Alert readers will have noticed the fewer-than-normal postings over the last couple of weeks. This is related mostly to pressures associated with real work (remember that we do have day jobs). In my case, it is because of the preparations for the next IPCC assessment and the need for our group to have a functioning and reasonably realistic climate model with which to start the new round of simulations. These all need to be up and running very quickly if we are going to make the early 2010 deadlines.
But, to be frank, there has been another reason. When we started this blog, there was a lot of ground to cover – how climate models worked, the difference between short term noise and long term signal, how the carbon cycle worked, connections between climate change and air quality, aerosol effects, the relevance of paleo-climate, the nature of rapid climate change etc. These things were/are fun to talk about and it was/is easy for us to share our enthusiasm for the science and, more importantly, the scientific process.
However, recently there has been more of a sense that the issues being discussed (in the media or online) have a bit of a groundhog day quality to them. The same nonsense, the same logical fallacies, the same confusions – all seem to be endlessly repeated. The same strawmen are being constructed and demolished as if they were part of a make-work scheme for the building industry attached to the stimulus proposal. Indeed, the enthusiastic recycling of talking points long thought to have been dead and buried has been given a huge boost by the publication of a new book by Ian Plimer who seems to have been collecting them for years. Given the number of simply made–up ‘facts’ in that tome, one soon realises that the concept of an objective reality against which one should measure claims and judge arguments is not something that is universally shared. This is troubling – and although there is certainly a role for some to point out the incoherence of such arguments (which in that case Tim Lambert and Ian Enting are doing very well), it isn’t something that requires much in the way of physical understanding or scientific background. (As an aside this is a good video description of the now-classic Dunning and Kruger papers on how the people who are most wrong are the least able to perceive it).
The Onion had a great piece last week that encapsulates the trajectory of these discussions very well. This will of course be familiar to anyone who has followed a comment thread too far into the weeds, and is one of the main reasons why people with actual, constructive things to add to a discourse get discouraged from wading into wikipedia, blogs or the media. One has to hope that there is the possibility of progress before one engages.
However there is still cause to engage – not out of the hope that the people who make idiotic statements can be educated – but because bystanders deserve to know where better information can be found. Still, it can sometimes be hard to find the enthusiasm. A case in point is a 100+ comment thread criticising my recent book in which it was clear that not a single critic had read a word of it (you can find the thread easily enough if you need to – it’s too stupid to link to). Not only had no-one read it, none of the commenters even seemed to think they needed to – most found it easier to imagine what was contained within and criticise that instead. It is vaguely amusing in a somewhat uncomfortable way.
Communicating with people who won’t open the book, read the blog post or watch the program because they already ‘know’ what must be in it, is tough and probably not worth one’s time. But communication in general is worthwhile and finding ways to get even a few people to turn the page and allow themselves to be engaged by what is actually a fantastic human and scientific story, is something worth a lot of our time.
Along those lines, Randy Olson (a scientist-turned-filmmaker-and-author) has a new book coming out called “Don’t Be Such a Scientist: Talking Substance in an Age of Style” which could potentially be a useful addition to that discussion. There is a nice post over at Chris Mooney’s blog here, though read Bob Grumbine’s comments as well. (For those of you unfamiliar the Bob’s name, he was one of the stalwarts of the Usenet sci.environment discussions back in the ‘old’ days, along with Michael Tobis, Eli Rabett and our own William Connolley. He too has his own blog now).
All of this is really just an introduction to these questions: What is it that you feel needs more explaining? What interesting bits of the science would you like to know more about? Is there really anything new under the contrarian sun that needs addressing? Let us know in the comments and we’ll take a look. Thanks.
Re 533 – thanks for that info (transportation land use).
Re 530 – I really don’t think desert ecosystems sequester much CO2, but I would agree with the overall point that providing either more or less water to a region will change the ecosystem, not protect it.
Re 538 – Prickly Pear have beautiful flowers. Although I’ve come to realize those actually grow far and wide well beyond the desert, but then there’s also the Saguaro cacti. Yucca, century plant, agave (now I’m just listing plant names I know – is agave the same as a century plant? I have no clue).
Re 534 – “Or are you arguing that a lack of life (aka sand dunes) is incredibly important to maintain in the fullest?”, Re 527,530,536,
Even a seemingly lifeless landscape has at least scenic beauty. Different landscapes and ecosystems have different values in different and multiple ways (natural pest control and pollination, water processing, flood control, climate regulation, a genetic library resource, source of knowledge and heritage, aesthetics, psychological health, financial investments, production/maintence of material and energy resources including food and shelter and space for those things, etc.). different uses affect the different sources of value in different places differently.
My earlier point about improving value of unused land via water runoff pertained more to agricultural land. Of course, with climate change, it could pertain to natural ecosystems to the extent that it counteracts a drying trend.
And yes, some water may actually be used by solar power plants. Except maybe for thermal electric generation, though, I think it’s quite a bit less than is used by coal and nuclear power, and a smaller fraction is actually lost by evaporation (?). Probably the best power for lack of water needs is wind power – or anything in the ocean, since it then becomes a moot point.
