The Antarctic ozone hole reached its annual maximum on Sept. 12, 2008, stretching over 27 million kilometers, or 10.5 square miles. The area of the ozone hole is calculated as an average of the daily areas for Sept. 21-30 from observations from the Ozone Monitoring Instrument (OMI) on NASA’s Aura satellite.

NOAA scientists, who have monitored the ozone layer since 1962, have determined that this year’s ozone hole has passed its seasonal peak for 2008. Data is available at online.

The primary cause of the ozone hole is human-produced compounds called chlorofluorocarbons, or CFCs, which release ozone-destroying chlorine and bromine into the atmosphere. Earth’s protective ozone layer acts like a giant umbrella, blocking the sun’s ultraviolet-B rays. Though banned for the past 21 years to reduce their harmful build up, CFCs still take many decades to dissipate from the atmosphere.

According to NOAA scientists, colder than average temperatures in the stratosphere may have helped play a part in allowing the ozone hole to develop more fully this year.

“Weather is the most important factor in the fluctuation of the size of the ozone hole from year-to-year,” said Bryan Johnson, a scientist at NOAA’s Earth System Research Laboratory in Boulder, which monitors ozone, ozone-depleting chemicals, and greenhouse gases around the globe. “How cold the stratosphere is and what the winds do determine how powerfully the chemicals can perform their dirty work.”

NASA satellites measured the maximum area of this year’s ozone hole at 10.5 million square miles and four miles deep, on Sept. 12. Balloon-borne sensors released from NOAA’s South Pole site showed the total column of atmospheric ozone dropped to its lowest count of 107 Dobson units on Sept. 28. Dobson units are a measure of total ozone in a vertical column of air.

In 2006, record-breaking ozone loss occurred as ozone thickness plunged to 93 Dobson units on Oct. 9 and sprawled over 11.4 million square miles at its peak. Scientists blamed colder-than-usual temperatures in the stratosphere for its unusually large size. Last year’s ozone hole was average in size and depth.

Starting in May, as Antarctica moves into a period of 24-hour-a-day darkness, rotating winds the size of the continent create a vortex of cold, stable air centered near the South Pole that isolates CFCs over the continent. When spring sunshine returns in August, the sun’s ultraviolet light sets off a series of chemical reactions inside the vortex that consume the ozone. The colder and more isolated the air inside the vortex, the more destructive the chemistry. By late December the southern summer is in full swing, the vortex has crumbled, and the ozone has returned—until the process begins anew the following winter.

The 1987 Montreal Protocol and other regulations banning CFCs reversed the buildup of chlorine and bromine, first noticed in the 1980s.

“These chemicals—and signs of their reduction—take several years to rise from the lower atmosphere into the stratosphere and then migrate to the poles,” said NOAA’s Craig Long, a research meteorologist at NOAA’s National Centers for Environmental Prediction. “The chemicals also typically last 40 to 100 years in the atmosphere. For these reasons, stratospheric CFC levels have dropped only a few percent below their peak in the early 2000s.“

“The decline of these harmful substances to their pre-ozone hole levels in the Antarctic stratosphere will take decades,” said NOAA atmospheric chemist Stephen Montzka of the Earth System Research Laboratory. “We don’t expect a full recovery of Antarctic ozone until the second half of the century.”

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The current ordinance that Springfield has regarding smoking in restaurants is too weak. The Springfield City Council and the next governor of Missouri should work to ban smoking in all public places. Secondhand smoke is a public health issue. It is also a personal one: I have a right to breathe clean air.

In July 2003, Springfield passed a law prohibiting smoking in restaurants, with the exception of eateries with annual alcohol sales exceeding $200,000 or when 50 percent or more of sales come from alcohol. There is also an exception for restaurants with 50 seats or less that may allow smoking, and a restaurant that sells liquor can allow smoking in a separate, ventilated area. If you ask me, way too many “exceptions.”

Many states have placed a ban on smoking in public establishments. For example, the Clean Indoor Air Act became effective in New York in July 2003 and the Freedom to Breathe Act became effective in Minnesota in October 2007. It is now time for the state of Missouri to follow their lead and enact legislation that will ban smoking in all public establishments: restaurants, stores, bowling alleys, bars, etc.

