Category: Environment & Weather

Are Cyclists Destroying the Earth?

Karl T. Ulrich, a professor at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, has put forth a provocative theory. Traveling by bicycle, he argued in a recent paper, may cause more environmental harm than driving around in pollution-spewing, fossil-fuel-swallowing cars and sport utility vehicles.

How can this be? Bicyclists are healthier, he wrote, so they live longer. Over their lifetimes, they consume more energy than they save.

The New York Times

Underarm Deodorant

Not everybody uses it, and this is a very important point. Even with just a billion people using it, a few decades back … and some of those billion using roll-on deodorant … the emission of chlorofluorocarbons still made a giant hole in Earth’s ozone layer.

And it was widening.

The global community was alarmed and took action and now three things are true:

* More people than ever use deodorant (praise the Lord)

* None of it emits chlorofluorocarbons (an alternative propellant was found — likewise for refrigerants)

* The hole in the ozone layer gradually disappeared (but you should still use SPF 15 or higher this weekend)

Okay? Do you see my point?

No?

My point is that if a little Right Guard can threaten our atmospheric equilibrium, isn’t it just really dumb to bet that the literally trillions of pounds of carbon dioxide we dump into the air each year will have no effect? Be honest: don’t you use more gasoline than deodorant?

— Andrew Tobias

First Half of 2006 Sets Heat Record

Heat MapThe average temperatures of the first half of 2006 were the highest ever recorded for the continental United States, scientists announced today.

Temperatures for January through June were 3.4 degrees Fahrenheit above the 20th-century average.

Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, Nebraska and Missouri experienced record warmth for the period, while no state experienced cooler-than-average temperatures, reported scientists from NOAA’s National Climatic Data Center in Asheville, N.C.

LiveScience.com

Wildfire Increase Linked to Climate

All those warnings from Smokey Bear and it wasn’t really even our fault.

Rising temperatures throughout the West have stoked an increase in large wildfires over the past 34 years as spring comes earlier, mountain snows melt sooner and forests dry to tinder, scientists reported Thursday.

More than land-use changes or forest management practices, the changing climate was the most important factor driving a four-fold increase in the average number of large wildfires in the Western United States since 1970, the researchers concluded.
…

“I think this is the equivalent for the West of what hurricanes are for the Gulf Coast,” said fire ecologist Steven Running at the University of Montana in Missoula, who was not connected with the research. “This is an illustration of a natural disaster that is accelerating in intensity as a result, I feel, of global warming.”

All told, the average fire season has grown more than two months longer, while fires have become more frequent, longer-burning and harder to extinguish. They destroy 6.5 times more land than in the 1970s, the researchers found.

Los Angeles Times

Build an ark

An astonishing rainstorm at Casa NewMexiKen this morning around 3. And, by my count, three lightning strikes way too close. You know, “One Mississippi, two Miss … oh damn, that was close.” NewMexiKen really doesn’t like lightning since my house was struck and set on fire in 1995.

Anyway, the rain was falling so fast and furiously I began to wonder if Lowe’s carried gopher wood.1 Then I panicked when I couldn’t remember the conversion from feet and inches to cubits (did we learn that in school?). And would it be OK if I accidentally on purpose forgot to bring two scorpions and two rattlesnakes. (But I did remember I’d only need one New Mexico whiptail.) It was really raining!

But it slowed to nothing much after 25-30 minutes. The arroyo2 next to my house is still running deep and fast, but things are returning to normal otherwise.

1 Genesis 6

  1. Make thee an ark of gopher wood; rooms shalt thou make in the ark, and shalt pitch it within and without with pitch.
  2. And this is the fashion which thou shalt make it of: The length of the ark shall be three hundred cubits, the breadth of it fifty cubits, and the height of it thirty cubits.

2 “Arroyo” is Spanish for concrete ditch.

Outlook tonight: dark, with gradual brightening by morning

Here’s the current weather warning for northern and central New Mexico:

SEVERE THUNDERSTORMS ARE NOT ANTICIPATED TODAY OR TONIGHT. HOWEVER…
STRONG THUNDERSTORMS CAN BE EXPECTED ACROSS PORTIONS OF THE STATE
TODAY WITH HAIL UP TO ONE HALF INCH IN DIAMETER…WINDS UP
TO 55 MPH…AND HEAVY TO VERY HEAVY RAIN. RAINS WILL RESULT IN
LOCALIZED FLOODING OF ARROYOS AND SMALL STREAMS…AS WELL AS SOME
LOW LYING AREAS AND STREETS IN THE URBAN AREAS.

Hail to half an inch, 55 mph winds, very heavy rain and flooding. But severe storms are NOT anticipated.

“Severe” thunderstorms must include frogs, boils, locusts and death of the first born.

