New plastic-eating bacteria could help save planet "(CNN)Scientists in Japan have discovered a strain of bacteria that can eat plastic, a finding that might help solve the world's fast-growing plastic pollution problem. The species fully breaks down one of the most common kinds of plastic called Polyethylene terephthalate (PET). It's the type often used to package bottled drinks, cosmetics and household cleaners..." While I think this is potentially great news, things like this sort of scare me because one day the cure may be worse than the disease:
Biotech will lead to great and terrible things. A God will we become. and I'm reminded of this... Ice-nine is a material appearing in Kurt Vonnegut's novel Cat's Cradle. Ice-nine is supposedly a polymorph of water (invented by Dr. Felix Hoenikker[1]), more stable than common ice (Ice Ih); instead of melting at 0 °C (32 °F), it melts at 45.8 °C (114.4 °F). When ice-nine comes into contact with liquid water below 45.8 °C (thus effectively becoming supercooled), it acts as a seed crystal and causes the solidification of the entire body of water, which quickly crystallizes as more ice-nine. As people are mostly water, ice-nine kills nearly instantly when ingested or brought into contact with soft tissues exposed to the bloodstream, such as the eyes or tongue. In the story, it is developed by the Manhattan Project in order for the Marines to no longer need to deal with mud, but abandoned when it becomes clear that any quantity of it would have the power to destroy all life on earth. A global catastrophe involving freezing the world's oceans with ice-nine is used as a plot device in Vonnegut's novel. Vonnegut came across the idea while working at General Electric: The author Vonnegut credits the invention of ice-nine to Irving Langmuir, who pioneered the study of thin films and interfaces. While working in the public relations office at General Electric, Vonnegut came across a story of how Langmuir, who won the 1932 Nobel Prize for his work at General Electric, was charged with the responsibility of entertaining the author H. G. Wells, who was visiting the company in the early 1930s. Langmuir is said to have come up with an idea about a form of solid water that was stable at room temperature in the hopes that Wells might be inspired to write a story about it. Apparently, Wells was not inspired and neither he nor Langmuir ever published anything about it. After Langmuir and Wells had died, Vonnegut decided to use the idea in his book Cat's Cradle.[2] Nonfiction[edit] While multiple polymorphs of ice do exist (they can be created under pressure), none has the properties described in this book, and none is stable at standard temperature and pressure, which is above the ordinary melting point of ice. The real Ice IX has none of the properties of Vonnegut's creation, and can exist only at extremely low temperatures and high pressures. The ice-nine phenomenon has, in fact, occurred with a few other kinds of crystals, called "disappearing polymorphs". In these cases, a new variant of a crystal has been introduced into an environment, replacing many of the older form crystals with its own form. One example is the anti-AIDS medicine ritonavir, where the newer polymorph destroyed the effectiveness of the drug until improved manufacturing and distribution was developed.[3] Ice-nine has been used as a model to explain the infective mechanism of mis-folded proteins called prions which are thought to catalyze the mis-folding of the corresponding normal protein leading to a variety of spongiform encephalopathies such as kuru, scrapie and Creutzfeldt–Jakob disease.[4]
In case anyone was wondering why the GOP denies climate science. https://www.opensecrets.org/industries/totals.php?cycle=2016&ind=e01
$327 million in the past 14 years? That is it? blahahahahaha In case anyone was wondering way Dems and clean energy companies push climate science. Below is in millions of dollars: https://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/de...gislative_reports/fcce-report-to-congress.pdf
An already politically active industry ramped up its presence in campaign finance even further in 2012 as presidential candidates Barack Obama and Mitt Romney debated climate change and potential curbs on carbon emissions. Companies with interests in oil and gas contributed more than $70 million to federal candidates in the 2012 cycle, more than double the total from 2010. Political donations from the industry - which includes gas producers and refiners, natural gas pipeline companies, gasoline stations, and fuel oil dealers - have taken on an increasingly conservative tint over the past two decades. In the 2012 cycle, 90 percent of its contributions went to the GOP. https://www.opensecrets.org/industries/indus.php?cycle=2016&ind=e01 This is a surprise to no one except perhaps dumb deluded conservatives. Which is basically all of them.
Scientists Trace Climate-Heat Link Back to 1930s "The world endured a warm year as President Roosevelt wrangled with crippling drought during the first year of his second term. Scientists now say global temperatures that year, in 1937, were record-breaking for the time. The heat record fell again two years later. More records were set in 1940, 1941 and 1944. For the first time, climate scientists have identified greenhouse gas pollution’s role in global temperatures measured during record-breaking years back to 1937, as industrialized cities and nations continued burning coal to power factories and trains. “What we found was that we could actually detect human influence on extreme events a lot earlier than we’d thought,” said Daniel Mitchell, an Oxford University physicist who researches climate change. He was part of an international team of scientists that published the findings this week in Geophysical Research Letters. The most recent global record, set in 2015, easily surpassed a record set just one year earlier. The first two months of 2016 appear to have broken monthly temperature records..." http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/other...heat-link-back-to-1930s/ar-AAgzZqr?li=BBnbcA1
what we know... we know we are having an el nino. we know that ocean temperature change precedes co2 levels by about 9 months. I suspect I could make that same model and chart by looking for increases in co2 after el ninos... And I don't even have any useful data in front of me. and oddly after reading those articles neither do you.
There had to be man made global warming back then. The CO2 levels were starting to rise from all the fossil fuel burnt.
lets learn something from this FC... could you go back on that chart... and point out when your author switched from using proxies to actual measurements? Could you also put that chart into a perspective like this...