PLEASE NOTE:
*
CCNet TERRA 17/2003 - 9 April 2003
----------------------------------
[irrelevant comment removed--bobk]
"Mother Nature played a cruel trick last week, dumping snow
and freezing rain on
Canadians desperate for spring after the coldest winter in a
decade."
--Planet Ark, 7 April 2003
"The impact of population growth on the urban heat island
effect is very real and
significant, vastly overshadowing the effects of nature
itself.... towns with as
few as 1,000 inhabitants typically create a warming of the air
within them that
is over twice as great as the increase in mean global air
temperature believed to
have occurred since the end of the Little Ice Age, while the
urban heat islands
of the great metropolises of the world rival the temperature
differences that
exist between full-fledged ice ages and interglacials."
--CO2 Science Magazine, 9 April 2003
(1) THE URBAN HEAT ISLAND OF HOUSTON, TEXAS
CO2 Science Magazine, 9 April 2003
(2) ICE PELLETS, SNOWSTORMS BATTER WINTER-WEARY CANADA
Planet Ark, 7 April 2003
(3) ATMOSPHERIC CO2 ENRICHMENT AND THE REDUCTION OF FOOD POVERTY
CO2 Science Magazine, 9 April 2003
(4) QUESTION: WHEN IS A RECORD FLOOD NOT A RECORD FLOOD?
CO2 Science Magazine, 9 April 2003
(5) NEW FUSION METHOD OFFERS HOPE OF NEW ENERGY SOURCE
The New York Times, 7 April 2003
(6) MEDIEVAL WARM PERIOD
Kevin O. Pope <kpope@starband.net>
(7) AND FINALLY: BIODIVERSITY SECURED AS SCIENTISTS CREATE
HEALTHY CLONE OF ENDANGERED SPICIES
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, 8 April 2003
========
(1) THE URBAN HEAT ISLAND OF HOUSTON, TEXAS
>From CO2 Science Magazine, 9 April 2003
http://www.co2science.org/journal/2003/v6n15c1.htm
Reference
Streutker, D.R. 2003. Satellite-measured growth of the urban heat
island of Houston, Texas. Remote Sensing of Environment 85:
282-289.
What was done
The urban heat island (UHI) of Houston, Texas was evaluated from
82 nighttime sets of radiation data obtained using the
split-window infrared channels of the Advanced Very High
Resolution Radiometer on board the NOAA-9 satellite during March
1985 through February 1987 and from 125 sets of similar data
obtained from the NOAA-14 satellite during July 1999 through June
2001.
What was learned
In the words of the author, "over the course of 12 years,
between 1987 and 1999, the mean nighttime surface temperature
heat island of Houston increased 0.82 ± 0.10 [°C]."
It was also pointed out that "the growth of the UHI, both in
magnitude and spatial extent, scales roughly with the increase in
population, at approximately 30%." In addition, it was noted
that the mean rural temperature measured during the second
interval was "virtually identical to the earlier
interval."
What it means
This extremely well designed study has probably characterized the
development of the urban heat island of Houston, Texas better
than has ever been done before for any city on earth; and, in so
doing, it has demonstrated that the growth of the UHI
"scales roughly with the increase in population." What
is more, it demonstrates that this phenomenon is huge. In just 12
years, the UHI of Houston grew by more than the IPCC calculates
the mean surface air temperature of the earth rose over the
entire past century, over which period the earth's population
rose by some 280% or nearly an order of magnitude more than the
12-year population growth experienced by Houston.
Clearly, the impact of population growth on the urban heat island
effect is very real and significant, vastly overshadowing the
effects of nature itself. It has been demonstrated by Oke (1973),
for example, that towns with as few as 1,000 inhabitants
typically create a warming of the air within them that is over
twice as great as the increase in mean global air temperature
believed to have occurred since the end of the Little Ice Age,
while the urban heat islands of the great metropolises of the
world rival the temperature differences that exist between
full-fledged ice ages and interglacials.
