Our Global Future in the 21st Century is based on "The Third Industrial Revolution" which finally connects our new ICT infrastructure with distributed energy sources that are both renewable and sustainable
A study by Drexel University has identified the major sources of funding for climate change denial. Some of the names are all too familiar such as the Koch and Scaife families while some have done their best to remain obscure and have yet to get noticed.
Cenk Uygur (http://www.twitter.com/cenkuygur) host of The Young Turks discusses this story. Did this story surprise you? Tell us what you think in the comment section below.
Click headline to view the YouTube video full screen--
The New England groundfishery is a disaster. Conservationists know it, the federal government knows it, processors, shipyards and supply houses know it. And nobody knows it like fishermen do.
The source of the disaster can be summed up in a word: Complexity.
Around every corner in the quest to manage the groundfishery lurks another tangled issue.
Fishery managers declare catch limits that are little better than arbitrary because our definitions of overfishing are at odds, a condition created by murky, imprecise language in the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery and Conservation Management Act, further complicated by the inability to agree on the size of the fishery, its relative vitality, the impact of warming and acidifying oceans, the number of fish versus the size of the fish, the role of economics and management mechanisms "¦ you get the idea.
Dr. Brian Rothschild points out in the policy paper intended as a launching point for debate over the looming reauthorization of Magnuson-Stevens that a network of national institutes might make sense of this complexity.
Rothschild, the president of the fledgling Center for Sustainable Fisheries based in New Bedford and the former — and founding — dean of the UMass Dartmouth School of Marine Science and Technology, met with The Standard-Times editorial board last week to discuss reauthorization and the center's policy paper.
In answer to a question about whether the resources being put toward "best science available" are adequate and properly allocated, he said he believes the simple questions are being adequately addressed: what is happening with one species, for example. For proper management of the fishery, however, an entity akin to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Cooperative Institute for Climate and Satellites in Colorado is needed: How do multiple species interact? How do the changing waters affect them? How does the economics of fishing affect them? The complex questions, he said, must be tackled by top experts in science, policy and law if Magnuson-Stevens hopes to live up to its promise.
The world's mobile phone carriers have failed to implement technology fixes available since 2008 that would have thwarted the National Security Agency's ability to eavesdrop on many mobile phone calls, a cyber security expert says.
Karsten Nohl, chief scientist with Berlin's Security Research Labs, told Reuters ahead of a highly anticipated talk at a conference in Germany that his firm discovered the issue while reviewing security measures implemented by mobile operators around the world.
Nohl also told Reuters that the carriers had failed to fully address vulnerabilities that would allow hackers to clone and remotely gain control of certain SIM cards. Those vulnerabilities were pointed out in July.
While the German cryptologist criticized carriers for failing to implement technology to protect customers from surveillance as well as fraud, he said he does not think they did so under pressure from spy agencies.
"I couldn't imagine it is complicity. I think it is negligence," he said. "I don't want to believe in a worldwide conspiracy across all worldwide network operators. I think it is individual laziness and priority on network speed and network coverage and not security."
A spokeswoman for the GSM Association, which represents about 800 mobile operators worldwide, said she could not comment on Nohl's criticism before seeing his presentation on the topic at the Chaos Communications Congress in Hamburg, Europe's biggest annual conference on hacking, security and privacy issues.
From the very first, the American spirit has been one of self-reliance and confident action.... What has dawned dramatically upon us in recent years, though, is a new recognition that to a significant extent man commands as well the very destiny of this planet where he lives, and the destiny of all life upon it. We have even begun to see that these destinies are not many and separate at all -- that in fact they are indivisibly one....
Stream TV Networks, Inc. is pleased to announce its participation with British Sky Broadcasting and London's Natural History Museum in promoting the New Year's Day premiere of the latest program from Britain's best-loved broadcaster. Extinct creatures are brought back to life in DAVID ATTENBOROUGH'S NATURAL HISTORY MUSEUM ALIVE 3D, to be broadcast at 6.30pm on New Year's Day on Sky 3D and in 2D on Sky 1 HD.
