The magic of water...

Water Is Weird

Gregg Davidson, Christianity Today

If someone were to stop you on the street and ask you to name, on the spot, a naturally occurring substance that epitomized ordinary—something entirely lacking in strangeness—there is high probability that you would eventually say “water.” You might note, as an aside, that it is a very important ordinary substance, essential to life and refreshing to the parched, but nothing about water strikes you as being particularly odd.

But you would be wrong. I mean, really, really wrong. The behavior of water, at least when compared to other natural materials, is a bit bizarre. In particular, there are at least five different properties of water that, if you were stumbling upon it for the first time, might strike you as strange.

Starving Central America

by NICK ALEXANDROV, Counterpunch

“The drought has killed us,” a young Honduran, Olman Funez, explained last summer. He was referring to what the World Bank called“one of the longest droughts in nearly half a century.” A 60-year-old Guatemalan peasant emphasized he had never “seen a crisis like this.” Carlos Román, a Nicaraguan farmer, told a reporter that “there is nothing. We eat what we can find.”

CO2 levels in atmosphere rising at dramatically faster rate, WMO report warns

By Joby Warrick 

Levels of heat-trapping carbon dioxide in the atmosphere rose at a record-shattering pace last year, a new report shows, a surge that surprised scientists and spurred fears of an accelerated warming of the planet in decades to come.

Global Warming: Welcome to Yesterday's Future!

Fed report: Warming disrupting Americans’ lives 

By Seth Borenstein, Associated Press

WASHINGTON (AP)—Global warming is rapidly turning America the beautiful into America the stormy, sneezy and dangerous, according to a new federal scientific report. And those shining seas? Rising and costly, the report says.

Climate change will mean way less sushi—and way more jellyfish

KURAGE SASHIMI

By Gwynn Guilford @sinoceros , QUARTZ

To anyone on land, climate change can seem subtle. The sea, however, is changing alarmingly. The latest report from the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)—the second of three reports on the impacts of global warming—offers the scary forecast that the hotter the planet, the higher the risk of  ”abrupt and irreversible changes” (pdf, p.13) to ecosystems.

In Canada’s Alberta province, oil sands boom is a two-edged sword

By Neela Banerjee, Los Angeles Times, October 21, 2013

FORT CHIPEWYAN, Canada—In the Cree language, the word “athabasca” means “a place where grass is everywhere.” Here in Alberta, the Athabasca River slices through forests of spruce and birch before spilling into a vast freshwater delta and Lake Athabasca.

In a town in Peru money does grow on trees

Alejandro Quispe Chilón

By Dowser.org, October 8, 2013

The Andes Mountains, the largest mountain range in the world, are home to 32 percent of Peru’s population, many of which rank among the poorest communities in the country. The struggle to keep crops and livestock alive in the harsh conditions brings many to either leave for hope of a better life in the city (which often fails to provide relief due to the mass amount of people with this same sentiment all unable to find work), or be stuck with little hope of creating a better life in their own community.

Arctic sea ice melting faster than expected, UN report finds

Source: Scientific American  

By Pilita Clark, Financial Times, September 18, 2013

The Arctic’s summer sea ice is set to nearly vanish in less than 40 years, according to the final draft of a sweeping UN climate change report that sharply revises past estimates of how fast the icy north is melting.

Arctic sea ice melting faster than expected, UN report finds

By Pilita Clark, Financial Times, September 18, 2013

The Arctic’s summer sea ice is set to nearly vanish in less than 40 years, according to the final draft of a sweeping UN climate change report that sharply revises past estimates of how fast the icy north is melting.

"A nearly ice-free Arctic Ocean in September before mid-century is likely," says the draft seen by the Financial Times of the first large-scale study in six years by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

The retreating ice is encouraging for Arctic nations such as Russia, which is trying to boost shipping traffic along its icy Northern Sea Route.

But it is worrying for scientists because of what was described in a recent study as an “economic time bomb” that could explode if the melting Arctic permafrost releases vast plumes of methane, a potent greenhouse gas, and drives significant climate change.

Mystery Malady Kills More Bees in the US

Mystery Malady Kills More Bees, Heightening Worry on Farms

By Michael Wines, NY Times, March 28, 2013
Following a now-familiar pattern, bee deaths rose swiftly last autumn and dwindled as operators moved colonies to faraway farms for the pollination season. Beekeepers say the latest string of deaths has dealt them a heavy blow. Bret Adee, who is an owner, with his father and brother, of Adee Honey Farms of South Dakota, the nation’s largest beekeeper, described mounting losses.

