Editor for @MotherNatureCo @DogCoutureCNTRY | Love my outdoors, environment activist and climate change advocate, health & yoga | Family, friends and of course puppies and dogs. Go figure! Social media geek at heart #cmgr all night and day.
The ongoing boom in the CBD products market offers the advantage of better choice and prices for you, the buyer.
Whether it is for good reasons or bad, cannabis is a very popular and well-known drug in America and all
If you haven’t noticed yet, the many varieties of how you can take CBD are obvious: vapes, oils, topical creams,
While AI hasn’t reached its full potential or its eventual impact yet, AI is making good progress in many directions simultaneously.
Let’s examine some of the progress to date.
While I’m sure that AI is adding value, I’m also sure there is more progress that is not visible yet as it is in the labs or being pioneered in several scientific avenues.
Let’s look at the value add of AI to date.
Work resources are only as useful as the knowledge they are provided to make decisions and take action.
AI is playing a substantial role in assisting and can accelerate learning to suggest where to direct current and future actions.
Problem Recognition: AI can sense various signals at the edge, or not, and recognize patterns.
Also, AI can find new and emerging scenarios and bring them to the attention of the right resources for decisions and possible actions.
By leveraging natural language, humans can kick off actions that are either pre-packaged and sequenced or parallel and emergent.
Sophisticated AI Agents or Bots will bid on tasks that are necessary to complete organizational outcomes within governance constraints.
The European Union will need to continue having a nuclear energy share of at least one-quarter until 2050 to meet the emissions reduction targets it has set for that year, according to a new report from Deloitte.
The EU has set targets of reducing emissions by 40% compared to 1990 levels, and by up to 95% by 2050 – or net zero.
An essential part of that plan will be phasing out the burning of coal, the highest-emitting fossil fuel which is still used heavily in countries such as Poland and Germany.
Countries such as France which have heavy use of nuclear power are getting a head start in the emissions reduction race, in which each EU member state will have to meet with their own adapted targets.
With a share of 40%, nuclear provides the largest contribution to France’s energy mix.
Nuclear power is not a fossil fuel and therefor emits very little in the way of carbon emissions.
However safety concerns have resulted in its steady phase-out in Europe, first in the United Kingdom and now in Germany.
Chancellor Angela Merkel announced a decision to phase out nuclear power in her country following the 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster in Japan.
But this has resulted in an increased use of coal and a resultant rise in Germany’s emissions, despite its heavy use of renewable energy.
“Not only will this enable the EU to achieve its carbon-free targets, whilst at the same time ensuring it has access to the energy it needs when it needs it, it will also provide a significant contribution in terms of economic growth and job creation.” The report’s authors assumed a high installed nuclear capacity of 150 gigawatts, based on the outcomes of a previous study by FTI-CL Energy Consulting, which assumed a continued share of at least one-quarter.
Lab activities can be one of the most effective ways to show children how global warming works on an accessible scale.
“We’ve ignored climate change for a long time and now it’s getting to be, like, a real problem, so we’ve gotta do something.” Many teachers we talked with mentioned NASA as a resource for labs and activities.
Some are drawn from this book: A People’s Curriculum For The Earth: Teaching Climate Change And The Environmental Crisis.
NPR = Nitwit Pinko Radio Nothing on that list of 8 idiotic “ways to teach climate change” is even remotely related to climate science… And citing Howard Zinn as a resource?
65% replied that it wasn’t related to the subject(s) they taught and 17% said the didn’t know enough about climate change to teach it… My hunch is that >97% of teachers, including the 45% who “teach” about it, are insufficiently familiar with the science to teach it.
Who needs science teachers when you have a “self-proclaimed ‘science guru’ for seventh-graders”?
And if it’s true that plastic is not degradable, well, the planet will simply incorporate plastic into a new paradigm: the earth plus plastic.
Plastic came out of the earth.
The earth probably sees plastic as just another one of its children.
Climate change?
Their results, reported in the journal Nature Geoscience, show that the ice is melting much more rapidly than previously thought due to inflowing warm water. “The stability of ice shelves is generally thought to be related to their exposure to warm deep ocean water, but we’ve found that solar heated surface water also plays a crucial role in melting ice shelves,” said first author Dr Craig Stewart from the National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research (NIWA) in New Zealand, who conducted the work while a PhD student at the University of Cambridge. “Previous studies have shown that when ice shelves collapse, the feeding glaciers can speed up by a factor or two or three,” said co-author Dr Poul Christoffersen from Cambridge’s Scott Polar Research Institute.
