Cher: Spending One Day in Beijing is Now the Equivalent of Smoking 40 Cigarettes

The Sierra Club and RYOT launched their second joint virtual reality video experience yesterday, viewable on the RYOT-VR mobile app, Facebook 360 and YouTube 360. The immersive experience, narrated by legendary singer/actress Cher, highlights the dirty, dangerous effects of coal pollution from power plants and the industries that buy their power China.
The video focuses particular attention on a small group of 21 individuals who are responsible for more than 10 percent of China's CO2 emissions. Just one day before the start of the Paris conference, Beijing was shrouded by smog again forcing the authorities to issue their highest smog warning so far this year, underscoring the need for China to act immediately.
“Spending one day in Beijing is now the equivalent of smoking 40 cigarettes," Cher says during the video. “Poisonous air causes the premature deaths of more than 4,000 people each day and two birth defects a minute. The Chinese people suffer in heartbreaking ways at the hands of these 21 polluters. The Chinese people are bound to lives in masks, beneath apocalyptic, smog-filled skies."
The video aims to not only highlight the devastating effects of coal use on the climate and air of China and the world, but also to urge Chinese leaders to take meaningful action. As part of the launch, the video will be launched by RYOT in Paris during the ongoing COP21 negotiations.
“China now produces more CO2 emissions than the U.S. and Europe combined, which is why it is more important than ever that we turn our shared commitments into action in Paris," said Michael Brune, Sierra Club executive director. “Together, the U.S. and China must leave coal and other dirty fuels behind and turn our commitments into even further climate and clean energy action, because no country is immune from climate change and no country can meet the challenge alone."
“Virtual reality is the perfect way to tell this important story," said Molly Swenson, COO of RYOT and an executive producer of the film. “It's one thing to hear about the dramatic levels of air pollution, but being transported into a place where people live with it every day makes you understand the headlines. Virtual reality can help make sure everyone is aware of how critical action on climate change is. If you woke up every day and had to breathe this air wouldn't you want leaders in Paris this week to step-up and help you?"
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By Katherine Kornei
Clear-cutting a forest is relatively easy—just pick a tree and start chopping. But there are benefits to more sophisticated forest management. One technique—which involves repeatedly harvesting smaller trees every 30 or so years but leaving an upper story of larger trees for longer periods (60, 90, or 120 years)—ensures a steady supply of both firewood and construction timber.
A Pattern in the Rings
<p>The <a href="https://www.encyclopedia.com/science/dictionaries-thesauruses-pictures-and-press-releases/coppice-standards-0" target="_blank">coppice-with-standards</a> management practice produces a two-story forest, said <a href="https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Bernhard_Muigg" target="_blank">Bernhard Muigg</a>, a dendrochronologist at the University of Freiburg in Germany. "You have an upper story of single trees that are allowed to grow for several understory generations."</p><p>That arrangement imprints a characteristic tree ring pattern in a forest's upper story trees (the "standards"): thick rings indicative of heavy growth, which show up at regular intervals as the surrounding smaller trees are cut down. "The trees are growing faster," said Muigg. "You can really see it with your naked eye."</p><p>Muigg and his collaborators characterized that <a href="https://ltrr.arizona.edu/about/treerings" target="_blank">dendrochronological pattern</a> in 161 oak trees growing in central Germany, one of the few remaining sites in Europe with actively managed coppice-with-standards forests. They found up to nine cycles of heavy growth in the trees, the oldest of which was planted in 1761. The researchers then turned to a historical data set — more than 2,000 oak <a href="https://eos.org/articles/podcast-discovering-europes-history-through-its-timbers" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">timbers from buildings and archaeological sites</a> in Germany and France dating from between 300 and 2015 — to look for a similar pattern.</p>A Gap of 500 Years
<p>The team found wood with the characteristic coppice-with-standards tree ring pattern dating to as early as the 6th century. That was a surprise, Muigg and his colleagues concluded, because the first mention of this forest management practice in historical documents occurred only roughly 500 years later, in the 13th century.</p><p>It's probable that forest management practices were not well documented prior to the High Middle Ages (1000–1250), the researchers suggested. "Forests are mainly mentioned in the context of royal hunting interests or donations," said Muigg. Dendrochronological studies are particularly important because they can reveal information not captured by a sparse historical record, he added.</p><p>These results were <a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-78933-8" target="_blank">published in December in <em>Scientific Reports</em></a>.</p><p>"It's nice to see the longevity and the history of coppice-with-standards," said <a href="https://www.teagasc.ie/contact/staff-directory/s/ian-short/" target="_blank">Ian Short</a>, a forestry researcher at Teagasc, the Agriculture and Food Development Authority in Ireland, not involved in the research. This technique is valuable because it promotes conservation and habitat biodiversity, Short said. "In the next 10 or 20 years, I think we'll see more coppice-with-standards coming back into production."</p><p>In the future, Muigg and his collaborators hope to analyze a larger sample of historic timbers to trace how the coppice-with-standards practice spread throughout Europe. It will be interesting to understand where this technique originated and how it propagated, said Muigg, and there are plenty of old pieces of wood waiting to be analyzed. "There [are] tons of dendrochronological data."</p><p><em><a href="mailto:katherine.kornei@gmail.com" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Katherine Kornei</a> is a freelance science journalist covering Earth and space science. Her bylines frequently appear in Eos, Science, and The New York Times. Katherine holds a Ph.D. in astronomy from the University of California, Los Angeles.</em></p><p><em>This story originally appeared in <a href="https://eos.org/articles/tree-rings-reveal-how-ancient-forests-were-managed" target="_blank">Eos</a></em> <em>and is republished here as part of Covering Climate Now, a global journalism collaboration strengthening coverage of the climate story.</em></p>Earth's ice is melting 57 percent faster than in the 1990s and the world has lost more than 28 trillion tons of ice since 1994, research published Monday in The Cryosphere shows.
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Noreen Nunez lives in a middle-class neighborhood that rises up a hillside in Trinidad's Tunapuna-Piarco region.