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 Post subject: 2050: What Will the Earth"s Population Be?
PostPosted: Tue Apr 14, 2009 12:32 pm 
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The_future_2_2On a planet that is so markedly divided between the ‘haves’ and the ‘have nots’, population growth is often seen as a massive problem. At the end of 2007 it was announced that the planets population had reached approximately 6.7 billion people. A common estimate also suggested that by 2050 the planets population would reach 9 billion people.



However, according to the Worldwatch Institute, a nonpartisan Washington research group, there is absolutely no confidence in that number any more.

Pop_hist_5
The report points to the massive variability in fertility rates
worldwide as the reason for this. There are simply too many factors to
pin on too many people to arrive at a conclusion worthy of recognition.
For pessimists, this only adds fuel to their fires of fear that Earth
will be overrun.



There are a veritable multitude of factors
that have brought researchers to this conclusion. Amidst the factors
exists a mass of contradictions.For example, there is a
massive contradiction in the fact that families continue to shrink in
number and in size, yet there are near-record levels of birth. This is
easily explained by the simple fact that there are now more women of
childbearing age then there was. Consider that in 1970 there were only
856 million women aged between 15 and 49; however in 2007 that number
had skyrocketed to 1.7 billion.From the report:



Only
the future growth of the reproductive-age population is readily
predictable, however: all but the youngest of the women who will be in
this age group in two decades are already alive today. But sustaining
further declines in childbearing and increases in life expectancy will
require continued efforts by governments to improve access to good
health care, and both trends could be threatened by environmental or
social deterioration.



The uncertain future of these factors makes
population growth harder to predict than most people realize. So
much makes up the population statistics of our planet. There are
enumerable reports showing that there is enough fresh water and food
for the entire planet, but once again the richer countries abuse that.
Even then, it is the poorer nations that often have larger families.



Posted by Josh Hill.





Related Galaxy posts:














Dr Strangelove Two? -Cambridge Astrophysicist Gives Earthlings a 50/50 Chance of Making it Through the Century
The Language of the Future: Harvard Mathematicians Break the Code
Predicting the Future -A Galaxy Insight
The Final Century -Video Classic

The "Hawking Solution" -Will Saving Humanity Require Leaving the Planet?

Bigger Threat than Global Warming -Mass Species Extinction

Coming of Age in the Holocene

Robots Rising -Scientists are Worried

Ghost Map -Scientists Unlock Secret of 1918 Pandemic



Links:





http://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/03/14/earth-2050-population-unknowable/
http://www.worldwatch.org/node/5645


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 Post subject: U.S. Energy Czar Nobel Laurate Warns of Planetary Water Crisis
PostPosted: Thu Apr 23, 2009 10:37 pm 
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 Post subject: The Mystery of Magnetic Fields (VIDEO)
PostPosted: Sun Apr 26, 2009 11:35 pm 
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1677 The lives of invisible magnetic fields are revealed as chaotic ever-changing geometries . All action takes place around NASA"s Space Sciences Laboratories, UC Berkeley, to recordings of space scientists describing their discoveries . Actual VLF audio recordings control the evolution of the fields, revealing recurrent ‘whistlers" produced by fleeting electrons.

The creators, Ruth Jarman and Joe Gerhardt of Semiconductor, ask: are we observing a series of scientific experiments, the universe in flux, or a documentary of a fictional world?.




Ruth Jarman and Joe Gerhardt were artists-in-residence at SSL. Combining their in-house lab culture experience with formidable artistic instincts in sound, animation and programming, they have created a magnetic magnum opus in nuce, a tour de force of equisite beauty of a massive invisible force brought down to human scale.




scalehttp://www.semiconductorfilms.com/root/Magnetic_Movie/Magnetic.htm







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 Post subject: The End of the Line: Plenty of fish in the sea?
PostPosted: Sat Jun 20, 2009 8:11 am 
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Watch this searching documentary about the plight of the world"s oceans and you may think a little harder before ordering your next tuna sandwich




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 Post subject: New Insights Into Prehistoric Global Warming
PostPosted: Fri Jul 17, 2009 1:27 pm 
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6a00d8341bf7f753ef01157188a4fb970b-500wi

Although an ancient global-warming episode
-known as the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM)- remains incompletely explained, a geo-biology team at Cal Tech
believes it might provide insights into possible global warming in the
future. During the PETM, 55-million years ago, the Earth
warmed by more than 9 degrees Fahrenheit after
huge amounts of
carbon entered the atmosphere over a period of just a few thousand
years.





