Geeko friendly's List: geography

• This, if confirmed, is really, really, really bad news:
• The first evidence that millions of tons of a greenhouse gas 20 times more potent than carbon dioxide is being released into the atmosphere from beneath the Arctic seabed has been discovered by scientists.
• In the past few days, the researchers have seen areas of sea foaming with gas bubbling up through "methane chimneys" rising from the sea floor. They believe that the sub-sea layer of permafrost, which has acted like a "lid" to prevent the gas from escaping, has melted away to allow methane to rise from underground deposits formed before the last ice age.
• Methane is about 20 times more powerful as a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide and many scientists fear that its release could accelerate global warming in a giant positive feedback where more atmospheric methane causes higher temperatures, leading to further permafrost melting and the release of yet more methane.
• Some have already begun calling for a program of massive geoengineering to stave off the triggering of runaway climate change as this methane starts hitting the atmosphere.

  • wtf is geoengineering??
• Our first priority as a civilization ought not to be huge interventions in systems we only barely understand, but a planetary commitment to Zero, now.
• The stakes are rising faster and faster. You often hear the line at conferences that on climate change, science is 10 years ahead of business, and business is 5 years ahead of policy and the public debate; I'm increasingly less sure that science and the public debate are even operating in the same space-time continuum anymore.
• Geoengineering, he said, is a forbidden topic among many who are concerned about climate change, because they fear that it will help to legitimize wasteful lifestyles which they would rather see changed.
• This, he said, is analogous to those who don't want to talk about birth control with teenagers, for fear that it will encourage them to have sex.
• To carry the analogy further: if the methane hydrates are indeed going off, then the girl is officially knocked up.
• Carbon sequestration is the *only* thing which might turn that process around

  • wtf is carbon sequestration?
• Nathan, I take your point, but that's a terrible analogy. Leaving aside the weirdness of gendering the climate as a teenage girl, it's not like geoengineering is abortion and will suddenly make that girl un-pregnant. We don't even know that any of the proposed geoengineering ideas would actually work. History suggests that it's far more likely that they would go disastrously wrong.

10 more annotations...

• Aiming to inspire people to think globally about sustainable living, Arthus-Bertrand has been photographing unique views of our planet, seen from the sky, since 1994
• 
• 
• Worker resting on bales of cotton, Thonakaha, Korhogo, Ivory Coast. Cotton crops occupy approximately 335,000 square klilometers worldwide, and use nearly one quarter of all pesticides sold.
• 
• 
• Barrios, Caracas, Venezuela. Caracas has grown enormously in the last 40 years, attracting people from all over South America, filling its narrow valley and climbing up the steep sides of the surrounding hills. These new districts, known as barrios or ranchos are home to more than 50 percent of Caracas's 3.8 million inhabitants
• 

6 more annotations...

• a high-resolution map shows where underground aquifers store vast amounts of water.
• the result of nearly a decade of sometimes difficult talks between neighbouring governments, mediated by UNESCO. The hope is that it will help pave the way to an international law to govern how water is shared around the world.
• Aquifers are underground layers of rocks or sediments from which water can be extracted – normally by drilling boreholes or digging wells. They hold 100 times the volume of freshwater that flows down rivers and streams around the world at any time.

  • explanation of aquifers
• So far, the organisation has identified 273 trans-boundary aquifers: 68 in the Americas, 38 in Africa, 155 in Eastern and Western Europe and 12 in Asia.
• "It highlights the importance of groundwater resources, which is generally misunderstood or ignored completely compared to surface water."
• The increasing reliance on aquifer groundwater – because there is more of it and it tends to be less contaminated by industrial run-off – has been called the "groundwater revolution".

• Where an aquifer lies relative to an international border is one variable, but others that could be considered include: which nation's geography contributes most to the aquifer's recharge, the size of the respective populations, and the amount of water removed to irrigate crops.

                  

  The UNESCO map merely helps define the geographical extent of an aquifer, which could be useful in defining international agreements.
• aquifers fall into two gross categories: those that are recharged by rainfall permeating from the surface and "fossil" aquifers, such as the famous Nubian sandstone aquifer beneath Egypt, Sudan, Chad and Libya. These contain water that can be tens of thousands of years old, relics of a much wetter climate. Crucially, they are not recharged by rainwater, making them finite resources.

6 more annotations...

• Dung is an essential part of Tibetan life and is Tibet’s most common form of biofuel. The 420,000 residents of the Nagqu area burn an estimated two million tonnes of dung per year.
• about one half of the pastures in the area are damaged – 300 million mu (20 million hectares) of land. The burning of dung is believed to be one cause of this.

• Yet there is no way that dung can meet Tibet’s ever-growing demand for energy.

    

  The Tibetan economy has grown rapidly in recent years. Infrastructure such as the Qinghai-Tibet railway and Nyingchi Airport are now up and running; the population has grown from 1.51 million in 1970 to 2.68 million in 2005 and energy shortages are worsening.

