The Azimuth Project is taking off! Today I woke up and found two new articles full of cool stuff I hadn’t known. Check them out:
• EROEI, about the idea of Energy Returned on Energy Invested.
• Peak phosphorus, about the crucial role of phosphorus as a fertilizer, and how the moment of peak phosphorus production may have already passed.
Both were initiated by David Tweed, but they’ve both already been polished by other people — Eric Forgy and Graham Jones, so far. So, it’s working!
Here’s the easiest way for you to help save the planet today:
1) Think of the most important book or article you’ve read about environmental problems, how to solve them, or some closely related topic.
2) Go to the Recommended reading page on Azimuth.
3) Click the button that says “Edit” at the bottom left.
4) Add your recommended reading! You’ll see items that look sort of like this:
### _The Necessary Revolution_
* Authors: Peter M. Senge, Bryan Smith, Nina Kruschwitz, Joe Laur and Sara Schley
* Publisher: Random House, New York, 2008
* Recommended by: [[Moneesha Mehta]]
* [Link](http://www.google.com/search?q=the+necessary+revolution)**Summary:** I confess, I haven’t read the book, but I’ve listened to the abridged version on CD many times as I drive between Toronto and Ottawa. It never fails to inspire me. Peter Senge et al discuss how organizations, private, public, and non-profit, can all work together and build on their organizational strengths to create more sustainable operations.
Copy this format and add:
## _the name of your favorite article or book_
* Author(s): the author(s) name(s)
* Publisher: publisher and date
* Recommended by: [[your name]]
* [Link](a URL to help people find more information)**Summary:** A little summary.
5) Type your name in the little box at the bottom of the page, and hit the Submit button.
Easy!
And if step 4 seems too complicated, don’t worry! Just enter the information in a paragraph of text — we’ll fix up the formatting.
Our ultimate goal is not a huge unsorted list of important articles and books about environmental issues. We’re trying to build a structure where it’s easy to find information — in fact, wisdom — on specific topics!
But right now we’re just getting started. We need, among other things, to rapidly accumulate relevant data. So — take 5 minutes today to help us out. And find out what other people think you’d enjoy reading!
Azimuth 
By the way, if you see a “Recommended reading” already there that you would also recommend, feel free to add your name to the list of “Recommended by”. The more recommendations, the more likely a newbie is to pick it up.
How about reviews? There is probably room to put reviews somewhere as well.
So far you can read quick summaries of these books:
# The End of Energy Obesity
# The Necessary Revolution
# Eaarth
# The Variety of Life
# Global Warming: Understanding the Forecast
# A Global Warming Primer
# The Long Summer
# Sustainable Energy – Without the Hot Air
# The Limits to Growth
# Whole Earth Discipline
Surely there are lots more good ones! And technical papers, too…
There’s a fascinating new link on the Recommended reading page, put there by someone I don’t know yet: Peadar Coyle.
It’s a link to the papers of Vaclav Smil. I’m starting to read one of these:
• Vaclav Smil, Power density primer: understanding the spatial dimension of the unfolding transition to renewable electricity generation.
Anyone who likes physics could enjoy this. A few quotes give the flavor:
In other words: how many watts can you get out of a square meter of land or water?
More later…
Here are some of Vaclav Smil’s results:
• Most large modern coal-fired power plants generate electricity with power densities ranging from 100 to 1,000 W/m2, including the area of the mine, the power plant, etcetera.
• The energy density of dry wood (18-21 GJ/ton) is close to that of sub-bituminous coal. But if we were to supply a significant share of a nation’s electricity from wood we would have to establish extensive tree plantations. We could not expect harvests surpassing 20 tons/hectare, with 10 tons/hectare being more typical. Harvesting all above-ground tree mass and feeding it into chippers would allow for 95% recovery of the total field production, but even if the fuel’s average energy density were 19 GJ/ton, the plantation would yield no more than 190 GJ/hectare, resulting in harvest power density of 0.6 W/m2.
• No other mode of large-scale electricity generation occupies as little space as gas turbines: besides their compactness they do not need fly ash disposal or flue gas desulfurization. Mobile gas turbines generate
electricity with power densities higher than 15,000 W/m2 and large (>100 MW) stationary set-ups can easily deliver 4,000-5,000 W/m2. (What about the mining?)
• Photovoltaic panels are fixed in an optimal tilted south-facing position and hence receive more radiation than a unit of horizontal surface, but the average power densities of solar parks are low. Additional land is needed for spacing the panels for servicing, access roads, inverter and transformer facilities and service structures — and only 85% of a panel’s DC rating is transmitted from the park to the grid as AC power. All told, they deliver 4-9 W/m2.
