Letters to Editors: Shedding Light

Shedding light is complicated, no matter how you look at it. In particular I have been looking at albedo, (reflected sunlight). Scientifically, albedo is measured on a scale of zero to one (0 to 1 - You can get a phone app for that.) 

How albedo affects climate depends on water vapor. The low albedo of a rain forests traps heat near the planet's surface, increasing humidity through the cooling effect of evaporation. At the same time, by trapping the heat near the soil surface, the atmosphere above cools, increasing the likelihood of cloud formation. Clouds have a relatively high albedo – which reflects the solar energy into space and further cools the air temperatures below the clouds and leads to lowering the temperature. Lowering the temperature holds less water vapor, which enhances the likelihood of precipitation, hence “Rain Forests”!

 Examples of the best, most efficient spots to cool the planet are areas where albedo is high and humidity is low, like the polar ice caps and the light sands of dry deserts. The reflected energy can escape the atmosphere because humidity (water vapor) is low. Any change in albedo has significant impacts on previously stable environments. 

Albedo is the key to understanding how dirty snow, greener deserts, and logged forests all contribute to global warming. And illustrates how albedo and water vapor make up the “Iron Man” suit which make CO2 such a powerful driver of climate change on our blue water planet.

Richard Roth
1318 Bruce Street
Chico, CA 95938

Ph: 530-514-0716
richardhroth1@gmail.com

References:

https://medium.com/the-green-code/albedo-effect-the-science-behind-climate-change-2f950b027087

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.h2optics.albedo&gl=US

https://www.nasa.gov/topics/earth/features/vapor_warming.html

Hue Todd: and Nature

I met Hue Todd , a Redding based Ag Engineer for the Soil Conservation Service in 1977(now NRCS). I was new to the job. He was a mentor. 

Hue was different in more ways than one. Farmers and ranchers would come to Hue with their plans and Hue would start breaking it down. Skeptical they would shake their heads ready to argue, but Hue just kept talking, and their shakes turned into nods. It was phenomenal to watch. 

Distilled, Hue taught an ancient lesson: “The farther from Nature you get, the more problems you will have.” 

Looking back and around me now I feel a constant sense of vertigo. When I was a child of the Kansas prairie I wished to grow up to be Native. I have now lived within the Little Chico Creek watershed for the last 43 years. Both the place I grew up in and the place I settled have become evermore foreign as the climate tips this way and then that. 

We are abandoned pups. Unless we take back the CO2 our ingenuity and creativity put into the sky, there shall soon be nothing recognizably ours; no Native peoples, No native plants or animals, no planet to call Mother. 

If our culture is going to carry on, or even if humans are going to exist at all, we must lean, and reflect on, a yardstick that carries us quickly toward a closer relationship to the stable Mother Nature we have estranged ourselves from.

Richard Roth

Mastodon

A Whole Lot of Grief Coming (published Enterprise Record

There is a whole lot of grief coming. My father raised six of us kids, four girls, two boys. All of them reproducing except me (though I picked up a couple of nice strays). I was dad's first born, and in all the time since, not a single one of his dozens of live birth descendants has died. Not one! And the babies of babies have for a while now been having babies. Now numbering in the dozens, I live far from all of them, and yet they are so much me. At my age many of my dear peers are leaving. This week there were two memorials. I attended neither, nor shall I again, nor desire one for myself. I cannot mark role-call – even in celebration. In me there are no absences, and we together have yet so much to do! I look around at a planet that has been estranged by our own handiwork. Fully three-fourths of the damage to atmosphere has occurred in my 70 years. So much of the life we have made must be turned on its head and rebuilt. The challenges and obstacles are great and time short. My inspiration comes, in part, from a girl-child with a disability, and those like her. There is grief to come, but a whole lot of work to do. So there is a whole lot of that – too. In a way, grief and the grief to come– and the work to be done - balances.

We have an apple tree given as a wedding present to us in 1990. It is an old variety. I forget the name, but it grows half-shaded under a huge Valley Oak tree and regularly produces a nice crop of smaller sweet crisp apples that only begin to ripen in late October through November. 

After the two week heat spell of 100 plus temperatures lasting until late at night, I noticed that the apples and leaves on the sunny side of the tree had fried. It illustrated for me what climate scientists have been saying, that humans no longer live on a planet humans have ever inhabited before.

Earth has become alien to the human race. It also means there are no native plants on a planet estranged. 

I have been using my backyard and garden as a quasi-scientific experiment for a few years now, letting whatever grows – grow – no-till, mowing occasionally, cutting back brush, while converting more and more to perennial fruits and vegetables, growing a food forest, all with the intention of sucking down carbon. What I have noticed is that every one of the invasive plants are C4 plants, meaning they are more efficient at converting sunlight into plant matter. 

It has made me wonder that maybe “invasives” are trying to do us a favor, and maybe Arundo (fake bambo) and Alantus (Tree of Heaven) are just two of the medicines we need to cool an overheated human-altered planet.

 

Richard Roth

Variations on Letters to Editors: Parts Per Million

It is ironically noteworthy that citizens within our communities contributing the least to the tragedies we shall soon endure are homeless. 

 I was born in 1951. That year the parts per million of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was 312. 312 is 32 ppm more than the stable climate that birthed the industrial revolution (about 280 ppm). Today, the ppm in the atmosphere is about 416. What this means is that three quarters of the damage to the atmosphere has happened in my lifetime. Half the damage was caused in the last thirty five years. 

That humans have brought us to this point means humans can do something about it. But today we live on a strange new planet. For the next handful of generations, our now estranged planet will become more and more inhospitable to us. But we have an opportunity to limit the worst from getting awful. 

If we are to maintain a climate on earth that preserves a semblance of human culture and holds the prospect of lasting peace and true prosperity, we must make radical adjustments to how we live. Chico and Butte County is a good place to start. 

Science makes for a good reference. We can do so much better than we have, but we need innovative and civil discussions and actions to re-Geo-engineer our culture to one that dives deep for insights into the ecology of our planet and is gentle to our neighbors. Research, reflect, speak, act and vote. 

How many parts per million of CO2 were in the atmosphere when you were born?