Discovery News: Environmental

Migrations Got Me Down

Usually, my job is really fun. I get to learn about how bumps on whale fins may make wind turbines more efficient or explore a surprising new take on how to reduce one's carbon footprint. But sometimes, this job is depressing.

While it captures the imagination to ponder the seemingly infinite migrations of passenger pigeons that once darkened the sky, or the huge masses of bison wandering the plains, reading up on these migrations, as I did for today's story, also makes me feel pretty sick at our history. We managed to wipe out three to five billion passenger pigeons from this continent within a couple of hundred years, using methods that were not pleasant to read about.

People saw the extinction coming, but nobody acted effectively to protect the species. By the time captive breeding efforts started, there were too few passenger pigeons; they needed large numbers to court and breed. The last known passenger pigeon died in 1914.

The buffalo story is equally depressing. Maybe you've heard it before, but I was reminded of it as I researched today's article. You can look at heaps of bison skulls, the animals killed for their pelts and the meat wasted. This story seems to have a happier ending, because we still have bison, but not that many.

These stories wouldn't get me so down if it didn't sound just exactly like what we're doing in a zillion ways today--with many aspects of climate change and conservation. Reading the stories in retrospect, the actors come across as ludicrously greedy and shortsighted. I can't help thinking that's how we'll look down the line, too.

(Image: Passenger pigeon)

Getting There Sans Car

While we're on the subject of walking, this week Google launched a version of Google maps for pedestrians. If you ask for directions to a spot less than 6.2 miles away, Google will now give you the option to select directions for going either by car or walking.

When I tried it, Google gave me a shorter route for walking to the University of Minnesota from my house than for driving, but certainly not a more pleasant one, sending me down a very busy street instead of along the river (which is about a half-mile longer). It looks like even when less-trafficked routes are equally direct, it picks a major street. But at least it won't send you on the freeway.

Meanwhile, here's a Google-maps-based cycling map created for the Vancouver, B.C. area. You can choose whether or not you want to include major streets in your route, and you can select whether you want to take the path with the least elevation gain, the most vegetation, the shortest distance, the least traffic pollution, or if you want to require that your route have no spots along the way that are steeper than a slope of your choice. Once it marks your way, the path is color coded to indicate the hilly parts.

In addition to telling you how far the route is and how long it's likely to take you, the site tells you the amount of  greenhouse gases you avoided by biking instead of driving, the mean nitrogen oxide concentration along the route, and how many calories you burned. I want one for the Twin Cities.

There's a push for more tools like this. Here's an AP story with some more info on efforts in other places.

(Image: From Cycle Vancouver)

How Walkable Is Your 'Hood?

Today Discovery News highlighted research showing that the more your neighborhood allows or encourages you to walk, the less you are likely to weigh.

So if you're looking to slim down and you've decided moving is cheaper than joining a gym (it is more likely to stick), Walk Score can help you pick the most walkable parts of any of the country's largest 40 cities. I'm a bit disappointed that Minneapolis-St. Paul is not on the list, because the two cities are counted separately and neither makes the top 40 on its own.

But if you live in Milwaukee, Cleveland, or 38 other cities, you can see a map and list of the most walkable neighborhoods in town.

According to Lawrence Frank of the University of British Columbia, Walk Score uses distance to many destinations to determine walkability, which has limitations. "You could be right near a mall, and you could be on the end of the culdesac and not be able to get to the mall," he said.

So, that's just to say that you shouldn't buy a house without visiting it first and making sure you really can walk where you want to. Indeed, Walk Score suggests this and notes its own limitations. But the site has some pretty nice maps and it's certainly better than nothing.

Check out America's most walkable neighborhoods.

Do you live in one? Does a walkable lifestyle make your life or health better?

(Image: Flickr user Atilla1000, some rights reserved.)

Saving the Planet, One Sandwich at a Time

I've been meaning to highlight the PB&J Campaign since one of its members brought it to my attention a couple of weeks ago in a comment on a blog post I wrote about meat consumption.