An increase in vegetation in some areas greater than the loss at ths solar power plant would have a climatic effect, tending to increase cumulus convection by reduced albedo. Some types of solar power plants could cause localized cooling that might enhance the solar resource if it tends to decrease cloud cover above (most effective for an overhead sun, or for solar power plants aligned in the direction of the shadow the sun would cast – north-to-south lines might be best since the solar resource is greatest at ‘local noon’, generally). Simply moving the precipitation from one area to another would not increase the overall evaporation from the two areas, and trapping moisture within the solar power plant by reduced evaporation would not increase the humidity level of the air above the devices.
Ray Ladbury Says (19 June 2009 at 6:55 AM):
“You have obviously never been to Eastern KY or WV. Recovery after mountain-top removal is on geologic timescales.”
In fact I have, though not for some years. But I do live where mining was and is common (do a search on “Comstock Lode”, for instance) so I can look at any number of abandoned mines & tailings piles, and see that life is reclaiming them. Even here, where lack of water limits growth rates, recovery is on the order of centuries.
(And of course I’m not talking about recovery being “hey, there’s a mountain there again”, but “that flat place where there used to be a mountain now has grass & trees on it”.)
“The fact of the matter is that if we are to have a sustainable economy, it cannot be based on oil, or natural gas or coal or nuclear. Consumption has consequences.”
Screw the economy :-) The fact of the matter is that current population levels simply aren’t sustainable, period. The problem isn’t how to sustain an economy based on those energy sources, it’s how to use them to transition to something that is sustainable.
On PDO and chaos vs. stability in weather patterns:
Let’s say we have something called the ASO, the “Atlantic Seasonal Oscillation”, which drives yearly variation in sea surface temperatures and wind patterns. This mechanism of this oscillation is based on Earth’s tilt and the progression around the sun – very clear.
Within this oscillation, let’s create the AWO “Atlantic Weekly Oscillation”, which, during parts of the year, generates easterly waves on a roughly weekly basis. This is due to atmospheric features over the Sahara desert, which generate ~60 waves per year. The physical mechanism driving these weekly oscillations is nowhere near as regular as the moon’s orbit, and thus they are not referred to as oscillations – and there is no solid connection between the number of easterly waves per year and the number of hurricanes per year. (Consider the problem of predicting how many acorn seeds will grow into trees, assuming a constant rate of acorn production – the acorn oscillator).
Now, let’s look at other oscillations, and ask if we can find the oscillatory mechanism – for example, in El Nino, is the water just sloshing back and forth on a time period of 2-7 years? What drives that? In other words, where is the oscillator? One likely overall candidate is the tropical ocean heat content, and strong La Ninas after big El Ninos could be some evidence for a kind of bounce effect.
Here is the picture to keep in mind, anyway which is the average surface heat flux for the world ocean:
http://oceanworld.tamu.edu/resources/ocng_textbook/chapter05/Images/Fig5-10B.htm
The cool blue along the western edges of North & South America and across the equator are due to wind-driven upwelling of deeper waters.
One possibility is that global warming essentially overwhelms the upwelling for good, leading to a permanent El Nino state across the region. That might have been what the climate was like 4 million years ago, which could be a likely long-term equilibrium state under the current climate trajectory.
Another is that winds will intensify and drive more vigorous upwelling, bringing up more cold water and perhaps resulting in an enhanced El Nino/La Nina cycle, with wider swings – and that was why the 1997-1998 El Nino was so powerful. This might be a transient effect – the heat has been turned up, but we’re not yet at full boil.
In any case, there isn’t much doubt that ENSO is the best understood “ocean oscillation system”, and the driving force is definitely not a moon-earth type oscillation.
When it comes to others, like the AMO and the PDO, ‘spurious’ comes to mind. Where is the multidecadal oscillator?
[Response: Did you really not read any of my response to your previous posting? Or any of the links I provided to several peer-reviewed modeling studies that discuss in some detail the multidecadal oscillatory mechanisms behind the AMO? Please do not continue to post on points that we have already addressed. It is most definitely not appreciated. -mike]
And why would anyone think that a slow-moving weak phenomenon like the PDO, if it even exists, could “damp” a much stronger and faster-moving equator-generated phenomenon like El Nino? Similar arguments apply to ‘cycles of droughts’ recorded in lake bed sediments – and chaotic phenomena can generate apparently periodic behavior (are hurricanes periodic? How about 100-year storms, 500-year floods, etc?).
The PDO in particular is odd – it must involve the Kuroshio current and the North Pacific gyre, but how? (similar issues arise with respect to Atlantic MO claims).
Nevertheless, we have this media broadcast from Bill Patzert at NASA/JPL – “Today, a Godzilla Niño is a long shot. Today’s Niño Pequena will be fighting a stong negative phase of the Pacific Decadal Oscillation, which tends to damp Los Ninos.”
Really? Just like the AMO controls hurricane formation, and La Nina controls global drought… cycles within cycles, didn’t you read your Laplace?
However, teleconnections seem to go in the opposite direction – and the deterministic gearing seems to be missing a lot of teeth:
The Atmospheric Bridge: The Influence of ENSO Teleconnections on Air–Sea Interaction over the Global Oceans (pdf Alexander et al. 2002)
For current ENSO conditions, and to track the developing? El Nino:
http://www.bom.gov.au/climate/enso/
Actually there’s been quite an interesting controversy brewing over desert C dynamics the last few years, especially the last year, when a couple of papers came out describing high sink rates in the Mojave and in western China. That garnered a Science (320:1409-) news story, and then a couple months ago, William Schlesinger, a leader in biogeochemistry going back 30 years, weighed in with the rationale of his strong doubts in a brief Global Change Biology article. He lays the blame primarily with faulty eddy covariance measurement techniques:
“Although it is possible that substantial uptake could have occurred during the 3-year period reported in these studies, the absence of changes in carbon storage in the ecosystem would presume that equally large losses are occurring (Chapin et al., 2006). However, the mechanisms for such loss are not obvious. Thus, we question the net uptake reported from these gas exchange studies in the Mojave Desert.
