ANOTHER DOOMSDAY-SCARE DEBUNKED: GULF STREAM NOT RESPONSIBLE FOR EUROPE'S MILD CLIMATE

If you grow up in England, as I did, a few items of unquestioned wisdom are passed down to you from the preceding generation. Along with stories of a plucky island race with a glorious past and the benefits of drinking unbelievable quantities of milky tea, you will be told that England is blessed with its pleasant climate courtesy of the Gulf Stream, that huge current of warm water that flows northeast across the Atlantic from its source in the Gulf of Mexico. That the Gulf Stream is responsible for Europe's mild winters is widely known and accepted, but, as I will show, it is nothing more than the earth-science equivalent of an urban legend.....

After completing my Ph.D. at Columbia University in New York City, I took a temporary postdoctoral position at the University of Washington in Seattle, where I should have immediately realized that something was wrong with the Gulf Stream-European climate story. Seattle and British Columbia, just to the north, I discovered, have a winter climate with which I was very familiar-mild and damp [like Britain], quite unlike the very cold conditions that prevail on the Asian side of the Pacific Ocean. This contrast exists despite the fact that the circulation of currents in the Pacific Ocean is very different from the situation in the Atlantic....

Because sea-surface temperatures vary less through the seasonal cycle than do land-surface temperatures, any place where the wind blows from off the ocean will have relatively mild winters and cool summers. Both the British Isles and the Pacific Northwest enjoy such "maritime" climates. Central Asia, the northern Great Plains and Canadian Prairies are classic examples of "continental" climates, which do not benefit from this moderating effect and thus experience bitterly cold winters and blazingly hot summers. The northeastern United States and eastern Canada fall somewhere in between. But because they are under the influence of prevailing winds that blow from west to east, their climate is considerably more continental than maritime....

One subtle but important effect stems from a fundamental principle in physics: the conservation of angular momentum. In meteorology, this principle translates to a rule that atmospheric flow must closely conserve the total angular momentum of a column of air. The angular momentum of the air contains two components: one arising from the rotation of the Earth (which meteorologists call the "planetary component") and another from the curvature of the fluid flow itself. The planetary component, which in the Northern Hemisphere is directed counterclockwise, is at a maximum at the pole and zero at the equator.

The conservation of angular momentum, it turns out, causes the mountains of North America to contribute substantially to the dramatic difference in temperatures across the Atlantic. To fathom why, you must first understand that the troposphere (the lower part of the atmosphere, where weather takes place) is bounded at the top by the tropopause, a region of stability where temperature increases with height and which acts somewhat like a lid. Thus when air flows over a mountain range-say, the Rockies-it gets compressed vertically and, as a consequence, tends to spread out horizontally. When a spinning ice skater does as much, by spreading his arms, the conservation of angular momentum slows his spin. An atmospheric column going up a mountain behaves in a similar way and swerves to the south to gain some clockwise spin, which offsets part of the counterclockwise planetary component of its spin.

On the far side of the Rockies, the reverse happens: The air begins to stretch vertically and contract horizontally, becoming most contracted in the horizontal when it reaches the Atlantic. And as with an ice skater pulling in his arms, conservation of angular momentum demands that the air gain counterclockwise spin. It does so by swerving to its left. But having moved to the south after crossing the mountains, it is now at a latitude where the planetary component of its angular moment is less than it was originally. To balance this reduction in angular momentum, the air acquires more counterclockwise spin by curving back around to the north. This first southward and then northward deflection creates a waviness in the generally west-to-east flow of air across North America and far downwind to the east.

Such waves are of massive scale. The southward flow takes place over all of central and eastern North America, bringing Arctic air south and dramatically cooling winters on the East Coast. The return northward flow occurs over the eastern Atlantic Ocean and western Europe, bringing mild subtropical air north and pleasantly warming winters on the far side of ocean.

