Natural Sciences Videos

The cap and trade legislation has been put off until well after the Copenhagen summit in December. It s pushed into spring, 2010, if then.  If you want to read some better bills than cap and trade, which should be called Cap and RAID, you can check out all the other bills that intend to mitigate [...]

My guest was ill proenza, Director of the Southern Region National Weather Service. We spoke about the Atlantic Tsunami Warning System, the International Association of Emergency Managers (IAEM) prestigious Career Excellence Award was given to Bill in Orlando. We also spoke about QuikSCAT. What is the latest information, funding and schedule for replacement. Career Excellence Award :: Let QuikSCAT die? :: Personal Hurricane Center Jacksonville Weather Examiner :: File Download (120:08 min / 29 MB)

Welcome to Radio Ecoshock. This week's program is about schizophrenia: the state of hoping the system will crash before it kills the planet, while counting on all the usual creature comforts of home, jobs, and a well-stocked supermarket. Yes, I know the Western world is hanging in suspension. We're waiting for the shopping to resume, for the economy to rebound, for the good life to return. Most politicians and the mainstream press promise that it will all go back to the normal process of chewing up and spitting out the last of the planet's goodness. Meanwhile we go to movies like 2012, slurping up scenes of the destruction of everything. Part of our secret selves hopes it all goes down in flames, or floods. Even while we worry about our children having a decent life. You see how it goes? I know you are worried about the economy. Maybe even your own job or home is at risk. Despite the propaganda, we'd be crazy not to worry about it. I've been told the general formula for every speech and radio program goes as follows: we paint the grim picture, but always, always end on a positive note. Give humans solutions, or they'll just go numb and do nothing. Sorry. This week we violate the rules. Lately Radio Ecoshock has run a series about greening our cities. A couple of listeners have written back, saying cities can never be sustainable, as Derrick Jensen says. Have I fallen into the camp of false good cheer? We'll start out with one of the most promising solutions I've heard about lately - a dream of new economics coming from a British government advisor, Professor Tim Jackson. He's got a new book out "Prosperity Without Growth". Then we'll head into more pessimistic territory with Dave Cohen, an analyst for ASPO, the Association for the Study of Peak Oil and Gas. Having written the American Empire is now obviously in decline, Cohen asks "Now What?" We talk more about the economic crisis, Wall Street bull (and bears) - and the energy crisis. Along with James Howard Kuntsler, and our recent guest Richard Heinberg, Cohen says normal consumption is never coming back. We might as well prepare ourselves for very hard times. We'll trash smug Canadians a bit, since real estate north of the border is just as stupidly over-leveraged as the American market. Then we'll notice Australia melting in the heat, while they push even more coal. A big Canadian company has just bought into the dirty Aussie coal market. Aren't we proud? In the end, I wonder, is hope just getting in the way of dealing with the limits of reality? This show is peppered with audio clips, including shorties from Max Keiser, Jeff Buckley's song "The Sky Is A Landfill", Bob Holman's "We Are the Dinosaur", and of course ending with the show title "Dinosaurs Will Die" from NOFX. We open with "Times Is Hard" by Loudon Wainwright III. READ MORE

