Domain: greenfacts.org
Stories and comments across the archive that link to greenfacts.org.
Comments · 8
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Wrong
Actually, the greening of the planet has been predicted for a long time. So has the drying, burning, and desertification.
Other predictions have already come to pass, such as weather patterns behind the extreme cold caused by the polar vortex of Winter 2012 in North America. The weather in Michigan very much resembled "The Day After Tomorrow".
Climate change deniers simply like to imagine that scientists have missed a magic solution. There is simply too much data from too many sources to be denied any longer.
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Re:Fresh Water vs. Ocean Water Fish
"It's estimated that freshwater fishes make up more than 6% of the world's annual animal protein supplies for humans - and the major and often only source of animal protein for low income families across Bangladesh, Indonesia and the Philippines.
This comes from the Fine Article - where does your data come from?
http://www.thefishsite.com/art...
Total protein consumption per capita is 78g. Total fish consumption is around 5.5g which gives around 7%. This is for both marine and inland. Then, looking at
http://www.greenfacts.org/en/f...
we can get around 41:102 ration between inland:marine, which would mean around 2% of total protein comes from freshwater fish and 5% from marine.Now it is your turn to provide some sources outside FA proving 6% for freshwater fish. Articles I have quoted above are from 5-10 years ago - maybe, in meantime, freshwater fish consumption increased by 200%...
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Re:Doesn't really tell the full story...
Number of deaths is not a good measure of safety. You nuclear proponents trot that measure out every time we have this debate. You bias even that pitiful measure by throwing out every death that cannot absolutely positively beyond 100% certainty be pinned on nuclear accidents. By that measure, Deepwater Horizon was a relatively minor event, as it killed only 11 people. Many commercial plane crashes would be considered worse disasters. Obviously, Deepwater Horizon was far worse. Look at the damage it did to the economy and property: $4.7 billion paid out just from BP's fund.
Chernobyl's damages to Belarus alone are estimated at $235 billion. And Fukushima? Let's look at only the land that must be abandoned for decades at the least: the 20 km zone around the plant. Roughly half of that is ocean, leaving about 700 sq km of land that must be abandoned. Land is very valuable in Japan. Cheapest prices I saw came out to $84 per sq meter. The lost land is worth at least $60 billion.
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Re:you don't combat false alarmism
alarm is the proper reaction to fukushima right now
No, it is not. Being alarmed is what actually caused most of the harm from Chernobyl. The fear and alarm is far more dangerous than radiation itself.
http://www.greenfacts.org/en/chernobyl/index.htm -
Re:power consumption
You know that our brain and nerves work electromagnetically
Actually, no. Your eyes are quite sensitive to EM waves in the just sub 1um range, and as a secondary effect, EM waves in the vague range of a kilowatt per square meter heat your skin just as much as sunlight does. Vision, and bulk thermal heating effects. That's about it for EM radiation effects on the body.
Your neurons (assuming earth species) work on electrical potentials in the vaguely mV-ish range plus or minus an order of magnitude or two or so.
Now, moving a charge carrier thru an immense magnetic field makes an electric field, that is whats theorized to cause any effects of "magnetism on the body".
There is some pretty crackpotty stuff about certain organic chemicals and enzymes having a small dipole moment that may or may not react differently under extreme fields, but probably not even in a lab. If it were relevant, living things would probably evolve to be very sensitive to their magnetic alignment, which they seem not to be. If I got 0.005% better liver enzyme function if I slept aligned N-S, I probably would have evolved to sense that to get the free bonus, but thats not happened.
and many processes in our body do not expect a strong magnetic field on the outside.
The electrical signals in your brain make femto-tesla range fields, charges that move in a non-straight line, etc. So... uh... every brain thats ever existed has always floated in a femto tesla range field of its own making. So that certainly sets a low range of concern of about 1 fT below which our own brains create a field stronger than the external field of concern.
