Drive, Don’t Walk!

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From one of those high-minded British publications:

Walking does more than driving to cause global warming, a leading environmentalist has calculated.

Food production is now so energy-intensive that more carbon is emitted providing a person with enough calories to walk to the shops than a car would emit over the same distance. The climate could benefit if people avoided exercise, ate less and became couch potatoes. Provided, of course, they remembered to switch off the TV rather than leaving it on standby.

The sums were done by Chris Goodall, campaigning author of How to Live a Low-Carbon Life, based on the greenhouse gases created by intensive beef production. “Driving a typical UK car for 3 miles [4.8km] adds about 0.9 kg [2lb] of CO2 to the atmosphere,” he said, a calculation based on the Government’s official fuel emission figures. “If you walked instead, it would use about 180 calories. You’d need about 100g of beef to replace those calories, resulting in 3.6kg of emissions, or four times as much as driving.

“The troubling fact is that taking a lot of exercise and then eating a bit more food is not good for the global atmosphere. Eating less and driving to save energy would be better.”

This is, of course, pants. He’s picked the worst possible food source (beef) for his calculation. The obvious implication, once he does the sums with various other foodstuffs, isn’t “don’t walk.” It’s “don’t eat beef.”

Bees

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squirrelOriginally uploaded by heinemanfleck.

Some random notes arising from cleaning off my desk and related spaces in my brain. Not sure this hangs together, but I need to put it somewhere so I can get on with my afternoon:

  • Walking this morning with Lissa and Sadie along Embudo Arroyo, a concrete arroyo in Albuquerque’s Northeast heights, saw squirrels living in PVC pipes that drain into the arroyo.
  • Visited some friends a week ago who live in a neighborhood near our own. They have a beehive in their backyard. They “smoked” the bees so they would become docile and we could look inside the hive. Few things I’ve seen as cool as that tightly organized frenzy. It’s 1.75 mi. (~3 km) from our house, so very possible that the bees in our backyard come from that hive. Bee stung me on the nose.
  • Peter Kareiva’s piece in the June 29 Science on “Domesticated Nature: Shaping Landscapes and Ecosystems for Human Welfare.” Key bit:

“Conservation has often been framed as the science aimed at protecting nature, and especially protecting nature from people. We restate here what others have already emphasized: There really is no such thing as nature untainted by people. Instead, ours is a world of nature domesticated, albeit to varying degrees, from national parks to high-rise megalopolises.”

  • Julio Betancourt’s 1981 Chaco pinyon-juniper paper. Key bit:

“Instead of climate, Anasazi fuel needs may explain the drastic reduction of pinyon and juniper after 1230 years ago.”

  • Pigeons sitting on the power lines above the Embudo Arroyo as we walked this morning. Lissa noted that this was an ideal setting for them – water trickling down the floor of the concrete arroyo, out in the open, safe from predators (most likely cats).
  • Sadie, walking with us, noticed neither the pigeons nor the squirrels.


Strange Maps

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San Francisco earthquake fire mapJim Belshaw recently linked to Strange Maps, a blog that is what it says. My interest in maps involves the intersection of the aesthetic with the cognitive, and the way the decisions about what you put in and what you leave out goes a long way both toward communicating and circumscribing. Today, a map of San Francisco after the fire.

A Problem with Geoengineering

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Pumping crap into the air to cool things off has been suggested as a way of countering global warming. A new paper by Kevin Trenberth and Aiguo Dai at NCAR makes this look like a bad idea. They used actual volcanic eruptions as an analog and looked at their effect on the hydrologic cycle:

Following the eruption of Mount Pinatubo in June 1991 there was a substantial decrease in precipitation over land and a record decrease in runoff and river discharge into the ocean from October 1991–September 1992. The results suggest that major adverse effects, including drought, could arise from geoengineering solutions.

The Tangled Bank

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Tim MoyYesterday afternoon’s service for Tim Moy was impossibly sad and impossibly beautiful. Looking around Keller Hall, I was amazed at the different communities who Tim had touched so deeply, from the other parents at Luke’s elementary school to the big thinkers at Sandia’s Advanced Concepts group to his students to the faculty to the stalwart defenders of evolution in our schools to his extended family.
I cried when I sat down and opened the program they had prepared for the service to find this:

It is interesting to contemplate a tangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other, and dependent on each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us…. Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.

Expanding Alabama Drought

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Drought Monitor map, southeast U.S.Watercrunch points out the significant expansion of drought conditions in Alabama in this week’s drought monitor:

The Southeast: With scattered rain last week in the Southeast, drought conditions did not improve, but instead expanded in some areas. Even with recent rains, many recording stations were below normal for July. Mississippi is a good example of conditions in the Southeast: the last 30-day period is one of the wettest on record, but the last 180-day period is the driest on record. D3 and D4 conditions in Alabama also expanded to cover much of the northern and central portions of the state while D3 conditions expanded in southwest Georgia. D2 and D3 conditions expanded to include western Tennessee and into eastern Arkansas. North Carolina saw an expansion of D1 to cover the southern part of the state and D2 expanded in the west. Near record low streamflow and reservoir levels are a big concern in North Carolina.

California Ag

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Aquafornia points to a piece about California water that has parallels here in New Mexico:

The future for agriculture rests on the availability of water. Plain and simple. Much has been written about the competition for water with the competing interests of farmers pitted against urbanites and food processors vying for water against other “sexier” industries. We’ve all seen it. What I have observed is that for most of this time there has at least been a case made in the public debate about water for the inherent, intrinsic value of agriculture to the community at large. Local officials and state decision makers usually can be counted on to understand the importance of agriculture and its role in the economy.

Europe Hotting Up

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It seems increasingly a waste of blog time to point out papers that show the planet’s warming. We already know that, right? So apologies for wasting your time, nothing really new to see here, move along. Today’s paper of the day comes from Paul Della-Marta and the University of Bern and colleagues:

[O]ver the period 1880 to 2005 the length of summer heat waves over western Europe has doubled and the frequency of hot days has almost tripled.

I’m being facetious, because this is an example of the sort of ongoing climate science research that has relevance beyond settling the unsettleable climate wars debates – giving folks at a regional scale useful information about their changing environment. From the AGU press release:

“These results add more evidence to the belief among climate scientists that western Europe will experience some of the highest environmental and social impacts of climate change and continue to experience devastating hot summers like the summer of 2003 more frequently in the future,” Della-Marta said.

On Democrats and Designated Hitters

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Never let it be said that political scientists shy away from the important questions:

Since its introduction in 1973, major league baseball’s designated hitter (DH) rule has been the subject of continuing controversy. Here, we investigate the political and socio–demographic determinants of public opinion toward theDHrule, using data from a nationwide poll conducted during September 1997. Our findings suggest that it is in fact Democrats, not Republicans, who tend to favor the DH. In addition, we find no effect for respondents’ proximity to American or National League teams, though older respondents were consistently more likely to oppose the rule.

(hat tip Andrew Gelman)

Daybook

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update:

  • word of the day: mesic – having a well-balanced supply of moisture