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Google Inc. on Monday launched a new version of Google Earth that allows users to explore the oceans, view images of Mars and watch regions of the Earth change over time.

The new features mark a significant upgrade to Google Earth, a popular software program that provides access to the world’s geographical information through digital maps, satellite imagery and the company’s search tools.

Google Earth 5.0 was unveiled at the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco, where former Vice President Al Gore, singer Jimmy Buffet and others spoke about its capacity to educate the public about global warming, ocean acidification and other threats to the planet.

“This is an extremely powerful educational tool,” said Gore, who won a Nobel Peace Prize for his work raising awareness about climate change. “One of my fondest hopes is that people around the world will use Google Earth to see for themselves the reality of what’s happening because of the climate crisis.”

Google Earth has been downloaded more than 500 million times since it was launched in 2005. The software is available for free on Google’s Web site. Researchers and organizations can purchase a more powerful version for $400.

John Hanke, director of Google Earth and Maps, said the idea of adding oceans came three years ago when a scientist pointed out that the software was missing the water that covers almost three-quarters of the Earth’s surface.

Google Earth users can now plunge beneath the ocean’s surface, explore three-dimensional images of the underwater terrain and view articles and videos about marine science contributed by scientists and organizations such as the National Geographic Society.

The Historical Imagery feature lets users see archive satellite images of individual locations to see how the region has evolved over time as a result of climate change and other forces. For example, viewers can observe how the largest glacier in Glacier National Park has melted over the past decade.

With Google Mars 3D, users can view three-dimensional, satellite imagery of the Red Planet taken during NASA space expeditions.

The new version also allows users to created narrated tours of places using the software’s content and images.

“It’s not just a fun demo,” said Google Chief Executive Eric Schmidt. “What it really is is a platform for science and research and literally understanding the future of the world.”

The economic downturn will test the world’s resolve to do more to fight global warming at 190-nation talks in Poland next week, but the election of Barack Obama as U.S. president should temper the gloom.The December 1-12 meeting of 8,000 delegates in Poznan, Poland, will review progress in a two-year push to work out a sweeping new U.N. climate treaty by the end of 2009.

So far, many countries have promised to fight global warming despite fears of deep recession, but few have come up with deep cuts in emissions that the U.N. Climate Panel says are needed to avoid the worst of heatwaves, droughts and rising seas.

“I’d expect the economic crisis to have an effect” on resolve, Yvo de Boer, head of the U.N. Climate Change Secretariat, said of the outlook for Poznan. And “lower oil prices will mean less of an incentive to invest in renewables.”

“The minute the financial crisis struck, industries said ‘this makes it difficult to take on expensive targets’,” he told Reuters.

Among canceled investments, FPL Group, the largest U.S. wind power operator, has slashed planned 2009 spending by 25 percent to $5.3 billion. Shares in China’s Suntech Power Holdings, the world’s largest solar module maker, fell to an all-time low last week, down more than 90 percent in 2009.

For many nations, Obama’s election is reason for optimism — many U.S. allies accuse President George W. Bush of doing too little to diversify away from fossil fuels. China and the United States are the top greenhouse gas emitters.

Obama has promised to “engage vigorously” in climate change talks once he is president and plans a costly stimulus package to revive the economy, including green jobs.

CUTS

“There are positive influences — Obama has got elected and he has said that the current economic crisis is not going to impair his resolve to tackle the problem of climate change,” said Rajendra Pachauri, head of the U.N. Climate Panel.

Obama has promised to cut U.S. greenhouse gas emissions back to 1990 levels by 2020 — Bush had foreseen a peak only in 2025 — and by 80 percent below 1990 levels by 2050.

Pachauri said Obama might be able to come up with even more. The U.N. panel says rich nations need to cut by 25-40 percent below 1990 levels by 2020 to keep temperatures below what some nations see as a “dangerous” 2 Celsius (3.6 Fahrenheit) rise.

“Maybe this is just the beginning of what we expect from him,” Pachauri told Reuters. Pachauri’s panel said it would cost less than 0.12 percent of global gross domestic product every year until 2030 to avert the worst of climate change.