As the title indicates, the Natural History Museum is the central setting for the program, so it seemed quite fitting to stage a promotion at the venue. After reviewing and stringently testing competing glasses-free 3D technologies on the market and in development, BSkyB has chosen Stream TV's Ultra-D™ 2160p displays for the first public showcase of the trailer in glasses-free 3D.
For the first time in the UK, the Ultra-D screens are now on display at the Natural History Museum, giving viewers an early look at highlights from the upcoming broadcast. The six week promotion at the museum will run continuously during opening hours, demonstrating how watching 3D on 50" screens without the need for clumsy glasses is a reality with Stream TV's 4K Ultra-D display.
Three years ago the world reached a societal turning point: more than half of the planet’s population were living in cities. That shift will continue to the point where six out of 10 people will be living in cities by 2030, and seven out of 10 will be living in cities by 2050. What this means is that life for the majority of the world will be marked by smaller urban spaces and increasingly shared and limited resources. As this decades-long population shift and resource crunch occurs, 2013 could stand out as the year that the web sharing economy became oh-so-very mainstream.
Most of us have heard of collaborative consumption, and the web sharing economy. Companies have emerged in recent years — like alternative home renting company Airbnb and on demand driver company Lyft — to create platforms for peer-to-peer services around physical goods and places. A variety of books have been written on the subject, and startups continue to launch increasingly niche-focused sites. All of these big and small networks run on the back of ubiquitous mobile computing, wireless broadband, and a trust-based economy created through transparent user feedback paved by sites like Yelp.
The world faces two potentially existential threats, according to the linguist and political philosopher Noam Chomsky.
“There are two major dark shadows that hover over everything, and they’re getting more and more serious,” Chomsky said. “The one is the continuing threat of nuclear war that has not ended. It’s very serious, and another is the crisis of ecological, environmental catastrophe, which is getting more and more serious.”
Chomsky appeared Friday on the last episode of NPR’s “Smiley and West” program to discuss his education, his views on current affairs and how he manages to spread his message without much help from the mainstream media.
Chomsky noted efforts to halt environmental damage by indigenous people in countries all over the world – from Canada’s First Nations to tribal people in Latin America and India to aboriginal people in Australia—but the nation’s richest, most advanced and most powerful countries, such as the United States, were doing nothing to forestall disaster.
“When people here talk enthusiastically about a hundred years of energy independence, what they’re saying is, ‘Let’s try to get every drop of fossil fuel out of the ground so as to accelerate the disaster that we’re racing towards,’” Chomsky said. “These are problems that overlie all of the domestic problems of oppression, of poverty, of attacks on the education system (and) massive inequality, huge unemployment.”
He blamed the “financialization” of the U.S. economy for income inequality and unemployment, saying that banks that were “too big to fail” skimmed enormous wealth from the market.
“In fact, there was a recent (International Monetary Fund) study that estimated that virtually all the profits of the big banks can be traced back to this government insurance policy, and in general they’re quite harmful, I think, quite harmful to the economy,” Chomsky said.
Nearly seven months after journalist and privacy activist Glenn Greenwald publicized Edward Snowden’s first revelations of the vast scope of the NSA’s digital surveillance, his life has changed absolutely.
Living in Brazil, he is advised not to travel. He’s a hero to privacy activists, and demonized by governments and national security agencies. And in a video keynote address to the Chaos Communication Congress (CCC) in Hamburg today, he promised that he and Edward Snowden aren’t anywhere near finished.
“There are a lot more stories to come, a lot more documents that will be covered,” Greenwald said. “It’s important that we understand what it is we’re publishing, so what we say about them is accurate.”
Greenwald’s role as keynote speaker at a conference attended in large part by programmers and hardware hackers was sign of how badly the half-year of revelations of digital surveillance by the NSA and its allies has shaken the hacker and privacy communities.
