Tag Archives: Ecology

New Dinosaur discovered in Antarctica?

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Here’s the headline:

New Dinosaur Discovered in Antarctica

Sounds exciting huh?  I mean, visions of Jurassic Park started racing through my mind. Business ideas started popping up.  Who wouldn’t want to see a dinosaur?  This could be HUGE!

Alas, it’s just sloppy writing.  The dinosaur isn’t all that new, it died about 190 million years ago.  It wasn’t even discovered recently.  The only thing that happened to make it “new” was it was given a name, Glacialisaurus hammeri.  Big whup.

Oh well, guess I’ll cruise some more for the next big discovery.

Well, I am curious about one part of this story that’s tossed aside as an afterthought.  Dinosaurs lived primarily in tropical environments.  If Antarctica ( called Gondwana then even though there were no people there to call it anything ), was that warm 167 million years ago, long before man existed, and, ( follow me here ), it’s very cold now, but man has destroyed it because of global warming, what caused it to be so warm then?  And, if it happened then, why can’t it be happening now?

Yeah, I know, only flat-earthers and UFO believers connect the dots like that.  But, it does seem like a kind of obvious question to ask.  Doesn’t it?

Bio-fuels worse for the environment than gas?

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Here’s the story:

Research findings published in the journal Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics calculate that corn and rapeseed biodiesels produce up to 70 percent and 50 percent more greenhouse gases respectively than fossil fuels.

Now, this gets to the root of my problem with the global warming debate.  Yeah, I know, the debate is over.  However, the problem still exists whether the “debate is over” or not.  Anytime someone asks whether we’re doing the right thing or not, we get lambasted as being crazy.  It gets tiresome.  But, it keeps coming back that people like me are the ones that need to be listened to and not Al Gore.  My stance has always been we don’t know enough about what we are doing to commit the planet to a very specific path.  This isn’t the first article I’ve cited that says bio-fuels may not be the way to go.  Brazil has destroyed rainforests in the pursuit of bio-fuels.  This just isn’t working very well.  The problem I see with the bio-fuel situation is mankind wants its cake and wants to eat it too.  Combustion is the problem, not the fuel that supplies it.  As long as we’re burning something horribly inefficiently, we’ll have waste. 

If bio-fuels do more harm than good, then we need the Al Gores telling us that we may as well stick with oil for the time being.  And, for purely personal and political reasons, that will never happen.  Now, what WILL happen I’m sure is the global warmists will totally dismiss this research as bogus and keep hammering those that want to know why with rhetoric.  Never once stopping to question themselves as to whether we truly are making the Earth a better place, or destroying it faster than we were before.

The Next Ice Age?

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Scientists were so concerned with the Merapi Volcano in Indonesia that they urged people to run away, far away:

So far, most of the locals aren’t terribly impressed.  They cite the fact that the animals haven’t come down from the mountain yet.  In the meantime:

The Lascar Volcano in Chile has apparently sprung to life.  And,

The Ubinas Volcano in Peru has sprung to life as well.

Now, the question I have, is what effect would it have on the Earth’s climate if all three erupted violently?  In 1991 Mount Pinatubo erupted in the Philippines.

The cloud over the earth reduced global temperatures. In 1992 and 1993, the average temperature in the Northern Hemisphere was reduced 0.5 to 0.6°C and the entire planet was cooled 0.4 to 0.5°C. The maximum reduction in global temperature occurred in August 1992 with a reduction of 0.73°C. The eruption is believed to have influenced such events as 1993 floods along the Mississippi river and the drought in the Sahel region of Africa. The United States experienced its third coldest and third wettest summer in 77 years during 1992.

Now, that was ONE major eruption.  Imagine the effect of three?

I’ll put it in a social perspective.  Global warming has been blamed for the melting of the polar ice caps, the collapse of some ecosystems, and a myriad of problems all the way from more frequent tornadoes to more frequent ( or less frequent depending events occurring at the time ) hurricanes.  The claimed effect of global warming is .4 degrees Fahrenheit.  That’s it.  One major eruption would negate the entire impact of global warming.  Two would totally reverse the entire impact of global warming.  I guess, according to the same math, three would send us into a cataclysmic ice age?

