An article in Friday's Washington Post has an article with the headline USDA Backs Production of Rice With Human Genes. The Agriculture Department has given a preliminary green light for the first commercial production of a food crop engineered to contain human genes, reigniting fears that biomedically potent substances in high-tech plants could escape and …
Category: Environment
Stewart Brand, builder of the world’s slowest computer
There's an interesting story in today's New York Times about a man named Stewart Brand. Brand was the publisher of the original Whole Earth Catalog, and an early leader of the environmental movement. Stewart Brand has become a heretic to environmentalism, a movement he helped found, but he doesn’t plan to be isolated for long. …
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U.S. Hardiness Zones and Climate Change
The National Arbor Day Foundation has released maps with revised "hardiness zones." These zones can be used for determining which plants can be grown in certain parts of the United States. For example, a Norway spruce grows well in zones 3 through 7, but would not grow well in much of the South. These maps …
Sea Level Rising
Sea level is rising! Coastal areas are going to be inundated! Billions of eco-refugees are going to be knocking on your door! Or maybe not. Here's some perspective on sea level rise: The recently-released IPCC Report (Climate Change 2007: The Physical Science Basis Summary for Policymakers) does not portray catastrophic sea level increases. Their projection …
A wild world of a different sort
Back in October, I wrote a post about the idea of introducing large mammals (elephants, camels, lions, and so on) into the high plains of the United States (see Pleistocene mega-fauna -- coming to a drive-thru safari park near you). The idea is to somewhat restore the pre-human ecosystem by bringing in mammals that went …
Wild World
At the middle school and high school level, biology textbooks usually have a section on biomes, which are large regions of the Earth that have distinctive communities of plants and animals. Examples of biomes include desert, tropical rainforest, temperate grasslands, and tundra. These biomes can be subdivided into smaller ecoregions, which have more specific assemblages …
The Doomsday Clock
The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists has moved its famous "Doomsday Clock" to 5 minutes before midnight. This clock has moved forward and backwards depending on this ("liberal") group's perception of how close the world is to nuclear holocaust (timeline). It has been as close to midnight as 2 minutes during the 1950s, when the …
World Population
Here is an interesting World Population animation from a biology class web site at the University of Western Kentucky, which calculates the population of the Earth when you were born.
The Chicago Statement on Biblical Application
The International Council on Biblical Inerrancy also produced a document called The Chicago Statement on Biblical Application. Article XVI of this statement is about the environment: Article XVI: Stewardship of the Environment We affirm that God created the physical environment for His own glory and for the good of His human creatures. We affirm that …
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Population #3 — European Demographics
Being that we live in Romania, here are a few thoughts about European demographics: The population of many Eastern European countries is declining. This is due not only to low birthrates but also to high emigration rates. Many young, educated Romanians, for example, desire to move either to Western Europe or to the United States. …
Population #2
The previous post was about the U.S. population hitting an estimated 300,000,000 this week. Is this a good thing or a bad thing? I read The Population Bomb by Paul Erlich back in the 1970s. Among its predictions: The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s and 1980s hundreds of millions …
300,000,000
The population of the United States is hitting 300,000,000 today (Tuesday). US Census Bureau Population Clock (11:30 AM Tuesday Morning, Eastern European Time Zone) A few observations: The United States is not overpopulated. Even relatively high-density areas, such as the Northeast and southern California have lower population densities than much of Europe and Asia. High …
A Lot of Gas
A commonly expressed argument against human-induced global warming is that A single eruption the size of the Mt. St. Helens eruption released more of these [greenhouse] gases, dust and ash into the atmosphere than all such emissions by human activity since the beginning of recorded human history. And there are numerous volcanic eruptions yearly. I …
Global Warming & Wayne Grudem
Last week, I linked to a Christianity Today article on global warming. I've been thinking about a quote by theologian Wayne Grudem in the CT article: Activities that produce carbon dioxide—such as "breathing, building a fire to cook or keep warm, driving a car or tractor, or burning coal to produce electricity … [are] morally …
Global Bubbling
Scientific American magazine offers some of its articles online for free. Free material from the October issue includes Impact From the Deep, which gives evidence that some mass-extinctions in Earth history were not caused by asteroid impacts but by massive upwellings of hydrogen sulfide (H2S) gas from the oceans. Here's the scenario: High levels of …
More Climate Change
More on climate change: Christianity Today has posted an article on climate change: Cool on Climate Change. The article highlights the Interfaith Stewardship Alliance. The opening paragraphs of the article read: A new coalition argues Christians need not heed warnings that millions will die from human-induced global warming and says we should seek more practical …
Global Warming Report (Part 2)
My friend Glenn Brooke has written further thoughts regarding my post "Global Warming Report." Read it here. Grace and Peace
Global Warming Report
The U.S. National Academy of Sciences has published an article on global temperature change. Here is the abstract: Global surface temperature has increased ~0.2°C per decade in the past 30 years, similar to the warming rate predicted in the 1980s in initial global climate model simulations with transient greenhouse gas changes. Warming is larger in …
Coming to a tight parking spot near you!
How about a car whose length is just a little longer than a Hummer is wide? How about being able to park two cars in a single parallel parking spot, by pulling into the space with the nose of the car against the curb? That's the Smart Car; a somewhat common car on the streets …
Arctic sea ice
According to NASA, Arctic sea ice is melting at an accelerating rate. NASA image. Yellowish areas of the ocean were covered with winter ice a few years ago, but are now open water year-round. Global warming is certainly occuring. Is it human-induced? Is it part of a natural cycle? I don't know, but the questions …
GeoChristian 