Global warming may have ‘devastating’ effects on rice

This is a lulu of a study.  They didn't actually study warming at all.  They just studied CO2 levels.  They thus ignored that warming would produce more rice per acre.  In warm Indonesia, they get two crops a year. The extra CO2 also produced more rice, of course.  But the average nutrient content of the rice grains decreased -- which is what you would expect from  bigger crops using the same amount of land.

So the only interesting question was the TOTAL amount of nutrients captured from the given acreage by the expanded crops.  It was most unlikely to be less and was probably more.  In summary, this eccentric study tells us nothing about the total amount of nutrients that would be provided by a crop under natural conditions


The change could be particularly dire in southeast Asia where rice is a major part of the daily diet, said the report in the journal Science Advances. “We are showing that global warming, climate change and particularly greenhouse gases — carbon dioxide — can have an impact on the nutrient content of plants we eat,” said co-author Adam Drewnowski, a professor at the University of Washington.

“This can have devastating effects on the rice-consuming countries where about 70% of the calories and most of the nutrients come from rice.” Protein and vitamin deficiencies can lead to growth-stunting, birth defects, diarrhoea, infections and early death.

Countries at most risk include those that consume the most rice and have the lowest gross domestic product (GDP), such as Myanmar, Laos and Cambodia, Mr. Drewnowksi said.

The findings were based on field studies in Japan and China, simulating the amount of CO2 expected in the atmosphere by the second half of this century — 568 to 590 parts per million. Current levels are just over 400 ppm.

For the experiments, 18 different strains of rice were planted in open fields, surrounded in certain areas by 56-foot wide octagons of plastic piping that released extra CO2.

Researchers found that iron, zinc, protein, and vitamins B1, B2, B5, and B9 — which help the body convert food to energy — were all reduced in the rice grown under higher CO2 conditions. “Vitamin B1 (thiamine) levels decreased by 17.1%; average Vitamin B2 by 16.6%,” said the report.

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British reliance on French nuclear energy increases by more than quarter

The UK’s reliance on importing French power to keep the lights on has increased by almost a quarter this year in further evidence of Britain’s energy cost crunch.

Energy prices in Britain are now around a fifth higher than they were this time last year on the wholesale market.

Meanwhile, across the Channel, nuclear power plants have flooded France with cheap electricity which is being sold at a tidy profit to struggling British suppliers.

“French nuclear plants have been far more reliable this year to date than last year,” said Jamie Stewart, the ICIS Energy analyst, “which has kept a firm lid on French power prices.”

The stark fundamental differences between the UK and its biggest electricity trade partner have nudged British imports, via twin high-voltage sub-sea cables, to a total of 6.4 terawatt hours so far this year. Last year Britain imported less than 5TWh over the same period. Energy brokers at Marex Spectron told The Sunday Telegraph that the “anomalously strong” imports from France are closer in line with Britain’s winter appetite for foreign energy than typical summer trends. The trend has also re-energised industry debate over Britain’s energy trading future once it leaves the EU next year.

Even with the bumper imports of cheap French nuclear power, Britain’s energy prices remain around 20pc higher than last year in a major threat to energy companies braced for the Government’s price cap to descend on the market at the end of the year.

In response, suppliers have drawn the ire of ministers by raising the price of energy tariffs to survive the cost crunch. Many of the cheapest suppliers have shown signs of existential strain.

Iresa Energy, the energy minnow, slipped into default on the wholesale market for a third time last week, according to Elexon, the market administrator. Meanwhile, Bulb and First Utility, the Shell-owned supplier, have been forced to raise prices in the wake of tariff hikes from the “big six” suppliers.

UK power prices hit 10-year highs in March following the freezing temperatures brought by the “Beast from the East” and show no sign of returning to typical summer prices due to the strong price of gas. The Siberian storm drained gas from storage facilities across Europe in the final weeks of winter, making it more difficult for suppliers to replenish the stocks over the summer.

On the ICIS Power Index, a key benchmark for energy trends, the three-week rolling average price of wholesale power stands at £52.70/MWh after spending much of last year fluctuating between £42 and £48 per megawatt hour.

SOURCE







Global Warming has Stopped And A Cooling Is Beginning”

Written by Henrik Svensmark

The star that keeps us alive has, over the last few years, been almost free of sunspots, which are the usual signs of the Sun’s magnetic activity. Last week [4 September 2009] the scientific team behind the satellite SOHO (Solar and Heliospheric Observatory) reported, “It is likely that the current year’s number of blank days will be the longest in about 100 years.” Everything indicates that the Sun is going into some kind of hibernation, and the obvious question is what significance that has for us on Earth.

If you ask the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) which represents the current consensus on climate change, the answer is a reassuring “nothing”. But history and recent research suggest that is probably completely wrong. Why? Let’s take a closer look.