Why is it that we have to pass laws in order to protect the nonsmoker? Everybody knows that smoking is dangerous for your health, smokers and nonsmokers alike. It is not news or shocking to cite that smoking and secondhand smoke cause or can lead to bronchitis, asthma, emphysema, COPD, heart disease, lung cancer, etc. I know a lot of smokers do not yet have these conditions, but the key word is “yet.” On the other hand, I have family members and friends with some of these conditions, some were caused by their own smoking, others were caused by secondhand smoke.

The fact that secondhand smoke can cause lung cancer is reason enough to ban smoking in all public establishments, not just restaurants. Why single out restaurants? Secondhand smoke is just as dangerous in a restaurant as it is a bowling alley. Plus, if a nonsmoking measure is statewide then businesses will not have to compete.

I smoked cigarettes for seven years and I remember offending people with my secondhand smoke and its offensive odor. I thought I cared and even felt bad, but I wanted to smoke and chose to do so in the presence of many nonsmokers. About 10 years ago, I was smoking with some friends while we bowled at Enterprise Lanes. The family in the next lane asked if I would stop smoking because they had a baby with them. Shame on me! And good for them for sticking up for their right to breathe clean air!

Smokers, yes you, listen: I do not want to breathe in your smoke.

I do not want it in my hair or clothes. I like to smell good. Every time I go to a place where smoking is allowed, when I come home I have to wash my hair. Because I, like my purse and clothes, stink!! I believe that the right to breathe clean air is greater than the right to exhale smoke into one’s clean air.

It all comes down to this: it is a MAJOR inconvenience for people to breathe in secondhand smoke, while it is a MINOR inconvenience for the smoker to go outside.

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Welcome Barrack Obama winning the United States presidential election, and we hope that it will bring positive energy context of global warming.

Martin

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Motion sensors ensure that unoccupied offices, storerooms and canteens go dark after workers and cleaning crews leave at night. Dimmers soften overhead lights that once could burn only bright or not at all. Timers guarantee that buildings fade to black while the city sleeps.

Gone are the days when cheap electricity, primitive lighting technology and landlords’ desire to showcase their skyscrapers kept floor after floor of the city’s highest towers glowing into the night. Now, rising energy costs, conservationism, stricter building codes and sophisticated lighting systems have conspired to slowly, often imperceptibly, transform Manhattan’s venerable nightscape into one with a gentler glow.

Instead of tower after tower shining at all hours — the World Trade Center stayed aglow long after its occupants went home — the skyline is becoming a patchwork of sparsely sparkling buildings decorated with ornamentally lighted tops.

“The tall tower with the illuminated floors on all night long is probably a thing of the past,” said Randy Sabedra, the owner of RS Lighting Design, who is helping to create a new map of the city’s most prominently lighted buildings. “You’re not relying on the glowing floors to have the building presence. It is relying on the crown of light.”

Since electricity set it ablaze more than a century ago, the skyline has dimmed a number of times. During World War II and the energy crisis of the 1970s, New Yorkers considered it patriotic to turn out lights. But such frugality disappeared once times were flush again (though the current troubles could leave more office space vacant, and thus dark).

The building boom of the last decade, the ever-expanding electronic billboards of Times Square and unshielded traffic lights have solidified New York’s status as one of the country’s most light-polluted cities, according to the International Dark-Sky Association, which has pushed for city and state legislation to turn the lights down.

New York scores a 9 on the 9-point Bortle Dark-Sky Scale, the association’s favored measure, along with other major cities like Houston and Las Vegas; a typical suburban sky ranks a 5, while Tucson, which has stringent outdoor lighting codes, is also a 5.

Illumination Overkill

“The light bulb has not really gone on in their head yet,” Susan Harder, who runs the association’s New York section, said of city officials. “We’ll always have an iconic skyline, but we don’t need this big glow over the city.”

To that end, the State Assembly passed legislation in June requiring that new outdoor lighting have shields that reduce glare and waste; the bill’s sponsor, Assemblywoman Linda B. Rosenthal, a Manhattan Democrat, said it would most likely be taken up by the State Senate if the Democrats manage to win a majority on Tuesday (Republicans currently hold a one-seat advantage).

City Councilman Alan J. Gerson has introduced a variety of similar measures — to require full streetlight shields and motion detectors in all commercial and government buildings, and to mandate more efficiently lighted billboards. The first of the proposals could be taken up as early as this month.