This week on Living Planet: the German chancellor announces plans to attend the climate conference in Copenhagen, Ecuador calls on the international community to pay it not to drill for oil, and bridging the social and ecological divide between the German majority and Turkish minority. Merkel announces plans to attend Copenhagen German Chancellor Angela Merkel will be joining her French and British counterparts at the global climate summit in Copenhagen. Many have applauded the move, but some environmentalists are skeptical.The announcement comes only days after leaders at the Asian Pacific Economic Cooperation summit in Singapore said they did not expect a major breakthrough at the talks. According to Merkels spokesman, these low expectations are partly why the chancellor has decided to attend. A former environment minister, she wants to play an active role in ensuring that the participating countries reach more ambitious agreements. Merkel isn't the first European leader to announce plans to personally travel to the Danish capital. But as Europe's largest economy and one of the greenest countries on the planet, Germany is certain to play a major role in the negotiations. However, some politicians and experts are skeptical about the chancellor's plans. Report: Eva WutkeEcuador wants money not to drill Industrialized nations are expected to pay out hundreds of billions of dollars over the next 40 years to help their developing counterparts combat the effects of climate change. Ecuador has proposed one way that money could be put to use.The small South American nation of Ecuador is one of the planet's 17 megadiverse countries, a group of nations that harbor the majority of the Earth's species. It's also one of world's poorest nations, with 40 percent of citizens living below the poverty line. All this despite the massive stores of oil tucked away beneath the ground. Since the 1970s, the government in Quito has allowed companies to pump oil out of the country, with little thought to the effects this would have on the environment. Ecuador has profited little from its natural resources and it's now realizing the environmental mistakes that have been made. Which is why they have come up with an offer to take with them to Copenhagen this December. They want money from the international community to invest in infrastructure and biotechnology, and in return they'll leave half of the available oil in the ground. It's one alternative, and if it works, other developing nations home to both immense biodiversity and oil like Venezuela and Nigeria might follow suit. Report: Thomas Nachtigall/Patricio Luna/Clare Atkinson Berlin eco-center helps migrants integrate while saving the planet Most migrants leave there homes in search of someplace better with more resources. Their ecological knowledge is often limited and most governments have no way to address that.In Germany, Turks make up the largest immigrant group. They were invited here following the Second World War as guest workers, and many of them never left. Many have also never fully integrated into German society, and blame for that has been passed around for decades. Turgut Altug is trying to change that while also building up ecological knowledge among immigrants. In the Berlin neighborhood of Kreuzberg he has founded a German-Turkish environment center to help with that mission the first of its kind in Germany. Report: Richard Fuchs

Devdutt Pattanaik takes an eye-opening look at the myths of India and of the West -- and shows how these two fundamentally different sets of beliefs about God, death and heaven help us consistently misunderstand one another.

Imagine cutting retractable doors in the side of a 747 airliner, installing a 17-ton telescope, and flying to the stratosphere to solve one of astronomy's greatest puzzles. That's what NASA and the German Aerospace Center plan to do with a cutting-edge airborne observatory named SOFIA. Please vote for this podcast at PodcastAlley! Get this podcast story.

Devdutt Pattanaik takes an eye-opening look at the myths of India and of the West -- and shows how these two fundamentally different sets of beliefs about God, death and heaven help us consistently misunderstand one another.

We measure our economies in terms of trade, production and services - but one vital component is missing: the environment. Pavan Sukhdev is the study leader for a UN-run program on the economics of ecosystems and biodiversity, and he wants to see these resources accounted for. Kerri Smith talks to him.

19 November: Why paleontologists should predict instead of just describe, how to factor environmental goods into the economy, the cultural context of Darwin's theories and a round-up of other highlights from Nature.

This week, we bring you the latest news from the world of science including the world's fastest camera and how higher heels make you a faster runner! We also discover the most distant object ever found and how the non-stick coating, PTFE, is bringing technological success to South Africa. Plus, we try to get a good signal, in question fo the week!

This week, we look into the latest developments in the field of fertility to see how scientists are trying to improve the conditions of in-vitro fertilisation, IVF. We also bring you the latest science news including how a babies cry depends on it's accent as well as reveal a new faster, cheaper way to sequence the human genome and discover how eating slowly may be better for your health. Plus, staying on the topic of fertility, we investigate how many children a sperm donor can father!

Leadership doesn't have a user's manual, but Fields Wicker-Miurin says stories of remarkable, local leaders are the next best thing. At a TED salon in London, she shares three.

Making Memory Room, Oh Rats!, Hackers Hacking Pacemakers, New Breast Implants, A Tale of Two Drugs, iCough, Building Bigger Muscles, Push-Button Electric, Golden Ears, Right-Handed Chimps, Minion Mailbag, and More!!!

