…for the Family Album
Have a good night, Venus
Filed under: GENERAL NEWS - International / National / Regional | Leave a comment »
Filed under: GENERAL NEWS - International / National / Regional | Leave a comment »
Filed under: GENERAL NEWS - International / National / Regional | Leave a comment »
Filed under: GENERAL NEWS - International / National / Regional | Leave a comment »
By Chelsea Gohd 2 days ago
If humans continue emitting greenhouse gases at the current pace, global sea levels could rise more than 15 inches (38 centimeters) by 2100, scientists found in a new study.
Greenhouse gases emitted by human activity, such as carbon dioxide, contribute significantly to climate change and warming temperatures on planet Earth, studies continue to show. As things heat up, ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica melt. A new study by an international team of more than 60 ice, ocean and atmospheric scientists estimates just how much these melting ice sheets will contribute to global sea levels.
“One of the biggest uncertainties when it comes to how much sea level will rise in the future is how much the ice sheets will contribute,” project leader and ice scientist Sophie Nowicki, now at the University at Buffalo and formerly at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland, said in a statement. “And how much the ice sheets contribute is really dependent on what the climate will do.”
The results of this study show that, if human greenhouse gas emissions continue at the pace they’re currently at, Greenland and Antarctica’s melting ice sheets will contribute over 15 inches (28 centimeters) to global sea levels. This new study is part of the Ice Sheet Model Intercomparison Project (ISMIP6), which is led by NASA Goddard.
The ISMIP6 team investigated how sea levels will rise between 2015 and 2100, exploring how sea levels will change in a variety of carbon-emission scenarios
They found that, with high emissions (like we see now) extending throughout this time period, Greenland’s melting ice sheet will contribute about 3.5 in (9 cm) to global sea level rise. With lower emissions, they estimate that number to be about 1.3 in (3 cm).
Ice sheet loss in Antarctica is a little more difficult to predict, because, while ice shelves will continue to erode on the western side of the continent, East Antarctica could actually gain mass as temperatures rise because of increasing snowfall. Because of this, the team found a larger range of possible ice sheet loss here.
The team determined that ice-sheet loss in Antarctica could boost sea levels up to 12 in (30 cm), with West Antarctica causing up to 7.1 in (18 cm) of sea level rise by 2100 with the highest predicted emissions.
However, to be clear: These increases in global sea levels are just predictions for the years 2015 to 2100, so they don’t account for the significant ice sheet loss that has already taken place between the pre-industrial era and modern day.
“The Amundsen Sea region in West Antarctica and Wilkes Land in East Antarctica are the two regions most sensitive to warming ocean temperatures and changing currents, and will continue to lose large amounts of ice,” Helene Seroussi, an ice scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, who led the Antarctic ice sheet modeling in the ISMIP6 project, said in the same statement.
“With these new results, we can focus our efforts in the correct direction and know what needs to be worked on to continue improving the projections,” Seroussi said.
These results are in line with estimates made by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), whose 2019 Special Report on Oceans and the Cryosphere showed that melting ice sheets would contribute to about one-third of the total global sea level rise.
According to the 2019 IPCC report, melting ice sheets in Greenland will contribute 3.1 to 10.6 inches (8 to 27 cm) to global sea level rise between the years 2000 and 2100. For Antarctica, the report estimates that melting ice sheets will add 1.2 to 11 inches (3 to 28 cm).
The results from this new work will help to inform the next IPCC report, the sixth overall, which is set to be released in 2022, according to the same statement.
“The strength of ISMIP6 was to bring together most of the ice sheet modeling groups around the world, and then connect with other communities of ocean and atmospheric modelers as well, to better understand what could happen to the ice sheets,” Heiko Goelzer, a scientist from Utrecht University in the Netherlands who is now at NORCE Norwegian Research Centre in Norway, said in the same statement.
“It took over six years of workshops and teleconferences with scientists from around the world working on ice sheet, atmosphere, and ocean modeling to build a community that was able to ultimately improve our sea level rise projections,” added Nowicki, who led the Greenland ice sheet ISMIP6 project. “The reason it worked is because the polar community is small, and we’re all very keen on getting this problem of future sea level right. We need to know these numbers.”
This work was published Sept. 17 in a special issue of the journal The Cryosphere.
Filed under: GENERAL NEWS - International / National / Regional | Leave a comment »
A 12-storey pig farm: has China found the way to tackle animal disease?
21 September 2020
Biosecure farms complete with staff quarantine and chutes for dead pigs are seen as progress, but may carry their own risks.
The buildings do not even look like farms. They are huge grey concrete blocks, many storeys high, which stand side by side in the middle of what might look like a quarry, a “hole” of red earth dug in the heart of a mountain.
We are on the Yaji mountain, which in Chinese means “sacred”, a few kilometres south of the city of Guigang in southern China. What we are looking at is the tallest pig farm in the world; units up to nine storeys high housing thousands of pigs, with construction of a 12-storey pig unit under way.
