Cows and Cars Re-engineering vs. Global Warming

 

Just one of the things I had to endure in a yuppie’s life this past week. After two dry months of what supposedly should have started the rainy season, (June and July,) it just won’t stop raining these days. After concerns of the dams’ water levels going critical, we now get urban flashfloods for almost the entire month of August so far. The previous years might have gotten people to get used to rains and floods from storms this time of the year but back then, the typhoon visits were somewhat staggered compared to the continuous run of storms now.

Whether the change in climate has to do with the global warming issue or not, I hope to have a ceasefire from the rains soon. I sure could use a rain-free week, (or weekend at least.)  Anyway here’s a couple of global warming tidbits:

Cow Modifications

One nice thing about the attention and concern given to global warming is that it had scientists looking for a lot of ways to curb harmful emissions to the atmosphere even from those from where we least expect.

For instance, in the Christian Science Monitor report, “How better-fed cows could cool the planet“, cows are put in focus as they along with other “ruminant livestock – including… goats, and buffaloes – produce about 80 million metric tons of methane a year, accounting for about 28 percent of man-made methane emissions annually.” The article simply puts it:

When cows digest, they burp methane gas, a powerful greenhouse agent. Scientists are working to try to reduce that.

And proceeds to detail how scientists are looking at changing the grasses and livestocks these cows eat to playing around with their digestive mechanisms. Other important points and interesting facts from the said report include:

• According to the US Environmental Protection Agency, pound for pound methane is about 21 times more effective at warming Earth’s atmosphere than carbon dioxide is.
• According to researchers from the Japanese National Institute of Livestock and Grassland Science in Tsukuba “the production of one kilogram of beef (2.2 pounds) results in the emission of greenhouse gases with a warming potential equivalent to 80 pounds of carbon dioxide. In other words: Serving steak to your family is the greenhouse-gas equivalent of driving 155 miles.”

Car Modifications

Fuel consuming transportation is one obvious aspect of Global Warming that has scientists’ and researchers’ attention for a good reason.

Late last June, a The Economist article came out featuring Thailand’s long shelved plan of coming up with environmental friendly car which are affordable and have low exhaust emissions and fuel consumption. Back in 2004, the Thaksin administration had the plan of the eco-car’s large-scale production in its priority but it was only last June 15 that the Board of Investment (BoI) “finalised a range of incentives for the production of such vehicles, and the government has also approved a large cut in excise taxes.”

The Risk Called Office Printers

Yup the title’s right. If the BBC article towards the end of the previous month’s to be believed:

The humble office laser printer can damage lungs in much the same way as smoke particles from cigarettes.

Read more on the said finding of a group of scientists from The Queensland University of Technology.

[08/18/07 Update] – For a good laugh, here’s abarclay12’s take on the printer risk thingie. Included there is an interesting tech article linking HP’s official statement on PC World which went:

HP is currently reviewing the Queensland University of Technology research on particle emission characteristics of office printers. Vigorous tests under standardized operating conditions are an integral part of HP’s research and development and its strict quality control procedures.

What’s with PR these days? More to the point I just don’t get what the second sentence is doing there. Strict quality control procedures and research and development should include health risks among important prerogatives and the fact that they did consider reviewing the study just shows that this is one thing they failed to consider.

I think I should talk to my boss for me to get placed a little farther away from the office laser printer. My proximity from the culprit right now’s somewhere around a meter or 2.

Obesity is ‘socially contagious’?

I’m not a big fan of the blame game but this Yahoo health tidbit roused an amount of interest anyway. The news bit focuses on obesity as something that’s “socially contagious.”

If your friends and family get fat, chances are you will too, researchers report in a startling new study that suggests obesity is “socially contagious” and can spread easily from person to person.

Maybe that’s one reason why a lot of people find contentment elusive: they base theirs against someone else’s. Then again that’s just me.

The Science of Parking

Urban planning this days has just given parking careful consideration. In its recent article, The New Science of Parking, Time magazine takes a look at an urban issue that has warranted due attention in the recent years.

Take the studies mentioned in the article for example:

In a 2006 study undertaken in a Brooklyn neighborhood by Transportation Alternatives, a New York-based advocacy group, 45% of drivers interviewed admitted they were simply looking for a parking spot. A more rigorous analysis was conducted in Los Angeles by Dr. Donald Shoup, an urban planning professor at UCLA and one of the nation’s top parking gurus. Over the course of a year, he and his students found, the search for curb parking in a 15-block business district “created about 950,000 excess vehicle miles of travel — equivalent to 38 trips around the earth, or four trips to the moon,” which consumes “47,000 gallons of gas and produces 730 tons of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide.”

The Heat Continues

Yahoo News posted another article on the heat wave onslaught experienced over some states in mainland USA. Experienced over the states of Idaho, Nevada, Utah, Oregon and Washington, the hot condition I’ve blogged about in my previous entry has farm livelihoods in danger, people suffering from heat stroke and air conditioners pummeled among best selling products there.

