gravity’s rainbow

Carbon dioxide levels have been increasing since the industrial revolution and have been increasing really really fast since the 1950s. You’ve all seen the hockey stick graph.

I’ve been looking at pinyon pine tree rings for the past year and think there might be something going on with increasing CO2 and what the rings are doing. So I’ve got a stack of papers to read through and thought I’d share some of them with all of you.

Carbon dioxide is pretty good for plants because plants need carbon for photosynthesis. We’re interested in what higher levels of CO2 will do to plants because if plants are growing more and eating more carbon dioxide it could help slow down global warming. But giving most plants most places extra carbon dioxide doesn’t seem to do much in the long run because plants need lots of other things to grow, like nitrogen and water, and carbon isn’t usually the most limiting. It’s the same for you: it doesn’t matter how many vegetables you eat if there’s no water.

But what about plants where carbon might be a limiting factor for growth? Carbon can be limiting in hot, dry places because to get carbon, plants have to lose water. Plants have little tiny pores in their leaves called stomata. They have to open these to let in CO2, but water escapes whenever they’re open. A lot of plants that live in hot, dry places have evolved a different kind of photosynthesis to deal with this.

Another place carbon might be limiting is at very high elevations. Atmospheric CO2 concentrations decrease with increasing elevation. That means that in the same amount of space there’s less CO2. This happens to all gases. Flagstaff is above 2000 meters. When people move here, they have a hard time breathing for awhile because of the lower oxygen concentration.

Lamarche et al. looked at tree rings in the 1980s of bristlecone pine growing at 3100 meters. They found that the trees had increasing growth since about 1840. Initially they thought that this was due to warmer temperatures, but then when it cooled down in the 60s, the trend kept going and even accelerated. So, the faster growth wasn’t due to hotter temperatures.

But was it caused by higher CO2 levels? Plants can only use so much CO2, no matter how much is available. Like at Thanksgiving dinner, there’s lots of food available, but you can only eat so much. In the 1960s, CO2 was between 223 and 230 ppm at 3500 meters. For spruce, that concentration is well below what it considers CO2 saturation and so is probably well below what bristlecone considers saturation.

While the authors didn’t really have enough data from enough places to say for sure CO2 makes trees growing at high altitudes grow more, what they do have certainly suggests it.

This paper is over 20 years old, so we’ll see what more recent papers have found…

LAMARCHE, V.C., GRAYBILL, D.A., FRITTS, H.C., ROSE, M.R. (1984). Increasing Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide: Tree Ring Evidence for Growth Enhancement in Natural Vegetation. Science, 225(4666), 1019-1021. DOI: 10.1126/science.225.4666.1019

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Several people have told me that solar and/or windpower are useless because the amount of energy necessary to manufacture them is less than the energy they can output over the entire life of the device.  That’s uninformed nonsense.

And don’t try the “it’s too expensive” argument either because now solar is actually cheaper than coal.  Which is a very very good thing considering that if we don’t get CO2 levels down to around 350 ppm real fast, we’re in real trouble.

Wind and solar aren’t the be all and end all of clean energy either.  My city uses poop to generate power at the waste treatment plant.

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Georgia: even more of a backwater than you thought.

Read a book, plant a tree. I need a lot of these.

You don’t believe in evolution. You just believe it.

To believe in something takes faith, trust, effort, strength. I need none of these things to believe evolution. It just is. My health is better because of medical research based on evolution. My genetic code is practically the same as a chimpanzee’s. My bipedal feet walk on an earth full of fossil missing links. And when my feet tire, those fossils fuel my car.

I was told that Australia was wider/larger than the continental US. But that’s not true! They’re just about the same size. The continental US is 8,080,464.25 km² and Australia is 7,617,930 km². Whew! I was worried about my knowledge of geography for a few days.

World’s best headline: Republicans Vote Against Moms; No Word Yet on Puppies, Kittens. And it just gets better. This reporter is angry, and rightfully so.

Neither is Boehner likely to be helped by a Senate ethics committee decision yesterday exonerating Sen. David Vitter (R-La.) over his use of the “D.C. Madam’s” call girls. The Senate cleared him because the prostitution occurred when he was in the House — and the House can’t punish him because he left for the Senate. The madam, meanwhile, killed herself by hanging last week.

Dear animal rights activists against all animal testing, you aren’t allowed to go to the doctor ever again.

You thought Jeremiah Wright was a problem? John McCain refuses to renounce a man he calls a moral compass even though he argues for the murder of millions of people, just because they’re Muslim.

Ok, so maybe this is the world’s best headline: Great tits cope well with warming.