“The sky won’t be totally dark,” Ms. Rosenthal said. “But it’s 2008, so we have to take into account energy concerns.”

In many ways, the business community is ahead of the politicians. Several of the city’s newest skyscrapers incorporate cutting-edge technologies that appeal to environmentalists — and those eager to keep energy costs down. Landlords have found that meeting stiffer energy efficiency standards in their new and refurbished buildings is a selling point with tenants, especially those that pay their own electricity bills.

“This time, the difference is that we’re more conscious of what we’re doing and the lighting industry is more advanced,” said Meg Smith, a manager in New York for Lightolier, a manufacturer that specializes in lighting fixtures and controls.
 

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LIKE his uncle, his grandfather and many of their neighbors, Arie Versendaal spent decades working at the Maytag factory here, turning coils of steel into washing machines.

When the plant closed last year, taking 1,800 jobs out of this town of 16,000 people, it seemed a familiar story of American industrial decline: another company town brought to its knees by the vagaries of global trade.

Except that Mr. Versendaal has a new factory job, at a plant here that makes blades for turbines that turn wind into electricity. Across the road, in the old Maytag factory, another company is building concrete towers to support the massive turbines. Together, the two plants are expected to employ nearly 700 people by early next year.

“Life’s not over,” Mr. Versendaal says. “For 35 years, I pounded my body to the ground. Now, I feel like I’m doing something beneficial for mankind and the United States. We’ve got to get used to depending on ourselves instead of something else, and wind is free. The wind is blowing out there for anybody to use.”

From the faded steel enclaves of Pennsylvania to the reeling auto towns of Michigan and Ohio, state and local governments are aggressively courting manufacturing companies that supply wind energy farms, solar electricity plants and factories that turn crops into diesel fuel.

This courtship has less to do with the loftiest aims of renewable energy proponents — curbing greenhouse gas emissions and lessening American dependence on foreign oil — and more to do with paychecks. In the face of rising unemployment, renewable energy has become a crucial source of good jobs, particularly for laid-off Rust Belt workers.

Amid a presidential election campaign now dominated by economic concerns, wind turbines and solar panels seem as ubiquitous in campaign advertisements as the American flag.

No one believes that renewable energy can fully replace what has been lost on the American factory floor, where people with no college education have traditionally been able to finance middle-class lives. Many at Maytag earned $20 an hour in addition to health benefits. Mr. Versendaal now earns about $13 an hour.

Still, it’s a beginning in a sector of the economy that has been marked by wrenching endings, potentially a second chance for factory workers accustomed to layoffs and diminished aspirations.

In West Branch, Iowa, a town of 2,000 people east of Iowa City, workers now assemble wind turbines in a former pump factory. In northwestern Ohio, glass factories suffering because of the downturn in the auto industry are retooling to make solar energy panels.

“The green we’re interested in is cash,” says Norman W. Johnston, who started a solar cell factory called Solar Fields in Toledo in 2003.

The market is potentially enormous. In a report last year, the Energy Department concluded that the United States could make wind energy the source of one-fifth of its electricity by 2030, up from about 2 percent today. That would require nearly $500 billion in new construction and add more than three million jobs, the report said. Much of the growth would be around the Great Lakes, the hardest-hit region in a country that has lost four million manufacturing jobs over the last decade.

Throw in solar energy along with generating power from crops, and the continued embrace of renewable energy would create as many as five million jobs by 2030, asserts Daniel M. Kammen, director of the Renewable and Appropriate Energy Laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley, and an adviser to the presidential campaign of Senator Barack Obama.

The unfolding financial crisis seems likely to slow the pace of development, making investment harder to secure. But renewable energy has already gathered what analysts say is unstoppable momentum. In Texas, the oil baron T. Boone Pickens is developing what would be the largest wind farm in the world. Most states now require that a significant percentage of electricity be generated from wind, solar and biofuels, effectively giving the market a government mandate.

And many analysts expect the United States to eventually embrace some form of new regulatory system aimed at curbing global warming that would force coal-fired electricity plants to pay for the pollution they emit. That could make wind, solar and other alternative fuels competitive in terms of the cost of producing electricity.