But late last week, our gassy, mooing ruminant friends showed up again at Discovery News, which gives me a good excuse.

I concluded my original blog post by saying, "To the climate conscious: learn to love lentils." But PB&J's Bernard Brown rightly pointed out that lentils need not be your only protein if you leave meat behind: don't forget the good ol' peanut butter and jelly sandwich.

It's a mighty good suggestion. If you haven't eaten a PB&J since fourth grade, I suggest you try one. The combination of nostalgia and tastiness makes returning to the most-classic of sandwiches a powerful experience.

Of course, the point of the campaign is not just to bring back one's playground days, but to highlight the reduced carbon footprint of a plant-based diet.

As for the PB&J, the campaign notes: "Each time you have a plant-based lunch like a PB&J you'll reduce your carbon footprint by the equivalent of 2.5 pounds of carbon dioxide emissions over an average animal-based lunch like a hamburger, a tuna sandwich, grilled cheese, or chicken nuggets."

The site also highlights some fun food carbon calculators here and here.

(Image: Flickr user Mr.Thomas, some rights reserved.)

Geiger Countertop

According to a New York Times article, your granite countertop may be a hot commodity. Literally.

It turns out that granite countertops emit radiation including radon--the radioactive gas resulting from the breakdown product of uranium within. The vast majority of granite countertops emit far less than the background radiation we're exposed to all the time.

But, a few countertops have been found to have relatively high levels of radiation--some more than 100 times background. (Even countertops emitting above background are unlikely to cause cancer, according to the Times.)

What struck me about this story was not the possible slight increased cancer risk from a granite countertop, but the following:

"The E.P.A. recommends taking action if radon gas levels in the home exceeds 4 picocuries per liter of air (a measure of radioactive emission); about the same risk for cancer as smoking a half a pack of cigarettes per day."

The recommended action level equates to 10 cigarettes per day? Given how widespread smoking bans are these days, I'm surprised there isn't more of a push to keep our basements from being the radon equivalent of a restaurant smoking section. Then again, who said these processes were rational?

P.S. I noticed that Larry O'Hanlon also posted about this article at his Earth Impacts blog. Check it out.

(Image: Flickr user Kyknoord, some rights reserved.)

Nuclear Cooling

Today I wrote a story about how wildfire smoke acts to cool the Arctic by reflecting light back into space before it hits the surface.

I spoke with Alan Robock at Rutgers University who said, "I worry much more about nuclear weapons than I do about climate change in its effect on our climate."

Nuclear weapons could create plenty of cooling smoke, Robock says, even if used on a relatively small scale.

"We've calculated how much smoke you would get from a 'tiny' war between India and Pakistan, each using 50 Hiroshima-sized bombs," he said. "Even that would produce climate change to temperatures colder than in the Little Ice Age."

Robock's study found that the associated drop in agricultural productivity from global cooling could be enough to lead to famine. Other studies have suggested that a full-scale nuclear war could result in death of a majority of the world's population from such indirect causes.

I'm all for avoiding climate impacts from CO2 emissions and from nuclear fallout. Everybody with me?

(Photo courtesy of National Nuclear Security Administration / Nevada Site Office)

Shuffling Species

As the climate warms, many species may no longer be comfy in their habitats and become better suited to survival at higher latitudes or higher elevations where they can escape the heat. But how is a tree species that takes decades to reproduce going to migrate fast enough to keep pace with a rapidly changing climate? What if a major city lies between a critter's old habitat and where it needs to go to survive?

We might help. That's the idea behind "assisted colonization"--deliberately moving plants or animals from places where they're doomed to places where they might survive in the future. In today's issue of Science, a group of researchers published an article saying this is an approach we should take seriously. Read an article about it at Discovery News.

It's a horrifying prospect to some conservation biologists. They point to the long list of species introduced into new habitats by humans (like moving cane toads to Australia) that have gone terribly wrong. The authors of the new report agree that some introductions would be risky and should be avoided: moving polar bears from the Arctic to Antarctica would introduce a predator of penguins and seals and likely decimate those populations.

