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Most paper in the US is made from trees grown on tree farms. Yes, trees are a crop, planted and raised by farmers, like any other crop. They just have a longer harvest cycle than seasonal crops.

http://www.ecology.com/2011/09...

Why do we want to put tree farmers out of business?

Since China does not have that much natural gas, load following will be up to that largest fraction of China's renewable generating capacity, which as in most other places is hydro:
http://www.ecology.com/2013/03...

Somebody has to make more humans for the species' survival.

Oh, you think that will pass a sanity check?
Lets see
Current pop 7.4 billion. That is up 400 million in 4 years. http://www.latimes.com/world/p...
  So 100 million new mouths per year and growing.

  55.3 million people die each year http://www.ecology.com/birth-d...

If the world quit spawning right now, we would be just under 7 billion people in a FREAKING DECADE.

We would still be over 6 Billion mouths in two FREAKING DECADES of 0 people on the planet making babies.

So with the global warming caused by excess people, as well as other issues like "We ate all the big fish in the sea and are now creating dead spots" and "Hey that oil that grows and moves our crops/food should run out by ~2038.", you think we need more people..

"I WANT BABY! BABY BABY BABY!!!" Is an emotional response that doesn't stand up to thinking about whether having one is a good plan. Sadly those more likely to feel about breeding rather than think about breeding are also more likely to reproduce. Good by thinkers, hello feelers.

We are at the point where irresponsible reproduction may be participating in the deaths of billions. Or we may be well past that point already.

Captcha: "maternal". Slashdot you be trollin' me.

It's almost like the old Soviet Union's fixation on Lysenkoism.

Ideology based science FTW?

Oh dear, it looks like this post is getting the bejabbers moderated out of it. A lot of people are calling it a troll.

Allow me to explain.

There are times, and there are groups, that allow their ideology to get in the way things that others declare as the truth,

Everyone is going to get their Ox gored here soon, so deal with it.

Lysenkoism was a politically motivated campaign against genetics and scientific agriculture. It was based on Lamarkian inheritance, and rejected Mendelian Inheritance, and utterly rejected Natural selection as professed by Darwinian Evolutionary Theory.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/L...

It held that plants could transmute into each other, and that rather than natural selection as a process, natural cooperation was the norm.

This outlook was for some reason very attractive to the ideals of the Communist party there. Stalin agreed with Lysenkoism, and it is interesting to note that some 3 thousand mainstrem biologists were sent to prison and died there, as well as scientific research in biology already done was destroyed, and further research banned in the field. Other related fields were either ideologically affected or banned, such as neurophysiology and cellular biology, in fact, any biological field that did not agree with the ideological based "facts" of Lysenkoism. Soviet Genetics remained in this state until the death of Stalin in 1953.

This situation may or may not shed some light on the repeated crop failures of the period

It was formally ended in 1964 after a huge amount of damage.

Now we come to some other idealism based fallacies. In the US, there are a fair number of people who ideologically favor a universe created in 4004 b.c.e, and also reject evolution and it's biological underpinnings. From time to time, they have tried to work their ideology into the classroom, however, and especially since their ideology is based upon a particular interpretation of their religious documents, they have failed do far. The latest version of this ideal based effort was in Dover PA, when a School board tried to implement science courses containing religious theory, eventually losing in court.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... In Georgia, they wanted to dismantle evolution by using the colloquial version of theory: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Now finally, we come to the Global warming issue. While certainly not as deadly as the Soviet Union's treatment of Biologists, there is a lot of ideological push against a concept as simple as the energy stored in the atmosphere and it's relation to certain components of the atmosphere.

Examples of this are a bit silly, like Florida's Governor Rick Scott banning the words Climate Change, Global Warming, and Sustainability, as well as banning the words 'sea level rise, and replacing it with "nuisance flooding". http://www.miamiherald.com/new...

In 2012 North Carolina passed a bill placing a 4 year ban on acknowledging that sea levels were rising.The Governor did not sign it into law. http://www.ecology.com/2012/07...