Much of the CCC’s four days of talks and workshops are dedicated to exploring the implications of Snowden and Greenwald’s revelations, from discussions about NSA attacks on the Tor private-communications network to a call by Julian Assange for hackers to fight back against the intelligence agencies.
“This is a digital agent orange. It took the leaves from the forest where we used to live and flourish,” said Tim Pritlove, one of the annual event’s organizers.
In his keynote speech, former Guardian columnist Greenwald paid rueful due to his own onetime lack of encryption skills, but said that most journalists covering national security had been no different as recently as a year ago. That has now changed, both among journalists and the interested general public, he said.
“One of most significant outcomes of the last few months has been the increased awareness of the importance of encryption and privacy,” he said. “It’s a remarkable sea change.”
Top-secret documents leaked by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden have been plastered across our screens and front-pages for months by Glenn Greenwald and his team.
And on Friday the journalist couldn't help but leak a few details about a forthcoming wave of fresh revelations regarding the US and UK governments' mass surveillance operations.
In a keynote speech to this year's Chaos Communication Congress in Hamburg, Germany, Greenwald claimed NSA and GCHQ analysts are infuriated that they cannot easily track or monitor airline passengers' smartphones and other electronic gadgets mid-flight – implying that may be about to change.
Conveniently, US comms watchdog the FCC has given a thumbs up to in-flight mobile broadband, and the European Aviation Safety Agency is relaxing its rules on the use of electronics before and during flights – in theory, granting spies a direct pathway to personal computers and handhelds tens of thousands of feet above ground.
Addressing the hackers' conference via Skype from his home in São Paulo, Greenwald – who used to break his NSA stories in UK daily newspaper the Guardian but has since moved on – spent most of his allotted hour praising Snowden and condemning corporate media giants.
Greenwald then turned his ire onto the NSA and GCHQ's long-running quest for total awareness of the world's communications networks:
In education, we tend to think of mobile learning as learning in classrooms with tablets and smartphones. And that’s part of it.
Students being able to untether themselves from desks is an extraordinary development that brings with it all kinds of possibility. The benefit of mobile learning thus far has been primarily personalization. Students that can move and access content on individual devices can have that content personalized for them in a just-in-time, just-for-me context. But we stifle the potential gains of technology and mobile learning when we simply shift the tether from the desk to the classroom walls.
This is only the beginning of how students will eventually use technology to inform their work and study. It’s true that mobile learning can solve the problem of creative spaces, but that misses the point of mobility–to go where you want, when you want, to be with who you want to be with to do the work you believe needs to be done. And to further combine local resources and spaces with digital networks and communities to do your best work.
Our current thinking that huddles groups of students in small rooms in mason-block buildings is based on problems of technology and assembly that are no longer problems. This likely sounds like education dreaming, but only because we’re stuck in old thinking patterns. Yes, it’s true that a 6-year-old can’t grab his tablet and hop on his big wheel and ride down to Starbucks to “think.”
Clearly we need systems (of some kind) to manage how we build literacy skills in children. Past that, compared to what’s possible in learning, schools–in their current form–quickly lose their credibility.
In truth, the same applies to game-based learning, project-based learning, and so many other trends that our “clients”–parents, families, organizations, and businesses–don’t understand.
Because it is not technology, but rather the communities and their inherent problems, creativity, and “human resources” that are the sleeping giants in education.
In the video below, Dave Coplin, Chief Envisioning Officer at Microsoft, explores this idea through the lens not of learning, but work. His take is that in work, productivity is not the solution but the problem. We’ve taken an industrialized approach to our work, which has damaged our creativity, innovation, and trust. (To the point where over 71% of Americans claim to be unhappy with their work–which is a staggering number.)
Click headline to read more and watch the RSA animation presentation--
The total number of global broadband subscribers in Q3-2013 has grown by 1.8% in the quarter to reach 670 Million (up from just 0.7% added in Q2). But the data also reveals that the UK has a 132.1% annual growth rate for fibre optic based broadband (FTTC/P/H etc.) and that puts us top of the table.