• Concentrating solar power (CSP) projects use tracking parabolic mirrors in order to reflect and concentrate solar radiation on a central receiver placed in a high tower, for the purposes of powering a steam engine. All facilities included, these deliver at most 10 W/m2.
• Wind turbines have fairly high power densities when the rate measures the flux of wind’s kinetic energy moving through the working surface: the area swept by blades. This power density is commonly above 400 W/m2 – but power density expressed as electricity generated per land area is much less! At best we can expect a peak power of 6.6 W/m2 and even a relatively high average capacity factor of 30% would bring that down to only about 2 W/m2.
So, part of the point is that going to renewable energy requires adapting to vastly lower power densities.
It could be that high power densities are so ‘addictive’ that we can only quit them after we run out fossil fuels.
But if we wait until fossil fuels run out, we’ll get massive global warming.
The End of Energy Obesity tries to point us toward a way out of our ‘addiction’.
A small comment on the Wiki system: there doesn’t seem to be a “discussion” page. On Wikipedia I make entries there about issues which are unclear to me but require an expert’s attention, or about editorial issues which have no place being part of the main article but which perhaps might be addressed as part of other more substantial editing. I don’t directly see that in the Azimuth Project wiki — am I missing something obvious?
FYI the two really niggardly issues I wished to comment on, but not make a big deal about, were in the Vaclav Smil article: first, dates like “2/10/2010” only make sense to US imperialists and are a combination of confusing, irritating, and ambiguous to every other person on the planet; and second, “panels are fixed in an optimal tilted south-facing position” is hemispherically insensitive, notwithstanding the global balance of population, development, landmass and carbon emission.
Hi Richard,
You probably know this already, but I’ll say it for the sake of others as well…
In addition to the Azimuth blog here and the Azimuth Project wiki, there is also an Azimuth Discussion Forum. The forum is where discussion about content on the wiki take place including recent changes, suggestions, etc.
Richard wrote:
For each article on the Azimuth Project there is (or at least should be) a corresponding discussion in the Latest Changes section of the Azimuth Forum, and that discussion is the best place to make comments. You need to join the Azimuth Forum to do so.
But your remark triggers two thoughts I’ve already had:
1) We should make a link from each Azimuth Project page to the corresponding discussion. I’ll go to the forum right this second and ask what’s the easiest way to do that.
2) Right now only Azimuth Forum members are allowed to post comments on the forum. I urge you to join the forum! But I can imagine the advantages of a section of the Forum where everyone in the universe can easily post comments. We discussed this already, but I don’t think our decisions are set in stone.
Please fix these stupid mistakes! It takes a lot less time to fix stuff than to have a conversation about it.
I am responsible for both, at least in part:
In the Azimuth Project I usually enter dates in a format like “2 October 2010”, which is comprehensible to everyone, even Americans. In this particular case I typed “2/10/2010” because:
1) I read that date in a Canadian newspaper and could not remember whether they used the US system or the rest-of-the-world system.
2) This particular date makes sense either way, since both 2 and 10 are less than 12.
3) I was feeling lazy and hoped someone else would figure it out and pick up after my mess.
As for “panels are fixed in an optimal tilted south-facing position”, I cut-and-paste this remark from an Azimuth Forum discussion, and didn’t notice that it was a Northern Supremacist remark.
Amusingly, right now I don’t know if I live in the Northern or Southern hemisphere — Singapore is very near the equator. I think now is the time for me to look it up. Okay — I’m 1° 22′ north of the equator.
(See, it would have been a lot faster if you’d just fixed these. But maybe it’s good to talk about such stuff a bit.)
My article just went online last night: “Fight Global Warming with Genetically Altered Trees!”.
This links to some interesting publications.
I read about peak phosphorus (and some other industrial-agricultural chemicals) in Asimov’s book on chemistry. I’ll see if I can track it down in my library
It is said that chinese introduced a kind of aquatic plant, called ‘shuihulu’ in chinese, from south America to clean the heavy metal in water, but people didn’t know that they have no natural enemies in china. As a result, many lakes and rivers are full of the plant, no other creatures can survive!
In recent decade, people have to spend a large amount of money and time to eliminate them.
I don’t much ideas about what the ‘Genetically Altered Trees’ may bring to us!
WWF’s “Living Planet Report 2010”
Thanks, Thomas! I’ve added a link to this page:
• Azimuth Project, Biodiversity.
