Our World and Everything in It

When we think of greenhouse gases we immediately think of CO2 emissions. But there are others on the list that are far worse and growing at a greater rate. CO2 just stands out because it is the most prevalent and can last in the atmosphere for 100 years or more.

On the Hinkle Charitable Foundation website for the environment there are some pretty interesting facts about global warming presented in a series of reports. Burning fossil fuels for energy is the main source of atmospheric greenhouse gases. We pretty much know that. The third report explained a measurement called the Global Warming Potential (GWP) that includes both a gas’s ability to trap solar heat and how long the gas persists in the atmosphere. I learned there are a lot worse gases than CO2 that are man made like perfluoromethane, an etchant and cleaning agent. It’s presence in the atmosphere is increasing at a much faster rate than CO2.  Not good.

Mother Nature certainly isn’t putting cleaning agents into the atmosphere, or sulfurhexafluoride, another dangerous greenhouse gas used in the electric industry as a dialectric medium for high voltage circuit breakers and other electrical equipment. We produce 8000 tons of this stuff to use every year.

Now get these numbers. If CO2 has a one hundred year GWP of one, and stays in the atmosphere one hundred years, how bad is perfluoromethane with a GWP of five thousand seven hundred, and lasts over fifty thousand years. And sulfurhexafluoride is outright evil with a GWP of twenty two thousand two hundred and stays in the atmosphere three thousand two hundred years.

As usual these gases are measured in parts per thousand. Again our lives are measured in parts per thousand. How many ppts have accumulated in the atmosphere over the years? This stuff never goes away. We’re messing with more than a few generations here.

Read more and look at the charts: http://www.thehcf.org/emaila3.html

Consider a few challenges for the environment: http://www.treehugger.com/files/2007/10/pure_waste_challenge_cfl.php

I was looking over Science Daily’s website and found so many articles about man’s involvement with global warming. It seems humans have affected the environment for thousands of years. The Little Ice Age and Medieval Warming period all the nay sayers like to brandish as proof that global warming happened before and is a natural occurrence just ain’t so.

Man has been affecting the environment for thousands of years. The sad thing is this article is almost 3 years old. Have these findings been censored from the general public because I’ve been arguing with people who have brought up the ice ages and warming periods of the past, while the whole time science has had proof that: “Humans have been tinkering with greenhouse gas levels in Earth’s atmosphere for at least 2,000 years and probably longer, according to a surprising new study of methane trapped in Antarctic ice cores conducted by an international research team.”

Read more about it and browse around because there is a plethora of articles and findings that substantiate we are indeed causing what we call global warming.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2005/09/050909075709.htm

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/1998/10/981002082033.htm

http://www.sciencedaily.com/videos/2007/0902-our_changing_climate.htm

 Since the Myanmar (Burma) hurricane, with already 100,000 people reported dead and 200,000 more missing, China was hit by a massive 7.9 earthquake with nearly 9,000 people dead and thousands missing or injured along with devastating tornadoes that ran through the middle of the U.S. all the way to Georgia leaving 23 dead, and there were very few reports about a tidal wave that hit S. Korea May 4^th, but it killed at least seven people when it hit a pier and seaside rocks sweeping away tourists and anglers. Who knows how many were in the area. 

So it’s been one heck of a week for big disasters. The tornadoes that keep hitting the center of our nation worse and worse every year are taking more and more lives. It wasn’t long ago that we could honestly make the statement that while tornadoes wreak a lot of damage across our country; very few usually die from them. Not so anymore.

Hits like this from Mother Nature are getting noticeably worse and more and more frequent. According to Wikipedia, as of May 8th, 819 tornadoes have been reported in the United States (of which at least 465 have been confirmed), with 98 confirmed fatalities. This already makes 2008 the deadliest year for them since 1998, and it’s not Memorial Day yet!

