Archive for August, 2006

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A Looming Threat to World Food Supply?

Thursday, August 31st, 2006

By David L. Brown

What would happen if our world, supporting a bloated and still growing population on the slender legs of a few monocultural crops, should be faced with a pandemic? No, I’m not talking about avian flu or any other animal or human disease, but a potential pandemic of plant disease that could attack a major food source.

According to recent statistics, cereal grain crops — primarily wheat, rice and corn (also known as maize) — provide 47 percent of the calories consumed by human beings worldwide, and 42 percent of protein. That’s right, cereal grains and mostly from just three crops, account for nearly half of the nutrition that supports more than 6.5 billion people.

And because of the intensive plant breeding that has produced the high-yielding varieties that made the Green Revolution possible, most native plants with their differing qualities of disease resistance have been replaced by one-size-fits-all varieties. That leaves a disproportionate amount of the worldwide grain crop potentially susceptible to a pandemic of disease that could spread from nation to nation with disastrous effects.

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Posted in Agriculture Issues, Disease and Pandemics | 2 Comments »

Ozone “Cure” Feeding Warming “Disease”

Wednesday, August 23rd, 2006

by Val Germann

In 1989, most of the world’s nations signed on to the Montreal Protocol and agreed to phase out a class of chemicals called CFCs that were doing serious damage to the Earth’s protective ozone layer. What was not widely reported at the time was the fact that CFCs were also very powerful greenhouse gases, thousands of times more effective per molecule compared to CO2. It also went mostly unreported that the replacements for those bad old CFCs, called HCFCs, were just as powerful greenhouse producers as the materials they were to replace. But they were allowed under the treaty because they were cheap and so would soften the economic blow (and any political blow-back) for most of the world’s consumers and politicians. But the resulting price has been high where global warming is concerned, as is pointed out forcefully in a recent article on the NATIONAL EXAMINBER website:

The chemicals that replaced CFCs are better for the ozone layer, but do little to help global warming. These chemicals, too, act as a reflective layer in the atmosphere that traps heat like a greenhouse.

That effect is at odds with the intent of a second treaty, drawn up in Kyoto, Japan, in 1997 by the same countries behind the Montreal pact. In fact, the volume of greenhouse gases created as a result of the Montreal agreement’s phaseout of CFCs is two times to three times the amount of global-warming carbon dioxide the Kyoto agreement is supposed to eliminate.

Yes, it’s true, the Montreal treaty has allowed the skyrocketing use of HCFCs world wide, the cumulative effect overwhelming any present benefit of Kyoto, even if that treaty were being actually enforced. As for the future, perhaps its better to ignore it because the developing world is building air-conditioned cities and automobiles at a fantastic rate.

And every ounce and every pound of the HCFCs that go into those AC units will eventually escape, out into the troposphere, there to contribute mightily to the overall greehouse effect on our planet.

Read the entire article here.

Posted in Climate Change, Melting Planet | Comments Off

French “End of Coal” Lasts Two Years

Tuesday, August 22nd, 2006

by Val Germann

If ever there were a sign that we’re headed for an energy crunch of some kind it was the news that France, which in 2004 ended coal mining with a flourish, has decided to get back into the hard stuff. Yes, that’s right, the Frogs will soon be mining coal again, as a recent article on the SPACEDAILY website reports:

More than two years since France brought up its last lump of coal and turned its back on three centuries of mining industry, a new consortium plans to reopen a pit and resume excavations.

We might keep in mind that France is the European nation with the most intensive electricity-from-nuclear-power program, those nuclear reactors having replaced coal. Except, well, they can’t totally replace fossil, not with demand and energy prices both rising rapidly:

The project comes at a time of renewed interest in energy sources that are not derived from oil, which hit a record high of 78.64 dollars a barrel earlier this month and which has put the economies of developed nations under pressure.

And so it is that the French, too, are going to build more coal-fired plants, rejoining the rest of the developed world which is doing the same. Say “good-bye” to Kyoto, folks, it’s dying faster than the doubts about global warming and climate change.

Read the entire SPACEDAILY article here.

Posted in Age of Oil, Energy Technology, Fossil Fuels, Pollution | 1 Comment »

Drought Threatens Areas of China

Friday, August 18th, 2006

By David L. Brown

The news from China, with a population of more than one billion and rising, is not good. Drought and other climate-related disasters are dogging the Middle Kingdom just when it needs to ramp up its agricultural base to satisfy the desire of its masses for a better standard of living.

According to a report on BBC.com today (read it here), China is experiencing its worst drought in 50 years. Quoting the state news agency Xinhua, BBC said that:

“the south-western region of Chongqing has been worst hit, but areas of Sichuan and Liaoning are also affected. In Chongqing there has been no rain for more than 70 days, and two-thirds of the rivers have dried up, Xinhua said.”

Nor is the drought the only symptom of climate change in China this year. According to The Chinese Ministry of Civil Affairs, in 2006 China has “faced its most severe natural disasters for six years.” The report went on to say:

By 15 August this year, natural disasters had killed 2,006 people, affected more than 316m others and caused economic losses of 160bn yuan ($20bn), the ministry estimated, according to Xinhua.

Earlier this year, some parts of China were hit by heavy snowfall, while in recent months there have been several deadly typhoons, each killing hundreds of people.

This drought is again affecting millions of people. According to Xinhua, 10m people in Sichuan, nearly 8m in Chongqing and 600,000 in Liaoning do not have enough access to drinking water at the moment.

The problem has also affected huge areas of farmland, with crop failures and the death of cattle.

The Chinese have been attempting to build a Western-style economy on its ancient agrarian foundations. Billions are being spent to “modernize” the country, which could be a mistake in what is now being called the “post-modern era.” In reality what China has set out to do looks more like trying to emulate the West of a century ago, building highways and internal combustion automobiles just as those things are becoming less desirable or sustainable.

The realities of climate change, pollution and resource depletion pose serious threats to this plan. Desertification is spreading in many parts of the country, water shortages are looming ever larger, air and water pollution have become serious problems … and the population bomb just keeps on ticking away. The recent drought is a grim reminder of just how vulnerable the Middle Kingdom can be in the face of global changes. China has in the past faced horrendous famines. Could it be in for more? To us, it seems inevitable.

Posted in Agriculture Issues, Climate Change, Population Issues | Comments Off

Trickle of Climate Refugees Could Become Flood

Thursday, August 17th, 2006

By David L. Brown

Climate refugees? There’s a phrase that is new to the world, but projected effects of ongoing climate change forecast that this category of displaced persons is bound to swell in numbers, possibly into the millions as rising oceans and global warming spreads around the Earth.

The term may not be familiar, but it describes a familiar picture if we simply step back and put things in perspective. We’ve seen footage and still images of these “climate refugees” whenever peoples in an underdeveloped area are stricken by drought and desertification. We know that such things happen only in poor, Third World places. It could never happen here. Right?

And yet…

According to an article in The Australian online edition today, a quarter million Americans — yes, Americans — are “climate refugees” in the aftermath of last year’s Hurricane Katrina. According to the article (read it here):

Katrina flooded New Orleans and sent an 8.5 metre storm surge into Mississippi and Alabama, forcing about one million people to evacuate to neighbouring states.

In New Orleans parish, only about half of the pre-Katrina population of 437,000 had returned by the beginning of last month, according to Claritas, a private demographic data firm.

The article, crediting the newspaper’s New York staff and a Reuters report, quotes well-known environmental expert Lester Brown, president of the Earth Policy Institute in Washington, DC. According to Brown, “the number of ‘climate refugees’ will grow unless the world cuts the amount of greenhouse gases it releases.” He continued, “What we’re looking at is the potential not of displacing thousands of people, but possibly millions of people as the result of rising seas and more destructive storms in the years and decades ahead….”

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Posted in Climate Change | Comments Off

New Popular Unit of Measurement Discovered

Wednesday, August 16th, 2006

By David L. Brown

We have written before about the strange way the popular press likes to invent new units of measurement when attempting to describe things scientific. For example, see my essay “Just How Big WAS That Bus, Anyway?” posted June 3. In that piece I discussed such journalistic “units of measurement” as school buses, microwave ovens, and the ever-popular football field.

Now I am delighted to announce that a new way of communicating scientific values, this time relating to the temperature scale, has been discovered by the writers of popular science news, as in this excerpt from a story today on FoxNews.com:

“Gabrielse and his colleagues isolated a single electron in a bottle devoid of almost all other particles, and chilled it to temperatures colder than the surface of Pluto.”

Now I hate to be a spoilsport, but unlike football fields, microwave ovens, and school buses, the temperature on Pluto is probably not something about which most news readers have very much knowledge and certainly no personal experience against which to relate the value. This statement might leave most readers wondering, “Huh? I wonder how cold it is on Pluto, anyway?” and yet others musing, “Hmmm, Pluto is a dog, right? How cold could that be?”

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Posted in Satire, Irony, and Humor | 1 Comment »

Solving the Carbon Problem — Burial At Sea?

