Sulfate aerosols cause acid rain, can worsen global warming

The “SuperFreaks” have put out a dishonest and stupid book, in which they advocate sulfate aerosols as a solution to global warming. Trouble is, it isn’t.

They claim climate scientist Ken Caldeira has endorsed this policy “solution,” but policymakers only listen to “people like Al Gore,” who think “it’s nuts.” Somehow Levitt and Dubner fail to mention that Caldeira himself has actually said the SuperFreaks’ policy perspective is ridiculous:

As a long-term strategy, it’s nuts.

Bizarrely, Levitt and Dubner never once mention the one policy area that is universally recognized as being “cheap and simple” by economists and scientists alike — boring energy efficiency. Guess they were too busy chatting with call girls and mosquito-laser billionaires.

Again the Wall Street Journal tries to trivialize global warming and its remedies, with this half-baked sulfate aerosol fantasy….solving global warming with a jet and a garden hose….Right. Just dirty up the atmosphere more than it already is, create more acid rain, poison the oceans…..and for nothing.
The Journal encapsulates so much of what is wrong with unrestrained capitalism: dishonesty, corruption, anti-science, monopoly, plutocracy, restraint of progress.
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Sulfate Lens Enhances Climate Warming Properties of Atmospheric Soot
By Susan Brown

June 29, 2009

Particulate pollution thought to be holding climate change in check by reflecting sunlight instead enhances warming when combined with airborne soot, a new study by researchers at the UC San Diego have found.

Like a black car on a bright summer day, soot absorbs solar energy. Recent atmospheric models have ranked soot, also called black carbon, second only to carbon dioxide in potential for atmospheric warming. But particles, or aerosols, such as soot mix with other chemicals in the atmosphere, complicating estimates of their role in changing climate.

Sunlight driven chemical reactions over Riverside, California, give suspended soot a lens-like coating that enhances its atmospheric warming effect. (Photo by arneheijenga via Flickr, creative commons share-alike license)“Until now, scientists have had to assume how soot is mixed with other chemical species in individual particles and estimate how that ultimately impacts their warming potential,” said Kimberly Prather, professor in the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry and Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego. “Our measurements show that soot is most commonly mixed with other chemicals such as sulfate and this mixing happens very quickly in the atmosphere. These are the first direct measurements of the optical properties of atmospheric soot and allow us to better understand the role of soot in climate change.”

Prather and Ryan Moffet, a former graduate student at UC San Diego who is now at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, measured atmospheric aerosols over Riverside, California and Mexico City. Using an instrument that measures the size, chemical composition and optical properties of aerosols in real time, they showed that jagged bits of fresh soot quickly become coated with a spherical shell of other chemicals, particularly sulfate, nitrate, and organic carbon, through light-driven chemical reactions.

Within several hours of sunrise, most of the atmospheric carbon they measured had been altered in this way, they report in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences online the week of June 29.

Particles of sulfate or nitrate alone reflect light, and some have proposed pumping sulfate aerosols into the atmosphere to slow climate change. But these chemicals play a different role when they mix with soot.

“The coating acts like a lens and focuses the light into the center of the particle, enhancing warming,” Prather said. “Many people think sulfate aerosols are a good thing because they are highly reflective and cool our planet. However we are seeing that sulfate is commonly mixed with soot in the same particles, which means in some regions sulfate could lead to more warming as opposed to more cooling as one would expect for a pure sulfate aerosol.”

Their measurements showed that in the atmosphere the lens-like shell of sufate and nitrate enhances absorption of light by coated soot particles 1.6 times over pure soot particles.

Leaf blowers, again

Yesterday, while riding my bike, I saw two people dealing with fall leaves. The first was a middle aged man in Mountain View, blowing madly away at leaves in his driveway, blowing them out into the street with a noisy gasoline-driven blower. I suppose then the neighbors will blow them back the next day.

The second person was a middle aged woman in Palo Alto, which prohibits gas blowers; she was suctioning up the leaves with an electric shop vacuum, rolling along on casters, to put them in her recycling bin.

Stanford, UC Berkeley form science news wire service

The slow and lingering death of “traditional” news media has prompted some of the nations premier scientific institutions to create their own science wire service.

…35 top research universities—including Stanford and the University of California, Berkeley—have created their own “wire service” of sorts, according to the San Jose Mercury News.

The service, called Futurity, is drafting and distributing articles about the universities’ discoveries to sites like Google News and Yahoo News. They are also leveraging new media, like YouTube, to get the word out. And the stories are also being posted on the consortium’s own site, Futurity.org.

