Dec 16, 2015 08:11 PM
(This post was last modified: Dec 16, 2015 08:12 PM by C C.)
Vegetarian and 'healthy' diets could be more harmful to the environment, study finds: Eating lettuce is more than three times worse in greenhouse gas emissions than eating bacon
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/201...130727.htm
RELEASE: Contrary to recent headlines -- and a talk by actor Arnold Schwarzenegger at the United Nations Paris Climate Change Conference -- eating a vegetarian diet could contribute to climate change.
In fact, according to new research from Carnegie Mellon University, following the USDA recommendations to consume more fruits, vegetables, dairy and seafood is more harmful to the environment because those foods have relatively high resource uses and greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions per calorie. Published in Environment Systems and Decisions, the study measured the changes in energy use, blue water footprint and GHG emissions associated with U.S. food consumption patterns.
"Eating lettuce is over three times worse in greenhouse gas emissions than eating bacon," said Paul Fischbeck, professor of social and decisions sciences and engineering and public policy. "Lots of common vegetables require more resources per calorie than you would think. Eggplant, celery and cucumbers look particularly bad when compared to pork or chicken."
Fischbeck, Michelle Tom, a Ph.D. student in civil and environmental engineering, and Chris Hendrickson, the Hamerschlag University Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering, studied the food supply chain to determine how the obesity epidemic in the U.S. is affecting the environment. Specifically, they examined how growing, processing and transporting food, food sales and service, and household storage and use take a toll on resources in the form of energy use, water use and GHG emissions.
On one hand, the results showed that getting our weight under control and eating fewer calories, has a positive effect on the environment and reduces energy use, water use and GHG emissions from the food supply chain by approximately 9 percent.
However, eating the recommended "healthier" foods -- a mix of fruits, vegetables, dairy and seafood -- increased the environmental impact in all three categories: Energy use went up by 38 percent, water use by 10 percent and GHG emissions by 6 percent.
"There's a complex relationship between diet and the environment," Tom said. "What is good for us health-wise isn't always what's best for the environment. That's important for public officials to know and for them to be cognizant of these tradeoffs as they develop or continue to develop dietary guidelines in the future."
CMU's Steinbrenner Institute for Environmental Education and Research and the Colcom Foundation funded this research.
Clouds, computers, and the coming storms
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/201...135037.htm
RELEASE: Herds of anvil-shaped clouds form in the tropics as part of the Madden-Julian Oscillation, a pattern of shifting winds and rain that starts over the Indian Ocean and travels eastward every 30 to 90 days. This image, taken from the International Space Station over western Africa, shows the complex nature of these systems. Herds of anvil-shaped clouds form in the tropics as part of the Madden-Julian Oscillation, a pattern of shifting winds and rain that starts over the Indian Ocean and travels eastward every 30 to 90 days.
A new image, taken from the International Space Station over western Africa, shows the complex nature of these systems. A herd of thunderstorms roughly the size of Alaska gathers over the Indian Ocean and creeps eastward in pulses: strong winds and torrential downpours peter out, giving way to softer winds and sunny days. The storms rain out, reform, fade, and stir up trouble on and on around the planet's equator. The sheer size and magnitude of these pulses can set off hurricanes, monsoons, and polar vortexes. The pulses also may trigger the El Nino system. While the individual storms are often given clever names and maps of their progress fill our screens, they are part of something much bigger. They are actually beats in the MJO symphony, which circumnavigates the globe every 30 to 90 days.
The MJO, or the Madden-Julian Oscillation, is named for Roland Madden and Paul Julian, who first saw the pattern in the early 1970s. Writ large, the MJO works by pulling in moist air from Earth's surface and causing it to rise and heat the upper atmosphere. Visualize a stock pot full of water centered on a small burner. Crank up the heat on the burner and the water in the middle warms up. The warm water moves up. In doing so, colder water from the edges is pulled in -- causing the temperatures to circulate. The burner is the warm tropical Indian Ocean and the resulting circulation pattern is the MJO, and the large pot represents the global atmosphere. That circulation in the atmosphere affects the weather near and far. For example, a particularly strong pulse of the MJO during the colder months in North America can pull a massive amount of cold air in from Canada toward the equator creating a polar vortex over the nation's capital.