The economic downturn means countries “are going to have all kinds of excuses to avoid making progress. So it (Poznan) will be a test,” said Angela Anderson, director of the Pew Environment Group’s global warming campaign.

The Poznan talks will mainly review progress and discuss new ideas such as new clean technology for developing nations such as China and India, ways to reward tropical nations for slowing deforestation or help poor countries adapt to climate change.

Logging of a Ghanaian forest submerged 40 years ago by a hydroelectric dam could point to an underwater timber bonanza worth billions of dollars in tropical countries, a senior Ghanaian official said on Monday.Exploiting submerged rot-resistant hardwoods such as ebony, wawa or odum trees in Lake Volta, the largest man-made lake in Africa, can also slow deforestation on land and curb emissions of greenhouse gases linked to burning of forests.

“Logging will start in October,” Robert Bamfo, head of Climate Change at the government’s Forestry Commission, told Reuters on the sidelines of a U.N. August 21-27 climate conference in Accra. “This will reduce the pressure on our forests.”

“The project aims to harvest 14 million cubic meters (494.4 million cu ft) of timber worth about $4 billion,” he said.

Logging will be led by a privately owned Canadian company, CSR Developments, which says it aims to invest $100 million in Ghana. Cutting equipment can be mounted on barges, guided by sonars to grab trees below water.

“There are very similar circumstances in numerous countries around the world including Ivory Coast, Cameroon, Brazil, Surinam, Malaysia and others,” Bamfo said of forgotten forests swamped by hydroelectric dams.

“The potential is there — they are awaiting to see the outcome of the Ghana project,” he said.

He told the conference there were estimates that there were “5 million hectares (12.36 million acres) of salvageable submerged timber in the hydroelectric reservoirs in the tropics with the potential to supplement global demand for timber.”

“The trees are still strong,” Bamfo said, even though they had been under water since construction of the Akosombo Dam in the 1960s. Harvesting would cost more than on land but was still commercial because of the value of the timber.

BOAT COLLISIONS

In some shallower parts of the lake, covering an area of 850,000 hectares (2.1 million acres), thousands of trunks jut several meters out of the water. The lake is 90 meters (300 ft) deep at its deepest with a mean depth of 19 meters.

“Boat collisions with submerged tree stumps cause many fatalities every year,” Bamfo said.

In the 1960s, no one saw a need to fell the trees as the lake rose. “Maybe at the time we thought we had enough timber in our forest estates to sustain us. Now, because of the decline, we need to diversify.”

Ghana is being deforested at a rate of about 1.9 percent a year.

The U.N. conference is looking at ways to slow deforestation, blamed by U.N. surveys for emitting almost 20 percent of greenhouse gases from human activities. Trees soak up carbon dioxide as they grow and release it when burnt or when they rot.

Here in a 13,700-year-old peat bog, ecologist Ed Berg reaches into the moss and pulls out more evidence of the drastic changes afoot due to the Earth’s warming climate.Rooting through a handful of mossy duff, Berg, an ecologist for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, shows remains of shrubs and other plants taking hold over the last 30 years in a patch of ground that has long been too soggy for woody plants to grow.

In other words, the ground is drying out, and the peat bog is turning into forest.

“There has been a big change,” Berg said. Core samples taken from the bog show moss nearly 22 feet under the ground, with no sign of trees or shrubs growing here for centuries, Berg said.

In 50 years, the bog could be covered by black spruce trees, he said.

Welcome to Alaska, where the blow of climate change will fall harder than on any other U.S. state.

Records indicate that Alaska has already experienced the largest regional warming of any U.S. state — an average 5 degrees Fahrenheit (3 degrees Celsius) since the 1960s and about 8 degrees Fahrenheit (4.5 degrees Celsius) in the interior of the state during winter months.

“We’ve got mounds of evidence that an extremely powerful and unprecedented climate-driven change is underway,” said Glenn Juday, a forest ecologist at the University of Alaska in Fairbanks.

“It’s not that this might happen, Juday said. “These changes are underway and there are more changes coming.”

