Forests
So delicately interwoven are the relationships that when we disturb one thread of the community fabric we alter it all perhaps almost imperceptibly, perhaps so drastically that destruction follows. rachel carson, Essay on the Biological Sciences, 1958 One night at the end of winter, from inside the house, I hear a pack of coyotes howling near John's Brook a hundred yards away. A waxing moon is just visible above the garden's treed boundary when I step into the evening's darkness with Celia. We...
Microbes And Bacterial Infections
The microbes of the unseen world can be segregated into three lists. The A list includes the spoilers the B list, the sickeners and the C list, the benefactors, those that make our lives livable and enjoyable. The A list contains such members as the genuses Pseudamonas, Serratia, Aeromonas, Leuconostoc, Fusarium, Flavobacterium, Shewanella, and Microccus. On the B list we have Campylobacter, Listeria, Escherichia coli O157 H7, Yersinia, hepatitis A and C, Clostridium, Salmonella, Staphylococci,...
Energy and Entropy Conservation
The first and second laws of thermodynamics were succinctly stated by Rudolf Clausius in 1865 The total energy of the universe is constant. The total entropy of the universe strives to reach a maximum Clausius 1865 . By associating nonnegative entropy production with any energy exchange, both laws can be expressed as conservation laws. Energy is a reasonably familiar concept, with the following description particularly appropriate for photovoltaics. Energy is The capacity for doing work. The...
Universities
According to Times Higher Education Supplement 30 March 2007 , UK universities use 5.2 billion kWh per year. Shared out among the whole population, that's a power of 0.24 kWh per day per person. So higher education and research seem to have a much lower energy cost than defensive war-gaming. There may be other energy-consuming public services we could talk about, but at this point I'd like to wrap up our race between the red and green stacks. Biomass food, biofuel, wood, waste incin'n, landfill...
Laura Koteen
The subalpine tree species whitebark pine Pinus albicaulis faces multiple threats to its existence. Predominant among them is the risk posed by the exotic fungus white pine blister rust, Cronartium ribicola . Throughout much of its range Fig. 8.1 , whitebark pine has suffered considerable losses approaching 90 in some locations. Blister rust, mountain pine beetle Dendroctonus ponderosae and successional replacement by subalpine cohorts due to fire exclusion account for the bulk of its...
Windscaping Buildings
There are many ways to sculpt a building into the landscape and Nestle the building into the landscape. This simple device of hiding a building behind a feature of the landscape is very effective. However, bear in mind that if the wind is needed to cool the building, siting it behind a spur in the landscape may cut it off from the breezes. In some cases people take bulldozers to the landscape to ensure that the winds from the refreshing directions are channelled around their houses and the hot...
Climate conditions during the Upper Pleistocene and Holocene
Van Zinderen Bakker 1976 proposed that, during the Last Glacial Period, cool and dry conditions prevailed in north and east South Africa, while cold temperatures, strong winds, and wet winters prevailed in the southern section. The same author maintains that, during the interglacial periods, pluvial conditions prevailed in the eastern part of South Africa in summer, while dry westerlies prevailed along the western and southwestern coasts. During winter, cyclonic storms penetrated the...
Spawning of fathead minnow prevented Recruitment failure of lake trout Lower
Mason 1990 . Aluminium also kills a variety of invertebrates, but the progressive concentration of the metal through food chains and food webs ensures that higher level organisms such as fish are particularly vulnerable, and it is possible that fish kills previously attributed to high acidity were, in fact, the result of aluminium poisoning Park 1987 . The mobilization of heavy metals by leaching may also help to reduce fish populations indirectly by killing the insects and microscopic aquatic...
Time Since Discharge Years
Fig. 10.4. Comparison of activity of alpha-particle and beta-particle emitters in spent fuel and in ground. The beta-particle activity is shown with and without actinides removed. The alpha-particle activity is only shown for the all-nuclides case, because it derives almost entirely from the actinides. Spent fuel 1 MTHM from PWR same parameters and data as for Table 10.4 . Ground 0.005 km3 of typical soil see text . to be at least several hundred meters below the surface of the Earth. The...
