 |
New Civilization News: Moonlight through Leaves |
Category: Education 4 comments 28 May 2005 @ 02:36 by koravya : Dark NightFriday evening, May twenty-seventh. Little kitty looking for a home in the little garden of high grass, surrounded by a wooden fence and an adobe wall in the dead center of the city, surrounded by miles of parking lots and the black-top-pit. City kittys know better than to walk across the street, and sometimes they jump right out in front of your headlights at night, and you wonder what can they be thinking putting their lives in danger like that? Once saw a little black kitty get nailed on the highway by the car just ahead of me on a fifty-five mile an hour stretch. That little kitty skidded across the asphalt like a hockey puck on ice. What was that little kitty thinking? Dont it know better than to cross the black-top-pit after the big iron monster has gone by? Gotta wonder what that kitty was thinking. Now theres a skittish kitty finding a spot to nap, and as it clambers over the wooden fence, it stops to look and see if this is friend or foe. . . . All of this weeks presentations have been presented, and all of the final grades are falling into place. Seventy students in five classes, one class each day. The Friday afternoon class got a nine person project together, and it was a tour-de-force, on the issue of immigration, both legal and illegal, into the United States from both borders. The Thursday morning class. Four women on one team covering diets in all of their variations and implications for health that each involves. The team of six men considering the issue of violence in the media, including movies, games, music, wherever it is injected into the minds of our youth, and who is responsible, and what can anyone who is concerned do? Wednesday morning was a smorgasbord of Economics. The good, the bad, and the ugly, but none so ugly as to merit condemnation. I can see some kind of effort in every-one in this class, some of it surprisingly much better than the presentations from two weeks ago. A little extra effort to make up for screwing up. No one under a Sea when all is said and done. Good show. Tuesday night was good. Randy and Eliseo on Wal-Mart. Lucasta and Elizabeth on Disney, and Dan & Mike & Chris on Eddie Bauer. Now these people have studied this, and this is something they would not have otherwise done, given their predilection for computer programming and networking. And then there is the paper shredding of old records. Lists of names from previous quarters feeding the teeth of the metal grinder. With stars in their eyes about the possibilities for a future. . . .While the glaciers melt. Its all over everybody. The planet is going to fry. All of your depleted uranium is going to fry along with it, and all of your nuclear arsenals are going to go off like firecrackers, and all of your money is going to flutter in the wind. There is nobody who is going to do anything about all of this. It is already done. The brothers and the sisters are going to know each other on the road. It will be a dark night. The emerging planet will look like nothing ever seen before. */-_/*-^_ 28 May 2005 @ 21:30 by koravya : More on Methane Selected paragraphs from Chapter five of KILLER IN OUR MIDST Methane Catastrophes in Earth's Past and Near Future http://www.killerinourmidst.com/index.html#anchorContents 5. METHANE CATASTROPHE (Continental Margin Methane Release) http://www.killerinourmidst.com/methane%20catastrophe.html What Erwin missed was the importance -- indeed, the indispensibility -- of the rapid increase of these gases for the transformation of global climate and marine chemistry. (The rate of release is crucial. A truck, moving at 100 kilometers, or sixty miles, per hour, can be extremely dangerous to things in its path; at a meter -- yard -- per hour, the truck would constitute little or no danger. Just as the truck's potential threat depends on its momentum and therefore its speed, so also does the ecological impact of methane and carbon dioxide depend on their ecological momentum, or rate of increase. The faster the delivery, the harder the blow.) . . . Global Warming But the most important consequence of a colossal methane release would have been the warming of the planet by the greenhouse gas methane and its successor, carbon dioxide. We tend to underestimate the impact of global warming on other organisms. . . . the impact of global warming has been popularly assumed to be something which will only gradually encroach upon other organisms, and cause extinction only in unusual circumstances. Instead, habitat destruction has generally been presumed to be the major human activity which will adversely affect our fellow species. . . . We no longer