Solar activity has always varied. Around the year 1000, we had a period of very high solar activity, which coincided with the Medieval Warm Period. It was a time when frosts in May were almost unknown – a matter of great importance for a good harvest. Vikings settled in Greenland and explored the coast of North America. On the whole it was a good time. For example, China’s population doubled in this period.

But after about 1300 solar activity declined and the world began to get colder. It was the beginning of the episode we now call the Little Ice Age. In this cold time, all the Viking settlements in Greenland disappeared. Sweden surprised Denmark by marching across the ice, and in London the Thames froze repeatedly. But more serious were the long periods of crop failures, which resulted in poorly nourished populations, reduced in Europe by about 30 per cent because of disease and hunger.

It’s important to realise that the Little Ice Age was a global event. It ended in the late 19th Century and was followed by increasing solar activity. Over the past 50 years solar activity has been at its highest since the medieval warmth of 1000 years ago. But now it appears that the Sun has changed again, and is returning towards what solar scientists call a “grand minimum” such as we saw in the Little Ice Age.

The match between solar activity and climate through the ages is sometimes explained away as coincidence. Yet it turns out that, almost no matter when you look and not just in the last 1000 years, there is a link. Solar activity has repeatedly fluctuated between high and low during the past 10,000 years. In fact the Sun spent about 17 per cent of those 10,000 years in a sleeping mode, with a cooling Earth the result.

You may wonder why the international climate panel IPCC does not believe that the Sun’s changing activity affects the climate. The reason is that it considers only changes in solar radiation. That would be the simplest way for the Sun to change the climate – a bit like turning up and down the brightness of a light bulb.

Satellite measurements have shown that the variations of solar radiation are too small to explain climate change. But the panel has closed its eyes to another, much more powerful way for the Sun to affect Earth’s climate. In 1996 we discovered a surprising influence of the Sun – its impact on Earth’s cloud cover. High-energy accelerated particles coming from exploded stars, the cosmic rays, help to form clouds.

When the Sun is active, its magnetic field is better at shielding us against the cosmic rays coming from outer space, before they reach our planet. By regulating the Earth’s cloud cover, the Sun can turn the temperature up and down. High solar activity means fewer clouds and and a warmer world. Low solar activity and poorer shielding against cosmic rays result in increased cloud cover and hence a cooling. As the Sun’s magnetism doubled in strength during the 20th century, this natural mechanism may be responsible for a large part of global warming seen then.

That also explains why most climate scientists try to ignore this possibility. It does not favour their idea that the 20th century temperature rise was mainly due to human emissions of CO2. If the Sun provoked a significant part of warming in the 20th Century, then the contribution by CO2 must necessarily be smaller.

Ever since we put forward our theory in 1996, it has been subjected to very sharp criticism, which is normal in science.

First it was said that a link between clouds and solar activity could not be correct, because no physical mechanism was known. But in 2006, after many years of work, we completed experiments at DTU Space that demonstrated the existence of a physical mechanism. The cosmic rays help to form aerosols, which are the seeds for cloud formation.

Then came the criticism that the mechanism we found in the laboratory could not work in the real atmosphere, and therefore had no practical significance. We have just rejected that criticism emphatically.

It turns out that the Sun itself performs what might be called natural experiments. Giant solar eruptions can cause the cosmic ray intensity on earth to dive suddenly over a few days. In the days following an eruption, cloud cover can fall by about 4 per cent. And the amount of liquid water in cloud droplets is reduced by almost 7 per cent. Here is a very large effect – indeed so great that in popular terms the Earth’s clouds originate in space.

So we have watched the Sun’s magnetic activity with increasing concern, since it began to wane in the mid-1990s.

That the Sun might now fall asleep in a deep minimum was suggested by solar scientists at a meeting in Kiruna in Sweden two years ago. So when Nigel Calder and I updated our book The Chilling Stars, we wrote a little provocatively that “we are advising our friends to enjoy global warming while it lasts.”

In fact global warming has stopped and a cooling is beginning. Mojib Latif from the University of Kiel argued at the recent UN World Climate Conference in Geneva that the cooling may continue through the next 10 to 20 years. His explanation was a natural change in the North Atlantic circulation, not in solar activity. But no matter how you interpret them, natural variations in climate are making a comeback.

The outcome may be that the Sun itself will demonstrate its importance for climate and so challenge the theories of global warming. No climate model has predicted a cooling of the Earth – quite the contrary. And this means that the projections of future climate are unreliable. A forecast saying it may be either warmer or colder for 50 years is not very useful, and science is not yet able to predict solar activity.

