Environmental News

There may not be 'big-data' analysts hanging around here with free time on their hands, but at least you should be aware of this opportunity:

Enter the UN’s Data for Climate Action Challenge and save the world | Ars Technica

Recommended, important topic , science writing pretty good:

Plants Might Have Saved Earth From Permanent Ice Age | WIRED

Research on that other thing plants do besides making reduced carbon that later (mostly) decomposes. Their roots increase surface area of 'rocks' and supply acids that further mess with rocks. When plants are 'doing their best' (at high CO2) such rock damaging (which removes CO2 from atmosphere) is also maxed.

A dramatic media account of future microbial resistance to medicines:
Peer Into the Post-Apocalyptic Future of Antimicrobial Resistance | WIRED
Or its scientific unpinnings:
Home | AMR Review

For your reading. Save them for when you are feeling just too happy and optimistic.

Aqua, one of the 'look-down' satellites, can measure ammonia even though it was not anticipated to be able to do so. Nice trick.

NASA Satellite Identifies Global Ammonia 'Hotspots'

The publication by Warner et al. in Geophysical Research Letters is not paywalled. Rare for that journal Y'all might enjoy taking a look.

In other news, PriusChat decides to charge members USD$ 0.05 for each 'like' given.


Not.

 

Make it a dollar then. I'll still 'like' mojo when he raises a teachable issue and you can't stop me

Secret for BobW getting likes is to tell us more about that dang airplane. C'mon, stick it in the air! All those floaters g onn a look like 'traffic'

 

Costs associated with increasing vehicle fuel efficiency:
Efficiency technology and cost assessment for U.S. 2025–2030 light-duty vehicles | International Council on Clean Transportation

Along with another perspective:
Scott Pruitt: We're protecting jobs and the environment

If you took an entomology course, you made an insect collection. That's the rule. But these folks are in a class by themselves:

Couple donates bug collection worth $10m, a goldmine for researchers | Environment | The Guardian

Not quite sure what to make of the article's claim of minimum per-insect value of $5... Maybe it will inspire some folks to start their own?

Useless personal trivia: I cannot smell cyanide. Missing some gene perhaps. I did not know this until preparing my 'kill jar' in class. We were supposed to add potassium cyanide to an hygroscopic chemical until we could smell it, then stop. I added, added, added until the students near me said "when are you going to stop?"

Possibly useful trivia: It is illegal to take dead insects out of some countries without appropriate paperwork. So if you go collecting abroad in search of a $300 rare specimen, might be trouble.

 

Increased electrical power generation needs in Africa will be addressed with some mix of renewables and fossils. Which, and where are addressed in this study:

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/03/170327172829.htm

 

Unpleasantness alert: Link below addresses human mortality associated with air pollution.

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v543/n7647/full/nature21712.html

 

Don't 'like' bad-news posts. It just encourages more of them

I started this with an intentional bias towards good news, but ya gotta play the cards as dealt.

 

(clears throat)

Open-access scientific publication means author(s) pay. A notable new exception exists:

Gates Foundation announces open-access publishing venture : Nature News & Comment

It will be stringently open in terms of revealing source data and analysis steps.

 

You 'tablet' folks have access to a whole lot of stuff you might want:

Climate at your fingertips

+++

Green plant/CO2/climate relationships a long time ago are under investigation:

Azolla event - Wikipedia

 

Recent 'smoke signals' suggest this web page might soon blink out:

FACT SHEET: Clean Power Plan By The Numbers | Clean Power Plan | US EPA

So have a look while ye may. Agree or not; I don't care.

 

The latest on global CO2 fertilization:

Large historical growth in global terrestrial gross primary production : Nature

Notable because it uses carbonyl sulfide (COS) as a marker that can in principle be tracked in frozen ice cores. COS has been all the rage at topical conferences over the last few years.

 

The UK will spend money for controlling several tropical diseases. Good. Some are very icky, all have more or less successful treatments. Many victims can pay little for treatment.

100 years ago with treatments lacking, one could think about this with a philosophical "oh well". But treatments are no longer lacking, so one either does something constructive or thinks about something else.

 

Only partially fitting description of 'environmental' but it is 'new'. This book published March 1:

Quite a lot of text is presented as online preview. More than for many other books. Probably enough for you to decide of the author is saying something accurate, valuable, and not already known to you.

My addition (actually perhaps Tom Nichols says so somewhere) is that it's OK to 'make fun of' experts. However there may be risks in making fun of people who don't know things - their feelings might get hurt.