Data from the instruments deployed on the mooring showed that solar heated surface water flows into the cavity under the ice shelf near Ross Island, causing melt rates to nearly triple during the summer months.
This area, known as the Ross Sea Polynya, absorbs solar heat quickly in summer and this solar heat source is clearly influencing melting in the ice shelf cavity. “Climate change is likely to result in less sea ice, and higher surface ocean temperatures in the Ross Sea, suggesting that melt rates in this region will increase in the future,” said Stewart.
Rapid melting identified by the study happens beneath a thin and structurally important part of the ice shelf, where the ice pushes against Ross Island. “The observations we made at the front of the ice shelf have direct implications for many large glaciers that flow into the ice shelf, some as far as 900 km away,” said Christoffersen.
The point of vulnerability lies in the fact that that solar heated surface water flows into the cavity near a stabilising pinning point, which could be undermined if basal melting intensifies further.
The researchers point out that melting measured by the study does not imply that the ice shelf is currently unstable.
The United Kingdom’s Labour Party is ramping up its climate proposals, making the crisis a central issue amid a wave of protests and new signs that the ruling Conservative Party is failing to cut emissions fast enough.
The opposition party, led by socialist firebrand Jeremy Corbyn, plans to force a vote this week on whether to declare climate change a national emergency.
And now its parliamentarians are promising a Green New Deal modeled on the movement quickly gaining steam among left-wing Democrats in the United States.
“‘Green New Deal’ is a phrase that has resonance,” Barry Gardiner, the U.K.’s shadow secretary of state for international climate change, told HuffPost.
On Sunday, the ruling Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party eked out a narrow parliamentary victory running on “El Green New Deal de España.” Jagmeet Singh, the leader of Canada’s New Democratic Party, said last week he’s proposing “a Canadian version of the Green New Deal” just months before the country’s next federal election.
Yanis Varoufakis, the former Greek finance minister, called for “nations to unite around an International Green New Deal” in an op-ed last week.
Scottish First Minister Nicola Sturgeon said over the weekend that climate activists “are right,” and backed calls to declare a climate emergency.
Some utilities are attempting to steel themselves against plans to bring them under public control, and Labour officials are considering creative ways to avoid 12-figure national expenditures.
“This has changed the whole atmosphere in the country,” Gardiner said.
Gardiner said the party plans to make a bid to host the U.N.’s 26th Conference of the Parties next year.
Remember that time in the 1980s when we almost took serious action on climate change?
We were never really that close to acting, although we certainly missed an opportunity to get the ball rolling.
That’s why I’ve started a new program within Grist called, simply, Fix.
Let’s not lose Earth this time.
The city passed a law this month that requires buildings like the Empire State Building and Trump Tower to slash their greenhouse gas emissions by 40 percent.
“We act like we’re aliens here, or like we’ve been given everything to dominate by God.” 4.
Your Sunday plans When life gives you lemons, make lemonade.
And when life gives you stinging nettles, well, make yourself some pesto!
In Washington state, where I live, the stuff is everywhere this time of year, and it hurts like hell when it rakes across your shins.
Ingredients: 3 cups fresh nettle leaves (careful!)
Six grassroots environmental activists will receive the prestigious Goldman Environmental Prize today.
To date, 194 winners from 89 different nations have received this award.
This year’s winners include an environmental and human rights lawyer who stopped the destruction of Liberia’s tropical forests, a conservationist who helped create a large protected area in Mongolia and a biologist from North Macedonia who fought against hydropower plants planned inside a critical habitat of the rare Balkan lynx.
The winners also include an indigenous leader from Chile who led a movement against two hydroelectric projects on a sacred river, a marine conservationist who campaigned to protect the Cook Islands’ marine biodiversity, and an activist from the U.S. who rallied residents to stop the construction of a massive oil export terminal that could have threatened the health and safety of the local community. “I am so moved and inspired by these six environmental trailblazers,” Susie Gelman, president of the Goldman Environmental Foundation, said in a statement. “Each of them has selflessly stood up to stop injustice, become a leader when leadership was critical, and vanquished powerful adversaries who would desecrate our planet.
These are six ordinary, yet extraordinary, human beings who remind us that we all have a role in protecting the Earth.”
The winners will be honored at the San Francisco Opera House in California, U.S., on April 29.
Former U.S. vice president and environmental activist Al Gore will present the keynote address.
Here are the winners of the 2019 Goldman Environmental Prize: