The Summer of Green Pears

by Carle P. Graffunder

It was the summer of green pears. Pears didn’t ripen. Rain did not fall. Streams dried up. Green pears, small, tough-skinned, and split open, fell like rain. But there was no rain.

Summer sun and summer heat, long pent, burst confinement. Week after week, day upon day, sun poured forth hour and hour and hour of eye-blurring heat.

Green pears fell like rain to the ground. But there was no rain. No low-lying cloud slaked thirst of twig or tree. Occasional devil dogs languidly rattled dead leaves trying desperately to cling to branches.

So it was that pears remained green and skimpy. From drooping branches unripe fruit with open wounds pelted the parched earth beneath. Dry leaves, desiccated and crinkled by sun, crunched under foot like soda crackers.

Pears were green and fell like rain. But there was no rain. Green pears fell. They were dried-up and small and hard with long, deep gashes because there was no rain and summer had been very hot for a very long time.

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Global Warming Update

by Robert N. Seitz

Last January I ran off a shirttail calculation estimating the weight of carbon dioxide in the Earth's atmosphere (280 gigatonnes), and compared it with the weight of methane trapped in the world's permafrost (also 280 gigatonnes). While methane has 22 times the global warming effects of carbon dioxide, it has a half-life in the atmosphere of only about 8 years. If this outgassing of AlCan and Siberian tundras took place completely but slowly, it would release something like 280 gigatonnes of methane that would convert to CO₂ over a period of decades. But what I didn't consider was the fact that a tonne (metric ton) of methane, with a molecular weight of 14, would oxidize to a little over three metric tones of CO₂, with a molecular weight of 44. So the 280 gigatonnes of methane would become 880 gigatonnes of CO₂, or about 3 times the 280 gigatonnes of CO₂ in the Earth's atmosphere today. That's not good news. That would quadruple the amount of CO₂ in the Earth's atmosphere. I also mentioned the lesser possibility that the methane clathrates ("methane ice" deposits at the bottom of the world's oceans contain about 10,000 gigatonnes of methane, and that would convert to about 31,500 gigatonnes of CO₂, and that this is thought to have occurred during the Mesozoic/Cenozoic Thermal Maximum that killed off the dinosaurs about 55,000,000 years ago. That wouldn't be the best prognosis for humanity, but at least it didn't transform the world into a searing hell like Venus.

It's important to be aware that the outgassing of methane hasn't yet been included in existing climate simulations, or at least in the forecasts that we're hearing right now.

That was the good news. Now for the bad news.

It has just been announced that the rate of rise of atmospheric CO₂ has more than 2.5-folded since 1990…. the fourth consecutive year of two-parts-per-million growth. Last year, 7.85 gigatonnes of CO₂ was added to the atmosphere compared to 6.87 gigatonnes in 2000.

A month ago, several news sites reported that in the latest annual report on climate change, issued last spring, it was erroneously concluded that methane release into the atmosphere had slowed down. In fact, it has continued to increase, but this fact was learned too late to correct it in the report. Now, in a display of "media Alzheimer's disease" the same media are reporting the incorrect earlier message that the methane release rate has fallen.

In the meantime, the rate of methane release from Arctic permafrost is rapidly accelerating.

To clothe methane release rates in numbers, suppose that methane is being released at the rate of 0.1% a year. At that rate, it would take 1,000 years for all the world's permafrost to outgas. Since there's an estimated 280 billion tones of methane locked up in the world's tundras, 0.1% a year would translate into a release rate of 280 million tones of methane a year. Given that methane has 22 times the greenhouse effect of CO₂, this rate of release would equate to about 6 gigatonnes of CO₂a year in terms of greenhouse effects, or about 3/4that of last year's CO₂release. (Note that after 8 years, half of the integrated total of 2.24 gigatonnes (= 1.12 gigatonnes) of methane released over the 8-year half-life of this atmospheric methane would have converted to 3.15/22 tonnes of CO₂, raising the global CO₂burden by 3.5 gigatonnes of CO₂.in 8 years. This would still be small compared to the 64 gigatonnes of CO₂ added to atmosphere from other sources. )

Clearly, even an outgassing rate of only 0.1% a year isn't happening yet, or the effects would be more evident. However, we might expect that the warmer the Arctic gets, the faster the permafrost will outgas.

What's so alarming about the outgassing of permafrost is the fact that it would be a case of global warming feeding upon itself. Although our burning of fossil fuels would have initiated this process, outgassing of methane could, possibly, continue to elevate CO₂levels even if we cut our fossil fuels emissions to zero.

This last summer, for the first time, a passage opened up through the sea ice all the way to the North Pole. This was a fluke, but it appears to be a harbinger of things to come.

Kerry Williams has brought up an interesting point, and has buttressed his case with computations. His calculations indicate that climate change is coming on too rapidly to permit trees to migrate toward the poles as fast as the global-warming-induced changes in their habitats. This could lead to an ecological crisis in which oxygen renewal might take a hit.

My personal prognosis-one that I try not to think about-is that we will pass the "tipping point" if we haven't already passed it, at which runaway global warming occurs no matter what we do. Conservation can help us reduce our fossil fuel demands somewhat, but some fuel guzzlers like 18-wheel transfer trucks are probably already about as efficient as they can currently be made, and our civilization depends upon our ability to haul freight. Even if we can reduce our CO₂output to some 20^th-century level, CO₂would continue to rise.

I suspect that sometime within the next decade, there's going to be panic in the streets over this. Venture capitalists are already pouring money into solar power startups. Semiconductor-grade silicon is currently a bottleneck in solar cell production, and the prices of solar cells have risen rather than fallen over the past two years, due in part to Germany's subsidization of solar power and to California's "million solar rooftops"program. In the meantime, solar technology is in a state of ferment. (The best investment plays might lie in supporting technologies such as batteries, power inverters, or mounting hardware.) Within ten years, we might have high-efficiency, low cost solar rooftops that are natural looking and are fashionably accepted within the neighborhood. Production of vehicle fuels might be another application of solar power. For countries that have extensive electrical grids, solar arrays may take hold in central power systems in sun-belt regions rather than in the form of distributed rooftop power.

Another promising area is battery research. Long-lived rechargeable batteries that store a kilowatt-hour per kilogram may be in the offing. These are being suggested for hybrid vehicles that can plug into the wall for recharging. (Some amateurs are beefing up the lead-acid batteries in their Priuses for short around-town jaunts on electric power only, with plug-in recharging back home.) A typical home uses about 40 kilowatt-hours of energy a day, although careful design can reduce that number. At that rate, 100 kilograms of batteries could probably provide for a household.

Wind power offers promise along coastlines and in mountainous areas.

Biodiesel generated from cellulose waste requires some further bioengineering of microbes, but that might become a way to generate vehicle fuels. (I suspect that some combination of ethanol and biodiesel generation may be the wave of the future rather than hydrogen fuel cells. We already have a century of experience and infrastructure in place for the internal combustion engine. But we'll see.)

Nuclear power is an immediate short-term solution to power requirements, but one would hope that we would step on the accelerator with respect to converting to alternate energy solutions, bypassing nuclear power. In any case, it will take years to build new nuclear power plants. Meanwhile, in spite of efforts to convert to alternate energy sources, China is planning to rely almost entirely on new coal-fired power plants for its burgeoning power goals. But I suspect that this plan may be overtaken by the "pani-in-the-streets"

If the "panic in the streets" scenario occurs at some future time, I could imagine southern property falling in value, and northern property values rising, as people try to relocate themselves in anticipation of rising temperatures. Commercial installations would be shifted northward, and residential acquisitions would follow. In North America, land along the northern Pacific coast, and in Canada and Alaska would seem to me to be especially valuable.

The UK science magazine, "New Scientist"has taking the unusual step of describing the well-funded global warming disinformation program that has been mounted by Exxon, General Motors, and Ford Motor Company-a campaign that is reminiscent of the disinformation programs financed by the tobacco and dairy industries that deliberately obfuscated the dangers of smoking and dairy products during the 60's and 70's..

Some Thumbnail Calculations

An object in interplanetary space will arrive at an equilibrium temperature at which the radiation power absorbed from the sun equals the radiation power re-radiated by the object. The total radiation power absorbed from the sun by a spherical "black body"(perfect absorber) is given by πr² times the power per unit area. For a spherical black body in the vicinity of the Earth, the power absorbed from the sun is given by the solar constant = 1,370 watts/square meter. The power re-radiated back into space will be spread over the entire surface of the sphere = 4πr². This means that the re-radiated power density will be exactly ¼th of the power density received from the sun, or 1,370/4 w/m² = 342.5 w/m². Then we can plug this number into the Stefan-Boltzmann equation, Power/m.² = 5.67 X 10^-8 T⁴, and solve for the equilibrium temperature at which the Earth re-radiates the same amount of power/m.² it receives from the sun. The resulting black-body equilibrium temperature is 278.8º Kelvin or 5.65º Celsius or about 40 degrees Fahrenheit. In reality, there are many complications that muddy these waters. There is cloud cover, atmospheric convection, and uneven surface and cloud top temperatures, to name just three.

Dr. Angell de la Sierra has raised the question: if CO₂blocks heat radiation from the ground, why doesn't it also block the incoming radiation from the sun? I believe that this asymmetry may arise because the radiation from the sun peaks at a wavelength of about ½ micron, whereas radiation emanating from the Earth peaks in the far infrared at a wavelength of about 10 microns. The atmosphere is transparent to visible and near-infrared radiation, whereas it is, perhaps, semi-opaque in the far infrared. Dr. de la Sierra also observed that the situation must be complicated. Convection patterns would play a role. If atmospheric CO₂is semi-opaque to far-infrared radiation, it can do so either by reflecting it or by absorbing it. If it reflects far-infrared radiation, then it would tend to re-radiate less radiant heat than the corresponding black body, and this would certainly have a warming effect. If atmospheric CO₂is semi-opaque because it's a good absorber differential in the 5 to 15 micron range, then it would heat up. At the same time, the effective temperature of the radiating surface would tend to be low because the radiating surface would be high in the Earth's atmosphere, which is where convection enters the picture. Also (Dr. de la Sierra pointed out), atmospheric CO₂might radiate from lower levels as well as higher levels, complicating the situation further.

If the Bush Administration's denial of the reality of global warming and deliberate inaction destroys humanity, it will be the greatest crime against humanity ever committed.

Time will tell.

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Lumber Production

Incontrovertible Indicator of the Health of our Environment

by Fred Vaughan

In the late eighties and early nineties the spotted owl controversy became heated in the Pacific Northwest. Loggers complained that environmentalists preferred an obscure bird which virtually no one had ever seen to letting ambitious men perform real work for a living for their families. Environmentalists ineptly argued that the spotted owl was only an indicator species of what was happening to our environment.

The logging industry began a public relations campaign whose radio and television adds ran something like this, "Weyerhauser is dedicated to effectively managing our forests. We harvest just two percent of the forest per year, etc.." Two percent harvest per year means a tree in Weyerhauser country can expect to live fifty years. So as I drive through regions of clear cut devastation and read the prominent signs that are posted for sightseers stating: "This forest was replanted by Weyerhauser in 1985." I began to calibrate what it all meant. Driving up highway 410 past Enumclaw, there was a new sign I had never seen before, "Weyerhauser, replanted in 1949." Oh, oh, I knew some trees a foot to a foot-and-a-half through for whom the grim reaper yearned! He shortly reaped!

Why a fifty year life cycle for a tree? I grew up walking the woods, hunting, daydreaming - mostly by myself. I remember the major stumps deep in the Skagit County forest, easily ten feet across, obviously sawed off ten or fifteen feet above the ground sacrificing thousands of board feet to the convenience of a clean fall. There was always that wonder, what was it like back then when trees were not 1½ to 2 feet through, but ten feet? It was like walking among dinosaur bones. These will mostly have perished now with another 40 or 50 years of decay. But I remember many places up the Skagit river around Marble Mount where ten foot Douglas fir were still standing proudly right near the road.

Not any more! In 1992 I took the trip around the Olympic peninsula - up through Forks - to see for myself what the situation looked like over there. You would not have believed it! There were so few trees left that you would laugh if it weren't so sad. All this talk about employment for the impoverished of Forks and we're talking the possibility of keeping them employed a couple more years at most even if we are willing to donate our last memories of a big tree. The audacity of it all. A sign read "Olympic National Rain Forest" with an arrow off to the right; you look that way and all you see for miles are stumps protruding a foot and a half above dirt like Ozymandias! Thousands and thousands of acres of it, right to the pavement - no row of trees to hide the devastation from nature lovers - no apology such as this ten thousand acre tract was destroyed to feed the boys and girls of Forks.

Trees as Lumber Manufacturing Plants

If lumber production is the objective, harvesting a fifty year old tree is idiotic. It has very little to do with the supposed impracticalities of tree-hugging liberals or perceived evils of ecofascists that would address the extinction of the spotted owl or sockeye salmon or others of the many species that man is crowding out of existence each day. It has more to do with the bottom line which hardwood thumpers of board rooms around this wobbling planet understand. A tree is not just the lumber of which it is comprised, but a lumber manufacturing plant of amazing efficiency whose productivity increases phenomenally with age. If you harvest trees after fifty years, you're going to lose a lot of money over the long haul, not in law suits or advertising, but in the number of board feet produced by the same forests each year - a difference so profound that only near-sighted selfishness could not succumb to the argument. It's like pulling all the beets for beet greens; it misses the point.

In searching the Internet for data on conifer forest growth, I came upon some sites with research data on conifer growth for various species, harvesting methods, etc.. One was the home page of a forestry department member at the University of Washington. It included some bonafide conifer growth formulas. I contacted him for details.

Since the formulas result from regression analyses, they apply more or less exclusively to the data from which they were obtained. That data does, however, include 1700 Douglas fir from many Pacific forest stands including trees with diameters of as much as seven feet and heights of nearly 300 feet -trees that are hundreds of years old. In the first of the figures below I have shown the resulting cross sectional diameter increment (in inches) and I've also shown that although the diameter growth slows with the size (age) of the tree, the cross sectional area is a monotonically increasing function.

I have taken a constant value of 50 for the height-to-diameter ratio. (It does not seem to vary widely within a species.) In the second figure the resulting height data has been combined with the cross sectional area increment to produce an annual increase in number of board feet of lumber produced by the tree. This function is a steep nonlinear function of tree size. How much more lumber it produces this year than it did last year increases dramatically each year. Naturally there are other issues including forest composition with increasing average age of trees but decreases in density imposed by systematic thinning would not overshadow this increase.

Data support the notion of a tree as a lumber producing factory that gets better and better each year that it lives. A tree's monetary value increases highly nonlinearly. Unless the tree is diseased or seriously damaged by storms, its lumber is better quality each year and there is much more of it. So the best forest management policy would seem to be to thin to maintain the rapid growth of giants, salvage them when they are damaged by storms or stricken with disease and let them continue to improve their process till then. Who would cash in a stock with such a bright economic future?

Revisiting Remarks on Logging

Old growth forests alas are all but gone so I was not speaking primarily of them. I understand the argument of those who would point out that the spotted owl controversy pertained exclusively to such old growth forests that will probably never be again. The "spotted owl argument" was "inept" not because it was not scientifically based although I have included here a photo of a spotted owl rescured by the author in a major metropolitan area showing that the species continues to survive. (We have seen him again as recently as October 2006.) But what was inept about that argument was that it was not geared to the minds of those who needed to be persuaded. It fueled a debate between fiscal economic values and more nebulous environmental benefits to which business men are less and less sympathetic. I despise this trend just as others hopefully do as well, but when arguing with such business mentalities it is misdirected to argue esthetics, ethics, whatever, when there are overwhelming economic reasons on one's side of the argument on which one can rely. If the public had understood that they were not making the return on their investment that conscionable management would give them, they might have been much less sympathetic to the near term timber industry interests in fleecing public lands. Perhaps timber interests could have been persuaded by the arguments as well.

Of course, we're not speaking primarily of private land which may be the concern of some, although I'm not sure from whence "private" property rights are assumed to have sprung. We're talking about predominantly public land we all own under the partnership of democratic government and how best to use it. There are sixty million people in America who buy bird seed for their window sills, decks and verandahs; it is estimated that "about one third of North Americans have at least some interest in watching birds." Not everyone who loves a diversity of life is a "zany masochist"as some would suggest. Greed and paranoia are typically more indicative of unhealthy states of mind than kindness and perspective.