Both presidential candidates have made expanding renewable energy a policy priority. Senator Obama, the Democratic nominee, has outlined plans to spend $150 billion over the next decade to spur private companies to invest. Senator John McCain, the Republican nominee, has spoken more generally of the need for investment.

In June, more than 12,000 people and 770 exhibitors jammed a convention center in Houston for the annual American Wind Energy Association trade show. “Five years ago, we were all walking around in Birkenstocks,” says John M. Brown, managing director of a turbine manufacturer, Entegrity Wind Systems of Boulder, Colo., which had a booth on the show floor. “Now it’s all suits. You go to a seminar, and it’s getting taught by lawyers and bankers.”

So it goes in Iowa. Perched on the edge of the Great Plains — the so-called Saudi Arabia of wind — the state has rapidly become a leading manufacturing center for wind power equipment.

“We are blessed with certainly some of the best wind in the world,” says Chet Culver, Iowa’s governor.

MAYTAG was born in Newton more than a century ago. Even after the company swelled into a global enterprise, its headquarters remained here, in the center of the state, 35 miles east of Des Moines.

“Newton was an island,” says Ted Johnson, the president of local chapter of the United Automobile Workers, which represented the Maytaggers. “We saw autos go through hard times, other industries. But we still had meat on our barbecues.”

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Furu Mienis studied the development of carbonate mounds dominated by cold-water corals in the Atlantic Ocean at depths of six hundred to a thousand metres. These reefs can be found along the eastern continental slope from Morocco to Norway, on the Mid-Atlantic Ridge and on the western continental slope along the east coast of Canada and the United States. Mienis studied the area to the west of Ireland along the edges of the Rockall Trough.

In her research Mienis analysed environmental factors like temperature, current speed and flow direction of seawater as these determine the growth of cold-water corals and the carbonate mounds. The measurements were made using bottom landers, observatories placed on the seabed from the NIOZ oceanographic research vessel ‘Pelagia’ and brought back to the surface a year later.

Food highways down to the deep

Cold-water corals are mainly found on the tops of carbonate mounds in areas where the current is high due to strong internal waves. These waves are caused by tidal currents and lead to an increase in local turbulence that results in the seawater being strongly mixed in a vertical direction. The outcome is the creation of a kind of highway between the nutrient-rich, sunlit zone at the sea surface and the deep, dark strata where the 380 metre-high tops of the mounds are found. This allows the cold-water corals to feed on algae and zooplankton that live in the upper layers of the sea. Lophelia pertusa and Madrepora oculata are the most important coral species found on the European continental slopes.

Carbonate mounds

How the carbonate mounds were formed was investigated by using a piston core from the research vessel to take samples of up 4.5 metres of sediment. These cores were then cut into thin slices that were analysed separately; the deeper the layer, the older the sediment. The samples studied were aged up to 200,000 years old. Large hiatuses found in the core were possibly caused by major changes in tidal currents.

The groups of carbonate mounds develop in the direction of the strongest current and their tops are of equal height. The mounds were found to be built up from carbonate debris and sediment particles caught in between coral branches. These cold-water coral reefs have, therefore, not developed as a result of leakage of natural gas from the sea bed. However, that may well be the case in the Gulf of Mexico. This area is currently being studied from the American research vessel ‘Nancy Foster’ by Furu Mienis, her supervisor Tjeerd van Weering and NIOZ associate researcher Gerard Duineveld.

Threats

Climate change has exerted a considerable influence on the growth of corals and the development of carbonate mounds. For example, corals stopped growing during ice ages. Present-day global warming and the resulting acidification of the oceans also pose a threat: organisms are less effective at taking up carbonate from seawater that is too acidic. This is true not only for corals but also for some species of algae that are a source of food for the corals. Other activities on the seabed that can cause damage to the coral reefs are offshore industries and bottom trawlers. A number of European areas containing cold-water coral reefs have thankfully already obtained protected status.

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To Save the planet we have approximately 2,580 days or 97 months. Climate experts argue that it is precisely then will be the critical threshold, and it will be impossible to stop the temperature that it will not exceed 2 degrees Celsius. 
Meeting begins tomorrow in Brussels on climate change issues. Hardly the first time participants understand that the power and the other clock, not only to the hook on the office wall. It does not count minutes before the Apocalypse, but recalls that all we do from now on, is extremely important. 