Since you come across a lot of interesting things, I hope you start putting those relevant to “saving the planet” onto the Azimuth Project wiki. You can put them here and I will put them there. But it’s almost as easy to put them there!
Thanks for the hint! I just tried it, I hope it fits the standards and how one puts links there.
Great! Thanks for adding that link!
If you come across more important information about the enviroment or sustainability issues, please add it. And if your contribution is interesting and substantial — for example, a whole new page — please tell us about it on the Azimuth Forum.
Heading Out (Dave Summers) has a lot of deep technical stuff on energy production in his blog posts. The links with titles are in the side bar. One way to get there is via his latest post, which everyone should read: Saudi Oil Production – read Minister Al-Naimi’s small print.
We are inclined, mostly correctly, to tend to trust people who combine an interest in the big picture with a command of a lot of detail, even if that is only in some part of the whole subject. Heading Out fits that bill. Darwin was a classic case, where his big picture views had to be respected by his peers because of the decades of detailed work on molluscs.
Sounds interesting! I’ve added it to my blog roll.
I wish, wish, wish that you’d take some of the most important facts from Summers’ blog and copy them over to suitable Azimuth Project pages. We need a lot more detailed information on energy production, costs, etc.
Of course I’d like to do it myself, but I’m already working about as hard as I can. My plan right now is to go through various plans of action, summarize them, summarize criticisms of them, then compare them… and then someday maybe come up with one of my own! Or our own, if anyone wants to help.
(I found not where to post in on the Azimuth Project pages): A new report: “The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity” by the TEEB: “The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity (TEEB) study is a major international initiative to draw attention to the global economic benefits of biodiversity, to highlight the growing costs of biodiversity loss and ecosystem degradation, and to draw together expertise from the fields of science, economics and policy to enable practical actions moving forward. … “Mainstreaming the Economics of Nature” is the last of four reports produced by the U.N. Environmental Program over the past two years and aims to capture how habitats such as tropical forests and coral reefs contribute to countries’ economic bottom lines.”
The “Ecosystem services” page
http://www.azimuthproject.org/azimuth/show/Ecosystem+services
seems like a good place. (There’s a ref to TEEB, but not that particular report.)
Yes, that seems like a good place to put it.
And when you add links, it’s always nice to include a little (or big!) summary. Links are infinitely more useful if the reader can tell what to expect by clicking on them.
The summary doesn’t need to be painful to write: the quote you just included would be fine.
Not directly related (really?) to climate change, but similar disturbing: Montgomery, D. R., Dirt: Erosion of Civilizations.
(By lack of time posted here): “one of the most powerful tools scientists have for understanding our planet’s changing climate”
A bit of history: “251-million-year-old evidence to understand the “Great Dying.””
Added the links here.
Thanks! Two more articles: Narwhals document continued warming of southern Baffin Bay, Have jellyfish in the Irish Sea benefited from climate change and overfishing? in this interesting journal.
(Again by lack of time posted here): A Wiki for the Biofuels Research Community and Is the ice at the South Pole melting?.
The first plenary talk at the California-Nevada regional conference of the Americal Physical Society, yesterday and today at Caltech, was Josh K. Willis, Ph.D., of JPL, on Global Warming and the Oceans (temperature, salinity, currents, sea level) who mentioned that he had
been derided by name on a Rush Limbaugh broadcast. … Rush condemned
endangering economic development due to the “musings of a few idiot
leftist scientists.” I have here Dr. Willis’s business card. Lovely
satellite photo of Earth and, right under his name: “Idiot Leftist
Scientist.”
“Extreme global warming in the ancient past” by the National Oceanography Centre, Southampton (UK).
More evidence that the ‘climate sensitivity’ is roughly 2-3 ° C per doubling of CO2:
Maybe someday they can sharpen it up a bit.
Here is info on a project. It’s self-description sounds to me a bit nebulous: “The International Council for Science (ICSU) is spearheading a consultation process in cooperation with the International Social Science Council (ISSC) to engage the scientific community to explore options and propose implementation steps for a holistic strategy on Earth system research.”
NYTimes on sea level rise. (link)
Fiametta Straneo posters and papers mentioned in the NYTimes article, important data for modelling, suggest pulses of large amounts of freshwater instead of steady flow…
How do changes in river input and sea ice affect the Hudson Strait outflow? D. Sutherland, F.Straneo, S. Dery and K. Drinkwater. AGU 2008 Poster. http://www.whoi.edu/science/PO/people/fstraneo/pdfs/AGU2008_HStrait.pdf
What controls the dispersion of riverine freshwater in Hudson Bay during the summer? P. St-Laurent, F.Straneo, J.F. Dumais, D.G. Barber, ArcticNet 2008 Poster.