Topographically forced atmospheric waves contribute significantly to the large difference in winter temperature across the Atlantic. When Battisti and I removed mountains from our climate models, the temperature difference was cut in half. Our conclusion was that the large difference in winter temperature between western Europe and eastern North America was caused about equally by the contrast between the maritime climate on one side and the continental climate on the other, and by the large-scale waviness set up by air flow over the Rocky Mountains.

Evidence from ocean sediments suggests that at times during the last Ice Age the North Atlantic thermohaline circulation was considerably weaker than it is today, or perhaps it even shut down entirely. One such event took place about 12,900 years ago, during the last deglaciation, and is called the Younger Dryas (after a European cold-dwelling flower that marks it in some terrestrial records). The Younger Dryas began with a dramatic reversal in what was a general warming trend, bringing near-glacial cold to the North Atlantic region. This episode ended with an even more dramatic warming about 1,000 years later. In Greenland and western Europe, the beginning and end of the Younger Dryas involved changes in winter temperature as large as 20 degrees taking place in little more than a decade. But the Younger Dryas was not a purely North Atlantic phenomenon: Manifestations of it also appeared in the tropical and southern Atlantic, in South America and in Asia.

For many years, the leading theory for what caused the Younger Dryas was a release of water from glacial Lake Agassiz, a huge, ice-dammed lake that was once situated near Lake Superior. This sudden outwash of glacial meltwater flooded into the North Atlantic, it was said, lowering the salinity and density of surface waters enough to prevent them from sinking, thus switching off the conveyor. The North Atlantic Drift then ceased flowing north, and, consequently, the northward transport of heat in the ocean diminished. The North Atlantic region was then plunged back into near-glacial conditions. Or so the prevailing reasoning went.

Recently, however, evidence has emerged that the Younger Dryas began long before the breach that allowed freshwater to flood the North Atlantic. What is more, the temperature changes induced by a shutdown in the conveyor are too small to explain what went on during the Younger Dryas. Some climatologists appeal to a large expansion in sea ice to explain the severe winter cooling. I agree that something of this sort probably happened, but it's not at all clear to me how stopping the Atlantic conveyor could cause a sufficient redistribution of heat to bring on this vast a change.

In any event, the still-tentative connections investigators have made between thermohaline circulation and abrupt climate change during glacial times have combined with the popular perception that it is the Gulf Stream that keeps European climate mild to create a doomsday scenario: Global warming might shut down the Gulf Stream, which could "plunge western Europe into a mini ice age," making winters "as harsh as those in Newfoundland," or so claims, for example, a recent article in New Scientist. This general idea been rehashed in hundreds of sensational news stories.

The germ of truth on which such hype is based is that most atmosphere-ocean models show a slowdown of thermohaline circulation in simulations of the 21st century with the expected rise in greenhouse gases. The conveyer slows because the surface waters of the subpolar North Atlantic warm and because the increased transport of water vapor from the subtropics to the subpolar regions (where it falls as rain and snow) freshens the subpolar North Atlantic and reduces the density of surface waters, which makes it harder for them to sink. These processes could be augmented by the melting of freshwater reserves (glaciers, permafrost and sea ice) around the North Atlantic and Arctic.

But from what specialists have long known, I would expect that any slowdown in thermohaline circulation would have a noticeable but not catastrophic effect on climate. The temperature difference between Europe and Labrador should remain. Temperatures will not drop to ice-age levels, not even to the levels of the Little Ice Age, the relatively cold period that Europe suffered a few centuries ago. The North Atlantic will not freeze over, and English Channel ferries will not have to plow their way through sea ice. A slowdown in thermohaline circulation should bring on a cooling tendency of at most a few degrees across the North Atlantic-one that would most likely be overwhelmed by the warming caused by rising concentrations of greenhouse gases. This moderating influence is indeed what the climate models show for the 21st century and what has been stated in reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Instead of creating catastrophe in the North Atlantic region, a slowdown in thermohaline circulation would serve to mitigate the expected anthropogenic warming!