For largely the same reasons, uptake reported by Xie et al. (2008) from an experimental study of saline and alkaline desert soils in western China – amounting to 62–622 g C m−2 yr−1– is even more problematic. The higher value exceeds net ecosystem production of highly productive coniferous plantations in the southeastern United States (Galang et al., 2007) and is orders of magnitude greater than net accumulations in soil carbonates of desert ecosystems worldwide. The field studies in China indicate that the uptake is the result of abiotic processes, most easily observed at night. Dissolution of carbonate minerals could account for the night-time uptake, but would render night-time values invalid for extrapolating to diurnal rates of uptake. In addition, such uptake would not occur in dry soils; thus, the extrapolated amounts are likely much too high. Carbon dioxide associated with carbonate dissolution accounted for an uptake of 2.1 to 7.4 g C m−2 yr−1 in a semi-arid, Russian cold steppe ecosystem (Lapensis et al., 2008)
Gas exchange studies of net ecosystem production in some forests agree closely with harvest measurements of carbon uptake (Oren et al., 2006). The large estimated fluxes of carbon uptake in deserts are intriguing, but these fluxes should produce obvious and related changes in the storage of carbon over relatively short periods of time. These studies of desert ecosystems show that even the most sophisticated modern techniques occasionally need validation by the use of a shovel and a pair of pruning shears.”
Schlesinger, W.H. et al. (2009). On carbon sequestration in desert ecosystems. Global Change Biol. 15:1488-
James, 552, then why the big push for nuclear power?
If the answer is to reduce power (and I agree: and that reduction DOES NOT have to mean reduction in standard of living, Alistair, especially if it turns up because we want it, rather than we have to adjust), then building new nuclear power stations is a waste of time, money, effort and resources.
Patrick, 551: “Even a seemingly lifeless landscape has at least scenic beauty. Different landscapes and ecosystems have different values in different and multiple ways”
Aye, and I never said anything different.
A dessert can be gorgeous.
[Response: I agree, especially a nice chocolate tart with colorful berries and whipped cream on top, with a raspberry ganache. -mike]
However, it cannot be considered an abundant biosphere. There’s a lot more out there than you’d expect when watching “Lawrence of Arabia”, but that abundance does not make.
James 550: “And so? Ever try to grow dryland plants where it’s too wet for them? They drown. Plants & animals evolve to suit their environment. Move them to a different environment, and they usually don’t prosper, if they survive at all.”
Well, yes.
But the greater hardship for all life is the lack of water, not the excess of it. Heck, life can live without ANYTHING from the sun. I don’t know yet of any lifeform that doesn’t need H2O. Do you?
So would a rainforest be abundant and a dessert not?
Or if you insist on calling a dessert abundant, what would you leave to describe a rainforest? “Massively overgrown seething mess of biologic processes seething in their own slime”?
[Response: Okay, now stop all of this discussion of dessert. Its late on a friday afternoon, and I’m really starting to get hungry now. Well, until you mentioned the slime – that sort of put a damper on the whole thing. -mike]
re 546. Yup, they get their water from what they eat.
This is not “doing without water”. Many dessert lizards do so and to a much greater utility. PS isn’t that the one that has the bushy breast and dips it in water to take back to the nest?
[Response: Dessert lizards??? Now that’s just plain disgusting. -mike]
re 547, Uh, The Antartic is a dessert. Yet there’s plenty of water there. If it were all to move out of the area and melt, isn’t it about 10-20 metres sea level rise? That’s a lotta water.
[Response: Antarctic a dessert? Not sure about that. But “Baked Alaska”–now, that is a dessert! -mike]
And isn’t there a place in Peru that has never rained in 20 years? However, a wet ocean sea breeze brings water in and it causes fog, so has a better (much better) water availability than the land just a little bit further inland.
Rainfall != water availability
(rather like weather != climate)
Re: “[Response: Dessert lizards??? Now that’s just plain disgusting. -mike]”
Yeah, lizard should be for the main course :-)
541 dhogaza, I own 160 acres outside of Alamosa, Colorado. Lots of sage, some cacti, a few wildflowers. Nothing over about 2′ high. There is little biodiversity – what lives on my 160 acres also lives on the zillions of acres surrounding my land, and there is no real threat to any species which exists there (other than climate change). Adding solar systems would just add to the mix. There’s plenty of space.
To all – The amount of life in a desert varies depending on which desert you’re talking about. The key is water. Solar power systems concentrate water, and also bring deep groundwater to the surface for the purpose of cleaning and whatnot. Yep, leaving pristine environments intact as much as is practical is a grand idea. Fortunately, it is EASY. There are zillions and zillions of pristine acres out there. The typical desert human encroachment is minimal. I have 160 acres. Perhaps 1 acre is disturbed. Most of my neighbors have 0 acres disturbed. Somebody putting in a solar concentrating power plant to power Alamosa would buy a SMALL plot of land (out there, 160 acres is dinky) and the environment wouldn’t notice the change – other than the water table and water availability would rise in the surrounding land. The whole argument about saving desert land from power stations is so stupid as to be laughable. Grazing, mining, road-building, just about any human activity is orders of magnitude more destructive than a solar power plant, especially since the solar power plant gives life to the land around it. Remember, power stations are sited to be as close as possible to human habitation, so pristine lands aren’t even on the list of potential sites. Instead, a few 160 acre homesites will be bought near a town. There is NO risk and NO issue here. It’s all a fake issue.