Click to access arctic_change2008poster.pdf
Does Warming of the North Atlantic over the Last Decade Explain the Acceleration of Outlet Glaciers in Southeast Greenland? Straneo, F., D. Sutherland, G.S. Hamilton, R. G. Curry, L. A. Stearns, AGU FALL 2008 Poster.
Click to access StraneoAGU2008.pdf
Papers
The outflow from Hudson Strait and its contribution to the Labrador Current. F. Straneo and F. Saucier, Deep Sea Res. I, 55, 926-946. Elsevier property, not publicly available.
The Arctic-Sub Arctic Exchange through Hudson Strait. F.Straneo and F. Saucier, Arctic-Subarctic Ocean Fluxes: Defining the role of the Northern Seas in Climate: Eds. R. Dickson, J. Meincke, P. Rhines, Springer_Verlag, NY, pp740.
Click to access straneo_asof.pdf
Observations of fresh, anticyclonic eddies in the Hudson Strait outflow. D. Sutherland, F. Straneo, S. Lentz, P. St. Laurent, 2010, J. Mar. Sys. submitted
Click to access Sutherland_HS_2009.pdf
^^^^^^!!!!!!^^^^^^!!!!!!!!!^^^^^^^^ look at the paper above…^^^^^^^!!!!!!!!!!^^^^^^^^!!!!!!!!!!!!^^^^^^^^^^
Variability and trends in streamflow output into Hudson Bay. Dery, S.J., Mlynowski, T.J., Hernandez-Henriquez, M.A., F. Straneo, 2010, J. Mar. Sys. submitted
What is the fate of the river waters of Hudson Bay? St. Laurent,F. Straneo, J.F. Dumais, D.G. Barber, 2010, J. Mar. Sys. submitted
World Ocean Review. The press info: “The non-profit company maribus gGmbH was established two years ago with the aim of raising the public’s awareness of the interconnectedness of the marine environment, thus contributing to more effective protection of the world’s oceans. The partners who have made such a vital contribution to the production of maribus’s first publication, the “World Ocean Review” (“WOR”), have many years of commitment and expertise in studying the seas at the highest scientific level.” (link)
Royal Society on “Four degrees and beyond: the potential for a global temperature increase of four degrees and its implications” (link)
For your weekend: http://arxiv.org/abs/1012.0421
Context: http://rabett.blogspot.com/2010/05/unto-us-paper-is-given-unto-us.html
Thanks for the reference, but I stopped reading that paper after this:
The new paper by Gehrlich and Tseuschner is too polemical to be interesting — as you might expect, given that they start their abstract by referring to their opponents’ “notorious claims”, and begin one passage with “Let us start with Halpern’s favorite object of lust”.
If anyone here wants to test their ability to argue physics with so-called climate skeptics, it probably makes more sense to start with G&T’s first paper:
• Gerhard Gehrlich and Ralf D. Tseuschner, Falsification of the atmospheric CO2 greenhouse effect within the frame of physics, International Journal of Modern Physics B 23 (2009), 275-364.
where they claim, for example, that:
For some silly reason, the paper by Halpern et al arguing against Gehrlich and Tseuschner’s claims — the one that G&T are arguing against now — is not available on the arXiv. However, you can get it for free with a little work:
• Joshua B. Halpern, Christopher M. Colose, Chris Ho-Stuart, Joel D. Shore, Arthur P. Smith and Jörg Zimmerman, Comment on “Falsification of the atmospheric CO2 greenhouse effect within the frame of physics”, International Journal of Modern Physics B 24 (2010), 1309-1322.
This is a new estimate about the coming Greenland ice sheet meltage.
Thanks, Thomas! Happy New Year! I’ll add this information to:
• Sea level rise, Azimuth Project.
For anyone too busy to read Thomas’ link: from the abstract, it seems the authors predict a 0.16 meter increase in sea level due to Greenland ice sheet melting during the period from 1950 to 2080.
That would be very nice. If the entire 2.85 × 106 km3 of ice in Greenland were to melt, it would lead to a global sea level rise of 7.2 meters. This would inundate most of the world’s coastal cities and remove several small island countries from the face of the Earth, since island nations such as Tuvalu and Maldives have a maximum altitude below or just above this level:
• D. A. Meese et al., The Greenland ice sheet Project 2 depth-age scale: methods and results, Journal of Geophysical Research 12 (1997), 411-426.