• There are fossil fuels under the Tibetan soil – reserves of tens of millions of tonnes of coal have been identified in the Nagqu, Chamdo and Kailash areas. But there are no plans to mine these reserves, due to environmental and other considerations.

    

  Currently Tibet imports hundreds of thousands of tonnes of coal and oil every year to ensure fuel is available for vehicles and other needs. Some of Punsto’s neighbours have bought cars now.

    

  But unlike other areas of China, Tibet does not have coal-fired power stations, and there is a shortage of electricity throughout the region – from Nagqu in the north, Nyingchi in the south-east and even the capital Lhasa.

• Several years back a 10,000 yuan (US$6,000) subsidy from the government allowed Punsto to install a solar panel. It provides enough power for illumination and several hours of television every evening.

    

  Tibet has rich solar resources. In some areas government projects are attempting to replace traditional fuels such as dung and firewood with solar cookers and methane. So what role can solar power play in the provision of electricity?

• 100 Kilowatt solar power station in Yangpachen. According to Corona engineer Lin Wei, this is the first solar power station to be hooked up to the electricity network – providing power for 150 households in Lhasa.

    

  The project area is now the centre for renewable energy efforts in Tibet, and the government plans to build an even larger solar power station here.
• the government has funded solar panels in villages not connected to the power grid

• total generating capacity is no more than 9 megawatts. For the moment at least, the generation of electricity from solar power is unlikely to become widespread.

    

  Solar power must also face the challenges from hydroelectric power.

• As herders’ homes have been connected to the electricity network, some solar panels are even falling into disuse – an awkward fact for a developing new source of energy.

    

  Currently hydroelectricity is the rising star of Tibet’s energy sector. A 25-megawatt geothermal plant in Yangpachen once supplied 40% of Lhasa’s power. But with the construction of projects such as the pumped storage hydropower station at Yang Lake, that figure has dropped to only 10%.

    

  And the construction of those hydroelectric plants is only getting started.

• These two plants are key parts of Tibet’s 11^th Five Year Plan electricity capacity project. Work on the 700 million yuan (US$ 102 million), 40-megawatt Zhokha plant started in June 2006. On September 26of the same year the first generator started operation. The Tiger Mouth project features Tibet’s largest single hydroelectric generator, and on completion the 1.3 billion yuan (US$185 million) plant will produce 100 Mw of power.

    

  Alongside these large and expensive projects, there are also several smaller hydroelectric plants in Tibet. Along the road through Nyingchi’s valley, I even came across a 3-Kilowatt plant providing power for a forestry station with only one occupant.

8 more annotations...

• A global public-private partnership that helps facilitate renewable energy projects around the world
• More than 4.3 million Euros will be available to support these projects.
• REEEP is intensifying its efforts to directly engage governments and financial institutions in its program.  It would like countries with specific policy, legislative or regulatory needs to work directly with the partnership.   Development finance institutions with need for financing structures and business models can also apply.   It is hoped that this will convince the  financial world to invest in these new markets.

1 more annotation...

• First it was mortgage lenders

  

  . Then large banks began to wobble. Now, entire countries, including Ukraine and Pakistan, are facing financial ruin. The International Monetary Fund is there to help, but its pockets are only so deep.
• A country has reached this final stage if, as a result of war or blatant mismanagement, it has gambled away all trust, can no longer service its debt or convince anyone to lend it any money, no matter how high an interest rate it promises to pay.
• In the end, the rating agencies will have no choice but to downgrade the problem countries to their lowest level of creditworthiness. When that happens, lenders will have no choice but to write off much of their money. For citizens, national bankruptcy would probably lead to massive inflation.
• Countries like Russia and Brazil owe their recent success in large part to the boom in commodities the world has experienced in recent years. But now prices for oil, copper, wheat and corn have plunged and a giant spiral of debt has begun to turn. The companies and banks that borrowed vast amounts of money abroad for their investments can no longer service their debt, and investors are pulling out their capital. As foreign currency becomes scarce and imports unaffordable, the currencies of these countries are losing value, which only increases the mountain of debt.
• The demise of these countries, says Jen, represents the new “epicenter of the global crisis.”
• The looming crisis has the countries in most dire need lining up for emergency loans from the International Monetary Fund (IMF). But all they are doing is buying time — a few weeks, or perhaps even months — and hoping that the general situation will soon improve.

• He defied the IMF, which has sought to impose drastic rules on the country. He alienated international creditors by offering to buy back government bonds for only 25 percent of their face value. Since then, Argentina has received almost no new loans in the global financial marketplace.

   

  Nevertheless, the country recovered from the crash with astonishing speed. In recent years, the Argentine economy has grown at impressive rates of 7 to 9 percent.
• This has prompted President Fernandez to discreetly seek rapprochement with the hated IMF and the Club de Paris, a group of lending nations made up of some of the world’s richest countries, in an attempt to reconnect Argentina to the international lending cycle.
• After receiving international credit assurances, neighboring Austria can finally breathe a sigh of relief. Its financial institutions, including Erste Bank, the Raiffeisen savings bank and Austria-Creditanstalt, have a strong presence in Hungary, where they control 22 percent of the banking sector. These days, it is quite possible that a crisis in small countries could end up pulling larger ones into its vortex.
• A vicious circle has already been put in place, now that steel mills are cancelling their coal orders. The coals mines, most of which survive on loans, can no longer pay the utilities, which in turn are shutting off the power supply. Winter is around the corner and Kiev has not yet reached a definitive agreement with Moscow over natural gas prices. Indeed, Moscow could be tempted, once again, to take advantage of the plight of its reviled neighbor.

• But what happens if the IMF runs out of money? The Washington-based financial fire department has already promised to pony up €27 billion ($34.3 billion) for Iceland, Ukraine and Hungary. This is about one-fifth of the funds the IMF currently has available for such packages, and Pakistan is looming.

   

  Should the virus of financial failure continue to spread, the €156 billion currently available to the IMF would soon be exhausted. If that happened, the major industrialized nations would have to inject additional funds and provide the IMF, possibly through loans, with fresh capital for the high-risk countries. Global investors would hardly be interested.
• The entire world is currently spooked by the Argentine ghost. Even if wealthy countries reach out to ailing nations, some governments will not survive the storm. Even this would not be truly dramatic. But if the industrialized nations then decide to leave the threshold countries to their own devices, the ensuing wildfire will burn indefinitely.

10 more annotations...

• World cement usage in 2008 is 2.8 billion tons and is forecast to be 3.5 billion tons in 2012 China is using 1.3 billion tons in 2008 about 45% of the world total.
  
  The cement usage is mainly driven by the fact that China is adding a one to one and half Los Angeles worth of city every year.
  
  1.5%- 2% population migration from rural areas to small and large cities.
  20 million to 30 million people into cities.

• physical evidence, backed by powerful simulations on the world’s most advanced computer climate models, is reshaping that view and lending strong support to the radical idea that human-induced climate change began not 200 years ago, but thousands of years ago with the onset of large-scale agriculture in Asia and extensive deforestation in Europe.

   

  What’s more, according to the same computer simulations, the cumulative effect of thousands of years of human influence on climate is preventing the world from entering a new glacial age, altering a clockwork rhythm of periodic cooling of the planet that extends back more than a million years.
• the introduction of large-scale rice agriculture in Asia, coupled with extensive deforestation in Europe began to alter world climate by pumping significant amounts of greenhouse gases — methane from terraced rice paddies and carbon dioxide from burning forests — into the atmosphere. In turn, a warmer atmosphere heated the oceans making them much less efficient storehouses of carbon dioxide and reinforcing global warming.

• Tole je v Boliviji blizu meje s Cilom - en kup visokogorskih lagun in vrelcev na 4500-5000m.
• 

• 1. Sign Up for a Twitter Account

• 2. Find the Cheapest Dates to Fly

  ITASoftware.com, which provides the technological backbone for many airfare shopping sites, allows users to scan an entire month’s fares for the least expensive rate. (Log in as a “guest” and click on “month-long search.” ) In January, the 28th and 30th were the cheapest dates to fly nonstop to London from New York ($536) for a week’s vacation, according to a recent search. The next best was Saturday, Jan. 23, at $640. To book the ticket, users must go to another site. Kayak.com has a flexible-dates option (registration is required) and a calendar that shows the best fares found by other Kayak users in the last 48 hours. Bing Travel, the Microsoft search engine, offers a similar option, found under “plan trips,” about halfway down the page.

• 5. Track Price Even After Buying

  Airlines have long offered to refund the difference in their fares (minus a change fee) in the form of a voucher to customers who ask. Using your confirmation number, Yapta.com will automatically track the price of your ticket, taking the airline’s fees into consideration, and send you, without charge, an e-mail message or Twitter alert notifying you of the lower price. You can then call the airline to claim the credit.

  Similarly, Travelocity.com promises to refund the difference in price for prepaid hotel reservations if you find the same room for a cheaper rate online before check-in.

• 8. Go Rental

  Tourists in most European cities can easily pay $200 a night for basic hotel rooms. By contrast, an apartment or villa can be rented for as little as $1,100 a week in Paris or Rome. Homeaway.com, Zonder.com and Rentalo.com are just a few of the many rental Web sites available. Some specialize in specific regions like Rentvillas.com for Europe or Wimco.com for the Caribbean.

2 more annotations...

• Fuerteventura isn't great, its ended up like a costa del sol. Lanzarote is much more quiet than the others, with a lot of history and culture to it. Gran canaria is much bigger, much more to do, but has become quite commercialised.
   
   If you can, try to pick a resort on the southwestern sides of whichever island you go to - its sheltered from the famous winds that blow across the sea from northern africa