“Our preference would be to have the level of coverage of science and research that we enjoyed for decades,” Lisa Lapin, a Stanford spokesman told the Merc. “But the major news organizations haven’t had the resources to provide that independent, objective look at what we are doing. It’s been declining.”

The Merc notes that newspapers across the country have been whittling down their science reporting staffs. Both the Merc and the San Francisco Chronicle closed their Science sections several years ago.

Well done, and it has to be an improvement over the coverage provided by general news reporters or even science reporters.

Shifting the world to 100% clean, renewable energy by 2030 – here are the numbers

Stanford Report

Study: Shifting the world to 100% clean, renewable energy by 2030 – here are the numbers
Wind, water and solar energy resources are sufficiently available to provide all the world’s energy. Converting to electricity and hydrogen powered by these sources would reduce world power demand by 30 percent, thereby avoiding 13,000 coal power plants. Materials and costs are not limitations to these conversions, but politics may be, say Stanford and UC researchers who have mapped out a blueprint for powering the world.

Most of the technology needed to shift the world from fossil fuel to clean, renewable energy already exists. Implementing that technology requires overcoming obstacles in planning and politics, but doing so could result in a 30 percent decrease in global power demand, say Stanford civil and environmental engineering Professor Mark Z. Jacobson and University of California-Davis researcher Mark Delucchi.

To make clear the extent of those hurdles – and how they could be overcome – they have written an article that is the cover story in the November issue of Scientific American. In it, they present new research mapping out and evaluating a quantitative plan for powering the entire world on wind, water and solar energy, including an assessment of the materials needed and costs. And it will ultimately be cheaper than sticking with fossil fuel or going nuclear, they say.

The key is turning to wind, water and solar energy to generate electrical power – making a massive commitment to them – and eliminating combustion as a way to generate power for vehicles as well as for normal electricity use.

The problem lies in the use of fossil fuels and biomass combustion, which are notoriously inefficient at producing usable energy. For example, when gasoline is used to power a vehicle, at least 80 percent of the energy produced is wasted as heat.

With vehicles that run on electricity, it’s the opposite. Roughly 80 percent of the energy supplied to the vehicle is converted into motion, with only 20 percent lost as heat. Other combustion devices can similarly be replaced with electricity or with hydrogen produced by electricity.
…
The Scientific American article provides a quantification of global solar and wind resources based on new research by Jacobson and Delucchi.

Analyzing only on-land locations with a high potential for producing power, they found that even if wind were the only method used to generate power, the potential for wind energy production is 5 to 15 times greater than what is needed to power the entire world. For solar energy, the comparable calculation found that solar could produce about 30 times the amount needed.

If the world built just enough wind and solar installations to meet the projected demand for the scenario outlined in the article, an area smaller than the borough of Manhattan would be sufficient for the wind turbines themselves. Allowing for the required amount of space between the turbines boosts the needed acreage up to 1 percent of Earth’s land area, but the spaces between could be used for crops or grazing. The various non-rooftop solar power installations would need about a third of 1 percent of the world’s land, so altogether about 1.3 percent of the land surface would suffice.

Klamath River dams to be removed in 2020; will there be any salmon left?

Finally somebody is gonna do something about the catastrophic collapse of the salmon fisheries. Of course it won’t happen until 2020. And we still have the issue of how fish farms are affecting the wild population.

SAN FRANCISCO — A draft plan to remove four aging dams along the Klamath River in Oregon and California was released Wednesday, a long-awaited step toward ending a protracted dispute over the waterway….
The federal government has often played the unhappy role of referee. In 2002, environmentalists asserted that a significant die-off of fish had resulted from a diversion of water to farmers that was ordered by the Interior Department. Four years later, fishermen complained when low levels of salmon in the river led to government restrictions on commercial fishing.

Bush and his band of profiteers always sold out to whatever was the bigger corporate entity. The small businessmen who fish, and the consumer, and all those who appreciate wildlife, are the losers. Not to mention the tribes.

Kentucky football coach “not guilty” of practice-related death of 15 year old.

Although the coach was acquitted, his case finally sends a real message to those die hard coaches who think football practice in hot weather is some kind of opportunity to speed up the process of natural selection. The boy’s temperature was 109. Coach refuses to apologize. Says he’s interceding with Jesus Christ on behalf of the family. Jerk. Seems to me he had some sort of responsibility to make sure the kids are not falling out. Temp 109! come on. But football coaches whose teams win have a certain power over the community.

and here’s another issue:

Suppose your kid is in high school, and he’s having a hard time with an algebra problem. “You’re stupid!” his teacher yells at him, loudly enough for everybody else to hear. “You’re terrible at math! Solve the problem, or I’m kicking you out of this class.”