Glacier lake outburst floods and glacier surges in Central Asia
Almaty population 1.2 million is subject to the risk of floods from torrential rainfalls and glacial lake outbursts. A glacier-induced debris flow in July 1973 in the mountains south of Almaty deposited over 4 million m3 of debris into the safety dam, which had been specially constructed to prevent the catastrophic impacts of such floods. Before this dam was built in 1967, debris flows caused many casualties and severe destruction in 1921 and 1 95 635,36. In July 1998, a glacier lake outburst...
i Concentrations of Some Important Atmospheric Gases i
Source Ahrens, C. Donald, Meteorology Today, Pacific Grove, Calif Brooks Cole, 2000. Radiation is the emission and transmission of energy through space or material. This includes sound waves passing through water, heat spreading out in a sheet of metal, or light traveling through air. Every object for example, a human body, this book, or the Sun has energy because it contains billions of rapidly vibrating electrons tiny, negatively charged particles . The energy travels outward, or radiates,...
A Reservoir For Water
To keep water moving between the atmosphere and the Earth's surface, the gaseous form of water, or water vapor, must pass through the atmosphere. While air is never dry, the amount of water vapor it contains varies from place to place and from time to time. This fact is obvious when comparing a summer day in Atlanta, Georgia, with a winter night in Fairbanks, Alaska. Humidity is the concentration of water vapor in the air. Up to 4 of the volume of the air can be water vapor. This vapor is...
Combining technologies
Meeting a significant percentage of a building's energy needs with microgeneration is usually best accomplished with a mixture of compatible technologies. Even a low technology approach might, at the very least, involve windcatchers, passive solar air and DHW heating and a rock bin thermal store. Over-complexity is a perceptible risk with a higher technology approach nevertheless, phase change materials, ground source heat pumps, advanced active solar water heating, several forms of solar...
Sea Turtles
As many as 85 percent of loggerhead sea turtle hatchlings living on beaches in the southern United States are now female, a sex ratio caused by a warming habitat that threatens this endangered species. A lack of males may cause the species to become extinct Lazaroff, 2002 . These turtles have very small gonads at this age and are difficult to identify, said Jeanette Wyneken, an assistant professor of biological sciences at Florida Atlantic University, who is an expert on sea turtle anatomy and...
Palm Trees And Banana Plants In English Gardens
Traditional English gardens have been changing as the climate warms, as described in an Associated Press dispatch carried in Canada's Financial Post. The fabled English garden with its velvety green lawn and vivid daffodils, delphiniums and bluebells is under threat from global warming, leading conservation groups said late in 2002. Within the next 50 to 80 years, palm trees, figs and oranges may find themselves more at home in Britain's hotter, drier summers, the National Trust and the Royal...
Soil Erosion and Agriculture
Agricultural lands are the principal source of eroded soil. According to the USDA, approximately 20 of the nation's land is set aside for cropland. Three-quarters of this land is actively used to grow crops for harvesting. The remainder is used for pasture or is idled for various reasons. This would include cropland enrolled in the Federal Conservation Reserve Program CRP . See Figure 11.8. Agriculture depends primarily on the top six to eight inches of topsoil. Fields planted in rows, such as...
Corpus Spongiosum
SYMPATHETIC, MOTOR AND SENSORY FIBERS IN PUDENDAL NERVE of their axons down to the erection-generating neurons in the lower spinal cord. There the PGN nerve endings release the neurotransmitter serotonin a chemical messenger that inhibits erections by opposing the effects of pro-erectile neurotransmitters. This discovery may have important implications for the millions of men and women who take serotonin-enhancing drugs to treat depression and other mental health problems. Drugs such as Prozac...
A Timeless Way Of Building
We do not have to search far for ideas for sustainable building they are all pervasive in our lost constructional traditions. The solutions to present environmental problems, however, are probably not to be found in the traditions of 'great architecture'. It is more likely that they will be associated with the 'prose of architecture', as Summerson called the everyday buildings that have always formed the greater part of towns and cities. Monumental architecture of the past with its profligate...
Dissolved organic matter DOM
Particulate organic matter is always present in seawater, but in addition, varying quantities of organic compounds are present in solution. This is referred to as dissolved organic matter DOM or dissolved organic carbon DOC Jorgensen, 1976 Williams, 1975 . The estimation of minute quantities of organic solutes is difficult, but it appears that ocean water commonly contains about 2 mg carbon per litre in dissolved organic forms, in some of which nitrogen, phosphorus, sulphur, iron or cobalt are...