‘BEETLES TAKE NO PRISONERS’

In a state that is one-third forest, the change will take the form of droughts, forest fires, and infestations of tree-killing insects like spruce beetles and spruce budworm moths.

Further north near the Arctic Circle, receding sea ice has major implications for polar bears, seals and dozens of species, as well as native humans who depend on the land to sustain them.

But here on the scenic Kenai Peninsula south of Anchorage, rising temperatures are partly to blame for an outbreak of bark-infesting beetles, which thrive in warmer climates.

Altogether more than 3 million acres (1.21 million hectares) of spruce have been killed in south-central Alaska since 1992, the biggest recorded outbreak in North American history.

“Beetles take no prisoners,” Berg told reporters during a tour of the refuge. “It’s a Mafia-style execution.”

Today’s beetle-infested forest is tomorrow’s subdivision, and the beetle has set off a flurry of land speculation. “The realtors loved it,” Berg said, describing how the new trend is to market clear-cut lands as “emerging view properties.”

While wetlands like the ones Berg studies have acted as a speed bump for forest fires, the drying pattern has scientists worried about an uptick in forest fires.

Scattered at the outskirts of the bog are seedling black spruce trees, which burn more easily than white spruce and could provide a “fuel bridge” to allow fires to burn across peat bogs, which have long acted as a fire retardant.

Peat bogs are about 50 percent composed of carbon, and drying or burning would release heat-trapping carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.

The three main components of Obama’s plan are:

— Get 1 million 150 mile-per-gallon plug-in hybrids on U.S. roads within six years.

— Require that 10 percent of U.S. energy comes from renewable sources by the end of his first term – more than double the current level.

—Reduce U.S. demand for electricity 15 percent by 2020.

“If I am president, I will immediately direct the full resources of the federal government and the full energy of the private sector to a single, overarching goal — in 10 years, we will eliminate the need for oil from the entire Middle East and Venezuela,” Obama said.

“To do this, we will invest $150 billion over the next 10 years and leverage billions more in private capital to build a new energy economy that harnesses American energy and creates 5 million new American jobs.”

To set an example, Obama is vowing to convert the entire White House fleet to plug-in hybrid vehicles within one year, and convert all federal vehicle purchases to plug-in hybrids or all-electric by 2012.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/politico/2008080…

What do you think of this plan?

One of your answers said that the plan doesn’t address the central problem of “bringing down gas prices.”

The central problem of identifying gas prices as the central problem is that if prices go down, we become complacent and go right back to the consumption levels we had when prices were low before.

I absolutely understand the pain involved in high prices for gasoline, but the energy consumption problem is so much larger than the individual wallet. In traditional economic analysis, we have a tendency to ignore any “costs” that are not bottom line or personal wallet factors. The cost of failing to curb our energy consumption or to change the source of the energy we do consume has been put off to another individual, another country, or even another generation. The generation that will most suffer from the oil based US economy isn’t the generation that established the oil based economy or the one that continued it after the easing of the oil embargoes of the 1970’s.

Another poster said that alternatives will take longer than 4 years and implied that “drilling as the cure” will take fewer than 7. In point of fact, hybrids are on the market now. In point of fact, all electrics like the Volt are scheduled to be available in less than a year and a half.

“What do you think of this plan?”

I don’t have any quick response to the plan because I have not studied it fully yet, but my first impressions are that it is, finally, a serious attempt to wean our nation from the international oil pipeline, and the only serious attempt to address our long-term impact on the world economy and climate. The devil is always in the details, and the problems are extremely complicated, but if we DON”T address the problem and instead continue to attempt to “drill our way out of the problem,” we will get the same impact we got after the last oil shortage scare…and that was more of the same rather than the brilliant solutions we are capable of devising and are in absolute need of devising.
As the saying goes, if you always do what you always did, you will always get what you always got.

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Easy to say, but much harder to do. Gets lots of applause but just exactly does he plan on accomplishing this? Anyone can say what they would like to do. He might as well say “I’m going to end world hunger and wars within 2 years of my presidency.” Liberals are all about feelings, what they would like to do, like to see happen.