In addition it’s also noted that true fibre optic FTTH connections saw a 13.6% increase in subscribers during Q3 2013 and this jumps to 70% for year-on-year. By comparison the other fibre based technologies, such as hybrid fibre FTTC (VDSL), added 4.7% more subscribers in Q3 and is running at over 20% year-on-year.
Engineers at the US Department of Energy’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) have created a continuous process that produces useful crude oil minutes after harvested algae is introduced. This new process does not require drying out the algae, which grows in water, saving time and energy that would be otherwise wasted. The final product can be refined into aviation fuel, diesel, or gasoline.
The process mimics some of the conditions that originally turned prehistoric plant material into fossil fuel deep within the earth – high pressures and temperatures.
Algae, an aquatic plant, has long been considered as a biofuel source, but the steps needed to turn a wet, green plant into clear, burnable fuel have been both expensive and time-consuming. The algae had to be processed in a series of steps, one of which involved drying it out and removing all the water, which might be 80 percent of the biomass. Then solvents were used to extract energy-rich hydrocarbons from the dried material.
The PNNL team created a continuous process that starts with the wet algae and subjects the entire mass – water, algae, and all – to high temperatures and pressures, in this case, 350ºC (662ºF) and 3,000 psi.
"It's a bit like using a pressure cooker, only the pressures and temperatures we use are much higher," said Laboratory Fellow Douglas Elliott, the leader of the research team. "In a sense, we are duplicating the process in the earth that converted algae into oil over the course of millions of years. We're just doing it much, much faster."
Click headline to read more, view pix gallery and watch video clip--
This is just tragic because people had no idea it was going to get so bad. Some where vacationers from Canada just trying to enjoy the sun during the holidays but it ended up a nightmare and ruined the local water supply. Next time you have to hope they will be better prepared and will have a better way of being warned before something like this will kill other people.
The Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC) is consolidating on the broadband initiative. It took a further step in this direction on December 17, 2013 during the maiden edition of the Telecoms Stakeholders Summit which held at the Intercontinental Hotel, Victoria Island, Lagos. The event was an opportunity for intense discourse about the industry, its potentials and its direction. The event which was themed: “Transforming a Nation with Broadband: Telecom as Instrument for Sustainable Development”, was a collaboration between the Ministry of Communications Technology, the NCC, as well as other stakeholders in the nation’s telecom sector.
According to the Executive Vice Chairman of the Commission, Dr. Eugene Juwah, the summit provided veritable platform for interaction and sharing of ideas by different stakeholders, as well as an opportunity for appraisal of the performance of the industry, while projecting for the future. He said the summit evolved out of the need to achieve a more inclusive consultation among the different stakeholders in line with the consultative approach to NCC’s regulatory mandate.
Chairman of the Organizing Committee of the Summit and Director, Public Affairs of the Commission, Mr. Tony Ojobo, said key stakeholder in the industry were fully represented at the event.
This is coming barely a month after the NCC summoned the global community to savour broadband opportunities in Nigeria. The commission’s boss had called the world’s attention to the investment opportunities in Nigeria’s broadband market at the 2013 International Telecommunications Union (ITU) Telecoms World event which held in Bangkok, Thailand.
This accelerated drive towards the broadband model is very welcome. Given Nigeria’s potential as the largest market on the African continent, the NCC will have to ensure that liberalisation of the telecoms market comprises key elements of the broadband service delivery: international gateway, national and regional backbone, and Internet access. Competition will ultimately strengthen broadband penetration and facilitate higher levels of investment in the sector.
A new survey of 2,011 British citizens (aged 16-75) by the Institution of Engineering and Technology (IET) has reported that 43% saw more economic benefit in extending the reach of superfast broadband to all premises in the UK than they did from building new Nuclear Power plants, airports or high speed trains.
