WASHINGTON - Will 2010 be the warmest year on record? How do the recent U.S. "Snowmageddon" winter storms and record low temperatures in Europe fit into the bigger picture of long-term global warming? NASA has launched a new web page to help people better understand the causes and effects of Earth's changing climate.

The new "A Warming World" page hosts a series of new articles, videos, data visualizations, space-based imagery and interactive visuals that provide unique NASA perspectives on this topic of global importance.

The page includes feature articles that explore the recent Arctic winter weather that has gripped the United States, Europe and Asia, and how El Nino and other longer-term ocean-atmosphere phenomena may affect global temperatures this year and in the future. A new video, "Piecing Together the Temperature Puzzle," illustrates how NASA satellites monitor climate change and help scientists better understand how our complex planet works.

The new web page is available on NASA's Global Climate Change Web site at: http://climate.nasa.gov/warmingworld

For more information about NASA and agency programs, visit: http://www.nasa.gov

Source: NASA

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In the long run we will all be death, right? Maybe not, but what should humankind do in order to survive in the millennia to come? This question is not just something that has religion as its reference point, but actually science.

Human beings have been for quite some time on Earth; we have been around for a little more than a million years, which is a lot, especially if you consider candles on birthday cakes, but if we measure our stay against other things, it really isn't so much: dinosaurs ruled the planet for almost two hundred million years, then they don't even measure up to life's evolution on our planet, which is about twenty times older. We can't compare with the age of the solar system or the universe, so we really amount for very little in the general order of things: Carl Sagan once made a striking comparison, saying that if we could squeeze the history of the universe into one of our years, humankind would have appeared just on the final moments before the end of the last day. So, while our telescopes might seem big as we look out in the cosmos, if we took the inverse perspective, we would only see a very little planet.

From that perspective and once you consider all the factors involved in the very long evolution of life, it is almost a miracle that we still exist. Just consider this: It is estimated that about once every hundred million years, a meteor capable of annihilating the majority of all life forms on the planet strikes its surface, threatening even its structural integrity in geophysical terms. So, with life hanging here for almost 4.000 million years, maths say that we could have been wiped out 400 times, over and over.

If you live in a neighbourhood with a little bit of insecurity, thieves going around, and we have been shot, stabbed and attacked around four hundred times in our life, the thing to do would really be to do something about the problem. Then, since meteors could plausibly have the same effect on our lives - and cool, nifty new cars - than volleys of bullets, the right thing to do about those obnoxious pieces of rock would be to protect ourselves. And if you now live in fear, consider this too: There are threats that we are merely starting to understand now, such as solar flares, supernovae and black holes. None of these are in our immediate space-temporal vicinity, for now, but considering the lapses of time that we are talking about in our new perspective, it is highly probable that humankind will sooner or later confront such problems.

Nikolai Kardashev, a Russian astronomer, created a few decades ago a model to understand the progress of any civilisation in the cosmos based on the use that it makes of its energy. What we know today as the Kardashev scale establishes several criteria to define how available energy is used and thus, what could each civilisation, at each of its own evolutionary stages could eventually control. For example, according to that scale, a type I civilisation would control all the energy available in its own home planet. Thus, events such as typhoons and quakes could be ameliorated or even stalled completely. Such civilisation would be capable of surviving against all planetary catastrophes. According to Sagan, we are now approaching the definition of a type I civilisation: It is expected that we will control all the energy available on Earth in no more than two hundred years. We already have some degree of control over some forms of energy and we can, at least, forecast some catastrophic events such as extreme weather, floods and so on. We still can't accurately predict things like earthquakes, much less control them, but hopefully we will get there too. So, according to this and Sagan's opinion, we would be around a 0,80 in the Kardashev scale.

This means that a type I civilisation would be safe in principle, from all sorts of planetary catastrophes. In order to achieve further levels of survivability, such as leaving a solar system suffering from an incoming black hole or with a failing star, or even repairing their own sun, a civilisation would have to evolve further and the Kardashev scale predicts that too: things like interstellar travel would have to be fairly common among them and we are still a little bit further from there; this does not mean that we should do nothing about it because even the longest trek begins with a single step, and while this might seem a bit like science fiction, we should remember that just a little more than a century ago flying through the atmosphere seemed as unlikely as travelling to Proxima Centauri these days, yet humankind did it. Ultimately, our survival depends on having enough imagination.

Source: Andinia.com

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Our world is in trouble, but it is up to us people to change things; we are expecting that politicians will revert global warming, provide us with new sources of energy and solve all troubles over our heads, but guess what? Human nature doesn't work that way.

There are two kinds of individuals in the world: those that are being led and those who lead, but the dispersion among both groups is not the same and most people, for various reasons, prefer to be led. If leaders are legitimate, like in a democracy, that creates expectations among the many based on the promises that the few, the elected leaders have made. In many cases this only ends in disappointment because it is indeed hard to keep all promises, not all politicians really have the will to do that and the nature of expectations is mostly subjective and thus, very difficult to gauge, let alone, satisfy. In other words, expecting something from others often ends in receiving nothing.

Energy is a problem for all of us; progress requires more energy but for several reasons, any progress we make regarding an increase in efficiency seems to be overshadowed very soon by what is known as the "rebound effect". This means that any improvement is always nullified by an increase of collateral problems coming from other factors in the same equation. For example: If auto - makers begin to produce more efficient cars, the improvements achieved in realms like efficiency and contamination decrease are pretty soon erased by things like an increase of the market. This is often related to the very nature of the improvements themselves: More car efficiency leads to money savings that instead of being invested or saved, become a money mass used for consumption, which increases soon and of course, also includes new cars. If now you have a vehicle that costs you - say - 20 euros an hour, and you get a certain speed, capacity and power for that money, once the same car becomes more 25% efficient, you would have to spend just 15 euros to use the same car.

However, since you now have five euros more to spend, you will likely not think about investing it in some sophisticated way but actually use that money, buying things. And one of the things that people like to buy is a vehicle, cars; so, instead of becoming more efficient with the car you had before, you would likely change it and get a 20-euros-an-hour brand new car, which means a more powerful and luxurious vehicle that drains more natural resources and for the environment makes no difference.

As long as we just expect our politicians to solve such issues we are doomed; as long as we believe in collective, coordinated action, we are doomed too because with those initiatives it is simply not enough. The basis of any society is the family, not the parliament or congress, not an environmentally minded NGO. For anything to take hold in society it is indispensable that it becomes a habit at the family level, for good or bad. Just take religion as an example of the importance of family values: It is not a great cathedral, synagogue, mosque or temple what defines religion, but what families do with their prayers. Visiting the Vatican or Mecca, while interesting and important for the faithful in their respective religions, is not definitive. It doesn't produce good Christians or Muslims. What does is what kids learn at their homes from their parents; that produces habits and leads them into whatever religious temple they prefer.

So, in the same way, it is not the price of crude oil itself or what the financial markets want what defines what really happens with the environment. It is not just the big fish but the little ones who decide because big fish in this realm without the agreement of little ones can do nothing. It is the citizen, the consumer that agrees to, tolerates or wants certain forms of energy, and it is up to the individuals that are responsibly for each family - that means you and your spouse too - to do something proactively to change things.

Source: Andinia.com

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