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Temperatures are expected to be a bit cooler in the next decade due to natural cycles, but after that, the current too-fast rate of warming will continue.  Hopefully people pay attention to articles like this instead of saying “well it’s been really cold the last few years so global warming can’t be a problem.”

Some scary things have happened on the supreme court in the past few years.  Do something about it.

Nuclear power has some serious problems.  Like nuclear waste.  Also, it’s got a wicked high carbon cost.

The new poll tax.

Dave Neiwert on Obama, Jeremiah Wright, and things Americans don’t like to talk about:

It’s human, of course, to want to think of yourself as a good person, and your country as a good country. Which is why it’s human of white Americans — the descendants and beneficiaries of the people who perpetrated these atrocities — to want to forget that these things happened. And they want to believe that because these events were in the past, and they took some initial steps toward reconciliation 40 years ago, the issues should have gone away, and if they haven’t, well, it’s the victims’ fault.

Choosing to buy bottled water may lead to having to buy bottled water as our municipal water supplies go bad.  So don’t buy bottled water.

This is definitely what those crazy churches’ retreats are like.  It’s terrifying that there are so many people who’ve been taught not to think.

And in the same vein, religion is child abuse.

Good science education is important for everyone.  An English TA comments on a student paper: “I personally have lots of reservations regarding evolution (even scientifically).”  This is appalling.  As one scientist put it

“Imagine a teaching assistant writing, ‘I personally have lots of reservations regarding the fact the Earth is round.’”

You may have heard Ben Stein recently claiming that “science leads to killing,” specifically that it led to the Holocaust.  A powerful refutation of his nonsense.

My period might save your life.

Someone needs to tell the Swiss government that plants could care less about their dignity.

Compassionate conservative Douglas Bruce calls immigrants “illiterate peasants.”

Obama and Clinton tap into anti-intellectual sentiment.

In Britain, donkeys get more government support than women.

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Sara Robinson writes about John McCain’s betrayal of the troops and how he’s paving the way for an army no one wants to see at Campaign for America’s Future.

Drive by botany in New South Wales at The Reluctant Botanist.

A short report on breast ironing in Cameroon at current tv.

How drunk do you have to be to fall asleep with a knife in your back?

At home, Mr Lyalin had some sausage from the fridge and lay down to sleep, the Komsomolskaya Pravda newspaper says.

After a couple of hours, his wife noticed the handle sticking out of his back and called an ambulance.

…

Mr Lyalin apparently feels fine and bears no ill-will.

“We were drinking and what doesn’t happen when you’re drunk?” he was quoted by Komsomolskaya Pravda as saying.

IPCC estimates of sea level rise are way too conservative.

Turning food into gas for your car makes people starve.

The very best explanation of the infuriating, demoralizing subtleties of sexism I’ve ever read.

Men explain things to me, and other women, whether or not they know what they’re talking about. Some men.

Every woman knows what I’m talking about. It’s the presumption that makes it hard, at times, for any woman in any field; that keeps women from speaking up and from being heard when they dare; that crushes young women into silence by indicating, the way harassment on the street does, that this is not their world. It trains us in self-doubt and self-limitation just as it exercises men’s unsupported overconfidence.

Best science class ever.

Fern poetry.

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The Australian government pays farmers during drought and wants to modify the program to help farmers deal better with climate change.

Agriculture Minister Tony Burke says he supports the payments system but wants it to be improved, with farmers given more help to deal with climate change.

…

“What we want to make sure of is that it can be improved so that whenever somebody goes through a period of drought and goes through a period of needing government assistance, by the time that period’s over, they’ve actually got themselves better prepared and better engaged to deal with climate change.”

Sounds good, right? Actually, if you’ve been keeping up with predictions of what climate change is going to do to Australia, this is not a good plan. This phrase - “by the time that period’s over”- demonstrates the problem. The period isn’t going to be over. I’m no expert on climate change, but a quick search shows that likely scenarios aren’t looking good. Here’s what scientists have to say about future moisture in Australia:

Considerable uncertainty remains as to future changes in rainfall, El Niño Southern Oscillation events and tropical cyclone activity. Overall increases in potential evaporation over much of the continent are predicted as well as continued reductions in the extent and duration of snow cover.

“Overall increases in potential evaporation” means that it isn’t going to matter if it starts raining again. When it’s warmer, more water evaporates and less water is available for plants.  So while we aren’t entirely sure what’s going to happen with rainfall, it’s going to be a rough life for plants regardless.  And what’s already happened is likely to continue happening:

There have been significant regional trends in rainfall with the northern, eastern and southern parts of the continent receiving greater rainfall and the western region receiving less.