The Ipsos Mori study found that support for extending superfast broadband was followed by a call to build more nuclear power plants (32%), plans to build new airports (17%), construction of the new HS2 high speed trains network (16%) and the idea of merely adding extra runways to existing airports (12%).
Communications giant BT has claimed its activities have generated £81m for the Oxfordshire economy in the past year.
The firm employs 638 staff in the county and spends a total of £2.52bn with suppliers in Oxfordshire and across the South-East.
John Weaver, BT’s South-East regional director, said: “BT and its employees make a major contribution to the Oxfordshire economy.
“They are a key part of its prosperity and economic well-being. “BT is at the centre of every community and our day-to-day work benefits every local authority area right across the UK.”
He added: “BT’s role in Oxfordshire and the South-East region as a whole is more significant than these figures suggest.
“In addition to the activities analysed in this comprehensive report, we are creating a high-speed fibre broadband network which will be essential to the future success of local businesses and households.”
Bayer is suing Europe to overturn the landmark ban on bee-killing pesticides -- and we're excited to announce we're joining the legal battle to make sure Bayer fails.
Europe's bee-saving ban has only just gone into force, but Bayer is fighting in the courts to overturn it. If Bayer wins, it will be a huge setback for the bees -- and so we're asking the European Court of Justice to let us join in the case and defend the ban.
The first hearings could happen in just a few weeks, and we've only got a few days to finalize our case. If the court accepts our application, we'll represent the interests of hundreds of thousands of SumOfUs members who have already spoken up -- and make sure the court has real evidence to counter Bayer's propaganda.
It's crucial we make our voices heard in the court and on the streets. We’ve already made a downpayment to hire European legal specialists to help us fight the case, but we know Bayer and Syngenta are going to throw everything they’ve got at defeating the bee-saving ban. That's why we need to stand ready to fight Bayer every step of the way -- no matter how long it takes.
Click headline to read more and donate to help STOP Bayer and Syngenta--
Mandatory tests prescribed by India's atomic regulator will be carried out at the Kudankulam Nuclear Power Project's (KNPP) first unit before the reactor power is increased, said a senior official.
"The tests are tentatively scheduled this week subject to the clearance from the Southern Regional Load Despatch Centre," KNPP site director R.S.Sundar said in a statement issued Thursday.
India's atomic power plant operator, the Nuclear Power Corporation of India Ltd (NPCIL) is setting up two 1,000 MW Russian reactors at Kudankulam in Tirunelveli district, 650 km from here. The total outlay for the project is over Rs.17,000 crore.
KNPP is India's first pressurised water reactor belonging to the light water reactor category.
The first unit attained criticality - the beginning of the fission process - in July 2013.
In August, the Atomic Energy Regulatory Board gave its nod to KNPP to raise the reactor power levels to 50 percent and for synchronisation of the unit with the power grid.
US President Barack Obama recently called for a return to an era when workers could have steady jobs in durable industries.
The trouble is, there are no more durable occupations that offer long-term job security. What’s more, most people would not want to go back to that era, for the age of disruption has created many benefits we have become accustomed to and opened even more opportunities.
But there is a catch — to win in the modern economy one must stop thinking about durable jobs and start becoming a durable talent.The last durable industry is not an industry at all, but your own skills and talent.
Where have all the industries gone? Their passing has been stunning in its speed. New entrants and competitors have changed the rules, innovated and disrupted in industry after industry. You make cameras? I’ll take mine on my smartphone, 10 megapixels and all — thank you very much. And while you’re at it, let’s skip the compact discs for my music collection, the GPS navigation gizmo for my car and the newspaper delivery to my house.
So many of these changes have come because of the shift from analogue to digital, from physical to virtual. Even in my own industry — higher education — massive open online courses (MOOC’s) hold the potential for massive disruption, especially to universities that cannot differentiate by brand, research, or teaching quality. Even tenure for professors is much less common than it used to be; by some accounts only one-third of university faculty are protected with such job security. If academia cannot offer durable jobs, who can?