Criteria for determining palaeoclimate
The most obvious way of detecting cold conditions in the past is to find evidence of the presence of ice. At the present day the sedimentary deposits associated with glaciers and ice sheets, which occur where melting ice dumps its rock load, range in grain size from boulders and pebbles to finely ground rock flour. Such deposits are known as boulder clay or till, and ancient examples consolidated into resistant rock as tillites. The surfaces of hard rock that have underlain substantial ice...
Cleaning Up The Mess
An apocryphal story illustrates the difficulty of discovering the cause of a system failure. A woman who cleaned hospital rooms was unable to find an unused electrical outlet to run her buffer. When she ran into this problem, she would simply unplug a cord from one of the outlets, complete her job, and then methodically reattach the cord, but not before patients on life support had expired. Tracing this simple problem would not be a trivial matter. Presumably, the affected patients would have...
Calculation of the Most Probable Kinetic Energy TKE
One may calculate the most probable kinetic energy by searching for that kinetic energy, e, which maximizes expression 6.9 for the partial width r A1,A2, , Uc,e . In essence, the decay widths to A1 and A2 are calculated for a series of e, allowed by energy conservation. For a given e, U1 and U2, the total excitation energy of a pair is determined using 6.8 . Integration over U1 is performed over all possible excitations of A1 allowed by the total available excitation energy. This automatically...
climate proxies
Clues to past climate can be contained in many indicators that clima-tologists refer to as climate proxies. Proxy means substitute. The term is used because climatologists cannot obtain direct temperature or other climatic data from proxies but can only infer past climatic conditions based on information obtained from the proxies themselves. As an illustration, it is possible to infer the climate of an area just by looking at a photograph. If the photograph, such as that shown on the facing...
CLIMATE FoRCINGpoSITIVE AND NEGATIVE FEEDBACK
The Earth's heat budget is controlled by the amount of energy it receives from the Sun and subsequently returns to space. The Earth's global energy balance is maintained when the incoming energy from the Sun is balanced with the outgoing heat from the Earth. There are mechanisms that cause the Earth's energy budget to get out of balance. Then it can result in climate change. There are several mechanisms that can change the Earth's energy balance in either a positive or negative way. Some of...
Torrential Rainfall Distribution and Controls
Tropical cyclones normally produce torrential rainfalls, meaning that both the amount of rainfall is large total in mm and the rainfall intensity is high amount per unit time, expressed in mm h-1 . Over oceans the rainfall is of convectional type since there are no fronts associated with tropical cyclones. Converging air rises over warm sea and cools adiabatically, leading to the condensation of water droplets, cloud formation and subsequent rainfall. But precipitation near the centre of...
Universal Participation As Conventional Wisdom
In academic treatments, universal participation has become an accepted necessary factor in regime building.1 Downs et al. claim that the acceptance of universal participation as necessary is a hallmark of the transformational approach to regime design.2 This approach is based on the idea that participating in a regime can transform the states that join, and that the regime will thus grow stronger over time. Inclusive, broad participation is thus a major prescription because it ensures the...
The Battle of Currents
The origin of power generation and distribution is a story of the Battle of Currents, a battle between two titans of business Thomas Edison and George Westinghouse. The motivation for their confrontation can be reduced to a single, fundamental issue how to electrify America. Edison invented the first practical incandescent lamp and was a proponent of electrical power distribution by direct electric current. He displayed his direct current technology at New York City's Pearl Street Station in...
Needs And Satisfiers
One of the most important elements of this emerging body of work is the crucial distinction between needs and satisfiers. Each culture attempts to satisfy collective and individual needs in its own way. The underlying needs may be universal. But the satisfiers vary from culture to culture and from time to time. In our own culture we have chosen a very specific development path characterised by the system of production and consumption in the industrial economy. The fact that this same...
Sterbas Biocentrism
James Sterba has defended a different kind of biocentrism that involves a commitment to equality of individual creatures of whatever species as it does for Taylor . Sterba recognizes that such a stance generates a dilemma, for our practical principles will apparently either be consistent but intolerable through forbidding human self-defense, or will allow human self-defense but will conflict with consistent biocentrism. He advances fundamental species-neutral principles that allow any species...
Technological Trajectories
The gradual evolution of a constrained upward-tending knowledge search and acquisition process over decades has been described as a technological trajectory Perez-Perez 1983 Freeman 1989 . We would modify the definition slightly. For us, a technological trajectory is a sequence of developments starting from a distinct functional configuration utilizing a basic principle. For instance, the 'atmospheric' reciprocating steam engine beginning with Newcomen can be regarded as the starting point of a...