Bio Willie

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Some people bitch and moan and do nothing ( read most of Hollywood ).  Some people put their money where their mouth is. 

The Willie Nelson Biodiesel Company sells Biodiesel nationally…..

OK, raise your hands, how many people ever thought they’d see Willie Nelson in a science blog?  Save the planet, use Bio-Willie!

The Next US Catastrophe?

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BEND, Ore. (AP) — A recent survey of a bulge that covers about 100 square miles near the South Sister indicates the area is still growing, suggesting it could be another volcano in the making or a major shift of molten rock under the center of the Cascade Range.

Recent eruptions at nearby Mount St. Helens in Washington state have rekindled interest in the annual Sisters survey and its findings.

Oregon has four of the 18 most active volcanoes in the nation ……

The story doesn’t do a terribly good job saying where South Sister is.  So, here it is:

It could be in a lot worse place for sure, but, following the calamity that New Orleans has been, I wonder what people are doing to prepare for the possibility of a major volcanic eruption?  A LOT more than the mayor of New Orleans did I hope.

weblog of Roger A. Pielke Jr.

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I have stumbled across the the weblog of the Roger A. Pielke Jr. Research Group. His stated mission is what makes it unique to me:

“We are initiating a new blog specifically focused on climate science issues. Among the topics to be presented are views on the science that are not receiving much if any attention in the science community even though the research is appearing in the scientific literature.”

He doesn’t particularly seem to be pro or anti global warming, which is refreshing. But rather, seems disturbed that certain practices in regards to studying climate change are being ignored. He comes to the profound conclusion that this omission is what is confusing politicians and people at large. I’m one of those people. Hopefully he can enlighten me. He speaks tech, so it’s hard to understand at times ( most of the time for me ). But, what I have gleaned so far is very interesting. Basically, measuring things like temperature and melting ice caps paints very little of the overall picture. The big picture is in energy exhchange, how much the Earth absorbs versus how much it emits. The primary tool for doing this is the ocean itself, not parts of it like the Antarctic. If I got that right, I agree with him. That pulls all the theories I have together into one formula. And, that’s really all I’ve been looking for. The temperatures of the Earth are going to be cyclicle whether we like it or not. The key is not to interfering with that cycle, but to understand it and how to best exist in it.

 

Blame it on the birds

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Seabird droppings — not particles carried by the winds — are the major source of pollutants in some parts of the Arctic. This discovery could lead to a better understanding of global pollution patterns.

The details are in an audio link.  The very concept that the major pollution problem in the Arctic are not manmade is a profound leap from all the "evidence" environmentalists would have us believe.  I would be a lot more skeptical of this article if it were from junkscience.com.  But, it’s not, it’s from NPR.  No news organization has been a larger support of the environmentalists than NPR.  For them to run this article baffles me.

Pulsating Alpine Glaciers

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The Alpine glaciers are shrinking, that much we know. But new research suggests that in the time of the Roman Empire, they were smaller than today. And 7,000 years ago they probably weren’t around at all. A group of climatologists have come up with a controversial new theory on how the Alps must have looked over the ages.

This is more of what I believe.   Some scientists have taken a very short period of time and pretty much ignored the rest of the story.  I want to know the entire picture before we try to make drastic changes that could be more harmful than good.

Measuring The Tsunami

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Satellites flying over the Indian Ocean on Dec. 26 were able to detect in a radar image the tsunami that struck the Asian and African coastlines. This is the first time that a profile of a tsunami has been measured in the open ocean.

The data was collected by the U.S./French oceanographic satellites, Jason and TOPEX/Poseidon, during an eight minute fly-by, which occurred two hours after the magnitude 9.0 earthquake. 

The leading wave front of the tsunami was found to be 500 miles (800 kilometers) long and one and a half feet (50 centimeters) high. 

“In the open ocean, that’s very high,” said NASA Project Scientist Lee-Lueng Fu. “But people at sea can barely notice it.”

This height gives some indication of the tsunami’s energy.  The speed of the wave front depends solely on the depth, so in the middle of the bay — where the depth is about 2.5 miles (4,000 meters) — the wave front was barreling along at 500 mph, Fu told LiveScience in a telephone interview. 

It is hoped these observations will allow better warnings in the future.  I hope they’re right.