Category Archives: farm waste

Roger Revelle and Freeman Dyson – 2 old guys argue about the obvious

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While the world drowns in people. The problems with greenhouse gases, ice melt and oceanic acidification, often lumped together under the term Global Warming, are really the end result of world over population. We are 7 billion now and before it is all over we wlll top out at 10 billion. The Earth only has the sustainable resources to support about a billion people well. Had we limited ourselves to that number, we would have eliminated most poverty and most disease. To do that would fly in the face of every religion known to man and everyone’s biological urge to reproduce. So we blindly let nature do it for us. I have no idea what a human biological die off looks like, and I do not want to be here for it. It will happen.

Dyson

http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/dysonf07/dysonf07_index.html

My first heresy says that all the fuss about global warming is grossly exaggerated. Here I am opposing the holy brotherhood of climate model experts and the crowd of deluded citizens who believe the numbers predicted by the computer models. Of course, they say, I have no degree in meteorology and I am therefore not qualified to speak. But I have studied the climate models and I know what they can do. The models solve the equations of fluid dynamics, and they do a very good job of describing the fluid motions of the atmosphere and the oceans. They do a very poor job of describing the clouds, the dust, the chemistry and the biology of fields and farms and forests. They do not begin to describe the real world that we live in. The real world is muddy and messy and full of things that we do not yet understand. It is much easier for a scientist to sit in an air-conditioned building and run computer models, than to put on winter clothes and measure what is really happening outside in the swamps and the clouds. That is why the climate model experts end up believing their own models.

Revelle

http://www.aip.org/history/climate/Revelle.htm

In the mid 1950s, not many scientists were concerned that humanity was adding carbon dioxide gas ( CO2) to the atmosphere by burning fossil fuels. The suggestion that this would change the climate had been abandoned decades earlier by nearly everyone. A particularly simple and powerful argument was that the added gas would not linger in the air. Most of the CO2 on the surface of the planet was not in the tenuous atmosphere, but dissolved in the huge mass of water in the oceans. Obviously, no matter how much more gas human activities might pour into the atmosphere, nearly all of it would wind up safely buried in the ocean depths

Dyson

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freeman_Dyson

Global warming

Dyson agrees that anthropogenic global warming exists, and has written

“ One of the main causes of warming is the increase of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere resulting from our burning of fossil fuels such as oil and coal and natural gas. ”

However, he has argued that existing simulation models of climate fail to account for some important factors, and hence the results will contain too much error to reliably predict future trends.

“ The models solve the equations of fluid dynamics, and they do a very good job of describing the fluid motions of the atmosphere and the oceans. They do a very poor job of describing the clouds, the dust, the chemistry and the biology of fields and farms and forests. They do not begin to describe the real world we live in… ”
“ As a scientist I do not have much faith in predictions. Science is organised unpredictability. The best scientists like to arrange things in an experiment to be as unpredictable as possible, and then they do the experiment to see what will happen. You might say that if something is predictable then it is not science. When I make predictions, I am not speaking as a scientist. I am speaking as a story-teller, and my predictions are science-fiction rather than science. ”

He is among signatories of a letter to the UN criticizing the IPCC [1]. The letter includes the statements “The average rate of warming of 0.1 to 0. 2 degrees Celsius per decade recorded by satellites during the late 20th century falls within known natural rates of warming and cooling over the last 10,000 years” and “there has been no net global warming since 1998”. Both statements have been criticised as inconsistent with the data.

He has also argued against the ostracisation of scientists whose views depart from the acknowledged mainstream of scientific opinion on climate change, stating that heretics have historically been an important force in driving scientific progress.

Revelle

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roger_Revelle

Global warming

Revelle was instrumental in creating the International Geophysical Year (IGY) in 1958 and was founding chairman of the first Committee on Climate Change and the Ocean (CCCO) under the Scientific Committee on Ocean Research (SCOR) and the International Oceanic Commission (IOC). During planning for the IGY, under Revelle’s directorship, SIO participated in and later became the principal center for the Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide Program. In July 1956, Charles David Keeling joined the SIO staff to head the program, and began measurements of atmospheric carbon dioxide at the Mauna Loa Observatory on Mauna Loa, Hawaii, and in Antarctica.

In 1957, Revelle co-authored a paper with Hans Suess that suggested that the Earth’s oceans would absorb excess carbon dioxide generated by humanity at a much slower rate than previously predicted by geoscientists, thereby suggesting that human gas emissions might create a “greenhouse effect” that would cause global warming over time.[3] Although other articles in the same journal discussed carbon dioxide levels, the Suess-Revelle paper was “the only one of the three to stress the growing quantity of CO2 contributed by our burning of fossil fuel, and to call attention to the fact that it might cause global warming over time.”[4]

Revelle and Suess described the “buffer factor”, now known as the “Revelle factor“, which is a resistance to atmospheric carbon dioxide being absorbed by the ocean surface layer posed by bicarbonate chemistry. Essentially, in order to enter the ocean, carbon dioxide gas has to partition into one of the components of carbonic acid: carbonate ion, bicarbonate ion, or protonated carbonic acid, and the product of these many chemical dissociation constants factors into a kind of back-pressure that limits how fast the carbon dioxide can enter the surface ocean. Geology, geochemistry, atmospheric chemistry, ocean chemistry … this amounted to one of the earliest examples of “integrated assessment”, which 50 years later became an entire branch of global warming science.

