Stories tagged global warming
Getting stoned: Here's an array of shapes and sizes of kidney stones. Researchers say global warming will lead to an increase in the production of the little buggers in our bodies.
Courtesy Trevor BlakeIt’s going after polar bears and ice sheets. It’s threatening glaciers and coastal cities. Now, global warming has is setting it’s evil intentions against your kidneys.
That’s the conclusion a group of scientists announced yesterday. Increases in global temperatures could lead to an increase in kidney stones.
Having had more than my share of bouts with those pesky stones, that alone is scaring me straight to reduce my carbon footprint and do my part to reduce global climate change.
A kidney stone forms from salts that crystallize inside the kidney. That process speeds up when bodies become dehydrated. As the stones grow and move through the urinary tract, they can cause enormous (and I mean enormous) pain until it passes out through urination. The bigger the stone gets, the greater the discomfort. About 12 percent of men and seven percent of women in the U.S. will experience a bout of kidney stones in their life.
What the scientists announced this week is that warm states in the southeastern U.S. have a 50 percent higher rate of kidney stone cases than in the northeast.
Warm weather and dehydration are two factors that can accelerate kidney stone production, the researchers said. They’re seeing an unusually high rate of kidney stones among soldiers serving in the heat of Iraq.
On the flip side, drinking lots of water and staying cool can help reduce kidney stone risks, the scientists added. Kidney stone rates have been on the rise in the U.S. since 1976
So what do you think? Is there a connection between hot weather and kidney stones? Do you have a great kidney stone story to share? Ever see the Seinfeld episode where Kramer passes a kidney stone at the circus? Share your thoughts about kidney stones and/or global warming here with other Buzzers.
Tags : Ta-ta tuatara?
in Diversity of Organisms, The Water Cycle, Weather and Climate, and Biological Populations Change Over Time
Going, going, gone?: Will global warming doom the tuatara?
Courtesy Andrew_mrt1976
The tuatara looks like a lizard, but it ain’t. It actually split off from the lizard family tree some 200 million years ago, frolicked with the dinosaurs, and is considered a “living fossil.”
How much longer it will go on living is a matter of some debate. Restricted to a few small islands off New Zealand, the tuatara has long been classified as a vulnerable species. But some researchers feel it faces a new threat: global warming.
Many reptile reproductive systems are tuned to temperature. If the weather is warm, a male hatches. If the climate is cold, the egg produces a female. Some researchers fear that warming temperatures will lead to nothing but male tuataras within 75 years, ending the species’ 200-million-year run.
Most of the article is hidden behind a subscription wall, so I don’t know if the researchers ever get around to explaining how the tuatara survived the much, much warmer temperatures of the Mesozoic, and the much, much cooler temperatures of the Ice Ages, without going extinct then, too. But I’m sure it’s a beautiful explanation, though.
Like this: But bigger, colder, and almost certainly further north.
Courtesy lildudePut on your party belts and wow-socks: some scientists think that this summer will be the first time in recorded history that there’s no ice over the North Pole! Yowza!
Plans as to just what to do with the newly open water are being hotly debated: Russia was quick to suggest waterslides, but there’s some thought that all the crying polar bears would be a major downer, and no one would really want to use the slides. Also, the Arctic Ocean remains fairly chilly.
The entire polar icecap, it should be said, is not expected to melt—just the area above the North Pole itself, a region covered in ice for the length of human memory.
The face of the enemy: Know it well. They wait, biding their time, building up the strength of their numbers, and of their horrible, secret weapon of doom!
Courtesy foxypar4
That’s sheep farts to you and me, and apparently it’s a major problem. There are over one billion sheep in the world. They spend their day, standing in the meadow, gamboling playfully, watching Sam, the big shaggy cartoon sheep dog, foil the ingenious but inevitably futile efforts of Ralph, the wolf who looks suspiciously like a coyote.
And eating. Grass is what sheep eat. Unfortunately, they can’t digest it. Instead, they have little tiny microbes in their stomachs (four stomachs per sheep) that break down the plant fiber for them.
Unfortunately, microbes are rude little creatures, emitting methane gas with every mouthful and nary an “excuse me” to be heard. The methane builds up inside the ovine until it escapes in the form of sheep farts. (And, seriously, if you ever have a chance to write an essay that can justifiably include the phrase “sheep farts,” then you should seize the opportunity and use the term just as often as you possibly can.)
Anyway, the methane (a.k.a. sheep farts) gets into the atmosphere where, some would have it, it will trap heat and warm the globe and eventually destroy civilization as we know it. This may or may not be a bad thing, but I personally would hate to see my home destroyed just because of sheep farts.