The Paleocene–Eocene Thermal Maximum lasted around 20,000 years, and was superimposed on the Eocene -a 6-million-year period of more gradual global warming,

During the Eocene around 1,500 to 2,000 gigatons of carbon were released into the ocean/atmosphere system over the course of 1,000 years. This rate of carbon addition -which peaked during the PETM- almost equals the rate at which carbon is being released into the atmosphere today through human activity.

The team of scientists  from Caltech and McGill University, discovered microscopic, magnetic fossils resembling spears and spindles, unlike anything previously seen, among sediment layers deposited during an ancient global-warming event along the Atlantic coastal plain of the United States.

"Imagine our surprise to discover not only a fossil bloom of bacteria
that make iron-oxide magnets within their cells, but also an entirely
unknown set of organisms that grew magnetic crystals to giant sizes,"
said Caltech"s Timothy Raub, who collected the
samples from an International Ocean Drilling Program drill-core
storehouse at Rutgers University in New Jersey. The research team believes these
fossils may be telling a story of radical environmental transformation



Perhaps in response to the environmental stress of the PETM, many land
mammals in North America became dwarfed. Almost half of the common sea
bottom-dwelling microorganisms known as foraminifera became extinct in
newly warmer waters that were incapable of carrying the levels of
dissolved oxygen for which they were adapted.




A typical "giant" spearhead-shaped crystal is only about four microns
long, which means that hundreds would fit on the period at the end of
this sentence. However, the crystals found recently are eight times
larger than the previous world record for the largest bacterial
iron-oxide crystal.




According to Dirk Schumann, a geologist and electron microscopist at
McGill University and lead author of the study, "It was easy to focus
on the thousands of other bacterial fossils, but these single, unusual
crystals kept appearing in the background. It soon became evident that
they were everywhere."




Geobiologist
In addition to their unusually large sizes, the magnetic crystals occur
in a surprising array of shapes. For example, the spearhead-like
crystals have a six-sided "stalk" at one end, a bulbous middle, and a
sharp, tapered tip at the other end. Once reaching a certain size,
spearhead crystals grow longer but not wider, a directed growth pattern
that is characteristic of most higher biological organisms.




The spearhead magnetic crystals compose a minor fraction of all of the
iron-oxide crystals in the PETM clay layer. Most of the crystals have
smaller sizes and special shapes, which indicate that they are fossils
of magnetotactic bacteria. This group of microorganisms, long studied
at Caltech by study coauthor Joseph Kirschvink, the Nico and Marilyn
Van Wingen Professor of Geobiology, use magnets to orient themselves
within Earth"s magnetic field, and proliferate in oxygen-poor water.




Spearheads are not, however, the rarest fossil type in the deposit.
That honor belongs to a spherical cluster of spearheads informally
dubbed the "Magnetic Death Star" by the researchers. The Magnetic Death
Star may have preserved the crystals as they occurred in their original
biological structure.




The researchers could not find a similar-shaped organism anywhere in
the paleontological annals. They hypothesize that it may have been a
single-celled eukaryote that evolved for the first time during the PETM
and was outcompeted once the strange climate conditions of that time
diminished. Alternatively, it may still exist today in a currently
undiscovered location.




"The continental shelf of the mid-Atlantic states during the PETM must
have been very iron-rich, much like the Amazon shelf today," notes
study coauthor Robert Kopp of Princeton University, who first started
working on the project while a graduate student at Caltech. "These
fossils may be telling a story of radical environmental transformation:
imagine a river like the Amazon flowing at least occasionally where the
Potomac is today."



The Caltech work was supported by the NASA Exobiology program.



Posted by Casey Kazan from materials provided by California Institute of Technology.

Source: : http://mr.caltech.edu/press_releases/13195






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 Post subject: The NEO Code -What Global Hotspots are Most at Risk Of Getting Hit by an Asteroid?
PostPosted: Tue Sep 08, 2009 9:42 pm 
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Asteroids
“The threat of the Earth being hit by an asteroid is increasingly being
accepted as the single greatest natural disaster hazard faced by
humanity,” according to Nick Bailey of the University of Southampton"s
School of Engineering Sciences team, who developed the identifying
program.










The team used raw data from multiple impact simulations to rank each
country based on the number of times and how severely they would be
affected by each impact. The software, called NEOimpactor (from
NASA"s "NEO" or Near Earth Object program), has been specifically
developed for measuring the impact of "small" asteroids under one
kilometer in diameter.



Early results indicate that in terms of population lost, China,
Indonesia, India, Japan and the United States face the greatest overall
threat; while the United States, China, Sweden, Canada and Japan face
the most severe economic effects due to the infrastructure destroyed.