Mark Says (19 June 2009 at 3:16 PM):
“James, 552, then why the big push for nuclear power?”
Because there are some six billion people on the planet. Unless you’re into mass murder, reducing the population to a sustainable level has to be done by reducing the birth rate, and that takes time. So the question becomes one of how to provide for the existing population while destroying/degrading the least possible amount of ecosystem. Look at the available (proven) options, and it appears that a significant share of nuclear does the best job, and costs little or nothing more than other possibilities when storage &c are taken into account.
Unlike some, I’m not at all religious about the power choice. Show me another option that a) works, b) has the same or lesser effects on ecosystems, and c) isn’t so much more expensive as to be impractical, and I’ll be all over it.
Mark Says (19 June 2009 at 3:23 PM):
“Or if you insist on calling a dessert abundant, what would you leave to describe a rainforest?”
Too hot & humid for comfort? Or in the case of e.g. the Pacific Northwest, or the west of Ireland, just sopping wet :-)
But really, abundance or the lack of it isn’t the issue here. The plain fact is that what you think are barren deserts do indeed have plenty of life, which survives quite well on its own terms, and adds its not-insignificant contribution to the global ecosystem.
561 James. Crapola. You said that full-scale nuclear war was a reasonable option compared to the utilization of 2% of desert lands for human use. The sooner you retract that abhorrent stance the sooner you will gain a wisp of credibility.
How are the sage grouse and burrowing owls doing on your land? Done a survey recently? Find any?
Got any cheatgrass on your land? Peppergrass? Crested wheatgrass?
How long has it been grazed with fire suppression and why do you think you’ve described an increasingly rare intact semi-arid ecosystem?
In the sense of consuming water, yes, species can and do. Brewer’s sparrow is able survive on air-dried grain, solely on metabolic water (this is not the only species, I find it interesting because a) I bet you’ve never seen one nor heard of it and b) most are surprised to learn that the species that is likely the most abundant in the United States is one that they’ve not heard of and is able to live without consuming water).
Obviously deserts have lower biodiversity and lower carry capacity than tropical ecosystems. Building strawmen must fun.
That does not, however, mean that your characterization of desert ecosystems being analogous to a person shot with ten arrows is correct.
Please, though, stop with the dessert ecosystems biodiversity stuff. The lower the (living) biodiversity in my food, the better.
ReCaptcha: gelded sister? that’s not even possible!
Since some above equate sand dunes with deserts …
How much rainfall does this desert get?
This one?
#531, Alastair, Gavin is usually always right on the science, enough to garnish my greatest respect beyond his astonishing time he dedicates for this blog. He was humble enough to admit that they didn’t see coming the great Arctic ocean Ice melt of 07. The ice as you mentioned is key, and I only fault RC for not placing it as a hot topic especially from now on, because this is the Achilles heel of the contrarians,
and Arctic Ocean ice should be in the minds of every one studying AGW, there is no need to be alarmist, the ice disappearing is alarming enough…. But many don’t understand its implications as you do, so please RC bring back Arctic Ocean sea ice topic, its time to describe why the models have failed predicting it, and especially to bring the most important present symptom of AGW (aside from Ocean acidification) always on the front page…
“Sudden Collapse In Ancient Biodiversity: Was Global Warming The Culprit?”:
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/06/090618161150.htm
Take heed.
Because
“New Report Says World Is Warming Faster than Thought”:
http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,631262,00.html
“but oh my desert yours is the only death I cannot bear.” —Richard Shelton
OK, I have to confess to being a bit of a desert rat. Some of my best times have been spent in places that actively try to kill you–Arches, Canyonlands, and I’ll confess to coveting RichardC’s land near Alamosa. In my opinion, anything that can survive on only 5 inches of rain a year is deserving of respect. Deserts are beautiful and fragile, and they can teach us a lot. They need to be preserved and protected. That said solar energy plants have to go somewhere, and if you think going to nuclear will save the deserts, you obviously haven’t read up much on Yucky Mountain. Where do you think they’ll store nuclear waste? I’ll give you a hint: it won’t be Manhattan or Washington, DC.
The fact of the matter is that we have to have a new energy infrastructure, and there won’t be any perfect solutions. However, regardless of the energy solutions we choose, we can either do this in a way that minimizes damage to the ecosystems around us, or we can exhibit the sort of idiocy that has characterized our species over recorded history. I don’t think we can avoid building solar generating stations in the desert. I also don’t think that means we have to destroy the desert.
Re Ike on XOs: see:
https://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2009/03/with-all-due-respect/langswitch_lang/fa#comment-116260
and
https://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2009/03/with-all-due-respect/langswitch_lang/fa#comment-116325
554 (Jim Bouldin) – very interesting. (James, I wanted to look at the websites on C uptake you mentioned, but neither seemed to be working at the time.)
On that topic, tropical rainforests do not sequester all that much C once mature. I think wetlands tend to do the most sequestering of the land ecosystems, so far as I know. Although prairies do build up a hefty mass of soil.
