Friday 29th of March 2024

frying pans are getting bigger...

frying pan - sculpture by the sea, Sydney...

The numbers are in. The year 2014 – after shattering temperature records that had stood for hundreds of years across virtually all of Europe, and roasting parts of South America, China and Russia – was the hottest on record, with global temperatures 1.24F (0.69C) higher than the 20th-century average, US government scientists said on Friday.

A day after international researchers warned that human activities had pushed the planet to the brink, new evidence of climate change arrived. The world was the hottest it has been since systematic records began in 1880, especially on the oceans, which the agency confirmed were the driver of 2014’s temperature rise.

The global average temperatures over land and sea surface for the year were 1.24F (0.69C) above the 20th-century average, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (Noaa) reported. Nasa, which calculates temperatures slightly differently, put 2014’s average temperature at 14.67C – 0.68C above the average – for the period 1951-80.

The scientists said 2014 was 0.07F (0.04C) higher than the previous records set in 2005 and 2010, and the 38th consecutive year of above-average temperatures.

That means nobody born since 1976 has experienced a colder-than-average year.

red more: http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/jan/16/2014-hottest-year-on-record-scientists-noaa-nasa

 

humans are modifying the planet beyond boundaries...

 

Human activity has pushed the planet across four of nine environmental boundaries, sending the world towards a "danger zone", warns an international team of scientists.

Climate change, biodiversity loss, changes in land use, and altered biogeochemical cycles due in part to fertiliser use have fundamentally changed how the planet functions.

These changes destabilise complex interactions between people, oceans, land and the atmosphere, the team of 18 scientists report in the journal Science.

Passing the boundaries makes the planet less hospitable, damaging efforts to reduce poverty or improve quality of life.

"For the first time in human history, we need to relate to the risk of destabilising the entire planet," says Johan Rockstrom, one of the study's authors and an environmental science professor at Stockholm University.

Scientists in 2009 identified and quantified the nine planetary boundaries within which humanity can develop and thrive.

The five other boundaries -- ozone depletion, ocean acidification, freshwater use, microscopic particles in the atmosphere and chemical pollution -- have not been crossed.

Passing the boundaries does not cause immediate chaos but pushes the planet into a period of uncertainty.

Scientists consider climate change the most serious crossed boundary.

"For climate change the risk to humans begins increasing as carbon dioxide rises above 350 parts per million (ppm)," says the study's lead author Professor Will Steffen of the Australian National University.

We're now at nearly 400 ppm; we're coping so far, but we're seeing extreme weather events become worse, loss of polar ice and other worrying impacts," says Steffen.

The study results are set to be incorporated into the new global development goals that will be finalised in September at the United Nations in New York to replace the Millennium Development Goals on poverty alleviation expiring this year.

Scientists hope the new study will help balance competing demands for economic growth and environmental sustainability which are likely to arise during the conference.

http://www.abc.net.au/science/articles/2015/01/16/4163512.htm

 

Meanwhile sea levels have risen faster than first calculated after revision of the data:

Estimating and accounting for twentieth-century global mean sea-level (GMSL) rise is critical to characterizing current and future human-induced sea-level change. Several previous analyses of tide gauge records123456—employing different methods to accommodate the spatial sparsity and temporal incompleteness of the data and to constrain the geometry of long-term sea-level change—have concluded that GMSL rose over the twentieth century at a mean rate of 1.6 to 1.9 millimetres per year. Efforts to account for this rate by summing estimates of individual contributions from glacier and ice-sheet mass loss, ocean thermal expansion, and changes in land water storage fall significantly short in the period before 19907. The failure to close the budget of GMSL during this period has led to suggestions that several contributions may have been systematically underestimated8. However, the extent to which the limitations of tide gauge analyses have affected estimates of the GMSL rate of change is unclear. Here we revisit estimates of twentieth-century GMSL rise using probabilistic techniques910 and find a rate of GMSL rise from 1901 to 1990 of 1.2 ± 0.2 millimetres per year (90% confidence interval). Based on individual contributions tabulated in the Fifth Assessment Report7 of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, this estimate closes the twentieth-century sea-level budget. Our analysis, which combines tide gauge records with physics-based and model-derived geometries of the various contributing signals, also indicates that GMSL rose at a rate of 3.0 ± 0.7 millimetres per year between 1993 and 2010, consistent with prior estimates from tide gauge records4. The increase in rate relative to the 1901–90 trend is accordingly larger than previously thought; this revision may affect some projections11 of future sea-level rise.

 

Read more: http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nature14093.html

 

And the sea is highly polluted with plastic products:

 

The world’s leading expert on the poisoning of the oceans said he was “utterly shocked” at the increase in plastic floating on the sea in the past five years and warned that it potentially posed a bigger threat to the planet than climate change.

Charles J Moore, a captain in the US merchant marine and founder of a leading Ocean research group, has just finished his first in-depth survey of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch – one of five major expanses of plastic drifting in the world’s oceans - since 2009.

“It’s choking our future in ways that most of us are barely aware,” said Captain Moore, who first caught sight of the patch in the North Pacific Ocean in 1997, while returning to southern California after the Los Angeles to Hawaii TransPacific yacht race.

He has since revisited the area with a team of scientists 10 times, noting an alarming increase in rubbish.

“Although it was my tenth voyage to the area, I was utterly shocked to see the enormous increase in the quantity of plastic waste since my last trip in 2009. Plastics of every description, from toothbrushes to tires to unidentifiable fragments too numerous to count floating for hundreds of miles without end,” Captain Moore wrote in a column in the New York Times.

“We even came upon a floating island bolstered by dozens of plastic buoys used in oyster aquaculture that had solid areas you could walk on,” he added.

read more: http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/plastic-rubbish-heaps-at-sea-pose-bigger-threat-to-earth-than-climate-change-claims-ocean-expert-9692265.html

a basic instinct...

Within a mere 10 seconds of being born, the shock of the brave new world startled your lungs into action as you gasped your first breath. And they haven’t stopped working since, averaging around 16 breaths a minute for a resting adult – or 23,000 a day. By the time you reach 30, you will have inhaled and exhaled roughly 250 million times.

You’d think, with all that practice, we’d all be experts at respiration. What more could we learn about this most basic instinct?

 

Read more:

https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20200303-why-slowing-your-breathing...

 

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yes, blah blah blah... The older we get the better we breathe, if we don't forget to do it... But this is not about absorbing air molecules but about the image used in the BBC article...

 

breathless

 

If you wonder where the place is, it is in Sydney, Tamarama beach, near Bondi, during the Sculture by the Sea exhibition... See image at top.