A MAN in the US has been arrested after Amazon’s Alexa called the police while he allegedly beat his girlfriend. He was shouting and threatening his girlfriend with a firearm while house-sitting in the small town of Tijeras when he yelled at her: “Did you call the sheriff?” It was this sentence that an Amazon Alexa smart speaker in the home recognized as a voice command – prompting it to  call emergency services. The New York Post reports that representatives from the Bernalillo County Sheriff Department arrived on scene shortly after the call was placed, taking the woman and her daughter to safety. Deputy Felicia Romero, a spokesperson for the department, said the woman sustained injuries but she was not taken to hospital. But according to the arrest warrant, she feared for her life during the violent attack.

According to the police statement, Barros was upset over a text message the woman had received – he was violently beating his girlfriend before making the accidental voice command. The arrest warrant said: “Barros told her she was not going anywhere and he was going to kill her. “When 911 called her phone, Barros saw the caller ID and threw her to the floor. “Barros then kicked her while on the ground at least 10 times in the face and stomach. “Barros told her he could not believe the cops had been called and he was not going back to prison and that she knew he was a felon. “The victim stated she thought she was going to be killed or shot.”

The couple’s daughter, who was in the house at the time of the attack, was not hurt.

view

Self-cloning super-ticks are sparking worry in some as the insects recently were linked with killing five cows by sucking their blood dry in North Carolina. Asian long horned ticks were first found in the U.S. in 2017. Earlier this year, an article published in the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases noted that the first man was bitten by one of the pests in New York State. Dr. Bobbi S. Pritt, director of the Clinical Parasitology Laboratory in Mayo Clinic, said the finding was “extremely worrisome for several reasons,” she wrote in a commentary for the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases, as reported by Arts Technica. Although ticks are common in the U.S., the Asian long horned species has sparked concern as females can lay eggs and reproduce without mating, as stated by the CDC. An individual animal may have thousands of ticks on it at one time.

Published on July 11th, 2019 | by Steve Hanley

Visualizing A 2º C Increase In Temperature In Major World Cities & Melting Of Thwaites Glacier In Antarctica. 

July 11th, 2019 by Steve Hanley 

A team of researchers at ETH Zurich headed by Jean-Francois Bastin has produced a report that shows how a 2º C rise in temperature would affect cities around the world. “We wanted to know what’s the most conservative estimate of what the climate will be for 520 major cities in 2050,” said Tom Crowther, a researcher at ETH Zürich. “The changes we found are huge,” he says according to a report by National Geographic.

Credit: Copyright Bastin et al., via PLOS.org

What is the purpose of this study? The authors believe people can better visualize and understand the impact of a warming planet if they can compare where they live now to another city they are familiar with. They say it does little good to demonize climate skeptics. It’s better to describe the predicted future in terms that are comprehensible to the audience.

[Note: The materials below and the graphic  shown above are copyright Bastin, et als, and are taken from a study published by PLOS.org. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.]

The gap between the scientific and public understanding of climate change, referred to as the “Consensus Gap”, is largely attributed to failures in climate change communication [which is] Often limited to ad-hoc reporting of extreme weather events or intangible, long-term climate impacts such as changes in average temperature by 2100.

Despite an exhaustive list of risks associated to climate change such as heat stress, air and water quality, food supply, distribution of vectors of diseases, social factors, the intangible nature of reporting on climate change fails to adequately convey the urgency of this issue to a public audience on a consistent basis.

It is hard for most people to envision how an additional 2°C of warming might affect daily life. This ineffective communication of climate change facts, compounded by uncertainty about the extent of expected changes, has left the door open for widespread misinterpretation about the existence of this global phenomenon.

History has repeatedly shown us that data and facts alone do not inspire humans to change their beliefs or act. Increased scientific literacy has no correlation with the acceptance of climate change facts. A growing body of research demonstrates that visualization — the ability to create a mental image of the problem — is the most effective approach for motivating behavior change.