Re 560 RichardC – it is not necessary for any human to have every stepped foot in a place to leave a mark. Not that I know of any specific cases in the desert, but an intrusive non-native species need only be introduced onto a connected area. (Not exactly far flung from direct human actions, but I have read that cattle may have changed grasslands in semiarid portions of the U.S. into shrublands (?) simply by the compaction of the land under their hooves.) (And then there’s feral horses. But feral horses are only a more recent version of our ‘native’ bison, which themselves, as I recall from reading, crossed the landbridge from Asia, replacing some megafauna that used to fill the same niche. Horses really came from the Americas, they’ve just come back home. But then, ecosystems evolve over the intervening time. “Jurassic Park” – Let’s not bring back the dinosaurs just yet. :) ) Salmon bring nutrients from the sea back to the land via getting eaten by bears – reverse erosion. Runoff from one area affects another. Albedo in one area affects the climate of another. I won’t see the tundra swans in the midwest if their breeding grounds up in Canada (I presume) are destroyed. Etc. (and not to imply that you are not aware of these sorts of issues – I just thought it deserved a mention).
Re 566 dhogaza:
“Obviously deserts have lower biodiversity and lower carry capacity than tropical ecosystems.”
YES!
Re Mark
“However, it cannot be considered an abundant biosphere.”
Yes, and I never said otherwise as well.
Good point about that part of coastal Atacama. I saw that in the program “Planet Earth”. I think part of the Namib desert is also a ‘fog desert’ (or ‘cloud desert’ (?)). What is interesting is that … I’m not sure, but I think the plants act to collect moisture from the air when it otherwise would not have been collected by the ground – so it is distinct in a way not only from rain/mist/snow but also dew and frost.
I’m not so sure about the classification of Antarctica as a desert, though. While the precipitation is meager, so is evaporation, and I’m not sure but in some definitions having a wet or icy surface exposed to air more often then not would disqualify one from desert status – (?).
Complete Antarctic thaw would raise sea level 10-20 meters multiple times.
——-
My over point being:
Yes, we affect the ecosystem when we put solar power plants in the desert. The effect is not just on the area occupied, or even just on the area where any runoff from the plant would go. But, if we use the least unique areas (by whatever combination of valued dimensions), or try to pick out any already degraded areas, and leave migration routes mostly connected, etc, we can minimize the ecological losses and the land area costs. And it seems worth it to me to do so to save quantities and qualities of water resources and ecosystems, included ecosystems we’ve created (croplands, infrastructure, etc), by reducing climage change to come.
There were horses and camelids, also giant ground sloths, in North America before 12,900 years ago. By the way, horses are not closely related to bison.
[reCAPTCHA gets it with “1867 runaways”]
RichardC Says (19 June 2009 at 4:16 PM):
“561 James. Crapola. You said that full-scale nuclear war was a reasonable option compared to the utilization of 2% of desert lands for human use. The sooner you retract that abhorrent stance the sooner you will gain a wisp of credibility.”
Such a stereotypical reaction: when confronted by evidence that you’re wrong, try to change the subject :-)
But I’ll bite, though this is yet more evidence that some few people here really, really need to work on reading comprehension :-) But let’s start with the parable about the camel’s nose: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Camel's_nose You want to say that it’s perfectly fine to cover up 2% of the land (though that’s a considerable underestimate of the actual area), in a way that kills off the underlying ecosystem. There’s your camel’s nose.
Now with the power supply problem “solved”, what happens? The population and the demand for power increases, and guess what? 2% just isn’t enough any more, now you need 4%. (Here comes the neck.) And after a few years, it’s 8% (the front legs), then 16% (the torso)… And how long is it before the whole camel’s in the tent, before solar panels cover everything that isn’t factory farm or city?
Though of course this point is never actually reached, because at some point before that the ongoing whittling away of the ecosystem will cause total collapse, and most of the human race will be condemned to slow starvation at best.
So yes, I think a small to medium scale nuclear war (one small enough to avoid a “nuclear winter” scenario) would be preferrable to this, just as I’d prefer to be shot than starved to death.
Same with wind power. Those who claim we can ignore siting issues because there are no siting issues because they don’t harm ecosystems are just being blind in the same way every other natural resources exploitation industry has been blind.
Ray Ladbury Says (19 June 2009 at 8:47 PM):
“…if you think going to nuclear will save the deserts, you obviously haven’t read up much on Yucky Mountain. Where do you think they’ll store nuclear waste?”
Underground? Which in fact Yucca Mountain does. Now I think that a lot of really dumb decisions went into its design, first and foremost being the decision to store once-through “waste” rather than reprocessing it, but the affected surface area is quite a bit less than would be covered by those solar plants.
“The fact of the matter is that we have to have a new energy infrastructure, and there won’t be any perfect solutions. However, regardless of the energy solutions we choose, we can either do this in a way that minimizes damage to the ecosystems around us, or we can exhibit the sort of idiocy that has characterized our species over recorded history.”
Which is pretty much what I’ve been trying to say. And I think if you look at the options without the “Omigawd, it’s radioactive!” factor, you have to come up with an answer close to mine.
“I don’t think we can avoid building solar generating stations in the desert. I also don’t think that means we have to destroy the desert.”
