Posted by edro on June 22, 2008
Does it really make any sense looking for ice on Mars as life becomes extinct down here on Earth?
Wouldn’t it be more sensible if NASA’s budget for discovering life on Mars
was reallocated to securing life on Earth?
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Posted in atmosphere, climate change, economy, energy, environment, future, lifestyle, pollution, soil, war | Tagged: Biosphere 2, ecosystems collapse, life on Mars, mars, Mars Exploration Rovers, Mars Global Surveyor, Mars Odyssey, Mars Orbiter, Mars Pathfinder, marsification of earth, NASA, Populating Mars, Viking | 2 Comments »
Posted by edro on May 21, 2008
Nature is an NPO. It has performed wonderfully well for a very, very long time. Why can’t humans do the same?
See Main Entry: Wal-Mart’s 7Rs
This new NASA Hubble Space Telescope image of the Antennae galaxies (NGC 4038 & 4039) is the sharpest yet of this merging pair of galaxies. During the course of the collision, billions of stars will be formed. The brightest and most compact of these star birth regions are called super star clusters.
The two spiral galaxies started to interact a few hundred million years ago, making the Antennae galaxies one of the nearest and youngest examples of a pair of colliding galaxies. Nearly half of the faint objects in the Antennae image are young clusters containing tens of thousands of stars. The orange blobs to the left and right of image center are the two cores of the original galaxies and consist mainly of old stars criss-crossed by filaments of dust, which appear brown in the image. The two galaxies are dotted with brilliant blue star-forming regions surrounded by glowing hydrogen gas, appearing in the image in pink. Source: http://imgsrc.hubblesite.org/hu/db/2006/46/images/a/formats/full_jpg.jpg
Credit: NASA, ESA, and the Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA)-ESA/Hubble Collaboration Acknowledgment: B. Whitmore (Space Telescope Science Institute)
The Infrared Milky Way
This panoramic view encompasses the entire sky as seen by Two Micron All-Sky Survey. The measured brightnesses of half a billion stars (points) have been combined into colors representing three distinct wavelengths of infrared light: blue at 1.2 microns, green at 1.6 microns microns, and red at 2.2 microns. This image is centered on the core of our own Milky Way galaxy, toward the constellation of Sagittarius. The reddish stars seemingly hovering in the middle of the Milky Way’s disc — many of them never observed before — trace the densest dust clouds in our galaxy. The two faint smudges seen in the lower right quadrant are our neighboring galaxies, the Small and Large Magellanic Clouds.
Atlas Image mosaic courtesy of 2MASS/UMass/IPAC-Caltech/NASA/NSF”
The Cosmic Microwave Background temperature fluctuations from the 5-year Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe data seen over the full sky. The average temperature is 2.725 Kelvin (degrees above absolute zero; equivalent to -273.15 C or -459 F), and the colors represent the tiny temperature fluctuations, as in a weather map. Red regions are warmer and blue regions are colder by about 0.0002 degrees. Source: NASA / WMAP Science Team
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Posted in atmosphere, climate change, economy, energy, environment, future, lifestyle, pollution, soil, war | Tagged: -459 F, co-operatives, collapsing cities, collapsing world, Cosmic Microwave, Infrared Milky Way, money, NASA, Nature, NPO, profit, rot, ruins, science, wal-mart, water | 3 Comments »
Posted by edro on April 30, 2008
Tipping Point
A confirmation of tipping point is presented in the following report by James Hansen, NASA climatologist:
Excerpts from Hansen’s report:
- We are at the tipping point because the climate state includes large, ready positive feedbacks provided by the Arctic sea ice, the West Antarctic ice sheet, and much of Greenland’s ice.
- Our home planet is dangerously near a tipping point at which human-made greenhouse gases reach a level where major climate changes can proceed mostly under their own momentum. Warming will shift climatic zones by intensifying the hydrologic cycle, affecting freshwater availability and human health.
Source:Tipping Point: Here and Now!
Report:Tipping Point: PERSPECTIVE OF A CLIMATOLOGIST [PDF]
The ice in the Arctic is much younger than normal, with vast regions now covered by first-year ice and much less area covered by multiyear ice. Left: February distribution of ice by its age during normal Arctic conditions (1985-2000 average). Right: February 2008 Arctic ice age distribution. Credit: NSIDC [Caption: NASA]
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Posted in air pollution, Arctic, atmosphere, civilization, climate, climate change, CO2, dynamics of collapse, Earth, energy, environment, extinction, future, health, HIoN, Human activities, human migration, Human-induced climate change, ice dynamics, Index of Human Impact on Nature, industrialism, lifestyle, limits to growth | Tagged: Arctic ice, climatic zones, collapsing cities, collapsing ecosystems, greenhouse gases, Greenland’s ice, James Hansen, multiyear ice, NASA, PERSPECTIVE OF A CLIMATOLOGIST, positive feedback, Tipping Point | Leave a Comment »
EDRO 
