The Hemp Revolution (video)

Niburu, 28-07-2010

The Hemp Revolution tells the amazing and little known story of the Hemp plant.

Hemp, probably the first plant ever to be cultivated, was among the worlds largest agricultural crops until the 1800s. This feature documentary explores the plants facinating history, its thousands of uses, the economic and cultural forces behind its prohibition, and its modern potential to solve major environmental problems.

Hemp, together with bio-technologies presented in this film, offer a visionary yet practical solutions that could help solve many of our current environmental problems including energy, medicine, food and clothing, etc.

Featuring top scientists, academics and professionals from around the world.

Hemp facts are Courtesy of The Kentucky Hemp Museum & Library, Versailles, KY

1. One acre of hemp produces twice as much oil as one acre of peanuts.
   Agriculture, Papermakers have high hopes for Industrial Hemp.
   Agri-View. " Wisconsin's largest farm newspaper" April 27, 1995.
   
2. America's first hemp law was enacted in 1619 at Jamestown Colony, Virginia ordering all farmers to grow Indian hemp seed.
   Clark. V.S., History of Manufacture in the United States, Mcgraw Hill. NY 1929. pg 34.
   
3. Cannabis hemp was legal tender in most of the Americas from 1631 until the early 1800's. you could even pay your taxes with cannabis hemp.
   
   Clark. V.S., History of Manufacture in the United States. Mcgraw Hill. NY 1929. pg. 34.
   
4. "The earliest known woven fabric was apparently of hemp which began to be worked in the eighth millennium (8,000-7,000) BC).
   "The Columbia History of the World. 1981. pg. 54.
   
5. The original. Heavy-duty, famous Levi jeans were made for the California '49ers out of hemp sailcloth and rivets so that the pockets would not rip when filled with gold.
   
   Hemp and the Marijuana Conspiracy: The Emperor Wears No Clothes, Jack Herer, Revised and expanded 1995 edition: copyright March, 1995, HEMP Publishing. 5632 Van Nuys Blvd., Van Nuys. CA 91401. pg. 6.
   
6. One acre of hemp produces as much cellulose fiber pulp as 4.1 acres of trees.
   Dewey & Merrill. Bulletin #404. U.S. Dept. of Age. 1916.
   
7. Hemp paper is stronger and has greater folding endurance than wood pulp paper.
   Dewey & Merrill. Bulletin #404, US Dept. of Ag., 1916.
   
8. Cannabis hemp seeds contain all the essential amino acids and essential fatty acids, which are vital to the immune system necessary to maintain a healthy life.
   
   Hempseed Nutrition. Osburn, Lynn, Access unlimited, P.O. Box 1900. Frazier Park. CA 93225.
   
9. Hemp seeds contain up to 24% protein. A handful of seed provides the minimum daily requirement of protein for adults.
   
   Rosenthal. Ed. Hemp Today, pg. 101.
   
   14. August 13, 1941, Henry Ford first displayed his plastic car at Dearborn Days in Michigan. The car ran on fuels derived from hemp and other agricultural based sources, and the fenders were made of hemp, wheat, straw, and synthetic plastics. Ford said his vision was "to grow automobiles from the soil."
   The Kentucky Hemp Museum and Library. 1998 Historical Hemp Calendar, February. Roulac, John. Industrial Hemp Practical Products - Paper to fabric to Cosmetics, pg. 11. Hemptech

EU and Google enlist ordinary people as environmental watchdogs

RNW, 28 July 2010 - 2:46pm | By Willemien Groot

(Photo: Google)

Eye on Earth, GEOSS and Google are planning to monitor the state of the environment. All three organisations plan to measure the influence of human activity on the environment and climate change. The big difference is that the organisations will not only be gathering data from scientists, but involving ordinary people as well.

Way back in 1998, then US Vice President Al Gore dreamed of a digital earth, where information could be gathered. NASA developed the first version and the possibility of creating a precise, accurate image of the state of the planet expanded exponentially with the rise of new social media such as Facebook and Twitter.