Given these facts, it is presumptuous in the extreme to believe
that the global surface air temperature record of the last two
decades of the 20th century -- when world population rose by over
35% -- could ever be accurately enough "massaged" to
provide a realistic assessment of what the planet's
non-urban-affected surface air temperature really did over that
period. Hence, like it or not, we are essentially forced to rely
on the satellite record when it comes to evaluating contemporary
global climate change; and that record suggests that the warming
of that period -- if there truly was any at all -- was a far cry
from the "unprecedented" status that climate alarmists
are fond of attaching to it.
Reference
Oke, T.R. 1973. City size and the urban heat island. Atmospheric
Environment 7: 769-779.
Copyright © 2003. Center for the Study of Carbon Dioxide and
Global Change
=============
(2) ICE PELLETS, SNOWSTORMS BATTER WINTER-WEARY CANADA
>From Planet Ark, 7 April 2003
http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/20382/story.htm
TORONTO - Mother Nature played a cruel trick last week, dumping
snow and freezing rain on Canadians desperate for spring after
the coldest winter in a decade.
Canadians may be accustomed to living in the world's second
coldest country (after Russia) but some struggled to take the
latest bad weather in stride at a time when April showers and
early spring flowers are more the norm.
"It's Canada. We shouldn't be surprised but sometimes we get
caught with our pants down," said Kevin Dwyer, 29, as he
shoveled ice off a walkway in downtown Toronto.
The storm working its way across the country hit the western
province of Alberta earlier this week, dumped 30 centimetres (1
foot) of snow on Regina, Saskatchewan, and poured ice pellets and
freezing rain across southern Ontario Thursday and Friday.
"It is truly nasty. And this is the lull, we're expecting
another wave of this misery," said David Phillips, senior
climatologist at Environment Canada. "This storm, when it
finally goes to the graveyard in the Atlantic, will have affected
most of Canada from Alberta right to Newfoundland."
Environment Canada said a year's worth of freezing rain has
fallen on Toronto and surrounding areas over the past two days.
At the city's main airport, numerous flights were canceled and
passengers faced significant delays as snowplows fought to clear
runways.
"It's been the kind of conditions we've never seen before
for a sustained period of time," said Pearson airport
spokesman Peter Gregg, adding suppliers are shipping in more
fluid from as far afield as New Jersey and Chicago.
Adding to the region's woes, snow removal contracts for many
Ontario cities ended in March, leaving towns scrambling to deploy
snowplows and salt trucks.
===========
(3) ATMOSPHERIC CO2 ENRICHMENT AND THE REDUCTION OF FOOD POVERTY
>From CO2 Science Magazine, 9 April 2003
http://www.co2science.org/edit/editor.htm
Over the last four decades of the 20th century, per capita world
food production rose by approximately 25% (FAO, 2000).
Nevertheless, as noted by Pretty et al. (2003), "food
poverty persists." In fact, out of the six billion people
currently inhabiting the planet, they say some 800 million lack
adequate access to food.
Writing as advocates for these undernourished individuals -- for
whom more food would be a godsend -- Pretty et al. suggest there
are "three strategic options for agricultural development if
food supply is to be increased."
The first of these options, in their words, is to "expand
the area of agriculture, by converting new lands to
agriculture." However, as they rightly note, this option
results in "losses of ecosystem services from forests,
grasslands and other areas of important biodiversity," as
they are transferred from the realm of nature to the domain of
man. Hence, this solution to the problem of world food security
is untenable, unless, of course, we care nothing about
maintaining what little of the natural world yet remains.
The second of Pretty et al.'s strategic options is to
"increase per hectare production in agricultural exporting
countries," so as to not take additional land from nature to
feed mankind. However, as they again rightly note, this
option means that food "must be transferred or sold to those
who need it." And those who need it, in the words of Pretty
et al., are those "whose very poverty excludes these
possibilities," in that they can't afford to pay for the
food they need.
We come, then, to the last of Pretty et al.'s three options,
which is to "increase total farm productivity in developing
countries which most need the food." This option is
essentially the same as option two, only applied to parts of the
world where farmers are constrained by their poverty to use
"low cost and locally available technologies and
inputs."