What Happens If the Mississippi Runs Dry?

By Tim Wall, Discovery News
The Mississippi River may soon be too shallow for barge shipping, which could hurt international trade and cause increases in domestic energy and food costs. Switching to other shipping methods could increase pollution.

However, there may be a bright side: drought and reduced traffic on the desiccated rivers may benefit wildlife in the long run.

The incredible amount of oil burned unto today. Deadly experiments part two

by F.G.Helmke
 

Can you kill the Earth "by burning an oil lamp?" Let’s calculate:

Total oil produced up to date: 100 billion tons

One ton is one billion milligrams

That’s one hundred billion billions of milligrams of oil produced

(100 000 000 000 000 000 000 mg)

The atmosphere of the Earth: 4 billion cubic kilometers (at sea level conditions)

One cubic kilometer is one billion cubic meters

So the atmosphere contains four billion billions of cubic meters of air

(4 000 000 000 000 000 000 m³)

100 billion billions of milligrams divided by 4 billion billions of cubic meters 
That’s  25 milligrams of oil burned per cubic meter of air in our atmosphere.

100 000 000 000 000 000 000 mg

:   4 000 000 000 000 000 000 m³

= 25 mg/m³

  Now let’s do the following experiment: Get a one cubic meter cardboard box. Put you head inside and seal it. Take a syringe with 25 mg or about 33 ml of crude oil, put it into an oil lamp and light it. If you survive, keep on driving your car! If not, be sure you go to heaven! When you arrive there you’d better have a good apology why you allowed this to happen your planet!

Apocalypse Soon

 U.N. report warns environment is at tipping point

(editor: The tipping point is when something loses its balance, usually followed by an uncontrolled fall)

RIO DE JANEIRO (AP)—The earth’s environmental systems “are being pushed towards their biophysical limits,” beyond which loom sudden, irreversible and potentially catastrophic changes, the United Nations Environment Program warned Wednesday.

Brazil’s Secretary of Research and Development Programs and Politics, Ministry of Science and Technology, Carlos Nobre, speaks during the launch of U.N. Environment Program Global Environment Outlook 5 in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, on Wednesday.

In a 525-page report on the health of the planet, the agency paints a grim picture: The melting of the polar ice caps, desertification in Africa, deforestation of tropical jungles, spiraling use of chemicals and the emptying out of the world’s seas are just some of myriad environmental catastrophes posing a threat to life as we know it.

“As human pressures on the earth … accelerate, several critical global, regional and local thresholds are close or have been exceeded,” the report says. “Once these have been passed, abrupt and possibly irreversible changes to the life-support functions of the planet are likely to occur, with significant adverse implications for human well-being.”

Such adverse implications include rising sea levels, increased frequency and severity of floods and droughts, and the collapse of fisheries, said the report, which compiles the work of the past three years by a team of 300 researchers.

The bad news doesn’t end there. The report says about 20 percent of vertebrate species are under threat of extinction, coral reefs have declined by 38 percent since 1980, greenhouse gas emissions could double over the next 50 years, and 90 percent of water and fish samples from aquatic environments are contaminated by pesticides.

“This is an indictment,” UNEP executive director Achim Steiner said at a news conference in Rio De Janeiro, which is to host later this month a U.N. conference on development that protects the environment. “We live in an age of irresponsibility that is also testified and documented in this report.”

“Once the tipping point occurs, you don’t wake up the next morning and say, ‘This is terrible, can we change it?’ That is the whole essence of these thresholds. We are condemning people to not having the choice anymore.”

Pressure cooker explodes. Potentially lethal experiment demonstrates effects of global warming

The sky is the limit. And we have reached it. 

F.G.Helmke

The distance from sea level up to the peak of Mount Everest is probably as much as from your home to where you work. If it were horizontal you could walk there in less than two hours. If it weren’t so rocky you could slide down there in forty minutes. That's not very high at all! But up there you have already 70% less oxygen. So as you see this World doesn't have an unlimited amount of air! To the contrary, the effective* thickness of the atmosphere is only 8.2km! (*measured at sea level conditions). That's from where you are right now to somewhere very near to where you are right now. 
So our atmosphere is actually as thin as a soap bubble in comparison to the size of the Earth! Just because you can't see its limit doesn't mean it doesn't exist and that you can pump an ever increasing amount of carbon dioxide into it. Scientists estimate that if nothing gets done temperatures will rise another 6 degrees Celsius long before the end of this century, and our world will simply be uninhabitable. And we all know as long as there is oil probably nothing will get done.                    