Direct action

At the zenith of the Gulf of Mexico oil disaster, a simple Google maps application made a deep impression, even though the idea behind the app was very simple. Anyone could have thought of it, says Ed Parsons of Google UK:

"This is a great example. It was actually an engineer who works at Google but it could have been anyone, who makes use of the fact that the American government published a daily piece of data that shows the extent of the oil slick in the Gulf. And what he does, is he takes that extent and allows you with a little application that he has built on the web to overlay that extent up around any part of the world. You could type in Amsterdam or wherever you are interested in and it will overlay that extent on that particular region".

Mr Parsons says the map and overlay makes far more impression than pages of raw data, although he hastened to add that raw data should always be available. He says it makes the process more transparent and far more attractive for people who want to delve a little deeper.

Conveying the message

Governments have also realised that new media is a powerful tool they can use to help convey their message to the general public. The British government launched a website to support their climate policy. A government application for use with Google Earth shows what would happen to the planet if the temperature were to rise by an average of four degrees Celsius; the results are both confronting and effective.

Interactive

The effects of drought and floods are also relatively easy to map and monitor. Facebook, Twitter and the photo-sharing website Flickr are full of information about the environment and climate change and it reaches millions of people every day. Why not collect all the snippets of information into one place?

Two European websites are working hard to do just that. The European Environmental agency's Eye on Earthwebsite aims to function as a two-way communication platform that combines scientific information with observations made by ordinary people.

The Group on Earth Observations (GEO), which was launched in response to the 2002 World Summit on Sustainable Development, is developing a Global Earth Observations System of Systems or GEOSS. GEO members include 81 governments, the European Commission and dozens of intergovernmental organisations whose mandate includes Earth observation and related environmental issues. The project also has the support of the European Commission's Joint Research Centre.

The JRC's Max Craglia says:

"We are promoting the idea that ordinary people can be providers of data. They know their local environment a lot better than any observing system rotating over the Earth. Bringing together different sources of data about the environment will help us understand the mechanisms of change; one cannot underestimate the importance of the idea. In addition, those billions of people who start monitoring will also develop a keener awareness of their own role in climate change".

Bend the Trend

GEOSS wants to play a global role but Eye on Earth is focused on Europe. The EU Environmental Agency (EEA) is publishing all available data about water and air quality and will add data on biodiversity and noise pollution later on.

The Bend the Trend website, launched by the EEA, is a social climate movement that aims to inform and inspire people to take action to combat climate change.

The success or failure of all the initiatives depend on their perceived trustworthiness says the EEA's Jeff Huntington: "As we get more and more into this way of thinking and working, I think the process that will become self-regulating. The final result will be a lot better than we have today."

Mr Huntington says the information provided by ordinary people or amateur scientists is not necessarily of inferior quality to data gathered by professional scientists. One source, even if it is scientific, is never enough.

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A Massive Winter Heading for the Northern Hemisphere?

Beyong Landscheidt, 07/25/2010 - 01:25 by Geoff Sharp

The winters of the past two years have been noticeably colder. The northern hemisphere in particular has experienced record cold, record snow and a rebuilding of the Arctic sea ice extent. The southern hemisphere this winter has also seen record low temperatures in South America which is resulting in many hundreds of deaths (human and livestock).

There are a number of players involved which can be attributed to this cooling trend and when they come together they are capable of dropping the world's temperatures by a significant amount.

Above image courtesy of Don Easterbrook, click on image for link.

Perhaps the most important player is the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO) which is a hot and cold ocean temperature cycle in the Pacific of about 30 years. The world's temperature trend very closely matches this cycle which has the potential to override solar activity of the day. The last major PDO cooling event was between 1946 and 1976 which experienced the highest solar cycle on record (SC19) followed by a low cycle (SC20). The deepest cold of this era was recorded when both the PDO and low solar activity teamed up, which is right where we are again today with perhaps a greater influence from the solar side with my predicted imminent grand minimum.

New research is suggesting the solar influence on climate/weather is not just about the overall heat output of the Sun which varies very little, but more about the atmospheric effects from extreme ultraviolet radiation (EUV). EUV can vary by as much as 16% over the solar cycle and this last solar minimum has seen the levels a lot lower than the previous solar minimum. EUV does it's thing in the upper atmosphere where it heats the Thermosphere and also creates Ozone, currently NASA is reporting the lowest recorded height of the Thermosphere and is at a loss at explaining all of the contributing factors. Others like Mike Lockwood are linking lower UV rates with changes in the polar jet streams that form a blocking effect on the normally warmer winds that occur in the northern hemisphere winter.

