Meanings of My Logo

The main theme of my logo is " Deforestation " .

House : I use the shape of a house in my logo to deliver the message of planting more trees to every family around the whole world and to the members of those family. At the same time, house is also signifies home or protection, it also indicates the message of protect and love our nature.

Green : Green is the color for trees and at the same time also been signified as the color of nature.

Latte : Latte is a color that represents soil color of the earth. I put the tree on this part to represents a tree being planted on the ground and we should protect them well now and forever.

Orange : Orange or red is give the meaning of heat or hot. I fill the part of the earth this color to enhance the messages of global warming and that the general temperature of the whole world have increased. I used buildings like features to represents the earth or can also symbolises concrete high buildings of the city. We all know that when more and more skyscrapers are built, it indicates that more and more trees were chopped down in order to clear the land which is one of the causes of global warming.

Blue : Blue represents water. I used it in my logo to represents the part of sea that cover the earth. The blue part of my logo represents the sea. As we can see, I applied wavy lines to enhance the features of sea. As we all knows, when global warming occurs, many of the giant icebergs in the Artic and Antartic have melt away due to the rise in global temperature and this has lead to the rising of sea level all around the world.

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PRODUCTION OF MY LOGO

1 . Firstly, I draw my logo on a piece of A4 paper and use a camera to snap a picture of it and upload it onto my blog.

2. Next, I open the pencil sketch in Adobe Illustrator and name it as Pencil Sketch.

3. I open up a new layer above the which I name it as Pen layer tool and trace along the pencil line of my rough sketch.

4. To start fill in colors for the tree, I set up a new layer for the tree and name it as Tree. Then I made a path by using Direct Selection Tool to make selection along the tree line. I fill the tree with gradient green color which the green color goes from deep to light green.



5. Then, I set up another layer which is the layer House and fill it with very light brown.

6. Next, I set up another layer as Earth layer, and fill it with gradient color which goes from Red to Orange and then to Yellow color.

7. For the next step, I create a new layer and name it as the Sea layer which I fill with gradient color from Deep Blue to Light Blue.

8. This is the final product of my logo.

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Deforestation

Forest Holocaust

The statistics paint a grim picture. According to the World Resources Institute, more than 80 percent of the Earth’s natural forests already have been destroyed. Up to 90 percent of West Africa’s coastal rain forests have disappeared since 1900. Brazil and Indonesia, which contain the world’s two largest surviving regions of rain forest, are being stripped at an alarming rate by logging, fires, and land-clearing for agriculture and cattle-grazing.

Among the obvious consequences of deforestation is the loss of living space. Seventy percent of the Earth’s land animals and plants reside in forests. But the harm doesn’t stop there. Rain forests help generate rainfall in drought-prone countries elsewhere. Studies have shown that destruction of rain forests in such West African countries as Nigeria, Ghana, and Côte d’Ivoire may have caused two decades of droughts in the interior of Africa, with attendant hardship and famine.

Deforestation may have catastrophic global effects as well. Trees are natural consumers of carbon dioxide—one of the greenhouse gases whose buildup in the atmosphere contributes to global warming. Destruction of trees not only removes these “carbon sinks,” but tree burning and decomposition pump into the atmosphere even more carbon dioxide, along with methane, another major greenhouse gas.

UN warn for negative effects of biofuels
Biofuels like ethanol can help reduce global warming and create jobs for the rural poor, but the benefits may be offset by serious environmental problems and increased food prices for the hungry, the United Nations concluded Tuesday in its first major report on bioenergy. Biofuels, which are made from corn, palm oil, sugar cane and other agricultural products, have been seen by many as a cleaner and cheaper way to meet the world‘s soaring energy needs than with greenhouse-gas emitting fossil fuels. But environmentalists have warned that the biofuel craze can do as much or more damage to the environment as dirty fossil fuels - a concern reflected throughout the report, which was being released Tuesday in New York, by U.N.-Energy, a consortium of 20 U.N. agencies and programs. Changes in the carbon content of soils and carbon stocks in forests and peat lands might offset some or all of the benefits of the greenhouse gas reductions, it said. It noted that soaring palm oil demand has already led to the clearing of tropical forests in southeast Asia.