Thanks! Here is a new report: “The magnitude of climate change during Earth’s deep past suggests that future temperatures may eventually rise far more than projected if society continues its pace of emitting greenhouse gases, a new analysis concludes. The study, by National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) scientist Jeffrey Kiehl, will appear as a “Perspectives” piece in this week’s issue of the journal Science.”
A recent BBC docu: “Nobel Prize winner Sir Paul Nurse examines why science appears to be under attack, and why public trust in key scientific theories has been eroded – from the theory that man-made climate change is warming our planet, to the safety of GM food, or that HIV causes AIDS. He interviews scientists and campaigners from both sides of the climate change debate, and travels to New York to meet Tony, who has HIV but doesn’t believe that that the virus is responsible for AIDS. This is a passionate defence of the importance of scientific evidence and the power of experiment, and a look at what scientists themselves need to do to earn trust in controversial areas of science in the 21st century.” (youtube video)
This is about the idea of energy saving software: “Saving energy is an activity that should come from many layers,” said Liu, who plans to build energy-related parameters into a programming language. A change at that level would permit and encourage programmers to express their energy-saving intentions directly when software is developed. He hopes to employ advanced programming language technologies known as “type systems” to answer questions such as: “What is the energy-consumption pattern of a large program, given the consumption patterns of its fragments?” and “Do programmers have conflicted views of the energy-consumption patterns of their software?”
Interesting! Since ‘type systems’ are closely related to category theory, I would like to see any papers by Yu David Liu on type systems and energy consumption. Unfortunately, I haven’t found any yet. Though his homepage has a link to a paper “”Toward a Unified Object Model for Cyber-Physical Systems (Position Paper)”, the link is broken.
New Scientist reports: “Warmer oceans release CO2 faster than thought”: “Climate records from the end of the last ice age show that as temperatures climb, the oceans emit CO2, which exacerbates warming. Previous studies have suggested that it takes between 400 and 1300 years for this to happen. But now the most precise analysis to date has whittled that figure down.”
This talk (video, article) about “removed knowledge” makes one wonder about the existence of similar issues related to climate change and environmental issues. If relevant knowledge risks “removal”, shouldn’t wikileaks-like methods for these themes be established?
Here something new on that question.
Here announes an article in a danish newspaper that tommorrow the “Arctic Monitoring and Assessment Programme” publishes new prognoses about the sea level rise, expecting 0.9 to 1.6 Meter until 2100, instead of the previous estimates of 0.19 to 0.59 Meter.
Thanks for all these items, Thomas! I’ll have to enter some into the Azimuth Library.
In case anyone wants something to read, or wants to give a friend a present, try this:
• Recommended reading, Azimuth Library.
We are trying to make this into a nice well-rounded collection, and it keeps getting better.
Added
* Paul N. Edwards: “A Vast Machine: Computer Models, Climate Data, and the Politics of Global Warming”
and finally wrote a short review of
* Thomas Tomkins Warner: “Numerical Weather and Climate Prediction”
“These findings underscore that the acidification of the oceans is a serious problem. The acidification has enormous consequences not only for coccoliths, but also for many other marine organisms as well as the global carbon cycle”: http://news.ku.dk/all_news/2011/2010.5/co2_makes_life_difficult/
Ocean acidification is hardly the only one. There are simply dozens of rapidly accumulating irreversible environmental catastrophes… that people act blithely unaware of. To me that is evidence people are building their world view and self-images from some entirely different set of information. It’s so inconsistent with our self-image.
I think there are several good entry points to the big question “what are we missing”? We’re clearly missing quite a lot. I had hoped people would see it as a good entry point to understand why models of the environmental energy needs of businesses need to overlook nominally 80% of the energy uses businesses pay for and rely on to operate. The great majority of energy uses businesses require to operate are naturally untraceable, and so naturally hidden from view and so naturally not part of our perceptions. Systems Energy Assessment It leaves our best science on the subject portraying the problem as technology fix and unaware that the lion’s share of energy use is in the whole system behavior.
Having that highly restricted view then lets you adopt very appealing economic policy ideas like “sustainability”, and get a global consensus to work hard reducing your visible energy uses and other impacts, while still multiplying your hidden energy use and other impacts… for generating the growing profits they produce but are not associated with.
Someday I hope that conundrum will be recognized as *altogether too human*, and so very plausible and worth checking out.