The MJO's complexity, in part, limits weather forecasts and makes it harder to protect people and property from floods, cyclones, snowstorms, or other events. Longer range forecasts could help power companies anticipate energy demands, hospitals prepare for winter-related illnesses and injuries, and shipping and travel industries create safer, more efficient schedules. For scientists, understanding the physics of the MJO would also lead to more detailed simulations of climate variations that can inform critical decisions across the nation.
But how do you study a phenomenon that spans the globe and has more moving parts than a dozen Thanksgiving Day parades in New York City?
ARMing climate models. The answer involves detailed data and supercomputers. The data challenge is partially answered by the Atmospheric Radiation Measurement (ARM) Climate Research Facility. Run by the Department of Energy's Office of Science, the facility's mission is to collect and provide hundreds of terabytes of free data, from land, sea, and air measurement stations, to the scientific community. The ARM team also leads international campaigns, such as the ARM MJO Investigation Experiment, nicknamed AMIE (pronounced like the woman's name).
The second half of the challenge comes in analyzing the data and developing and evaluating simulations to represent it. Run on supercomputers, the models let scientists visualize the data and study the roles of various processes. However, accurately modeling the MJO, which acts on a large scale but involves small events, is difficult. In fact, 80 percent of the major climate models cannot faithfully reproduce the MJO's start and progression.
Building blocks or instigators? What causes the MJO to start up? There are many theories since there are so many factors, and researchers are still searching for clues in the storms. Scientists looked at the small, puffy clouds that decorate miles of the sky over the Indian Ocean as the culprits, thinking that they draw in moisture and serve as the building blocks for the anvil-shaped storm kings. However, Chidong Zhang and his colleagues at the University of Miami poured over the AMIE data and other ARM data sources, and found that they shallow clouds only provide a foundation to build the first pulse on. The clouds aren't the instigators, but they aren't innocent bystanders either.
Courtney Schumacher and Cara-Lyn Lappen at Texas A&M University delved further into the role of these clouds. These clouds, and in fact, all clouds produce heat when their moisture condenses to form rain. This heat, researchers determined, is more important to the models than previously thought. However, the math involved in representing the cloud heat in the climate modeling grids is not a simple addition. It must be carefully fit in or it can cause problems elsewhere in the simulation. Lappen and other modelers work very hard to keep the various threads of the model untangled. "The MJO is complicated to measure and observe," said Lappen. "We're trying to get as close to reality as we can."
An invisible culprit. So, what sets off the first wave of the MJO? Samson Hagos at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory and his colleagues counted, categorized, and analyzed thousands of clouds near the MJO's starting point, and found the culprit is invisible. A simultaneous buildup of moisture a few miles above the Earth's surface and strong upward motion that lifts up moist air from the ocean's surface is what creates the anvil-shaped storm kings that slowly move eastward.
Then what? The answer lies in something as small as the size of the raindrops in the first storm. Just as evaporating sweat cools the skin, so evaporating raindrops cool the air. Large drops evaporate slowly and provide less cooling. Small drops evaporate quickly. When the first storm has small raindrops, it creates large pools of cold air that sink to the surface and push warm, moist ocean air upward, creating the next set of clouds and so on.
Northern Alaska: North Slope permafrost thawing sooner than expected
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/201...185901.htm
RELEASE: New projections of permafrost change in northern Alaska suggest far-reaching effects will come sooner than expected, scientists reported this week at the fall meeting of the American Geophysical Union.
"The temperature of permafrost is rapidly changing," said Vladimir Romanovsky, head of the Permafrost Laboratory at the University of Alaska Fairbanks Geophysical Institute.