Local climate policies
A similar conflict between ambition and actual practice can be observed at the local level. Local authorities can play an important role in realizing national climate policy targets, but can also make more ambitious policies. As in many other countries, municipalities in The Netherlands have responsibilities and decision-making powers which are essential for achieving the transitions discussed in Chapter 2. For instance, they have to issue permits for any new construction or form of land use....
Design Features of the AP
The AP600 was designed to be simple in configuration and relatively inexpensive to build.8 Part of the savings comes from modular construction, in which components are built and to some extent assembled off-site, substantially reducing the construction time at the reactor site itself. When compared 8 This discussion is based primarily on information from Westinghouse, including published documents and private communications with Ronald P. Vijuk. to conventional PWRs, the design simplifications...
Animal Ethics And The Romantic Period
Although Coleridge would give up both poetry and his idealization of nature to become a philosophical idealist by the early 1800s, the extraordinary popularity of his Rime of the Ancient Mariner has earned him a perhaps outsized influence on environmental thought. This selfconsciously mysterious and symbolic poem tells the story of the mariner's apparently random killing of a beautiful and companionable animal and the revenge enacted upon him by both the natural and supernatural worlds. The...
The Cost Of Form In Site Planning
An interesting case study of a new ecohousing development in Hungary demonstrates that there are very real financial advantages of adopting solar strategies in housing layout. The developers, Aldino Ltd of Budapest, bought a 64-ha site at Veresegyhaz some 30 minutes from the centre of Budapest, in April 1993. The land had few trees and sloped gently to the south. The first design Figure 1.15A using conventional housing layouts planned for a maximum density of 380 houses on 1000 m2 plots, but...
Microbial or Photochemical Conversion of Methane to Methanol
Certain bacteria, known as methanotrophs, can obtain all the energy and carbon they need for life from methane 187 . The key step for their utilization of methane is its selective conversion to methanol using oxygen. In subsequent biological processes, methanol is further oxidized to formaldehyde, which in turn can be either incorporated into biomass or oxidized to CO2, thereby providing the energy needed by the bacteria. Nature's catalyst for the conversion of methane to methanol is an enzyme...
Marine isotope stage e and the last Eemian interglacial
As the last, best-dated and most intensively studied full interglacial, the 'Eemian' has received special attention. The demonstration that the Holocene temperature record in central Greenland showed much less variability than that which characterised the preceding glacial period has led to speculation as to whether this was a general characteristic of all interglacials. This, in turn, has provoked questions concerning the degree of variability during the Eemian. The term Eemian was coined to...
Case Study Rainfall Distribution Across Fiji During Tropical Cyclone Gavin in
The track and behaviour of Tropical Cyclone Gavin through the Fiji Islands from 4 to 11 March 1997 were described earlier in Section 5.3 on storm surge. Meteorological records from Fiji's 22 synoptic climate stations demonstrate the widely variable pattern of rainfall delivered by TC Gavin over the islands. Fig. 5.28. Maximum 1-day rainfall delivered by Tropical Cyclone Gavin across the Fiji Islands in early March 1997. Fig. 5.28. Maximum 1-day rainfall delivered by Tropical Cyclone Gavin...
Greenpeace
Greenpeace is an international nongovernmental organization NGO that is committed to protecting the global environment and promoting peace. It originated in Vancouver, Canada, and has established national and regional offices in forty-one countries and a central headquarters in the Netherlands. It has close to three million members worldwide. It is known for its confrontational nonviolent, direct-action, and media-savvy strategies for exposing and promoting solutions to global environmental...
The Road to Skibbereen
West Cork is today a world of endless sandy bays washed by the Atlantic swell, where celebrities like movie mogul Lord Putnam, actor Jeremy Irons, and Ireland's richest man, the publisher Tony O'Reilly, all have homes. But there are ghosts here. Ghosts of the terrible Irish famine a century and a half ago, which killed a million people. And also of Bob Malthus. His natural law that the poor will grow their numbers until cut down by disease or hunger was said at the time to have caused the...
Indoor Environmental Quality Questions
Since the major business case benefits of green buildings derive from gains in productivity and health, it's vital to start considering these issues early in the design effort. 1 If the building must have a large floorplate, can we design an atrium that will enhance daylight penetration and natural ventilation into all occupied areas of the structure 2 Will the massing and orientation of the building support passive solar design and or natural ventilation and daylighting strategies Fig. 10.3 3...