Maybe a better idea would be to move farming to regions where more rainfall is expected.  Or find something else for the farmers to do.

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Rachel Carson inspired the environmental movement with her book Silent Spring. Her 100th birthday was earlier this year and lots of celebrations were held in her honor. But our government’s attempt to honor her impact didn’t go forward.

Sen. Tom Coburn derailed approval of a Senate resolution honoring the life of Carson, whose 1962 book “Silent Spring” warned of the dangers posed to wildlife and humans by the pesticide DDT and who is credited with inspiring the modern environmental movement.

“Rachel Carson’s work both directly and indirectly created a climate of hysteria and misinformation about the impact of DDT on the human populations,” said John Hart, a spokesman for Coburn, in explaining why the Oklahoma Republican withheld his support for the plan to honor her.

And we wonder why it’s so hard to get people moving on issues like climate change. This guy wants to bring widespread DDT use back. Of course, he probably recognizes the dangers, but he’s probably getting paid to say things like this. You’d think as a doctor he’d care a little more about the health of his constituents.

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I’ve posted before about the damage farm subsidies can do to the economies of other countries. Corn is one of the most heavily subsidized crops and it’s being used to create ethanol, which is currently more profitable than selling the corn for food because ethanol is subsidized, too. This is causing some very serious problems in Mexico: the cost of corn, a staple of mexican food, has gone out the roof. People are hungry enough to protest.

Ethanol isn’t significantly better for the environment than oil, but the government needs to look like it’s trying to become more energy independent because of the mess we’ve made in the Middle East. Things don’t happen in a vacuum. The war in Iraq and Afghanistan is linked to hunger in Mexico.

The high price of tortillas and other, crueler vagaries of the international order illustrate the interconnectedness of events, from the Middle East to the Middle West, and the urgency of establishing trade based on true democratic agreements among people, and not interests whose principal hunger is for profit for corporate interests protected and subsidised by the state they largely dominate, whatever the human cost. [link via LMB]

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Cleaning up

Yet emissions keep on rising. If greenhouse-gas concentrations are to be stabilised, then the carbon price or the support mechanisms for clean energy, or both, will have to rise or be adopted worldwide, or both. And if that happens, the returns on clean-energy investments will increase even further and the companies that have already invested in such businesses will have a head start over those that have not.

Minnesota case fits the pattern in flap over firing of U.S. attorneys

At a time when GOP activists wanted U.S. attorneys to concentrate on pursuing voter fraud cases, Heffelfinger’s office was expressing deep concern about the effect of a state directive that could have the effect of discouraging Indians in Minnesota from casting ballots.

Life 2.0

Scientists in the last couple of years have been trying to create novel forms of life from scratch. They’ve forged chemicals into synthetic DNA, the DNA into genes, genes into genomes, and built the molecular machinery of completely new organisms in the lab—organisms that are nothing like anything nature has produced.

If It Feels Good to Be Good, It Might Be Only Natural

when the volunteers placed the interests of others before their own, the generosity activated a primitive part of the brain that usually lights up in response to food or sex. Altruism, the experiment suggested, was not a superior moral faculty that suppresses basic selfish urges but rather was basic to the brain, hard-wired and pleasurable.

Fear-Mongering and Fiction: Cheney Addresses West Point Grads

As Cheney told the graduates of the enemies they may soon face — terrorists “who oppose and despise everything you know to be right, every notion of upright conduct and character” — there were moments when it seemed that he had simply recycled an old speech from 2002. Indeed, long after most members of the Bush administration have distanced themselves from some of the more insidious claims that propelled the U.S. into war with Iraq, the vice president continues to repeat them as fact. At one point today he cited the link between Iraq and Al Qaeda (which has been thoroughly debunked) as the reason why the U.S. invaded Iraq. “America is fighting this enemy in Iraq because that is where they have gathered,” he told the West Point graduates. “We are there because, after 9/11, we decided to deny terrorists any safe haven.”

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mushroom on the roof

Originally uploaded by hans s

I posted about the extended growing season for mushrooms in the UK a few weeks ago. A cool fact I didn’t know at the time: the discovery was due to a 50 year data collection by Alan Ganges, an amateur mycologist.

Fungus enthusiast Edward Gange amassed 52,000 sightings of mushroom and toadstools during walks around Salisbury over a 50-year period. Analysis by his son Alan, published in the journal Science, shows some fungi have started to fruit twice a year. It is among the first studies to show a biological impact of warming in autumn.

Science takes passion and creativity and you don’t have to dedicate your life to it to contribute or enjoy it.

Via Majikthise.

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