This page has been visited
In any case the dominant absorption of the sun’s radiation in the atmosphere is determined by water vapor, while clouds have little affect [Arking]. When the sun’s rays go down through a clear atmosphere very little energy is absorbed. When it strikes the soil almost all the energy is instantly converted into heat. What is not is reflected out into space in the form of visible light. Almost all of that energy is lost. The heated soil warms the deeper regions of the soil and the air a few inches above the surface. The atmosphere as a whole then is warmed by convection of the surface layer of air along with turbulence. Some of the heat from the soil surface is radiated out as infrared light. Some of that is absorbed by the carbon dioxide and methane in the air, the methane being especially potent per amount of it. Most of this is radiated back to the earth by those gasses and clouds to keep the earth at a fairly constant average temperature. When there is cloud cover the energy budget is different from clear days, but over vast areas and considerable periods it is just like above. You may see an extensive IPCC report here. However nevertheless current climate models ignore climate forcing from land use [mentioned in conclusions in this site].
The biggest concern is coastal flooding by melting of Arctic ice. However, it has been proposed that two thirds of this is from deposition of black carbon particles [Kintisch]. Soot remains in the atmosphere only a few weeks, so if a political solution could be found for it, the solution would be rapid [Tollefson]. Cooking stoves contribute 40% of the black carbon from China and two thirds of it from India [Tollefson]. Providing those people with free solar cooking stoves might prove to be a good investment by people owning real estate next to the ocean. Forest fires contribute a significant amount also, so creating fire breaks would be a good idea for several reasons. I suspect they could be made inexpensively using wooden fences treated with sodium silicate fire proofing along with cleared strips planted with succulent plants. The largest areas are covered by ocean water. The bulk of the ocean is very cold, near freezing, So this should serve as a considerable buffer against rapid climate change in the near future, other than melting of Arctic ice.
In any case the global warming has been rather minor in the past century and now has not changed much in the last ten years or even declined in some areas. There is considerable concern about climate change. This is understandable, especially if it happens rapidly. It is usually assumed that it will be from carbon dioxide increase. This will be without a doubt part of it. However, I suspect a considerable part of what little warming has happened these days is the removal of vegetation to create annual farms, denuded land, roads, buildings, and desertification or over grazing, as currently in central Asia, for instance and in Tibet. You can easily confirm this phenomenon by touching a stone walk in full summer sun and those adjacent grass or leaves of trees under full sun, and noting the dramatic difference in temperature. In an area in Oregon where fire bared the soil, there was a temperature difference between burned and unburned adjacent areas that rose to as much as 20 degrees centigrade [Running]. Streams running out of forests are cooler than those out of clear cut areas. Also leaves in warm climates have adaptations that lower leaf temperatures toward their optimum photosynthetic temperature [Brent], which should lower climate temperature a little. This can not be due to water evaporation alone because leaves are cooler than adjacent bare, dark, and wet soil in full sun, as you can verify for yourself. I suspect that the increase in agricultural annual farming in the early 20th century is responsible for a considerable part of the warming between 1920 and 1940 in the northern hemisphere. It was no doubt considerably assisted by the cessation of volcanic activity after 1912 though, since dust from volcanoes causes considerable cooling by volcanic particles reflecting sun light out into space as do aerosols other than black carbon. To say that the small area of bare soil could not possibly be warming the atmosphere would be something like saying that the small area of a steam radiator could not possibly heat up a room. There is considerable pressure for scientists to join up with a carbon dioxide only hypothesis, with funding often withheld, publication denied, and careers ruined. Luckily no one has been, like poor Bruno for daring to propose that the earth was not at the center of the solar system, been burned at the stake yet.
