Jack Dini is author of Challenging Environmental Mythology. He has also written for American Council on Science and Health, Environment & Climate News, and Hawaii Reporter.
If you heard that a temperature record had been set, how long would you expect that temperature to hold: 1 hour, 30 minutes, 10 minutes,1 minute? In 2008, Lin and Hubbard argued it should be 7 minutes, that even a 5 minute averaging was not long enough to avoid some warming bias in maximums and cooling bias in minimals. 1
You might know that zinc, element number 30 on the periodic table, is used for galvanizing iron and steel. Here are some things you might not know.
Zinc is ubiquitous in our bodies and facilitates many functions that are essential for preserving life.
A single industry accounts for around 5% of global carbon dioxide emissions. It produces a material so ubiquitous it is nearly invisible: cement. Cement is the primary ingredient in concrete, which in turn forms the foundations and structures of buildings we live and work in, and the roads and bridges we drive on.
Across the globe, on nearly every continent, China is involved in a dizzying variety or resource extraction, energy, agricultural, and infrastructure projects—roads, railroads, hydro-power dams, mines—that are wrecking unprecedented damage to ecosystems and biodiversity reports, William Laurance. 1
In a world where more than 1 billion people have no electricity and a much larger number live in deep energy poverty, only the fossil fuel industry has developed the ability to produce energy for electricity, fuel and heat for those in need. The politically popular alternatives, solar and wind, are expensive, unreliables that depend on reliable sources, mostly fossil fuels for life support reports Alex Epstein. 1
Radiation is a natural process that is occurring at all times all around us. It is measured in units called millirems (mrems). The average person experiences a dose of about 620 mrems per year. International Standards consider exposure to as much as 5,000 mrems (5 rem) a year safe for those who work with and around radioactive material.
Although wind power achieved just 0.39% of the world's total energy consumption as of 2013, it is assumed that a rapid expansion of wind power will ultimately be environmentally advantageous both due to its reputation as a 'clean' energy and because of the potential to contribute to reduced CO2 emissions.1
The science team of Canadian Research icebreaker CCGS Amundsen involving 40 scientists, five universities and $17 million in taxpayer funding to study climate change canceled the first leg of the 2017 Arctic expedition due to extreme ice condition in the south.
Biology textbooks are riddled with passages relating how bad humans are at perceiving odors. As the oft-quoted statistic goes, humans can only perceive '10,000 odors', a number that sits particularly well with some dog-lovers, who like to remind us that canines have 300 million odor receptors, while humans only sport 6 million. But a study in 2014 revealed that humans might not be as olfactorily challenged as we once thought because, as it turns out, we can perceive more than 1 trillion odors—and that's a conservative estimate. 1
People are willing to set up a two trillion dollar global market to read carbon, but their carbon models are so primitive that giant 'oops' moments are now happening on a regular basis reports Joanne Nova. 1
Eating a diet rich in fruits and vegetables can help lower calorie intake, reduce risks for heart disease, obesity and Type 2 diabetes, and protect against certain cancers.
With all these benefits, why do some consumers choose to avoid produce? Approximately three-quarters of people in the US don't eat enough fruits and vegetables.
Elephant numbers across Africa have been declining rapidly under the onslaught of ivory poachers. However, one national park faces an entirely different problem. Hwange's elephant population just keeps growing. But what, on the face of it, might appear to be good news has become an equally serious problem, one that is more a threat to the elephants long-term survival than ivory poaching. Quite simply, Hwange has too many elephants reports Martin Dunn. 1
The new eastern span of the bridge which crosses the San Francisco Bay between Yerba Buena Island and Emeryville was officially opened in September 2013.
Air pollution from China, India and several other Asian countries has wafted across the Pacific Ocean over the past 25 years, increasing levels of smog in the western US according to recent research. 1
Listeria monocytogenes bacteria can cause a potentially fatal disease in people with vulnerable immune systems. Listeria infection is the third leading cause of death from food poisoning in the United States. About 1,600 people get sick from Listeria each year and about 260 die.1
Bacteria are tiny, one-celled organisms-- generally 4/100,000 of an inch wide (1 micron) and somewhat longer in length. What bacteria lack in size, they make up in numbers. We can't avoid them.
Jack Dini is author of Challenging Environmental Mythology. He has also written for American Council on Science and Health, Environment & Climate News, and Hawaii Reporter.