Wednesday, August 16th, 2006

By David L. Brown

Surely one of the most important issues facing us today — and one of the least discussed in mainstream media and public forums — is the threat posed by rising amounts of CO2 and other greenhouse gases (GHG) in our planet’s atmosphere. CO2 has been identified as a major problem, reaching levels that have been clearly demonstrated to be causing global warming.

There is no longer any doubt that global warming is real and is taking place now. The evidence lies in melting glaciers everywhere, the receding Greenland Ice Sheet and breakup of huge ice floes along the fringes of Antarctica, and many other clear signals. Rising GHG comes in large part from the burning of fossil fuels which releases carbon long sequestered in the Earth into the air. Other factors include forest destruction and slash-and-burn agriculture.

The best course of action, many scientists agree, would be to “bury” the excess CO2, either before it enters the atmosphere or by removing it from the air. The question is, where to put it? Proposals have included the use of abandoned oil wells, coal seams and salt mines. But according to an article in this week’s edition of New Scientist magazine, the best place would be deep in the oceans, where high pressures and low temperatures would liquify the gas or lock it up in frozen hydrates by combination with water. According to the article:

Even earthquakes would not shift it, says Kurt House, a geoscientist at Harvard University. Better still, the available storage space is vast. The US could store thousands of years of emissions within its own territorial waters, he says (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences).

One worry is that if climate change warms up the oceans, the stored hydrates might be released back into the atmosphere, as might also happen with the methane hydrates that are already deep in the sediment. House says the bottom of the ocean would have to warm by more than 5 °C for that to happen “which is very unlikely”. Injecting CO2 into methane hydrates should be avoided, though, as it could destabilise them.

This last point raises a potential problem, since the ocean floor is already home to vast quantities of methane hydrates. If these should be disturbed and release the sequestered methane, it could initiate a significant increase in atmospheric GHG — and methane is a greenhouse gas 24 times more efficient than CO2.

A program to sequester CO2 on a global basis and in quantities large enough to stabilize or even reduce CO2 levels would undoubtedly be the most ambitious project ever undertaken. The cost would be extraordinary — but the question must be asked: What price will we pay if GHG is allowed to continue to rise? Continuing to do nothing no longer seems to be an option.

Posted in Climate Change, Energy Technology, Fossil Fuels, Pollution | Comments Off

Problem with Pluto Proliferates New Planets!

Wednesday, August 16th, 2006

by Val Germann

As many of our readers know, a trend common in our school systems today is the idea that “everybody’s special” and there are no winners and losers. It seems as though this idea has percolated up to the International Astronomical Union, which body has determined that, indeed, all solar system objects are “special” and there will be no real winners or losers in the Great Planet Debate.

The general outlines of the new rules for planets are discussed today on THE GUARDIAN website. Pluto is to be retained as a planet, sort of, under a new multi-tiered system which probably will be accepted by the entire IAU but seems just a tad overcomplicated.

If the ideas are approved at the general meeting of the IAU in Prague next week, schoolchildren will, in future, have to learn that the solar system has 12 planets: eight classical ones that dominate the system – Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Neptune and Uranus – and four in a new category called plutons.

At first blush, this seems to be a genius-level solution until the clinkers appear. That is, in spite of the BBC quote above, two of the named objects above are actually not to be Plutons but, well, something else. Ceres, once called a planet but then downgraded to “asteroid,” is now a planet (of some kind) again. Also upgraded is the mysterious  Charon, which orbits between Uranus and Neptune. These two are not “classical planets” or “Plutons” but, ah, just planets. The BBC didn’t get that quite right, which is not surprising considering how arcane some of these rules seem to be.

As for the Plutons, they will include anything greater than about 500 miles in diameter obiting the sun beyond Neptune, which will add a lot of objects over the next few years.

And so, at the end of the day, Pluto remains a “planet” – sort of – but it’s kind of not a planet, too, viz:

The definition keeps Pluto in the planets club, despite the calls to demote it. “Had astronomers realized in 1930 that Pluto was smaller than our moon and with a mass well under 1% that of the Earth, perhaps some special designation would have been devised for it,” Owen Gingerich, the chairman of the planet definition committee, said. “Although Pluto remains a planet by the proposed definition, it will generally be preferable to call it a pluton to emphasise its role as the prototype for a physically distinct category of planetary bodies.”

So, everybody got something out of this new “definition” which, to this writer, merely postpones the real crunch of determining, once and for all, what is truly a “planet” and what truly is not. In the meantime, somebody will get to sell a lot of replacement textbooks, which at least is good for the publishers, eh?