Which is fine, once someone invents a magic new technology that lets us do that. But I don’t see how it would work. Maybe put the solar panels on giant helium balloons (or hot air – good use for all that waste heat) and float them up to the stratosphere.
Humm… Just how thin can a thin-film PV cell be made? Or maybe mirror-surfaced balloons, reflecting on to a central solar thermal generator… Quick, somebody call my patent attorney!
Yes, exactly.
But if people are convinced that there aren’t unique systems in the desert, that degraded areas are “pristine”, and that migration routes aren’t important, then siting criteria will be based simply on what’s most convenient for industry. Just as we blow the tops of mountains and dump the spoils in valleys, obliterating streams and small rivers, because it’s most convenient for industry. Or just as we used to let heap-leach cyanide gold mines ignore leakage issues because it was most convenient for industry.
Do people really want the solar and wind power industries to act with the same lack of consideration for natural resources values as traditional energy companies have done?
Dear Gavin,
Just try to imagine what it would be like for us, the ones who really want good information, science, and a grounding in the real world, if Real Climate did not exist.
You all are irreplaceable.
Dessert in a desert, a delectable delight, wouldst though favor the flavor of a dreamy dusty diet, or the freezing dry of ice, to the heat of Mojave’s midday might.
“What interesting bits of the science would you like to know more about? Is there really anything new under the contrarian sun that needs addressing?”
I’m not sure that it is that new , but I would like to see some sort of explanation as to why the relationship between temperature and CO2 concentrations should be logarithmic. It cannot be logarithmic at very low concentrations; at zero concentration, the nonsensical answer of “-infinity” is the outcome.
The simple answer, I would guess, is that the relationship changes (morphs) from a linear to a logarithmic one. But this explanation isn’t very satisfactory. What determines when the change over occurs?
I hate to mention the name of Motl but his suggestion of a reducing exponential relationship does have some merit. He’s clearly fiddled the constants in his original suggested equation, but if they were made a little more realsitic a curve showing 3 degs of warming from 2x Co2 looks pretty reasonable.
http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3380/3582363543_ee6a6872d4_o.png
Of course it can well be argued that no simple equation can be truly representative of the real relationship, over all concentrations, but the contrarians have latched on to the logarithmic relationship to produce all kinds of improbable curves. Isn’t it time to make a little more of the linear relationaship at lower concentrations?
Patrick (#572) Fair enough, you didn’t say abundant but so many had before you and it looked to me like you were winding up toward that statement too, so I figured it had better be headed off at the pass.
And the rest of the entry is fine.
Ta.
Re 567, dhagoza, all that repeating of straw is getting tiresome.
a) you don’t get dessert in a place with 10 inches of rain a month
b) you still haven’t proven or even flipping answered the “are desserts abundant” query.
I haven’t even bothered clicking the links because you aren’t answering the question so the links you put aren’t going to either.
” However, it cannot be considered an abundant biosphere.
Obviously deserts have lower biodiversity and lower carry capacity than tropical ecosystems. Building strawmen must fun.”
Good. You agree. Finally.
In 544: you make the strawman I have been trying to beat up, so either you’re agreeing with you making it up or you have your rectal regions mixed with your elbow.
> The baking of the soils in a desert negates any sequestering. Deserts are “life on the edge”.
>
>Praise be to God that I’m surviving life on the edge.
>
>There’s a nice bit of ecological ignorance being demonstrated on this thread
Only by you.
“life on the edge”. In what way, when talking about desserts is this wrong?
As I said right at the beginning, there’s a lot of pompous wanger-waving going on with some who are overly impressed with their education and rather narrow minded when it comes to the phraseologies that people less educated in a narrow sphere.
So, now that you agree there is a lot less life in the dessert than in the rainforest, please, instead of being a pompous ass, say why “desserts are life on the edge” is so wrong and deserving of scorn.
This is not “doing without water”. Many dessert lizards do so and to a much greater utility. PS isn’t that the one that has the bushy breast and dips it in water to take back to the nest?
[Response: Dessert lizards??? Now that’s just plain disgusting. -mike]
Well, that very nearly WAS a genuine LOL! I snorted a bit and *nearly* laughed.
Yeah, so the grammar made sense in my head (where time is a relative concept) but when boring old consequential linear time got in (when typing it out, darn keyboard) it IS rather fractured.
PS my grief with dag was his snooty nosed “You’re so dumb” comment. Heck, even if it was to RodB at his worst, I’d be telling him off. If he’d expanded and, say, tried to EDUCATE, maybe the snoot would have had some use, but plain old snooty doesn’t help anyone.
[Response: Okay, now stop all of this discussion of dessert. Its late on a friday afternoon, and I’m really starting to get hungry now. Well, until you mentioned the slime – that sort of put a damper on the whole thing. -mike]
Problem is geting used to the wavy red underline not appearing when you write dessert and wanted desert. And double ss’s aren’t easy to spot when you’re the one writing the sentence, since you read the sentence not the words. Unless you’re reading it anew.
564 dhogaza asks, “How are the sage grouse and burrowing owls doing on your land? Done a survey recently? Find any?
Got any cheatgrass on your land? Peppergrass? Crested wheatgrass?
How long has it been grazed with fire suppression and why do you think you’ve described an increasingly rare intact semi-arid ecosystem?”