Or climate change will beat us, or we have it. Climate change will force us to change, but change and the unknown is always afraid of, though we have the necessary knowledge, tools and technologies that change the sušvelnintume and veiktume responsibly. 

The right to speak - for each 

By 2012 the Kyoto Protocol in force. In 2009 in Copenhagen the international community must take a decision on a new agreement. Therefore, conference and called the “Road to Copenhagen.” In December, the UN debate was held in Bali, and this year is December 1-10 days of negotiators will meet in Poznan (Poland). 

Politicians alone will not solve the problems of climate change. Change will come of all the planet’s inhabitants daily decisions, clear requirements for businesses and politicians. This process will address all, without exception, so each worth concern. Political, business elites and experts should not be the only participants in this debate. 

UN debate on climate change are generally considered more technological and economic factors, less - human or social aspects. It is the latter raise the Brussels Commission, which will be served in Poznan susirinksiantiems UN negotiators. 

Only people can stop 

Why is the human aspect of us seem so important? In 1820 the United Kingdom was the world’s richest country. The average income of its population was 3 times higher than in the poorest regions of the world - in sub-Saharan African countries. Now the world’s richest countries - the United States of America, where the resident receives an average of almost 20 times more than the above-mentioned African countries. Until 2050, the world’s population still 2.6 billion. - The majority of them live in the world’s poorest countries, where the economy essentially no growth, unstable political situation and that of climate change will suffer the most. It is obvious that climate change do not merit the problems of poverty and the proportion encountering any responsibility for the impact on climate. 

Technology of itself not been poverty, not human rights, might be hindered by climate change, and does not create a harmonious society. This can only make the people. Responsibility for the climate impact of proportionality - a key initiative “Road to Copenhagen” question.

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Main idea is that I am back and I will place there many posts about Global warming issues from tomorow. So check back daily !!!

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Among the many bills Congress is considering before it recesses for the November elections is a proposed land swap between the State of Alaska and the federal government that would allow a gravel road to be built through a remote national wildlife refuge.

Environmental groups are lined up against the proposal, saying a road would threaten the pristine wilderness area. Building it would require cutting an approximately 200-acre strip through the Izembek National Wildlife Refuge on the Alaska Peninsula, a resting place for hundreds of thousands of migratory birds and other animals.

Alaska officials, led by Senator Lisa Murkowski, a Republican, say the road is needed to connect one tiny outpost, King Cove, to another, Cold Bay, so that the 800 residents of King Cove have reliable access, particularly in emergencies, to the all-weather airport across the water in Cold Bay.

The issue before Congress is whether to allow Alaska to swap about 43,000 acres of state land for the 200 or so acres in the Izembek refuge needed for the road, which would be a single lane and, though the exact route has not been determined, would require an estimated 17 miles of construction, at $1 million to $2 million per mile.

Though the proposed land swap has been a source of debate for years, some opponents are drawing new attention to it as an example of Congressional excess. They have compared it to the controversial Bridge to Nowhere in Ketchikan, Alaska, which was ultimately abandoned but has proved a thorn for the governor, Sarah Palin, in her campaign as the Republican nominee for vice president. Ms. Palin supports the land exchange and the proposed road through Izembek.

A road “is going to fragment and irreparably harm one of the most pristine and valuable wilderness and wetland areas in the Northern Hemisphere,” said Nicole Whittington-Evans, the associate director of the Wilderness Society’s Alaska office.

But supporters of the project say opponents are misrepresenting it. They point out that the basics of the proposed land swap have not been significantly altered since well before Ms. Palin took office, in December 2006. Furthermore, while the measure before Congress would give the Department of the Interior the authority to approve the project, no money would be set aside under the current bill and several caveats could delay or stop the project outright.

“There is no earmark request here,” said Ms. Murkowski, the bill’s sponsor in the Senate (Representative Don Young, a Republican and the state’s lone Congressional representative, sponsored it in the House). “There is none pending. There hasn’t been any that was asked for.”

Ms. Murkowski said Democrats had demanded significant changes, including measures to require more environmental study and to give the interior secretary discretion to determine whether the project was in the “public interest.”

Opponents, however, say the bill as they interpret it essentially directs the secretary to find that the proposal is in the public interest. If that were to happen, the road could be financed by the state using money from the federal Highway Trust Fund, instead of an earmark, according to state transportation officials and Ms. Murkowski’s office. The road is not currently in the state transportation financing plan.

