Sustainable World -Farm Environmental – Page 153

One person can make a difference for the environment!

Video – World Economic Forum

June 19, 2019

One person can make a difference.

These four exercise trends let you save the planet while getting fitter

One person can make a difference. 📕 Read more: https://wef.ch/2WfIWYt

Posted by Video – World Economic Forum on Tuesday, June 18, 2019

The Netherlands is creating a society where nothing goes to waste.

World Economic Forum

Including the world’s first bike path made from recycled plastic.

📕 Read more: https://wef.ch/2R88WSA

Here are 3 innovative ways the Netherlands is creating a society where nothing goes to waste

Including the world's first bike path made from recycled plastic. 📕 Read more: https://wef.ch/2R88WSA

Posted by World Economic Forum on Monday, April 29, 2019

A day in the life with 4ocean Bali.

4ocean

June 15, 2019

A day in the life with 4ocean Bali. #4ocean #4oceanBali

A day in the life with 4ocean Bali. #4ocean #4oceanBali

Posted by 4ocean on Friday, June 14, 2019

Trump official consulted global warming rejecters

Associated Press

By Ellen Knickmeyer and Seth Borenstein, June 14, 2019

In this March 29, 2013, file photo, a worker helps monitor water pumping pressure and temperature, at an oil and natural gas extraction site, outside Rifle, on the Western Slope of Colorado. A Trump administration national security official has sought help from advisers to a think tank that disavows climate change to challenge widely accepted scientific findings on global warming, according to his emails. (AP Photo/Brennan Linsley, File)

WASHINGTON (AP) — A Trump administration national security official has sought help from advisers to a think tank that disavows climate change to challenge widely accepted scientific findings on global warming, according to his emails.

The request from William Happer, a member of the National Security Council, is included in emails from 2018 and 2019 that were obtained by the Environmental Defense Fund under the federal Freedom of Information Act and provided to The Associated Press. That request was made this past March to policy advisers with the Heartland Institute, one of the most vocal challengers of mainstream scientific findings that emissions from burning coal, oil and gas are damaging the Earth’s atmosphere.

In a March 3 email exchange Happer and Heartland adviser Hal Doiron discuss Happer’s scientific arguments in a paper attempting to knock down climate change as well as ideas to make the work “more useful to a wider readership.” Happer writes he had already discussed the work with another Heartland adviser, Thomas Wysmuller.

Academic experts denounced the administration official’s continued involvement with groups and scientists who reject what numerous federal agencies say is the fact of climate change.

“These people are endangering all of us by promoting anti-science in service of fossil fuel interests over the American interests,” said Pennsylvania State University climate scientist Michael Mann.

“It’s the equivalent to formulating anti-terrorism policy by consulting with groups that deny terrorism exists,” said Northeastern University’s Matthew Nisbet, a professor of environmental communication and public policy.

The National Security Council declined to make Happer available to discuss the emails.

The AP and others reported earlier this year that Happer was coordinating a proposed White House panel to challenge the findings from scientists in and out of government that carbon emissions are altering the Earth’s atmosphere and climate.

President Donald Trump in November rejected the warnings of a national climate change assessment by more than a dozen government agencies.

“I don’t believe it,” he said.

Happer, a physicist who previously taught at Princeton University, has claimed that carbon dioxide, the main heat-trapping gas from the burning of coal, oil and gas, is good for humans and that carbon emissions have been demonized like “the poor Jews under Hitler.” Trump appointed him in late 2018 to the National Security Council, which advises the president on security and foreign policy issues.

The emails show Happer expressing surprise that NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine, a former Oklahoma congressman who once questioned mainstream climate science, has come round to accepting that science.

A May 2018 email exchange between Heartland’s Wysmuller and Happer calls the NASA chief’s change of heart on climate science “a puzzle.” The exchange calls scientifically established rises in sea levels and temperatures under climate change “part of the nonsense” and urges the NASA head — copied in — to “systematically sidestep it.”

Happer at the time was not yet a security adviser, although he had advised the Trump Environmental Protection Agency on climate change.

A NASA spokesman on Thursday upheld the space agency’s public statements on climate change.

“We provide the data that informs policy makers around the world,” spokesman Bob Jacobs said. “Our science information continues to be published publicly as it always has.”

But at the Heartland Institute, spokesman Jim Lakely defended the effort, saying in an email that NASA’s public characterization of climate change as manmade and a global threat “is a disservice to taxpayers and science that it is still pushed by NASA.”

After joining the agency, Happer sent a February 2019 email to NASA deputy administrator James Morhard relaying a complaint from an unidentified rejecter of man-made climate change about NASA’s website.