The rest of Pretty et al.'s paper describes a number of
well-conceived programs designed to achieve this goal and lists
their successes to date. We describe another such program
(perhaps we should call it a phenomenon) that was neither
conceived nor planned by anyone, but which has also had many
successes and is destined to have many more in the years and
decades to come.
The phenomenon to which we refer is the enriching of the air with
carbon dioxide that has come about as a consequence of the
development and progression of the Industrial Revolution. Because
of the prodigious and ever-increasing quantities of CO2 that have
been released to the atmosphere by the burning of the coal, gas
and oil that has fueled this incredible human enterprise, the
air's CO2 concentration has risen -- without any overt planning
on the part of man -- from a pre-industrial value of
approximately 275 ppm to a current concentration on the order of
375 ppm.
What has this extra 100 ppm of CO2 done for us to date in the way
of increasing farm productivity? In our Editorial of 11 July
2001, we describe experimental work based on the studies of
Mayeux et al. (1997) and Idso and Idso (2000) that suggest its
aerial fertilization effect has led to mean yield increases of
approximately 70% for C3 cereals, 28% for C4 cereals, 33% for
fruits and melons, 62% for legumes, 67% for root and tuber crops,
and 51% for vegetables. Although less than the 93% increase
in per-hectare food production brought about by the many
low-cost, low-tech projects assessed by Pretty et al., these
historical CO2-induced yield increases have nevertheless been
both substantial and important. What is more, they were totally
unplanned by man, coming about solely as a result of humanity's
flooding of the air with CO2. In addition, this unanticipated but
welcome godsend is not just a relic of the past; for, if we will
let it, it will grow even stronger in the years and decades
ahead, as the air's CO2 content continues to rise.
Another positive aspect of the technologies and inputs employed
in the projects studied by Pretty et al. is that "they make
the best use of nature's goods and services whilst not damaging
these assets." This virtue is best appreciated when
compared to some of the negative side effects of what Pretty et
al. call "industrialized agriculture," where they say
"environmental and health problems associated with
industrialized agriculture have been well documented,"
citing the works of Conway and Pretty (1991), EEA (1998) and Wood
et al. (2000). Within this context, we merely note that not
only does atmospheric CO2 enrichment not hurt "nature's
goods and services," it actually helps them, making natural
vegetation -- and field crops too -- more resistant to the
deleterious effects of gaseous air pollution, soil salinity,
water stress and high temperatures (Idso and Idso, 1994).
Speaking of agricultural systems that emphasize the principles
employed in the programs they analyzed -- which are shared, if
not bettered, by enriching the air with CO2 -- Pretty et al. say
they "contribute to a range of valued public goods, such as
clean water, wildlife, carbon sequestration in soils, flood
protection, groundwater recharge, and landscape amenity
value." With such side effects as these, the ongoing
rise in the atmosphere's CO2 concentration would appear to be
just the medicine the world needs to sustain its natural
ecosystems while helping humanity to adequately feed its growing
numbers.
Sherwood, Keith and Craig Idso
References
Conway, G.R. and Pretty, J.N. 1991. Unwelcome Harvest:
Agriculture and Pollution. Earthscan, London, UK.
EEA. 1998. Europe's Environment: The Second Assessment. European
Environment Agency, Copenhagen, Denmark.
FAO. 2000. Agriculture: Towards 2015/30. Global Perspective
Studies Unit, Food and Agriculture Organization, Rome, Italy.
Idso, C.D. and Idso, K.E. 2000. Forecasting world food supplies:
The impact of the rising atmospheric CO2 concentration.
Technology 7S: 33-55.
Idso, K.E. and Idso, S.B. 1994. Plant responses to atmospheric
CO2 enrichment in the face of environmental constraints: a review
of the past 10 years' research. Agricultural and Forest
Meteorology 69: 153-203.
Mayeux, H.S., Johnson, H.B., Polley, H.W. and Malone, S.R. 1997.
Yield of wheat across a subambient carbon dioxide gradient.
Global Change Biology 3: 269-278.