“On each floor we can breed 1,270 pigs,” says Yuanfei Gao, vice-president of Yangxiang, the company that built the farm. “But in the future with the design of the new buildings we plan to have 1,300 pigs per floor.”
Yangxiang is one of the Chinese giants of the pork industry, producing about 2 million pigs a year in a dozen farms throughout China. The Yaji mountain site is its largest and most advanced multistorey farming system, and will have the capacity to produce around 840,000 pigs a year when construction is finished.
Read much more regarding this facility at
Regards Mark
Filed under: GENERAL NEWS - International / National / Regional | Leave a comment »
WAV Comment: We always thought that Trump had lost his marbles way before he was elected as the ‘President’ of the United States; but as money and the making of is his sole intention and concern; here we see that New York; with one of the largest Covid casebooks in the US, is now opening up its wet market doors because of Yom Kippur.
One really has to ask where the priorities of the US lay – trying to beat the Covid virus or simply as the article blow states:
“New York Mayor Bill de Blasio; his Health Commissioner, Dr. Dave Chokshi; and his Deputy Commissioner of Disease Control, Dr. Demetre Daskalakis, allow this mass ritual slaughter to take place, in spite of the health code violations and risks to public health, because NYC’s ultra-Orthodox Jewish communities represent a powerful voting bloc that can make or break elections in NYC and NY State”.
Now we know; to hell with the deaths and families affected; as per the Trump mentality; votes and money are the thing than mean more than anything else.
If the American public understand and believe this; then vote him in once again and put money before everything else. We have exposed the links to Covid deaths and the meat industries in many posts; if you ignore the evidence and go with the money; then that is your choice. We suggest that US citizens really taken this issue on board and start asking some hard, deep down questions about the New York policy – what is most important ? – deaths or votes.
The choice, voters of the USA, is down to you.
Link – New York Times 22/9/20:
At least 5 new coronavirus deaths and 575 new cases were reported in New York on Sept. 21. Over the past week, there have been an average of 790 cases per day, an increase of 5 percent from the average two weeks earlier.
As of Tuesday morning, there have been at least 455,187 cases and 32,691 deaths in New York since the beginning of the pandemic, according to a New York Times database.
And yet……
Link: https://theirturn.net/2020/09/19/kaporos-wet-markets-yom-kippur/
In the days leading up to Yom Kippur, tens of thousands of Hasidim in Brooklyn will purchase and physically handle live chickens in a wet market setting. Wearing little to no PPE, they will swing the chickens around their heads as part of an annual atonement ritual called Kaporos. The chickens will be killed in approximately 30 makeshift slaughterhouses erected without permits on public streets in residential neighborhoods in violation of eight New York City health codes.
The body parts, blood and feces of thousands of animals will contaminate the streets of South Williamsburg, Crown Heights and Borough Park for several days.
Kaporos is, in effect, the largest live animal wet market in the country and the only one in which the customers handle the animals before the animals are killed. Many of the animals have compromised immune systems and show signs of respiratory disease. The chickens make each other sick, and they also infect some of the people who handle them with e. Coli and campylobacter. If the viruses that these animals carry commingle and mutate into a more dangerous strain that could be spread among humans, then these Kaporos wet markets could be the source of the another zoonotic disease outbreak. According to a toxicologist who studied fecal and blood samples taken during Kaporos, the ritual “constitutes a dangerous condition” and “poses a significant public health hazard.”
In addition to putting all of us at risk of another zoonotic disease pandemic, Kaporos, which attracts hordes of people in small areas, could be a COVID “super spreader” event because Hasidic communities have been observed not wearing masks or engaging in social distancing.
New York Mayor Bill de Blasio; his Health Commissioner, Dr. Dave Chokshi; and his Deputy Commissioner of Disease Control, Dr. Demetre Daskalakis, allow this mass ritual slaughter to take place, in spite of the health code violations and risks to public health, because NYC’s ultra-Orthodox Jewish communities represent a powerful voting bloc that can make or break elections in NYC and NY State.
In fact, taxpayers help to underwrite the cost because the NYPD provides barricades, floodlights and a large police presence at many of the Kaporos sites. Given the risks and the disruption and death we have already endured already with pandemic, how can the Mayor and his health deputies allow Kaporos to take place?
For the past several years, animal rights and public health advocates have pled with Mayor de Blasio and his revolving door of health commissioners (Dr. Mary Bassett, Dr. Oxiris Barbot and now Dr. Dave Chokshi) to shut down Kaporos, given the health code violations and the risks to the public health.
Both in court and in the media, city attorneys and spokespeople for the NYC Department of Health have defended Kaporos and argued that the City has discretion over which laws to enforce. Throughout the month of September, the Alliance to End Chickens as Kaporos plastered 300 posters around New York City to sound the alarm about Kaporos.
Regards Mark
Filed under: GENERAL NEWS - International / National / Regional | Leave a comment »