“I’m concerned that many children are being indoctrinated by this bad science,” said the email that Happer relayed.

Happer’s own message was redacted from the records obtained by the environmental group.

Two major U.S. science organizations took issue with Happer’s emails.

“We have concerns that there appear to be attempts by a member of the National Security Council to influence and interfere with the ability of NASA, a federal science agency, to communicate accurately about research findings on climate science,” said Rush Holt, chief executive officer of the American Association for the Advance of Science, the world’s largest general scientific society.

There have been hundreds of scientific assessments by leading researchers and institutions the last few decades that look at all the evidence and have been “extremely credible and routinely withstand intense scrutiny,” said Keith Seitter, executive director of the American Meteorological Society. “Efforts to dismiss or discredit these rigorous scientific assessments in public venues does an incredible disservice to the public.”

Near Record ‘Dead Zone’ Predicted for Gulf of Mexico

EcoWatch

Near Record ‘Dead Zone’ Predicted for Gulf of Mexico

Jordan Davidson June 11, 2019

This map shows how pollution from cities and farms flows down into the Gulf of Mexico. NOAA

Every year the Gulf of Mexico hosts a human caused “dead zone.” This year, it will approach record levels scientists from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration — or NOAA — estimate, in a statement released Monday.

The researchers predict the hypoxic zone — an area with little to no oxygen that can kill marine life — to be nearly 8,000 square miles or roughly the size of Massachusetts.

NOAA wasn’t the only organization to estimate a near record dead zone this summer. Researchers from Louisiana State University (LSU) released a statement on Monday predicting this year’s dead zone to be 8,717 square miles, making it the second largest on record.

“We think this will be the second-largest, but it could very well go over that,” said Nancy Rabalais, a marine ecologist who studies dead zones co-authored the LSU report, as CNN reported.

The Gulf of Mexico’s dead zone is a result of nutrient pollution, including nitrogen and phosphorus from urban environments and farms, traveling through the Mississippi River watershed and into the gulf, according to NOAA’s press release.

NOAA pointed to the overwhelming spring rains along the Mississippi River, which led to record high river flows and flooding, as a major contributing factor to this year’s sizeable dead zone.

The record flooding brought a substantial amount of pollutants into the water. “This past May, discharge in the Mississippi and Atchafalaya rivers was about 67 percent above the long-term average between 1980 and 2018. USGS estimates that this larger-than average river discharge carried 156,000 metric tons of nitrate and 25,300 metric tons of phosphorus into the Gulf of Mexico in May alone. These nitrate loads were about 18 percent above the long-term average, and phosphorus loads were about 49 percent above the long-term average,” NOAA said in its press release.

What happens is the nitrogen and phosphorus stimulate the growth of phytoplankton, which fall to the bottom of the water and decompose with the bacteria that uses up the oxygen, creating an area with not enough oxygen to sustain life.

“The low oxygen conditions in the gulf’s most productive waters stresses organisms and may even cause their death, threatening living resources, including fish, shrimp and crabs caught there,” LSU said in a statement. “Low oxygen conditions started to appear 50 years ago when agricultural practices intensified in the Midwest.”

To prevent the problem in the future, a task force of federal, state and tribal agencies from 12 of the 31 states that comprise the Mississippi River watershed set a goal of reducing the dead zone from an average of about 5,800 square miles to an average of 1,900 square miles, but that number is far from today’s reality, according to NBC Dallas-Fort Worth.

“While this year’s zone will be larger than usual because of the flooding, the long-term trend is still not changing,” said Don Scavia, an aquatic ecologist at the University of Michigan who contributed to the NOAA report, in a University of Michigan statement. “The bottom line is that we will never reach the dead zone reduction target of 1,900 square miles until more serious actions are taken to reduce the loss of Midwest fertilizers into the Mississippi River system.”

In the meantime, farmers along the Mississippi can build embankments to stop runoff, diversifying their crops and using sustainable perennials like wheat grass, which will hold more nitrogen and soil in the ground since it has a longer root than corn and soybeans, according to CNN.

Plant Extinction Is Happening 500x Faster Than Before the Industrial Revolution

EcoWatch

Plant Extinction Is Happening 500x Faster Than Before the Industrial Revolution

By Jordan Davidson June 11, 2019

Cyanea superba, endemic to the island of Oahu and now extinct in the wild. David Eickoff/ CC BY 2.0.

Researchers have found that nearly 600 plant extinctions have taken place over the last two and a half centuries, according to a new paper published in Nature Ecology and Evolution.

