Black snow: just as ugly and dangerous as black ice

 

If you’ve ever walked across asphalt on a hot August day, you can imagine how a mountain covered in dirty snow feels.  Scientists in the western U.S. looked at how fast snow melts when covered in soot from fossil fuel burning plants and diesel engines. They found that the soot accelerates snowmelt by over one degree Fahrenheit by absorbing more sunlight than white snow, according to a report from the Department of Energy.

This news may upset the snow bunnies, but it may be even more devastating for wildlife and those residing in the valleys dependent on stream and river flows for farming, drinking water, and habitat.  In a Darwinian twist, the residents of water starved areas may have created the pollution that will ultimately reduce their own water supply.  Unfortunately this may also affect time-sensitive stream fish and invertebrates dependent on nutrients and water fluctuations as snow melts.

Increased temperatures from climate change coupled with faster snow melt may lead to bald mountains across the U.S. Reductions in particulate pollution may be on Obama’s plate, but only time will tell us how well these ecosystems survive change.

science is back!

News leaked late this evening that President-elect Obama picked his energy and environment staff and will be announcing the information at a press conference tomorrow.

Nobel prize winning physicist Steven Chu will be the head the Department of Energy, Lisa Jackson will be the head of the EPA, Carol Browner has been picked as the energy “czar” and Nancy Sutley will lead the White House Council on Environmental Quality.

• Chu was one of three scientists who shared the Nobel Prize for physics in 1997 for work in cooling and trapping atoms with laser light. He’s a professor of physics and molecular and cell biology at the University of California, Berkeley, and has been the director of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory since 2004, where he has pushed for research into alternative energy as a way to combat global warming.

It is the oldest of the Energy Department’s national laboratories, doing only unclassified work, and in recent years under Chu has been at the center of research into biofuels and solar technologies.

• Jackson, who will be the first black person to lead the EPA, is a former New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection commissioner who worked at the federal agency for 16 years, including under Browner when she was Clinton’s EPA chief. Jackson is a co-chairman of Obama’s EPA transition team, and currently serves as chief of staff to New Jersey Gov. Jon S. Corzine.

A New Orleans native, she grew up in the Lower Ninth Ward, the area stricken by Hurricane Katrina. She holds chemical engineering degrees from Tulane University and Princeton University.

• Browner, who served as EPA chief for eight years under Clinton, will become Obama’s go-to person in the White House overseeing energy issues, an area expected to include the environment and climate matters. Now chair of the National Audubon Society and on the boards of several other environmental groups, Browner has been leading the Obama transition’s working group on energy and environment.

• Sutley, the deputy mayor for energy and environment in Los Angeles and the mayor’s representative on the Board of Directors for the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California, is the first prominent member of the gay and lesbian community to earn a senior role in Obama’s new administration.

She was an EPA official during the Clinton administration, including being a special assistant to the EPA administrator in Washington. She also previously served on the California State Water Resources Control Board and was an energy adviser to former Gov. Gray Davis.

Obama continues to impress with his appointments. In this move, a clear statement has been made to American public that science is back in the White House.

DOE vs. the World

The second article, not about the EPA, but a government organization dealing with the environment, so included it…

Department of Energy Tells Scientists to Cut and Run, via Huffington Post

I didn’t know this study was in place. And, it seems just as I found out about it, it will disappear.

For more than a decade, the federal government has spent millions of dollars pumping elevated levels of carbon dioxide into small groups of trees to test how forests will respond to global warming in the next 50 years.

Some scientists believe they are on the cusp of receiving key results from the time-consuming experiments.

The U.S. Department of Energy, however, which is funding the project, has told the scientists to chop down the trees, collect the data and move on to new research.

There are mixed reasons for why they want to stop the study. Apparently, they put together a group of people, with unknown backgrounds, and decided that they had enough data. But, why are the scientists in charge of the experiment considered the experts to determine this. In fact, some data is seems extremely relevant and needs to be studied further:

Results so far indicate that elevated levels of carbon dioxide make forests grow more quickly, said Ram Oren, professor of ecology at Duke University’s Nicholas School of the Environment and Earth Sciences and principal investigator on the experiments there.

But unless forests are on fertile ground _ hard to come by because of development _ growth will be in leaves, needles, and fine roots, which die off and decompose in a year or two, releasing the carbon dioxide back to the atmosphere, Oren said.

I guess we will see how this develops.

more like… Department of (we are running out of) Energy

Oh crap. This administration is kind of sneaky… it is the Modus Operandi. So, while we are all losing sleep over which bank is collapsing where… the president announced today it plans to appoint someone new to the Department of Energy.

Who….? F. Chase Hutto, III. He’s friends with Cheney.

Click HERE for article by grist.org. Click HERE for announcement by White House