Powerful customers have also emerged to force change in supplier companies, much of it directed toward lowering costs, and therefore, wages. This is not only about Walmart or Amazon.com. The legal industry, for one, is in turmoil because of precisely this pressure from traditional big company customers who are no longer willing to effectively subsidize the training of young lawyers by paying for their billable hours.
In the run-up to the holidays, few noticed a rather horrifying number California water managers released last week: 5%.
That’s the percentage of requested water the California State Water Project (SWP), the largest manmade distribution system in the US, expects to deliver in 2014. The SWP supplies water to two-thirds of the state’s 38 million residents and 750,000 acres of farmland.
Ending one of its driest years in recorded history for the second year in a row, California, an agricultural and technological powerhouse, faces extreme drought conditions in 2014 unless winter storms materialize between now and April, according to the US National Weather Service.
Droughts by the end of this century somewhere in the world will be 20% more frequent. But the catch is that nobody right now can predict with any certainty which places will feel the effects soonest, or more frequently.
Thirty research teams from 12 countries report in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that unless greenhouse gas emissions are reduced on a global scale, an extra 40% more people are likely to experience real water scarcity.
While some will have too little water, others might have too much. Of the areas investigated, more than half could also expect increases in river flooding.
The areas most likely to experience drier climates and more prolonged droughts include the Mediterranean, the Middle East, the southern USA and southern China.
Southern India, western China and parts of east Africa could experience what one author, Simon Gosling of the University of Nottingham, UK, calls “substantial increases in available water.”
Neither such predictions of drought nor the admissions of uncertainty are in any way new. The significance of the latest research perhaps lies in its scale, its thoroughness and the fact that it confirms, once again, the unhappy picture of climate change in a world which resolutely goes on burning fossil fuels (this is always called “the business as usual” scenario”).
In July, CNRL's in situ mining operation near the Cold Lake Air Weapons Range experienced a massive underground oil blowout that has leaked more than 1.5 million liters of bitumen (heavy crude) emulsion. Oozing and percolating from the surface, the leak has polluted surrounding wetlands, forests and muskeg, as well as the traditional lands of the Beaver Lake Cree and Cold Lake First Nations.
The full extent of the Primrose leak is not yet known. Unlike a pipeline rupture, where leaks are readily detected and measured, it is nearly impossible to monitor the scope of an underground spill in real time. The spread of bitumen emulsion through subsoil as it threatens reservoirs and expansive swaths of wilderness is difficult to track from the surface. Oil from the Primose leak already has enveloped sacred gravesites and hunting land of the Beaver Lake Cree.
Alberta Environment reports that four distinct bitumen releases have been identified at Cold Lake. One was caused by a fissure at the bottom of a small, unnamed lake that has since been drained to mitigate long-term damage to wetland and amphibian life. Damage to the caprock at this site has allowed bitumen leakages to contaminate aquifers and groundwater.
As pressurized steam technologies gain traction in Alberta - there are 122 sites in the province - the safety of in situ mining technologies has been called into question. First Nations communities whose lands are threatened by leakages have been at the forefront of demands to end environmentally dangerous practices.
This article presents a valid report on the environmental detriments of mining specific resources. Occupational health and safety professionals would seek to implement precautionary strategies to ensure exposure to poisonous materials are monitored and protective equipment is made available.
If you wonder why America’s utilities are rattled by the explosive growth in rooftop solar -- and are pushing back -- William Walker has a story for you.
A flip-flop wearing Walker stands in his driveway pointing to a ubiquitous neighborhood feature – solar panels on the roofs of five of six houses nearby. He lives in Ewa Beach, a development on the sultry leeward coast of the Hawaiian island of Oahu built on land cleared of sugar cane fields.
Shade is scarce and residents here call their homes “hot boxes,” requiring almost round-the-clock air conditioning. Hawaii, which imports pricey oil to power its electricity grid, has the highest utility rates in the nation -- at 37 cents a kilowatt-hour, they’re more than double California and triple the national average.
