Watershed Info No 1026

1. Astroshed: For Those In The Back: it’s Venus!

Watershed Info 1026  EnviroInsight

When Venus appears just above rooftops after sunset, its dazzling brightness means it is often mistaken for a plane or even a UFO. The clouds that cover Venus give it a high albedo, or reflectivity, making it the brightest planet seen from Earth. This is especially true this month, when Venus is the most eye-catching object in the night sky.

2. Ways to Cut Down on Post-Thanksgiving Food Scraps. In the United States alone, approximately 133 billion pounds of food is wasted each year. According to the EPA, that’s 31 percent of our total food supply. These food scraps go to landfills and release methane, contributing to global warming. Whether or not you’re cooking this Thanksgiving, here are five ways to avoid wasting food.

Food Calculator
What do you need to host Thanksgiving dinner? With the food calculator from the Natural Resources Defense Council, you can find out in minutes. This guestimator takes into account the expected number of guests, their projected eating capacity, the number of leftover meals you desire, and the type of meal you’re looking for (vegetarian, classic, or smorgasbord) to create the perfect grocery list. Enjoy.

Watershed Info 1026  EnviroInsight

Refrigerator Thermometer
Now that you have your ingredients, you have to keep them fresh for the big day. The fridge thermometer is an essential and affordable gadget. Incorrect temperatures are one of the biggest contributors to household food waste; a recent study by Daily Mail found that a whopping 75 percent of people are running their fridges at too high of a temperature. That accounts for 4.2 million tons of food waste and represents even more wasted money and time.
You can purchase your own fridge thermometer at Amazon.com.

OLIO
Now that you’ve made your meal and preserved your extra ingredients, you might consider giving your leftovers away. OLIO can help. It’s a free app that connects neighbors and local businesses so that surplus food can be shared instead of thrown away. This includes food nearing its sell-by date in local stores, spare home-grown vegetables, and the groceries in your fridge. For your convenience, OLIO can also be used for nonfood household items. It’s easy. To make an item available, simply open the app, add a photo, description, and when and where the item is available for pickup. To access items, browse the listings available near you, request what you’d like, and arrange a pickup via private messaging.

Fruit and Vegetable Disk
Even if your refrigerator is just right, you need to preserve that extra half sweet potato. Once you cut your produce, it can quickly rot before you have time to eat it. Spoiled produce can be frustrating and expensive, not to mention wasteful. A fruit and vegetable disk, like the ExtraLife Produce Preserver, takes care of that. Fruit and vegetables emit ethylene gas as they ripen, which accelerates spoilage, so these affordable little disks aim to absorb rot-inducing gases and extend food’s shelf life in the process.

Copia
Another way to recycle your excess food: the Copia app. For a small, volume-based fee, the app schedules pickups of your surplus food by certified food handlers, who safely deliver it to local nonprofits in need. You can track surplus trends, make better buying decisions, access tax deductions, and even receive photos from the people you fed.


3. Tucson Grease Collection and Recycling Event-January 4, 2020

Fats, Oils, and Grease (FOG) from your kitchen should never be poured down the drain. Instead, store it in containers and bring it to the 15th Annual Grease Collection and Recycling Event.

The Pima County Regional Wastewater Reclamation Department and its partners, Grecycle, The Town of Sahuarita, Jacobs, and Gold Star Pumping invite you to start the year off right by taking your leftover holiday grease to one of the six collection sites listed below on Saturday, January 4, 2020 from 9:00 a.m. – 1:00 p.m.

The collected grease will be recycled into biodiesel, a cleaner-burning fuel that can reduce our dependence on crude oil.

Store it, don’t pour it! You can always recycle your grease at the year-round location listed below:
a. Nueva WRF/Jacobs
b. W. Calle Agua Nueva, Tucson, AZ 85745 (520) 405-043



4. Glendale Glitters Tis the time of the year when one of the state’s premier events light up. The lights are on every night from now to January 11th from 5 to 10 p.m.. The best time to visit downtown Glendale is on the weekends to experience the 1.6 million lights. Get into the Christmas spirit and spend a little time immersed in the joyous lights of Christmas in downtown Glendale.


5. Is Your Drinking Water Safe To Drink? EWG tested water from all over the United States. Go to https://mail.aol.com/webmail-std/en-us/suite and enter your zip code to learn about your town’s drinking water.


6. Tucson Household HazardousWaste (HHW). There is an HHW collection on the first Saturday of every month from 8 a.m. to noon at 7575 E. Speedway Blvd. Residents who are not able to drop off materials themselves may request a home pick-up for $25. Whether it’s delivery or pickup, please be sure to separate all materials, especially batteries. Do not bring CRT monitors, dried paint, medical waste, or ammunition. For questions and more information, email kendra.hall@tucsonaz.gov.