Then there's the
.1 mT -ish range earth's magnetic field. Which occasionally drops to zero. And probably, occasionally goes over it's normal range due to magnetic storms and stuff. Anything from the earth is green and organic and therefore good, much like, say, hemlock, or poisonous mushrooms. So, good old mother nature sets low range of 1 mT or so. It seems most species can't evolve a useful sense organ for "mT" level fields, strong indication fields of that strength are not biologically active.A kids toy bar magnet runs around single digit mT range, so I'd worry more about the red lead paint on the "N" side of the magnet, than the actual field itself.
When you break out the liquid helium, then I'd worry about cryo accidents, suffocation / oxygen displacement accidents, and of course accidentally placing a body part between the "T" range magnet and something made of iron. Way down on the list of concerns, maybe there would be worries about the biological effect of the field.
How strong is still OK
Here's an interesting link from some green group, which may or may not be flaky, but seems remarkably reasonable to an engineer like me, and suggests fields stronger than current model MRI range are getting troublesome to humans.
http://www.greenfacts.org/en/static-fields/l-3/4-interactions-body.htm
Here's the world health organization's opinion. A gross generalization of their 30+ page report is don't worry be happy.
http://www.who.int/entity/peh-emf/about/en/Static%20and%20ELF%20Fields.pdf
and is the one who defines this trustworthy?
Well, greenie luddites are probably as technophobic, and ignorant of what they fear, as a group can get, and they seem only mildly concerned about the highest field levels from the most powerful magnets being built in today's laboratories, everything else you'll ever experience is probably a factor of ten thousand to ten million lower field and probably a factor of more than thousands to millions safer, since risk is not strictly linear since we live in a planetary field and our own nerv
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Numbers
In case anyone else was wondering, industrial/commercial uses of C02 are on the order of 120 megatons per year, while CO2 emissions are about 13 gigatons (source). But if they can reclaim the CO2 using less energy/money that other sources, it wouldn't hurt to reuse it.
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Please no more stories by Roland Piquepaille.
I wish that Slashdot editors would not post stories by Roland Piquepaille. He is a paid publicity manager. He is paid to place stories. Do Slashdot editors get paid when they post his stories? They have never said they don't, apparently.
He has apparently succeeded in getting this story in many publications.
This sentence is nonsense: "He's now going further, saying that he wants to build objects 100,000 times smaller than the atomic nucleus." Someone made a mistake somewhere. If there are things that small, they have nothing to do with making isotopes. Neither Roland Piquepaille nor the Slashdot editors have enough knowledge of science that they could see the mistake.
There is apparently nothing particularly new about the apparatus described in the Michigan State University press release.
Apparently the writer of the Michigan State University press release, "Sue Nichols", didn't have the slightest understanding of the subject either, and didn't care, because she said, "Isotopes are the different versions of an element." Maybe she was in a hurry to go shopping. She could have looked on Google for a definition of isotope: "Atoms of the same element that have the same number of protons (same atomic number) but different numbers of neutrons (different atomic masses)." -
Literacy always helps!
Hey buddy, you are dead wrong.
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2005/11/11 10_051110_warming.html
"Evaporated H2O is a known greenhouse gas--a gas that absorbs and re-emits infrared radiation in Earth's atmosphere, thereby increasing temperatures"
http://www.greenfacts.org/studies/climate_change/l _3/climate_change_8.htm
"The Earth's surface temperature would be about 34C (61F) colder than it is now if it were not for the natural heat trapping effect of greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide, and water vapor. Indeed, water vapor is the most abundant and important of these naturally occurring greenhouse gases. In addition to its direct effect as a greenhouse gas, clouds formed from atmospheric water vapor also affect the heat balance of the Earth by reflecting sunlight (a cooling effect), and trapping infrared radiation (a heating effect)."
I won't even begin to discuss how the role of tropical, or, any forest for that matter in CO2 uptake, might be overstated. That is, if you plant a tree, it will consume CO2 while it grows, but then, it stays even, dies, and rots, and releases methane, which is a worse greenhouse gas than CO2 is. To some extent, one could argue that chopping down all of the trees and making boards out of them would be the best way to sink carbon - if you knew trees would go back to take the place of the ones you cut down. The problem is, in the rain forest, they don't grow back, because the soil sucks.