 | « on: Today at 08:04:20 PM » |  Quote |
part 1
The World Tomorrow 1988 - "Inside the New Europe" AKA New World Order!! 1 of 3
part 2
The World Tomorrow 1988 - "INSIDE THE NEW EUROPE" /NEW WORLD ORDER 2 of 3
part3
The World Tomorrow 1988 - "INSIDE THE NEW EUROPE" /NEW WORLD ORDER 3 of 3
The World Tomorrow 1988 - "Inside the New Europe" AKA New World Order!! 1 of 3
part 2
The World Tomorrow 1988 - "INSIDE THE NEW EUROPE" /NEW WORLD ORDER 2 of 3
part3
The World Tomorrow 1988 - "INSIDE THE NEW EUROPE" /NEW WORLD ORDER 3 of 3
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| « on: Today at 09:23:58 AM » | Quote |
http://www.cnn.com/2009/TECH/space/12/14/wise.spacecraft.launch/index.html
(CNN) -- NASA launched a new telescope into space on Monday to scan the cosmos for undiscovered objects, including asteroids and comets that might threaten Earth.
The Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, or WISE, spacecraft will employ an infrared camera to detect light- and heat-emitting objects that other orbiting telescopes, such as the Hubble, might miss.
WISE launched Monday at 9:09 a.m. ET aboard a Delta II rocket from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California. The launch was postponed from Friday because of a problem with the motion of a booster steering engine.
The unmanned WISE will spend the next nine months in orbit, 326 miles above the Earth, mapping the universe in infrared light. Its lens eventually will cover the whole sky 1½ times, snapping a picture every 11 seconds.
"The last time we mapped the whole sky at these particular infrared wavelengths was 26 years ago," said Edward "Ned" Wright of UCLA, the principal investigator of the mission. He was referring to WISE's predecessor, the Infrared Astronomical Satellite, which launched in 1983 and discovered six comets.
Infrared technology has come a long way since then," Wright said. "The old all-sky infrared pictures were like impressionist paintings -- now, we'll have images that look like actual photographs."
Watch video of the launch
The solar-powered WISE will not be the first infrared telescope in space. Two others -- NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope and the European Space Agency's Herschel Space Observatory -- also catalog images of the universe, although both focus on specific celestial objects instead of surveying the entire sky.
Mission leaders expect WISE to find hundreds of asteroids and comets with orbits that come close to crossing Earth's path. By measuring the objects' infrared light, the telescope also should help determine their size and composition -- data that may help astronomers learn how often Earth can expect to be struck by a hurtling asteroid.
"We can help protect our Earth by learning more about the diversity of potentially hazardous asteroids and comets," said Amy Mainzer, deputy project scientist for the $320 million mission at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.
WISE also will be looking for dim stars called brown dwarfs and millions of far-away galaxies that are shrouded in dust and often can't be seen in visible light.
Watch a video about the mission
Data taken by WISE will be downloaded by radio transmission four times per day to computers on Earth, which will combine the many overlapping images into an atlas covering the entire celestial sphere -- complete with a list of all the detected objects.
The rocket is expected to cross the California coastline shortly after liftoff and head south, out over the Pacific Ocean. About five minutes later, the "fairing" covering the telescope was expected to split open like a clamshell and fall away.
At about 55 minutes after launch, the spacecraft is expected to reach its final orbit and separate from the rocket. Engineers expected to pick up a signal from WISE anywhere from about one to 10 minutes after separation.
| « on: Today at 07:01:49 PM » | Quote |
Gore: Melting glaciers may deprive over 1 billion of fresh water
http://rawstory.com/2009/12/gore-melting-glaciers-deprive-1-billion-fresh-water/
By Agence France-Presse
Monday, December 14th, 2009 -- 6:41 pm
Climate guru Al Gore warned UN climate talks Monday that the record melting of glaciers worldwide could deprive more than a billion people of access to fresh water.
"There are more than a billion people on the planet who get more than half of their drinking water -- many of them all of their drinking water -- from the seasonal melting of snow melt and glacier ice," Gore said at the release of a report he co-sponsored.
A triple threat from crumbling ice sheets, disappearing glaciers and the shrinking Arctic ice cap are feeding global warming and will fuel rising sea levels, the report found.
Adding to an avalanche of bad scientific news over the last two years, the former US vice president also cited new research showing that the Arctic ice cap may have shrunk to record-low levels last year.
"2008 had a smaller minimum, probably, than 2007," Gore said, alluding to work led by California-based researcher Wieslaw Maslowski.
"Some of the models suggest to Dr. Maslowski that there is a 75 percent chance that the entire polar ice cap during some summer months could be completely ice free within five to seven years," Gore said.
Scientists reported in September that the Arctic ice cover -- which helps beat back the Sun's heat-delivering rays back into space -- had reversed course compared to 2007, when it had shrunk to its smallest size since the start of accurate measurements some four decades ago.
But when measured by volume, it turns out that the 4.5 million sq km (1.7 million sq miles) area in 2008 was actually smaller than the year before.
The Arctic ice cover does not affect sea levels, but is a critically important barrier to global warming.