Aside from other ocean oscillations the ENSOpattern has a large short term effect on our climate/weather system. We are just coming out of a rather warm El Nino cycle and current observations are showing the possible impact of a very strong La Nina cooling pattern taking shape.

The La Nina phase is now official with the Australian BOM records showing all the major indicators heading into continued La Nina conditions. Of particular interest is the sub surface temperatures in the Pacific showing a large area 4 deg C under normal.

Another oscillation called the Antarctic Oscillation (AAO) is showing its highest readings since records began in 1979, during the strong 1999 and 2008 La Ninas the AAO was also high.

The cooling phase of the PDO is just beginning and should reduce the strength and frequency of future El Ninos and add extra punch and frequency to upcoming La Ninas.

Joe Bastardi from Accuweather who is an avid follower of this site is also predicting the same cooling trend, he also adds the possible cooling effects that could result from impending volcanic eruptions.

So the stage is set for one of the most interesting natural experiments, nearly all the cool players are in place with the exception of the Atlantic Oscillation still not in its cool phase. I predict the extra boost from my predicted solar grand minimum along with the current oceanic conditions the next northern winter will experience conditions similar to the Little Ice Age (1250-1850).

The test is in place...will the so called "greenhouse effect" brought about by man made CO2 have any bearing on the upcoming northern hemisphere winter?

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Greenpeace activists close down BP stations in London

BBC News, 27 July 2010 Last updated at 07:41 GMT

BP petrol stations in central London have been shut down by environmental activists.

Greenpeace said it wanted the
company to adopt greener policies

Campaign group Greenpeace claimed it had shut off the fuel supplies to all stations in the area. The oil company said about 20 had been closed.

BP said activists stopped the flow of fuel by flipping safety switches on forecourts, then removing them to prevent the petrol stations reopening.

Greenpeace said it wanted the company to adopt greener energy policies.

A BP spokesman said the petrol stations would be reopened as soon as it was safe to do so.

He described the stunt as "an irresponsible and childish act which is interfering with safety systems".

Logo changed

Greenpeace said the protest was being held to urge Bob Dudley, who will take over from outgoing BP chief executive Tony Hayward from October, to move away from "his predecessor's obsession with high-risk, environmentally-reckless sources of oil".

At one station in Camden, north London, Greenpeace climbers replaced BP's logo with a new version showing the green "sunflower" disappearing into a sea of oil.

At others, protesters put up signs saying: "Closed. Moving beyond petroleum." Greenpeace said the safety switches will be returned.

The organisation's executive director John Sauven said: "The moment has come for BP to move beyond oil.

"We've shut down all of BP's stations in London to give the new boss a chance to come up with a better plan.

"They're desperate for us to believe they're going 'beyond petroleum'.

"Well now's the time to prove it."

Robert Dudley, will replace Tony Hayward as BP's chief executive officer, effective October 1

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Indigenous groups occupy Brazil hydro-electric plant

BBC News, 26 July 2010 Last updated at 16:26 GMT

Indigenous protesters in the Brazilian Amazon have occupied the site of a hydro-electric plant they say has been built on an ancient burial ground.

Some 300 protesters took over the power plant in Mato Grosso state on Sunday, initially preventing 100 workers from leaving, local media reported.

They want compensation and have demanded talks with the company and government officials.

The plant is one of several being constructed in the Amazon region.

The protesters, from several tribes and armed with bows and arrows, occupied the power plant site early on Sunday.

An estimated 100 construction workers were unable to leave, but there were no reports of any violence or injuries.

Later reports on Monday said the protesters had allowed the workers to leave, with several company officials taking their place.

The plant is being built on the Aripuana river, some 400km (250 miles) north of the Mato Grosso state capital, Cuiaba.

It is the first phase of a hydro-electric project there and is expected to start operations by January 2011.

'Cultural impact'

The Indians want compensation for the construction of the plant, saying it has destroyed an ancient burial ground and archaeological site.

"This site is 30km from our reserve and has caused great cultural and social impact in our community, not to mention environmental damage," Aledeci Arara, a tribal leader, told the G1 news portal.