To get this podcast started, Robert ambushes Jad with a question a question we ve all been dying to ask him since June 10th, 2009, when Amil Abumrad came into the world. But fear not, we didn t do a whole podcast just to give the new dad a hard time. Robert talks to Josh Greene, the Harvard professor we had on our Morality show. They revisit some ideas from that show in the context of the big, complicated problems of today (think global warming and nuclear war). Josh argues that to deal with those problems, we re going to have to learn how to make better use of that tiny part of our brain that handles abstract thinking. Not a simple proposition, but, despite the odds, Josh has hope. If you do not see flash audio player please install the latest flash player. Download MP3 Photo by: Flickr/ connieth

Lachlan Whatmore gets squishy on ya with immortal jellyfish. Victoria Bond eulogises the Mars rovers, Patrick Rubie and Ian Woolf discuss new understandings about short-sightedness, Ian Woolf and Pat Rubie collide with bread and hadrons Lachlan Whatmore eulogises mighty biochemist Mildred Cohn. Presented by Patrick Rubie, Produced by Lachlan Whatmore, and panelled by Patrick Rubie

Performance-based environmental management (PBEM) is a strategic, goal-oriented methodology that is implemented through effective planning and decision logic to reach a desired end state of site cleanup. The goal of PBEM is to be protective of human health and the environment while efficiently implementing appropriate streamlined cleanup processes. The major components of PBEM include: systematic planning; effective communications; agreement of a land use risk strategy; current conceptual site model; decision logic analysis; remediation process optimization (RPO); ARAR analysis; exit strategy development; and performance-based contracting including environmental insurance. This ITRC training presents an overview of what PBEM is, explains how and when to implement it, and describes the issues that regulators are concerned about throughout PBEM's implementation. Case studies will be presented to illustrate successful PBEM projects. The course is valuable not only because PBEM is being proposed and implemented at many federal and private sites throughout the country, but also because PBEM provides an opportunity to enhance all site remediation. This training is geared to those in the environmental remediation field including Federal, state and local government officials; owners or operators of sites, and consultants. The course will be most beneficial if the participant has taken one of ITRC's remediation process optimization courses. Online archives are available for What is Remediation Process Optimization and How Can It Help Me Identify Opportunities for Enhanced and More Efficient Site Remediation? and for Remediation Process Optimization - Advanced Training. These courses are recommended as pre-requisites, but are not required. The training materials are based on the ITRC RPO Team's Technical Regulatory Guidance Document: Improving Environmental Site Remediation Through Performance-Based Environmental Management (RPO-7, November 2007). To view the slides associated with this audio, please visit http://www.clu-in.org/conf/itrc/pbem_101509/

Performance-based environmental management (PBEM) is a strategic, goal-oriented methodology that is implemented through effective planning and decision logic to reach a desired end state of site cleanup. The goal of PBEM is to be protective of human health and the environment while efficiently implementing appropriate streamlined cleanup processes. The major components of PBEM include: systematic planning; effective communications; agreement of a land use risk strategy; current conceptual site model; decision logic analysis; remediation process optimization (RPO); ARAR analysis; exit strategy development; and performance-based contracting including environmental insurance. This ITRC training presents an overview of what PBEM is, explains how and when to implement it, and describes the issues that regulators are concerned about throughout PBEM's implementation. Case studies will be presented to illustrate successful PBEM projects. The course is valuable not only because PBEM is being proposed and implemented at many federal and private sites throughout the country, but also because PBEM provides an opportunity to enhance all site remediation. This training is geared to those in the environmental remediation field including Federal, state and local government officials; owners or operators of sites, and consultants. The course will be most beneficial if the participant has taken one of ITRC's remediation process optimization courses. Online archives are available for What is Remediation Process Optimization and How Can It Help Me Identify Opportunities for Enhanced and More Efficient Site Remediation? and for Remediation Process Optimization - Advanced Training. These courses are recommended as pre-requisites, but are not required. The training materials are based on the ITRC RPO Team's Technical Regulatory Guidance Document: Improving Environmental Site Remediation Through Performance-Based Environmental Management (RPO-7, November 2007). To view the slides associated with this audio, please visit http://www.clu-in.org/conf/itrc/pbem_101509/