In The News

[SailOar]

Planting 1.2 Trillion Trees Could Cancel Out a Decade of CO2 Emissions, Scientists Find

There is enough room in the world’s existing parks, forests, and abandoned land to plant 1.2 trillion additional trees, which would have the CO2 storage capacity to cancel out a decade of carbon dioxide emissions, according to a new analysis by ecologist Thomas Crowther and colleagues at ETH Zurich, a Swiss university. ...

“There’s 400 gigatons [of CO2 stored] now in the 3 trillion trees,” Crowther said. “If you were to scale that up by another trillion trees, that’s in the order of hundreds of gigatons captured from the atmosphere – at least 10 years of anthropogenic emissions completely wiped out.”...

So if Earth's current population is ~7 billion, and maybe one in seven could participate in such a tree planting extravaganza, they would each have to plant ~1,000 trees.

[GordMay]

From Sailoar’s linked article:
“... The United Nations’ Trillion Tree Campaign has planted nearly 15 billion trees across the globe in recent years. And Australia has announced a plan to plant a billion more by 2050 as part of its effort to meet the country’s Paris Agreement climate targets."
☞ https://www.trilliontreecampaign.org/
☞ http://www.agriculture.gov.au/SiteCo...tries-plan.pdf
☞ https://www.pm.gov.au/media/securing...estry-industry

[GordMay]

Impressive video of orcas on the hunt in Howe Sound
Bradford McArthur was on a sailboat last week, when a pod of killer whales (orcas) swam around and underneath the vessel, including one with a freshly caught seal in its mouth.
Video ➥

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MmTR2nPbQL0

More ➥ https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/briti...ideo-1.5141624

[transmitterdan]

The Peculiar Blindness of Experts:

Credentialed authorities are comically bad at predicting the future. But reliable forecasting is possible.

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine...future/588040/

Experts tend to focus on only a narrow range of fields and ideas (sometimes not even plural). Thus they miss events and facts not within their area of expertise. So they don’t adjust their theories when it should be obvious to them they are wrong.

[GordMay]

Redefining the kilogram and more
Updates to scientists’ system of measurement went into force May 20, redefining the kilogram and several other units in the metric system. The revamp does away with some outdated standards, most notably, a metal cylinder (Le Grand K) kept in a vault near Paris, that has defined the kilogram for 130 years (cast in 1879). The SI will now be based on seven physical constants*, and thus inherently stable.
The kilogram (basic unit of mass) is now defined by a quantum quantity, known as the Planck constant. That value, an immutable constant of nature, is the same everywhere in space and time.
Also redefined, according to an agreement reached in November 2018 at the 26th General Conference on Weights and Measures in Versailles, France, are the kelvin, the unit of temperature; the ampere, the unit of electric current; and the mole, the unit for an amount of substance.
Scientists now have their sights set on updating the unit of time: the second.
Currently, the second is defined by atomic clocks made of cesium atoms. But a new generation of atomic clocks, known as optical atomic clocks, are about 100 times more precise than cesium clocks.

➥ https://www.bipm.org/utils/en/pdf/CGPM-Press-Kit.pdf

*The set of seven (7) defining constants of the SI will be: the caesium hyperfine splitting frequency, the speed of light in vacuum, the Planck constant, the elementary charge (i.e. the charge on a proton), the Boltzmann constant, the Avogadro constant, and the luminous efficacy of a specified monochromatic source.
➥ https://www.nist.gov/pml/weights-and...ic-si/si-units

[transmitterdan]

Your gut is trying to tell you something and that may be causing you unnecessary anxiety. You can tell your gut to change its tune by adjusting the microbes therein. It can even improve your overall mental health.

https://m.medicalxpress.com/news/201...-bacteria.html

[transmitterdan]

https://apple.news/AvNuFmCBJRz26Ps11YfU5FQ

Strange waves rippled all the way around the Earth last year. Now we may know why.

[senormechanico]

Mayotte residents are probably singing this song:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PECjfHjvVQA

[GordMay]

Andreas Nikolaus Lauda died May 20, 2019, Vienna, Austria
Three-time Formula 1 world champion (Ferrari in 1975 and 1977 and McLaren in 1984) Niki Lauda has died at the age of 70.
On 1 August 1976, one year after winning his first title, he suffered third-degree burns to his head and face and inhaled toxic gases that damaged his lungs after his vehicle burst into flames at Nurburgring.
He was given the last rites in hospital, but made an almost miraculous recovery and returned to racing, still bandaged, just 40 days later.
Having previously had two kidney transplants, he underwent a lung transplant in August 2018.
☞ https://www.formula1.com/en/drivers/...iki_Lauda.html

Nurburgring 1976

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PYgjRTWhWi8

[GordMay]

Heinz has released a limited-edition product called “Mayochup”, which is a combination of mayonnaise and ketchup. Cree speakers say the word Mayochup translates to '****-face' in that language.
➥ https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/sudbu...tion-1.5144737

[Bill Seal]

There are about 6000 languages in the world, everything spoken in one means something else in another language.