In 2012 Arizona attempted to abolish sustainability efforts and attempted to make it a crime for cities to endorse or implement the UN agenda 21 principles of sustainable development.. Alabama, Kansas, and Louisiana attempted to as well. Tennessee passed a resolution condemning them. Seems these folk

Funny how Asians never seem to count as a minority

Maybe that's because they aren't. Nearly 2/3 of the population of this planet lives in Asia. And relatively few of those Asians are light-skinned.

Pasty white people are more of a minority than you have been led to believe. It's just simple 1st-grade-science-class genetics. White skin is a recessive trait. So are blue eyes. It's entirely unlikely to have a majority population with a single shared recessive trait. It's only the extraordinary violence, greed, and ambition of medieval Europe that put the descendants of its population in control of the last few centuries of human history. They're a minority, but they're not an oppressed one.

And that's the distinction everyone is looking for, but some are too blind (or, more accurately, willfully ignorant) to see. Not "minority", but "discriminated against". When you discriminate against black people, for whatever reason (racism of some form or another, usually), you're rightly called a racist. But when you discriminate against white people (usually because of their overrepresentation in some categorical subset of the population), it's still discrimination, and you're still being a racist asshole.

Basically, "SJW's" are a bunch of racist fucks, just like the other side. The only winning move is to not play.

Conservatives did try to murder the NEA [arts.gov] over that!

Actually, I believe they tried to stop the government from forcing people to pay for having such art made. Some people saw the creation of Piss Christ as being outside the role of the federal government. Crazy, I know.

The Government / NEA doesn't (usually) commission specific pieces of art, but rather gives grants to artists so they may pursue their craft (with some measure of freedom of expression). If we limit grants to only those artists that produce art pleasing to everyone, that offends no one, or simply placates the common denominator, than what does that gain us as a society?

The Government funds a lot of things that offend *someone* - my mother thinks grants that study oceanic algae blooms are a waste of money, despite the fact that about 70-80% of the world's oxygen comes from marine algae.

4 people are born each second. (Source.) So Barnum (or whoever actually said that) was calculating that 1/4 of the population is composed of suckers.

Your calculations assume that all of the people that bought iPhones at this release were born during the release window. There may have been 38 suckers per second over this weekend, but it seems that this is repeat behavior for most (or possibly all) of them. These were not new suckers. They were not born in the minutes preceding their purchase.

Over the 72-hour launch weekend, approximately 4320 suckers were born. Apple can't possibly survive on such low growth numbers. That's why the RDF exists. It turns non-suckers into suckers temporarily. Just long enough for the sale to complete and the shiny to wear off.

By comparison, solar power is still the clear winner, according to ecology.com

That sites like "ecology.com" declare solar to be a winner is not surprising. That they even ask a question, however, is a sign, that things aren't as obvious and clear-cut, as some would like the rest of us to believe.

Just twenty years ago we were lead to believe, growing more corn for conversion to ethanol would save the Earth and otherwise make the world a better place. That turned out to be a lie, but you wouldn't find a mention of it on ecology.com. Or, maybe, you would nowadays, but it is hardly trumpeted the way "progressive" politicians were praised for pushing ethanol and the "kkkonservative" ones — lambasted for opposing it.

> Now it (worldwide population) is growing by millions a day.

http://www.ecology.com/birth-d...

400k/day. But gettin there..

Terrorists are dumb. That is the only thing saving humanity.

That's a hyperbole. There is a whole lot of humanity out there. There are 15,000 births PER HOUR. The 3000 people dead from 9/11 didn't even make a dent in the daily population increase.

Not trying to be callous here, it was a horrible attack, just that humanity will continue even if we give terrorists one ICBM and an instruction manual written at a second grade level.