Mathews, et al say that deforestation results in a cooling due to snow albedo. This is no doubt true in northern latitudes especially in winter. In the tropics deforestation must result in considerable temperature increase however. That must be true to a considerable extent in the subtropics also, at least in summer. Soil warming may be a considerable part of the reason why the southwest USA is warmer than the southeast USA. Any warming from deforestation in temperate regions may be minimal or even net cooling other than greenhouse gas release. However in summer time there must be a considerable warming from deforestation in temperate regions and southwards and all year in the tropics and sub tropics and decrease in rainfall (on page 591, 592). The arctic region would not be much affected by agricultural activity or city construction and lumbering should be rapidly replenished if not by trees, at least by shrubs. The Rocky Mountains cause America to be cooler than Europe because they deflect cold Arctic air south. Europe is warmer because the air deflected is warmed by an Atlantic ocean that has been warmed in summer time. The Gulf Stream itself plays only a minor role in actual transfer of heat from further south.The absorption of sun light by the vast northern Atlantic Ocean dwarfs the heat brought north by the Gulf Stream, which itself is warmed by the sun light. You may see the current rate of deforestation, desertification, CO2 emissions, and oil depletion as it occurs globally here.
The situation is especially serious in South America because that continent straddles the equator and it is the most productive of carbon into vegetation of any continent [Bowman fig. 2]. The drought there could cause wide spread forest fires. They would probably rage out of control over vast areas because the human population to fight them is sparse and the forests are almost continuous. The situation is already serious in Africa, which has more fires than any other area in the world [bowman fig. 2]. It is ridiculous and stupid to allow our USA forests to burn out of control, let alone deliberately set fire to under brush, both of which are now often done. Not adequately protecting them with fire barriers is not much smarter. The fire hazard under brush should be harvested for agricultural mulch for our farms or at least use it to supply our coal burning electric plants. It would be a lot safer than mining coal. Any objections, that preventing artificial fires would alter the natural ecology, are not really true. Even if it were, pristine ecologies could be preserved in walled off areas. Rather than allowing forest fires to rage out of control, fire breaks should be created using wooden barriers fire proofed with sodium silicate through strips planted with succulent plants. Buildings in forests should be protected with fire proofing also. Worldwide it is estimated that forests would double in size if there were no fires [Bowman (in the conclusions) ].
The greatest change in climate from human affects is occurring between 45 degrees south latitude and 50 degrees north [Smith]. This heating of the soil affect may be the reason why Antarctica has not been affected much by global warming yet [Gillette], since the greatest land mass is in the northern hemisphere. Also there is probably much less particulate carbon in Antarctica falling on the ice. This causes much of the loss of ice in the arctic ocean, However, even so, recently Antarctica’s ice loss has speeded up in the last ten years 75% to enough to raise sea levels half a millimeter or 0.02 inches per year. Most of the ice lost in both Antarctica and Greenland is along the coast. Thickening inland counteracts most of this loss at present.
Denudation could be easily considerably reversed in North America by planting shade trees along roadways, substituting nut and fruit trees for annual crops, and growing vegetation on rooftops. This would in addition cause considerable energy saving from air conditioning costs.
Also, pumping water using huge pumps out of rivers during catastrophic floods into clean gravel filled large holes to raise water tables under arid regions should be advantageous and help considerably to alleviate drought areas, in addition to contributing to rainfall where the water table can be brought up to within reach of plant roots. Whole rivers are pumped into the ocean during flood stage in Rhode Island, so the pumps already exist. There is a big difference between a ten foot well and a 100 foot well to a farmer, both in cost of construction and cost of operation. This is not a trivial problem. 15% of India’s food is produced by irrigation and the ground water will soon be exhausted [Brown]. Half of India’s hand dug wells are dry and millions of tube wells causing some suicide of those affected [Brown]. In China the situation is also serious. The upper water table is almost gone in the North China Plain, where half their wheat is produced. On the Gulf coast of Texas near Aransas Pass, a main highway was constructed parallel to the coast and the el nino excess water was shunted into the bay with a drainage ditch. They could have used the water to recharge the lower water table or replace the live oak organic contaminated upper water table. As a result the shrimp harvest breeding area was ruined instead. This is not intelligent. You may see some of the procedures that are currently used in India here.