Fortunately some researchers in New Zealand have come to our rescue. These plucky kiwis are tackling the sheep fart menace head-on, trying to develop a vaccination that will improve the microbes’ table manners. An anxious world holds its breath – partly in anticipation of the coming breakthrough in sheep fart technology, but mostly in response to the sheep farts themselves.
Another dismal post about the dismal science.
Today, we look at The Copenhagen Consensus. A group of economists are presented with a thought experiment: let’s say you had $75 billion to spend on solving one of the world’s problems – how would you allocate your funds?
Economists, being the dismal people that they are, take no account of what is “moral” or “right” or what “ought” to be done. They just try to figure out where you get the biggest bang for your buck. Their answer? Micronutirents for kids. Providing vitamin A and zinc to 80 percent of the 140 million children who lack them would provide almost $17 in health benefits for every dollar invested.
Other items in the top ten:
- Micronutirents for kids
- Expanding free trade
- Fortifying foods with iron and salt
- Expanding immunization coverage of children
- Biofortification
- Deworming
- Lowering the price of schooling
- Increasing girls' schooling
- Community-based nutrition promotion
- Support for women's reproductive roles
The majority of the most-efficient solutions deal with health, thus proving the old saying, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.
The least-efficient proposal was a plan to mitigate global warming. Nobel Prize-winning economist Thomas Schelling noted that that spending $75 billion on cutting greenhouses gases would achieve almost nothing. In fact, the climate change analysis presented to the panel found that spending $800 billion until 2100 would yield just $685 billion in climate change benefits.
Economist Richard Nordhaus, in his book A Question of Balance: Weighing the Options on Global Warming Policies, draws a similar conclusion. Projects to massively reduce greenhouse gases end up costing more than they deliver—in some cases, many trillions of dollars more. OTOH, investing in alternative energy (wind, solar, etc.) and bio-engineering can produce great results for the amount spent on them.
The economists at Copenhagen felt funding research and development of low-carbon energy technologies was worthwhile, and ranked it 14th out of the 30 proposals they considered.
Other items at the bottom of the priorities list are proposals to reduce air pollution by cutting emissions from diesel vehicles; a tobacco tax; improved stoves to reduce indoor air pollution; and extending microfinance. These are not necessarily bad ideas. It’s just that other proposals provide more bang for the 75 billion bucks.
The law of unintended consequences, part 4,937: Fuel cells don't pollute. But the process of making the fuel that goes in to them does.
Courtesy geognerd
Fuel cells are sometimes promoted as a clean energy alternative. They work by combining hydrogen and oxygen to create water, with some left over energy that can then be turned into electricity. The only waste products from a fuel cell are water and heat.
- Water vapor, it turns out, is a major greenhouse gas.
- Getting hydrogen to go into the fuel cell requires either zapping water with electricity, or treating natural gas with steam. Both of these processes require power, which currently comes from—burning coal.
So, while the fuel cell doesn’t pollute, the process of making the fuel for it does. (Though that could change if a hydrogen plant could be designed to run on wind, solar or other clean energy.)
The law of unintended consequences: Making ethanol to reduce carbon in the atmosphere is playing havoc with food prices.
Courtesy swankslot
Well, probably neither. But ethanol – a type of fuel made from plants – has been causing a lot of controversy lately. We’ve talked about this here before.
Many people like ethanol. As the price of gasoline rises, ethanol becomes an economical alternative. We can grow it at home, and not have to buy it from foreign countries who may or may not be our friends. And using it as fuel does not add any extra carbon into the atmosphere.
The problem is, most ethanol today is made from food crops, like corn. The more food we turn into ethanol, the less there is to eat. This puts pressure on food prices, as do droughts and growing populations. Food riots have broken out in several countries, and some people are beginning to rethink the push toward ethanol.
(A rather more bleak assessment of the same phenomenon.)
However, not everybody sees this as gloom-and-doom. Here's a spirited defense of biofuels.
Dennis Avery, Director of the Center for Global Food Issues, argues that the push for ethanol is hurting the movement toward sustainable farming.
However, blogger Austin Bay argues that, while rising demand for ethanol is a factor in food prices, it is far from the only one, or even the most important.
A scientific convention right here in Minneapolis agrees, noting that the problem isn’t biofuel per se, but the use of food crops to make biofuel. If we used non-food crops, we would relieve some pressure on food prices. Furthermore, non-food crops like native prairie grass actually make better ethanol than corn does!
