Thousands of scientific ocean robots suggest that ocean temperature has not warmed up at all over the past four or five years
Everybody from Al Gore to Arnold Schwarzenegger have preached about the effects of global warming but is the planet actually warming? We know that the global average air temperature near the Earth’s surface rose about 1-2 degrees during the last hundred years but what does that equate to in the grand scheme of the planet? A hundred years is a small fraction in the billions of years the earth has been around. Instead of just measuring the air temperature, scientist have been monitoring the oceans for changes, but what they have found is to the contrary.
This is puzzling in part because here on the surface of the Earth, the years since 2003 have been some of the hottest on record. But Josh Willis at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory says the oceans are what really matter when it comes to global warming.
In fact, 80 percent to 90 percent of global warming involves heating up ocean waters. They hold much more heat than the atmosphere can. So Willis has been studying the ocean with a fleet of robotic instruments called the Argo system. The buoys can dive 3,000 feet down and measure ocean temperature. Since the system was fully deployed in 2003, it has recorded no warming of the global oceans.
So if these ocean robots are actually giving accurate data, then where is all the heat going?
Kevin Trenberth at the National Center for Atmospheric Research says it’s probably going back out into space. The Earth has a number of natural thermostats, including clouds, which can either trap heat and turn up the temperature, or reflect sunlight and help cool the planet.
In actuality, the scientist really can’t explain this missing heat at all. Is it too soon to tell if global warming is real? There is no disputing that what people do effects the environment. China and India build coal-burning plants like they are going out of style. We are too dependent on foreign oil. The list could go on and on, but are you really sold on global warming? Is it possible that we humans have done so much damage in the past 50 years? Or is the current rise in temperatures just a natural blip that has occurred many other times in the history of the Earth, we just weren’t around to notice.
Imagine eating breakfast in Brussels and then dinner in Sydney – all in the same day. If the hypersonic AS concept plane is ever built, you may be able to do just that. Twice as long as the new Airbus A380, the A2 will carry up to 300 passengers, with rates promised to be comparable to a business class ticket. The plane will speed along at 3,900 miles per hour (Mach 5) or five times the speed of sound. That is twice as fast as the Concorde!
Modern air travel is a marvel. It’s also a source of endless delay, annoyance and planet-killing greenhouse gases. A proposed hydrogen-powered hypersonic airliner could change all that. The plane is Reaction Engines’s A2 concept, a Mach-5 (3,400mph) craft for 300 passengers funded in part by the European Union’s Long-Term Advanced Propulsion Concepts and Technologies project (Lapcat). Lapcat wants an airliner that can fly from Brussels to Sydney in less than four hours. If built, the A2 will do just that—without producing a trace of carbon emissions.
Engineers created the A2 with the failures of its doomed supersonic predecessor, the Concorde, very much in mind. Reaction Engines’s technical director, Richard Varvill, and his colleagues believe that the Concorde was phased out because of a couple major limitations. First, it couldn’t fly far enough. “The range was inadequate to do trans-Pacific routes, which is where a lot of the potential market is thought to be for a supersonic transport,” Varvill explains. Second, the Concorde’s engines were efficient only at its Mach-2 cruising speed, which meant that when it was poking along overland at Mach 0.9 to avoid producing sonic booms, it got horrible gas mileage. “The [A2] engine has two modes because we’re very conscious of the Concorde experience,” he says.
But an even greater asset than the A2′s speed is its negligible carbon footprint. It’s hydrogen-powered, so it produces only water vapor and a little bit of nitrous oxide as exhaust. And although a hypersonic jet loaded with liquid hydrogen might sound dangerous, hydrogen fuel is actually no more explosive than normal jet fuel.
Don’t look for the A2 anytime soon. The plane’s maker thinks this concept could become a reality within 25 years.
Forget the fact that we have waited our whole lives for this futuristic flight, the Thunderpack Jet Pack is here and ready for take off. Thunderbolt Aerosystems’ wants to bring the jet pack to the masses. Can you imagine the sky rage trying to get to work!
Get out your steel umbrellas or find the nearest basement – the sky is falling. A disabled spy satellite is reportedly out of control and on a collision course with earth. Yahoo reports that officials anonymously reported the top secret information. It sounds like a wild Hollywood movie script, but it is very real.
The satellite may collide with the earth in late February or early March and authorities have no idea where. The spy satellite is reported to weight about 10 tons and is the size of a bus.
A few key questions to be answered before any real panic sets it:
How much damage would it really cause if it where to land in a populated area?
Could it be destroyed or damaged by a missile?
Based on the size of the earth and population densities what percentage of the earth’s surface actual contains civilization that could be harmed by the satellite? I read here that 10 percent of the earths surface is at least ‘lightly populated’. That number sounds pretty hight though.
You think Seattle has it bad. How about a lightning storm that lasts for 10 hours a day, 160 times a year.
This almost permanent storm occurs over the marshlands where the Catatumbo River feeds into Lake Maracaibo and it is considered the greatest single generator of ozone in the planet, judging from the intensity of the cloud-to-cloud discharge and great frequency. The area sees an estimated 1,176,000 electrical discharges per year, with an intensity of up to 400,000 amperes, and visible up to 400 km away. This is the reason why the storm is also known as the Maracaibo Beacon as light has been used for navigation by ships for ages.
New video from the planet Mars shows another mysterious figure that actually looks like the famous image of Bigfoot. Sasquatch on Mars you say? Hey could be. Leading conspiracy theorists speculate that Bigfoot may have actually been captured by the government and send up with the Mars rover. Ok. I made that crap up, but seriously that does look a lot like that famous Bigfoot picture?
Can’t they just drive the Mars rover over and take another picture? The thought that life might be on Mars or any other planet is pretty big news. Hell, who cares about soul samples, chase that thing down already.
Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo is scheduled to make its debut flight in 2009
Virgin Group founder Sir Richard Branson and Scaled Composites CEO Burt Rutan showed off their new design for SpaceShipTwo. Billed as the worlds firstcommercial suborbital spacecraft, SpaceShipTwo will take travelers to the edge of the universe. Well, not quite the edge of the universe but the edge of outer space. The inaugural flight will contain about 100-200 wealthy travelers who have reserved a $200,000 seat aboard the craft.
SpaceShipTwo has a 42-foot wingspan and a tail height of 15 feet. It’s covered in windows with 18-inch diameters so that Virgin Galactic travelers will be able to have a full view of space and the Earth below them as they experience zero gravity. They’ve paid $200,000 for between four and five minutes of weightlessness, so they’d better have a darned good view.
SpaceShipTwo (in the middle of the picture) will be mounted on its “mother ship,” WhiteKnightTwo. The WhiteKnightTwo aircraft is a high-altitude aircraft that will taxi SpaceShipTwo to the upper atmosphere where it will detach. The process known as an “air launch” is said to be much more “green”per passenger than a typical commercial flight and safer too.