A new study on ” mass mortality in greenhouse oceans” and a a naturally occurring response to greenhouse conditions.
missing link: http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2011-05/uoa-gos051711.php
Here is a report fromthe technical university of Denmark: “We have the technology for creating sustainable energy systems of the future”.
Today’s news:
Ice sheet collapse affects ocean circulation,
Global Warming May Affect the Capacity of Trees to Store Carbon,
Rethinking endangered plants,
Study details path to sustainable aviation biofuels industry.
Doubts at species’ adaptability to a warming environment: “It’s been assumed that widespread species have a lot of genetic capacity to work with, but this study shows that may not be so,” said co-author Rick Grosberg, professor of evolution and ecology at UC Davis. Many other species of animals, birds and plants face stress from climate change, and their habitats have also been fragmented by human activity — perhaps more than we realize, he said. “The critical point is that many organisms are already at their environmental limits, and natural selection won’t necessarily rescue them,” Grosberg said.”
A report by the FAO on how to produce “more food for a growing world population in an environmentally sustainable way”.
BBC on “World’s oceans in ‘shocking’ decline”
And “How climate change threatens west coast water supplies”: “
A new study on >a href=”http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2011/06/13/1015619108.full.pdf?with-ds=yes”>“Climate related sea-level variations over the past two millennia”: “We present newsea-level reconstructions for the past 2100 y based on salt-marsh sedimentary sequences from the US Atlantic coast. The data from North Carolina reveal four phases of persistent sea-level change after correction for glacial isostatic adjustment. Sea level was stable from at least BC 100 until AD 950. Sea level
then increased for 400 y at a rate of 0.6mm/y, followed by a further period of stable, or slightly falling, sea level that persisted until the late 19th century. Since then, sea level has risen at an average rate of 2.1 mm/y, representing the steepest century-scale increase of the past two millennia. This rate was initiated between AD 1865 and 1892. Using an extended semiempirical modeling approach, we show that these sea-level changes are consistent with global temperature for at least the past millennium.”
“Greenhouse-gas emissions from energy use in the water sector” is the theme here, in this interesting journal on climate change. Maybe interesting too are these (not free) articles on “Early warning of climate tipping points” : 1, 2.
Stefan Rahmstorf, professor of physics of the oceans at the Potsdam University, published a book “The Climate Crisis”. It “summarises the current scientific knowledge on climate change for a wide readership, lavishly illustrated with hundreds of photos and graphs. It explains the basic science and measurements, the impacts of climate change as well as the solution strategies.”
That sounds really good. Thanks for all these recommended readings, by the way! At some point I’ll copy them to the Azimuth recommended reading page or perhaps more suitable specialized pages.
A nice article on vanishing knowledge related to vanishing species: e.g. “Ethnographic studies of the American Southwest in the 1930s and ’40s showed that the average Apache teenager could name and describe the edible and medicinal benefits of more than 200 different species of plants. In the 1990s, the late nature writer Paul Gruchow conducted an informal survey on a similar topic. With 60 of what he described as the brightest seniors from the high school in his Minnesota prairie town, Gruchow explored the shores of a nearby lake. He’d asked the students to identify as many of the plants as they could along the way. “A few of the students could name a handful; they were mostly farm kids who knew the weeds,” he reported. “But the majority of the students could name no more than two or three. The dandelion was the only plant they all knew. They didn’t recognize cattails. Most of them couldn’t tell the difference between a willow tree and a cottonwood tree. They have wandered and played along that lakeshore for a lifetime, utterly blind to it.” … Nobel Peace Prize laureate Norman Borlaug points out that some 30 plant species now supply 92 percent of the world’s food requirements. Of these 30-odd species, just four — wheat, corn, rice and potatoes — comprise the bulk of the foodstuffs upon which most of us depend for our daily caloric intake. Besides being the most utilized plant foods, they also are the most inbred, making them extremely vulnerable to diseases and insects. The natural world offers a cornucopia of options for diversifying — and thereby safeguarding — the contents of the nation’s larder. But in North America, Gruchow points out, “with the exception of the sunflower we have yet to make significant use of any of its thousands of native plants as a source of food.” [4] In an emergency, which ones would we choose? Would we even know where to find them? … Our ignorance is truly staggering. According to some estimates, 95 percent of organisms in the soil alone are unknown to science. Many of them labor unseen, in the dark, serving as the churning stomachs of our planet, digesting dead plants and animals and, in the process, enriching the earth we depend upon for food and fiber. Other organisms expel their gaseous waste — a precious resource known as oxygen —to create the