I spent a pleasant Labor Day week-end with my family on Lake Quinault which is West of the Olympic mountain range in Washington State - the heart of the temperate rain forest region. I visited the world's largest spruce tree - 58 feet around. I also saw many huge firs - one I measured was 28 feet two inches around at breast height and it was no more special that fifty or a hundred others along that short section of the trail. I measured rings on a spruce that had fallen across the trail and had had to be sawed in two for passage. Sixty feet from its base it had 250 growth rings and was three feet in diameter. The diameter increment curve I showed in the previous article for Douglas fir trees was an underestimate of the ability of a tree to continue its diameter increment which in this case went down to about 0.20 inch within 40 years and remained at approximately the same level for the next two hundred years. (See the figure below.) This tree was not large in comparison to others on the hike. It had blown over in a recent storm; there was no sign of its having been rotted anywhere. Unfortunately this hike is a short four mile loop and from across the lake where we stayed it was obvious that the entire loop was in a very small preserve (relative to the size of the hill at the lower reaches of which it stood) - a mere token for tourists. Visible above it from across the lake (although not from the trail) was a large slide area caused by earlier deforestation of the hillside. A sign of poor management.

Driving on up from Quinault over to and along the beautiful Washington Coastline, there are many hundreds of square miles of devastation where stumps and debris - scattered as if defiantly - mock us, the owners of the missing temperate rain forests. It's better than in 1992 only because many of the clear-cut areas now have replants standing ten to fifteen feet in height so one can no longer see the tremendous scope of the devastation.

My article addressed the logging industry - not the tourist industry - its future, not its past! When one sees logging trucks in the Northwest, they are carrying logs whose diameters place them in the fifty year age bracket; you don't see caravans of trucks with one huge log on them as one did quite often in the days of my youth. These new growth forests that I'm talking about have been planted for 50 year harvests so they would need (or could use) thinning at fifty years and at intervals thereafter using the logging roads that already exist which are not unlike the trail through the old growth preserve that I spoke of above. These roads are big enough for a truck and a cat (caterpillar tractor) and a muleskinner which would come through only occasionally to pick up the logs which had been trimmed after having met with natural disaster like the one I measured and illustrated in the figure above. (Hurricane level storms occur in the Northwest about every 20 years.) And the point is that such forests would be beautiful and economical such that we could take pride in ownership of our land again! Clearly since these trees can live easily a thousand years, the old growth characteristic would not be realized till well along in this third millennium AD, but they would soon begin to exhibit many of those features - probably even being hospitable to the spotted owl. And, they would become more economical, more ecologically sound and more beautiful with every passing year.

As an aside, it is indeed unfortunate that large conifers must now have names, thanks to their rarity - a situation for which forest management practices are responsible! The "General Sherman"sequoia in California contains 600,000 board feet of lumber and continues to produce the equivalent of a one foot diameter tree in lumber every year; this is after having survived a couple of millennia.

the author frees a spotted owl caught in some protective lines above his trout pond within the city limits of a city of nearly 100,000 people. We can live together!

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Millennial Fever in Retrospect?

by Fred Vaughan

Some time ago while on a business trip I asked a very sharp traveling companion a question regarding his religious standing, I found to my dismay that although he does not attend the church of his upbringing with his disgruntled wife, he does nonetheless believe its precepts because of its "accurate predictions"of latter day phenomena. When pressed concerning which phenomena, he explained what was so convincing to him although certainly not to me. Since the Soviet Union had typically been read into Revelations by my father-in-law in much the same way, I asked my colleague jovially whether "bears" had played into the final formula of the church of his apostasy as well. He knew instantly who the "bears"were and said with good humor, "Oh, yes. They were one of the opposing teams!"

"Go bears!"I cheered, not being able to resist a mild blasphemy.