As iconic locations, cities are associated with distinct sets of environmental conditions. As such, shifts in the climate conditions of these urban areas could provide a unique opportunity for people to visualize the impacts of climate change, and to establish effective response strategies to address the effects.

Several studies and press reports have shown that the use of ‘cities geographic shift’ or “city analogues” can help to understand and visualize the effects of climate change. In particular, cities can serve as useful climate analog, enabling people to visualize their own climate future via comparison with other cities that currently experience those climate conditions.

Specifically, we aim to test three questions: (i) What proportion of the world’s major cities of the future most closely resemble their own current climate conditions vs. the climate conditions of other cities in different geographic regions? (ii) What proportion of cities will experience novel climate conditions that are outside the range experiences by cities today? (iii) If cities do shift their climate conditions, is this spatial shift uniform in direction across the planet?

Tom Crowther, one of the study authors, has created an interactive map that allows viewers to mouse over a city to see what other urban area today most closely approximates what that city will be like in 2050.

The study results suggest several things.

“77% of future cities are very likely to experience a climate that is closer to that of another existing city than to its own current climate. In addition, 22% of cities will experience climate conditions that are not currently experienced by any existing major cities.

“As a general trend, we found that all the cities tend to shift towards the sub-tropics, with cities from the Northern hemisphere shifting to warmer conditions, on average ~1000 km south and cities from the tropics shifting to drier conditions. We notably predict that Madrid’s climate in 2050 will resemble Marrakech’s climate today, Stockholm will resemble Budapest, London to Barcelona, Moscow to Sofia, Seattle to San Francisco, Tokyo to Changsha.”

Professor Bastin of ETZ Zurich says, “We want to help people visualize the impact of climate change in their own city, within their lifetime.” It should be noted that the calculations made by the researchers are based on a more or less optimum assessment of where average global temperatures will be by 2050 assuming a 2º C rise in average global temperatures by that date.

Many climate scientists believe up to 4º C is likely with some predicting an increase of as much as 7º C is possible. Using the best case scenario helps to offset the yapping of climate deniers like Andrew Wheeler, head of the EPA, that climate scientists are focusing only on extreme scenarios.

The likely temperature increases are quite similar regardless of which scenario is used, but after 2050 the increase in average temperatures sky rockets if the more aggressive scenario is followed to its logical conclusion according to preeminent climate scientist Michael Mann of Penn State University. That’s why the US government now limits all discussion of future temperatures to 2050 or sooner.

Will Antarctica Be The New Europe?

An aerial view of Thwaites glacier, which shows growth of gaps between the ice and bedrock. Photo credit: NASA/OIB/Jeremy Harbeck/Handout/EPA

Regardless of which climate change model you choose — the best case scenario preferred by the current administration or the worst case scenario that some scientists argue is not extreme enough — a new study by NASA finds the Thwaites Glacier in Antarctica is melting faster than anyone predicted. Never heard of the Thwaites Glacier? Here’s a little perspective, courtesy of The Guardian.

Antarctica has nearly eight times more land-based ice than Greenland and 50 times more than all mountain glaciers combined. The Thwaites glacier alone contains enough ice to increase global sea levels by about 50 centimeters. Sea level rise linked to warming has already been linked with increased coastal flooding and storm surges. 50 centimeters, in case you live in the US and are not familiar with the metric system, is just about 19 inches — enough to endanger many world cities.

It is not possible to estimate the effect of rising sea and air temperatures on Thwaites because the land beneath it is impossible to study accurately as it has always been covered by ice in modern times. Yet studies show that if the entire West Antarctica ice shelf melts, sea levels will rise 16 feet, dooming many coastal cities. While it may take hundreds of years for that to happen, the point, NASA scientists say, is that Antarctica will soon reach a tipping point after which catastrophic melting will proceed no matter how much global carbon emissions are reduced.

Given that the world community has failed to reduce emissions significantly even knowing the emergency confronting it, the prospect of actually doing so in the future is unlikely at best. Another study published recently finds that melting of the Antarctic ice sheet suddenly picked up speed in 2014 for reasons no one knows. Since then, satellite data shows Antarctica lost as much sea ice in four years as the Arctic lost in 34 years.