The Longevity of a Legend

When Battisti and I had finished our study of the influence of the Gulf Stream, we were left with a certain sense of deflation: Pretty much everything we had found could have been concluded on the basis of results that were already available.... All Battisti and I did was put these pieces of evidence together and add in a few more illustrative numerical experiments. Why hadn't anyone done that before? Why had these collective studies not already led to the demise of claims in the media and scientific papers alike that the Gulf Stream keeps Europe's climate just this side of glaciation? It seems this particular myth has grown to such a massive size that it exerts a great deal of pull on the minds of otherwise discerning people.

This is not just an academic issue. The play that the doomsday scenario has gotten in the media - even from seemingly reputable outlets such as the British Broadcasting Corporation - could be dismissed as attention-grabbing sensationalism. But at root, it is the ignorance of how regional climates are determined that allows this misinformation to gain such traction. Maury should not be faulted; he could hardly have known better. The blame lies with modern-day climate scientists who either continue to promulgate the Gulf Stream-climate myth or who decline to clarify the relative roles of atmosphere and ocean in determining European climate. This abdication of responsibility leaves decades of folk wisdom unchallenged, still dominating the front pages, airwaves and Internet, ensuring that a well-worn piece of climatological nonsense will be passed down to yet another generation.

Much more here






Toilet bowl cancer scare deserves a good flush

Do the deodorant toilet bowl blocks used in public restrooms cause cancer?

"Chemical compounds in household products like mothballs and air fresheners can cause cancer by blocking the normal process of cell suicide," reported University of Colorado researchers this week. The chemical compounds at issue are naphthalene, which is used in mothballs, and para-dichlorobenze (PDCB), which is used in deodorant toilet bowl blocks and other air fresheners. The study spawned worrisome headlines from the United Press International ("Mystery of carcinogenic mothballs solved") and "[Colorado University] sniffs out cancer link in mothballs"). "This study shows why mothballs and some air freshener products may be harmful to humans," said study author Ding Xue. "Understanding how carcinogenic compounds can trigger tumor growth is important for federal regulatory agencies that deal with human exposure to hazardous chemicals," Xue added. Since consumers use more than one million pounds of naphthalene and PDCB annually, should this new study cause worry?

First, the researchers did not study whether the chemicals actually caused cancer in humans. Instead, they studied the effects of the chemicals on nematodes - worms, that is. When the worms were exposed to the chemicals, cells that normally would have died, instead survived, according to the researchers.

Before addressing the more general proposition that chemical-caused biological effects in worms might be reasonable predictors of chemical effects on humans, consider the existing studies involving actual human exposure to naphthalene and PDCB. We can only consider such studies very briefly, however, since there are none that link either chemical to cancer in humans.

As the Environmental Protection Agency says on its web site, "Available data are inadequate to establish a causal association between exposure to naphthalene and cancer in humans" and "No information is available on the carcinogenic effects of [PDCB] in humans."

And it's not like naphthalene and PDCB are new substances that no one knows anything about. Naphthalene was produced in the early 19th century and was in widespread use as an insect repellent (moth balls) by 1900. The use of PDCB as an insecticide/moth repellent dates back to 1912. By 1934, 21 million gallons of naphthalene and PDCB were used annually in the U.S. alone. Virtually everyone is exposed to naphthalene - not only from moth balls, but also from the burning of coal and gasoline - and PDCB, typically from toilet deodorant blocks. Moreover, despite the large scale production of naphthalene and PDCB, no studies report higher cancer rates among workers who would be expected to have relatively high exposures to the chemicals.

That brings us to the University of Colorado's worms. Neither naphthalene nor PDCB reportedly caused cancer in the worms - it's not even clear that worms can get cancer in the first place. The chemicals reportedly merely delayed cell death, which may be linked with cancer, but not necessarily. Not only is the relevance of this particular biological event to cancer development unclear, but relevance of worm biology to humans is also questionable -- worms and humans, after all, belong to different animal groups or phyla. So why use worms in the first place if their relevance to humans is dubious?