There is a very simple experiment you can do: put a pot of milk on your stove and start heating it up. Don’t turn off the stove. Just wait for what will happen. The result of this experiment will show you that you can’t heat up things indefinitely without serious consequences. 
Another good experiment is filling up a pressure cooker with lentils almost up to the brim and put it on the fire. This experiment will teach you that there is only one safe moment to turn off the fire, and that’s the very moment when you realize that you made a mistake. Then you have to leave the room, because he next moment it might explode just as mine did. Unfortunately this is exactly what we are doing to our planet. It’s now or forget it, buddy!

“They ate and drank and got married (or merry, and didn’t worry) until the day the flood came”, Jesus said about the people at the time of Noah. Mankind hasn’t changed since. But when God speaks about the end of the world he speaks about the end of this kind of world where greed and ignorance rule. Not the one he created. Jesus said the day it burns he will come back with a big fire extinguisher and rescue us! I suppose he would prefer to leave it up to us to take care of this beautiful creation, and not to intervene, but there seems to be not much of an alternative.

Indian man single-handedly plants forest

By Nadine Bells | Good News

Jadav Payeng, known as “Mulai” to his friends and neighbours, has spent the last 30 years single-handedly planting and caring for a huge 550-hectare forest on a sandbar in the middle of the Brahmaputra River in Assam, India.

In 1980, Assam’s Jorhat district’s social forestry division launched a tree-planting initiative on 200 hectares of the land. After five years, the project was completed and the labourers left—except for Payeng. He stayed behind, living alone on the sandbar.

Payeng chose a life of isolation on the sandbar where he cared for the trees and continued to plant thousands more of them.

First, he transformed the sandbar into a bamboo thicket.

“I then decided to grow proper trees. I collected and planted them. I also transported red ants from my village, and was stung many times. Red ants change the soil’s properties. That was an experience,” Payeng tells the Times of India.

He still lives in the forest’s vicinity, in a hut with his wife and three children. He earns money by selling cow and buffalo milk.

The forest, home to thousands of varieties of trees, is now known as “Mulai Kathoni,” or “Mulai’s forest.” Payeng’s dedication to the land didn’t just cultivate thriving plants, it provided a home for wildlife, including endangered animals.

“There are about four tigers, three rhinos and more than a hundred deer, rabbits and apes. There are innumerable varieties of birds who call this place home, as well. A herd of about 100 elephants is known to visit the place every year for six months,” Oddity Central reports.

Forestry officials were only made aware of the huge forest in 2008.

“We were surprised to find such a dense forest on the sandbar,” Assistant Conservator of Forests, Gunin Saikia tells the Times of India. “We’re amazed at Payeng. He has been at it for 30 years. Had he been in any other country, he would have been made a hero.”

There is now talk of Mulai’s forest being declared a wildlife sanctuary. If the government proves itself capable of caring for the land, Payeng will start planting elsewhere.

The program that enables life (and industry)

Do you want to see a program that says, “dirt, assemble yourself to a new laptop, mine just broke down”?  Look outside. Don’t dream about the future, look outside. Can you see a green leaf?

Almost all plants have tiny little green cells that perform an amazing chemical process: a tiny nano-factory absorbs CO2 molecules from the air. At the same time water molecules travel upwards, apparently defying the laws of gravity, are then split by an amazing process, and by adding the hydrogen of the water molecules the program converts the CO2 molecules in an astonishingly effective way into a pretty complicated new substance, a carbohydrate, glucose. Like sugar as found in sugar cane for example. Six molecules of water plus six molecules of carbon dioxide produce one molecule of sugar plus six molecules of oxygen. The leftover oxygen is released into the atmosphere to maintain the atmospheric balance. Sounds easy, but just look it up and try to understand it, ha!

All plants live from this substance in their sap. This incredible smart program even uses solar energy to produce what is the basis for life on Earth: carbohydrates. Photosynthesis is the source of the carbon in all the organic compounds within organisms' bodies. Green.exe controls the production of the source of all organic matter.

A microscopic factory that converts fizzy water into sugar! All plants are build with carbohydrates, life on Earth as well as in the sea is based on it. Here is where the food chain begins. Cows turn grass into milk and steak. Bugs eat it, and chickens turn the bugs into eggs and so on. Microscopic animals in the sea, zooplankton, eat microscopic plants in the sea, phytoplankton, and tiny fish eat the tiny animals, and the big fish eat the small fish, and we buy tuna in the supermarket. Basically all animals live directly or indirectly from plants, so do we. Whether we eat lettuce or hamburgers, at the other end of the food chain was something based on photosynthesis.