I bet you’d complain to the teacher, or maybe to the principal. And so would I. A teacher shouldn’t condemn his students for failing to grasp the material, which will only make it harder for them to learn later on. And he certainly shouldn’t humiliate them in front of their peers.

So why do we let athletic coaches do so?

The behavior of high school coaches is imitated by the players in their relations with other students, and is a root cause of some of the ugliness in high school society.

WOMAN KILLS SNAKE; lol wut

SF Mayor Newsom moves to tax soda

I don’t think I’ve had more than two or three sodas since I suffered through a kidney stone a couple years back. And since I lost 40 pounds. I approve of Newsom’s initiative. It’s just a tax, not prohibition, and it’s avoidable. Obesity is a huge problem.

Calling soda the new tobacco, San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom will introduce legislation this fall that would charge a fee to retailers that sell sugary beverages.

Newsom would need voter approval to tax individual cans of soda and sugary juice, but only needs approval from the Board of Supervisors to levy a fee on retailers. His legislation would charge grocery stores like Safeway and big-box stores, but would not affect restaurants that serve sodas.

Newsom wouldn’t say how much the stores would have to pay or how the city would spend the fees. When he first floated the idea in 2007, he said the money would go to his Shape Up San Francisco exercise program and for media campaigns to discourage soda drinking.

The mayor said the city attorney’s office has warned him the city would likely be sued over the matter, but he said it is worth the risk to try to curb a leading cause of obesity and diabetes.

“We know we’ll be sued,” he said. “But I really believe this is important to do.”

Newsom said he was particularly motivated to move forward with the legislation by today’s release of a UCLA study showing a link between soda and obesity in California. Researchers found that adults who drink at least one soft drink a day are 27 percent more likely to be obese than those who don’t – and that soda consumption is fueling the state’s $41 billion annual obesity problem.

The study also found that 41 percent of children and 62 percent of teens drink at least one soda daily.

“Soda is cheap, sweet and irresistibly marketed to teens,” said Susan Babey, the study’s lead author. “Not enough teens know about the health and dietary risks of drinking huge quantities of what is essentially liquid sugar.”

Insurers Spending $700K a Day to Kill Healthcare Reform

and how easily they manipulate the ignorant sheep/teabaggers into making idiots of themselves.

[lifted from Dkos; by mcjoan]

Wow, that could be providing a helluva lot of healthcare.

Washington, D.C. – A campaign finance watchdog’s analysis of insurance and HMO political contributions and lobbying expenses found the industries spent $126,430,438 over the first half of 2009 and $585,725,712 over the past two and a half years to influence public policy and elected officials. The group, Public Campaign Action Fund, found that in the first part of 2009, the industries were spending money at nearly a $700,000 a day clip to influence the political process and that the monthly pace of political spending this year has increased by nearly $400,000 over the average spent per month in the previous two years.

In addition to PAC contributions to our “public servants,” that’s funding 875 registered lobbyists for the insurance industry, and 920 for the HMOs. Which really is hardly a drop in the bucket for the industry, when you take into consideration their CEO compensation, which ranges from $3 million to $24 million.

Nice to know what our premiums are paying for, huh? We could cut out the middleman here. We could start giving all the money we’re spending on premiums directly to our representative and Senators. Maybe then they’d listen to us, the people who hired them, when it comes to vote.

Will CNN stop sponsoring the egregious racist Republican assault on President Obama?

This is the most disgusting display of partisanship and racism in recent American history, and it is being sponsored by our media.

After giving Mark Williams, one of the leaders of the Tea Party movement, weeks of free publicity, CNN finally took the conservative activist to task on Monday, calling him out for describing President Barack Obama as a “racist-in-chief” and “an Indonesian Muslim turned welfare thug.”

Williams, who is vice-chairman of Our Country Deserves Better, the group organizing the Tea Parties, and whom CNN has described as “the showman” of the Tea Party organizers, defended the statements, which he made on his blog.

The blog posting in question appears to have been removed.

During a panel discussion on AC 360 Monday, host Anderson Cooper asked Williams: “Do you believe [the president is] Indonesian? Do you believe he’s a Muslim? Do you really believe he’s a welfare thug?”