Read the entire GUARDIAN article here.

Posted in Astronomy, Satire, Irony, and Humor | Comments Off

China’s Pollution Rising Amid Signs of Concern

Tuesday, August 15th, 2006

By David L. Brown

China’s pollution emissions have risen dramatically in the last year, a fact that is attributed to the huge Asian nation’s rapid industrialization. According to a news report today in the China Daily on-line edition, measurements of COD or “chemical oxygen demand” rose by 4.2 percent over a year ago. (Although the article doesn’t explain, the term COD is commonly used to refer to a means of determing the amount of organic chemicals in surface water.) Sulfur dioxide emissions climbed by 5.8 percent, the article said.

This photo from the web site showing a power plant near Zhangjiakou illustrates the character of the problem:

xin_24080301085542414231.jpg

It appears that China is giving priority to expanding its industrial base, without assuring that the new factories and power plants are environmentally sound. Zhou Shengxian, minister of the State Environmental Protection Administration (SEPA), admits as much. He said that in the first half of 2006, “investment in fixed assets developed so fast that pollution treatment supervisors were unable to keep pace.” (Read it all here.)

The China Daily article added:

Fixed asset investment expanded by nearly 30 per cent, reaching 4.2 trillion yuan (US$525 billion). About 100,000 projects were launched, including heavy polluters such as mining and auto manufacturing.

“What needs to be focused upon is that some local industries operate seriously counter to environmental requirements,” Zhou said.

Ministry figures show that only 30-40 per cent of newly launched projects at county level have passed environmental impact assessment, according to Zhou.

Furthermore, construction of sulphur removal equipment lagged far behind development of high-energy consumption industries.

Of the coal-fired power plants with installed capacity of above 32 million kilowatts built in the past six months, half had no sulphur removal equipment when they started operations, Zhou said, without giving exact figures.

Although these facts seem grim, at least the Chinese are giving lip service to taking the problem seriously. The article went on to say that SEPA last week published environmental standards for construction and management of eco-industrial parks, the nation’s first green standard to put development of industrial parks onto an environmentally friendly track. There are currently 18 such parks across the country.

According to China Daily, in the past three years 1500 plants in southern China have been closed due to environmental hazards. SEPA inspections also will target environmental pollution treatment by industrial parks, where factories are concentrated and the possibility of pollution accidents are high. “Raising the green threshold of industrial parks is a step by the country to slow down fixed asset investment,” the report said.

China is the world’s fastest growing economy, and it is doing so the old-fashioned way—by building coal-fired power plants which have already proven inefficient and polluting in the West. As the United States and other First World nations move toward cleaner and more efficient infrastructure, China seems bent on duplicating the achievements of a century past. Already they are reaping the whirlwind of pollution, and spreading the greenhouse gases and toxins around the planet. Let’s hope they are serious in addressing these problems to become environmentally responsible citizens of the 21st Century world.

Posted in Pollution | Comments Off

Planet Pluto on the Chopping Block

Monday, August 14th, 2006

by Val Germann

It’s refreshing to turn away from Global Warming and Climate Change to something truly trivial: the destruction of an entire planet! Yes, our beloved Planet Pluto, the only one named after a dog (or was it the other way around?) is about to be stripped of its epaulettes and relegated to the outer darkness. Oh, wait a minute, it already IS in the outer darkness so, well, it’s just going to be de-moted, or rather re-moted, down to actual mote, or un-planet, whatever. The people who do this sort of thing, the International Astronomical Union, are meeting now, in secret cabal, to decide the issue, as reported by the BBC:

Astronomers are gathering in the Czech capital, Prague, hoping to define exactly what counts as a planet. The International Astronomical Union hopes to settle the question of Pluto, which was first spotted in 1930.

Yes, Pluto was discovered by American Clyde Tombaugh, a personal hero of mine. Clyde was a great guy, universally liked, and as long as he lived there was no way Pluto was in trouble. But Clyde passed away in the mid-1990s, and within months a serious effort was underway, in some circles, to de-planetize Pluto.

As an astronomy teacher, who still uses a blackboard, giving Pluto the heave-ho will help me out. When I put the planets up on the board this fall there may at last be true symmetry, the four terrestrial planets balanced by the four Gas Giants, and no Pluto to upset the apple cart, or planet chart, whatever.

But I’ll hate to see Pluto go, no doubt. It’s the only planet discovered by an American and the only planet that barks. Yup, I’ll just hate to give all that up.

Read the entire BBC article here.

Posted in Astronomy, Satire, Irony, and Humor | 3 Comments »

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