Lake Erie's future?

John Mangels, reporting for the Cleveland Plain Dealer:

The record-shattering glut of toxic algae that fouled much of Lake Erie in 2011 wasn’t a fluke, but a sign of what’s likely ahead for the troubled lake, researchers say.

A combination of weather extremes and long-standing farming practices that unwittingly aid algae growth spawned the 2011 mega-bloom, a team of Midwest scientists who spent months examining the phenomenon reported Monday.

Algae Blooms Threaten Lake Erie

Michael Wines, reporting for the New York Times:

The algae are fed by phosphorus, the same chemical that American and Canadian authorities spent billions to reduce — for good, they believed — in the 1970s and ‘80s. This time, new farming techniques, climate change and even a change in Lake Erie’s ecosystem make phosphorus pollution more intractable.

Study: Nuke Power Has Saved Millions of Lives. Media Yawns.

Keith Kloor:

How does mainstream media not jump all over the news that nuclear power has apparently saved millions of lives? Then there’s the climate change angle, the massive amount of carbon emissions that seems to have been prevented. This strikes me as big!

He’s got a point.

Nuclear power may have saved nearly 2 million lives

Ashutosh Jogalekar, writing at The Curious Wavefunction:

A new paper from NASA’s Goddard Institute authored by Pushker Kharecha and James Hansen in the journal Environmental Science and Technology purports to do just that. Hansen is well known as one of the founders of modern global warming science. The authors come up with the striking figure of 1.8 million as the number of lives saved by replacing fossil fuel sources with nuclear. They also estimate the saving of up to 7 million lives in the next four decades, along with substantial reductions in carbon emissions, were nuclear power to replace fossil fuel usage on a large scale. 

Why did 28,000 rivers in China suddenly disappear?

Amar Toor, writing for The Verge:

“Our research has shown that in some areas, especially in north China, rivers are drying up or turning into seasonal rivers,” Ma said in a phone interview with The Verge. There are several explanations for this phenomenon, including deforestation and, to a less certain extent, climate change, though Ma says the two primary catalysts are pollution and overpopulation.

L.A. synchronizes its stoplights

Ian Lovett, reporting for the New York Times:

Other cities have chased to keep up, adopting centralized control of at least some traffic signals. But Los Angeles has remained at the forefront, with a system that is not only more widespread, but also faster and more autonomous than most others.

Now, the magnetic sensors in the road at every intersection send real-time updates about the traffic flow through fiber-optic cables to a bunker beneath downtown Los Angeles, where Edward Yu runs the network. The computer system, which runs software the city itself developed, analyzes the data and automatically makes second-by-second adjustments, adapting to changing conditions and using a trove of past data to predict where traffic could snarl, all without human involvement.

No mention of whether they’re prepared to integrate autonomous vehicles into the system.

Correlation, Speculation and the Periodicity of Environmental Journalism

Thomas Hayden, writing for The Last Word on Nothing:

So if it’s not sun spots, and it’s not just an inherent societal attention span, what else could be driving the ups and downs of environmental reporting, at mainstream outlets at least? I think it comes back to the faddishness of journalism. The news business is by definition about the pursuit of novelty. Sure, conflict, personal impact, horrifying disasters and political battles are nice too. But at the end of the day the great majority of reporters, editors, producers and managers in the media are fiends for the new.

Keen insight. Sadly, he’s probably right.

"Endling"

Wikipedia:

An endling is an individual animal that is the last of its species or subspecies. Once the endling dies, the species becomes extinct.

(Via Lucas Brouwers.)

A Slice of London So Exclusive Even the Owners Are Visitors

Sarah Lyall, reporting for the New York Times:

Along Elizabeth Street, home to a Poilâne bakery outlet and tony boutiques, foot traffic the other day was very slow. A Belgravia resident from Colombia, who was shopping at a pet store where dog beds go for $358 and cat blankets for $289, said that there were two English people along her street, and that it was hard to tell whether many of her neighbors were there or not there.

$230 billion

That was the cost in 2010 of China’s environmental degradation, according to the Chinese Academy of Environmental Planning. Put another way, it’s 3.5 percent of GDP. This being an “official” number from the Chinese government, I’m guessing it’s a low-ball estimate.

Mystery (maybe) solved

John Noble Wilford, reporting for the New York Times:

The reddish barren spots, thousands of them, are called fairy circles, the name itself an invitation to try to solve the mystery of their origins. They dot a narrow belt of desert stretching from Angola through Namibia into northern South Africa. For no obvious reason, the round patches of sandy soil interrupt the arid grassland, like a spreading blight on the land.

The cause? Sand termites, ecologists think.

Can you tell urban from rural?

If you were given a section of a map, could you tell if was from a city or the countryside? The answer to that question may be trickier than you expect. I pondered this a year and a half ago when I wrote, “ ‘countryside’ is inherently interpretable term, one that depends more on how the land is used than it does on population density.”

It first struck me when I was traveling around Taiwan. There, the distinction between the rural and urban areas wasn’t always apparent to my Western eyes. The same can be true with maps. Distinguishing between urban and rural depends as much on geographic and cultural contexts as it does on visual cues like road networks.

Can you tell which is which?

The following maps are road networks from a variety of locations around the globe. Guess which are cities and which are rural areas. All maps are drawn to the same scale.

1. 1. Urban or rural?

2. 2. Urban or rural?

3. 3. Urban or rural?

4.

5.

6.

7.

From top to bottom: 1. city (Denver) 2. countryside (Japan) 3. city (New York City) 4. city (Houston) 5. countryside (Taiwan) 6. city (Los Angeles) 7. countryside (Wisconsin)

Related posts:

What do we mean by “rural”?

Income inequality, as seen from space

If the world’s population lived like…

The Suburban Idea

Graeme Davidson:

For more than 150 years, Australia was itself a mental suburb of England, taking many of its ideas ready-made from the world’s metropolis, London.

Clever. Suburbanism isn’t necessarily based on location, but a state of mind. I couldn’t agree more. Having grown up near a big city, people often referred to my town as a suburb. It may be one now, but when I was growing up, it didn’t feel suburban. It was very much an independent community.

(Via Samuel Arbesman.)

What Shall We Conserve?

Hillary Rosner, writing for Ensia:

For years, conservation has centered on species: the gray wolf, the spotted owl, the Devils Hole pupfish. We go about protecting ecosystems by first protecting the singular species that live there. So what happens when that “singular” species turns out to be two or six or 10 genetically distinct types of organisms, each with its own singular role in the environment?

What Will Human Cultures Be Like in 100 Years?

Annalee Newitz, writing for io9:

You hear a lot about “next gen” science and technology, but not so much about will happen to human societies and cultures in the future. To fill the gap, we asked three futurists and one science fiction writer what social changes we should expect to see in the next century.

Perhaps the most intriguing is how “community” could come to resemble something more similar to internet forums than geographic locales.

From really bad to pretty bad

The American Society of Civil Engineers grades the state of America’s infrastructure every year. Good news: We rated a D+ this year, up from a D last year. Hooray?