Geologic Extinction Episodes
Extinction is part of the natural process of species evolution. It is as much a part of the natural life cycle as speciation and has been occurring continually since life first began to diversify from simple organisms. It is not, however, an evenly paced phenomenon Speciation and extinction may proceed gradually, in tandem, for millennia, but at various times there have been episodes of rapid, mass extinction that far outstrip the pace of species divergence. These past episodes of mass...
Major Environmental Events In China
Ethics, values, and major events contribute to the public's awareness of the environment and environmental ethics. The 1998 flood of the Yangzi River Valley made many people think seriously about the relations between humans and nature. The outbreak of severe acute respiratory syndrome SARS in 2002 led the public to reflect on its relationship with animals. In May 2004 the announcement by the Beijing Municipal Legal Affairs Office that it had drafted legislation on animal welfare spurred a...
Atmospheric temperature observed by satellites
Since 1979 meteorological satellites flown by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration NOAA of the United States have carried a microwave instrument, the Microwave Sounding Unit MSU , for the remote observation of the average temperature of the lower part of the atmosphere up to about 7 km in altitude. Figure 4.3b shows the record of global average temperature deduced from the MSU and compares it with data from sounding instruments carried on balloons for the same region of the...
Mobility at Cisco
Cisco's mobile work environment is referred to as the Cisco Connected Workplace CCW and it integrates the physical workplace and Internet Protocol Telephony plus other technologies. The CCW incorporates mobility strategies throughout the building from the desktop user through to the basement to ensure a connected strategy. In the workplace, each team is allocated a range of workplaces workstations, dedicated team rooms, quiet space, and shared facilities. Cisco has embraced mobility for its...
The RomanByzantine period ka to ka BP including the RomanByzantine transition
From about 2.3 ka BP to about 1.3 ka BP, there is quite a good correlation between the different proxy-data time series in the Levant. It started with a phase of cooling and humidity which continued up to c. 1.7 ka BP, during which time the level of the Dead Sea rose to more than 30 m above the present level, there was a profusion in planktonic foraminifers in the Eastern Mediterranean Sea, and a lighter composition ratio of environmental isotopes were laid down in cave and lake deposits....
The MoslemArab period c ka to ka BP
The deterioration of the climate all over the Middle East sometime around 13 ka BP can be deducted from most of the proxydata time series, especially from the environmental isotope composition of the deposits of the Sea of Galilee, the caves of Galilee and Soreq Cave. Bar-Matthews et al. 1998a,b calculated, based on the isotopic composition of the stalagmites in Soreq Cave, that the average annual precipitation over the Judean mountains had begun to decrease some time after 1.4 ka BP after...
Carbonless Energy Carriers
Electricity is the highest quality energy carrier, increasingly dominant throughout the world's energy infrastructure. Ultimately electricity use can expand to efficiently meet virtually all stationary energy applications, eliminating stationary end-use carbon emissions. This approach is unlikely to work in transportation, however, due to the high cost and low energy density of electricity storage. Chemical energy carriers, such as hydrogen, can more effectively serve transportation fuel and...
Mean upperair patterns
The patterns of pressure and wind in the middle troposphere are less complicated in appearance than at the surface as a result of the diminished effects of the landmasses. Rather than using pressure maps at a particular height, it is convenient to depict the height of a selected pressure surface this is termed a contour chart by analogy with topographic relief map see Note 1 . Figure 7.3 and 7.4 show that in the middle troposphere of the southern hemisphere there is a vast circumpolar Figure...
Electrocution
Power generating plants create electricity that is transported by transmission lines carrying high voltage to substations where the voltage is reduced. This reduced voltage electricity is then transferred to distribution lines that carry the electricity to various customers. Although lower in voltage, distribution lines are more often associated with bird mortality than transmission lines, because of the closer spacing of their electrical conductors 2 to 6 feet, versus 7 to 30 feet Harness and...
pebble bed storage size correction
For the development of the -chart of Figure 11.6, a standard storage capacity of 0.25 cubic meters of pebbles per square meter of collector area was considered, which corresponds to 350 kJ m2- C for typical void fractions and rock properties. Although the performance of air-based systems is not as sensitive to the storage capacity as in liquid-based systems, other storage capacities can be used by modifying the factor X by a storage size correction factor, Xc X, as given by Klein et al., 1977...