CO2 Emissions and China

Looks like China may determine the fate of the World relative to global warming. They have been targeted for "dumping" solar panels (I'd like to think they were trying to help the World go solar, but the US Gov thinks otherwise), and now they are recorded as increasing CO2 emissions by 9.3% per year.

At least China's population growth rate is down to a modest 0.5%.

But shouldn't every country be down to 0% growth rate? This is planet Earth!...and I don't think in the foreseeable future we are going to colonize any other planets, large space stations, moons, or whatever.

Sustainable Seafood

Sustainability has become a very popular term, hopefully because it makes so much sense, and because it is very needed in so many ways. Sustainable food production, which includes aquaculture and commercial fishing, in the long run is really the only means of feeding the world in a healthy manner, without degrading our environment. Sustainable energy production is ultimately the only way to meet the world's energy needs, without catastrophically altering the world's climate.

So, should you eat farmed fish? Marc Guenther addresses this complicated question and provides some optimistic insights into what the aquaculture industry is doing to become more sustainable. New to me was the size of the aquaculture industry. "Already, roughly half the world’s supply of fish is farmed."

“Aquaculture’s big,” said Jose Villalon, a fisheries biologist who leads the aquaculture program at the World Wildlife Fund. “It’s the fastest growing food industry in the world. It’s not a trend. It’s here to stay.” He said that aquaculture has been growing about 9% a year for at least a decade, and that fish farming can become one of the most sustainable sources of healthy food.

The Monterey Bay Aquarium  is a leading non-profit working to  promote sustainable seafood through their Seafood Watch program. They offer free pocket seafood guides which clarify which fish species are harvested in a sustainable manner. Monterey Bay also offers an app with their Sea Watch program. One key criteria for sustainability is that the fishing technique does not have a large bycatch, and that it does not seriously harm the marine environment.

Another approach to sustainable seafood which gaining in popularity is voluntary certification. There are two organizations involved in a world-wide effort: the Marine Stewardship Council and the Aquaculture Stewardship Council.

So if you refuse to become a vegan, you can still switch the cattle, dairy, poultry portion of your diet to healthy, sustainable seafood, as I have done.

Aqua Sattellite 10 year Anniversary

From Earth Observatory "Aqua has collected a remarkable 29 million gigabytes of data throughout the last decade. (For perspective, one gigabyte holds the contents of about 10 yards of books on a shelf; 100 gigabytes would hold a floor of books in an academic library)." 
For a 10 year summary.

Satellite information gathering will probably be our best resource to figure out how to save the Earth, IF we indeed are willing and can save the Earth.

Flatulence, Climate and Dinosaurs

Methane released by cattle, and other ruminants accounts for 50 to 100 million tons of greenhouse gas emissions per year, and methane is 23 times more potent than carbon dioxide at warming our planet. This knowledge prompted some British scientists to hypothesize what large herbivorous dinosaurs might have released. Their calculations came up with about 520 million tons of methane per year, a quantity large enough that it could have accounted for the earth's relatively warm temperatures back in the age of dinosaurs 140 million years ago.

This news has been widely publicized, so maybe it is not new to you. What surprised me is that after reading about it from 4 or 5 different sources, I found by far the best and most accurate summary in the Wall Street Journal article, Dinosaur Gas Emissions May Have Warmed Air.