Your last point he made about investing $150 Billion!!!!…invest it where? In what? What does he mean “invest”? If it were profitable for industry to use alternative fuels don’t you think they would have already? Oh…hasn’t he flip-floped again and now he’s in favor of drilling in the US?

Is there any correlation factor for assessment of odor and other gases from waste water treatement plant in correlation with some parameter of the waste water, for instance such as COD, BOD5 etc. The main gases from WWTP are CH4, N2O, CO, CO2, NH3. I also need distribution in air assesment for these gases.

He was an economist back in the early 19th century who warned of problems of finite resources vs. population growth.
For example,he warned of increasing food supply,but even more increasing population. Do U believe he was right in believing the world is headed for disaster during to the said above,especially with petroleum being the most obvious manifestation of the phenomenon going on?

Yes, I am aware of Thomas Malthus (there’s an “L” in his last name).

Ironic that by modern standards he was from a very large family, isn’t it?

I personally don’t see how humans as a whole are generally so myopic and fail to see how our over population of earth is going to come to a head at some point.

Then I think about the people (for the most part) who are having oodles of children. People from third world countries with little, to zero education. People in first world countries who tend to be on the bottom levels socially, employment wise, and education wise.

If people do not have a view of how the ENTIRE world is, then their world is tiny. It may be no bigger than their family, or their village. How can they possibly know that it’s a problem if they have 8-10 children, and 4-5 of them survive to adult hood? In their mind, it’s great! Someone to take care of them when they get old.

I currently live in Idaho, near a little town of ten thousand people. I’m constantly amazed at how little some of them know about the “outside” world….meaning more than 200 miles from town. For them, their entire world is relationships, squabbles, employment, ect right here within about a 50 mile zone. They don’t THINK further afield than that. To them it doesn’t matter that they produce seven children….there’s always food at WalMart.

I have done polls and such on the internet before. One would assume internet users to be a much more “worldly” crowd.

I’ve asked before what people would do if there was a famine (people actually starving to death) here in the United States. Over and over again, I am simply flabbergasted by the number of people who state something like, “It wouldn’t affect me, I get my food at the grocery store.” Or (this is priceless) “I’d just eat out if the stores didn’t have any food.”

So people in third world countries have a serrious disconect over the fact that there are simply too many humans, and we are running out of resources. People in first world countries have a SERRIOUS disconect over where their resources come from.

Yes, without question I believe the world is headed for a global meltdown. The earth will still be here…and the earth has proven wonderfully able to recover. However at some point humans themselves are going to be pitted against a true peril, which will kill millions.

Unfortunatly, there are so many humans now, and we breed so well, AND are able to stand on the shoulders of humans before us, that I don’t believe the earth will ever be rid of all humans. What I mean by “stand on the shoulders of humans before us,” is that we have the abbility to pass knowledge on. A baby born today does not have to “discover” fire. It can grab a book, and know how to mine coal, or built an oil drilling platform. As we build our knowledge each generation, we also build the damage we do to the earth.

I believe the begining of the end (for current human civilization) will happen with both a famine, and a pandemic.

Famine first, to weaken the population, pandemic next as a disease gains a foothold in a weakend population.

It’s possible, it could happen as soon as 2013, when Ug99 hits China, and all of India and Africa. What will the U.S. do when over 1/2 of the worlds population is facing starvation? What will the 1/2 of the world that is starving do to the U.S.? Remember “stand on the shoulders of humans before us”….we are not the only country who learns…..we are not the only country which is Nuclear capable.

So what exactly would the Chineese Government do if their people were dying of famine and disease? Hint: The Chineese military still teaches their soldiers that “war with the United States is inevitable.”
http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index;…

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The earth is finite. We live on a bounded sphere.

How can we possibly increase population, use resources and dispose of waste indefinitely in a finite world?

Doesn’t matter how efficient we get. Eventually resources will get used up, the biosphere will collapse under our waste and our population will crash.
There are countless examples of this in the natural world and examples of man himself outstripping his local environment.
Now we are doing it on a global scale.
It’s just simple logic that the Malthus prediction hasn’t come true - because we haven’t reached the limit - yet.
E.O. Wilson calculated the theoretical absolute limit - and it’s 14 billion.
The strain is showing at 6 billion.
At 9 or 10, I believe we will wish we had listened.