Using a clean stone base for roads instead of road stone (which is stone mixed with sand and silt) would also be helpful as would porous concrete underlain by clean stone where shoulders are not possible. The above procedures would be especially directly advantageous to increasing rainfall where the water table could be brought up to within a meter or two of the surface because of the increased transpiration, in addition to taking the edge off droughts to farms from easier well irrigation. It would also probably cool the climate slightly as well. A fringe benefit would be avoidance of destruction of down river farms and cities. 28% of the world’s land is too dry for agriculture, which is twice as much land that is suitable. So there is plenty of room for improvement. I suspect procedures like those would take much of the misery out of expanding populations for a hundred years. They had better exercise birth control before that though climate temperature will be the least of our problems. This procedure would not be useful where the ground water is high in fluoride, which is very poisonous. Biotite and muscovite micas probably furnish the most fluoride from the parent material sources, as much as 4 and 2 per cent in each respectively. There is 290 ppm average in 10 mile deep crustal rock. So fluoride must leach out of soils eventually. Formations of dolomite, bentonite, or volcanic ash produce dangerous concentrations of fluoride in ground water (from a study in Estonia). These days considerable fluoride must be entering the ground water from the insane practices of using fluoride insecticides and fluoridated municipal water.
The drought itself should be noticeably reduced if we manage our soils intelligently by increasing the depth, organic content, mulch cover, and design of our soils. There is no reason why we should allow rain water to surge almost instantly across the ground into the rivers and out to sea destroying farms and cities on the way. Pumping it into reservoirs, ponds, and ground water would have significant ameliorating climate affects as well and would create rain fall from the “lake effect” similar to that provided by the Great Lakes. A fringe benefit could be attained if the ponds were underlain by a screen that was periodically lifted out to kill mosquito larvae. The millions of people saved from death and disability from malaria would provide a marvelous labor pool and the money saved from medical bills and funerals could provide considerable financing. There is no reason why moisture can not be trans located further inland than it is currently, especially with increased tree cover. You say that this would require us to put time into the project? Since when is this last a valid objection when everyone complains that our unemployment figures are too high? I can think of no better exercise for those lazy senior citizens with the attendant health increase as well. Of course this increased vegetation cover would probably have somewhat of a warming affect in the opposite direction as well because of reduced dust and increased humidity. Gildor has proposed that more than 25 times as much dust as today accentuated glacial cycles in the past.
If not the above solutions, no problem, we will have plenty of room for the people of southern Florida and drought stricken areas on our Canadian and Siberian farms. The situation is much more serious over seas. For instance, more water flows into Egypt each year in the form of imported grain, than flows down the Nile and Israelis have only enough water for 20% or less of their food [Barnaby]. They should initiate a crash program to reduce their population because population rise in the western hemisphere will make it impossible to support them in the future. Even now New York state could only furnish 35% of its food for its population from within its borders.
It has been proposed that changes in sunlight and in the number of cosmic rays reaching the earth is having affects on climate. This (except for the cosmic rays being deflected by the sun) is plausible and there is some evidence, especially correlations with the sun’s phenomena. It has also been proposed that a much lessened fog in Eastern Europe may be responsible for as much as 50% of the warming there as possibly resulting from a much reduced emission of sulfur dioxide and possibly 10-20% in western Europe [Vantard]. If so there will not be much additional warming from this cause in the future there. All other areas stayed the same or rose in aerosol [Wang]. The brown clouds over South Asia are two thirds from burning of biomass and this causes cooling of the ground and heating of the upper atmosphere [Gustafsson]. This will probably end in the future, which should cause a net warming.
There has been important changes in the amount of sunlight reaching the earth in summer as versus winter as formulated by Milankovitch because of the wobble of the earth’s axis of rotation (orbital forcing). This is hypothesized as determining the waxing and waning of continental glaciers during the Pleistocene. However this is unlikely to have much affect on current climate problems because the periods involved are enormously long.