The 571 proven plant extinctions lost since 1753 is twice the number of animal species lost in the same time frame and nearly four times as many plants lost as botanists recently estimated. The researchers with the Royal Botanic Gardens in the UK and Stockholm University also noted that many plant species disappeared without anyone ever knowing about them, pushing the true number of extinctions much higher.

The extinction rate — 500 times greater now than before the Industrial Revolution — is also quite alarming, according to The Guardian. This number, too, is likely an underestimate.

“This study is the first time we have an overview of what plants have already become extinct, where they have disappeared from and how quickly this is happening,” said Aelys Humphreys, Ph.D., of Stockholm University, the BBC reported.

The paper documented all known plant extinctions in the world, finding that most lost plants were in the tropics and on islands. The researchers created a map that showed South Africa, Australia, Brazil, India, Madagascar and Hawaii as particular hotspots for plant extinction, according to The Guardian.

So what’s causing the rapid rate of plant extinction? The main culprit is human activity like clear cutting forests for timber and converting land into fields for agriculture.

The researchers note that their paper also shows what lessons can be learned to stop future extinctions.

“Plants underpin all life on Earth,” said Eimear Nic Lughadha, Ph.D., at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, who was part of the research team, as The Guardian reported. “They provide the oxygen we breathe and the food we eat, as well as making up the backbone of the world’s ecosystems – so plant extinction is bad news for all species.”

Life on Earth relies on plants for oxygen and food. And, the extinction of one plant can lead to cascading effects that threaten to harm other species that rely on the plant for food or for a place to lay eggs, the BBC reports.

“Millions of other species depend on plants for their survival, humans included, so knowing which plants we are losing and from where, will feed back into conservation programs targeting other organisms as well,” Nic Lughadha said, as the BBC reported.

The researchers highlighted steps to slow down plant extinctions including, recording all plants in the world, preserving specimens, funding botanists and educating children to recognize local plants, according to the BBC.

The research comes on the heels of other grim reports that have highlighted the destruction humans have caused. Last month, a UN report said that one million of Earth’s eight million plant and animal species are threatened with extinction.

Dandelions are Edible: Save the Dandelions!

Ma’s Backyard Beez

Image may contain: flower, plant, outdoor and nature

U.S. Floods Snarl Trucks, Trains, Barges

Brian K. Sullivan, Shruti Date Singh and Mario Parker, Bloomberg

June 8, 2019

‘Punched in the Face’: U.S. Floods Snarl Trucks, Trains, Barges

(Bloomberg) — Hundreds of barges are stalled on the Mississippi River, clogging the main circulatory system for a farm-belt economy battered by a relentless, record-setting string of snow, rainstorms and flooding.

Railways and highways have been closed as well, keeping needed supplies from farmers and others, and limiting the crops sent to market. For Chris Boerm, who manages transportation for Archer-Daniels-Midland Co., one of the nation’s largest agricultural commodities dealers, the weather is an unyielding, ever-changing challenge.

He and his co-workers spend time carefully planning out the quickest way to get supplies to the people that need them, he said. But it’s tough staying ahead of the drenching rain.

“It’s sort of like Mike Tyson’s quote, everybody’s got a plan until you get punched in the face, right?” Boerm said by telephone. “Every day we come in and we’ve got a plan. But then it rains three inches somewhere overnight where it wasn’t expected, and the plan changes.”

That means supplies they plan to move on one river may need to be rerouted to a different waterway, or offloaded onto a rail car or a truck, with the hope they won’t be delayed by the weather as well. For instance, when water reaches the wheel bearings on a freight car in a siding, it can’t be hauled long distances without an inspection, yet another potential delay.

At just two locks along the upper Mississippi, almost 300 barges are being held in place as a result of high water and fast currents, according to Waterways Council Inc., which tracks barge movements. And hundreds more are waiting in St. Louis, Cairo, Illinois and Memphis, Tennessee, said Deb Calhoun, the council’s senior vice president.

“It’s a big bottleneck,” Calhoun said.

The contiguous U.S. had its wettest January to May on records dating back to 1895, according to the U.S. National Centers for Environmental Information in Asheville, North Carolina. Nebraska, Kansas and Missouri had their rainiest May on record, the center’s data shows, while Arkansas, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Wisconsin and Illinois were all in the top 10.

Since last year, heavy snow fell on the Midwest and Great Plains, melting into saturated ground early in the spring. In March, a so-called bomb cyclone drenched Nebraska and Iowa with record rain and snow, sending the Missouri River out of its banks and creating a multi-state disaster area.

While high waters stop barge traffic, they also carry other dangers. Flood waters have closed off Interstate highways on a number of occasions and water itself. That overwhelms farm fields, sewer and septic systems and industrial plants along its banks, which can become quite toxic as it flows away from the river beds.