One thing that is not immediately obvious is that the primary greenhouse gas from the Nuclear industry is not Carbon Dioxide but Chlorinated Fluro-Carbons (CFC114) a greenhouse gas 20,000 times more potent than C02. Whilst it's equivalent effect is slightly over 8 megatons of C02 (a conservative estimate per year since the bans on CFC began) more potent is the destruction this compound causes to the ozone layer and it's eventual effect on Phytoplankton which creates more breathable oxygen than the Amazon.

whilst the focus is on the negation of C02 it's important to recognise the systemic effect in the environment of the industrial compounds used to produce the fuel in the first place. Here are some quick quotes and links to understand Phytoplankton's role and susceptibility to ozone depletion;

Overall, the production of oxygen in the oceans is at least equal to the production on land if not a bit more

Field studies indicate that photosynthesis is impaired first, followed by decreases in protein concentration and changes in pigment composition. As a result, a dramatic decrease in photosynthetic oxygen production can be measured after exposure to solar radiation

Or of course you could just go straight to UNITED NATIONS ENVIRONMENTAL PROGRAMME: Environmental effects of ozone depletion: 1998 Assessment. Sure it's over 10 years old, but that's roughly an extra 450,000 kilograms of CFC114 per year from enrichment operating, I don't imaging it's got any better.

The more advance the science we got, the more people we gonna have, and the more pressure the human population gonna put on the ecology of Planet Earth

Link below illustrates the link between population explosion since the dawn of modern industrial revolution
 
 

http://www.ecology.com/2011/09/18/ecological-impact-industrial-revolution/
 
 

""Modern humans have been around for about 2.2 million years. By the dawn of the first millennium AD, estimates place the total world human population at between 150 Ã" 200 million, and 300 million in the year 1,000"

"At the dawn of the Industrial Revolution in the mid 1700s, the worldÃ(TM)s human population grew by about 57 percent to 700 million."

"It reached one billion in 1800."

"The birth of the Industrial Revolution altered medicine and living standards, resulting in the population explosion that would commence at that point and steamroll into the 20th and 21st centuries.

"In only 100 years after the onset of the Industrial Revolution, the world population would grow 100 percent to two billion people in 1927 (about 1.6 billion by 1900). "

(not directed at you fahrbot-bot just all the people that think no taxes are a good thing)

Cool. Personally, I don't mind spending money (or paying taxes), I just don't like to waste money. In addition, I'm fairly liberal on what constitutes spending and not wasting as I'm not an expert on all things and try to keep an open mind. Unfortunately, that cannot be said for others, even in my own family.

For example, my mother - who used to be a liberal Democrat when she was young and struggling Nurse, but is now a retired narrow-minded conservative, Fox "News" watching (seriously, on all the time), Tea Party Republican (enjoying her Medicare) [sigh] - was bitching about someone wanting to "waste" tax dollars studying algae in the ocean even after I reminded her that algae provides 70-80% of the Earth's atmospheric oxygen for us to, you know, breathe.

Or that some of the taxes she no longer wants to pay go to police, firefighters, the paramedics that rescued her mother, and fixing our roads, etc... or helping those less fortunate, like she/we used to be, or people that want to, but cannot work - who are not "free loaders". The subject line describes what her feelings seem to be.

Fuck me. Sometimes, I can't believe I'm related to her any more.

The geometric growth rate of the human population is NOT a consequence of technology.

While you may be right that the geometric growth rate of the human population is not a CONSEQUENCE of technology, I would like to add that technology _does_ play AN IMPORTANT ROLE in the whole scheme of things.

Read this:

http://www.ecology.com/2011/09/18/ecological-impact-industrial-revolution/

"Modern humans have been around for about 2.2 million years. By the dawn of the first millennium AD, estimates place the total world human population at between 150 â" 200 million, and 300 million in the year 1,000"
 
"At the dawn of the Industrial Revolution in the mid 1700s, the worldâ(TM)s human population grew by about 57 percent to 700 million."
 
"It reached one billion in 1800."
 
"The birth of the Industrial Revolution altered medicine and living standards, resulting in the population explosion that would commence at that point and steamroll into the 20th and 21st centuries.
 
"In only 100 years after the onset of the Industrial Revolution, the world population would grow 100 percent to two billion people in 1927 (about 1.6 billion by 1900). "
 
 

Also it should be noted that a statement such as "no greenery left on Earth" is an exaggeration at best, considering life would die on the planet without the Oxygen Cycle.