Intact, its white surface acts as a mirror, but when the ice disappears it becomes a sponge.
"Instead of 85 percent of the solar energy being reflected, 85 is absorbed in the Arctic Ocean," said Gore who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007 for his work on warning of the threat posed by climate change.
One of the report's authors Robert Corell of the H. John Heinz III Center for Science, Economics and the Environment in Washington pointed to another threat: the massive, accelerating loss of mass -- measured in hundreds of billions of tonnes per year -- from icesheets in Greenland and Antarctica.
Combined with the expansion of ocean water due to global warming, the continent-sized icesheets are now set to contribute to a global sea level rise of about a metre by the end of the century, double the mid-point prediction of the UN's benchmark science report in 2007.
"A one meter rise equals 100 million people who will have to move, one hundred million environmental refugees," said Corell.
"We have woken giants," said Arctic ice specialist Dorothe Dahl-Jensen at Copenhagen University of the ice sheets.
"This is really scary. This really shakes us scientists. These icesheets are enormous," she said in presenting a second report on Greenland from the Arctic Monitoring and Assessment Programme.
Greenland's ice block holds enough frozen water to lift seas seven metres, while West Antarctica could add another five metres to the global water mark.
Dahl-Jensen said the pace at which some glaciers on the west coast of Greenland were "calving", or falling into the sea, has sped up dramatically over the last decade.
"This is by far the fastest flowing ice we have ever dreamed of. This is a rate of loss that we have never seen before," she said.
Both scientists pointed out that all of these impacts had been unleashed by a less than 1.0 degree Celsius (1.8 degree Fahrenheit) increase of global temperatures since pre-industrial times.
"Current proposals from individual countries for their own actions would lead to a temperature increase of approximately 3.8 C (6.8 F)", by the end of the century, Corell said.
http://rawstory.com/2009/12/gore-melting-glaciers-deprive-1-billion-fresh-water/
By Agence France-Presse
Monday, December 14th, 2009 -- 6:41 pm
Climate guru Al Gore warned UN climate talks Monday that the record melting of glaciers worldwide could deprive more than a billion people of access to fresh water.
"There are more than a billion people on the planet who get more than half of their drinking water -- many of them all of their drinking water -- from the seasonal melting of snow melt and glacier ice," Gore said at the release of a report he co-sponsored.
A triple threat from crumbling ice sheets, disappearing glaciers and the shrinking Arctic ice cap are feeding global warming and will fuel rising sea levels, the report found.
Adding to an avalanche of bad scientific news over the last two years, the former US vice president also cited new research showing that the Arctic ice cap may have shrunk to record-low levels last year.
"2008 had a smaller minimum, probably, than 2007," Gore said, alluding to work led by California-based researcher Wieslaw Maslowski.
"Some of the models suggest to Dr. Maslowski that there is a 75 percent chance that the entire polar ice cap during some summer months could be completely ice free within five to seven years," Gore said.
Scientists reported in September that the Arctic ice cover -- which helps beat back the Sun's heat-delivering rays back into space -- had reversed course compared to 2007, when it had shrunk to its smallest size since the start of accurate measurements some four decades ago.
But when measured by volume, it turns out that the 4.5 million sq km (1.7 million sq miles) area in 2008 was actually smaller than the year before.
The Arctic ice cover does not affect sea levels, but is a critically important barrier to global warming.
Intact, its white surface acts as a mirror, but when the ice disappears it becomes a sponge.
"Instead of 85 percent of the solar energy being reflected, 85 is absorbed in the Arctic Ocean," said Gore who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007 for his work on warning of the threat posed by climate change.
One of the report's authors Robert Corell of the H. John Heinz III Center for Science, Economics and the Environment in Washington pointed to another threat: the massive, accelerating loss of mass -- measured in hundreds of billions of tonnes per year -- from icesheets in Greenland and Antarctica.
Combined with the expansion of ocean water due to global warming, the continent-sized icesheets are now set to contribute to a global sea level rise of about a metre by the end of the century, double the mid-point prediction of the UN's benchmark science report in 2007.
"A one meter rise equals 100 million people who will have to move, one hundred million environmental refugees," said Corell.
"We have woken giants," said Arctic ice specialist Dorothe Dahl-Jensen at Copenhagen University of the ice sheets.
"This is really scary. This really shakes us scientists. These icesheets are enormous," she said in presenting a second report on Greenland from the Arctic Monitoring and Assessment Programme.
Greenland's ice block holds enough frozen water to lift seas seven metres, while West Antarctica could add another five metres to the global water mark.
Dahl-Jensen said the pace at which some glaciers on the west coast of Greenland were "calving", or falling into the sea, has sped up dramatically over the last decade.
"This is by far the fastest flowing ice we have ever dreamed of. This is a rate of loss that we have never seen before," she said.
Both scientists pointed out that all of these impacts had been unleashed by a less than 1.0 degree Celsius (1.8 degree Fahrenheit) increase of global temperatures since pre-industrial times.
"Current proposals from individual countries for their own actions would lead to a temperature increase of approximately 3.8 C (6.8 F)", by the end of the century, Corell said.
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