Pretty, J.N., Morison, J.I.L. and Hine, R.E. 2003. Reducing food
poverty by increasing agricultural sustainability in developing
countries. Agriculture, Ecosystems and Environment 95: 217-234.
Wood, S., Sebastien, K. and Scherr, S.J. 2000. Pilot Analysis of
Global Ecosystems. IFPRI and WRI, Washington, DC.
Copyright © 2003. Center for the Study of Carbon Dioxide
and Global Change
===========
(4) QUESTION: WHEN IS A RECORD FLOOD NOT A RECORD FLOOD?
>From CO2 Science Magazine, 9 April 2003
http://www.co2science.org/journal/2003/v6n15c2.htm
Reference
Sheffer, N.A., Enzel, Y., Waldmann, N., Grodek, T. and Benito,
G. 2003. Claim of largest flood on record proves
false. EOS: Transactions, American Geophysical Union 84: 109.
Background
>From 8 to 9 September 2002, extreme flooding of the Gardon
River in southern France -- which occurred as a result of half a
year's rainfall being received in approximately twenty hours --
claimed the lives of a number of people and caused much damage to
towns and villages situated adjacent to its channel. The event
elicited much coverage in the press; and, in the words of Sheffer
et al., "this flood is now considered by the media and
professionals to be 'the largest flood on record'," which
record extends all the way back to 1890.
What was done
Coincidently, Sheffer et al. were in the midst of a study of
prior paleofloods of the Gardon River when the recent "big
one" hit. Hence, they had data spanning a much longer time
period against which to compare its magnitude.
What was learned
The authors report that evidence of the five greatest flood
events they have identified to date is to be found in a cave that
is located more than 17 meters above the level of the river's
normal base flow, whereas "the September 2002 flood reached
a stage of only 14 m above the normal base flow at this
site." Hence, they say "the extraordinary flood
of September 2002 was not the largest by any means; similar, and
even larger floods have occurred several times in the recent
past."
How "recent" you ask? Three of the five greatest
floods the authors have so far identified occurred over the
period AD 1400-1800 during the Little Ice Age.
What it means
Although climate alarmists love to point to recent extreme
meteorological phenomena and say they are the result of global
warming (as they did time and again during the severe flooding
experienced in Europe and elsewhere this past year), this paper
clearly demonstrates that that claim is simply not true. In
the words of Sheffer et al., "using a longer time scale than
human collective memory, paleoflood studies can put in
perspective the occurrences of the extreme floods that hit Europe
and other parts of the world during the summer of
2002." And that perspective shows us that even greater
floods occurred repeatedly during the Little Ice Age, which was
the coldest period of the current interglacial.
Copyright © 2003. Center for the Study of Carbon Dioxide
and Global Change
============
(5) NEW FUSION METHOD OFFERS HOPE OF NEW ENERGY SOURCE
>From The New York Times, 7 April 2003
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/04/08/science/physical/08FUSI.html
By KENNETH CHANG
PHILADELPHIA, April 7 - With a blast of X-rays compressing a
capsule of hydrogen to conditions approaching those at the center
of the Sun, scientists from Sandia National Laboratories reported
today that they had achieved thermonuclear fusion, in essence
detonating a tiny hydrogen bomb.
Such controlled explosions would not be large enough to be
dangerous and might offer an alternative way of generating
electricity by harnessing fusion, the process that powers the
Sun. Fusion combines hydrogen atoms into helium, producing
bountiful energy as a byproduct.
"It's the first observation of fusion for a pulsed power
source," said Dr. Ramon J. Leeper, manager of the target
physics department at Sandia, in Albuquerque, who presented the
findings at a meeting of the American Physical Society here.
Fusion power would be safer than fission, the current method used
in nuclear power plants, because fusion does not produce
long-lived radioactive waste.
Most fusion efforts have tried to use magnetic fields to compress
hydrogen to temperatures hot enough for fusion to occur
continuously, as it does in the Sun. But sustaining a dense hot
cloud of hydrogen gas has proved trickier than scientists thought
when they started fusion experiments 50 years ago. Even
proponents say decades of research and expensive reactors are
needed before a commercial power plant is possible. Dr. Jeff
Quintenz, director of the Pulsed Power Sciences Center at Sandia,
likened the approach to burning coal in a furnace.