Everyone is concerned about the atmosphere being increased in carbon dioxide and not without reason. However an answer to a question we have not been asking is; "We should not be using our carbon fuels for so trivial a purpose as to merely generate heat and therefore electricity or non aviation transportation in a world where every week the sun beams down enough energy on the state of Arizona alone to supply the whole world with non aviation transportation energy during that time". 165,000 square miles of solar cells would provide 90% of the USA’s energy, assuming only present efficiencies [Zweibel]. Those carbon fuels should be devoted to chemical stock and aviation, not heat and electricity. Burning carbon is something like burning your furniture to keep warm. Oil will probably run out in another hundred years or so and practical coal probably in another one or two hundred or so [Kerr] or less if population continues to increase. What do we have planned for the remaining million years this nation (USA) is scheduled to survive? Our constant drum beat about not being dependent on foreign oil is 180 degrees off. If we were really greedy we would use foreign oil as much as possible. If a major war should loom after our oil runs out we will be left high and dry, and maybe defeated. If we were defeated by the likes of Hitler, Sadam Hussein, Bin Ladin, or Stalin it would make little difference whether the world was warm or cold outside because life would not be worth living any way.
But if our coal and oil policy seems foolish, our atomic fuel policy must seem like insanity by comparison. At least the carbon will still be on the surface of the earth, extremely expensive to turn into lubricants and chemicals, but not impossible. Uranium once burned will be gone forever. Our progeny will curse us if they come across a very valuable use for uranium and it is gone. If that purpose were to be the only practical way to get rid of a meteor scheduled to destroy the earth, for instance, they will be cursing us with their dying breath. They will look back on our problems with those incompetent jerks in Afghanistan with fond nostalgia. The only saving circumstance may be an enormous amount of uranium said to be present in sea water [Fetter] if a practical method can be found to extract it. If so, instead of the current probable 860 year estimated supply, there would be a maximum of a 60,000 year supply [editor]. It will be desirable to use atomic power for awhile in the near future because it is much cleaner and less expensive than other methods, at least in the existing plants. But the sooner we switch over to various solar methods, the better. What we should be shooting for is each household generating its own energy. I suspect this would be easy if we went to low voltage DC appliances as Edison suggested. Such a strategy would be almost immune to sabotage, a VERY important consideration during war time. It would also be almost immune to electric shock or fire, so homeowners could do their own installation and maintenance, a saving which would mitigate a considerable part of solar cells costs. Fire would still be a small problem from self installation, but this could be eliminated with sodium silicate treatment so far as catastrophe is concerned. [see this site again. ]
Nor would we have to be dependant on Arizona power for cars. Nickel-zinc battery carrying car trailers topped by solar panels would go a long way to solve energy for cars. Long distance travel would seldom be a problem if we were to build wide gauge piggy back railroads to carry the cars, bikes, tricycles, and quadcycles.
And there is no reason why we can not design our roads around a healthy method such as bicycles. In some city areas covered, raised bike paths would be actually quicker and safer commuting than automobile roads during rush hour and definitely healthier. They would not have to be difficult to operate. Wide wheels cushioned with steel springs should work very well or quadcycles or even quadcycle mopeds used instead of bicycles. I once commuted across New Brunswick, N.J. in the 1950s by bicycle and often arrived before the cars tied up in grid lock.
It is often said that we can not tap the sun’s energy without further expensive research. This is not so. We already know how to make linear parabolic mirrors and numerous effective ways to make heat generated vapor engines as well as photovoltaic cells. It is probably possible to generate electricity by photovoltaic and heat engines at the same time. Indeed, there are already many dozen photovoltaic manufacturers some selling cells as little as $1.50 per watt and one promising 30 cents per watt. Inexpensive thin film printed solar cells promise to go into full production shortly. There have been numerous methods of storing energy created, Even those crude wind generators are fairly practical (except to the birds). Only geothermal energy on a large scale should possibly not be attempted. This would have the affect of cooling the lower geological formations with possibly the danger of triggering earthquakes or, worse yet, volcanic eruptions from the resulting contraction.