The plant's manager, Paulo Rogerio Novaes, said the indigenous protesters were seeking better living conditions, demands the government should address.

"The company has never refused to do something for the community, but we are awaiting a study from Funai, which is analysing what should be done," he said, referring to the government's indigenous affairs agency.

About 80% of the energy in Brazil comes from hydro-electric dams and the government has been pushing ahead with the construction of new plants.

New technology generates electricity from exhaust gases

RNW, 26 July 2010 - 10:44am

A Dutch company has developed a device which recycles unused exhaust heat. The Tri-O-Gen ORC converts residual heat into electricity using the Organic Rankine Cycle.

This cycle first converts all kinds of residual heat into vapour. This expands in a turbine connected to an electric generator. The system uses no fuel except for exhaust gases or other sources of residual heat which would otherwise disappear into the atmosphere.

The installation can improve the electrical output of an engine or gas turbine by 20 percent - a huge improvement on previous methods which were limited to increases measured in tenths of a percent. It requires minimal maintenance and has no adverse effects on the environment.

The device is the result of nine years of development, experiment and sustainability testing in collaboration with the Technological University of Delft, the TNO research institute and the National Aerospace Laboratory.

The output of a single ORC is enough to meet the consumption of 300 households.

Tri-O-Gen calculates that if all the unused heat in the Netherlands were converted into electricity this way, the country would need one less coal-fired generator.

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Miraculous escape for driver as car falls 20ft into sinkhole at traffic lights during storm

Daily Mail, By MAIL FOREIGN SERVICE, 24th July 2010

He's thanking his lucky stars that he was pulled out alive.

Yet, miraculously, the driver of this SUV only suffered minor cuts and bruises when his vehicle plummeted 20ft into a sinkhole as he approached traffic lights.

Lance Treankler was driving his black Cadillac Escalade during torrential rains in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, yesterday, when the road opened up beneath him.

Gaping hole: A Cadillac Escalade sits at the bottom of a sinkhole in Milwaukee after a section of road collapsed during torrential rain yesterday. (Enlarge)

'The road just went out from under me,' Mr Treankler said.

'When I landed, my head snapped back. I went unconscious for a few seconds.

'When I looked up, I saw water run over me.'

Mr Treankler was rescued by a passer-by, 46-year-old Mark Pawlik, who was walking along when he saw the vehicle disappear and a traffic light land on its roof.

Mr Pawlik said: 'The Escalade just went "wham". Everything went down.

'The power line went like "pow" and then I think it was sewer water was just pouring into the hole.'

The 20-foot-deep, 40-foot-wide sinkhole formed when a manhole collapsed, and will require several weeks to repair, a city spokesman said.

Cordoned off: The driver, Lance Treankler, was rescued by a passer-by and suffered minor cuts and bruises. (Enlarge)

Wisconsin's governor declared a state of emergency yesterday after storms flooded homes and opened sinkholes in Milwaukee and closed the city's main airport.

Runways were inundated at the city's General Mitchell International Airport, which was shut down temporarily.

The airport, which handled nearly eight million passengers last year, shut on Thursday night as storms dumped 14cm of rain on the city. One rain gauge in the suburb of Shorewood recorded nearly 30cm of water.

Governor Jim Doyle said:'Yesterday, Milwaukee saw what may be record rainfall.'

Dam fails in eastern Iowa, causing massive flooding

CNN, By the CNN Wire Staff, July 24, 2010 5:08 p.m. EDT

STORY HIGHLIGHTS

• A dam has failed in eastern Iowa
• The breach has forced residents to flee the area
• The breach was caused by "massive rain," officials say

(CNN) -- A dam on an eastern Iowa lake suffered a "catastrophic" failure Saturday, sending a massive amount of water into nearby communities and forcing residents to flee, officials said.

The Lake Delhi dam, about 45 miles north of Cedar Rapids, failed as a result of "massive rain -- a very unusually high amount this season," according to Jim Flansburg, communications director for Gov. Chet Culver.

Culver told CNN that nearly 10 inches of rain had recently fallen in a 12-hour period in the area and was "too much water for the dam to hold."

The roads on either side of the dam -- which were part of the dam's containment measures -- apparently gave out as a result of the rainfall, Flansburg told CNN.