atmosphere that supports and sweetens the earth with such glorious creatures as toucans and manta rays and blue morpho butterflies, not to mention writers and academics. Some bacteria are even thought to contribute to the formation of clouds. [5] And yet, in the earth’s sixth great extinction event, currently under way, many organisms — great and small — are silently sliding unnamed into oblivion. According to some estimates, by the end of the 21st century, one-quarter or more of all species of plants and animals now living will have gone extinct or been issued a non-refundable one-way ticket off the planet. And they are being snuffed out at a rate that is 1,000 times more rapid than that of any extinction event documented in the fossil record. This great disappearing act, as Gruchow points out, is “one of destroying, and thereby rendering forever nameless, more information about life than we are gaining.” (source)
“… Roman Kaiser, a Swiss fragrance chemist who developed a technology called “headspace” in the 1970s that made it possible to capture and analyze the scent given off by flowers and other objects. Using a glass container, a pump, and a sampling trap that gathers molecules using a solvent or coated surface, the system allows a chemist or perfumer to gather the volatile scent molecules exuded by an object without harming it. In 1995, Kaiser read a book called “Vanishing Flora” that contained beautiful, detailed illustrations of rare and endangered plants, and had an idea: He convinced his employer, Givaudan, the world’s largest flavor and fragrance company, to let him embark on an olfactory version of the project. Over the past 10 years, Kaiser has traveled the globe to capture the scents of hundreds of rare and endangered plants. His recently published book, “Scent of the Vanishing Flora,” contains lists of chemicals representing the formula for each plant’s scent, and he has also reconstituted many of these fragrances synthetically. His main purpose was to show people the olfactory beauty in nature, but it also has scientific value: A plant’s scent is an important component of its evolution and ecology. “These are documents,” Kaiser says, “so you would be able in 200 years to re-create these scents when all these plants do not exist any more.” (from a review of this book)
A report on an idea for a “Mathematical Framework That Could Help Convert “Junk” Energy Into Useful Power … “We could have chips that take energy from road vibrations, runway noise from airports — energy that we are not able to make use of very well — and convert it into pulses, packets of electrical energy, that become useful power.” … “You give me noise,” Sen said, “I give you organized bundles.”(link)
OK, climate sceptics: here’s the raw data you wanted : “HadCRUT3 is one of the global temperature records that have underpinned Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) assessment reports and numerous scientific studies. The data subset consists of a network of individual land stations that has been designated by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) for use in climate monitoring and other data that the Met Office has gained permission from the owners to make available. The data contain monthly average temperature values for more than 3,000 land stations.” link)
New Scientist on the “The carbon cost of Germany’s nuclear ‘Nein danke!’“
Thomas says:
August 3, 2011 at 2:16 pm
“Breeding crops with roots a metre deeper in the ground could lower atmospheric CO2 levels dramatically” (link</a<)
[…] For commemorating the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki two links to recent comments, which I left on the blog Azimuth. One link is to a comment to the new scientist article article “The carbon cost of Germany’s nuclear ‘Nein danke!’ ” where I try to explain why the authors arguments that Germany’s renunciation of commercial nuclear power generation l… […]
Documentary ‘Living with a warming ocean’ “During February 2011 documentary maker Jean-Yves Collet from Com on Planet traveled to several coastal areas in France, the Netherlands, Belgium, Germany, Italy and the United Kingdom interviewing scientists, professors, farmers, fishermen, students and the man in the street about their knowledge of impacts of climate change on the European marine environments. The storyline is inspired by the results from the European survey on public perception and awareness. As such, the documentary touches upon the gap between what is known by research and what the general public knows about the impacts and the socio-economic consequence. Issues like sea level rise, changes in ocean biodiversity, modifications of ocean currents and ocean acidification are approached.”,
Climate Change & Marine Ecosystem Research Results, Inventory Report of Relevant Research and their Outputs Marine climate science outreach programmes.
A report on Global CO2 emission trend until 2010 (more).
An interesting mathematician and “one of the key intellectual progenitors of ecological economics”. (review)
If you can read German, you may enjoy this investigative report on the trade of raw materials and how developing countries get tricked off their (possible) wealth – a report by the Berne Declaration(“… a Swiss non-governmental organization with more than 20,000 members. We have been promoting more equitable, sustainable and democratic North-South relations since 1968. To this end, we carry out research, run campaigns to raise public awareness of different issues and do advocacy work.”).