“We dealt with a wet fall, and then record snowfall in many places,” said Tim Eagleton, senior engineering specialist for FM Global, an industrial insurer. “Of course, all that melts and comes down the Mississippi. Not only that, but we have had 200%-plus rainfall over a large part of that basin for months, and then a record-wet May in a lot of places.’

The bottom line, according to Eagleton: “Very long duration flooding on the Mississippi River that can really start to wear on people.’’ Almost 200 miles of the Mississippi has been shut down, he said.

Farmers are definitely feeling the crunch.

Iowa corn farmer Bob Hemesath, whose farm is about 35 miles west of the Mississippi River in Decorah, had planned to deliver about 20,000 bushels of corn to a Bunge Ltd. facility in McGregor in March and April. Instead, he ended up sending the grain to a local ethanol plant because the facility was closed due to high water levels and still remains shuttered.

He knows neighboring soybean farmers who are waiting to send their crops down the river as well. U.S. farmers still hold a lot of crops in their silos from their 2018 harvest because selling hasn’t made financial sense during the U.S.-China trade war, slow demand and slumping prices. Now, with northbound and southbound river traffic stalled, Hemesath is worried about what the barge backlog is going to look like this fall.

“We are going to be missing almost three months of river traffic, I don’t even know how we will get caught up,” he said. “If the river facilities don’t have barges that are caught up on old crop they won’t be able to ship new crop. It’s another stress for farmers.”

Among Boerm’s worries is that with the water levels so high — and for so long — there isn’t a lot of visibility yet on what the long-term impact to the waterways may be.

Boerm was an ADM manager in 1993, when more than 17 million acres were flooded across nine states in June through August. He recalls working with the Red Cross in Hardin, Illinois, sandbagging the bloated waterways and helping evacuate homes. The recent flooding is just as formidable a beast, he said.

“In ’93, the flood was really kind of concentrated in Iowa and the Upper Midwest,” Boerm said. “This has been much more expansive, getting all the inland rivers,” affecting the entire Mississippi, the Arkansas River, the Illinois River and the Ohio River.

It’s impossible to know the full fallout until the waters recede, Boerm added.

That could take some time, according to Jeff Graschel, service coordination hydrologist with the Lower Mississippi River Forecast Center in Slidell, Louisiana. “A lot of locations since December to January have been above flood levels, and they probably will be in June to July,’’ he said. “We have another month or two before we can get some of these areas to go below flood.’’

Waterways near Baton Rouge, Louisiana, Natchez, Mississippi and Cairo, Illinois, have all set records for the length of the flood by weeks, Graschel said.

The repercussions will ripple through the economy for the rest of the year, said Jon Davis, chief meteorologist with RiskPulse, a weather analytics firm in Chicago. When crops that have been sowed late in the season to start moving to market, barge, truck and train traffic will soon be stretched thin, he said.

“There are a couple of things that make this situation incredibly unique, the first of which is the longevity of the flooding, ’’ according to Davis. “The other factor is how widespread everything is.’’

Corn and soybean planting lags the five-year average, and grain shipments on the Mississippi, Arkansas and Ohio Rivers have already dropped well below last year and the three-year averages, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

With assistance from Michael Hirtzer and Kevin Varley.

To contact the reporters on this story: Brian K. Sullivan in Boston at bsullivan10@bloomberg.net; Shruti Date Singh in Chicago at ssingh28@bloomberg.net; Mario Parker in Chicago at mparker22@bloomberg.net

To contact the editors responsible for this story: James Attwood at jattwood3@bloomberg.net, Reg Gale, Pratish Narayanan.

This incredible facility transforms 96% of household waste into reusable materials!

Global Citizen

May 28, 2019

This incredible facility transforms 96% of household waste into reusable materials! ♻️

This Trash Facility In Poland Repurposes Household Waste

This incredible facility transforms 96% of household waste into reusable materials! ♻️

Posted by Global Citizen on Tuesday, May 28, 2019

What If Orgasms Didn’t Exist?

What.If

June 5, 2019

What If Orgasms Didn’t Exist?

Would you exist if humanity never had the pleasure of the big O?

What If Orgasms Didn’t Exist?

Would you exist if humanity never had the pleasure of the big O?

Posted by What.If on Wednesday, June 5, 2019

Video – World Economic Forum

World Economic Forum

4ocean

Associated Press

Emails: Trump official consulted global warming rejecters

EcoWatch

Near Record ‘Dead Zone’ Predicted for Gulf of Mexico

EcoWatch

Ma’s Backyard Beez

Bloomberg

‘Punched in the Face’: U.S. Floods Snarl Trucks, Trains, Barges

Global Citizen

What.If