The only thing stopping us is oil selling for, probably, a third of what it would cost to manufacture it out of carbon dioxide or limestone, and recently as little as a sixth. Wald has written an excellent analysis of the pros and cons of each of the non carbon energy sources [Wald]. A chart is available here that shows the present global energy flux and destruction, and also here. There are numerous energy information links here. There is a site showing worldwide energy statistics in graph form here. The mother URL for this site is at this site, for a free internet book. You will probably have to click on the PDF column.
Producing alcohol from plants is hopeless since we need the land for food and will have no choice in the future. It is hopelessly uneconomic at present anyway, of course. Below is by Richard Charles Antolinez.
“Food prices are soaring because corn is being used for ethanol production, and food riots are breaking out in many places. E10 or 90% gasoline 10% ethanol is supposed to only reduce fuel mileage by 2% to 3%. I don’t know how they came by their numbers, but I assume they simply deduced that ethanol has about 30% less British Thermal Units, and since it made up of 10% of E10, then about a 3% reduction in mileage could be expected. This is the way the morons in labs think, especially when their job depends on it. Many vehicles are seeing a 10% or more drop in fuel mileage. You see no vehicle is designed to run on E10, and it simply is out of tune for E10. So it is more than just the BTU difference between the E10 blend and straight gasoline. Many owners have clogged the internet with such complaints; fleet owners have reported as much as an 11.9% drop in mileage. Ethanol tends to act as a combustion inhibitor when mixed with gasoline. Did you know for every gallon of ethanol produced, the American taxpayer pays .55 cents to the producers? Plus the government has another gaggle of subsidies I won't get into.
In terms of energy output compared with energy input for ethanol production: Corn requires 29 percent more fossil energy than the fuel produced. Switch grass requires 45 percent more fossil energy than the fuel produced. Wood biomass requires 57 percent more fossil energy than the fuel produced. These figures don't include the fact that ethanol has to be shipped by truck, because it is incompatible for current pipe-lines.”
ADDENDA
You may see an article that describes how the removal of vegetation by spread of wood roaches and termites at the close of the Permian may have caused a dramatic, even ruinous, rise in temperature in the Triassic again in http://www.angelfire.com/nc/isoptera/permian.html .
You may see a history of the development of the science of the carbon dioxide greenhouse affect here and the history of the development of the science of biotic affects (especially forests) on climate here. An article discussing geoengineering of climate with many climate change links may be seen here. You may see a site with many links discussing attributes of the atmosphere here, such as change of temperature with altitude. Schneider has written an extensive attempt to analyze climate trade off philosophy here. There is an extensive discussion of possible affects on health from climate change in this IPCC report.
For a hypothesis that explains the large volcanoes of Mars and the bulges associated with them as the disruption from the antipode of a huge meteor impact, see this site.
----It has been proposed that the Decca traps were caused by violent movement of the crust in the antipode opposite to the Yucatan Cretaceous meteor impact. That the antipode is in the Indian ocean and not in India is not proof that India has moved as the author suggests since the seismic waves travel faster under the Pacific than under Africa. Shallow earthquakes under even the longest ridge/ridge transform faults and other anomalies are strong indication that the continents do not move.
There is a URL that has an incredible number of links to information supposedly for those interested in law as applying to environmental concerns However it lists main newspapers, news search engines, financial news sources, directories (telephone, email, lawyer, government, financial, congressional, business, corporate executives, zipcodes), online legal and ethics research, banking, trade associations, law reviews, bar associations, weather, airline tickets, and more that would be useful for other purposes as well.