The Sandia experiments, by comparison, could lead to something
more like an internal combustion engine, in which power is
generated through a series of explosions. "Squirt in a
little bit of fuel, explode it," Dr. Quintenz said.
"Squirt in a little bit of fuel, explode it."
That approach is potentially simpler, eliminating the need to
confine hot hydrogen gas. But designing a machine that could
detonate controlled thermonuclear explosions in quick succession
- and survive them - is an engineering challenge that scientists
have only begun to think about.
Earlier, scientists at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in
California set off fusion explosions by shining intense lasers on
hydrogen capsules. Livermore plans to further that research in a
new National Ignition Facility. Other scientists are looking to
implode hydrogen with beams of heavy elements like xenon or
cesium.
The Sandia apparatus, the Z accelerator, was originally built to
study nuclear weapons explosions without actual nuclear tests. In
the mid-90's, the Z accelerator put out an impressive 20 trillion
watts of X-rays. But that was far short of what is needed to
induce fusion, and Sandia officials considered turning it off.
Improvements have raised the peak X-ray power by a factor of 10,
to more than 200 trillion watts. It has been considered a
dark-horse candidate for practical fusion. "We are solidly
in the fusion regime," Dr. Quintenz said. "We're in the
game."
For a few billionths of a second, the power of the X-rays
crashing into the hydrogen capsule far exceeds the output of all
the world's power plants.
Most of the 104-foot-wide machine, which resembles a large wagon
wheel, stores a large amount of electrical energy, enough to
power 100 houses for two minutes, and unleashing it quickly,
which sets off a Rube Goldberg chain of events that leads to
fusion. At the center of the machine are 360 vertical tungsten
wires that form a cylindrical cage one and a half inches across.
Inside the cage is a plastic foam cylinder. Encased in the foam
is a BB-size plastic capsule that holds deuterium, a heavy form
of hydrogen.
The burst of 20 million amperes of current vaporizes the tungsten
wires and generates a magnetic field that accelerates the
tungsten vapor toward the center of the cylinder. The vapor slams
into the plastic foam, creating a supersonic shock wave. The
shock wave generates X-rays that heat the deuterium to more than
20 million degrees Fahrenheit and squeeze it tightly.
FULL STORY at http://www.nytimes.com/2003/04/08/science/physical/08FUSI.html
============================
* LETTERS TO THE MODERATOR *
============================
(6) MEDIEVAL WARM PERIOD
>From Kevin O. Pope <kpope@starband.net>
Dear Benny,
While I appreciate Professor Stott's comments quoted in CCNet
from The Sunday Telegraph about the need to place the current
climatic regime in an historical perspective, his statement that
the Medieval Warm Period was a "wonderful period of plenty
for everyone" exhibits a rather strong northern European
bias. The Medieval Warm Period brought severe drought to much of
the New World. The collapse of the Maya, Tiwanaku, and
Anasazi civilizations are all linked to major droughts in this
time period, as is a major increase in warfare in coastal
California. With respect to Dr. Brown's statement in the same
piece in The Sunday Telegraph, it seems that the Medieval Warm
Period probably was a global climatic event, although
"warming" may not have been its salient feature. As in
all climate changes, there were winners and losers.
Kevin O. Pope
Geo Eco Arc Research
Maryland, USA
MODERATOR'S NOTE: I generally agree with Kevin's observation that
as far as climate change is
concerened, there will always be winners and losers. However, I
am less convinced about his
suggestion that the Medieval Warm Period drove the recurrent mega
droughts in the Americas. Long
periods of drought have been a recurrent feature of climate in
the Yucatan Peninsula during much
of the last 2500 years (and not just during the 9th and 10th
centuries). Recent research suggests
that variable solar activity has been the major player in driving
the cyclical dynamics of
drought in this region. A recent paper in SCIENCE (Hodell et al.