But not only that. Time, pressure and temperature turn vegetation into coal and oil. Modern life runs on these results of photosynthesis. Without photosynthesis we’d have no cars, no factories, no furniture, almost no electricity. Photosynthesis is the basic program that enables life: embedded in a tiny green cell one of the most amazing programs ever written produces the food and fuel that makes life on Earth possible.

The actual process of photosynthesis is of course much more complex than that, it involves lots of highly complex chemicals that are activated by certain wavelengths of the sun’s rays. If you look up photosynthesis on the internet you will find out that this most basic element of nature that makes the most “primitive” plants tick is nothing but an incredibly complicated sophisticated piece of high tech art. You will see that it takes much more than just intelligence to write it. Just to build that machine you have to be quite an engineer. But the most amazing thing is the program itself. A program that tells this machinery to kind of put itself together by itself, from the raw material found in dirt.  In simple words it says: “Dirt and water, assemble a machine that produces glucose!” This was considered magic until recently. Nowadays everybody knows programs like Skype that say: “Face of grandmother, appear on my computer screen and let me hear her talk to me!” Yet I want to see a program that says: “Dirt, assemble yourself to a new laptop, mine just broke down!”  

What a program! By the way, its color green seems to be the trademark of its designer. Wherever you see life, you see green, to remind you of the One who wrote the most wonderful program ever imagined: Life. Enjoy it. Make the most out of it. In case you get stuck, just press the help button. He’ll show you what to do.

By FG Helmke

The world is about to boil over

World temps maintain the heat of global warming
DURBAN, South Africa (AP)—World temperatures keep rising, and are heading for a threshold that could lead to irreversible changes of the Earth, the U.N. weather office said Tuesday. 2011 is tied for the 10th hottest year since records began.

More Extreme Weather Expected as Planet Warms
Reuters
DURBAN (Reuters)—The world is getting hotter, with 2011 one of the warmest years on record, and increasing temperatures are expected to amplify floods, droughts and other extreme weather patterns around the planet, said a U.N. report released on Tuesday.
The World Meteorological Organisation, part of the United Nations, said the warmest 13 years of average global temperatures have all occurred in the 15 years since 1997.
That has contributed to extreme weather conditions that increase the intensity of droughts and heavy precipitation across the world, it said.
“Our science is solid and it proves unequivocally that the world is warming and that this warming is due to human activities,” WMO Deputy Secretary-General Jerry Lengoasa told reporters in Durban.
This year, the global climate was influenced heavily by the strong La Nina—a phenomenon usually linked to extreme weather in Asia-Pacific, South America and Africa, but which developed unexpectedly in the tropical Pacific in the second half of 2010.
One of the strongest such events in 60 years, it was closely associated with the drought in east Africa, islands in the central equatorial Pacific and the United States, as well as severe flooding in other parts of the world.
The report was released to coincide with the start of U.N. climate talks this week in the South African coastal city of Durban aimed at reaching cuts in gas emissions to head off what scientists see as a global ecological disaster caused by climate change.
Prospects for a meaningful agreement appear bleak with major emitters the United States and China unwilling to take on binding cuts until the other does first, major players Japan, Canada and Russia unwilling to extend commitments that expire next year and the European Union looking at 2015 as a deadline for reaching a new, global deal.
The report said the build-up of greenhouse gasses has depleted sea ice caps and put the world at a tipping point of irreversible changes in ecosystems caused by global warming.
“Concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere have reached new highs,” WMO Secretary-General Michel Jarraud said separately in a statement.
“They are very rapidly approaching levels consistent with a 2-2.4 degree Centigrade rise in average global temperatures which scientists believe could trigger far reaching and irreversible changes in our Earth, biosphere and oceans.”
U.N. scientists said in a separate report this month an increase in heat waves is almost certain, while heavier rainfall, more floods, stronger cyclones, landslides and more intense droughts are likely across the globe this century as the Earth’s climate warms.
The Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development said global average temperatures could rise by 3-6 degrees Celsius by the end of the century if governments failed to contain emissions, bringing unprecedented destruction as glaciers melt and sea levels rise and small island states are erased from existence.

editor: It's like heating up milk. At a certain point unwillingness to turn off the heat will trigger the milk to boil over. Didn't we all see this happen once in our lives? I saw a pressure cooker explode once because the pot was too full and the security valve blocked. Reaching the threshold means: beyond this point there's no way back. We are now approaching this point. Not in the next generation, but within the next few years.

