Vardaman Virtual Forestry Company
FRIDAY REPORT OF 08/25/06
The Most Direct, Frequent Link to Knowledge Workers in the Eastern Forest Economy
“WATER, WATER EVERYWHERE?”
Our quotes are from an 8/21/06 article on www.economist.com:
“Is the world running out of water? A group of scientists, economists and development experts who have been studying the question for the past five years think they have the answer. Their ‘Comprehensive Assessment,’ backed by the UN’s Food and Agricultural Organisation and various research institutes, governments and aid groups, will be released in November. But at the World Water Week, a conference now underway in Sweden, they have revealed some early findings. The bad news is that a third of the world’s population, some two billion people, are already short of water…
“The main culprit is agriculture. It takes roughly 3000 litres of water to grow enough for one person for one day, or about a litre for each calorie. Demand for water will grow as the world’s population increases and as people eat more – and more meat in particular. Raising livestock requires more water, per calorie, than growing crops. So the assessment suggests that, by 2050, agriculture will consume twice as much water as it does today. Industry and domestic use, which now account for only a small fraction of water consumption, are also growing quickly. Global warming adds another layer of uncertainty and risk…
“Governments have traditionally tried to increase agricultural output through huge and expensive irrigation projects. But smaller investments, in simple devices such as pumps to tap groundwater, are faster to deploy, yield greater returns on capital, and bring fewer environmental and social problems. Modest outlays on rain-fed agriculture, in particular, could sharply raise farmers’ productivity in poor countries, and so help both to lift their incomes and to reduce the need for an expansion of agriculture elsewhere…”
To read the complete story and view the map, click on http://www.economist.com/agenda/PrinterFriendly.cfm?story_id=7815561
STILL MORE FROM
“THE END OF NATURE
by BILL MCKIBBEN”
Our quotes below are from this outstanding new book:
“A hurricane draws its might from the heat transferred to the atmosphere when ocean water evaporates. The warmer the ocean’s surface, and the further beneath the surface the warm water runs, the more powerful the hurricane. If the sea turns cold a few meters beneath the top, the winds of the hurricane will soon churn up that frigid water and the storm will brake itself. But if the warm water runs deep – and in the tropics it may stretch down a hundred and fifty meters or more – the hurricane can build and build. Under present conditions – tropical ocean temperatures of about 80 degrees Fahrenheit – Hurricane Gilbert, which formed off the Windward Islands in the autumn of 1988, approached what Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor Kerry Emanuel has calculated as the upper bound of intensity for a hurricane. The atmospheric pressure at its center dropped to about 885 millibars, and so its winds reached two hundred miles per hour. It can’t get any worse than that – under present conditions.
“But we switch now from the present to the future. Say the global temperature increased, and as one result the temperature of the ocean went up. A rise of 3 o4 4 degrees Fahrenheit in tropical sea-surface temperatures would cause the upper limit of hurricane strength to grow. In the middle of these warmer storms, atmospheric pressure could fall to 800 millibars; as a result, the destructive potential of these superhurricanes would between 40 and 50 percent – a Gilbert and a half.
“We have killed off nature – that world entirely independent of us which was here before we arrived and which encircled and supported our human society. There’s still something out there, though; in the place of the old nature rears up a new ‘nature’ of our own devising…
“Simply because it bears our mark doesn’t mean we can control it. This new ‘nature’ may not be predictably violent. It won’t be predictably anything, and therefore it will take us a very long time to work out our relationship with it, if we ever do. The salient characteristic of this new nature is its unpredictability, just as the salient feature of the old nature was its utter dependability. That may sound strange, for we are used to thinking of the manifestations of nature – rain or sunshine, say – as devious, hard to predict. And over short time spans and for particular places they are; the most cheerful and boisterous weathermen are no more reliable in their forecasts than the cheerful and boisterous sportscasters seated next to them. But on any larger scale nature has been quite constant, and on a global scale it has been a model of reliability. In fact, it has been the model of reliability – ‘as sure as summer follows spring.’…
“Carbon dioxide and the other greenhouse gases come from everywhere, so they can be fixed only by fixing everything. The small quantities and quick fixes are difficult. Many in Congress, for instance, support the development of methanol-fueled vehicles that emit fewer pollutants like nitrogen oxide. But much methanol would be made with coal – the process could dramatically increase levels of carbon dioxide.
“The size and complexity of the industrial system we’ve built makes even the most obvious and immediate changes physically difficult. For instance, one answer that people often suggest for the carbon dioxide crisis is that we plant more trees. And we should – but, as one study showed, enough American sycamores to soak up fifty years of the world’s output of carbon dioxide from fossil fuel burning would cover a land area the size of Europe with American sycamore seedlings. And a land area the size of Europe doesn’t exist uncovered by crops or desert or ice. Also, say EPA researchers, there may not be enough phosphate, nitrogen, or potash for fertilizer. And acid rain is killing the trees we do have. And as it gets hotter in the next few decades – as a result of carbon dioxide already released – huge tracts of forests may die, as we have seen. And if we plant huge numbers of trees on fallow land, we might change the albedo of the earth. This is a controversial point, but some scientists contend that fewer of the sun’s rays would be reflected by the dark green of the trees than the grassland they replace. (One study even estimated that massive tree planting could reduce the earth’s reflectivity by 20 percent, increasing the world temperature at a rate roughly equivalent to seven years of carbon-dioxide emissions.) Another common suggestion is to replace much of the coal and oil we burn with natural gas, since it produces only about half as much carbon dioxide. But if natural gas – methane – escapes into the atmosphere before it burns, it traps solar radiation twenty times more efficiently than carbon dioxide. And natural gas does leak – from wells, from pipelines, from appliances. Dean Abrahamson, an analyst at the University of Minnesota, says data suggest that 2 to 3 percent of American natural gas escapes unburnt. As a result, switching to natural gas may have no effect on the greenhouse effect. It might even make it worse…
“Every country has its own forms of despoliation to protect; just as an example, the Canadians, who are forever moaning about their role as the helpless victims of American acid rain, are cutting down the virgin forests of British Columbia as a semi-Brazilian pace. And the fact that decisions must be made now for decades ahead means that, in the words of Deputy Secretary of State for the Environment, Health, and Natural Resources, Richard Benedick, ‘somehow political leaders and government processes and budget makers must accustom themselves to a new way of thinking.’ Of all the quixotic ideas discussed here, that may top the list.
“…We must act, and in every way possible, and immediately. We must substitute, conserve, plant trees, perhaps even swallow our concerns over safety and build some nuclear plants. We stand at the end of an era – the hundred years’ binge on oil, gas, and coal, which has given us both the comforts and the predicament of the moment. George Woodwell, a Woods Hole marine biologist, who is currently studying the world’s forests to discover just how hast they are dying, says we are committed to a warming of several degrees. But if we do not dramatically cut carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases, the atmosphere will never reach a steady state and ‘there is virtually no action than can be taken to assure the continuity of natural communities.’ Even the countries that think they wouldn’t mind warming of a degree or two for a longer growing season can’t endure an endless heating. There is, Woodwell says, ‘no question that we’ve reached the end of the age of fossil fuels.’ The choice of doing nothing – of continuing to burn ever more oil and coal – is not a choice, in other words. It will lead us, if not straight to hell, then straight to a place with a similar temperature.”
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