I can tell you that the mosquitos are doing fine :-). The San Luis Valley is a fairly unique biosphere – almost no rain but no lack of water. It used to be an alpine lake, then a swamp, and now a desert – the water is all artesian. (The San Luis is the source for the Rio Grande) A couple of my neighbors have 4″ wells (but no houses) that spew like firehoses. (ergo the mosquitos!) Most of the farms use flood irrigation. I’ve no idea the last time there was a fire. The sage oil sure burns and the wind blows, but there isn’t a source of ignition. They call the San Luis the land of cool sunshine. LOTS of sun, LOTS of wind, and friggin cold in the winter.
You ask why I think it’s increasingly rare – well, my point is the opposite. Desert lands have such a low human population as to be mostly unspoiled even where people live. Small towns here and there and just outside town 160+ acres per lot with most lots totally empty doesn’t make for rare. My point is that there is plenty of desert to spare. A few percent for power production would just add to the diversity.
Ray Ladbury: “… if you think going to nuclear will save the deserts, you obviously haven’t read up much on Yucky Mountain.”
Or uranium mining.
But I’m sure that James will enlighten us about how massively expanded uranium mining in areas like, for example, the immediate vicinity of the Grand Canyon, will be a “net improvement”. Even better than Chernobyl.
Just like the lush forests that he imagines are growing on Appalachian mountaintops obliterated by coal mining (above the streams and watersheds buried under toxic waste).
And he’ll explain how either of those options — or even a nuclear war — is preferable to putting solar thermal power plants on one percent of the USA’s deserts.
And he will of course refuse to even address proposals to provide most of the USA’s electricity from CSP power plants on one or two percent of the USA’s deserts, and instead start raving about the horror of covering the entire continent with an endless sea of solar panels.
I’m really trying to avoid the “groundhog day” syndrome by not responding to James’s silliness, but sometimes …
Dhog, got a blog somewhere to talk about cheatgrass and medusahead? Pointer welcome.
“I’m not sure that it is that new , but I would like to see some sort of explanation as to why the relationship between temperature and CO2 concentrations should be logarithmic.”
Not the accurate answer, but think of lagging on a hot water pipe.
Double the thickness can not remove as much as the first lagging thickness you put on, can it? If, for example, you put on enough to halve the loss, putting the same amount on won’t do the same power rate loss, else it would be a perfect insulator.
So you can see that insulation will not be a linear change in power retained for a linear increase in lagging.
Now given that, what do YOU think it will be?
To get to the more accurate answer, what is your education and what is your level of expertise.
And to make sure answering you is worth any effort whatsoever, answer the following:
1) Why do you want to know
2) Will you read it
3) What do you expect to know that you did not before
Mark Says (20 June 2009 at 4:34 AM):
“a) you don’t get dessert in a place with 10 inches of rain a month”
Though I haven’t checked the actual rainfall figures, I’ve never had trouble ordering dessert in Seattle…
“b) you still haven’t proven or even flipping answered the “are desserts abundant” query.”
Sheesh, just read the flippin’ menu!
“I haven’t even bothered clicking the links…”
Explains a lot, that does :-)
But what does the “abundance” (whatever you mean by that) of deserts, or lack thereof, have to do with anything? They are as they are, and (like any ecosystem) are better left that way than when scraped bare and treated with herbicides.
“I hate to mention the name of Motl but his suggestion of a reducing exponential relationship does have some merit.”
Um, isn’t a reducing exponential relationship merely a polynomial fit???
The reason why you fit an exponential fit is if the new value change depends only on the previous value.
E.g. each number is the double of the earlier number.
1
2
4
8
…
Like, for example, the extinction of light through an opaque but homogeneous medium.
But you wouldn’t use an exponential fit for, for example, the tangent of a value as the value increases.
Etc.
This is totally false, and your own post declares it:
Right. Flood irrigated farms represent a pristine, untouched desert ecology.
Don’t get me wrong, flood irrigation hay farming provides abundant habitat for a great diversity of birds such as sandhill cranes, willet, avocet, black-necked stilt, yellow-headed and red-winged blackbirds, bobolink, phaloropes, and many more.
I suspect many of these species are familiar to your neighbors managing those flood-irrigated fields.
None of those are considered desert-adapted species, though (one of my photos above was of a flood-irrigated field in the SE Oregon corner of the Great Basin, perhaps 10 inches of rain a year, yet supporting a great diversity of wetland life due to the reliable spring flow of water from snow up in mountains a few tens of miles away).
These are wetland ecologies which happen to be located within a geographically arid or semi-arid region of the country.
This is extremely untrue. Sheep and cattle grazing, along with introduced pest plant species introduced both deliberately and unintentionally, have greatly altered most of our (US) arid and semi-arid lands. This is not a controversial point for anyone who’s done any biological field work in the West.
Where it might be said to be true would be the extreme arid (5″ or less, typically, in our western states) salt pans, sand dunes (those not trashed by ATVs), etc which have never supported enough vegetation of a variety palatable to even sheep.
If you want to build your solar plant on top of Bonneville Speedway, hey, ecologically you’re not going to hear much of an argument. The salt flats are about as barren of life as it gets, biology types have no particular interest in maintaining race car and motorcycle ecologies, and if there’s an expensive solar installation there perhaps the State of Utah and feds might be motivated to get off their ass and force the potash mines and highway people (Interstate 80) to alter their water management to quite eroding the salt flats (which have lost something like 2/3 of their depth in the last few decades).
And, I see you never actually answered my question but responded by talking about flood irrigated lands nearby.