We laughed somewhat awkwardly but suffice it to say that neither he nor I (for different reasons) have returned to our religious underpinnings based on his convictions. But he is one very clever individual. In addition there are others I know who give some credence to the end of the world being nigh at hand including a relative who just the other day attested that what is happening in Iraq and the Middle East was foretold in the bible. Evidently it is a quite natural frame of mind to interpret current events in light of traditional Christian scriptures - such concepts as Armageddon, the Apocalypse, Rapture, Christ's "return," resurrection of the dead, the "Millennium,"etc. were introduced there. Some would deny the association but it seems natural enough to me for anyone who entertains such possibilities which is, after all, the truly absurd aspect! My traveling companion considered it likely, however, that God would wait "thirty years or so after the year 2000 AD just so people can sneer at millennial fever and then, Bam!"He gestured with a closed fist. My God!

Maybe, on the other hand, a millennium is like "K"years, popularly 1,000 but in actuality 1,024, (except as erroneously used in Y2K) such that 2048 AD would be the next significant eschatological date. There was, of course, the possibility that the operative phenomenon would be the transpiration of integral numbers of "the number of man and his number is six hundred threescore and six,"[Rev. 13:18] in which case 1998 AD would have been ominous! Man has, after all, demonstrated extreme folly at approximately such intervals: The origin of Christianity (or Christ's crucifixion, depending on how one looks at it), the emergence of Islam, European famine and Black Death, the Mother of All Battles or …

But if you think this article is going to be about that kind of "millennial fever," you're wrong! I think of all such reasoning as a "crock!" When people use terms like millennia, they invariably presume much more than is warranted. That the happenstance of our civilization adopting the decimal number system and that the value of the right-most three "digits" in the representation of the number of times the earth has revolved about the sun since some arbitrary point in time in that system happens to be zero seems to me to have no more significance than someone I know having been 38 when she had, in fact, been born in nineteen hundred and 38 which excited her no end at one point. (Guess when!) That is one thing.

Another thing is that civilization has survived less than nine such intervals - certainly insufficient for statistical significance even if there had been nine unambiguously validated extraordinarily prophetic events at such intervals.

However, there are phenomena for which millennia are reasonable units of time - the natural (uninterrupted) life expectancy of conifers in temperate rain forests, for example. And there are subatomic phenomena, the half-life of which make them easier to understand when they are averaged over such time scales. And the atmospheric temperature at the surface of the earth is such a phenomenon. Climatic variations caused by the elongation of the earth's orbit, volcanic activities, sunspots, giant meteors, etc. create spikes in the data which obscure trends when averages are made over appreciably smaller time scales. In the figure below this temperature data has been plotted with the area colored in below the curve. The abscissa is number of millennia prior to the year 2000 AD. (The curves below have been brought up to the minute by including data since the year 2000 in the circles continuation toward disaster.) In one sense the data seem harmless enough on this scale. Even the great ice ages, although apparent at the left of the plot and 15 or 20 millennia ago, seem fairly minor dips in the temperature when averaged over the whole earth for whole millennia.

But what is truly scary with regard to fever is the juxtaposition of data on atmospheric concentrations of CO₂ over the same time interval as the temperature data. It would be difficult to argue that the underlying phenomena were not directly related. See the line plot in the figure. A second figure is provided to show the data with finer precisions since the industrial revolution. The data for CO₂ are taken from the concentration in bubbles in ice cores from as much as two miles deep in glacial ice near the poles. The temperature data are derived from tree rings and other fossil growth indicators.

An advanced degree in eschatology from Oral Roberts University is hardly a prerequisite for interpreting this data. A hair raising prediction leaps from the page like "an angel flying through the midst of heaven, saying with a loud voice, 'Woe, woe, woe, to the inhabiters of the earth.'" [Rev. 8:13] All that remains to be revealed in these latter days is exactly how much the inflection in the temperature curve will lag the one in the CO₂ concentration curve - maybe "thirty years or so after the year 2000 AD just so people can sneer at millennial fever and then, Bam!" (If Einstein had been a fundamentalist Christian he might have said, "God would have done it that way.") We now know that 1998 was not the year of revelation - the year of man. I guess we'll have to wait and see - the science of global warming is after all, like Christian eschatology, rather imprecise. But don't ignore it!

S/he who hath ears to hear, let her/im hear!

Problems worsen even as the US administration and congress vehemently ignore them!

* The circled data are update the plots to the current year.

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