Real Estate // Current

Zombie apocalypse stage 1: Zombie Buildings

While the overall U.S. financial system is showing signs of stability, a rapidly... more

Pericles_Lewnes
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3 days ago
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Reasons to Buy Your First Home

This article can help you decide if you are ready to stop renting and become a homeowner.

Josephine_Trejo
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5 days ago
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Real Estate Reveal New EP Details

With the looming release of their debut self-titled album only a week away, Real... more

CarlosG
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8 days ago
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Investment Property Generates "Phantom Income"

Real estate investors whose properties are worth less than the mortgage amount don't... more

IlyceGlink
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8 days ago
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Ghost Towns in China Prove GDP is a Farce

The fraudulent real estate bubble found a poster child in Lehman investment McAllister... more

WallStCheatSheet
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10 days ago
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Mortgage Refinancing is Up While Home Purchase Applications are Down

Chalk up another point for banks and another strike for citizens in the housing market ...

WallStCheatSheet
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11 days ago
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Walkable Urbanism is the Future of Real Estate

Last week the Urban Land Institute and PriceWaterhouseCoopers released their... more

slovelett
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13 days ago
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Rising Foreclosures: A History of Violence

Foreclosures don't just affect the value of your house, they also threaten our safety ...

WallStCheatSheet
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14 days ago
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Troy Bohlke, of the Westward Fund, Calls USA the Melting Pot of Foreign Investors

In today's USA Today...... more

webgrafix
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18 days ago
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Jason Gilbert Tip 1 – What is an MLO (Master Lease Option)?

To claim your free Manifesto And Blue Prints from Jason Gilbert go to:... more

jguploading
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25 days ago
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2 Bedroom 2 Bathroom Condo for Rent in North Bay Village, Florida

MLS listing for 360 Condo in North Bay Village, Florida

rjeann1
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28 days ago
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Growth of medical-marijuana demand fuels Colorado land rush

Real estate brokers say that Colorado's medical-marijuana law has sparked a land rush,... more

Trypnotik
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28 days ago
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Medical Marijuana Leading To Boon For Many Colorado Real Estate Firms

Real estate brokers say that Colorado's medical-marijuana law has sparked a land rush,... more

atomiclegion
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29 days ago
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Apartment in Hong Kong goes for $56.5 million dollars

As China’s economic recovery has gathered force this autumn, wealthy Chinese are... more

Chod77
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1 month ago
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Troy Bohlke... 'Ghost town' coming to life in N. Phoenix

Clint Bolick likes to call CityNorth "a ghost town." Bolick, attorney for the... more

webgrafix
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1 month ago
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Number of wealthy Russians buying British country homes doubles - Telegraph

The number of wealthy Russians buying luxury country homes in Britain has doubled... more

billyg_53
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1 month ago
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Post-human Earth: How the planet will recover from us

WHEN Nobel prize-winning atmospheric chemist Paul Crutzen coined the word Anthropocene around 10 years ago, he gave birth to a powerful idea: that human activity is now affecting the Earth so profoundly that we are entering a new geological epoch.

The Anthropocene has yet to be accepted as a geological time period, but if it is, it may turn out to be the shortest - and the last. It is not hard to imagine the epoch ending just a few hundred years after it started, in an orgy of global warming and overconsumption.

Let's suppose that happens. Humanity's ever-expanding footprint on the natural world leads, in two or three hundred years, to ecological collapse and a mass extinction. Without fossil fuels to support agriculture, humanity would be in trouble. "A lot of things have to die, and a lot of those things are going to be people," says Tony Barnosky, a palaeontologist at the University of California, Berkeley. In this most pessimistic of scenarios, society would collapse, leaving just a few hundred thousand eking out a meagre existence in a new Stone Age.

Whether our species would survive is hard to predict, but what of the fate of the Earth itself? It is often said that when we talk about "saving the planet" we are really talking about saving ourselves: the planet will be just fine without us. But would it? Or would an end-Anthropocene cataclysm damage it so badly that it becomes a sterile wasteland?

The only way to know is to look back into our planet's past. Neither abrupt global warming nor mass extinction are unique to the present day. The Earth has been here before. So what can we expect this time?

Take greenhouse warming. Climatologists' biggest worry is the possibility that global warming could push the Earth past two tipping points that would make things dramatically worse. The first would be the thawing of carbon-rich peat locked in permafrost. As the Arctic warms, the peat could decompose and release trillions of tonnes of carbon into the atmosphere - perhaps exceeding the 3 trillion tonnes that humans could conceivably emit from fossil fuels. The second is the release of methane stored as hydrate in cold, deep ocean sediments. As the oceans warm and the methane - itself a potent greenhouse gas - enters the atmosphere, it contributes to still more warming and thus accelerates the breakdown of hydrates in a vicious circle.

"If we were to blow all the fossil fuels into the atmosphere, temperatures would go up to the point where both of these reservoirs of carbon would be released," says oceanographer David Archer of the University of Chicago. No one knows how catastrophic the resulting warming might be.

That's why climatologists are looking with increasing interest at a time 55 million years ago called the Palaeocene-Eocene thermal maximum, when temperatures rose by up to 9 °C in a few thousand years - roughly equivalent to the direst forecasts for present-day warming. "It's the most recent time when there was a really rapid warming," says Peter Wilf, a palaeobotanist at Pennsylvania State University in University Park. "And because it was fairly recent, there are a lot of rocks still around that record the event."

By measuring ocean sediments deposited during the thermal maximum, geochemist James Zachos of the University of California, Santa Cruz, has found that the warming coincided with a huge spike in atmospheric CO2. Between 5 and 9 trillion tonnes of carbon entered the atmosphere in no more than 20,000 years (Nature, vol 432, p 495). Where could such a huge amount have come from?

Volcanic activity cannot account for the carbon spike, Zachos says. Instead, he blames peat decomposition, which would have happened not from melting permafrost - it was too warm for permafrost - but through climatic drying. The fossil record of plants from this time testifies to just such a drying episode.

Continued at link . . .WHEN Nobel prize-winning atmospheric chemist Paul Crutzen coined the word Anthropocene... more