Al Gore mentions Revelle as a personal inspiration in a segment of the Academy Award-winning global-warming documentary An Inconvenient Truth.

Dyson

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/03/25/freeman-dyson-speaking-out-on-global-warming/

What may trouble Dyson most about climate change are the experts. Experts are, he thinks, too often crippled by the conventional wisdom they create, leading to the belief that “they know it all.” The men he most admires tend to be what he calls “amateurs,” inventive spirits of uncredentialed brilliance like Bernhard Schmidt, an eccentric one-armed alcoholic telescope-lens designer; Milton Humason, a janitor at Mount Wilson Observatory in California whose native scientific aptitude was such that he was promoted to staff astronomer; and especially Darwin, who, Dyson says, “was really an amateur and beat the professionals at their own game.”IT WAS FOUR YEARS AGO that Dyson began publicly stating his doubts about climate change. Speaking at the Frederick S. Pardee Center for the Study of the Longer-Range Future at Boston University, Dyson announced that “all the fuss about global warming is grossly exaggerated.” Since then he has only heated up his misgivings, declaring in a 2007 interview with Salon.com that “the fact that the climate is getting warmer doesn’t scare me at all” and writing in an essay for The New York Review of Books, the left-leaning publication that is to gravitas what the Beagle was to Darwin, that climate change has become an “obsession” — the primary article of faith for “a worldwide secular religion” known as environmentalism. Among those he considers true believers, Dyson has been particularly dismissive of Al Gore, whom Dyson calls climate change’s “chief propagandist,” and James Hansen, the head of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York and an adviser to Gore’s film, “An Inconvenient Truth.” Dyson accuses them of relying too heavily on computer-generated climate models that foresee a Grand Guignol of imminent world devastation as icecaps melt, oceans rise and storms and plagues sweep the earth, and he blames the pair’s “lousy science” for “distracting public attention” from “more serious and more immediate dangers to the planet.”http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?artid=33716

In 1975 Roger returned to UCSD to become Professor of Science and Public Policy. For the next 15 years he taught courses in marine policy and population, and he continued to be active in oceanographic affairs. When in 1978 the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) decided to focus its international efforts on a few selected issues, Roger chaired the AAAS group that identified the build-up of heat-absorbing gases in the atmosphere as one such issue. As a result, the AAAS Board created the Committee on Climate, and Roger served as its chairman for a decade. The Committee was responsible for the first effort to identify the costs and benefits of increased atmospheric carbon dioxide.

He received the National Medal of Science from President George Bush in 1991

for his pioneering work in the areas of carbon dioxide and climate modifications, oceanographic exploration presaging plate tectonics, and the biological effects of radiation in the marine environment, and studies of population growth and global food supplies.

To a reporter asking why he got the medal, Roger (10) said, “I got it for being the grandfather of the greenhouse effect.”

It is difficult to do justice to a man with such broad accomplishments. When questioned about his profession, Roger would reply “I am an oceanographer.”

FINALLY

Dyson

http://www.boingboing.net/2008/05/27/freeman-dyson-on-glo.html

At this point I return to the Keeling graph, which demonstrates the strong coupling between atmosphere and plants. The wiggles in the graph show us that every carbon dioxide molecule in the atmosphere is incorporated in a plant within a time of the order of twelve years. Therefore, if we can control what the plants do with the carbon, the fate of the carbon in the atmosphere is in our hands. That is what Nordhaus meant when he mentioned “genetically engineered carbon-eating trees” as a low-cost backstop to global warming. The science and technology of genetic engineering are not yet ripe for large-scale use. We do not understand the language of the genome well enough to read and write it fluently. But the science is advancing rapidly, and the technology of reading and writing genomes is advancing even more rapidly. I consider it likely that we shall have “genetically engineered carbon-eating trees” within twenty years, and almost certainly within fifty years.

Carbon-eating trees could convert most of the carbon that they absorb from the atmosphere into some chemically stable form and bury it underground. Or they could convert the carbon into liquid fuels and other useful chemicals. Biotechnology is enormously powerful, capable of burying or transforming any molecule of carbon dioxide that comes into its grasp. Keeling’s wiggles prove that a big fraction of the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere comes within the grasp of biotechnology every decade. If one quarter of the world’s forests were replanted with carbon-eating varieties of the same species, the forests would be preserved as ecological resources and as habitats for wildlife, and the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere would be reduced by half in about fifty years.

It is likely that biotechnology will dominate our lives and our economic activities during the second half of the twenty-first century, just as computer technology dominated our lives and our economy during the second half of the twentieth. Biotechnology could be a great equalizer, spreading wealth over the world wherever there is land and air and water and sunlight. This has nothing to do with the misguided efforts that are now being made to reduce carbon emissions by growing corn and converting it into ethanol fuel. The ethanol program fails to reduce emissions and incidentally hurts poor people all over the world by raising the price of food. After we have mastered biotechnology, the rules of the climate game will be radically changed. In a world economy based on biotechnology, some low-cost and environmentally benign backstop to carbon emissions is likely to become a reality.

Revelle

http://www.heartland.org/policybot/results/9858/Gores_global_warming_mentor_in_his_own_words.html

Revelle had made an even stronger statement just a few days earlier, in a July 14, 1988 letter to Congressman Jim Bates: “Most scientists familiar with the subject are not yet willing to bet that the climate this year is the result of ‘greenhouse warming.’ As you very well know, climate is highly variable from year to year, and the causes of these variations are not at all well understood. My own personal belief is that we should wait another ten or twenty years to really be convinced that the greenhouse effect is going to be important for human beings, in both positive and negative ways.”
Revelle’s writings

In the premiere issue of Cosmos, in 1991, Revelle and coauthors S.F. Singer and C. Starr contributed a brief essay, “What to do about greenhouse warming: Look before you leap.” The three write: “Drastic, precipitous and, especially, unilateral steps to delay the putative greenhouse impacts can cost jobs and prosperity and increase the human costs of global poverty, without being effective.”

They continue, “Stringent controls enacted now would be economically devastating, particularly for developing countries for whom reduced energy consumption would mean slower rates of economic growth without being able to delay greatly the growth of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. Yale economist William Nordhaus, one of the few who have been trying to deal quantitatively with the economics of the greenhouse effect, has pointed out that ‘. . . those who argue for strong measures to slow greenhouse warming have reached their conclusion without any discernible analysis of the costs and benefits.’”

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Dyson’s most remarkable quote is that, “I would rather be wrong than vague”.

To which I would respond, “Sir I would rather be right than dead”.

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Energy Efficient Gardening – What about your soil

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So you have your soil test back. Hopefully you have planted several plantings of your favorite stuff to eat so that they will continue to produce for as long as the weather will allow. In a totally fluke year I had some spinach that lasted for a year and well into the next spring.

It is time to start both improving your soil and planting your “main” crops. The soil test says that you “need something”. Now I am not going to cover all of the soil additives but usually there will be somekind of chemical deficiency. Here you run smack dab into your modern industrial farming dilemma. Don’t worry, this will only last for a year. At the end of World War II the world had a total surplus of explosives and poison gas. What to do? Well they converted the explosives to nitrogen fertilizer and they turned the poison gas into herbicides and pesticides. Farmers fell in love with them and well here we are no longer loving our food. NO2 (commonly called Nox) is a much more potent greenhouse gas than CO2 It is estimated that when farmers fertilize there fields they castoff more greenhouses gases than the entire world’s transportation fleet:

http://gristmill.grist.org/story/2008/5/16/124957/304

Nitrogen bomb

‘Science’: nitrogen as important as carbon in climate change

Posted by Tom Philpott at 5:05 PM on 16 May 2008

Speaking of the troubles associated with industrial agriculture and its fertilizer regime, check this out:

“The public does not yet know much about nitrogen, but in many ways it is as big an issue as carbon, and due to the interactions of nitrogen and carbon, makes the challenge of providing food and energy to the world’s peoples without harming the global environment a tremendous challenge.”

The speaker is University of Virginia environmental sciences professor James Galloway (quoted in an AP piece), talking about his paper published (abstract here) in the latest Science.

According to Galloway, “We are accumulating reactive nitrogen in the environment at alarming rates, and this may prove to be as serious as putting carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.”

Nothing new here that I can tell at first glance. (I’d love to read the paper, but it’s password-protected.) I agree, though, that nitrogen’s role in climate change is way under-discussed.

The same issue of Science also contains an article about how synthesized nitrogen affects the oceans — specifically their role as greenhouse-gas sinks.

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So what to do about nutrients? Well it all comes down to crap. That’s right manure, excrement or poo. Not your’s. Though there is a case to be made for that, the small scale gardener is hard pressed to deal with human crap. In fact there are better fertilizers around. But lets take a step backwards, in the “old days” of sustainable farming the farmers had all kinds of animals, goats, cows, horses, mules, and chickens to name a few. They would collect this shit and straw from their animal’s housing and their yards and toss it in a pile. At the end of the growing season they would take all this manure and spread it on their field. Over winter it would break down. Then in the spring when they plowed they would turn it into the soil and “there you have it” fertile soil.

http://www.aces.edu/department/crd/publications/ANR-723.html

ENVIRONMENTAL EDUCATION SERIES
ENVIRONMENTAL QUALITY
Agriculture & Natural Resources

EXTENSION ENVIRONMENTAL EDUCATION, AUBURN UNIVERSITY, AL 36849-5647

Using Livestock Manure As Fertilizer

ANR-723, 1992. By Charles Mitchell, Extension Agronomist, Agronomy, Auburn University

Livestock manure is an excellent fertilizer for the soil, providing such nutrients as nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium. Manure application can also benefit the soil’s water holding capacity and tilth. When using livestock manure, however, one should follow good management practices in order to avoid hazards to the crop and the environment. Sources Of Livestock ManurePoultry waste, cattle manure, and swine manure are all used as organic fertilizers in Alabama. They are all excellent sources for nutrients; however, nutrient compositions will vary among operations and over time. Users of manures from broiler houses, lagoons, or feedlots should have an idea of the total and available nutrient content before they are applied to land.Possible ProblemsBecause nitrate-nitrogen can leach into groundwater and both nitrogen and phosphorus can erode or runoff into streams, manure applications should be based strictly on the nutrient requirement of the crop. Therefore, the soil should be tested to determine nutrient needs for the crop to be grown.Good Management PracticesThe following precautions should be taken in order to prevent nutrient losses through leaching, erosion, and runoff:

  1. Eliminate excessive applications.
  2. Time applications appropriately, rotate crops,
  3. and use winter cover crops. Apply manure when it will be utilized by the crop.
  4. Incorporate or inject the applications into the
  5. soil. Do not leave the manure on the soil surface.
  6. Do not apply manure to steep slopes or during
  7. periods prone to erosion and runoff.
  8. Document the amounts and contents of material applied.
  9. Protect soil from erosion.
  10. Use filter strips or buffer zones between fields
  11. and nearby streams

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So when I end my growing season, I take a couple of big tubs to a local animal farm and I get free poo and straw from the farmer. Take it to my garden and toss it on. Big draw backs? It’s hard work and it stinks. But so what? Why did I say that this will be a problem for you only a year? Well because you have started a compost pile (hint hint) and you have located a farmer (hint hint). What to do now for you though. Well, you can go get fertilizer for one year and tell yourself everyone has to start somewhere. Or you can buy composted manure. Here again you have be to careful. Transportation and its oil use is the real issue so read the labels. Buy the composted manured produced the closest to you. If you are lucky you can find some poo from your own state. Now, if you have started your seeds inside and it’s time to plant YOUR plants. Or if you depend on a garden center it’s time to plant THEIR plants. Try to stagger them just like you did for your early crops so that they will produce for the entire growing season.

Oh, and for awhile you maybe a standard “row” gardener but there are more efficient ways to use your land:

http://www.squarefootgardening.com/

The Official Site of Square Foot Gardening and Mel Bartholomew, Originator and Author

Welcome  To  My  Garden

No Work, Organic Gardening the Square Foot Way

 

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or french intensive gardening

 

http://www.learn2grow.com/gardeningguides/edibles/planting/FrenchLesson.aspx

A French Lesson in Intensive Planting
Linnea Thornton

Juvenile Garden
Photo Credit: Courtesy of Barbara Wilde, L’Atelier Vert,Everything French Gardening, frenchgardening.com
This juvenile bed in a French garden shows how closely young plants are crowded together in intensive planting.

Crowding a bunch of plants in a narrow plot might not seem like a good idea at first. After all, it runs counter to everything you’ve learned about gardening. But this specialized method of planting – called French intensive gardening – is actually a tried-and-true technique to maximize your harvest in a small space. Even if you’ve only got a tiny plot, you can get amazing results if you develop it properly.
As you might’ve guessed by its name, French intensive gardening evolved in Europe. Its purpose is to make the most of limited growing space. Known as “square-foot gardening” in the US, it’s also the preferred method of many growers who want extra produce for themselves or to share with friends and neighbors.

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Australia Feeling The Effects Of Global Warming – There is a reason they call it downunder

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In Victoria the temperature has been above 44 degrees all week and they are forecasting another week of 40+ temperatures.  Power is failing, trains have stopped running because tracks are buckling under the heat .  It’s just scorching.  And it seems that the people are not the only ones suffering.
 
Check out these photos of a little Koala which just walked  onto  a  back porch looking for a bit of heat relief.   The woman filled up a bucket  for it and this is what happened!

bears.JPG

Kinda dark but:

bearss1.JPG

Getting better:

bears2.JPG

About right:

bears3.JPG

But see this is actually the effects of Global Warming. We are burning the animals and plants off this planet UP.

http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/IOTD/view.php?id=36900

australialsta_tmo_2009025.jpg

For those who track their local temperatures using the Celsius scale, 40 degrees is a daunting number. In early February 2009, residents of southeastern Australia were cringing at their weather forecasts, as predictions of temperatures above 40 degrees Celsius (104 degrees Fahrenheit) meant that a blistering heat wave was continuing.

This map of Australia shows how the land surface temperature from January 25 to February 1 compared to the average mid-summer temperatures the continent experienced between 2000-2008. Places where temperatures were warmer than average are red, places experiencing near-normal temperatures are white, and places where temperatures were cooler than average are blue. The data were collected by the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Terra satellite. While southern Australia was scorching, a similarly large area of northern and central Australia was several degrees cooler than it was in the previous nine years. The cool anomaly across that region is probably linked to the above-average rainfall the area has received during this year’s wet season.

Land surface temperature is how hot the surface of the Earth would feel to the touch in a particular location. From a satellite’s point of view, the “surface” is whatever it sees when it looks through the atmosphere to the ground. That could be the sand on a beach, the grass on a lawn, the roof of a building, or a paved road. Thus, daytime land surface temperature is often much higher than the air temperature that is included in the daily weather report—a fact that anyone who has walked barefoot across a parking lot on a summer afternoon could verify.

The Australian Bureau of Meteorology (BOM) called this heat wave “exceptional,” not only for the high temperatures but for their duration. One-day records were broken in multiple cities, with temperatures in the mid-40s. In Kyancutta, South Australia, the temperature reached 48.2 degrees Celsius (118.8 degrees Fahrenheit). Many places also set records for the number of consecutive days with record-breaking heat.

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It will only get worse.

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Energy Consumption And Water Consumption Go Hand In Hand – Throw it away throw it awa….

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Only contrary to the new environmental mantra there really is an “away” to water. Once its befouled (I love that word), then un-befouling it is difficult. Take for instaces what is happening to the bulk of the fresh water in the world, the Artic and the Antartic ice sheets. If we are going to melt them off we would be better off trying to transport that water to some storage location like a dried up lake bed(s), than let it melt into the sea. Because then it is really hard to get it to be fresh water again. Same with pollution, once you dump contaminates into water then it is very hard to clean up. We have been doing that in a big way for 300 years.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/environment/article5562906.ece

January 22, 2009

Ecologists warn the planet

is running short of water

Leo Lewis in Tokyo 

A swelling global population, changing diets and mankind’s expanding “water footprint” could be bringing an end to the era of cheap water.

The warnings, in an annual report by the Pacific Institute in California, come as ecologists have begun adopting the term “peak ecological water” — the point where, like the concept of “peak oil”, the world has to confront a natural limit on something once considered virtually infinite.

The world is in danger of running out of “sustainably managed water”, according to Peter Gleick, the president of the Pacific Institute and a leading authority on global freshwater resources.

Humans — via agriculture, industry and other demands – use about half of the world’s renewable and accessible fresh water. But even at those levels, billions of people live without the most basic water services, Dr Gleick said……..

A glass of orange juice, for example, needs 850 litres of fresh water to produce, according to the Pacific Institute and the Water Footprint Network, while the manufacture of a kilogram of microchips — requiring constant cleaning to remove chemicals — needs about 16,000 litres. A hamburger comes in at 2,400 litres of fresh water, depending on the origin and type of meat used:}

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Why Are We Doing All This Home Improvement Anyway – Well to save money of course but..

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To save our grandchildren as well..

 http://www.livescience.com/environment/090121-antarctica-warming.html#comments

Antarctica Is Warming:

Climate Picture Clears Up

By Andrea Thompson, Senior Writer

posted: 21 January 2009 01:04 pm ET

 

Warming temperatures in Antarctica
This illustration depicts the warming that scientists have determined has occurred in West Antarctica during the last 50 years, with the dark red showing the area that has warmed the most. Credit: NASA

The frozen desert interior of Antarctica was thought to be the lone holdout resisting the man-made warming affecting the rest of the globe, with some areas even showing signs of cooling.

Some global warming contrarians liked to point to inner Antarctica as a counter-example. But climate researchers have now turned this notion on its head, with the first study to show that the entire continent is warming, and has been for the past 50 years.

“Antarctica is warming, and it’s warming at the same rate as the rest of the planet,” said study co-author Michael Mann of Penn State University.

This finding, detailed in the Jan. 21 issue of the journal Nature, has implications for estimating ice melt and sea level rise from the continent, which is almost entirely covered by ice that averages about a mile (1.6 kilometers) thick. The revelation also undermines the common use of Antarctica as an argument against global warming by contrarians, Mann said.

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For more see the rest of this article and:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/environment/climatechange/4307829/Antarctica-is-warming-faster-according-to-scientists.html

http://www.reuters.com/article/environmentNews/idUSTRE50I4G520090120?pageNumber=1&virtualBrandChannel=0

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Never mind this:

http://berkeley.edu/news/media/releases/2009/01/21_seasons.shtml

Summer peak,

winter low temperatures now arrive 2 days earlier

By Robert Sanders, Media Relations | 21 January 2009

BERKELEY — Not only has the average global temperature increased in the past 50 years, but the hottest day of the year has shifted nearly two days earlier, according to a new study by scientists from the University of California, Berkeley, and Harvard University.

July
Map of average distribution of global temperatures for JulyFebuary
Map of average distribution of global temperatures for FebruaryThe average distribution of global temperatures for July and February. Because the sun is further north in July, the warm bulge of high temperatures is shifted into the northern hemisphere in that month. In the Northern Hemisphere, warm temperatures extend farther north on land than over ocean in the summer and cold temperatures extend farther south on land than on the ocean in the winter. (Image by Alexander R. Stine/UC Berkeley; data from the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia )

Just as human-generated greenhouse gases appear to the be the cause of global warming, human activity may also be the cause of the shift in the cycle of seasons, according to Alexander R. Stine, a graduate student in UC Berkeley’s Department of Earth and Planetary Science and first author of the report.”We see 100 years where there is a very natural pattern of variability, and then we see a large departure from that pattern at the same time as global mean temperatures start increasing, which makes us suspect that there’s a human role here,” he said.

Although the cause of this seasonal shift – which has occurred over land, but not the ocean – is unclear, the researchers say the shift appears to be related, in part, to a particular pattern of winds that also has been changing over the same time period. This pattern of atmospheric circulation, known as the Northern Annular Mode, is the most important wind pattern for controlling why one winter in the Northern Hemisphere is different from another. The researchers found that the mode also is important in controlling the arrival of the seasons each year.

Whatever the cause, Stine said, current Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) models do not predict this phase shift in the annual temperature cycle.

Details are published in the Jan. 22 issue of the journal Nature.

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Why Call Them Landfills? They are dumps, eyesores, middens and disgraces.

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 When has it been ok to urinate and defecate in a drinking water source. But Humans world wide do it every day. Some of us purify those byproducts before they actually get to the river or the lake or the aquifer, some of us don’t. When has it ever been OK to put food products let alone industrial products (lets take the buy out of byproduct) in a drinking water source yet we have done it for 200 years. What did we think? That there would be no results?

Yet we go further. We stack our garbage in the most inappropriate places like we are PROUD of it. Heh look our garbage pile is bigger than yours.  Like the garbage dump that you can see from SPACE.

http://gothamist.com/2003/09/30/fresh_killpark.php

Fresh Kill…Park?

Mayor Bloomberg announced the city’s plans to turn the closed Fresh Kills landkill into a park. The Times points out that the landfill is “a garbage dump site that is so large it can be seen from space,” which is why it’s a sensitive and important issue for Staten Islanders…especially Staten Islanders who can vote. Reporter Michel Cooper describes the city’s renderings of a Fresh Kills Park as “Monet using Photoshop” or Andrew Wyeth-like. Staten Island Borough President James Molinaro called the announcement was “the final nail in the heart of Dracula,” as people have been speculating the dump might reopen since it closed in 2001. The Post says the proposal from Field Operations, the landscape company that won the competition to transform Fresh Kills, includes “bird-nesting island, public roads, boardwalks, soccer and baseball fields, bridle paths and a 5,000-seat stadium.

Of course, all of this is also an effort to keep his approval numbers from slipping any further, although at this point, it’d be in the negative territory…people would just claim ignorance when asked about Mayor Bloomberg.

More information about Fresh Kills.

2003_9_freshkills.jpg

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What the heck have we ever been thinking?

 http://naturecalendar.wordpress.com/2008/05/27/fresh-kills-earning-back-its-name

fk2.jpg

by Erik Baard

 

Not so many years ago, if you told people that you were getting up early on Saturday morning to rush over to Fresh Kills on Staten Island, they would have thought you were crazy or a highly-paid union worker. Today, a few savvy folks might peg you for a naturalist.

 

The world’s largest dump (actually, the world’s largest manmade structure, of sorts, in that it exceeded the volume of the Great Wall of China) is quietly transforming into the city’s second largest park, after Pelham Bay Park. You can witness the process yourself by signing up for a free tour now through November through this link. Don’t fret the competition to get a ticket – the tour I joined this weekend wasn’t booked up. Besides, you have, oh, a few more years of chances. The park officially opens in 2036.

 (the site has four large ones mounds, ranging between 140? and 200? tall)

At the moment the trash is being digested by microbes, which will actually cause the mounds to shrink a bit. But not before they’ve earned their keep! The methane (“natural gas” in daily parlance), organic chemicals, and carbon dioxide produced are tapped via long pipe networks (see the methane taps in the foreground of the above photo by Emmanuel). The natural gas is purified and sold to Keyspan (now part of National Grid), which in turn sells it to heat up to 10,000 homes at a time. I can imagine a “green” dry cleaner using the CO2 to spiff up designer suits for the local gentry.

 

Less immediately marketable is the leachate goo that landfills produce when water jazzes up microbial and fungal activity. That’s dried and shipped out to another landfill in West Virginia. As a side note, the five boroughs now send trash to Pennsylvania, Virginia, and South Carolina. Remember, the primary insight of environmentalism is that when things are thrown away, there is no “away.”

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Please read both articles if you have a strong stomach.

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Why We Throw Things Away? Everything has value.

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Isn’t throwing things away basically throwing money on the ground and walking away? Some people assert that discarding behavior originates in our time, historically, spent in the trees.  In other words a primate swinging in the trees with no pockets throws everything away, even if its valuable sometimes. In fact if it is valuable and it lands on the ground and there is a predator around it could be lost forever.

Other people say that our discarding behavior is based in our hunting techniques. Once we figured out that we could kill other meat sources by throwing rocks and sticks then it was a simple step to throw other things away as well. But middens are an archaeological constant.

Still other people have pointed out that discarding behavior was probably a fact of our nomadic lives. They argue that for us to retain “things” we would have had to carry them. So there would be a point where a thing, like a broken spear, or a pot would no longer possess enough value that would make it worth carrying on to the next campsite.

But will that explain all of this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Landfill

Landfill

A landfill, also known as a dump (and historically as a midden), is a site for the disposal of waste materials by burial and is the oldest form of waste treatment. Historically, landfills have been the most common methods of organized waste disposal and remain so in many places around the world.

Landfills may include internal waste disposal sites (where a producer of waste carries out their own waste disposal at the place of production) as well as sites used by many producers. Many landfills are also used for other waste management purposes, such as the temporary storage, consolidation and transfer, or processing of waste material (sorting, treatment, or recycling).

A landfill also may refer to ground that has been filled in with soil and rocks instead of waste materials, so that it can be used for a specific purpose, such as for building houses. Unless they are stabilized, these areas may experience severe shaking or liquefaction of the ground in a large earthquake.

800px-stockisland.jpg
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That hill is a garbage dump on an island in Florida. Or is this worth it?:

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http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/the-worlds-rubbish-dump-a-garbage-tip-that-stretches-from-hawaii-to-japan-778016.html

The world’s rubbish dump:

a garbage tip that stretches from Hawaii to Japan

By Kathy Marks, Asia-Pacific Correspondent, and Daniel Howden
Tuesday, 5 February 2008

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INDEPENDENT GRAPHICS

 

A “plastic soup” of waste floating in the Pacific Ocean is growing at an alarming rate and now covers an area twice the size of the continental United States, scientists have said.

The vast expanse of debris – in effect the world’s largest rubbish dump – is held in place by swirling underwater currents. This drifting “soup” stretches from about 500 nautical miles off the Californian coast, across the northern Pacific, past Hawaii and almost as far as Japan.

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Please see this article…it is really really really scary.

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Archer Daniels Midland And Greenwash – They profess green but consistenly pollute

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We are going to trust these folks with our watershed?

http://www.corpwatch.org/article.php?id=13646

Green Fuel’s Dirty Secret

by Sasha Lilley, Special to CorpWatch
June 1st, 2006

The town of Columbus, Nebraska, bills itself as a “City of Power and Progress.” If Archer Daniels Midland gets its way, that power will be partially generated by coal, one of the dirtiest forms of energy. When burned, it emits carcinogenic pollutants and high levels of the greenhouse gases linked to global warming.

Ironically this coal will be used to generate ethanol, a plant-based petroleum substitute that has been hyped by both environmentalists and President George Bush as the green fuel of the future. The agribusiness giant Archer Daniels Midland (ADM) is the largest U.S. producer of ethanol, which it makes by distilling corn. ADM also operates coal-fired plants at its company base in Decatur, Illinois, and Cedar Rapids, Iowa, and is currently adding another coal-powered facility at its Clinton, Iowa ethanol plant.

That’s not all. “[Ethanol] plants themselves – not even the part producing the energy – produce a lot of air pollution,” says Mike Ewall, director of the Energy Justice Network. “The EPA (U.S. Environmental Protection Agency) has cracked down in recent years on a lot of Midwestern ethanol plants for excessive levels of carbon monoxide, methanol, toluene, and volatile organic compounds, some of which are known to cause cancer.”

A single ADM corn processing plant in Clinton, Iowa generated nearly 20,000 tons of pollutants including sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxides, and volatile organic compounds in 2004, according to federal records. The EPA considers an ethanol plant as a “major source” of pollution if it produces more than 100 tons of any one pollutant per year, although it has recently proposed increasing that cap to 250 tons.

Sulfur dioxide is classified by the EPA as a contributor to respiratory and heart disease and the generation of acid rain. Nitrogen oxides produce ozone and a wide variety of toxic chemicals as well as contributing to global warming, according to the EPA, while many volatile organic compounds are cancer-causing. Last year, Environmental Defense, a national environmental group, ranked the Clinton plant as the 26th largest emitter of carcinogenic compounds in the U.S.

For years, ADM promoted itself as the “supermarket to the world” on major U.S. radio and television networks like NPR, CBS, NBC, and PBS where it underwrites influential programs such as the NewsHour with Jim Lehrer. Now, as it actively promotes its ethanol business, ADM has rolled out its new eco-friendly slogan, “Resourceful by Nature” which “reinforces our role as an essential link between farmers and consumers.”

Despite the company’s attempts at green packaging, ADM is ranked as the tenth worst corporate air polluter, on the “Toxic 100” list of the Political Economy Research Institute at the University of Massachusetts. The Department of Justice and the Environmental Protection Agency has charged the company with violations of the Clean Air Act in hundreds of processing units, covering 52 plants in 16 states. In 2003 the two agencies reached a $351 million settlement with the company. Three years earlier, ADM was fined $1.5 million by the Department of Justice and $1.1 million by the State of Illinois for pollution related to ethanol production and distribution. Currently, the corporation is involved in approximately 25 administrative and judicial proceedings connected to federal and state Superfund laws regarding the environmental clean-up of sites contaminated by ADM operations.

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Even The Right Wing Doesn’t Like Archer Danieals Midland -How Often do I agree with the Cato Institute?

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To date once:
http://www.cato.org/pubs/pas/pa-241.html

Archer Daniels Midland: A Case Study In Corporate Welfare

by James Bovard

James Bovard is an associate policy analyst with the Cato Institute. His most recent book is Shakedown: How the Government Screws You from A to Z (Viking, 1995).

Executive Summary

The Archer Daniels Midland Corporation (ADM) has been the most prominent recipient of corporate welfare in recent U.S. history. ADM and its chairman Dwayne Andreas have lavishly fertilized both political parties with millions of dollars in handouts and in return have reaped billion-dollar windfalls from taxpayers and consumers. Thanks to federal protection of the domestic sugar industry, ethanol subsidies, subsidized grain exports, and various other programs, ADM has cost the American economy billions of dollars since 1980 and has indirectly cost Americans tens of billions of dollars in higher prices and higher taxes over that same period. At least 43 percent of ADM’s annual profits are from products heavily subsidized or protected by the American government. Moreover, every $1 of profits earned by ADM’s corn sweetener operation costs consumers $10, and every $1 of profits earned by its ethanol operation costs taxpayers $30

One of the most politically charged debates in Washington revolves around business subsidies known as “corporate welfare.” A number of policy organizations have published studies examining the corporate welfare phenomenon: what qualifies as corporate welfare, how much it costs taxpayers, and how much it damages the economy. This study examines the dynamics of corporate welfare somewhat differently by investigating ADM as a classic case study of how those subsidies are obtained, how the welfare state encourages such “rent seeking,” and how such practices fundamentally corrupt the political life of a nation. Congress’s expressed desire to foster a free marketplace cannot be taken seriously until ADM’s corporate hand is removed from the federal till.