"[Testing chemicals] on lab rats can take two years to complete," Xue said in a media release. "But we can do the same kind of [tests with worms] in two weeks," Xue added. Xue's goal, therefore, is to be able to test chemicals on worms rather than animals because the process is shorter and less expensive. Xue's idea is not entirely illogical, but it does increase the uncertainty in extrapolating research results -- at least lab rats are in the same animal phylum as humans. But Xue may want to reconsider the whole notion of laboratory testing of chemicals for their potential to cause cancer.

The idea that typical human exposures to chemicals increase cancer risk and that testing chemicals on lab rats is a good way to find out whether particular chemicals pose cancer risks is a now largely discredited idea leftover from 1970s-era hysteria over chemicals. Since the 1970s, millions of lab rats have been poisoned with thousands of chemicals to produce uncountable cancer scares and incalculable regulatory and consumer costs. But when you compare the results of those high-dose lab rat experiments with much lower-dose, real-life human exposures to chemicals, it's become clear over the years that the lab rat experiments are of little-to-no relevance to humans. Based on Xue's naphthalene/PDCB study, it doesn't appear that lab worms represent an improvement over lab rats. So next time you're in a public restroom and you see one of those toilet deodorant blocks, you can flush away any cancer anxiety that you may have.

Source






Texas: Feathers must not be ruffled

State wildlife officials will observe tonight whether a fireworks display just offshore of this Galveston County island community wreaks havoc at a nearby nesting site of thousands of endangered brown pelicans. Some preservationists fear the privately financed fireworks display's loud booms and bright sprays of pyrotechnic light might disrupt life in the nesting area of the endangered brown pelican on North Deer Island, causing some chicks to starve if their parents are so spooked by the fireworks that they flee the nests and lose track of their offspring. It is against federal law to harm or harass endangered species.

"But you can't do anything until the disturbance is observed," Houston Audubon Society president Stennie Meadours said. "Parks and Wildlife told us that they would observe the fireworks wherever the display is located to see if there is any disturbance to the birds."

An unidentified Tiki Island homeowner has paid for a July Fourth holiday weekend display for the past three years, said Mayor Charlie Everts, a retired Houston police officer. The man has had the display set up on a spit of land about 600 yards from North Deer Island, and no one has complained about the event until it was mentioned in a community newsletter this year, he said.

At least one complaint by a Tiki Island resident to the Audubon Society this week raised concerns among bird preservationists that the fireworks would harm the strong recovery of the brown pelican evident along the Texas coast in recent years. The complaint led to meetings among state and local officials. Everts said the fireworks do not violate city ordinances because they are set off on land outside the city and the pyrotechnics are legal in unincorporated parts of the county.

On Wednesday, Meadours and representatives of the Texas Department of Fish and Wildlife, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the Texas General Land Office boated the North Deer Island area, looking for bits of dry land more distant from the nesting area than the one on which the fireworks have been set off in recent years. On Thursday, Everts said representatives of all three agencies agreed that the fireworks staging area should be moved to a tiny island a bit farther west of North Deer Island than the normal site. But Everts said state officials will monitor the show despite the compromise on location. "We think that satisfies everyone involved, and the fireworks will go on, and the residents of Tiki Island will be able to enjoy them, and there won't be any danger to the birds," said Aaron Reed, a spokesman for the state parks and wildlife agency.

North Deer Island is a federal bird sanctuary used as a nesting site by an estimated 10,000 to 30,000 pairs of birds of different species annually, according to information on the state fish and wildlife department's Internet site. Roseate spoonbills, reddish egrets and white-faced ibises also nest on the island. About one-third of the island is made from materials dredged from nearby shipping channels. "It is the most productive colonial bird nesting site in Galveston Bay, and it's the only place the brown pelicans are nesting this year here," Meadours said.