The top ten countries most at risk are China, Indonesia, India,
Japan, the United States, the Philippines, Italy, the United Kingdom,
Brazil and Nigeria.



“The consequences for human populations and infrastructure as a
result of an impact are enormous,” says Bailey. “Nearly one hundred
years ago a remote region near the Tunguska River witnessed the largest
asteroid impact event in living memory when a relatively small object
(approximately 50 metres in diameter) exploded in mid-air. While it
only flattened unpopulated forest, had it exploded over London it could
have devastated everything within the M25. Our results highlight those
countries that face the greatest risk from this most global of natural
hazards and thus indicate which nations need to be involved in
mitigating the threat.”



The team is also examining how the consequences of an impact change
with increasing impact energy. Initial results indicate that a 100
meter diameter asteroid will predominantly cause localized casualties
and damage across a few countries when impacting on either land or
ocean. However, the consequences of a 200 meter diameter asteroid
hitting the ocean increase significantly, with the generated tsunamis
reaching a global scale. At 500 meters in diameter, almost any ocean
impact will generate significant casualties and economic cost across
the world.

As Stephen Hawking says, the general consensus is that any comet or
asteroid greater than 20 kilometers in diameter that strikes the Earth
will result in the complete annihilation of complex life - animals and
higher plants. (The asteroid Vesta, for example, one of the
destinations of the Dawn Mission, is the size of Arizona).

How
many times in our galaxy alone has life finally evolved to the
equivalent of our planets and animals on some far distant planet, only
to be utterly destroyed by an impact? Galactic history suggests it
might be a common occurrence.

The first this to understand about
the KT event is that is was absolutely enormous: an asteroid (or comet)
six to 10 miles in diameter streaked through the Earth"s atmosphere at
25,000 miles an hour and struck the Yucatan region of Mexico with the
force of 100 megatons -the equivalent of one Hiroshima bomb for every
person alive on Earth today. Not a pretty scenario!

Recent
calculations show that our planet would go into another "Snowball
Earth" event like the one that occurred 600 million years ago, when it
is believed the oceans froze over (although some scientists dispute
this hypothesis -see link below).

While microbial bacteria might
readily survive such calamitous impacts, our new understanding from the
record of the Earth"s mass extinctions clearly shows that plants and
animals are very susceptible to extinction in the wake of an impact.

Impact
rates depend on how many comets and asteroids exist in a particular
planetary system. In general there is one major impact every million
years -a mere blink of the eye in geological time. It also depends on
how often those objects are perturbed from safe orbits that parallel
the Earth"s orbit to new, Earth-crossing orbits that might, sooner or
later, result in a catastrophic K/T or Permian-type mass extinction.

Vredefort
The asteroid that hit Vredefort located in the Free State Province of
South Africa is one of the largest to ever impact Earth, estimated at
over 10 km (6 miles) wide, although it is believed by many that the
original size of the impact structure could have been 250 km in
diameter, or possibly larger(though the Wilkes Land crater in
Antarctica, if confirmed to have been the result of an impact event, is
even larger at 500 kilometers across). The town of Vredefort is
situated in the crater (image).

Dating back 2,023 million
years, it is the oldest astrobleme found on earth so far, with a radius
of 190km, it is also the most deeply eroded. Vredefort Dome Vredefort
bears witness to the world’s greatest known single energy release
event, which caused devastating global change, including, according to
many scientists, major evolutionary changes.

What has kept the
Earth "safe" at least the past 65 million years, other than blind luck
is the massive gravitational field of Jupiter, our cosmic guardian,
with its stable circular orbit far from the sun, which assures a low
number of impacts resulting in mass extinctions by sweeping up and
scatters away most of the dangerous Earth-orbit-crossing comets and
asteroids



Posted by Rebecca Sato



Note: This post was adapted from a news release issued by University of Southampton.



Related Galaxy Posts:



The Dawn Mission -NASA"s Journey to the Beginning of the Solar System



The End of the World -A Video (the most terrifying short film ever!)



Past as Prelude -Asteroids amp; the Origin of LIfe (Includes "Impact Map of the World")



A Future KT Impact Event -Would the Human Species Survive



Dr Strangelove Two? -Cambridge Astrophysicts gives Earthlings a 50/50 Chance of Survival by End of Century
 





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 Post subject: What Caused Most of Planet"s Extinction Events? Leading Expert Says "Global Warming"
PostPosted: Tue Sep 15, 2009 3:22 pm 
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Global_warming_071009_ms_3_3“If you look at the fossil record, it is just littered with dead bodies from past catastrophes,”  observes University of Washington paleontologist Peter Ward. Ward says that only one extinction in Earth’s past was caused by an asteroid impact – the event 65 million years ago that ended the age of the dinosaurs. All the rest, he claims, were caused by global warming.