7. Climate Change: Where Are We Now? While some politicians and citizens continue to deny the existence of man-made global warming, the evidence supporting it continues to grow.

As the clock continues ticking toward the collective future of the human species on planet Earth, there are still some among us who are either skeptics or out-right deniers of climate change. While ignoring the scientific data and credibility of internationally renowned climate scientists and researchers, these skeptics focus their arguments on relatively insignificant generalizations that are often made in the mainstream press or other online media sources. While I do the daily rounds of mainstream media outlets, I don’t depend on their news articles to provide the scientific data necessary for arriving at conclusions on such an important topic―one that poses serious threats for both our near and long-term future.

What I do trust, however, are the findings of scientists from such prestigious organizations as the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change(IPCC), and the Union of Concerned Scientists USA (UCSUSA), to name but a few of the groups that have stated that 97% of climate scientists worldwide agree that global warming is caused by human activities. By spreading rumors based on unreliable media sources rather than seeking facts from authorities in their respective scientific fields, these climate change deniers appear to be much more interested in preserving personal lifestyles than in learning how to interpret and digest scientific data. Thus, in an effort to help balance some of those skeptics who may be sitting on the proverbial fence at the moment, let’s take a look at relevant data as well as some of the international institutions that are working to address climate change.

A Few Relevant Data Points
With the advent of the Industrial Revolution in the late 18th century, humans began their dependence on the burning of fossil fuels―coal first and then later oil and natural gas―to power factories, heat homes and light city streets at night. Later, Henry Ford and others developed methods for the mass production of cars and trucks, making them affordable for the middle class while at the same time radically increasing our appetite for fossil fuels.

According to Dr. Caleb A. Scharf, Director of Astrobiology at Columbia University, “Current data (from direct measurements of the atmosphere to historical records of Page 4 industry) tells us that between 1751 and 1987 fossil fuels put about 737 billion tons of CO2 into the atmosphere. Between just 1987 and 2014 it was about the same mass: 743 billion tons. Total CO2 from industrialized humans in the past 263 years: 1,480 billion tons.”

While the ramifications of such data may be difficult to grasp by the layperson, what’s important to note here is that carbon emissions from human activities have been accelerating at an alarming rate. The collection of CO2 and other greenhouse gases in Earth’s atmosphere traps heat which has subsequently caused surface temperatures to steadily rise, particularly since the 1980s.

Watershed Info 1026  EnviroInsight

Note: This graph illustrates the change in global surface temperature relative to 1951- 1980 average temperatures. Eighteen of the 19 warmest years all have occurred since 2001, with the exception of 1998. The year 2016 ranks as the warmest on record.

The UCSUSA points out that “Consequences of global warming include drought, sea level rise, flooding, extreme weather, and species loss. The severity of those impacts is tied directly to the amount of carbon dioxide we release.” While CO2 may be the greatest contributor to climate change, other gases such as methane and nitrous oxide are also responsible for creating the greenhouse effect, therefore, solutions must also focus on the reduction of these gases.

Climate Change Awareness Timeline

Concern in scientific circles about climate change isn’t merely a recent phenomenon. In 1906, Swedish scientist Svante Arrhenius foresaw the warming of the planet as a positive advantage for his far-northern country when he wrote, “By the influence of the increasing Page 5 percentage of carbonic acid in the atmosphere, we may hope to enjoy ages with more equitable and better climates, especially as regards the colder regions of the earth…” Since researching climatic change is a slow, painstaking process, it took scientists another eight decades to begin drawing firm conclusions.

Fast forward to 1988 and a series of natural disasters―extreme temperatures, drought and raging forest fires―brought about the founding of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the United Nations body tasked with assessing the science of climate change. The IPCC was an outgrowth of a 1987 Canadian conference which produced the Montreal Protocol, an international treaty designed to protect the ozone layer by phasing out the production of numerous substances that are responsible for ozone depletion.

In June of 1988 James E. Hansen, a climate scientist and head of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS), testified before a US Senate committee telling them he was 99% sure that “the greenhouse effect has been detected and is changing our climate now.” Over the following two and a half decades, scientists continued to collect data on climate change at the same time that governments worldwide argued over the economic and political implications of taking action to counter its effects. United States presidential administrations prior to Barack Obama’s chose to ignore Hansen’s warning and go on with business as usual.

Global Greenhouse Gas Emission


Read the entire article at https://www.unsustainablemagazine.com/2019/05/01/climate-changewhere-are-we-now/



Copyright EnviroInsight.org 2019


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