seven at the time of her death. Okay. Her carcass was in pretty good shape. And they found it in Siberia back in two thousand ten now. You may be asking Ernie rightly so how soon until we start seeing these hairy beasts in our woods. It’s only going to be a matter of time before we see him over in Waco. Oh, sure, they say could be quite a while. While the cells took to the mouse eggs, the cells divide to create anything like a fetus. But it did prove that science. It did prove to scientists that they could reawaken cells isn’t a Willie ma’am at the size of an elephant speaker is even bigger than the elephant much planting this what did they think how big do? They think the uterus of the mouse is gonna ho- how big is this thing gonna have to know the science behind this. But it will be fascinated. The I want to be there for the discussion of where do we put them? Do. We put them exactly where they were. Yeah. We put them in Madison Wisconsin or wherever the heck large populations of them were found dead or do we just like, well, we got to put them in Montana and do they have to be in cold climates? Do they have to the plane in Texas? Well, Waco, actually does have a giant mammoth? Sanctuary study dig whatever you wanna call it. But that was four thousand years ago. I imagine the weather was much colder. No, no, no science on that has been settled. I don’t know the science of the weather twenty eight thousand four thousand years ago. Neither does anyone else. Unfortunately, they settled the science. So if so we have to unleash and Canada, I candidate deal with it. I would suggest this that if you’re going to rebuild the woolly mammoth, which are you in on. I know I think you are weak. You shouldn’t be I think, hey, you had your day it came and went you’re gone. Didn’t is man to blame for them not being around. And you know, no man is not to blame Jesus Jesus. That’s right. You had your shot you blew it. You sat around drinking beer watching TV all day. You got fat all of you had heart attacks, you’re gone. It’s done. So I don’t want these things coming back. But if you’re gonna bring them back, I would like you to modify the genes to where we smaller version. Yeah, they’re the size lapdog. Yeah. They could be the size of a lapdog, and they’re domesticated because I’ll be happy to have a woolly mammoth at the house a little horns. Yeah. Tiny little horns, it’s really adorable or you trick them out to be like those Ali fonts Lord of the rings that have long horn. I like that. Yeah. Something something like that since we’re really tricky since we’re playing the part of Jesus here. Let’s go ahead. And trick these suckers up when they come back or just here’s a better idea. Let’s cross him. So when they come back, they have mink coats, look, really, really snazzy, nightlife. Yeah. Really soft. You can sleep around with them. Chinchilla? Yeah. Exactly beautiful. Now. I don’t like the idea of see I’m all about it. Are you? I when I die. I’m figuring unless something kills mega tell about ninety. Okay. I think by ninety we’ll have it figured out. And if I could see a willy mammoth for die man, that’d be great. But what if a kick ass, but here’s the problem if they can do that. Then eventually they can bring you back and then you’ll see the woolly mammoth in life number two. Nobody’s gonna wanna do that. No guy. They don’t bring back. The key had his shot. Kind of like how you talk about it. You had your shot you blew it. Let’s”
KLIF 570 AM
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Scientists in India observed the highest-voltage thunderstorm ever documented with the help of a subatomic particle you might not hear much about: the muon.
The researchers operate the GRAPES-3 telescope, which measures muons, particles that are similar to electrons but heavier. Specifically, the Gamma Ray Astronomy at PeV EnergieS Phase-3 (GRAPES-3) muon telescope measures high-energy particles from outer space called cosmic rays. It typically picks up 2.5 million muons each minute, mapped on a 13-by-13 grid across the sky. But during thunderstorms, it experiences quick changes to the amount of muons it receives. The GRAPES-3 researchers added electric field monitors to the experiment, and devised a way to turn these muon fluctuations into measurements of the voltage of passing storms.
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Over the last 540 million years, the Earth has weathered three major ice ages—periods during which global temperatures plummeted, producing extensive ice sheets and glaciers that have stretched beyond the polar caps.
Now scientists at MIT, the University of California at Santa Barbara, and the University of California at Berkeley have identified the likely trigger for these ice ages.
In a study published in Science, the team reports that each of the last three major ice ages were preceded by tropical “arc-continent collisions”—tectonic pileups that occurred near the Earth’s equator, in which oceanic plates rode up over continental plates, exposing tens of thousands of kilometers of oceanic rock to a tropical environment.
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