"For the last 30 years, the mean annual ground temperature at the top of permafrost on the North Slope has been rising," Romanovsky said. The mean annual ground temperature -- an average of all of the years' highs and lows at the Deadhorse research site -- was 17.6 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 8 degrees Celsius) in 1988, and now it's 28.5 F (minus 2 C). Researchers expect the average annual ground temperature to reach 32 F (0 C), the melting point of ice, in many areas.
"We believe this will be before 2100 at many locations within the North Slope," Romanovsky said.
Romanovsky and his team, including UAF's Dmitry Nicolsky and Santosh Panda, entered data from several models, as well as their own on-the-ground observations, into the Geophysical Institute Permafrost Laboratory model, which primarily examines effects of climate and surface disturbances on permafrost.
They projected what would happen to permafrost in two possible scenarios.
A moderate scenario assumes worldwide carbon dioxide emissions will continue to decline at the modest rate they are now. This will lead to carbon dioxide levels in the Earth's atmosphere leveling off by roughly 2050 and staying constant until the end of the century.
"In this scenario we will see substantial thawing of permafrost on Alaska's North Slope, but only in certain areas, particularly the foothills north of the Brooks Range," Romanovsky said.
The extreme scenario assumes worldwide carbon dioxide emissions continue at today's rates. In that case, permafrost thawing on the North Slope will be much more significant and will extend beyond the foothills and into the Arctic coastal plain, Romanovsky said. In this outcome, the results at 2050 would be similar to the outcome in the moderate scenario, but after 2050 permafrost thawing would accelerate. More than half of the permafrost on the North Slope would be thawing by 2100 in this scenario.
"Under these conditions, the permafrost will become unstable beneath any infrastructure such as roads, pipelines and buildings," Romanovsky said. "The result will be dramatic effects on infrastructure and ecosystems."
"All the engineering solutions (to allow oil production on Alaska's North Slope) were designed and infrastructure was built when the permafrost was much colder," Romanovsky said. "When it reaches the (thawing) threshold, it will be very difficult to keep all the infrastructure running."
Panda, a research associate at the UAF Geophysical Institute, is also reporting this week on his work with the National Park Service to produce high-resolution maps of likely permafrost change in Alaska's national parklands. He has completed work on the projections for 2050 and 2100 for the five Arctic national parks: Gates of the Arctic National Park and Preserve, Noatak National Preserve, Kobuk Valley National Park, Cape Krusenstern National Monument and Bering Land Bridge National Preserve. These five parklands total 20 million acres, about the size of South Carolina. The 40 million acres of Alaska's NPS lands that lie within the areas affected by permafrost constitute nearly half of all the NPS-administered lands in the United States.
The release of carbon from thawing permafrost has been discussed widely, Panda said, but he thinks the resulting landscape changes on Alaska's North Slope will be more important in the near future.
"If there is thawing, the ice-rich soils are going to change dramatically," Panda said. "Permafrost degradation is going to touch the whole landscape through changes in water distribution, slope failures and changes in vegetation that will affect wildlife habitat and the aesthetic value of the parks."
The NPS will be interested in ways to minimize or manage those changes, Panda said. The agency wants to know how the changes affect wildlife, their migration patterns and the people who depend on those animals, Panda said.
Kevin Schaefer, a research scientist at the National Snow and Ice Data Center at the University of Colorado Boulder, said the United States needs a permafrost forecasting system.
"There is a huge demand for better information about permafrost," said Schaefer. "For example, people who maintain and build infrastructure in Alaska need to know what the thaw depth is going to be so they can plan."
Scientists currently assess permafrost conditions in certain areas, but these projects are "one-time deals," according to Schaefer.
"They often can't repeat it because they need resources like money and time," he said.