Ward"s Under a Green Sky explores extinctions in Earth’s past and predicts extinctions to come in the future.

Ward demonstrates that the ancient past is not just of academic concern. Everyone has heard about how an asteroid did in the dinosaurs, and NASA and other agencies now track Near Earth objects. Unfortunately, we may not be protecting ourselves against the likeliest cause of our species" demise. Ward explains how those extinctions happened, and then applies those chilling lessons to the modern day: expect drought, superstorms, poison–belching oceans, mass extinction of much life, and sickly green skies.

The significant points Ward stresses are  geologically rapid climate change has been the underlying cause of most great "extinction" events. Those events have been, observed Harvard evolutionary biologist Stephen Gould, major drivers of evolution. Drastic climate change has not always been gradual; there is solid empirical evidence of catastrophic warming events taking place in centuries, perhaps even decades. The impact of atmospheric warming is most potent in its modification of ocean chemistry and of circulating currents; warming inevitably leads to non-mixing anoxic dead seas. We are already in the middle, not the beginning, of an anthropogenic global warming, caused by agriculture and deforestation, which began some 10,000 years ago but which is now accelerating exponentially; though the earliest wave of anthropogenic warming has been stabilizing and beneficial to human development, it appears to have the potential for catastrophic effects within a lifetime or two.

Ward"s prior book, Out of Thin Air, makes the case for changes in atmospheric chemistry being a major driver of evolution at the level of family and even order. Under a Green Sky recapitulates some of that hypothesis and the evidence to support it.

As a prominent paleontologist, Ward is well positioned to point us reader toward other significant studies of the same events. One such is Tony Hallam"s "Catastrophes and Lesser Calamities". Hallam is an oceanographic paleontologist; his research focuses on rising and falling sea levels, and on the causes and effects, which he correlates very convincingly with extinction events, and which he presumes to be chiefly the result of tectonic plate movement. Ward"s analysis based on atmospheric changes and Hallam"s based on oceanic changes are more or less complementary. Both have radical implications for the current Darwinian model of evolution. Both have alarming implications for the near-term future of humankind.

Looking at the ancient evidence, Ward notes that ice caps began to shrink. "Melting all the ice caps causes a 75-meter increase in sea level will remove every coastal city on our planet." It will also cover earth"s most productive farmland, the author warns, adding, "It will happen if we do not somehow control CO2 rise in the atmosphere."

Ward sees positive signs in the fight against global warming. "Most people are now educated as to what it is and most everyone knows that it has to do with carbon dioxide and that we have to slow that down. There is half the battle right there."

Ward is encouraged that we are beginning to make changes in their daily lives and demanding action from their leaders -"that we are on a planet that has violent convulsions, and that we humans are playing with nature in such a way that we could recreate what were some really awful times in earth"s history, that we really tinker with the earth"s atmosphere at our peril."

Posted by Casey Kazan.

Related Galaxy posts:

The Great Debate: How Fast Will Sea Levels Rise?
The Andes Vanishing Glaciers
The Day the Seas Died: What Can the Greatest of All Extinction Events Teach Us About Climate Change?
The Timeline For 21st Century “Climate Change Events
”
Coming of Age in the Holocene
"Snowball Earth" Challenged
Bigger Threat than Global Warming -Mass Species Extinction
A "Flat World" Solution to Climate Change
Monitoring Climate Change -Experts Say We Need Lunar Observatories
Unraveling the Mysteries of -Clues to Climate Change on Earth?
Arctic Discovery –Ancient Connections amp; the Global Climate
Stephen Hawking: Climate Change Greatest Threat Facing Planet

Arctic’s Legendary Northwest Passage is Ice-Free for the First Time in Recorded History
Coming War for the Arctic?





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 Post subject: Can Ancient Records of the Nile Predict Sun"s Impact on Climate Change? NASA Thinks So
PostPosted: Tue Sep 22, 2009 4:43 am 
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161624main_nile_river

While Congress was setting the climate-change record straight, challenging the Bush Adminstration"s deliberate distortion of the facts about global warming, NASA announced that a group of NASA and university scientists has found a convincing link between long-term solar and climate variability in a unique and unexpected source: directly measured ancient water level records of the Nile, Earth"s longest river, which runs south to north through Egypt.

Scientists have traditionally relied upon indirect data gathering methods to study climate in the Earth"s past, such as drilling ice cores in Greenland and Antarctica. Such samples of accumulated snow and ice drilled from deep within ice sheets or glaciers contain trapped air bubbles whose composition can provide a picture of past climate conditions.