have any excuse for such naiveté. A careful examination of a large number of species in numerous parts of the planet projects that a stunning portion of them will be "'committed to extinction'" in just 50 years, with only modest global warming (Thomas, 2004). It does not mean that 50 years from now all these "committed" species will be gone, but rather that they will no longer have a habitat in which they can survive. The demise of the last members of such species may hang on for some decades, but their ultimate doom is assured. In 50 years, more than 10% of terrestrial species -- at minimum -- will be on a one-way path to extinction; in 100 years, almost all those species will be gone. . . . The message of this study is simple: climate change kills -- and kills extraordinary numbers of living things -- even when it is minor. . . . Cloud cover would have increased, but the role of clouds in determining climate is a matter of continuing discussion and much serious investigation among scientists, because clouds both increase Earth's albedo (thus reflecting more solar radiation back into space) and cooling the planet, and increase the amount of warmth beneath them. It is still unknown whether, on balance, clouds contribute more to planetary warming or cooling, though the answer is sure to be different for different types of clouds. . . . While the initial triggering mechanism is different -- the anthropogenic production of carbon dioxide in the present versus direct oceanic warming and indirect CO2-induced global warming caused by Traps volcanism at the end of the Permian -- the effects would have been the same. The atmosphere warmed, and the ocean and the terrestrial surface with it. Huge numbers of species were not able to survive the changed conditions, and they died. . . . The term "dissociation" refers to the breakup of the clathrate structure of the hydrate, those icy lattices that contain the methane. Once these lattices dissolve, the methane is released. Small amounts of methane are always being released through dissociation; massive dissociation refers to significant breakup of the clathrates, and a major release of methane. This can occur only by the warming of the sediments, or by their depressurization caused by a fall in sea level. . . . Methane hydrate can cause or contribute to the instability of continental margins and the likelihood of submarine landslides in several ways. . . . The association between hydrate dissociation and slumping, in fact, was one of the first dangers of seafloor hydrates to be recognized, now almost thirty years ago (McIver, 1977). Not surprisingly, slumping is the most abrupt and potentially catastrophic of the various modes of methane release. . . . Continuous and Episodic versus Catastrophic Release: Certain of the release modes of continental margin methane are more or less continuous, and seem to represent the usual way that methane is released from margin sediment. These modes are trickling and rafting, though rafting is a very minor release mode and only attracts attention because of its startling unfamiliarity. Sediment waves presumably develop regularly in various parts of the world ocean seafloor over long periods of time, and their methane likely is also released gradually. Venting occurs episodically, as free methane pressure builds in sediment and then forces its way out through faults or such other fluid release structures as pockmarks. Mud volcanism is an occasional, local phenomenon that periodically injects small quantities of methane into the ocean and atmosphere. The remaining two modes allow for catastrophic release. . . . Submarine landslides Massive landslides are among the most rapid and destructive geological processes on the planet. But since submarine landslides are not visible to the unaided eye -- and in the murky depths of the ocean can only be seen and photographed in tiny areas which provide no clue as to their real extent -- a comparison with a highly visible terrestrial landslide may be useful. . . . An estimated 350 billion metric tons of methane was released in these slide events, both from dissociated methane hydrate and the free gas that lay below them. This amount of methane contains some 263 billion metric tons of carbon, equivalent to about 1/3 the total carbon in the atmosphere, making its release roughly equivalent to the amount of anthropogenic carbon released into the atmosphere since the beginning of the industrial age. . . . Though other suggested scenarios for the cause of the end-Permian extinction may be found to be compatible with these time estimates, it is only the margin methane proposal which independently generated such timelines (based on the LPTM and computer modeling), and enjoys several