"What we need is an operational forecast that occurs every year -- projecting out at least one year but probably up to a decade," Schaefer said. The forecasting system would predict the permafrost's active layer thickness, or thaw depth, and its temperature at a specified depth. Additional monitoring stations would also need to be installed throughout Alaska, the only state with territory north of the Arctic Circle.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/201...130727.htm
RELEASE: Contrary to recent headlines -- and a talk by actor Arnold Schwarzenegger at the United Nations Paris Climate Change Conference -- eating a vegetarian diet could contribute to climate change.
In fact, according to new research from Carnegie Mellon University, following the USDA recommendations to consume more fruits, vegetables, dairy and seafood is more harmful to the environment because those foods have relatively high resource uses and greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions per calorie. Published in Environment Systems and Decisions, the study measured the changes in energy use, blue water footprint and GHG emissions associated with U.S. food consumption patterns.
"Eating lettuce is over three times worse in greenhouse gas emissions than eating bacon," said Paul Fischbeck, professor of social and decisions sciences and engineering and public policy. "Lots of common vegetables require more resources per calorie than you would think. Eggplant, celery and cucumbers look particularly bad when compared to pork or chicken."
Fischbeck, Michelle Tom, a Ph.D. student in civil and environmental engineering, and Chris Hendrickson, the Hamerschlag University Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering, studied the food supply chain to determine how the obesity epidemic in the U.S. is affecting the environment. Specifically, they examined how growing, processing and transporting food, food sales and service, and household storage and use take a toll on resources in the form of energy use, water use and GHG emissions.
On one hand, the results showed that getting our weight under control and eating fewer calories, has a positive effect on the environment and reduces energy use, water use and GHG emissions from the food supply chain by approximately 9 percent.
However, eating the recommended "healthier" foods -- a mix of fruits, vegetables, dairy and seafood -- increased the environmental impact in all three categories: Energy use went up by 38 percent, water use by 10 percent and GHG emissions by 6 percent.
"There's a complex relationship between diet and the environment," Tom said. "What is good for us health-wise isn't always what's best for the environment. That's important for public officials to know and for them to be cognizant of these tradeoffs as they develop or continue to develop dietary guidelines in the future."
CMU's Steinbrenner Institute for Environmental Education and Research and the Colcom Foundation funded this research.
Clouds, computers, and the coming storms
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/201...135037.htm
RELEASE: Herds of anvil-shaped clouds form in the tropics as part of the Madden-Julian Oscillation, a pattern of shifting winds and rain that starts over the Indian Ocean and travels eastward every 30 to 90 days. This image, taken from the International Space Station over western Africa, shows the complex nature of these systems. Herds of anvil-shaped clouds form in the tropics as part of the Madden-Julian Oscillation, a pattern of shifting winds and rain that starts over the Indian Ocean and travels eastward every 30 to 90 days.
A new image, taken from the International Space Station over western Africa, shows the complex nature of these systems. A herd of thunderstorms roughly the size of Alaska gathers over the Indian Ocean and creeps eastward in pulses: strong winds and torrential downpours peter out, giving way to softer winds and sunny days. The storms rain out, reform, fade, and stir up trouble on and on around the planet's equator. The sheer size and magnitude of these pulses can set off hurricanes, monsoons, and polar vortexes. The pulses also may trigger the El Nino system. While the individual storms are often given clever names and maps of their progress fill our screens, they are part of something much bigger. They are actually beats in the MJO symphony, which circumnavigates the globe every 30 to 90 days.
The MJO, or the Madden-Julian Oscillation, is named for Roland Madden and Paul Julian, who first saw the pattern in the early 1970s. Writ large, the MJO works by pulling in moist air from Earth's surface and causing it to rise and heat the upper atmosphere. Visualize a stock pot full of water centered on a small burner. Crank up the heat on the burner and the water in the middle warms up. The warm water moves up. In doing so, colder water from the edges is pulled in -- causing the temperatures to circulate. The burner is the warm tropical Indian Ocean and the resulting circulation pattern is the MJO, and the large pot represents the global atmosphere. That circulation in the atmosphere affects the weather near and far. For example, a particularly strong pulse of the MJO during the colder months in North America can pull a massive amount of cold air in from Canada toward the equator creating a polar vortex over the nation's capital.
