The apple orchards have been replaced with orange groves, the turf covered over with gravel and the summer borders replanted with cacti. They may look like scenes from a Portugese holiday, but these images could be the future of the traditional English garden, plant experts claimed yesterday. The striking images are part of a National Trust campaign to highlight how gardens will look if global warming brings Mediterranean weather to Britain in the next few decades.
Arctic melting caused the earthquakes in New Zealand and Japan. California coast soon underwater. Greenland Ice Sheet next to melt. We can stop it by buying a Japanese car.
Connecting the dots – melting ice and earthquakes
Considering the two recent unusually large earthquakes: first in New Zealand and then in Japan, it would be helpful at this point to look at the story behind the story that has not been explored by our major media. It may not be apparent to everyone.
You should know that there is mounting evidence that melting polar ice can cause an increase in earthquake activities.
One recent study found on the National Geographic website (http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news) shows that earthquakes are “suppressed in the presence of ice and promoted during melting of the ice,” said study leader Andrea Hampel of the Ruhr University Bochum in Germany.
As ice sheets melt, they can release pent-up energy and trigger massive earthquakes, according to this new study. It also shows that this can happen even along faults that are normally quiet and are not prone to slip.
It is projected that by this summer, the North Pole will be ice free for the first time in 100,000 years. The Greenland Ice Sheet is next in line and is currently melting at a record rate.
If it goes, we will have the Diablo Canyon Nuclear Power Plant on the California coast under water.
We should take these recent catastrophes as a word of warning and do everything we can to reduce our carbon footprint.
To replace our fleet of gas guzzlers with fuel-efficient vehicles to stave off further ice melt would be something that we could all move toward.
Urging our leaders to take a more cautious approach to dangerous technologies like nuclear and coal energies would also be helpful at this time of great upheaval.
Sheila Jenkins, Lincoln
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NC7bE9jopXE]
UN IPCC chairman Rajendra Pachauri justifies this absurd situation by sermonizing, “Unless we live in harmony with nature, unless we are able to reduce our dependency on fossil fuels and adopt renewable energy sources, and until we change our lifestyles, the world will increasingly become unfit for human habitation.”
During the 1960s and 1970s, responsible companies like Motorola used to dump large barrels of carcinogenic solvents out in the desert near Phoenix and Tucson. These chemicals found their way down into the water table, and now the state of Arizona spends huge amounts of money and effort keeping the plumes of toxic waste away from municipal wells.
To make things worse, Motorola aggravated the problem a few years ago by dumping more contaminated water in 2008.
TCE is much less dangerous than CO2 – the ultimate toxic waste.
I used to be in the nuclear waste business, and the best idea I ever heard was to put it downhole when detonating nuclear tests.
When you blow up a nuke underground, it creates a large spherical hole lined by a metre of glass. The nuclear waste becomes embedded in the glass, which is impervious to diffusion and allows radioactive elements to decay in situ.
The nuclear test ban treaty of course made this solution impractical, but from a technical viewpoint it is by far the safest way to contain the waste – which is currently piling up on the surface for lack of any better ideas.