And this is just about 7 months after the U.N. report on the inevitable increase in global temperature in spite of any effort to curb fossil fuel use.

The image is linked from the said Yahoo News article btw.

[07/08 Update] A check at Yahoo News a day after this post, wildfires over Reno are now ablaze as the heat wave over the mainland continues. Hundreds of people are reported to have been evacuated due to an 8,000 acre wildfire which in turn is included in the list of more than a dozen ones which have affected a total of 55 square miles in that area of Nevada.

The image’s again from the article btw.

[07/09 Update] Another wildfire went at it again, this time on the southern side of Black Hills in South Dakota. This one was started by lightning then went on to flare up roughly about 11 square miles.  According to the report, the wildfire is one of dozens among several states including California, Utah, Nevada, Washington, Colorado, Montana and Oregon.

The Mystery of China’s Celtic Mummies

A certain blog entry of the same title bearing the same contents from this article by the UK independent got my attention over the weekend. The same content about the discovery can be found all throughout a lot of other blogs including this Uyghur American Association page.

That is the mummies found in China are strangely, Celtic in origin as confirmed by results of DNA tests on a hundred other samples found in Xinjiang. Now that says something about how the West and East was bridged in the remote past. I guess the only thing surprising is that though the article’s nearly a year ago already, I found it interesting because it was just about the first time I heard of it. Maybe it was because it came out at a time when I was busy studying Lotus Workflow and Domino Document Manager.

It is also interesting that given that the mummies date back to about 3000 years ago, there now exists a possibility that the west may have been in contact with the east even before Marco Polo’s documented travels and that there may have been more influence between the two cultures a lot more than what is understood now.

Unearthing Ancient Egypt

Last weekend, I encountered three Yahoo news bits regarding archaeological discoveries in Egypt. The first one is the discovery of a 3000 year-old mummy. It was identified as a high priest to the god Amun in the southern city of Luxor, antiquities supremo Zahi Hawass told the official MENA news agency on Saturday.

The next is the discovery of what is thought to be the gold source of Egypt then. The archaeologists who found the ancient gold-processing and panning camp thought that non-Egyptians called Kushites, who ruled the region, gathered gold at the site from about 2000 B.C. to 1500 B.C. and used it to trade with Egypt.

The last discovery comes from satellites from space which reportedly have spotted an ancient Egyptian city. The large project responsible for the find aims to map as much of ancient Egypt’s archaeological sites, or “tells,” as possible before they are destroyed or covered by modern development and is led by Sarah Parcak of the University of Alabama at Birmingham. Among the sites found by the satellite includes a 1,600-year-old metropolis, another large city dating to 600 B.C. and a monastery from 400 A.D. among those sites which number at around 400. The said metropolis according to Parcak seems to be a massive regional center that traded with Greece, Turkey and Libya.

Common Energy Myths

Just encountered a blog entry on 6 things to consider when it comes to energy saving these days. The said tips are from an even larger list of tips from this blog from the same author of the former, Steven G. Atkinson, who himself is a technology consultant and an author. Here are the 6 myths:

• An idle computer doesn’t use much energy.
• It’s harmful to the computer to be turned off and on.
• It takes more energy to raise or lower the temperature in the house than keeping it constant.
• Compact Fluorescent Light Bulbs have poor light quality, makes noises and takes time to turn on.
• Higher costs negate any savings.
• Off is no energy used.

Refer to the pertinent entry in 6 Things to Consider for more information on the said myths. The said blog in itself is a pretty worthwhile staple on RSS readers because of its doses of 6’s: 6 new things in 6 days of the week.

Texas Leads Carbon Emissions

Early this month a Yahoo article of the same title takes a look at the Lone Star State in terms of Global Warming. So the article presents:

• Wyoming’s coal-fired power plants produce more carbon dioxide in just eight hours than the power generators of more populous Vermont do in a year.

• Texas, the leader in emitting this greenhouse gas, cranks out more than the next two biggest producers combined, California and Pennsylvania, which together have twice Texas’ population.

• In sparsely populated Alaska, the carbon dioxide produced per person by all the flying and driving is six times the per capita amount generated by travelers in New York state.

The U.S. is one important ingredient missing in the Kyoto Protocol and this maybe one of the several reasons as to why the powerhouse chose to do so. This despite the fact that the U.S. is the world leader in dumping greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.

Proof of Dark Matter

Another NASA article involving astronomy and physics the other day had me writing this entry. This time, the article involves the dark matter of one of the lot of theories in physics.

It is pretty interesting to note that while astromers believe that the stuff comprises majority of the known universe, they know so little about it. The discovery of a hazy ring of what’s supposedly dark matter then is more than welcome in the move to shed light on the subject. Now whether it does actually count for concrete evidence or not is another thing to watch out in subsequent editions of Physics books.