independent lines of support by way of confirmation. . . . By contrast, large-scale methane release can indeed produce serious global consequences. It has great potential as a greenhouse gas for warming the planet, and, of course, it is quickly oxidized to carbon dioxide. Thus, for warming the planet, large quantities of methane are an excellent, readily-available resource. In addition, that methane has the ability to directly cause oceanic anoxia, and to reduce the level of atmospheric oxygen by interfering with the activity of marine and terrestrial photosynthesizers. Therefore, methane has the potential to produce more significant, global, and protracted consequences for Earth's organisms than did Siberian Traps volcanism alone. . . . Recently there have been a number of new and revived proposals regarding the cause(s) of the end-Permian extinction. . . . The first of these theories starts with an allegedly anoxic ocean. The anoxia allows methane to reach, or almost reach, saturation levels (where the seawater has as much dissolved methane as it can hold) in the ocean. Then, perhaps triggered by an earthquake, volcano, warm current, or other disturbance -- or without any external cause at all -- this gas suddenly erupts from the ocean, much like soda from a shaken pop bottle. Ignited by lightning, the methane devastates life on land, and the Earth is plunged either into a period of cooling (caused by sun-obscuring firestorms) or warming (caused by the increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere)(Ryskin, 2003). . . . The evidence we now have regarding end-Permian events, and their connection to the end-Permian extinction seem quite adequate to explain that extinction. Traps volcanism initiated the process, helping shut down thermohaline circulation and warming the globe, including releasing continental margin methane. The methane release completed the transition to anoxia in the deeper ocean, and contributed to hypoxic conditions in coastal areas. The increased acidity of rainfall, ocean-eutrophying volcanic ashfalls, and occasional bursts of hydrogen sulfide from the shallow seafloor made additional contributions to the increasingly unpleasant and inhospitable ecological conditions. Most important, however, was the rise of global temperatures, initiated by carbon dioxide from Traps volcanism, and followed by the high atmospheric levels of methane and its successor greenhouse gas carbon dioxide. The new projections of the near-future impact of current global warming indicate that even the heating of the planet by a few degrees can have extremely lethal consequences (Thomas, 2004). What other killing mechanisms are necessary? None. *-/_* 29 Jan 2015 @ 07:51 by Sofia @190.205.118.227 : STtQiOZqQIxjOLnycyu But of course!! some couiernts do not eat beef, And our leaders are letting them dictate in this nation, How sick is that?? I say if you don't like it leave!!!! Another control mechanism, Some can see it some do not want to!!! some are just Sheoplel!!! and cattle and sheep do not mix!! If you do have access to homegrown anything!! its always better for you, My husband has been to those cattle manu. plants, and some are very sad indeed, Also range beef is usually not feed all that awful stuff!! its just natural, like drinking raw cows milk, which is very good for children!!!, even though the govt took it off the shelves of the grocery stores!! sad indeed!! 29 Jan 2015 @ 15:15 by Ado @190.0.50.34 : gCMODDebtOOcClkzgN factory farmed alanims in general are bad for your health. they are pumped full of antibiotics, hormones and pesticides. many people are becoming antibiotic resistant because of the medication that is put in their food. little girls get their periods when they are 6-7, due to their elevated hormone levels from drinking milk. google image search factory farms and you will see just exactly why your meet is unhealthy.you should never eat an animal that is given medication to prevent disease. they should be in an environment where disease does not exist. period.logically, getting rid of factory farms (industrial agriculture) would reduce the carbon footprint made by our nation, more than every person driving hybrids would. Other entries in Education 28 Apr 2016 @ 17:25: cosmology-vedas-interlinks-and-knowledge-expansion-cosmological Index 29 Jun 2010 @ 02:35: LARGE CLASS, MAD DISCOURSE: SAME ROOTS 9 Jun 2010 @ 18:31: Spilling The Beans.. 22 Dec 2008 @ 05:55: Third Week 22 Nov 2008 @ 23:39: The L Word – part two and a half (baked) 28 Aug 2008 @ 05:12: Catherine 22 Aug 2008 @ 05:21: Final Exams 4 Apr 2008 @ 13:12: EDUCATION IS DEFICIENT FOR GIFTED MINDS 3 Apr 2008 @ 20:25: Welcome to the ratrace. 13 Feb 2008 @ 08:36: Horizon
|
24 May 2005 @ 07:56, by John Ashbaugh