"Liquid biofuel production could threaten the availability of adequate food supplies by diverting land and other productive resources away from food crops," it said, adding that many of those biofuel crops require the best land, lots of water and environment-damaging chemical fertilizers. It suggested that farm co-ops, as well as government subsidies, could help small-scale farmers compete. "More and more, people are realizing that there are serious environmental and serious food security issues involved in biofuels," Greenpeace biofuels expert Jan van Aken said. "There is more to the environment than climate change," he said. "Climate change is the most pressing issue, but you cannot fight climate change by large deforestation in Indonesia."

But with the surge in interest by the private sector, the rise in commodity prices and an awareness of the strain on water supplies that has resulted from biofuel production, "we now have to raise the red flags and say ‘be careful, don‘t go too fast,‘" he said in an interview. That the report exists is something of a miracle, since there has long been opposition among U.N. member states - including OPEC , nuclear and other energy lobbies_ to have any kind of international dialogue on energy. There is for example, no U.N. Millennium Goal for energy, and recent U.N. working documents on sustainable development continue to be very fossil-fuel oriented, Best said. The document is intended for governments to help them craft bioenergy policies that maximize the potential but minimize the negative impacts - even as the technology continues to change. "We can‘t cross our arms and wait to have better data or better methodologies," Best said. "We need to contribute to the discussion, but in a balanced way."

source:http://www.mongabay.com/images/rainforests/deforestation-in-the-amazon.jpg

http://www.nationalgeographic.com/eye/deforestation/effect.html

http://www.energyportal.eu/news/biomass/un-warn-for-negative-effects-of-biofuels.html

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The loss of the ozone layer

Surrounding planet Earth are different atmospheres. Exosphere is a transitional zone that separates Earth from space. Thermosphere and Mesosphere are the adjacent atmospheres as you move towards Earth. Closest to the planet are the Stratosphere and Troposphere, the troposphere being the lowest layer of the atmosphere, the site of our weather, our rain and our wind. Observable phenomena, and knowledge of chemical reactions, have built a large database with regard to ozone depletion. Much is known — the consequences of CFC’s, how ozone is built, how it is destroyed — but theoretical explanations still predominate.
What we do know is the Universe, including the Sun, releases stored energy in a range of alternating electric and magnetic fields. Scientists have named the shortest detectable wavelengths Gamma rays and X-rays. Ultraviolet waves are next on the spectrum:
UVC in the 10 to 290 nanometer band,
UVB, 290 to 320 nanometers,
UVA, 320 to 400 nanometers.

Gasses and particulates destroy ozone
Volcanic emissions are a natural way to destroy ozone. If a volcanic eruption is strong enough it will send particulates and gases into the upper troposphere and stratosphere. Scientists estimate that the Mount Pinatubo eruption in June 1991 had eruption columns at an altitude of 35 kilometers, higher than the average concentration layer of ozone. Adding to this natural effect, two months later the volcanic Mount Hudson in southeast Chile erupted.Volcanic eruptions are a natural phenomenon, a temporary loss of ozone that the Earth life system incorporates into its biosystem.

Carbonyl sulphide is a photochemical reaction of sulphur. It contains organic compounds and was a major factor in causing the stratospheric ozone depletion of 1991/1992. The ozone hole over Antarctica was the largest recorded following the two eruptions.

Recording of ozone has been taking place over the Antarctic for the past fifty years.
Volcanic emission particulates and chemicals are not the only factors involved in ozone depletion.
Chlorine and Bromine are known to be two major causes of recent ozone breakdown.
For instance, when a chlorine radical connects with ozone, it produces oxygen and chlorine oxide, ClO.