So, how are the burrowing owls on your land and the neighboring sage-steppe (not flood-irrigated hay fields)? Doing well? If not, why not? Because your 160 acres are pristine sage-steppe habitat? Got cheatgrass? Peppergrass? How are the jackrabbits? Badger? Ferruginous hawks?
Ever done a biologically survey of your land to see if claims to its representing pristine desert habitat is actually true or not?
So much for the pristine San Luis Valley:
And my first question was how long has fire been suppressed and how long has it been grazed. I asked that knowing nothing about the San Luis Valley because any place in the semi-arid west where there’s water, there have been cattle, historically as many as the ranchers could pack on until the Taylor Act, and afterwards not much less until federal conservation laws began to take hold in the 70s and be more strongly enforced in the decades after.
The claim that there are huge swaths of land in the arid and semi-arid portions of the west that are largely untouched by human impact is simply false.
What this actually means of course is that there are millions of acres of heavily-impacted land available for solar power and really no reason to place them in those areas which have been relatively lightly touched. The Mojave? There’s plenty of military land that was chewed up extensively by tanks during training for the north african invasion in 1942 that’s probably still pretty much messed up. Why pick sensitive areas other than the fact that 1) they’re closer to LA 2) public land, no acquisition costs 3) most people – including many here – believe that they’re ecologically useless.
And why do I ask RichardC about sage grouse (specifically Gunnison Sage Grouse, split as a separate species based on DNA studies not long ago)?
Again, so much for the pristine, unaltered, lightly-touched sage steppe habitat with the San Luis Valley.
BTW sage steppe used to be characterized as having a fairly decent amount of bunchgrass with much less sage and prickly pear and the like that RichardC accepts as being the norm there.
I’m not personally familiar with the San Luis Valley, but the reason why cattle ranchers were attracted to the Great Basin sage steppe habitat was because of an ABUNDANCE OF GRASS. Not an abundance of sagebrush (cattle don’t eat it, why would sage/greasewood/winterfat/etc alone attract cattle ranchers when they don’t eat it?). Great Basin Rye grows well in excess of six feet in good habitat, though it’s generally less impressive where there’s less water. Carrying capacity of cows in sage steppe in the Great Basin today is much lower than in the late 1880s. Thus efforts in the 1960s (mostly) to restore creativity by using anchor chain dragged between two tractors to uproot sage, greasewood and other plants (in pre-ranch years removed fairly frequently by fire), followed by the planting of crested wheatgrass from the steppes of eurasia (which is far more grazing tolerant than the native bunchgrasses).
This is what one piece of sage steppe, with some encroaching juniper, looks like ten years after fire
The sage hasn’t returned though you can see how densely it covers the ground in the background where it did not burn.
The original landscape looked a bit like a blend of the two, plenty of grass with interspersed woody shrubs such as sage. But the juniper would’ve been an anomaly because they were largely restricted to ridgelines and lee slopes (of prevailing winds) where they were protected from burns (some being very well protected, juniper of 1,000 years in age have been bored on Steens Mountain, Oregon).
Anyway … let’s site our solar power plants with care and some respect for those ecosystems which will be damaged to some extent by their development. Plenty of trashed land out there, after all.
“restore creativity” -> restore productivity (i.e. grass for cattle) :)
[duplicate]
Patrick (572) says:On that topic, tropical rainforests do not sequester all that much C once mature.
The idea that old growth forests, tropical or otherwise, are carbon neutral is a hypothesis advanced by Eugene Odum 40 years ago on the basis of data from a single site over a limited time. Certainly at some point, forests must be carbon neutral–they cannot accumulate without limit–for a given environmental envelope. But in the last decade there have been a couple of papers showing that this limit appears not to have been reached.
Most directly relevant was the paper in Nature earlier this year by Lewis et al (Nature 457:1003-; “Increasing carbon storage in intact African tropical forests”). They demonstrated that in equatorial, undisturbed African forests, above-ground carbon was accumulating at an average rate of just under 2/3 of a metric ton per ha per yr (0.63 Mg C ha-1 yr-1), over a 40 year span. Including the American and Asian tropics, they estimated a tropics-wide mean rate of about a half metric ton per ha per yr. The mechanism for these increases is uncertain, but most likely represents either atmospheric and/or climatic enhancement rather than long term response to disturbance.
I think wetlands tend to do the most sequestering of the land ecosystems, so far as I know. Although prairies do build up a hefty mass of soil.
You are confusing sequestration with productivity there. The latter refers to carbon that is permanent over some defined time frame, whereas productivity does not (same as the distinction between NPP and NEP). Wetlands have high productivity (NPP) but, with the exception of swamp forests, do not generally accumulate a lot of biomass (low NEP), because their predominantly herbaceous vegetation is quickly lost via mortality and ecosystem respiration. The sequestered part is the partially decomposed plant matter and CH4 at the bottom. Prairie soils can accumulate high soil carbon stocks, but the above-ground C is small and the total doesn’t compare with forest C.
above, should be: “The former refers to carbon that is permanent…”
further to 596: one of the causes of the Savannah being grassland when the vegetation is trying to settle trees in there is the elephant.
But we don’t kill off all the elephants to get it “pristine”.
Yes, we SHOULD be careful of any change we make in sorting out our energy needs, but it’s “careful” not “paranoid” like some would like to say (you don’t seem to be saying this).
And our energy needs should be reduced. There’s a lot of waste that goes on.