But other introductions seem less likely to cause a disruption. Most would be regional moves, not inter-continental. The authors point out that staghorn corals currently live over a range of latitudes and that those at low latitudes can tolerate higher temperatures than the ones further from the equator. Moving low-latitude coral into higher latitudes where cold-adapted corals are already dying off is unlikely to cause a problem, the authors argue.

The researchers discuss assisted colonization as a way to save species from extinction, but there might be other motivations.

For instance, here in Minnesota, we are at the southern tip of the spruce-fir forest range, which is likely to retreat into Canada in a warming climate, and our deciduous forests face threats, too. But having forests in the state is a big part of its identity. Can we be happy knowing that the forests exist to the north and learn to live without them here? Or, should we bring in trees from further south that will thrive in our new climate and keep us under a forest canopy?

It's not just a psychological issue: forests contribute to our industrial and recreational economy, so people may be reluctant to let the woods give way to savanna. Check out an earlier post about a conference here where they discussed the topic.

What do you think? Is this a good idea? When would you be willing to give a species a helping hand? Or, should we let nature take its course... whatever that means in today's world?

(Image: Flickr user *Micky, some rights reserved)

A Test

Here's an awareness test to try for fun. You can check out the home site here. If you're interested in the subject, here's a related post.

More Math at $4 a Gallon

I wrote a couple of weeks ago about one way that $4 a gallon gasoline might get us looking at things differently.

It is interesting to see stories emerging about other ways that fuel at $4 a gallon is causing changes.

First, Reuters had a story late last week about how home buyers are abandoning the 'burbs in favor of cities, partly driven by the higher fuel prices. The article mentions a survey of realtors, 80 percent of whom reported that higher fuel costs are making buyers more interested in living in cities.

The New York Times ran a story a couple of weeks ago with a similar message. It says:

In 2003, the average suburban household spent $1,422 a year on gasoline, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. By April of this year -- when gas prices were about $3.60 a gallon-- the same household was spending $3,196 a year, more than doubling consumption in dollar terms in less than five years.

Meanwhile high oil prices effect more than just fuel. Petroleum provides the raw materials for making plastics, paints, adhesives, soaps, fibers, pharmaceuticals and more. Just as people are looking for alternatives to using petroleum for fuel, others are trying to obtain the carbon molecules necessary to make this array of products from renewable sources.

Plastic made from corn is one example, and DuPont is making a fiber that comes partly from corn that it is using in carpets.

Of course, the expense of these alternative products has been an obstacle, because commodity chemicals derived from oil have been cheap, cheap relative to developing new, bio-based materials. But, as a Cargill executive told me when I spoke with him more than a year ago, "When you have 75 dollar a barrel oil, a lot of things can happen."

That threshold seems a quaint memory now, and the chemical industry is feeling the heat. Dow announced price hikes of up to 25 percent on commodity chemicals a couple of weeks back.

So, by the executive's estimation, bio-based processes ought to be looking pretty good. And, one researcher told me, because the amount of carbon needed for chemicals is just a teeny trickle compared with what's needed for fuels, sending some biomass to chemical processes to make plastics and other non-fuel applications should not create the competition for food that we're seeing with corn-derived ethanol and other biofuels.

(Image: Flickr user KB35, some rights reserved.)

Humpback Wisdom

Check out today's story at Discovery News explaining how seemingly odd bumps across the front of humpback whale fins allow the whales to make the tight turns necessary to surround their herring prey before rising from beneath, mouths agape, to swallow as many as they can.

I was amazed to learn that the whales encircle the fish and release air bubbles that act like a cage the fish won't cross before moving in for the kill.

Above is a great video showing the hunt.

Also, take a look at the gorgeous video on the website for WhalePower--a company that is capitalizing on these bumps in making better wind turbines and fans--to get a nice look at the fins and some lovely views of swimming whales. Guaranteed to make you feel more relaxed.