The NASA team analyzed Egyptian records of annual Nile water levels collected between 622 and 1470 A.D. These records were then compared to another well-documented human record from the same time period: observations of the number of auroras reported per decade in the Northern Hemisphere. Auroras are bright glows in the night sky that happen when mass is rapidly ejected from the sun"s corona, or following solar flares.

Since the time of the pharaohs, the water levels of the Nile were accurately measured, since they were critically important for agriculture and the preservation of temples in Egypt. These records are highly accurate making them a rare and unique resource for climatologists to peer back in time.

A similarly accurate record exists for auroral activity during the same time period in northern Europe and the Far East. People there routinely and carefully observed and recorded auroral activity, because auroras were believed to portend future disasters, such as droughts and the deaths of kings.

The researchers found some clear links between the sun"s activity and climate variations. During periods of high solar activity, the North Atlantic Oscillation"s influence extends to the Indian Ocean. These adjustments may affect the distribution of air temperatures, which subsequently influence air circulation and rainfall at the Nile River"s sources in eastern equatorial Africa. When solar activity is high, conditions are drier, and when it is low, conditions are wetter.

NASA Link

Link

Congress Global Warming





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 Post subject: Is There a Massive Deep Bioshpere That Preceded Life on Earth"s Surface? World"s Leading Expert Says "Yes"
PostPosted: Thu Sep 24, 2009 2:20 pm 
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Biosphere_pre

"No scientific subject holds more surprises for us than biology."

Freeman Dyson -Institute for Advanced Studies, Princeton





Cornell University Professor Emeritus Thomas Gold, who for 20 years
directed the Cornell Center for Radiophysics and Space Research,
proposes the striking and controversial theory that "a full
functioning ecosystem feeding on hydrocarbons, exists deep within the earth, and that a
primordial source of hydrocarbons lies even deeper." Gold believes that the microbes predate all of the planet"s other life forms, existing even before photosynthesis became the preferred life-giving form.






Gold, a world-renowned physicist  and author of The Deep Hot : The Myth of Fossil Fuels, belives that oil and natural gas hydrocarbons are
not biological in origin and are found not only in the shallow crust of
the earth but also at greater depths. He maintains that hydrocarbons,
especially methane, were an important constituent of the earth when it
was formed and are widely distributed in depth. These deep hydrocarbon
deposits continuously replenish the shallower deposits.



If Gold"s controversial theory is true, then even the term "fossil
fuels" would have to be dropped. Gold contends that petroleum is
promordial and currently supports biological activity in the Earth and
is not the converted remains of ancient life after a few million years
of decomposition. In addition, these theories explain the presence of
compostion of mineral enriched earth and a few other mysteries such as
the presence of helium which has been so far unexplained by
conventional ideas.



As Gold points out, so far no one has ever
been able to come up with the chemical reactions needed to form
petroleum from decaying organic matter.


Analysis of thermal vents in the deep ocean and cold petroleum
seepages on the shallower ocean floor has revealed forms of bacteria
that rely on hydrocarbons such as methane and ethane, for food. These
bacteria, of the Archaea domain, thrive at temperatures as high as
100-150 degrees C and do not depend on photosynthesis. The genomes of
Archaea suggest they developed very early in the evolution of life.
Gold concluded that Archaea probably developed deep underground, rather
than on or near the surface, reflecting his choice of the book"s title.
In consuming methane, the Archaea produced carbon dioxide and water
which also migrated to the surface and were added to the atmosphere.
Water in the liquid state became more plentiful.






Most scientists think the oil we drill for comes from decomposed
prehistoric plants. Gold believes it has been there since the earth"s
formation, that it supports its own ecosystem far underground and that
life there preceded life on the earth"s surface.




The "deep hot " hypothesis would explain the thermophiles, the
minerals and the oil Swedish drillers found in 1990 under rock where no
one expected them. The hot goo and massed gas far under our feet would
also explain some mysterious historical earthquakes (notably the New
Madrid, Mo., shocker of 1811), and it would tell puzzled geologists why
so many oil reserves just happen to sit underneath coal fields.




If Gold is correct, the planet"s oil reserves are far larger than
status quo policymakers expect, and earthquake-prediction procedures
require a shakeup; moreover, astronomers seraching for extraterrestrial
contacts might want to shift from seeking life on other planets and
inquire about life deep inside them.




Posted by Casey Kazan.





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 Post subject: Better world: End the pillaging of the high seas
PostPosted: Mon Oct 05, 2009 4:02 am 
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We must put a stop to the free-for-all out on the oceans to have any chance of saving their riches from the ravages of climate change



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