This begins a chain reaction where the chlorine oxide quickly releases the chlorine radical — which then attaches itself to another ozone molecule, producing a new oxygen molecule and chlorine oxide molecule, which quickly releases, and so on.
CFCs, halon, hydrochlorofluorocarbons, methyl bromide, methyl chloroform and carbon tetrachloride, all are recognized as manufactured compounds that when released into the atmosphere significantly destroy ozone.
With an increase in biomass burning, industrial, and waste management activities, and the use of fertilizer — tests have shown soil-borne microorganisms produce nitrogen oxides as a decay product — more nitrogen oxides are being released into the atmosphere.
While much of the nitric oxide and nitrogen dioxide returns to the ground, nitrous oxide, commonly known as laughing gas, remains. N2O acts as a greenhouse gas. It also rises into the stratosphere where it is decomposed by UV radiation. Some N2O is converted to NO. Nitrogen oxide reacts catalytically with ozone to produce nitrogen dioxide and oxygen.

Aircraft as they fly around the world emit nitrogen oxides in their exhaust. A chemical process takes place in the wake of the exhaust transforming fumes into particulates. With an increasing number of planes flying near the tropopause, both nitrous oxide, and particulates, become readily available for transfer to the stratosphere. Aircraft exhaust is a factor in Ozone depletion.

source: www.thewe.cc/weplanet/poles/antarcti/ozone.html

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Background Research

Warming Winds, Rising Tides, Bangladesh
Asia's largest rivers, the Ganges and the Bramaputra, join in the world's most extensive delta and flow into the Bay of Bengal. There lies Bangladesh, a nation of 140 million people beset by poverty and the floods of the rivers, and now also affected by rising sea level. Gary Braasch visited to document this threat, traveling by boat south from Dhaka and speaking to villagers, fishermen, and scientists. Already a million people a year are displaced by loss of land along rivers, and indications are this is increasing. Villagers spoke of losing a town mosque to unexpectedly fast erosion, even in a time of good weather in the dryer season. The one meter sea level rise generally predicted if no action is taken about global warming will inundate more than 15 percent of Bangladesh, displacing more than 13 million people and cut into the crucial rice crop. Intruding water will damage the Sundarbans mangrove forest, a world heritage site. The picture on the left shows the fast eroding eastern edge of Bhola Is., Bangladesh.

Warming Winds, Rising Tides: Tuvalu
The 11,000 Tuvaluans live on nine coral atolls totaling 10 square miles scattered over 500,000

square miles of ocean south of the equator and west of the International Dateline. Tuvalu is the smallest of all nations, except for the Vatican. Tuvalu has no industry, burns little petroleum, and creates less carbon pollution than a small town in America. This tiny place nevertheless is on the front line of climate change. The increasing intensity of tropical weather, the increase in
ocean temperatures, and rising sea level -- all documented results of a warming atmosphere -- are making trouble for Tuvalu.

Tuvaluans face the possibility of being among the first climate refugees, although they never use that term. Former assistant Environmental minister and now assistant secretary for Foreign Affairs Paani Laupepa said he felt threatened. "Our whole culture will have to be transplanted."

Sea level rise is the greatest problem. Tuvalu's highest elevation is 4.6 meters -- 15 feet -- but most of it is no more than a meter above the sea. Several times each year the regular lunar cycle of tides, riding on the ever higher mean sea level, brings the Pacific sloshing over onto roads and into neighborhoods. In the center of the larger islands the sea floods out of old barrow pits and even squirts up out of the coral bedrock. Puddles bubble up that eventually cover part of the airport on the main island of Funafuti and inundate homes that are not along the ocean.

This February, the tides were driven against the shore by unusual westerly winds, and there was increasing erosion. The main asphalt road is only about 10 km long, yet it runs right along the lagoon in many places and was covered in water and coral rocks thrown up by the tide. Hundreds of wood frame and corrugated metal roofed homes and several churches, built right on the lagoon, were drenched by the wind waves riding on the higher tides.

The islands are not going to go under immediately. Yet the effects accumulate, year by year. "Even if we are not completely flooded, " said Laupepa, "in 50 to 70 years we face increasingly strong storms and cyclones, changing weather patterns, damage to our coral reefs from higher ocean temperatures, and flooding of all our gardens." Not growing enough food and decreasing fish catch if reefs are damaged would mean "importing more food, more foreign exchange, and more health and diet problems, " he said.

source: http://www.worldviewofglobalwarming.org/pages/rising-seas.html

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