Actually "It is estimated that between 70% and 80% of the oxygen in the atmosphere is produced by marine plants." meaning Algae (I also heard this statistic on a Discovery channel show.) The article continues:

Plants on land and in the ocean are extremely important to us and we wouldn't be here without them. Land plants provide us (and other critters) with food, raw materials like wood, and fiber to make cloth and paper. They protect the land from erosion with their roots, provide beauty and shade on a hot day, and produce oxygen as an extra added bonus although we could probably survive with the oxygen.

Despite the Montreal Act, CFC114, which is also a greenhouse gas 20,000 times more potent than C02, is leaking from Paducah Uranium Enrichment facilities into the atmosphere through hundreds of kilometres of cooling pipes. The average is 1 million pounds (thats 453,592.27 kilograms) PER YEAR since the bans began. That is 8 618 255.03 kilograms (8 Megatons) of CFC114 *since* they were banned. That's the equivalent of 172,365,100,000 kilograms of carbon dioxide from the enrichment process alone and does not include the 1 Gigawatt of coal fired power used to run Paducah.

One thing that is not immediately obvious from the destruction this compound causes to the ozone layer is the eventual effect on Phytoplankton which creates more breathable oxygen than the Amazon. The assertion is examined in these links production of oxygen in the oceans is at least equal to the production on land if not a bit more

and Field studies indicate a dramatic decrease in photosynthetic oxygen production can be measured after exposure to solar radiation

and Environmental effects of ozone depletion: 1998 Assessment. Sure it's 10 years old, but that's an extra 10 million pounds of CFC114 resultant from enrichment operating, I don't imaging it's got any better.

Going after nitrous oxide emissions is the proverbial trying to plug a hole in a dam with your fingers while it is bursting elsewhere. CFC 114 is still used for enrichment today, and the Nuclear industry is the number one industrial emitter of CFC's in the United States. We can expect up to 1 million pounds of CFC114 to leak into the atmosphere per year whilst enrichment continues.

Only 9% of the wood used to make books comes from old growth forests ( http://ecology.com/features/paperchase/ ), so there is some merit to his theory.

Let's get some facts straight. CFC 114 is not "used for enrichment," it is used as a coolant like any other CFC. There is no technical reason that another, less ozone toxic chemical or method could not be used.

Irrelavent. CFC114 is used in the process, whether it is used to cool the beers of the technicians or comes in direct contact with the element. The FACT is CFC114 is used.

Furthermore, the primary reason coolant usage is ... producing U-235 through such an outdated method.

Again, irrelevant. Whatever the reasons, Paducah is still in operation enriching uranium leaking CFC114.

By the way, if modern nuclear power plants could get approval to be built, there would be less need for enrichment in the first place.

All modern pre-approved reactor designs are once through cycle, for example the Westinghouse AP-1000. Politically conditions are extremely favourable for Nuclear reactors to be built. Regulatory framework has been discarded (in the guise of the 2005 Energy act).

However, modern designs only require an initial source of enriched material and then can be fed U-238. They accomplish this through extensive reprocessing of nuclear waste and breeding new fissionable material. The end result is an extremely efficient system (uses 99.5% of the energy in uranium as opposed to a LWR which uses 1%) that produces very little waste.

Uses U-238 !?!?!? Are you sure you don't mean Pu-239? Because I think you are talking about a IFR - which needs significant advances in material technology to be viable. Send a link if you really mean a viable commercial reactor that can use U-238.

Industrial emissions amount to a small percent of the total amount of CFCs released per year. the reason for the CFC emissions being so high for industrial use is that the USEC plant is very old ...In other words, stop trying to make it sounds like nuclear fuel enrichment is single-handedly causing the destruction of the ozone layer which is going to kill us all.

Compared to what, domestic emissions? old fridges on rubbish tips? More irrelevance, the plant is in operation - no other enrichment facilities are available. CFC114, a greenhouse gas 20,000 times more potent than C02 is leaking from Paducah at 1 million pounds, thats 453,592.27 kilgrams PER YEAR since the bans began. That is 8 618 255.03 kilograms *since* CFC114 was banned. That's the equivalent of 172,365,100,000 kilograms of carbon dioxide from the enrichment process alone and does not include the 1 Gigawatt of coal fired power used to run Paducah. What part of 'Paducah is still in operation' do you not understand?