[GordMay]

Anthropocene
The 34-member Anthropocene Working Group (AWG) voted this week to designate a new geologic epoch, the “Anthropocene”, to mark the profound ways in which humans have altered the planet.
The ‘Atomic Age’ would mark the start of the current geologic time unit, if the proposal receives final approval. Once the AWG makes its formal proposal, it will be considered by several more groups of the International Commission on Stratigraphy. If it makes it past that group, final ratification would come from the executive committee of the International Union of Geological Sciences.
➥ Working Group on the ‘Anthropocene’ | Subcommission on Quaternary Stratigraphy

[GordMay]

Originally Posted by Bill Seal

There are about 6000 languages in the world, everything spoken in one means something else in another language.

That's old data.

The most extensive catalog of the world’s languages, generally taken to be as authoritative as any, is that of Ethnologue (published by SIL International), whose detailed classified list as of 2009 included 6,909 distinct languages.
The most commonly cited statistic from the Ethnologue is the tally of living languages. The 22ND edition, of 2019, lists a total of 7,111 living languages worldwide—a net increase of 14 living languages since the 21st edition was published one year ago.
➥ https://www.ethnologue.com/ethnoblog...e-22nd-edition

[SailOar]

Scientists Have Pinpointed the Mystery Source of an Ozone-Destroying Chemical

The recovery of the ozone hole has been a quintessential environmental success story, as the world has worked largely in harmony for decades to phase out ozone-depleting chemicals. So last year’s discovery that emissions of CFC-11, one of those banned chemicals, was suddenly reversing course came as a shock....

Rigby and other scientists working on the issue had a hunch China might be the source of rogue emissions, but they couldn’t tease that out from the Hawaii dataset alone. So they turned to air monitoring stations in Japan and Korea for the new study and weather modeling. The findings show that China’s CFC-11 emissions went from an average of 6.4 gigagrams per year from 2008-12 all the way to 13.4 gigagrams a year between 2014 and 2017. The weather modeling helped further pinpoint the results to show that northeast China is the source of the emissions, though the method doesn’t allow for pinpointing specific factories as the guilty parties....

“We can only really see a few hundred kilometers from measurement stations,” Rigby said. “With the infrastructure we’ve got, we can do this analysis in North America, parts of Europe, and a small part of eastern Asia.”

There are clearly other sources of rogue emissions, and increasing the network of monitoring stations will be a way to keep on top of those emissions now and into the future to ensure CFC-11 continues to be phased out.....

[GordMay]

Sea levels could rise by as much as two metres by 2100 in a worst-case scenario (within the 90% uncertainty bounds) involving melting ice caps and high CO2 emissions, a new study* suggests.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) suggested (ranging from 17 to 83 per cent probabilities), in 2014, a one-metre rise in sea levels by the end of the century.
For a 2 degree C warming scenario, the researchers found that sea levels could rise by 26 centimetres by 2100, with a worst-case scenario of 81 centimetres. However, for 5 C of warming, the impact could be 51 centimetres, and up to 178 centimetres in a worst-case scenario. Once melting glaciers and thermal expansion are factored in, that worst-case scenario jumps to two metres by 2100. There is a five per cent chance that by 2200 that number could rise to approximately 7.5 metres.

“Ice sheet contributions to future sea-level rise from structured expert judgment” ~ by Jonathan L. Bamber, et al.
➥ https://www.pnas.org/content/early/2.../14/1817205116

About “Structured Expert Judgement”:
“Expert Elicitation: Using the Classical Model to Validate Experts’ Judgments” ~ by Abigail R Colson & Roger M Cooke
➥ https://academic.oup.com/reep/article/12/1/113/4835830

To most of us, uncertainty means not knowing. To scientists, however, uncertainty is how well something is known. And, therein lies an important difference, especially when trying to understand what is known about climate change.
An uncertainty interval refers to confidence interval. A claimed 90% expanded uncertainty level should be expected to contain the true value 90% of the time.
While it seems clear that the Earth’s future climate will be unlike the climate that ecosystems and human societies have become accustomed to during the last 10,000 years, the exact magnitude of future climate change, and the nature of its impacts, will always remain somewhat uncertain.
“Uncertainty Terminology”
➥ https://www.nap.edu/read/12782/chapter/26

Meanwhile:

A new report*, called “Missing the Bigger Picture”, consists of a relatively prosaic tabulation of the growing contribution of clean energy to the existing Canadian economy. It estimates the clean energy industry accounts for about three per cent (3%) of Canada's GDP, more than agriculture and forestry or the hotel and restaurant industry, and employed 298,000 people in 2017. Not only is Canada’s clean energy sector growing faster than the rest of the country’s economy (4.8% versus 3.6% annually between 2010 and 2017), it’s also attracting tens of billions of dollars in investment every year.
“Missing the Bigger Picture: Tracking the Energy Revolution 2019"
* ➥ Missing the Bigger Picture: Tracking the Energy Revolution 2019 - Clean Energy Canada