Foodwatch report (in the german language) on food market: http://foodwatch.de/foodwatch/content/e36/e68/e42217/e45559/e45563/foodwatch-Report_Die_Hungermacher_Okt-2011_ger.pdf
An interesting data collecting and analyzing project: “Our aim is to resolve current criticism of the former temperature analyses, and to prepare an open record that will allow rapid response to further criticism or suggestions. Our results will include not only our best estimate for the global temperature change, but estimates of the uncertainties in the record.” http://berkeleyearth.org/
This looks like an interesting journal issue: “WOULD you jump off a skyscraper? What if someone told you that physicists still don’t fully understand gravity: would you risk it then?”: http://www.newscientist.com/issue/current
Yes, there’s also this article there about climate knowns and unknowns .
“The condition of the sea is frightening. Since the beginning of industrial fishing in the 60’s, the fishing resources decreased by 90%. Scientists are warning against a complete exctinction of all fish species in less than 50 years. But most of the people know nothing about that. To change this, I used my Bachelor semester to spread the facts and statistics of industrial fishing and generate attention for this topic, by creating this visual essay.” by Uli Streckenbach, a design student awarded (for an other project) by the “Art Directors Club Germany”: http://www.uhsless.de/#meere
A chinese study on climate change induced reduction of glaciers: http://m.iopscience.iop.org/1748-9326/6/4/045404
“Extreme Melting on Greenland Ice Sheet” reports CCNY Team: http://www1.ccny.cuny.edu/advancement/news/Extreme-Melting-on-Greenland-Ice-Sheet.cfm
“Human-caused climate change a major factor in more frequent Mediterranean droughts”: http://www.noaanews.noaa.gov/stories2011/20111027_drought.html
“Forests not keeping pace with climate change”: http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2011-10/du-fnk103111.php
UN Human Development Report 2011: http://hdr.undp.org/en/reports/global/hdr2011/download/
Arctic microbes wake up: “The permafrost is poised to become a major source of greenhouse gases as the temperature in the Arctic is expected to increase dramatically compared to the expected temperature increase in many other regions of the world” (link1, link2), adding to this “record year for CO2 emissions”.
From the October 27th New York Review of Books, a review of two books.
The End of Energy: The Unmaking of America’s Environment, Security, and Independence
by Michael J. Graetz
MIT Press, 369 pp., $29.95
Hidden Costs of Energy: Unpriced Consequences of Energy Production and Use
a report by the National Research Council’s Committee on Health, Environmental, and Other External Costs and Benefits of Energy Production and Consumption
National Academies Press, 506 pp., $47.00 (paper), available for free at http://www.nap.edu
“The city of tomorrow – Morgenstadt: A city that obtains its power from renewable resources, where electric cars move quietly along the streets and which emits almost no carbon dioxide – German federal minister Mrs. Schavan and the president of Fraunhofer, Hans-Jörg Bullinger, shone a spotlight on the scenario of a sustainable city of the future in the vision of “Morgenstadt“. At the UrbanTec Trade Fair in Cologne from October 24 -26, 2011 in Hall 7, Booth A029. Fraunhofer researchers are demonstrating which of the technologies shown can already be implemented today”: http://www.fraunhofer.de/en/press/research-news/2011/october/technologies-for-the-city-of-tomotrrow.html
An answer to an “answer to 56-million-year question” (on methan-hydrates and their climate impact), offering some very unpleasant possibilities.
That second link has some fascinating details on the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum, or PETM:
As they note, this holds lots of lessons for us:
In fact an increase of 9 degrees Fahrenheit (or 5 °C) or more is quite possible by the end of this century, according to various models.
Melting permafrost news (link 1, blog with video) – “This survey is part of the scientific process, what we think is going to happen in the future, and how we come up with testable hypotheses for future research … The authors estimate that the amount of carbon released by 2100 will be 1.7 to 5.2 times larger than reported in recent modeling studies, which used a similar warming scenario.”
“Severe tissue damage in Atlantic cod larvae under increasing ocean acidification” and “Reduced early life growth and survival in a fish in direct response to increased carbon dioxide”> are two worrying new studies.
On animal species at risk of extinction in the United States have not made it onto the country’s official Endangered Species Act (ESA) list: Study, and a study on climate change killing trees.
Apparently a new “Tool detects patterns hidden in vast data sets”.
“A new German-based project is setting out to rescue biodiversity data at risk of being lost, because they are not integrated in institutional databases, are kept in outdated digital storage systems, or are not properly documented. The project, run by the Botanic Garden and Botanical Museum Berlin-Dahlem, provides a good example for a GBIF recommendation to establish hosting centres for biodiversity data.” link)
On my “About” page, Anton wrote: