biosphere

August 13th was Earth Overshoot Day. The correct date, if calculated precisely, would come earlier and earlier each year, the current choice is just an approximation. This year, the year 2015, by sometime around August 13th, humanity had consumed as much of what we require from the lands and seas as our planet can sustainabley provide in an entire year. That is another way of expressing the fact that at current consumption rates, humanity requires 1.6 planet earth's worth of fruits and vegetables, meat, fish, wood and other organic materials. It is a remarkable annual deficit, and if it is…

(the featured image above is of the once aptly named Rio Grande, now referred to by locals as the "Rio Sand") The LA Times has a very chilling piece on New Mexico's not so chilling climate change.  Here are a few quotes to pique your interest: "All of New Mexico is officially in a drought, and three-quarters of it is categorized as severe or exceptional." "The last three years have been the driest and warmest since record-keeping began here in 1895." "With water supplies at the breaking point and no relief in sight, a domino-effect water war has broken out, which might be a harbinger of the…

We have another climate metric to add to W/m^2 (climate forcing), GT/year (CO2 emissions), mm/year (sea level rise) and oC/decade (temperature change) and that would be m/day. Meters per day is for tracking how quickly climatic zones will move as a result of man-made climate change and it is actually an astonishingly high number.  David Appell at Quark Soup uses some rough numbers and comes up with a figure of 8 metres/day over the last 20 years.  He bases this calculation on an article in the Scientific American (sounds like an oxymoron these days!) by Ken Caldiera who looks at the average…

Several years ago, I was at a going away party for Bruno. Bruno was a hard core scientist who was being brought into the Biosphere project down in Arizona to get it straightened out after a long period of bad press. One of the folks at the party was an archaeology graduate student, Ben, who had a very dry sense of humor. As Ben was leaving that evening, he turned to Bruno to wish him well. "Bruno, see you around! And good luck with the terrarium!" .... Sorry, that's my only Biosphere story. Here's a Ted Talk on it: Jane Poynter tells her story of living two years and 20 minutes in…

tags: Biosphere 2, environment, biophilia, green living, Jane Poynter, TEDTalks, streaming video In this video, Jane Poynter tells her story of living two years and 20 minutes in Biosphere 2 -- an experience that provoked her to explore how we might sustain life in the harshest of environments. This is the first TED talk drawn from an independently organized TEDx event, held at the University of Southern California. [15:54] TEDTalks is a daily video podcast of the best talks and performances from the TED Conference, where the world's leading thinkers and doers give the talk of their lives…

Ever get sick of your life here on Earth? What about really getting away from it all; what if you wanted to live in space, orbiting the Earth, away from everyone. (At least for awhile, like a summer home.) What would you need to do it, and what would it consist of? I propose an idea which I'll call a "space house," where I'll go through what I think is the cheapest and easiest way to get all the things you would need to comfortably survive in space for an extended period of time. First off, let's go over all the things a human would need to survive, while still having a good life, in space:…