NASA has put out a video showing the increase in global warming if the CO2 in the atmosphere continues to increase at its current rate. And let's just say you won't be needing that jacket in the year 2100. If you feel this issue is important, pass this video on. It doesn't matter if you piss off a friend. They need to know the truth.
1) The NASA video – http://huff.to/1chTFHT
2) Pentagon bracing for public dissent over climate change – http://gu.com/p/3ghcy/tw
3) Climate change linked to increased violence – http://huff.to/14JyENk
4) Carbon in atmosphere reaches 400 ppm for first time in a million years – http://gu.com/p/3fzzb/tw
5) Song – “If We Should Stop This War” by Lorne Clark. Go here for more – http://www.songaweek.com/clarke.asp
We are born with a natural concern for the environment—even if we don't always hang onto it
Jeffrey Kluger
TIME, 31 July 2013
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To test where living things, particularly plants, fall on this do-no-harm spectrum, Training College researcher José Domingo Villaroel assembled a sample group of 118 boys and girls, ages 4 to 7, from local public schools. He started with the basics, showing the kids two sets of four pictures each—a dog, a tree a bird and a flower; and the sun, clouds, a car and a motorcycle—and asked which of them was alive and which not. That, as it turned out, was a trickier question than it would seem. The youngest kids particularly would often exclude the tree from the living things category but include the car or the motorcycle. Self-locomotion, it seemed, was the defining quality here.
An international team of astronomers and astrophysicists have created a video spotlighting their new 3-D map of the known universe. The map was created from a collection of galaxy redshifts — observations of light emitted from galaxies as they move away from the earth.
“In terms of moving — pardon the pun — pictures, this is by far the best I have seen among numerous motion pictures showing where we are at, literally and figuratively, in the biggest picture of all,” Ian Steer, co-leader of the NASA/IPAC Extragalactic Database of galaxy Distances, commented on the video on Vimeo.
As seen in the video, the map shows the location of all the visible galaxies in our universe as far away as 340 million light-years.
The next two years will be marked more by power vacuums and gaps than by a reassuring graceful degradation of the world order or by the rise of new power constellations. For this reason it is necessary to change the traditional geographic subdivision still built around the borders of nation states into a new vision more adapted to present and future realities. In fact one should conceive global relationships as wide area geopolitical and geoeconomic networks (i.e. geonetworks) crisscrossed by shaping flows.1
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The Pacific Geonetwork is dominated by the shift of the strategic centre of gravity towards the Chinese Sea that is the focus of acute maritime controversies. The backdrop is provided by the ambiguous and controversial bond between China and the United States, who are interdependent through the dynamics of the economic global crisis. The banking sector is a particularly critical area because on one hand the US banks are still very vulnerable to higher interest rates (no stress tests have been carried out regarding this emergence) and because the US shadow financial system is practically still unregulated, with serious consequences on national debt as security risk. On the other the Chinese shadow lending system risks to cause another financial crisis with €1,4 billion outstanding wealth manage ment products. There is a serious recovery effort by the USA in the Pacific Ocean, but for the time being military action will be ruled out (Korean crises apart, which remain a serious concern) because the whole American continent is witnessing major political reorganization in all leading countries (USA, Mexico, Venezuela and Brazil).
The Indian Geonetwork is characterised by a strategic China-India rivalry that is moving away from the traditional confrontation along the mountainous arc of Himalaya; the fight for influence is now centred on increased air-sea presence in the Indian Ocean, despite the fact that Washington is the dominant naval power. At the same time a fluid relationship between China, India and the USA is emerging around a tangle of rather converging interests that could isolate Pakistan in the medium term, once the military part of the intervention in Afghanistan will end. The country itself will concentrate more on its internal transition after the 2013 parliamentary polls in May.
The Earth is changing at a climatic level, and we humans, in the wake of a growing list of extreme weather events and years-long trends, are scrambling to react. Within the built environment (which includes everything from utility grids to residential homes), designers and architects are turning the focus toward what is emerging as a buzzword: resiliency.
New York Mayor Bloomberg last month announced that the city will spend $20 billion on a program to make its infrastructure more capable of surviving Sandy-like superstorms in the future, which could cost the city upwards of $90 billion by 2050, as sea levels continue an upward march. One research group says the global “climate adaptation services” industry is already worth $2 billion. The U.S. Green Building Council is also considering a plan to give builders Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) points for constructing weather- and natural disaster-resilient buildings, because a green building is one that doesn’t need to be rebuilt when disaster hits.
This begs the question: how do we make the built environment more resilient?
For the architecture and engineering firm HOK, the pathway is found in nature. HOK formed an alliance in 2007 with Biomimicry 3.8, a non-profit that helps organizations and educators find design inspiration in biology, and it has been integrating biomimetic principles into projects such as a Haitian orphanage.
The number of Africans living below the poverty line has fallen dramatically and the business climate is good. So what's holding back the fastest growing continent in the world?
With a projected average growth rate of 6 percent from 2013-2015 and one-third of African countries with economic growth rates currently above 6 percent, the African Development Bank says that Africa is now the fastest growing continent in the world.
In a new report, the African Development Bank Group says that 350 million Africans now earn between $2 and $20 a day as the share of the population living below the poverty line has fallen from 51 percent to 39 percent.
A recent piece in Uzbekistan's state-sanctioned media has advocated joining NATO and taking over the territory of Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, and most of the rest of Eurasia. The piece, published on 12news.uz, was taken down shortly after being published, but was preserved on inoSMI.ru. [PBI: English translation below the line.]
The piece, at nearly 9,000 words, offers a number of controversial (to put it kindly) claims: that Tajiks are merely Persian-speaking Uzbeks, that Uzbekistan is the successor state to the Mongol Golden Horde, that the agreement between Russia and Kyrgyzstan to develop hydropower plants is invalid because it misspells “Kyrgyzstan,” among many others. Its main thesis, however, is that the “threats of a natural-technical character” — namely proposed hydropower plants in Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan — are the gravest security threats facing Uzbekistan, comparable to a nuclear bomb. And the solution is that Uzbekistan should join NATO.
The piece is a bit out there, but Uzbek analysts point out that it must have been officially sanctioned. “This site [12news.uz] is not just semi-official, it’s official,” dissident political analyst Tashpulat Yuldashev told uznews.net. “It's curated by Dilshod Nurullaev, former Security Commission chairman and advisor to the President,” he said. “There is total censorship in Uzbekistan, and such a politically charged article would not have been allowed to be published without permission from the very top.” That assertion was backed up by another Uzbek analyst to The Bug Pit.