So in many ways we stand at a crossroads. The near future will be extremely interesting. I think it is important to accept that Nature pays no heed to what we humans think about it. Will the greenhouse theory survive a significant cooling of the Earth? Not in its current dominant form. Unfortunately, tomorrow’s climate challenges will be quite different from the greenhouse theory’s predictions. Perhaps it will become fashionable again to investigate the Sun’s impact on our climate.

SOURCE






Stop Trying to Get Workers Out of Their Cars

"Smart growth" is dumb about commuting.

If you hate urban sprawl, you're probably familiar with the complaints of the "smart growth" movement: Roadways blight cities. Traffic congestion is the worst. Suburbanization harms the environment. Fortunately, say these smart growthers, there is an alternative: By piling on regulations and reallocating transportation-related tax money, we can "densify" our urban communities, allowing virtually everyone to live in a downtown area and forego driving in favor of walking or biking.

Smart growth proponents have been gaining influence for decades. They've implemented urban growth boundaries (which greatly restrict the development of land outside a defined area), up-zoning (which tries to increase densities in existing neighborhoods by replacing single-family homes with apartments), and "road diets" (which take away traffic lanes to make room for wider sidewalks and bike lanes).

Alas, there are inherent flaws in the "smart growth" approach—beginning with the idea that it makes sense for everyone to live and work in the same small area. In fact, that idea flies in the face of what economists call urban agglomeration.

Urban agglomeration is why there are more jobs in and around big cities. Job seekers have access to a large number of potential employers, which increases each person's likelihood of finding one that can make the best use of her unique talents and skills. The same is true for business owners, who have a much better chance of finding people in a large populous urban area who match their needs.

Transportation turns out to be a key factor in enabling these wealth-increasing transactions. Imagine drawing a circle around the location of your residence, defined by how far you are willing to commute to get to a satisfying job. The larger the radius of that circle, the more potential work opportunities you have. Likewise, a company's prospective-employee pool is defined by the number of people whose circles contain that company's location.

Most people measure that radius in time rather than distance; studies show they are generally unwilling to spend much more than 30 minutes commuting each way on a long-term basis. That means the size of their opportunity circle is critically dependent on how quickly they can get around.

Despite urban sprawl and ever-increasing congestion levels, economists Peter Gordon and Harry Richardson of the University of Southern California have documented, using census data, that average commute times in various metro areas have hardly changed at all over several decades. More recently, Alex Anas of the University of Buffalo modeled what would happen as a result of a projected 24 percent increase in Chicago's metro area population over three decades. He estimated that auto commute times would increase only 3 percent and transit trip times hardly at all. The reason is that people tend to change where they live or work in order to keep their travel times about the same. But this happy result comes about only if the transportation system expands accordingly.

A recent empirical study from the Marron Institute of Urban Management at New York University likewise found that, on average, the labor market of an urban area (defined as the number of jobs reachable within a one-hour commute) nearly doubles when the workforce of the metro area doubles. The commute time increases by an average of only about 7 percent, however—assuming an efficient region-wide transportation network. To achieve higher economic productivity, they recommend fostering speedier rather than slower commuting; more rather than less commuting; and longer rather than shorter commutes.

These policies would expand the opportunity circles of employers and employees, enabling a more productive urban economy. But these are exactly the opposite of the policy prescriptions of smart growth, which generally seek to confine people's economic activity to a small portion of a larger metro area.

One early manifestation of this was the attempt by urban and transportation planners in the '80s and '90s to promote "jobs-housing balance," where each county of a large metro area has comparable percentages of the region's jobs and of its housing. The rationale was that this would reduce "excessive" commuting by enabling people to find work close to their homes. But urban agglomeration theory makes it clear that that is a recipe for a low-productivity urban economy. Census data show that many suburban areas are now approaching jobs-housing balance on their own, but this does not necessarily reduce commute distances—to get to the jobs they want, many people still travel across boundaries.

A fascinating example is Arlington County, Virginia. Since 2000, the number of jobs and the number of working residents in the county have been approximately equal. But it turns out that only 52 percent of those working residents have jobs in the county. Out of 582,000 resident workers, 280,000 commute to adjacent counties or the District of Columbia. And out of 574,000 jobs in the county, 272,000 are filled by workers from other places.

A less extreme version of smart growth says that we should discourage car travel and shift resources heavily toward transit. People should be encouraged to live in high-density "villages" where they can easily obtain transit service to jobs elsewhere in the metro area. The problem with this vision is the inability of transit to effectively compete with the auto highway system.

Simply put, cars work better for workers. A 2012 Brookings study analyzing data from 371 transit providers in America's largest 100 metro areas found that over three-fourths of all jobs are in neighborhoods with transit service—but only about a quarter of those jobs can be reached by transit within 90 minutes. That's more than three times the national average commute time.