The MJO's complexity, in part, limits weather forecasts and makes it harder to protect people and property from floods, cyclones, snowstorms, or other events. Longer range forecasts could help power companies anticipate energy demands, hospitals prepare for winter-related illnesses and injuries, and shipping and travel industries create safer, more efficient schedules. For scientists, understanding the physics of the MJO would also lead to more detailed simulations of climate variations that can inform critical decisions across the nation.
But how do you study a phenomenon that spans the globe and has more moving parts than a dozen Thanksgiving Day parades in New York City?
ARMing climate models. The answer involves detailed data and supercomputers. The data challenge is partially answered by the Atmospheric Radiation Measurement (ARM) Climate Research Facility. Run by the Department of Energy's Office of Science, the facility's mission is to collect and provide hundreds of terabytes of free data, from land, sea, and air measurement stations, to the scientific community. The ARM team also leads international campaigns, such as the ARM MJO Investigation Experiment, nicknamed AMIE (pronounced like the woman's name).
The second half of the challenge comes in analyzing the data and developing and evaluating simulations to represent it. Run on supercomputers, the models let scientists visualize the data and study the roles of various processes. However, accurately modeling the MJO, which acts on a large scale but involves small events, is difficult. In fact, 80 percent of the major climate models cannot faithfully reproduce the MJO's start and progression.
Building blocks or instigators? What causes the MJO to start up? There are many theories since there are so many factors, and researchers are still searching for clues in the storms. Scientists looked at the small, puffy clouds that decorate miles of the sky over the Indian Ocean as the culprits, thinking that they draw in moisture and serve as the building blocks for the anvil-shaped storm kings. However, Chidong Zhang and his colleagues at the University of Miami poured over the AMIE data and other ARM data sources, and found that they shallow clouds only provide a foundation to build the first pulse on. The clouds aren't the instigators, but they aren't innocent bystanders either.
Courtney Schumacher and Cara-Lyn Lappen at Texas A&M University delved further into the role of these clouds. These clouds, and in fact, all clouds produce heat when their moisture condenses to form rain. This heat, researchers determined, is more important to the models than previously thought. However, the math involved in representing the cloud heat in the climate modeling grids is not a simple addition. It must be carefully fit in or it can cause problems elsewhere in the simulation. Lappen and other modelers work very hard to keep the various threads of the model untangled. "The MJO is complicated to measure and observe," said Lappen. "We're trying to get as close to reality as we can."
An invisible culprit. So, what sets off the first wave of the MJO? Samson Hagos at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory and his colleagues counted, categorized, and analyzed thousands of clouds near the MJO's starting point, and found the culprit is invisible. A simultaneous buildup of moisture a few miles above the Earth's surface and strong upward motion that lifts up moist air from the ocean's surface is what creates the anvil-shaped storm kings that slowly move eastward.
Then what? The answer lies in something as small as the size of the raindrops in the first storm. Just as evaporating sweat cools the skin, so evaporating raindrops cool the air. Large drops evaporate slowly and provide less cooling. Small drops evaporate quickly. When the first storm has small raindrops, it creates large pools of cold air that sink to the surface and push warm, moist ocean air upward, creating the next set of clouds and so on.
Northern Alaska: North Slope permafrost thawing sooner than expected
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/201...185901.htm
RELEASE: New projections of permafrost change in northern Alaska suggest far-reaching effects will come sooner than expected, scientists reported this week at the fall meeting of the American Geophysical Union.
"The temperature of permafrost is rapidly changing," said Vladimir Romanovsky, head of the Permafrost Laboratory at the University of Alaska Fairbanks Geophysical Institute.