Which Reminds me of a Story…

Functional Ambivalent pokes a little fun at NewMexiKen —

Best blog buddy NewMexiKen is celebrating actual rain after months or years or maybe decades of little or none in his home town of Albquerque, New Mexico. Which, I feel obligated to point out, is in the middle of a desert. Still the normally sensible NewMexiKen seems shocked and disturbed that it doesn’t rain there.

but goes on to tell a funny story about L.A. TV weathermen. (Whose ranks once included Pat Sajak.)

A Perfect Storm Descends on the Nation’s Capital

In the White House, only hours after that old elm had fallen, Bush was addressed by a reporter, thus: “I know that you are not planning to see Al Gore’s new movie, but do you agree with the premise that global warming is a real and significant threat to the planet?”

“I have said consistently,” answered Bush, “that global warming is a serious problem. There’s a debate over whether it’s manmade or naturally caused. We ought to get beyond that debate and start implementing the technologies necessary … to be good stewards of the environment, become less dependent on foreign sources of oil…”

The President — as far as the extensive and repeated researches of this and many other professional journalists, as well as all scientists credible on this subject, can find — is wrong on one crucial and no doubt explosive issue. When he said — as he also did a few weeks ago — that “There’s a debate over whether it’s manmade or naturally caused” … well, there really is no such debate.

At least none above what is proverbially called “the flat earth society level.”

Not one scientist of any credibility on this subject has presented any evidence for some years now that counters the massive and repeated evidence — gathered over decades and come at in dozens of ways by all kinds of professional scientists around the world — that the burning of fossil fuels is raising the world’s average temperature.

Or that counters the findings that the burning of these fuels is doing so in a way that is very dangerous for mankind, that will almost certainly bring increasingly devastating effects in the coming decades.

One small group of special interest businesses leaders — those of some fossil fuel companies — have been well documented by journalist Ross Gelbspan and others to have been fighting a PR campaign for 15 years to keep the American public confused about the wide and deep scientific consensus on this.

They’ve aimed, as Gelbspan explains, to keep us thinking that (to borrow the president’s words this morning) “There’s a debate over whether it’s manmade or naturally caused” — though no open and thorough journalism this reporter knows of can find any such thing.

Bill Blakemore, ABC News

Greenland’s Ice Sheet Is Slip-Sliding Away

Excerpt from a report in the Los Angeles Times:

The Greenland ice sheet — two miles thick and broad enough to blanket an area the size of Mexico — shapes the world’s weather, matched in influence by only Antarctica in the Southern Hemisphere.

It glows like milky mother-of-pearl. The sheen of ice blends with drifts of cloud as if snowbanks are taking flight.

In its heartland, snow that fell a quarter of a million years ago is still preserved. Temperatures dip as low as 86 degrees below zero. Ground winds can top 200 mph. Along the ice edge, meltwater rivers thread into fraying brown ropes of glacial outwash, where migrating herds of caribou and musk ox graze.

The ice is so massive that its weight presses the bedrock of Greenland below sea level, so all-concealing that not until recently did scientists discover that Greenland actually might be three islands.

Should all of the ice sheet ever thaw, the meltwater could raise sea level 21 feet and swamp the world’s coastal cities, home to a billion people. It would cause higher tides, generate more powerful storm surges and, by altering ocean currents, drastically disrupt the global climate.

Climate experts have started to worry that the ice cap is disappearing in ways that computer models had not predicted.

By all accounts, the glaciers of Greenland are melting twice as fast as they were five years ago, even as the ice sheets of Antarctica — the world’s largest reservoir of fresh water — also are shrinking, researchers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the University of Kansas reported in February.

Key quote: “The amount of freshwater ice dumped into the Atlantic Ocean has almost tripled in a decade.”

Best line of the day, so far

“Like many people, I’d been on the fence about seeing it, mostly because I almost prefer to remain unaware of horrible things beyond my control.”

Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez, who goes on to say, “I was wrong on two counts. ‘An Inconvenient Truth,’ while terrifying, is not depressing. It is a celebration of our planet … I was also wrong to think global warming is beyond my control.”

Science homework

This evening, just as the sun sets, take note of its direction in relation to neighborhood landmarks — trees, other houses, water towers, what have you. Write it down, make a diagram, or take a photo.

We’ll come back to this in September and December.

(Alternative assignment: Same, only at sunrise.)

Solstice

In the northern hemisphere, summer begins at 6:26 AM MDT (12:26 UTC).

It’s the longest day of the year for locations north of the equator. The further north, the more daylight. That means 14 hours and 31 minutes of daylight in Albuquerque, 14 hours and 59 minutes in Denver, Colorado, 15 hours and 43 minutes in Billings, Montana, and 21 hours 48 minutes in Fairbanks, Alaska.

The United States Naval Observatory can tell you the duration of daylight today in your location (U.S. only).

Sunrise at Stonhenge

Sunrise Solstice at Stonehenge (2005)