With bills for 1,600 square foot houses like these running as high as $400 a month, solar is seen as less a green statement than an economic no-brainer given state and federal tax credits for as much as 65 percent of installation costs. Almost every day since Walker and his wife Mi Chong moved in last April, solar installers came rapping on the door, hawking a rooftop system.
They finally bought one: an 18-panel, $35,000 installation producing 5.9 kilowatts of power financed for $305 a month. It would be connected to the grid under a system known as net metering that essentially lets residents deduct the value of their solar-produced electricity from their power bill and even be paid for electricity in excess of that.
Walker estimates his bill would have dropped most months to an $18 service charge -- offsetting that $305 loan payment. Anticipating his power bills would continue to rise, he figured the system could pay for itself in as little as five years; his electricity after that would be free.
That is until his utility, a subsidiary of Honolulu-based Hawaiian Electric Industries Inc., told the Walkers they couldn’t connect their system to the grid. They aren’t alone. Solar installers here estimate that hundreds if not thousands of the state’s residents are being put in solar limbo by a virtual moratorium on new connections in many parts of the company’s service area.
Click headline to read more and watch Bloomberg News video clip--
With the Cessna Citation X set to receive FAA certification in early 2014 and knock the Gulfstream G650 off it's world's fastest civilian aircraft perch thanks to its maximum operating speed of Mach 0.935, Boston-based Spike Aerospace is looking to leave both those aircraft in its wake with its S-512. Spike says its S-512 will be the world's first supersonic business jet, boasting a cruising speed of Mach 1.6, and a maximum speed of Mach 1.8.
The Spike team, made up of engineers with experience at Gulfstream, Eclipse and Airbus, has spent the last couple of years designing the Spike S-512. Initially to be targeted at business users for whom time is money, the aircraft is designed to carry a maximum of up to 18 passengers in the luxury befitting an aircraft with an estimated price tag of between US$60 to $80 million.
The company says the Mach 1.6 to 1.8 speed capabilities of the aircraft will translate to a flight from New York to London taking three to four hours instead of six to seven, and the 14 to 16 hour flight time for a Los Angeles to Tokyo flight cut to eight hours.
Click headline to read more, view pix gallery and watch video clip--
We are in the midst of an era of frightening contradictions, when it comes to public understandings of climate change. While climate changes are occurring more quickly than scientists have ever predicted, most people’s knowledge of these realities remains hazy and clouded by political overtones.
Because of both the counter-intuitive nature of climate change and the massive misinformation campaigns created by the fossil fuel industry, the general population is 20 years behind most climate scientists when it comes to the straightforward fact of "believing in" climate change.
This is an ominous statistic: Now that scientists are predicting that even worse impacts than previously understood will happen significantly sooner, a rapid global response will be necessary for any attempt to stave them off. We are likely closer to irreversible dangerous climate change - if it has not begun already - and to take action, there must be a basic public consensus. There is, however, some hopeful news on the technological front if action is taken soon.
In 1976, Wallace Broeker was one of the first to suggest climate change could alter our planet harmfully within our lifetimes. Even though a few scientists said in the '70s we could be headed for an ice age, Broeker had already made the connection, and those few climate scientists have not talked about a coming ice age in nearly 40 years. Broeker is arguably the grandfather of climate science: He's been at it for 55 years.
One of his first jobs was under Willard Libby, who was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1949 for discovering carbon-14 dating. This rare but predictable form of carbon is radioactive, and it completely decays in about 55,000 years. It is because of carbon-14 dating that we know for absolutely certain that the extra carbon dioxide in our atmosphere came from burning fossil fuels.
There are many other ways that we know for sure. The physics of the greenhouse effect are easily demonstrated in the lab, and even the simplest models from the early 1980s prove their effect. Surprisingly, the complicated high resolution climate models of today yield results that are quite similar to those of the simplest models of the early 1980s.
But how are we supposed to trust the models when weather people can't even get the seven-day forecast correct?
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