Versions of the bill have cleared key committees in the House and Senate and await floor votes. However, given the economic bailout plans Congress is considering, the prospect of a measure passing this year “looks grim,” said Bill Wicker, a spokesman for the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources.

If the road is not approved this year, it will not be the first time. In 1998, the Clinton administration opposed the road, being pushed by the Alaska delegation, and instead brokered a $37 million deal to provide a hovercraft across Cold Bay to improve transportation for medical evacuations; the plan also upgraded a medical center in King Cove. But the hovercraft just started operating last year, and residents say weather and high costs make its use unpredictable. The local government also says it costs about $100,000 a month to operate. Opponents of the road, however, say it, too, may be unusable in foul weather and they note that the hovercraft has conducted medical evacuations since it came into use. Residents say the road is a matter of public and economic health.

“They say those people over there will be killing all the ducks and ruining the environment and decimating the country,” said Mayor Stanley Mack of the Aleutians East Borough, much of whose population is Native Aleut and Yupik. “Where do you get off saying that? We’ve been out here for 4,000 years, protecting the country.”

The Izembek National Wildlife Refuge has long been overshadowed by its northern cousin, the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, and the fight over building the gravel road has lacked the political tension of the fight over drilling for oil. But environmental groups have also long felt that building a road, on an isthmus between two wildlife-rich lagoons in the refuge, would threaten the welfare of a dwindling caribou herd and hundreds of thousands of migratory birds, including Pacific black brant and the threatened Steller’s eider.

The 43,000 acres of state land, plus 18,000 more that a local village corporation run by Alaska Natives has offered as part of the swap, cannot compensate, they say. “We’re talking about quality versus quantity,” Ms. Whittington-Evans said of the Wilderness Society.

Critics also note that the designated landing area for the hovercraft in King Cove was placed more than 15 miles away from town, and that the road there follows a course that could easily be extended to Cold Bay.

One local official confirmed that the hovercraft access road had been intentionally built with the goal of one day extending it through the refuge.

“Yes, this community isn’t backing down from building this road,” said the official, Robert S. Juettner, the administrator for the Aleutians East Borough. “And one day it will succeed.”

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The eight-year-old, multibillion-dollar effort to rescue the Everglades has failed to halt the wetlands’ decline because of bureaucratic delays, a lack of financing from Congress and overdevelopment, according to a new report.

The 287-page study by the National Research Council, a biennial review required by Congress, warned that South Florida’s stunning river of grass was quickly reaching a point of no return. Without “near term progress,” the report said, more species will die off “and the Everglades ecosystem may experience irreversible losses to its character and functioning.”

William L. Graf, chairman of the committee that wrote the report, put it more simply. “There is no other place like this,” Mr. Graf said. “It’s existed for 5,000 years this way, and we’re in danger of losing it for our kids and their kids.”

The harsh review of the federal effort, known as the Comprehensive Everglades Restoration Plan, or CERP, comes in the midst of what could be a major shake-up. Florida is negotiating a proposed $1.75 billion purchase of nearly 300 square miles of farmland from the United States Sugar Corporation to add storage space for millions of gallons of water south of Lake Okeechobee.

The plan, which is expected to be finalized by the end of the year, was praised by the National Research Council. But with the acquisition’s impact at least a decade away, the report’s authors concluded that it would not be a panacea.

“The bottom line,” said Mr. Graf, a professor of geology at the University of South Carolina, “is I don’t think we can wait and see what happens.”

He emphasized that there were larger problems that needed to be fixed. Money remains the most obvious. The restoration plan, finalized in 2000, made the federal government and Florida equal partners, but Congress has failed to match the state’s commitment of more than $2 billion.

Behind the shortfall, the report found, is a planning and appropriations process that requires the Army Corps of Engineers to show the benefits of each project individually, making it difficult to get money for the interconnected plumbing and environmental components of the Everglades effort.

Mr. Graf said progress could be forthcoming because the corps and Congress seemed open to rewriting the rules so projects could be clustered. And an amendment in the stopgap spending measure the House passed last week could, 19 years after Congress approved it, create a $225 million, one-mile bridge on the Tamiami Trail to let water flow south toward Florida Bay, alleviating a significant clog.

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