"For the last 30 years, the mean annual ground temperature at the top of permafrost on the North Slope has been rising," Romanovsky said. The mean annual ground temperature -- an average of all of the years' highs and lows at the Deadhorse research site -- was 17.6 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 8 degrees Celsius) in 1988, and now it's 28.5 F (minus 2 C). Researchers expect the average annual ground temperature to reach 32 F (0 C), the melting point of ice, in many areas.
"We believe this will be before 2100 at many locations within the North Slope," Romanovsky said.
Romanovsky and his team, including UAF's Dmitry Nicolsky and Santosh Panda, entered data from several models, as well as their own on-the-ground observations, into the Geophysical Institute Permafrost Laboratory model, which primarily examines effects of climate and surface disturbances on permafrost.
They projected what would happen to permafrost in two possible scenarios.
A moderate scenario assumes worldwide carbon dioxide emissions will continue to decline at the modest rate they are now. This will lead to carbon dioxide levels in the Earth's atmosphere leveling off by roughly 2050 and staying constant until the end of the century.
"In this scenario we will see substantial thawing of permafrost on Alaska's North Slope, but only in certain areas, particularly the foothills north of the Brooks Range," Romanovsky said.
The extreme scenario assumes worldwide carbon dioxide emissions continue at today's rates. In that case, permafrost thawing on the North Slope will be much more significant and will extend beyond the foothills and into the Arctic coastal plain, Romanovsky said. In this outcome, the results at 2050 would be similar to the outcome in the moderate scenario, but after 2050 permafrost thawing would accelerate. More than half of the permafrost on the North Slope would be thawing by 2100 in this scenario.
"Under these conditions, the permafrost will become unstable beneath any infrastructure such as roads, pipelines and buildings," Romanovsky said. "The result will be dramatic effects on infrastructure and ecosystems."
"All the engineering solutions (to allow oil production on Alaska's North Slope) were designed and infrastructure was built when the permafrost was much colder," Romanovsky said. "When it reaches the (thawing) threshold, it will be very difficult to keep all the infrastructure running."
Panda, a research associate at the UAF Geophysical Institute, is also reporting this week on his work with the National Park Service to produce high-resolution maps of likely permafrost change in Alaska's national parklands. He has completed work on the projections for 2050 and 2100 for the five Arctic national parks: Gates of the Arctic National Park and Preserve, Noatak National Preserve, Kobuk Valley National Park, Cape Krusenstern National Monument and Bering Land Bridge National Preserve. These five parklands total 20 million acres, about the size of South Carolina. The 40 million acres of Alaska's NPS lands that lie within the areas affected by permafrost constitute nearly half of all the NPS-administered lands in the United States.
The release of carbon from thawing permafrost has been discussed widely, Panda said, but he thinks the resulting landscape changes on Alaska's North Slope will be more important in the near future.
"If there is thawing, the ice-rich soils are going to change dramatically," Panda said. "Permafrost degradation is going to touch the whole landscape through changes in water distribution, slope failures and changes in vegetation that will affect wildlife habitat and the aesthetic value of the parks."
The NPS will be interested in ways to minimize or manage those changes, Panda said. The agency wants to know how the changes affect wildlife, their migration patterns and the people who depend on those animals, Panda said.
Kevin Schaefer, a research scientist at the National Snow and Ice Data Center at the University of Colorado Boulder, said the United States needs a permafrost forecasting system.
"There is a huge demand for better information about permafrost," said Schaefer. "For example, people who maintain and build infrastructure in Alaska need to know what the thaw depth is going to be so they can plan."
Scientists currently assess permafrost conditions in certain areas, but these projects are "one-time deals," according to Schaefer.
"They often can't repeat it because they need resources like money and time," he said.
"What we need is an operational forecast that occurs every year -- projecting out at least one year but probably up to a decade," Schaefer said. The forecasting system would predict the permafrost's active layer thickness, or thaw depth, and its temperature at a specified depth. Additional monitoring stations would also need to be installed throughout Alaska, the only state with territory north of the Arctic Circle.