Sea ice does not contribute directly to sea level changes, but when it melts, the dark water underneath absorbs more heat from the sun, heat that previously was radiated back into the atmosphere by the reflectivity of the ice. Warmer seas lead to more melting which lead to warmer seas. It is this feedback loop effect that many climate deniers do not understand.

The Takeaway

Whether the discussion is about warming cities or rising seas, it is clear that something is going on with the world we live in. Evolutionary theory suggests that land creatures, including humans, evolved from aquatic species. If things continue as they are going, someday humans may need to grow flippers, fins, and gills again as the seas close over the land. Maybe that’s what Rex Tillerson meant when he said we will just adapt to changes in climate. The problem is biological changes require thousands of years to happen. We simply don’t have the luxury of that much time. 
 

Steve Hanley Steve writes about the interface between technology and sustainability from his home in Rhode Island and anywhere else the Singularity may lead him. His motto is, “Life is not measured by how many breaths we take but by the number of moments that take our breath away!” You can follow him on Google + and on Twitter.

The University of Liverpool ocean scientists found an area of the ocean that is reverberating with ‘oscillations of the Earth’s gravity field’ in such a way that they can be ‘heard’ from space.

Despite all of the noise coming from the ocean worldwide, there is a region in the Caribbean Sea where the synchronistic waves are allowing a whistle like effect that is blowing very loudly.

The Caribbean Sea is south-east of the Gulf of Mexico and is part of the Atlantic Ocean. This area has the Caribbean islands, Central America, and South America surrounding it.  The region is a very large area of around 1,063,000 square miles (2,754,000 km2).

By measuring the various pressures and sea level readings from the bottom of the ocean in combination with ocean activity spanning over 50 years and observing satellite measurements of gravity the university was able to discover what they are calling the ‘Rossby Whistle’.

The `Rossby Whistle’

This strange phenomenon, or whistle, is created when a large wave moves slowly across the ocean in a westward direction and interacts with the seafloor.  While normal waves would cancel each other out this wave is able to die out on the west side of the basin and then reappear on the east side.

This strange wave system is named the ‘Rossby wormhole’ and they are able to hold together and oscillate for a sharply-defined period of time.

A-flat Tone

The water moves in and out of the basin in a cycle that takes 120 years. The massive movement of this wave also changes the Earth’s gravity field in such a way that we can measure it from a satellite. The whistling itself is actually a very low octave tone far below what we can normally hear and is playing an A-flat.

“We can compare the ocean activity in the Caribbean Sea to that of a whistle. When you blow into a whistle, the jet of air becomes unstable and excites the resonant sound wave which fits into the whistle cavity. Because the whistle is open, the sound radiates out so you can hear it.” –Professor Chris Hughes, who is an expert of Sea Level Science.

“Similarly, an ocean current flowing through the Caribbean Sea becomes unstable and excites a resonance of a rather strange kind of ocean wave called a ‘Rossby wave’. Because the Caribbean Sea is partly open, this causes an exchange of water with the rest of the ocean which allows us to ‘hear’ the resonance using gravity measurements.”

When you speed up the footage and audio recorded from the ocean it actually makes it high-pitched enough that you can hear what is going on. In the video clip below you can see the measured pressure changes across the region and also hear the tone it produces repeating several times.

Listen to the Whistle Below:

Coastal flooding from this wave

“This phenomenon can vary sea level by as much as 10 cm along the Colombian and Venezuelan coast, so understanding it can help predict the likelihood of coastal flooding.”

As we are able to gather more data about the large-scale cycles of the earth we are more able to predict big weather changes that haven’t happened since before everyone on earth was born.

These seemingly small sea level changes can actually create a great deal of flooding in Colombia. Sometimes it only takes a sea level change of 20 cm in order to create a huge problem for us.

The scientists who studied this phenomenon believe that it may also have an effect on the Northern Atlantic ocean since the Caribbean Current flows in that direction turning into the Gulf Stream. This may be a big core part of the ocean’s climate engine.

Sources-