Another study, by Andrew Owen and David Levinson of the University of Minnesota, looked at job access via transit in 46 of the 50 largest metro areas. Their data combined actual in-vehicle time with estimated walking time at either end of the transit trip, to approximate total door-to-door travel time. Only five of the 46 metro areas have even a few percent of their jobs accessible by transit within half an hour. All the others have 1 percent or less. Within 60 minutes door-to-door, the best cities have 15–22 percent of jobs reachable by transit.

Meanwhile, Owen and Levinson found that in 31 of the 51 largest metro areas in 2010, 100 percent of jobs could be reached by car in 30 minutes or less. Within 40 minutes, all the jobs could be reached by car in 39 of the cities. Within an hour, essentially every job in all 51 places could be reached by car. The roadway network is ubiquitous, connecting every possible origin to every destination. The contrast with access via transit—let alone walking or biking—is profound.

SOURCE





The darkness of the Green/Left

The new movie "First Reformed" is being lauded by critics and described as the magnum opus of director and screenwriter Paul Schrader. He found fame with his screenplay for the 1976 classic Taxi Driver, and his movies often feature alienated protagonists who grapple with the evil in society and in themselves. This film is one of Schrader’s most personal, and charts the disillusionment, despair and apostasy of a pastor from the Dutch Reformed tradition — the style of Protestantism in which Schrader was raised, but later abandoned.

The symbolism of First Reformed is complex and open to interpretation. But if comments made by Schrader are any indication, his latest work is a sobering testament to the dark, increasingly dangerous religion of leftist politics.

Reverend Ernst Toller (Ethan Hawke) lives in quiet agony, preaching to the smattering of parishioners who attend his church on Sunday morning. Throughout the week he gives tours of the austere 18th-century sanctuary, which is derided as “the museum” by the pastor (Cedric Kyles) of the local megachurch that funds him. Toller lives like a lonely monk in his unfurnished rectory, scribbling thoughts of hope and despair in his journal between shots of whiskey. At length we learn he had been a military chaplain, whose marriage collapsed when he lost a son in Iraq, and whose faith is likewise threatening to buckle. Often he wanders the church graveyard and repairs its fallen tombstones — the emblems of a dying faith in which he is losing hope.

“If only I could pray,” he laments to himself.

When a pregnant congregant named Mary (Amanda Seyfried) seeks counsel for her troubled husband Michael (Philip Ettinger), Toller finds an alternative to his decrepit traditional Christianity. Michael introduces him to the catechism of climate change — a faith that addresses the contemporary political issues Schrader cares about, and comes complete with its own prophets of doom, its own activist martyrs and its own unquestioned orthodoxy. Like Schrader, who has claimed he does not believe humanity will survive the century, Michael believes the end is nigh. The original sin incurring this looming judgment is corporate capitalism, which has merged with right-wing American evangelicalism to render them indistinguishable. Against these Schrader uses his film to issue a snarling indictment.

When Toller discovers that his own church is underwritten by a major polluter, he obtains an epiphany. Terminally ill from the pollution he has inflicted upon himself, he embraces the dogma of despair. His great dilemma becomes the choice between suicide and the mass killing of those he deems guilty. Having lost faith in the traditional Christian God, Toller dethrones Him and seeks to install himself as the judge and executioner of those heretics that transgress his new environmentalist gospel. “I have found another form of prayer,” he says, overlooking a ravaged landscape while strapped in a suicide vest. The movie’s cryptic, unsatisfying ending will leave many viewers scratching their heads, wondering if Schrader is actually saying what he seems to be saying.

Is Schrader hiding behind his art a radical political message? It may be telling that his protagonist shares his name with Ernst Toller, a Marxist revolutionary and playwright. Three days after the 2016 presidential election, Schrader posted on Facebook that Trump’s victory was a call to arms. “I felt the call to violence in the 60s and I feel it now again,” he wrote. “This attack on liberty and tolerance will not be solved by appeasement. Obama tried that for eight years. We should finance those who support violence [sic] resistance. We should be willing to take arms.” Schrader closed his comments by commending to his readers the example of John Brown, the radical 19th-century abolitionist whose bloody solutions to social ills helped plunge the nation into civil war. (It is likely not a coincidence that Rev. Toller reflects upon his church’s abolitionist past when plotting his murderous vengeance.)

Further reflection led Schrader to delete his post and blame it on “a couple of cabernets and half an Ambien.” But the dark themes of First Reformed call into question his repentance. On the contrary, it is one of the clearest depictions yet that some on the progressive left have replaced Christianity with a new religion. Fueled by raging despair and an apocalyptic fear of climate change, this radical new faith possesses the same self-assured dogmatism exhibited by the severest strains of the one Schrader fled in his youth. But it is untempered by mercy, hope or the humble reluctance to cast the first stone.

At the very least, First Reformed acknowledges that the end of this new religion is madness and blood.

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