People can pooh pooh extreme weather all they want. I reported a long time ago in one of my blogs that I was curious about reports of global warming relative to increased disastrous weather/climate activity and researched the recorded events myself. This was back in 2000. I went to the NOAA website and printed extreme weather events worldwide from 1990 to 2000. 1990 events took up 1/3 of a page. By 2000, 3 ½ pages printed out for that year.

It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to see how fast weather events are advancing. We don’t hear enough about them in the media. We need to see it, and hear it, over and over until we have some notion of what some people are going through because of Mother Nature, not just look out our windows and say “Well, it’s not me.”

Great explanation and map of active fault lines and what causes earthquakes @:

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/7807001/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tornadoes_of_2008

Yesterday I reported that NASA satellites are studying all types of changes on the earth. One of NASA’s studies whose results were on their website stated that:

Scientists from Stanford University in Palo Alto, Calif., set out to see what effect reduced sea ice cover would have on the organisms that comprise the base of the Arctic marine food web, the single-celled floating algae called phytoplankton. Because these photosynthetic organisms rely on the sun to meet their energy demands, reduced Arctic sea ice cover means an increase in the amount of open water habitat suitable for algal growth. Thus, their abundance is expected to increase.

Not surprisingly, the scientists found that the growth of phytoplankton has indeed increased markedly in concert with the rapid reduction in sea ice cover over the last five years. However, they were surprised to find that this growth did not take place in the areas of the Arctic where we expected it. The researchers anticipated that areas experiencing the most dramatic loss of sea ice would show the largest increase in algal growth. However this was not the case. Algal growth did indeed rise in newly ice-free areas, but only accounted for about one third of the total Arctic increase. The majority of the increase in algal growth (70 percent) was observed in the shallow waters that ring the Arctic Ocean. In these areas, algal growth rates increased because the sea ice in these areas, algal growth rates increased because the sea ice cover was melting sooner and freezing later in the year giving the algae increasingly more time to grow.

This was nine year study using all types of satellite imagery including and MRI Spectroradiometer to compare ocean color and temperature relative to sea ice melt that was also assessed.

I read a lot of things and certain words like phytoplankton buildup tweaked my curiosity as to the difference between phytoplankton and plankton. Phytoplankton is the autotrophic component of plankton. According to Wikipedia an “autotroph is an organism that produces complex organic compounds from simple inorganic molecules using energy from light or inorganic chemical reactions. Another article I found at:

http://www.futurepundit.com/archives/002481.html didn’t differentiate between phytoplankton and plankton.

This does not bode well at all in my mind because of the blog I just wrote about explosions of methane gas into the atmosphere that are growing in size to that of meters in the ocean waters off of Namibia. If all of this phytoplankton is rapidly spreading in the shallow waters that ring the Arctic Ocean, and there are not enough fish or marine mammals in that region to eat the excess plankton (phytoplankton), doesn’t it stand to reason that this Arctic phytoplankton will go the way of plankton near Namibia? In other words, it will die and rot, creating hydrogen sulfide pockets. All that is needed is high pressure from a storm on the ocean’s surface to affect the pressure on the ocean bottom in these particularly shallow waters around the Arctic and an eruption might occur. These are the same eruptions happening off of Namibia. I realize that scientists claim these explosions are not likely to take place because of the constant churning of the ocean floor. But then there is Namibia. Explain that?

http://www.blogsmonroe.com/world/2008/04/24/mankind-contributes-to-global-warming-through-fish/

Scary stuff since the first global warming event 40 million years ago was from methane gas eruptions. The earth was eventually scorched. This just shows how delicately balanced our world really is. We fish too much, or disrupt certain species by changing habitat drastically, and something else is thrown out of kilter like phytoplankton, something so small we don’t really see it except for greenish colored water. It’s something so small, yet it can eventually kill us.

NASA website: http://www.nasa.gov/topics/earth/features/ecosystem_research_briefs.html..