The National Weather Service reported a 30-foot-wide gap in the berm alongside the dam.

Video showed massive amounts of water violently gushing from the pool behind the dam into the river below. Nearby homes and buildings were under water up to their eaves.

Evacuation sirens sounded about 1 p.m. (2 p.m. ET) for the approximately 700 residents of Hopkinton, who had about five minutes to flee, Flansburg said.

No injuries were reported.

The town of Monticello, where Culver was meeting with emergency personnel, was also under a flood warning.

Culver activated the National Guard in the area to help with recovery efforts, his office said.

Culver credited the lack of injuries to local officials providing early warning to residents in the flood plain about the possibility of a dam breach.

The governor said such a failure had never happened before

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Smeared

The Jakarta Post, The Associated Press | Sat, 07/24/2010 1:21 PM

In this photo taken on Friday, and released by Greenpeace, a local fisherman works to clean up the oil, which has spread far from the original explosion site in Xingang port, Dalian, northeastern China. The first details emerged Friday on the cause of China's largest reported oil spill, while environmentalists urged the government to do more to warn local residents of potential danger, saying children are playing still off nearby beaches. AP/Greenpeace, Jiang He

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Stars reveal carbon 'spaceballs'

BBC, By Victoria GillScience reporter, 22 July 2010 Last updated at 18:14 GMT

The football-shaped molecules are the largest molecules ever found in space

Scientists have detected the largest molecules ever seen in space, in a cloud of cosmic dust surrounding a distant star.

The football-shaped carbon molecules are known as buckyballs, and were only discovered on Earth 25 years ago when they were made in a laboratory.

These molecules are the "third type of carbon" - with the first two types being graphite and diamond.

The researchers report their findings in the journal Science.

Buckyballs consist of 60 carbon atoms arranged in a three-dimensional sphere. The atoms are linked together in alternating patterns of hexagons and pentagons that, on the molecular scale, look exactly like a football.

They belong to a class of molecules called buckministerfullerenes - named after the architect Richard Buckminister Fuller, who developed the geodesic dome design that they so closely resemble.

The research group, led by Jan Cami from the University of Western Ontario in Canada, made its discovery using Nasa's Spitzer infrared telescope.

Professor Cami and his colleagues were not specifically looking for buckyballs, but spotted their unmistakable infrared "signature".

"They oscillate and vibrate in lots of different ways, and in doing so they interact with infrared light at very specific wavelengths," explained Professor Cami.

When the telescope detected emissions at those wavelengths, Professor Cami knew he was looking a signal from the largest molecules ever found in space.

"Some of my undergraduate students call me a world record holder," he told BBC News. "But I don't think there's a record for that."

The molecules were named
after the developer of the
geodesic dome

The molecules were named after the developer of the geodesic dome

The signal came from a star in the southern hemisphere constellation of Ara, 6,500 light-years away.

Professor Cami said the discovery was perhaps not surprising, but was "very exciting".

"Lots of scientists have expected that they would exist in space, because they are amongst the most stable and durable of materials," he said.

"So once they've formed in space, would be very hard to destroy them.

"But this is clear evidence of an entirely new class of molecule existing there."

The researchers now want to find out what fraction of the Universe's carbon might be "locked up" in these spheres.

They also want to use the known properties of buckyballs to gain a better understanding of physical and chemical processes in space.

The discovery may even help shed light on other unexplained chemical signatures that have already been detected in cosmic dust.

Third way

Back on Earth, the discovery of buckyballs' existence was also accidental. Researchers were attempting to simulate conditions in the atmospheres of ageing, carbon-rich giant stars, in which chains of carbon had been detected.

"The experiments were set up to make those long carbon chains, and then something unexpected came out - these soccer ball type molecules, which just looked weird," said Professor Cami.

"And now it turns out that those conditions that were deliberately created in a laboratory actually occur in space too - we just had to look in the right place."

Sir Harry Kroto, now at Florida State University in the US, shared the 1996 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for the discovery of buckyballs.

He commented: "This most exciting breakthrough provides convincing evidence that the buckyball has, as I long suspected, existed since time immemorial in the dark recesses of our galaxy.

"I think of the buckyball as being like Orson Welles' mysterious character in The Third Man, revealing itself only fleetingly."

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