The island is just south of the Intracoastal Waterway, along which towboats pushing thousands of barges travel each year. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has taken the brown pelican off the endangered species list along the entire Atlantic coast and the coasts of Florida and Alabama among the Gulf states. The species remains on the endangered list in Mississippi, Louisiana and Texas. [How can it be an "endangered species" in just one place?]

Everts said the man who is paying several thousand dollars for the fireworks display asked not be to identified although he sat in on Thursday's meeting with state officials. Audubon Society officials and members and representatives for the state agencies said they did not learn the man's name. "We had a nice meeting, and everybody was after the same goal," Everts said. "I think we got the mission accomplished."

Source






THAT EVIL AIR-CONDITIONING:

From Alternet

As the Age of Air-conditioning has waxed, America's social and political climate has deteriorated -- among Democrats, Republicans and independents, from north to south -- and that deterioration can't be completely separated from the climate-control technology that grew along with it. Imagine a country where economic life, by necessity, slows during the summer. Where potential customers stay home or go swimming on a hot afternoon, so salespeople are sent home early. Where factories simply shut down the line for a couple of weeks. That was this country before air-conditioning, but in 2006, it sounds like a distant, exotic land. In today's rapid-growth, high-consumption "service economy," workers and consumers, like computers and ovens, are components, each of which is maintained at an appropriate operating temperature.

Air-conditioners are not inherently right-wing devices. You'll hear them whirring all over Washington, D.C., this time of year, outside offices occupied by Republicans, Democrats and political groups across the spectrum, from the NRA to NOW and beyond. Only a tiny number of politicians, and no leading member of either major party, would dare put ecological limits ahead of short-term economics. Who's going to suggest that summer be a time to back off and simply not make, sell and buy so much stuff? None will dare say that a million and a half people have no business living and working in a place like Phoenix or that Miami has grown beyond supportable limits. And the ecological damage done by that refusal to slow the wheels of commerce is irreversible (see See Part I).

If it means keeping control of Middle Eastern and Central Asian oil and gas, the White House and most members of Congress have no problem calling for sacrifices: the prospect of a trillion dollars out of taxpayers' pockets, the blood of many thousands, the devastation of whole nations. But don't expect political leaders to ask that Americans save energy by sweating a bit more. They certainly aren't asking themselves for any sacrifices. As Rep. John Murtha, D-Pa., a decorated combat veteran and harsh critic of the Iraq war, recently said of Karl Rove, "He's sitting in his air-conditioned office on his big, fat backside saying, 'Stay the course.' That's not a plan."

The political system is wilting partly because its roots have become shallow. People are becoming less and less inclined to gather spontaneously in noncommercial places, and air-conditioning reinforces that social chill. A shady suburban street on a pleasant 85-degree summer evening can be as free of human life as it might be during a Christmas Eve ice storm. Keeping people indoors and comfortable reinforces a tight focus on the individual or nuclear family rather than a larger community, and that is part of what's crippling grassroots political action. Air-conditioning helps numb us to the prospect of ecological breakdown on a planetary scale as well. It's more tempting to think of global warming as a problem that only people in sweltering Bangladesh will have to deal with when we view their flood-prone plight from a seat in a cool living room or movie theater.

Lack of toughness in dealing with summer heat and personal discomfort will make any efforts to kick the carbon habit seem just as feeble. Clinging to air-conditioning as a necessity is the best way to prove anti-ecological conservatives right when they dismiss renewable energy as inadequate. Better insulation and 'green' energy can never be enough to satisfy the nation's summer demand for A/C. Just to air-condition buildings -- and do nothing else -- would require eight times as much electricity from renewable energy as is currently produced. In a paper published in the journal Science in 2002, a team of 18 leading energy researchers predicted what would be required to supply the world's expected energy needs in the year 2050 without adding carbon dioxide to the atmosphere. Finding, in the words of a press release announcing the article, that "no existing alternative energy source, nor combination of sources, currently exists that could adequately replace the energy produced by fossil fuels," they struggled to identify as-yet-undeveloped technologies that could supply the planet's needs, assuming per-capita consumption remains similar to today's.