REFERENCES see below
SOME HEALTH ARTICLES
Rheumatoid arthritis and potassium -- Roles of potassium in the body - - . Electrolyte regulation (sodium and potassium) -- . Purpose of cortisol -- . Copper nutrition and physiology -- .. Potassium nutritional requirements -- . Potassium in food to treat hypertension, rheumatoid arthritis and heart disease. – -- . Processing losses of potassium -- . Losses of potassium in the kitchen -- . Potassium supplementation -- Side effects of supplements and heart disease -- Strategies for Chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS) and fibromyalgia
Too high blood potassium solutions.
There is an article discussing cashew nuts to cure a tooth abscess which might prove useful if you get a tooth ache.
There is also an article which proposes some speculation about diabetes.
Fluoride in city water will cause distruction of the thyroid gland, fluorosis discoloration of teeth, weakened bones, damage to the kidneys and immune system, bone cancer, and, worst of all, damage to the nerves resembling Alzheimer’s disease. It will also cause damage to ligaments resembling arthritis and has an infinite life in sewer treated soil and ground water until washed into the water table.
See this site for some links to health articles.
REFERENCES
----Arking A 1996 Absorption of Solar Energy in the Atmosphere: Discrepancy Between Model and Observations. Science 273; 779-782.
---- Barnaby W 2009 Do nations go to war over water? Nature 458; 282-283.
---- Bowman MJS, et al Fire in the earth system (a review) 2009 Science:
324; 481 – 484.
---- Brent R Helliker Richter SL 2008 Subtropical to boreal convergence of tree-leaf temperatures. Nature 454, 511-514.
---- Brown LR 2009 Could food shortages bring down civilization. Scientific American 300; 50-57.
---- editor 2009 Ask the experts. Scientific American. 300; 84.
---- Fetter S 2009 Ask the experts. Scientific American 300; 84.
---- Cox P Jones C 2008 Illuminating the modern dance of climate and CO2. Science 321; 1642-1644.
---- Gillette NP, Dáithí A. Stone, Peter A. Stott, Toru Nozawa, Alexey Yu. Karpechko, Gabriele C. Hegerl, Michael F. Wehner & Philip D. Jones 2008 Attribution of polar warming to human influence. Nature Geoscience 1; 750-754.
---- Gustafsson O et al 2009 Brown clouds over south Asia: biomass or fossil fuel combustion? Science 323; 495-498.
---- Jacobs Z, et al 2008 Ages for the middle stone age of southern Africa: implications for human behavior and dispersal. Science 322; 733-735.
---- Kerr RA 2009 How much coal remains? Science 323; 1420-1421.
---- Kintisch E 2009 New push focuses on new ways to curb global warming. Science 324; 323.
---- Montanez IP Tabor NJ Niemeier D DiMichelle WA Frank TD Fielding CR Isbell JL Birgenheier LP Rygel MC 2007 CO2-forced climate and vegetation instability during late Paleozoic deglaciation. Science 315; 87-91.
---- Running SW 2008 Ecosystem disturbance, carbon, and climate. Science 321; 652-653.
---- Smith HJ 2008 Geophys. Res. Lett. 35
---- Tierney JE et al 2008 Northern hemisphere controls on tropical southeast African climate during the past 60,000 years. Science 322; 252-255.
---- Tollefson J 2009 Clmte’s smoky spectre. Nature 460; 29-32.
---- Wald ML 2009 Scientific American 300; 56-61.
---- Wang K 2009 Clear sky visibility has decreased over land globally from 1973 to 2007. Science 323; 1468-1470.
---- Vantard R Yiou P van Oldebborgh GJ 2009 Decline of fog, mist and haze in Europe over the past 30 years. Nature Geoscience. Published online: 18 January 2009 | doi:10.1038/ngeo414.
---- Zweibel K Mason J Fthenakis V 2008 By 2050 solar power could end U.S. dependence on foreign oil and slash greenhouse gas emissions. Scientific American 298; 64-73.
This page has been visited
times
This article has been modified in Oct., 2009.