It's always, always the same thing. Nuclear advocates can't take responsibility for the externalities of the nuclear industry, instead 'it's those greenies fault for not letting us build something else'. Build a geologically stable waste dump first and then maybe we can move on from there.

As for the bit about the algae, there is not a lot of evidence to support your assertion.

Well a quick google seach produced this straight away

Overall, the production of oxygen in the oceans is at least equal to the production on land if not a bit more

and

Field studies indicate that photosynthesis is impaired first, followed by decreases in protein concentration and changes in pigment composition. As a result, a dramatic decrease in photosynthetic oxygen production can be measured after exposure to solar radiation

Or of course you could just go straight to the official UN monitoring of CFC114 after Montreal Environme

Trees are great but I heard that a lot of the world's oxygen comes from aquatic plants so I did a quick fact check and found this:

Which means that a lot of CO2 is consumed by these plants right? I'm now wondering, if these marine plants only have access to dissolved CO2 in the water would it help to diffuse CO2 into the water? Wouldn't this be a good alternative being that there are so many "Easy Extraction" machines in the seas? These are also not susceptible to forest fires AFAIK.

On the contrary, making something that will be widely read available online will have only a small effect of power usage. If you factor in the amount of power used by the machines that harvested and created the paper it WOULD have been printed on, I imagine there is a pretty big savings.

When ice melts into salt water, the water level actually does rise. Because of the density of the salt water, the ice floats higher on the ocean. When it all melts in, it will incease the raise the water level. Not a lot, but there will be some rise.

Ref:
Ecology.com
Geophysical Journal International

Canada does not have spare Hydroelectric power, at least not is usable markets. However, Hydro Canada does supply about 60% of the nations power, but 40% is still accounted for in other ways (fossil fuel, nuclear). Don't forget that hydroelectric power has environmental impacts too.

Actually, it's $590 billion. Inflation hasn't been that bad.

You might want to look here. I doubt it will assuage your FUD, but it might help others.

It's worth noting that CRAC2 was completed in 1982, meaning that there has been 20+ years of research into reactor design and safety. While it's important to check these kinds of things, it's also important to update the report once in a while. Has this been done?

I have similar concerns about a Enviromission's proposal to build a giant chimney in New South Wales, Australia. What effects will a constant steam of hot air rising into the atmosphere have on local weather patterns?? Articles on the proposal can be found here, here, and here.

Biotech has replaced nuclear power as a bogeyman.

It is important to separate legitimate concerns, such as Monsanto engineering a 'terminator' into their seeds, from tinfoil hat ravings about 'Frankenfood' causing cancer. There are more worrisome things happening in agriculture than pest-resistant strawberries or drought-resistant wheat.

Are there risks associated with GM organisms? Yes. Will GM orgamisms destroy the world as we know it? No.

-Carolyn

There are forces slowing it down: gravity from the Moon and Sun, friction from the gasses that surround the planet (atmosphere and cosmic). It may take time for those minute forces to stop the Earth, but the eventually should.

And you might be interested to know that we can even measure this; it's in the order of 40,000 tonnes/year. Total mass gain since the end of the late bombardment would come out at 0.0000000027 times the Earth's mass. The estimated time for the Earth/moon system to become tidally locked is 40 billion years, assuming the system still exists. The moon will then get close enough to break up into a ring after another 60 billion years.

There's also the known fact that the Earth's magnetic field changes (swaps) every 250,000 years or so. North becoms South, and vice verca. This change may very well have a significant impact on rotation and orientation of the axis of the planet. (Some scientists say there is evidence that we are in the midst of such a swap now and the event could occur during this millenium)

Right, just one question: How the f**k does a change in the Earth's magnetic field (yes, that field which can tell you which way is north, as long as you are not too close to a bl**dy fridge magnet) have the slightest impact on the rotation axis of a planet the size of the earth? This may sound like a rant, but I've heard that idiocy repeated ad nauseum...

Why bother with the ozone layer? It's a cyclical beast, it's shrinking by itself... 1, 2, 3.