Environment

Physics is one of the most remarkable scientific subjects there is. It incorporates many incredible discoveries, like The Quantum Leap, the Law of Falling Bodies, Universal Gravitation, and the Laws of Motion.  However, understanding how extraordinary physics is doesn’t mean you’ll excel in physics-based study to enter your chosen scientific career field. This field can be complex, and grasping even the most basic physics concepts can take time and practice. If you’re passionate about physics and need to improve your comprehension to enhance your learning potential, take these actions:…

While deforestation has declined rapidly in the last 60 years, clearing trees to make room for farmland was once essential.  Even an island like England had farming going back thousands of years. Hundreds of dead tree trunks in the low-lying Fens of eastern England, caught in the machinery of Fenland farmers while plowing their fields, were from yew trees that populated the area between four and five thousand years ago. Yet farmers did not cut them down, Fen yew woodlands died rapidly about 4,200 years ago due to climate change, when peat expanded the trees fell and were preserved until…

Global warming is not new to the history of our planet, and so, by studying previous periods of global warming, scientists hope to uncover secrets that can be used to combat global warming today. The Middle Eocene Climatic Optimum, which occurred some 40 million years ago, has attracted particular scrutiny because of its unique properties. researchers have found that clay formation during this period led to an unusually long period of global warming. This has important consequences for the climate today, by suggesting that enhanced weathering can be used to protect the climate.  The…

This plant above is what is regarded as a typical fern. However, a quite different looking type of fern played an important role in the development of Earth’s climate around 49 million years ago. Following the asteroid impact which ended the Mesozoic era and ushered in the Cenozoic (Tertiary) era, temperatures over the globe were considerably warmer than they are today. Besides overall trends, there were some notable thermal excursions such as the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM), a short interval of maximum temperature lasting approximately 100,000 years during the late Paleocene and…

Malaria infects 250,000,000 each year and kills nearly 700,000. It is so rare in America that academics and activists can lament chemicals that kill mosquitoes which transmit it to humans, and even block mosquitoes engineered to prohibit reproduction, but the damage is too great to risk on tinkering with alternatives. A few species of mosquitoes are ecologically useless. Despite the protestations of fallacious 'balance of nature' evangelists there is nothing they do that wouldn't be taken up by tens of thousands of other species - except transmit diseases like Mosquitoes spread diseases like…

In wealthy western breadbaskets like France and the United States, environmental groups who get donations from the $130 billion organic food industry claim it is viable everywhere else too. It's not just that they don't understand agriculture or science, though that is most of it. It is that they don't realize their modern White Savior Colonialism puts Africans at risk. There is a reason that as Kenya has gotten better about feeding itself, none of it is using the "organic" process - that whole market is just 0.69% and is mostly people who wish they had the money for pesticides. The…

With allied epidemiologists placed inside the US Environmental Protection Agency, and scientists pushed to the side, environmentalists feel like they are about to get a win when it comes to per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) that have been common for 80 years. And it will be a win - for the yacht payments of their lawyers. For the public, we will be no safer, we're not being harmed now, but the costs to 'clean up' a problem we don't have will be onerous. And we're all going to be harmed by that. Maybe you instead buy into the populist rhetoric of environmentalists who claim they will…

While modern weedkillers are great about using fewer chemicals and therefore less runoff into streams, the organic manufacturing process uses older, less effective compounds and that means on a calorie-per-calorie basis, the harm to the environment may be substantial. Water contaminated with copper sulfate, the most popular organic weedkiller, is harmful to crops, animals, and people. It's a $130-billion-a-year industry, so efforts are on to recycle more harmful chemicals used in the organic process, and that can help conventional farming also. For example, a new effort uses pyrolis - heating…

I have recently watched two videos on climate change by Sabine Hossenfelder.  The first one deals with the understanding of the greenhouse effect.  It is far from being as simple as taught in schools, with young people appearing on television coming out with suitable speeches as if they were Young Pioneers from the Soviet Union. Inspired by this video, I went and searched to find out how much of the Sun’s radiation is in the visible part of the spectrum.  Very few sources on the web actually give a value, and the most informative diagram I found came from Wikimedia.  It…

Food and energy are strategic resources and since conventional energy like oil is presumably finite, its extinction first said to be 30 years ago, the rationale has been to subsidize and mandate alternatives like solar and wind schemes. Food is also subsidized because it is a strategic resource but the curve is going the other way. Instead of being depleted 'real soon' as environmental PR gurus like Jeremy Rifkin successfully convinced journalists to repeat about oil decades ago, we have so much food that for the first time in human history poor people can afford to be fat. And with…