While I was on the NASA website I couldn’t help but click on ” Forests Damaged by Hurricane Katrina Become Major Carbon Source.” That article stated that, “a research team has estimated that Hurricane Katrina killed or severely damaged 320 million large trees in Gulf Coast forests, which weakened the role the forests play in storing carbon from the atmosphere. The damage has led to these forests releasing large quantities of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.” The satellite pics in the article show the devastation from Katrina. It was quite a wipe out.

The NASA article also stated that “[t]he carbon cycle is intimately linked to just about everything we do, from energy use to food and timber production and consumption. [] As more and more carbon is released to the atmosphere by human activities, the climate warms, triggering an intensification of the global water cycle that produces more powerful storms, leading to destruction of more trees, which then act to amplify climate warming.”

So one event, like a massive hurricane, results in deforestation and decay that cause more CO2 to be released, and more overall warming for more massive hurricanes. Destructive cycle seemed to be formed rather easily. Not good for us.

Read more and check out the web short “In Katrina’s Wake” @ http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/hurricanes/archives/2007/katrina_carbon.html.

There is a presentation at MCCC’s Meyer Auditorium tonight called “Coming Home. State of the Straits: Status and Trends of Key Indicators. This is an effort to present the results of compiled data on the ecosystems health in the Detroit River and Lake Erie. I wanted to go but I’m 40 minutes away from MCCC’s parking lot and don’t like the looks of the weather. What I did is find the results of the program and printed out about 30 pages that comprise the comprehensive and integrative assessment.

This presentation is based on information in “50 key trend data sets and indicators” according to the report itself. However, it also states that this comprehensive and integrative assessment is initial and heavily weighted on state information with “important data and knowledge gaps.” Nevertheless, it “lays the foundation for continuous improvement in the future.”

But I can’t tell from the report what we’re improving on. There are percentages of increase or decline of contaminants with no beginning measurements given. There are also very few quantitative targets. So we don’t know what aiming for.  The study is over a 35-year time span. In 1970, we were polluted. The Clean Air and Water Act improved everything initially in a huge way. So to tell me from 1970 until now there has been an overall improvement in our water, well no kidding. What I want to know is what transpired over the past 10 years? For instance, regarding contaminants in western Lake Erie sediments, there is a record in 1971, and another in 1995 for mercury and PCB’s. Two records, 24 years apart are telling us there is a 70% decline in mercury in sediment and a 50% decline in PCB’s and other organochlorine contaminants. I don’t think that is very thorough. The mercury is 70% lower from what amount? Does this constitute a good amount? Mercury may have been 85% lower in the 90’s with pollution levels going up some 15% since then and the overall reading from 1971 will still look good at 70% reduction in pollution even though it’s rising again and quickly. Many of these reports concerning water end in 2004 too, like amounts of mercury in walleye.

Reports from 1977-2004 show that mercury in walleye has seen a 60% decline between the late 70’s and early 80’s; levels have remained steady since. What? Nothing has changed in over 25 years? It may be because there is more fishing, and therefore more fish caught at an early stage. We’re told to eat the smaller fish, especially in the ocean, because they have had less time to ingest mercury. There is nothing in this report that shows the accumulative affects of mercury either like from sediment, to fish, to birds, to larger predators.

I had to consider the source and motivation of this report too when I saw the list of editors and funding. Two of the editors are from the USFWS, the controversial agency that currently aims to kill the wolves and buffalo out west without presenting a solid answer as to why.  And the funding sources include DTE, and the US EPA, another favorite controversial agency of mine. But like I said, I really wanted to hear this presentation. The presenters probably had really good slides of the wildlife that is thriving. Nothing is all bad news. If anyone attended please let me know about it.

I’ve included an article from the Toledo Blade about this presentation relative to receding shorelines and loss of water in the Great Lakes too.  http://toledoblade.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20080107/NEWS06/801070402.

These are the actual tables resulting from the compilation of data for the trends reported in the presentation. http://www.epa.gov/med/grosseile_site/indicators/sos/assessment.pdf.
 