Few of the strategies they considered -- including outlandish ones like a set of 660 photovoltaic solar arrays, each the size of Manhattan Island, placed in outer space -- appear likely to become reality. And, warned the authors, "the disparity between what is needed and what can be done without great compromise may become more acute as the global economy grows." The only effective approach will be to slash current energy consumption, especially where it is most wasteful.

Along with keeping cars parked, we could start by throwing open a few windows. The United States devotes 18 percent of its electricity consumption just to air-condition buildings. That's more than four times as much electricity per capita as India uses per capita for all purposes combined. Producing that power for climate control in our interior spaces is playing a big role in distorting the planet's climate. To achieve the deep reduction in our greenhouse gas emissions that's going to be necessary, while insisting that we remain an air-conditioned nation, would take us into the realm of science fiction -- or maybe into a nuclear power-plant construction boom.

Lacking political will to urge restraint or sacrifice, a growing number of lawmakers in both parties are considering the nuclear option. Conventional thinking seems to be leading mainstream environmentalists in the same direction. The venerable organization Environmental Defense is taking tentative first steps down that grim cul-de-sac. Here is its president Fred Krupp, speaking to NPR a year ago: "I think we have to have an open mind and certainly ask the serious tough questions about nuclear power that, um, need to be asked. And we should not just throw it off the table from the get-go." The Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) has taken a similar position: that if fuel and wastes can be dealt with safely, "NRDC would not seek to exclude nuclear generation from competing on a level playing field with other reduced-carbon energy sources."

Luxuries like comfort air-conditioning are affordable only in a make-believe world with unlimited fossil fuel reserves and a method for pumping carbon dioxide into outer space (or unlimited tolerance for nuclear disaster and storage for radioactive wastes). In a greenhouse future, we will need every kilowatt we can squeeze out of wind machines, solar arrays, and biomass just to fulfill essential needs. None will be left over for cooling down the Astrodome.

If it now seems absurd to suggest that Americans give up air-conditioning, it's because we've become too used to living in the land of plenty. In her history "Air Conditioning America: Engineers and the Controlled Environment, 1900-1960," Gail Cooper tells how the U.S. government's War Production Board in May 1942 banned the manufacture or installation of air-conditioning systems "solely for personal comfort." Plans were even drawn up to remove the few existing comfort air-conditioning systems from commercial and government building for use in military production facilities.

The end of World War II and the economic boom of the 1950s brought a reversal of attitude that is still with us today. Cooper quotes one industry executive of the time who announced, "The problem has been one of selling the public on the idea that air-conditioning is no longer a luxury." But, says Cooper, that idea didn't require much selling: "Architects, builders and bankers accepted air-conditioning first, and consumers were faced with a fait accompli that they had merely to ratify." If air-conditioning could be banned by the United States in wartime and then be declared a necessity in a time of abundance, we need not regard it as inevitable today. In an era when air-conditioning systems are proliferating, heating up the planet and chilling the social and political climate, their most important feature has become the "off" switch.

***************************************

Many people would like to be kind to others so Leftists exploit that with their nonsense about equality. Most people want a clean, green environment so Greenies exploit that by inventing all sorts of far-fetched threats to the environment. But for both, the real motive is to promote themselves as wiser and better than everyone else, truth regardless.

Global warming has taken the place of Communism as an absurdity that "liberals" will defend to the death regardless of the evidence showing its folly. Evidence never has mattered to real Leftists

Comments? Email me here. My Home Page is here or here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there are mirrors of this site here and here.

*****************************************