Ronald Bailey, science correspondent for Reason magazine, notes the effect of ethanol on food prices, and makes some suggestions for reversing the trend.
Scientists in Tennessee are working on just that, using switchgrass to make ethanol. Meanwhile, researchers at the University of Massachusetts are making progress towards turning switchgrass straight into “green gasoline” – a substance chemically identical to gasoline (unlike ethanol, which has some important differences.)
(We’ve discussed switchgrass on Science Buzz before.)
Researchers in Texas are working to make ethanol from sweet sorghum. This would reduce the need to use corn, but sorghum is used in syrup and other sweeteners, so it really wouldn’t solve the food-into-fuel problem.
A prominent federal meteorologist has reversed his stance on global warming’s role in the recent increase in hurricanes. Tom Knutson, a researcher for the NOAA fluid dynamics lab in Princeton, has published a new paper in the journal Nature Geoscience predicting that Atlantic hurricanes will decrease by 18 percent by century’s end.
The new study is already brewing up a storm of its own because Knutson has complained in the past of being censored by the Bush administration for his previous views of climate change’s adverse effect on weather. Not surprisingly other researchers contend Knutson’s new computer models are flawed. Read the full story here.
Tusk, tusk: A pair of narwhals surface in the Arctic waters. A new study says that the sea creatures are the most at risk to changes from global warming
Courtesy Glenn WilliamsIs there a more overlooked creature of the animal kingdom than the narwhal? Granted, it lives in the frosty waters of the Arctic Ocean and has a twisted, mean-looking tusk, but why don’t we give the narwhal more love?
Global climate change researchers are taking note of the odd sea beast. They’ve categorized the narwhal as being the sea creature most at risk from global warming changes. The pronouncement was made following in-depth analysis of how potential environmental problems that could affect the 11 marine animals that live year-round in the Artic region.
Polar bears, which have been generally considered the most “at-risk” animals from global warming, came in second place in the rankings.
Right now there are actually a lot more narwhals in the Arctic region (50,000 to 80,000) than polar bears (20,000). But researchers feel the overall impacts of global warming could have a quicker, more devastating impact on narwhals.
What’s the difference? Adaptability. Polar bears are able to gather food either by swimming or roaming land. As ice sheets diminish, they can forage for food on land.
Narwhals, on the other hand, are highly specialized creatures. A main feeding practice is diving to depths of 6,000 feet to feed on halibut. They live in areas with 99-percent ice cover. If that ice area diminishes, predators like orcas and polar bears will have easier access to getting to narwhals. And warming waters could send the narwhal’s favorite food of halibut to non-icy areas as well.
Following narwhals and polar bears as the most at-risk Arctic animals were the hooded seal, bowhead whale and walrus. Least at-risk are ringed seals and bearded seals according to the study.
Aerial view: A group of narwhals can be seen swimming together from an aerial view.
Courtesy narwhal.infoBTW: Here’s a little more general information about narwhals:
• They don’t use their tusks for hunting. Males do have “duels” with each other using the tusks to establish dominance. Male tusks can grow up to be 10 feet long. Females grow a much smaller tusk. The tusks are also twisted in a corkscrew fashion.
• An adult narwhal can measure to around 25 feet in length. Males can weigh up to 3,500 pounds while females are about 2,200 pounds.
• The animals also exclusively hunt under thick ice sheets.
• Inuit legends has it that the narwhal was created when a woman holding onto a harpoon had been pulled into the ocean and twisted around the harpoon. The submerged woman was wrapped around a beluga whale on the other end of the harpoon, and that is how the narwhal was created.
Science in action
in Scientific World View, Scientific Inquiry, and The Water Cycle, Weather and Climate
Hurricanes and global warming: The debate over their connection continues.
Courtesy NASA
In 2005, Dr. Kerry Emmanuel, a climate scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, published a paper claiming there was a link between rising global temperatures and increases in hurricane strength.
This year, Dr. Emmanuel has published another paper in which he reconsiders the evidence. He found that the models used to predict hurricane activity were not matching up with what was happening in the real world. The link between hurricanes and global warming may not be as strong as originally suspected, or may not exist at all.
This is precisely how science is supposed to work – examining evidence, coming up with theories to explain the evidence, testing those theories, and adjusting the theories if necessary.
In another three years, Emmanual may write another paper showing that he was right the first time. Or that the whole hurricane-warming link is a dead end. Or perhaps some other conclusion. But the important thing is to keep looking, and to report honestly what you find.
As economist John Keynes famously said, “When the facts change, I change my mind.” A good approach to any debate.
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