Our grandchildren won't have a world to live in

This prestigious world-wide recognized agency, the IEA,  calmly says we are creating an "un-live-able" world, using words like: "business-as-usual" and "widely accepted" by "scientists and governments".  
This is a rare description of how man himself is creating apocalyptic monsters that destroy our world, and he doesn't seem to need God to dig his own grave. 

World has five years to avoid severe warming: IEA

By Marlowe Hood, AFP, Nov. 9, 2011
The world has just five years to avoid being trapped in a scenario of perilous climate change and extreme weather events, the International Energy Agency (IEA) warned on Wednesday.

On current trends, “rising fossil energy use will lead to irreversible and potentially catastrophic climate change,” the IEA concluded in its annual World Energy Outlook report.

“The door to 2.0 C is closing,” it said, referring to the 2.0 Celsius (3.6 Fahrenheit) cap on global warming widely accepted by scientists and governments as the ceiling for averting unmanageable climate damage.

Without further action, by 2017 the total CO2 emissions compatible with the 2.0 C goal will be “locked in” by power plants, factories and other carbon-emitting sources either built or planned, the IEA said.

To meet energy needs while still averting climate catastrophe, governments must engineer a shift away from carbon-intensive fossil fuels, the agency said bluntly.

Business-as-usual emissions would put the world “on an even more dangerous track toward an increase of 6.0 C (10.8 F),” the report says.

Scientists who have modelled the impacts on biodiversity, agriculture and human settlement say a 6 C world would be close to unlivable due to violent extremes of drought, flooding, heatwaves and storms.

The planet’s average temperature has risen by about 1.0 C (1.8 F) over the last century, with forecasts for future warming ranging from an additional 1.0 C to 5.0 C (9.0 F) by 2100.

Europe’s Oceans Changing at Unprecedented Rate

Reuters, September 
LONDON (Reuters)—Europe’s seas are changing at an unprecedented rate as ice sheets melt, temperatures rise and marine life migrates due to climate change, a report by the Climate Change and European Marine Ecosystem Research (CLAMER) project warned.

Scientists examined a mass of EU-funded research on the impacts of climate change on Europe’s marine environment and identified the gaps and priorities for future work.

“Change has been clearly visible and is much more rapid than we thought was possible,” Carlo Heip, chair of the CLAMER project and lead author of the report, told Reuters on Tuesday.

Over the past 25 years, sea water temperatures have increased as Arctic sea ice has melted. The combination of rising sea-levels and increased winds has contributed to the erosion of 15 percent of European coasts, the report said.

Warming has speeded up in the past 25 years at around 10 times faster than the average rate of increase in the 20th century, it added.

From 1986 to 2006, sea surface temperature rises for European waters were three to six times higher than the global average.

“Scenario simulations suggest that by the end of the 21st century, the temperature of the Baltic Sea may have increased by 2 to 4 degrees centigrade, the North Sea by 1.7 degrees, and the Bay of Biscay by 1.5 to 5 degrees,” the report said.

Melting ice sheets and glaciers add more uncertainty. Current estimates for 2100 suggest European sea levels could rise 60 cms and up to 1.9 metres at some British coasts.

Sea level rise threatens populations in all low-lying areas of Europe, but countries such as Britain, France and the Netherlands could be less vulnerable because they are rich enough to adopt coastal protection measures.

Changes in the marine food chain have also occurred as organisms have migrated to the Atlantic from the Pacific via seasonal ice-free passages through the Arctic.

While some species can thrive in other oceans, any major upheaval to the marine ecosystem could have devastating effects, the report said.

CLAMER also found that some bacteria strains were becoming more prevalent and could be a potential threat to human health. For example, cholera strains have increased in the North Sea over the past 50 years, perhaps due to temperature change.

Studies show dramatic decrease in plankton as planet warms

by DarkSyde

New studies show that as much as 40 percent of the ocean's critical phytoplankton have disappeared.

    In the long-term, nothing predicted the numbers of phytoplankton better than the surface temperature of the seas. Phytoplankton need sunlight to grow, so they’re constrained to the upper layers of the ocean and depends on nutrients welling up from below. But warmer waters are less likely to mix in this way, which starves the phytoplankton and limits their growth.