Not Saying What - Just Saying

Not saying you should buy one for you or your family. I’m just warning you, people will be doing just that. You will see a lot more of them when you are out and about after the holidays. There are a lot of reasons. Not often you can shop and save money from year to year while significantly reducing your carbon footprint. And possibly put several hundred dollars in your pocket. I have used mine exclusively for six years. It has paid for itself several times over. A similar cargo one can be purchased for less than half of what I paid. They are more fun than a hula hoop. Ridiculously, you could throw one away every year and buy a new one and still save money. Fewer parts will mean they are, or will soon be, cheaper than multi-geared bicycles. It’s a tossup of whether to do it now or later. The market for used cars is fairly high now . So if you do … Look for discounts, Know what you want. Of course helmets and locks are essential too, and it might be good to send a note to each of your elected representatives encouraging them to focus funds on sustainable dedicated routes separate from auto traffic, since painted stripes alone, on busy streets, do little to nothing to decrease accidents – or deaths. Protected lanes make streets safer for everyone. Just some “heads up!” Take care everyone. Happy Holidays!

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

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