The problem with meat is that it’s yummy. But it’s also probably the lowest hanging greenhouse gas reduction fruit in the developed world. Simon Donner has more:
In order to achieve the twin goals of reducing poverty and fighting climate change, we will need to decrease the GHG emissions required to produce a gram of food protein. And that may very well mean reducing consumption of foods from low efficiency production systems, especially grain-fed beef.
On the federal budget process and its implications for the nuclear weapons program:
The new fiscal year starts on Oct. 1— in just 10 days. But Congress hasn’t completed any spending bills, and partisan bickering has broken out in Washington over what to do about the problem.
In the long term, the battle is over deep divisions between the House of Representatives, which wants to cut the nuclear weapons program, and the Senate, which does not.
This year’s nuclear weapons budget is $6.3 billion, including $1.5 billion at Los Alamos and $1 billion at Sandia. The House is proposing a 9.4 percent cut in 2008. The Senate wants to increase the budget 3.3 percent. The specific effect of cuts on each lab is unknown.
Proposed House cuts, in addition to eliminating thousands of jobs at Sandia and Los Alamos, would put the brakes on a plan to expand the manufacture of plutonium nuclear weapon parts at Los Alamos.
But all eyes are on the short term now— what to do come Oct. 1 to fund things while a final spending plan is worked out.
Every state in the Western U.S., save Colorado, currently has below average reservoir storage.
Via Stoat comes word that the fight against global warming does not come without a price:
The British Surfing Association (BSA) and the environmental campaign group Surfers Against Sewage (SAS) back the principle of wave power and the Wave Hub project. But they remain worried that if the size of the project is increased or others introduced, the waves that reach the shore could be significantly reduced.
From NASA Goddard:
NASA researchers using data collected from 1987 to 2006 found snow melting in unlikely places in 2005: as far inland as 500 miles away from the Antarctic coast and as high as 1.2 miles above sea level in the Transantarctic Mountains. The 20-year data record was three times longer than previous studies and reaffirmed the extreme melting irregularity observed in 2005. During the same period, they also found that melting had increased on the Ross Ice Shelf, both in terms of the geographic area affected and the duration of increased melting across affected areas.
“Snow melting is very connected to surface temperature change, so it’s likely warmer temperatures are at the root of what we’ve observed in Antarctica,” said lead author Marco Tedesco, a research scientist at the Joint Center for Earth Systems Technology cooperatively managed by NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md., and the University of Maryland at Baltimore County, Baltimore. The study will be published on Sept. 22 in the American Geophysical Union’s Geophysical Research Letters.
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Another one of those proud parent mornings.
Shaun McKinnon over at the Arizona Republic
The drought thing’s back in the news:
Scarce winter rain across much of drought-parched Australia led a key government forecaster Tuesday to slash its harvest predictions for wheat and barley.
The wheat harvest, one of Australia’s major agricultural exports, was estimated at 15.5 million metric tons (17 million U.S. tons), down 31 percent from the Australian Bureau of Agricultural and Resource Economics’ last forecast in June.
Staci Matlock at the Santa Fe New Mexican wrote a good primer over the weekend about the difference between water rights and actual water here in New Mexico:
Real water: That’s wet water, the stuff one needs for drinking, washing clothes, growing food, building houses and cooling power plants.
Paper water: The piece of paper that says how much real water someone has the legal right to use.
The problem: New Mexico has more paper water than real water.
Some smart person at NOAA’s climate prediction center has done a lovely mashup of two maps I regularly look at to track drought: the weekly drought monitor and the USGS streamflow map.