2001) has shown a significant
and recurrent drought periodicity of 208 years. It concludes that
"a significant component of
century-scale variability in Yucatan droughts is explained by
solar forcing." (Hodell, D.A.,
Brenner, M., Curtis, J.H. and Guilderson, T. 2001. Solar forcing
of drought frequency in the Maya
lowlands. Science 292: 1367-1370.) What is more, the three
examples of civilisation breakdowns
listed by Kevin occurred almost 500 years apart: The multi-year
droughts that are widely believed
to have broght down the Mayan culture occurred at approximately
810, 860 and 910 AD
(http://www.whoi.edu/media/hughen.html).
On the other hand, ice core and lake sediment data
linked to the abandonement of the Tiwanaku fileds and cities
coincided with a sever dry spell
around 1100 AD. In contrast, the disappearance of the Anasazi
from northern Arizona is dated to
around 1300 AD and is associated with the so-called Great Drought
of 1276-1299 in the American West. Benny Peiser
=========
(7) AND FINALLY: BIODIVERSITY SECURED AS SCIENTISTS CREATE
HEALTHY CLONE OF ENDANGERED SPICIES
>From The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, 8 April 2003
http://www.accessatlanta.com/ajc/news/science/0403/08cloning.html
Scientists have for the first time created a healthy clone of an
endangered species, offering powerful evidence that cloning
technology can play a role in preserving and even reconstituting
threatened and endangered species.
The clone -- a cattlelike creature known as a Javan banteng,
native to Asian jungles -- was grown from a single skin cell
taken from a captive banteng before it died in 1980. The cell was
one of several that had remained frozen in a vial at the San
Diego Zoo until last year, when they were thawed as part of an
experimental effort to make cloned banteng embryos.
Scientists transferred dozens of such embryos to the wombs of
standard beef cows in Iowa last fall, and the first baby banteng
clone was born April 1 after gestating for a standard 9 1/2
months.
"It let out this big bellow and everybody cheered,"
said Robert Lanza, a scientist with Advanced Cell Technology, a
Worcester, Mass., company that collaborated in the project with
the Zoological Society of San Diego and an Iowa high-tech cattle
reproduction company.
"It was so surreal," Lanza said. "There we are,
out at this farm in the middle of Iowa, and this beef cow is
giving birth to this exotic animal that normally lives in the
bamboo forests of Asia."
A second cloned banteng was born two days later to another cow on
the same research farm, but was in poor health Monday and its
prospects remained uncertain -- a reminder that scientists still
have a lot to learn before mammalian cloning becomes routine.
The only other member of an endangered species ever cloned -- a
cattlelike Asian gaur, born in January 2001 -- died of an
infection less than two days after birth. By contrast, the
first-born banteng "is doing beautifully," Lanza said.
"It's a beautiful, adorable creature."
Bantengs, which as adults sport enormous horns and can weigh as
much as 1,800 pounds, once roamed in large numbers through the
bamboo forests of Indonesia, Malaysia, Burma and other Asian
nations. Hunting and habitat destruction have reduced their
numbers by more than 80 percent in the past 20 years. Today only
3,000 to 5,000 remain worldwide.
Most worrisome to conservationists, only a handful of large herds
remain, so the animals are at risk of becoming dangerously
inbred. That's where the cloners hope to help.
The stored cells were from a male banteng that died at the San
Diego Wild Animal Park before it had a chance to mate, depriving
the small captive population there of the genetic diversity it
could have added.
Lanza and his colleagues combined some of the banteng's preserved
skin cells with ordinary cow eggs whose own DNA had been removed,
a standard method for making cloned embryos. When the embryos
were six days old, the team shipped them by overnight mail to
Trans Ova Genetics in Sioux Center, Iowa -- a company that makes
genetically engineered cows that produce drugs and other
biomedical products in their milk.
Scientists there transferred 45 of the banteng embryos to 30
cows. Two pregnancies made it to term, and the two bantengs were
delivered by Caesarean section.
The goal is to ship them to the wild animal park, allow them to
mature for six years, then mate them with captive banteng cows.
© 2003 The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
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