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The tornadoes disaster that struck the south Tuesday was different. We’ve seen interviews of people after a tornado struck their home, or threw them around. They’ve always been curiously stoic, that they are alive and that’s all that matter. The reporter ends by saying something like “looking at the debris and destruction, it’s amazing no one was killed.” Not so this time.

People were visibly shaken, edgy, overwhelmed. There didn’t seem to be any warning.  An aerial view of a touchdown on Union University campus shows signs of the whirring motion that hit like a blender. The middle of the campus is gone, while the outward spirals of wind blew apart the dorms that were clustered around it. One student got sucked out of a hallway while holding onto a heavy gumball machine. He didn’t have enough time to run inside far enough. Part of the building collapsed on him but he made it. Up to 60 other people didn’t.

The death toll keeps climbing as people look through the debris. I’m tornado phobic. Not so much of the actual funnel but because caught off guard, these storms are deadly. And the chances of being caught off-guard are greater than you think. I found a good website, WeatherEye, that based its info on results of Project Vortex, the world’s largest storm-chasing project. What better info than people that sit in those weird mobile units gathering data at the edge of a huge twister.

It’s always been believed that a tornado takes 20-30 minutes to form, and we have detectors everywhere. Try 5 to 10 minutes, and tornadoes many times come from small weather patterns that develop between weather stations. So what happened Tuesday is something like this. You’re sitting there in Tennessee in February. There are storm predictions. The storm starts.  And out of nowhere drops a funnel cloud. You’re not prepared at all, just hanging onto your breeches. It lasts a few minutes, but your life is changed forever—no mementos, no trophies, no pictures, nothing to wear, no paperwork, no purse, no pets…absolutely stripped.  The teeth of some of the people interviewed were still chattering. I don’t ever want to be surprised like that, not living in a frame house with a 4 ft. crawlspace, along with 2 cats and a parrot. All I visualize is the entire contents of our pole barn whisking around and mowing my house to shreds, while I’m trapped below listening to it.

I’ve got good reason to be afraid. Our weather is getting more and more erratic, and it’s those warm days that don’t want to budge when the cold moves in that cause the problems.  After this week’s tornado fest, everyone should be a little more respectful. You would think by now we would have better predictions.

According to WeatherEye, NASA launched an OTD or Optical Transient Detector satellite in 1995 that was able to view lightening strikes even in the daylight. That satellite passed over a storm and picked up 200 lightening flashes while our sensors on the ground picked up only 9. It also detected plenty of cloud-to-cloud strikes. While they seemed to reach their peak, a tornado touched down. There seems to be a correlation between cloud to cloud lightening activity and the materialization of a tornado. This satellite picked up as much as 20 times more cloud-to-cloud activity than detected on the ground.

That was back in 95, why are we still being surprised by tornadoes like those on Tuesday? It’s 2008. We have a state of the art satellite that can help predict bad weather patterns before they strike, far better than any other before. It’s sitting in a warehouse somewhere. President Bush didn’t allow money for it. He wants to pursue the space station project. The shelved satellite was to replace one that is soon to be obsolete and out of service. In view of the bad weather that we are experiencing, and it’s only going to get worse, I think it would be prudent to urge whoever is the next president to get it launched, and quickly.

http://www.blogsmonroe.com/world/?p=186

http://weathereye.kgan.com/expert/tornadoes/predict.html.

http://weathereye.kgan.com/expert/tornadoes/predict2.html.

I just got through reading some current worldwide environmental news and have to say, we don’t seem to have a clear-cut view of anything. What we profess, what we say, and what we actually do is all contrary.  First, I saw the Pope give his blessing and speak on behalf of peace and the environment over the Christmas season to over one billion Catholics. And the World Council of Churches that represents 560 million Christians worldwide is calling concerns over global warming a matter of faith. The WCC has had a program about climate change since 1992 and books about ecotheology (I’m interested).  Dr. Samuel Kobia the Secy. General of the WCC stipulates that Christians are well aware that dominion over all living things was given to us. He said that meant, “We were entrusted with the care of the rest of God’s creation.” The emphasis is on the word “CARE” here.