Introduction

ADM is certainly the nation’s most arrogant welfare recipient. And it is one of the few welfare recipients that spend millions of dollars each year advertising on Sunday morning television shows populated and watched by politicians. Chairman Dwayne Andreas’s and ADM’s success in farming Washington represents the rational result of contemporary government policies that turn elections into “an advanced auction of stolen goods,” as H. L. Mencken quipped. Thanks to its multi-million-dollar hustling in Washington, a company that lives and dies on the generosity of the American taxpayer has managed to get itself revered as a great public servant. Although ADM is not the only corporation with its hand out in Washington, it is easily one of the most successful beggars on the block.(1)

Andreas recently told a reporter for Mother Jones, “There isn’t one grain of anything in the world that is sold in a free market. Not one! The only place you see a free market is in the speeches of politicians. People who are not in the Midwest do not understand that this is a socialist country.”(2) Andreas’s comment about “no free markets” is like the old joke about the son who murdered his parents and then asked for the court’s mercy because he was an orphan. ADM champions political control over markets and then invokes that control as an excuse for its continued political manipulation. Andreas has exerted his influence in Washington to ensure that the U.S. form of “socialism” resembles 1930s’ Italian corporate statism: the government plunders the citizenry for the benefit of politically connected corporations. And, though Andreas does not like to admit it, there are many markets in the world for agricultural products that are not controlled by politicians.

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I know it is from 1995 but what has changed in the past 13 years? They have gotten a whole lot bigger.

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CES Is Not The Only Organization Critical Of Archer Daniels Midland – They can be so wrong in so many ways

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http://www.stopcorporateabuse.org/cms/page1662.cfm



Download this page as a pdf
Back to Hall of Shame homepage
More on ADM
*Corporate welfare and greenwashing
*Corporate snapshot
*Take actionMore info on ADM from Rainforest Action Network
Forests burn in Indonesia to make way for palm oil plantations.
Forests burn in Indonesia to make way for palm oil plantations.
© Greenpeace / Daniel Beltrá

First the good news: burning ‘biodiesel’ fuels emits less global warming pollution than burning standard, oil-based gasoline.

Now the bad news: producing biofuels creates tons of global warming pollution – easily enough to offset any global warming benefits gained at the tail end of the process.

At least that’s the case when it comes to Archer Daniels Midland (ADM) and its business partners that manufacture and trade in Indonesian palm oil.

ADM is an agribusiness giant, and they’re a big player in the biodiesel business. A large part of the business relies on clearing Indonesia’s woodsy wetlands, or “peatlands,” to create palm plantations. The result? A whole lot of palm oil and a whole lot of resulting global warming pollution.

A 2007 Greenpeace report found that clearing, draining and setting fire to Indonesian peatlands emits 1.8 billion tons of carbon dioxide every year. That’s about four percent of the world’s total greenhouse gas emissions. Roughly half of Indonesia’s peatlands have already been destroyed, helping Indonesia achieve a dubious ranking as the world’s third largest emitter of greenhouse gases, behind only China and the United States.[1]

But if this palm oil can be used instead of standard gasoline to fuel our cars, isn’t it worth it? Sadly no. Not by a long shot. According to Rainforest Action Network, “Producing palm oil, one of the most popular sources of biodiesel, entails so much deforestation that, over its lifecycle, palm-based biodiesel can emit up to ten times more carbon dioxide per gallon than gasoline.”[2]

ADM and its partners’ rampant destruction of Indonesian peatlands also threatens the existence of endangered species like the orangutan; a close relative of ours that scientists say could be wiped out by 2012 .[3]

Corporate welfare and greenwashing
ADM is a major player when it comes to influence in Washington, DC. Indeed, one of ADM’s largest supporters is the American taxpayer; the biofuels behemoth rakes in massive tax credits to subsidize its ethanol sales.[4]

Meanwhile, ADM is bending over backwards to present itself to the public as a friend of the environment. ADM’s company slogan is “Resourceful by Nature”, and its website extols its efforts to “develop nature-based alternatives to the world’s finite stores of fossil fuels.” Unfortunately, one of its alternatives is destroying an ecosystem and accelerating global warming.

Corporate snapshot
Founded in 1902 and incorporated in 1923, the Decatur, IL-headquartered ADM is one of the world’s largest processors of agricultural crops and a “world leader” in biodiesel fuels. [5]

According to Greenpeace, “global commodity traders including ADM-Kuok-Wilmar (ADM’s business alliance operating in Indonesia), Cargill, Golden Hope and Sinar Mas have commanding control over the entire palm oil supply chain – from plantations in Indonesia to refined vegetable oil or biofuel [processing facilities]. The alliance brings together Wilmar, the ‘largest palm biodiesel manufacturer in the world’, and ADM, the ‘world leader in renewable transport fuels’.
The ADM-Kuok-Wilmar alliance have ‘rapid expansion plans’ in relation to biodiesel. Between early 2006 and mid-2007, the ADM-Kuok-Wilmar alliance gained control of more than 1.4 million acres of peatland.[6]

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There is a whole lot more. Please read the entire article and see who ADM pals around with in the rest of the Corporate Hall of Shame.