Lack of human contact. Personal or otherwise.

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the only disadvantage belongs to the Conscience decision made by people to remain ignorant on important subjects simply because the information is right there. its like because they could learn at any second about anything they have decided not to. I know a guy who didn’t know that there are people starving around the world now a days. He was BAFFLED when I told him. and he was one of the best students at our school!!!! I’m only 18 and make it a point to learn SOMETHING each day.

Glass bottles instead of plastic,
organic and petro free baby lotion, soap, etc
organic clothing and bedding,
wood floors in nursery,
cloth diapers…….WHAT ELSE?

Go as natural, pesticide and chemical free as possible. A couple good websites for purchasing items are www.gdiapers.com, they have compostable diapers and www.biggreenpurse.com they can help you locate vendors.

Going green is easy, there are so many great resources about the subject. My personal favorite is “The Green Book” which has parts of its book online as well at www.readthegreenbook.com.

As I have been striving to “Go Green” I realize it is like stepping back in time without getting rid of my modern conveniences. I’m doing many things I learned as a child, like line drying my clothes, sweeping instead of vacuuming, opening the windows in the morning to catch the cool breeze, only buying what I need instead of everything that looks cool, growing some of my own food, and canning what I can’t eat now.

To me “going Green” is a frame of mind. Do what fits your lifestyle and do the easy things first, it is a process and like dieting if you go to radical to soon, you are more likely to go back to bad habits. I also believe there are good, better, best choices in most things. If you aren’t ready to start a home garden, then try finding a farmers market, until you locate one look for produce grown as close to home as possible and go organic when available.

Many people think “going green” is expensive, I disagree. Some changes may take an initial investment, but they usually have a short payoff time. Things like weatherstiping and insulation cost, but the energy savings will add up quickly. You may need to purchase reusable bags, but most stores give you a 5 or 10 cent credit, so you are paid back within a few months.

My top tips are make your home more energy efficient, that also means using natural light, cooling and heating.

Reduce your packaging, if you eat more fresh food you will generally reduce packaging, it’s the same thing they tell dieters, shop the perimiter, that is where all the meat, dairy and produce are located. Only buy what you will use, many Americans throw away a lot of unused food. Buy in bulk, that doesn’t just mean large packages, but that area with the bins that you buy only what you plan on using.

Replace disposable items with durable items, if you eat outside often and use disposable paper or plastic plates, it is a wise investment to purchase a set of reusable plastic plates. Replace disposable razors, diapers and cleaning products like swiffer. Avoid bottled water, get a home filter like Pur or Brita.

Recycle, www.earth911.org will help you locate the nearest recycle center. I try to only purchase plastics that are #1 or #2, they are more easily recycled. I also buy recycled products when available, that includes paper towels, napkings, toilet paper, tissue, school/office supplies and clothing.

Detox your cleaning, vinegar and baking soda clean almost anything, they can even losen a hair clog. Seventh Generation and Method are a couple mainstream brands that are very earth friendly.

Just start small and build from there, don’t get overwhelmed.

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Buying local products can help too. I used to California Baby products for my kids, but we live in NC, so I’ve switched to Burt’s Bees which is manufactured a few miles away.

Walk or take public transportation as much as you can. Invest in a good stroller, buy it used to save to some money, and/or sling or carrier. I’ve found that through two kids you get what you pay for when it comes to baby gear. It really frustrates me to buy a lower priced item and have it fall apart and end up in a landfill.

As your baby grows teach him or her about the importance of the environmental decisions you make. My 4yo has been helping with the recycling since she was 2. In fact she used to pick up trash at local parks and pitch and give people lectures about dropping it. She’s since moved on to lecturing people about composting.

Another thing we do is buy some items used. When the kids are looking for new books we go to the used bookstore first. That way we’re not using resources to create new ones. We did splurge on Earth Day and buy a new copy of The Lorax printed on recycled paper with eco friendly inks.