Care doesn’t come under savagely taking a machete to an orangutan trying to defend it’s young, or hooking a live dolphin in the side and sending it to be stripped of skin before it’s even dead, while the resulting meat is basically poison from ingesting too many pollutants, or shooting 6 elephants dead for stepping into a coffee field that is supposed to be their sanctuary. We should actively try to get this stopped, but our demands for things like lumber and coffee encourage it.  Oh and don’t forget about native animals and the latest Internet hunting websites that have yet to be banned in over 20 states.

I run into a lot of people who apply basic logic to the idea of global warming. I too apply basic logic to most things so I understand when some people don’t get upset that many large glaciers are melting. They know that the amount of water released by a melting glacier will not make sea level rise anymore than the displacement from the original frozen mass. An example of displacement is watching to see how much the pool water rises when good old fat uncle Charlie and aunt Rose get into the pool, or why we always want the largest person to do a cannonball.

But there is this phenomenon called Thermal Expansion that really compounds the rise in sea level. Since 1993 thermal expansion accounts for 57% of the sum total of rising water. So more than half of the increased rise in sea level is due to thermal expansion. Not to talk down to anyone but I found a grade 6-8 school project to do that demonstrates the thermal expansion of water. http://www.usc.edu/org/cosee-west/glaciers/ThermalExpansionActivity.pdf. It’s a pretty neat project that explains much I think.

According to a Nova article on science.org: “In its 2001 assessment of global warming, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) projected that global mean sea level is expected to rise between 9 and 88 centimeters by 2100, with a ‘best estimate’ of 50 centimeters.” This is around 20 inches. So thermal expansion accounts for 11.4 of those inches? That’s a little scary. Only 8.6 inches of extra water is actually present, but turns into 20 with heat. Siberia is melting at a rate right now that is gorging 3 rivers that lead to the seas and the Arctic Ocean. The Gulf Stream around the British Isles is slowing for what is speculated to be from lesser salt concentration because of dilution off of Siberia. Salt concentration has a huge bearing on our gulf streams, and the air masses above them.  

The article explained further on: “The reality promises to be a little grimmer. In many places, 50 centimeters would see entire beaches being washed away, together with a significant chunk of the coastline. For people living on low-lying islands such as Tuvalu, Kiribati or the Maldives, where the highest point is only 2-3 meters above current sea levels, an extra 50 centimeters could see significant portions of their islands being washed away by erosion or covered by water. Even if they remain above the sea, many island nations will have their supplies of drinking water reduced because sea water will invade their freshwater aquifers.” Here that Michigan? Here we have emphasis on drinking water again. Read my blog about Kiribati: http://www.blogsmonroe.com/world/?p=48.

 For Australia the consequences of even moderate sea level rise is multiplied. The same Nova article, by Australia’s Greenhouse Office states: “Each centimeter of sea-level rise will lead to increasing impacts on low-lying coastal land. Modeling predicts the inundation would cause sandy beaches on the Australian coastline to recede by the order of 100 times the vertical sea-level rise. For example, if the sea level rises by a meter, the coastal beaches could retreat by about 100 meters unless some preventative action is taken. Given that about 85 per cent of Australia’s population lives within an hour’s drive of the coast, this is particularly relevant.” Make note this is based on IPCC’s 2001 assessment. Much has changed. http://www.science.org.au/nova/082/082key.htm. 

Keep up to date with our ever-changing environment. Read the most current reports from the IPCC from December, 2007: http://www.ipcc.ch/.  The IPCC shared the Nobel Peace Prize honor for ‘efforts to build up and disseminate greater knowledge about man-made climate change, and to lay the foundations for the measures that are needed to counteract such change.’ http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/ap/fn/5383964.html. This panel had a series of four conferences dealing with current global climate change topics and many categories within each topic. Hopefully many answers to most questions are contained in these reports.