A view of deforestation

I was looking for some satellite images recently and I came across a site maintained by NASA called Visible Earth. It contains thousands of images taken of the earth from various satellites. There were a few images that I found particularly striking, so I thought I would share them with you. I was looking for images of deforestation because I have been reading the book Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed by Jared Diamond, and it deals heavily with the effects of deforestation on societies (you can read my review of the book on my personal blog, if you are interested).

One of the hard things about deforestation, and climate change in general, is that many parts of the earth have already been impacted so we don't have a good idea of what the earth looked like before human impact so we can't get a clear picture of the extent to which we have changed the environment. Satellite imagery is only helpful up to a point because we only have a few years worth of data and that can't tell us much about the past, so it is hard to predict how much our actions will affect the climate in the future, and how much needs to be done to preserve our environment. But in some cases areas of the world have been preserved because of the actions of certain governments and thus provide us with a "control group" to show us how much we have already imacted the environment.

Here is one image of northern Argentina and southern Brazil with Paraguay on the top left and Uruguay on the bottom right. [You can find higher resolution images here.]

The country borders are shown as very thin black lines, but if you notice the dark green "boot" shaped thing in the middle, that is the provice of Misiones in Argentina. A significant protion of that provice is designated as "preserve" and even the parts that aren't are still preserved for specialty logging. The dark green tail coming off the end of the boot is a national park in Bazil.

Another view taken at a different time gives an even starker view of the extent of the deforestation. [Hi-res here]

So at one point that entire area, from the northern edge of the picture, south to almost the boarder with Uruguay, and from the ocean to the Río Paraguay was as green as Misiones now is. That should give you an idea of the extent of deforestation that we are dealing with. So when some people get concerned about the impact that we are having on the environment, this is what they are fretting about.

Now a view from the ground. In case you were wondering, this is what Misiones looks like from the ground (ok maybe these are the more touristy parts).

How We Use Our Planet

Until we find some habitable extrasolar planets and figure out how to get to them, we have a limited number of available planets to us as a species. Currently about 75% of ice-free land on Earth has been altered by humanity according to a recent study (subscription required) by researchers at the University of Maryland and McGill University. Here's how we use our current allotment of planets (click to embiggen):
See the accompanying explanation from NASA's Earth Observatory here.

There Is No Such Thing as Nuclear Waste

About a week and a half ago there was an article in the Wall Street Journal about nuclear power entitled "There Is No Such Thing as Nuclear Waste". After reading it I would say that it expresses my sentiments on the subject. An even better commentary is given by my brother on his blog here. I think that nuclear power is a proper and viable option and should be heavily invested in. If we are concerned about the CO2 output of the US then we should definitely invest in more nuclear power. I think that the moratorium on new nuclear power plants in the US has done more to increase the CO2 output of the country than any thing else. As my brother puts it, "radical environmentalists of the 1960s and 1970s (even continuing on to today) did far more damage to the global environment than any other group." They are uncompromising and prevent any rational discussion of the problem at hand.

I just thought I would throw that out there and see what you guys think about it. I know I'm preaching to the choir here but with more and more people becoming environmentally minded how do we prevent the old school anti-nuclear environmentalists from taking over the new global warming scare and preventing a solution being found?

Save the Planet, Stay Married

Anybody who has ever spent more than a week on campus at BYU has been inundated with quick facts about how marriage is good for people, such as the well documented correlation between marriage and happiness (as measured by surveys). This, however, is a new fun fact to me: marriage is good for the environment.

A study by researchers at Michigan State University has shown that divorce is causing a surprisingly large negative impact on the environment. In 2006, divorce caused the US to use 73 billion kilowatt hours of electricity and almost half a trillion gallons of water more than if everyone had stayed together. This increased impact is caused by the fact that divorce causes a decrease in the average household size. Larger households are more energy efficient because it takes less than five times the energy to heat a house with five occupants than it does to heat a house with one occupant. The same scaling applies to water use and average use of housing space. For example, the study reports that the average number of rooms per person in a divorced household went up by 33% to 95% compared to a married household, causing more housing to be built.

So to those of you out there considering divorce, I urge you to stay together - for the environmental benefits.