People can buy and eat whatever they want; we have a huge range of choices. If an order of curly fries is gigantic, like the one we got yesterday, three people and their dogs can share it.
I understand that some cultures don't like sharing or to-go boxes from restaurants. Most people do that here. Both affect portion size. I can get cassoulet from the little French place down the hill, have a lot of bread and dessert, and take away another meal or two. Laurent, the little French guy who runs the place, has got used to us barbarians.
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John Larkin Highland Technology, Inc trk
jlarkin att highlandtechnology dott com
A bigger problem is mercury from coal plants, especially in the Great Lakes. In Ontario, pregnant women are advised to avoid eating fish from the lakes.
There was a big scare about that in the '60s, too. They found that fish that had been frozen for 100 years had the same Hg concentration. The sky really isn't falling.
Jeroen has rather higher standards than Jamie, who won't have read the Scientific American article, which was popular science, and therefore designed to be comprehensible to people without physics training.
I did find Jeroen a couple of higher level articles, and he has yet to complain about them.
Jamie is much too dumb to work out what was actually going on.
Radiation (noun) is what you get irradiated with (verb).
Jamie's language skills are much what you would expect from the rest of his intellectually battery of pop-guns.
The radiation source in bananas is the high level of potassium, most of whi ch is potassium-39 (93.33%) and potassium-41 (6.7%) but the remaining 0.012 % is radioactive potassium-40. Potassium-40 has a half-life of 1.25 billion years, but it is still active enough to be the largest single source of ra diation in the human body.
Equipment doesn't come into it, unless you count the supernova that made th e potassium at least five billion years ago.
That's wrong and misleading. There are about 4,400 K-40 nuclear transformat ions per second in the average human body, corresponding to a dose of 0.39 mSv/year, about forty times more than you get from C-14 - roughly 0.01 mSv /year. There are about 3000 C-14 nuclear transformation per second (not 15 ,000) which is nearly as many events, but C-14 decay produces less energeti c and less damaging products.
Bequels are nuclear transformations per second which may be more fundamenta l, but Sieverts are units of radiation damage, which is what we care about.
That's probably right. For a start, the Pacific is huge and Fukushima hasn' t contaminated much of it.
Which particular tipping point are you thinking of?
We are still a very long way short of the most crucial tipping point where water boils at the equator which would get us into Venus style thermal runaway. I tried to do this once to one of the earlier climate models that I was given access to by adding 3% of new CO2 in a step. (that is approximately 2^10 increase so a global 30K rise)
It was bad news for coastal cities but the temperature difference between poles and equator flattened out so I didn't boil the seas. It took a few hundred years to sort itself out to new equilibrium.
It might be possible that the planet's weather moves to a new attractor with different modes to what we are used to in future. It could make drier some equatorial zones uninhabitable and release loads of methane from the permafrosted tundra locking in a deep hysteresis. Models suggest that high latitiudes and the poles warm fastest and this seems to be observed.
The most likely one we could trigger is shutting down the Atlantic conveyor which would certainly alter the distribution of temperatures too but could easily see the UK and NW Europe getting more latitude appropriate (ie very much colder) weather in an overall warmer world.
Yes you can although it may take a massive effort. There is probably nothing we can do even with our worst business as usual trash the planet scenarios that could not be undone by provoking the Yellowstone caldera into full scale vulcanism. It would of course totally destroy the USA but would save the world. That seems an equitable trade to me.
The carbon tax is a complete mess and a spivs charter. It is worth pushing for improved fuel economy and better insulation - basically taking all the no-regrets measures and low hanging fruit to conserve fossil fuel resources rather than squandering them needlessly.
That seems a little unlikely. There have been plenty of very nasty mercury poisoning incidents of which the most infamous was at Minamata in Japan. The irony being that sick people were fed more (highly toxic) local fish to try and help them get better.
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