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We've been taking a closer look at plastics and the plastic waste that's showing up all over the world. Global plastic production has grown to 420 million tons in 2015, and some plastics will last for centuries or even longer. NPR most recently published a story looking at efforts in the Philippines to hold major brands accountable for the plastic waste from their products and another story profiling two teenage sisters from Indonesia who've been campaigning to ban plastic bags.
Here we are ready to go at 1 PM (ET, 17 UT)! Follow Chris and Rebecca or the NPR Science desk on Twitter, and ask us anything!
It is fantastic enough to think that all life shares the same DNA/RNA. Did these nucleic acids start it all off in primordial times or do we know if they have evolved themselves as life complexity grew?
So I've recently come across these graphs on some of these global warming conspiracy websites. https://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/04/11/methane-the-irrelevant-greenhouse-gas/
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Atmospheric_Transmission.png
They seem to show that Methane has pretty small absorption peaks in the terrestrial radiation spectrum compared to something like CO2 or water vapor. Since it's also much less prevalent in the atmosphere it seems unintuitive that it should have such a disproportionately large global warming potential(Over 28 the GWP of CO2 according to the EPA website).
So what's going on here? Does Methane have other peaks in it's spectrum outside the range of the graphs that account for it's high warming effect? Are there other factors our models need to take into account to properly describe the heat trapping abilities of gases in the atmosphere? Am I misunderstanding what global warming potential actually means? Are the graphs just wrong, or incorrectly labelled/interpreted?
The title says the most of it. I'm in the Midwest right on the Mississippi and to say that its cold out is something of an understatement. I went for a quick walk by the river to see what all the hype was about (I'm from the West coast originally and I've never been in temps anywhere near this cold).
I was outside for all of twenty minutes as tightly and hotly bundled as a human can be and my eyelashes froze and I thought I'd freeze solid if I had to stay outside for an hour. I could hardly see where I was going while I was walking into the wind I had to keep blinking and wiping the ice away.
All the while I saw dozen of birds out flying around, in the few patches of river that hadn't frozen yet and flying in the air above. It was -20 give or take when I went out, and that's peanuts compared to what it was overnight, but these birds clearly survived that. How do they manage it?
I guess for clarification, I'm talking about gulls, bald eagles and birds I am fairly certain were ducks.
Edit: Front page of r/AskScience? Alright! Thanks everybody for the responses, I can tell I'm not the only one curious about this.
AskScience AMA Series: Drs. Eric Wilberg, Alan Turner, and Chris Brochu - Ecological shifts in crocodiles and their extinct relatives
Groundhog Day
Ask Anything Wednesday - Physics, Astronomy, Earth and Planetary Science
Darwin Day
Ask Anything Wednesday - Engineering, Mathematics, Computer science
