Environmental News

Patents are not secret. They only protect profits that might be gained from innovation.

 

Another open letter to Trump from scientists.

An Open Letter from Scientists to President-Elect Trump on Climate Change - Scientific American Blog Network

 

Here are some well-written science books.

The Greatest Science Books of 2016 – Brain Pickings

 

The 2009 EPA endangerment finding is far from news. But it may come around again, with Pruitt-led EPA. This is the thing that would need to be successfully disputed in court to undo CO2-based regulations. Cars and coal and perhaps others as well.

So there is a chance that someone might want to read it. Search for "endangerment_tsd(1)"
and make the 198-page pdf all yours.

Mr. Pruitt in his current capacity is already suing EPA about this, but I don't know how that is proceeding.

 

Very nice writing about Bauhinia and (typical) sterility of hybrid plants:

BBC - Earth - How a weird hybrid plant ended up on the flag of Hong Kong

Unless you have local trees of this genus, you may be unfamiliar with those that produce seeds. When seed pod dry they change shape suddenly and seeds go zinging out in all directions. Ballistic expulsion of seeds is not rare, but it is quite a thing to observe in person

(that eek face should be wearing eye protection)

 

Food waste is a large part of global human food budget. Something we’d want to deal with as part of a plan to feeding the anticipated 9.7 billion by 2020. But human food waste is supporting other species now, and they would miss it if it gets gone:


Birds Are Becoming Totally Dependent On Our Delicious Landfills | The Huffington Post


Please don’t get all ‘huffy’ and deflective at the source linked. Just read Dr. Gordon’s published work if that suits you better.


A similar situation is known with coastal release of untreated sewage. The nitrogen and phosphorus becomes algae and then fish and then birds. We get better about sewage treatment and birds don’t like it.


This is a complicated aspect of externalities.

 

American Geophysical Union Annual Autumn meeting in San Francisco. I know better than to try to interest readers here in presentations made about terrestrial carbon cycling.

Some may be interested in “Observational Quantification of Water Vapor Radiative Forcing”, by Willis Eschenbach and Anthony Watts. How much can water vapor and its changes influence the infrared balance of atmosphere? This is a great question. Second, authors’ names ought to be familiar to at least a few here. Third, it is a poster that anyone can download.

I’d be happy to post it here, but as a 1.8 MB pdf, maybe that’s excessive? Advice?

My summary surely would differ from theirs! Here is mine anyway:

A CERES satellite dataset (it has a longer name) shows global outgoing long-wave radiation. It shows where absorption happens, and with an increase through time. Quite aside from the rest, this may come as a surprise to some who don’t realize such a thing exists.

Another dataset describes spatial and temporal variation of atmospheric water vapor. That also is increasing and I have previously linked to other studies showing same.

What E&W did was regress those two against each other. Reasonable, but it needs a bit of thought. When we consider that ‘A causes B’, we are explicitly excluding other factors. You can guess that the one on my mind is CO2. Anyway, they found a very strong relationship and calculated its slope. From that slope, they could show that (recent) atmospheric energy trapping could have been caused by increased water vapor. From that they conclude that CO2 has no warming effect.

And that is the problem. Water vapor and CO2 have both increased. Any analysis that starts out by excluding a CO2 effect cannot possibly detect it. I am sure that some interesting discussions occurred at this poster, and I’m so sad to not have witnessed them. Discussions might have included graphical information not presented in the poster, specifically, that the largest temperature increases have been in high-latitude areas where water vapor has not increased. I really have no idea how W&E would respond to that.

I imagine at least one member here disagrees that there have been water-vapor increases, or long-wave absorption increases. Take those issues up with the authors mentioned above, by all means.

For me, the problem is as I have stated before. The way to figure out CO2 energy absorption in the atmosphere involves a complicated thing called HITRANS, and from that, the direct effect of CO2 is about 1.5 oC per doubling. It should be similarly possible to determine direct effect of H2O (per any amount of increase). I have simply not seen the latter done done. I offer no excuse for not ‘taking this up’ with Dr. Pierrehumbert, for example. My understanding is that the water vapor effect is (would be) the largest positive feedback, increasing CO2 doubling effect to 3.5 oC in climate models. My second problem with climate models is that while most net trapped energy goes into oceans, they remain a black box. Very dark gray at least.

Anyway, I commend this item to your attention.

 

I am pretty sure it can be downloaded from the AGU meeting website. But simple enough to get from WUWT? website. If one is philosophically opposed to even clicking on that, search AGU.

It is 1.85 MB so I could just upload it. Don't care. But I kinda feel like if one wants to read E&W's work, they should get some sort of credit. Like clicking on WUWT.

 

Poster is
2016 AGU Fall Meeting
With no direct link to the pdf. So if y'all are afraid to get it from WUWT, plead with me to post it here

 

2016 November sea ice extent was notably low at both poles

Sea Ice Index



And I pledge to update those graphs as soon as they return to non-tragedy levels.

 

Fukushima reactor 2 has developed much higher radiation levels inside

Radiation Levels Are Soaring Inside the Damaged Fukushima Nuclear Plant

Measurements are not very precise, but now they can't send the (planned) robot inside because it would quickly get cooked.

In summary this cleanup is nowhere near over, and the spike was not anticipated.

Hundreds of Sieverts/hr is an intensity that you don't really want to think about.

 

First and second remain unknown. Apparently they are getting approx. flux from video camera 'noise'. (Which sounds vague to me)

Third - wot the heck? You image with neutrinos? Any idea how hard those buggers are to detect? See ICECUBE at South Pole.

 

Link@98 says

"The researchers think that, for monitoring fission reactions in a radius of 100–500 km, a detector would need a scintillator mass of 10^34 free protons – in the order of a hundred thousand tonnes.

So, with enough (of the right) mass they can be detected. May we agree that imaging is a whole 'nother thing?