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Earth’s Plant Growth Fell Because of Climate Change, Study Finds
Drought linked to climate change has reversed a decades-long trend of increased global plant growth, according to a new analysis of NASA satellite data.
“Earth has done an ecological about-face,” a NASA statement said. “Global plant productivity that once flourished under warming temperatures and a lengthened growing season is now on the decline, struck by the stress of drought.”
Research over the past two decades had shown terrestrial plant growth on the rise, with higher temperatures and longer growing seasons linked to a 6 percent increase in global plant productivity from 1982 to 1999. Between 2000 and 2009, terrestrial plant growth declined by 1 percent.
“This is a pretty serious warning that warmer temperatures are not going to endlessly improve plant growth,” Steven Running, a biologist at the University of Montana in Missoula and co-author of the report, said in the NASA statement.
The researchers found that high latitude ecosystems in the Northern Hemisphere continued to benefit from longer growing seasons and higher temperatures, but that this increased productivity was offset by severe warming-associated drought in the southern hemisphere.
Link:http://green.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/08/23/plant-growth-affected-by-climate-change-study-finds/
Greenhouse Basics
Overview The concept of a greenhouse is fairly simple. It allows in the radiant heat from the sun, but then traps most of it in the greenhouse so that the interior stays warmer, many times much warmer, than the outside air. However, for those who are looking to install a greenhouse or who are just beginning to work in one, there are many things to consider. The materials used and the way plants behave in the greenhouse are among those things that beginning gardeners will need to consider. Function The main function of a greenhouse is to provide heat and serve as a place to raise plants in an environment where they often would not be able to survive. Often, this is the way flowers and vegetables are raised when they would normally be out of season. It is also a way to have plants for personal use and enjoyment.
Link:http://www.gardenguides.com/69978-greenhouse-basics.html#ixzz0xPRLwfGs
City targets erosion at Kingston Point (video)
KINGSTON — Erosion control work at the municipal park at Kingston Point is ahead of schedule and on budget as workers move to prevent further damage to the patch of land on the Hudson River, a city official said Friday.
Steve Finkle, the director of the city’s Office for Economic Development, said the work at Rotary Park is about two weeks away from being completed.
“This is all being done to protect Kingston Point because in the past few years there has been a lot of erosion,” Finkle said. “It is important that we keep this resource available for residents and tourists.”
Link:http://www.dailyfreeman.com/articles/2010/08/22/news/doc4c70b7dc3669f593173443.txt
Our Vanishing Coastlines
THE challenge of halting the erosion of our coastlines has moved from a mere media campaign to a group protesting the neglect to government.
A resolution is still pending.
Erosion threats the coastal areas are facing are treated with the same disinterest as erosion that that have left gullies in many villages in the South East. Coast erosion has the additional challenge of the management of wrecked and abandoned vessels.
Lekki seems to be the focus of the protest, but the problem is more wide spread.
Silence from other quarters could be partially from ignorance or occupation with the daily travails of survival.
Lagos State Government once responded in two days to a protest from the indigenes of Lekki, calling for removal of abandoned ships and saving the coastal communities and businesses in that axis from the imminent invasion of the Atlantic Ocean.
Link:http://www.vanguardngr.com/2010/08/23/our-vanishing-coastlines/
Green tumbs grow West Milford Community Garden.
Gardeners without the space or the experience have a home in West Milford.
For just $35 a plot, the organic community garden run by local non-profit Sustainable West Milford provides a place for novices and experts alike to research, experiment and share in their toil with like-minded neighbors. For roughly half the year, it is a quiet place near a busy county corridor where trial, error and adjustments reign supreme. It is where hobbyists forge their skills, using ever-difficult and often-fickle, chemical-free techniques to attempt to bring life to the rocky soil of West Milford.
And, in addition to needing new members for 2011, the garden is a blossoming sanctuary in need of a new leader.
Link:http://www.northjersey.com/community/101277764_Community_garden_promotes_green_thumbs.html
COMMENTARY Look Of Global Warming
Global warming, with the unkind assistance of a powerful anti-scientific minority of Americans led by Sen.
James Inhofe and other Republicans, is striking again.
The Pakistani flood, as well as the Russian forest fires, mudslides in China, and heat records from Finland to Kuwait, are freak events that fall right into the pattern predicted by global warming. It will probably always be impossible to confidently ascribe any single event to global warming, but these events fit the predicated pattern and can be expected to recur with increasing frequency.
Link:http://www.nwaonline.com/news/2010/aug/22/commentary-look-global-warming-20100822/?nwa-opinion
RBS: £13bn funding to companies blamed for global warming
New report fuels environment protest outside bank’s HQ
The Royal Bank of Scotland has provided nearly £13 billion-worth of funding to many of the companies blamed for causing global warming since it was bailed out by the taxpayer two years ago.
The figures, revealed today by the Sunday Herald, are the first authoritative and detailed account of the bank’s controversial financing of the world’s ‘dirty’ oil and gas industries.
According to figures from the financial information company Bloomberg, RBS has directly loaned nearly £3.6 billion to fossil fuel companies since the bailout on October 13, 2008. At the same time, the bank has helped raise equity finance worth £9.3 billion.
New Guide Book on Vegetable Gardening
More and more people are starting to grow vegetables. Some are families trying to reduce their grocery bills, some folks want to know their food is fresh and local. Many others are trying to make some money by starting their own small farm stand or selling locally. Whatever the reasons, there has been an increased need for research-based information on how to grow vegetables.
Penn State has responded by releasing a brand new 58 page guide book. It starts out with all the cultural things to think about when choosing a site for a vegetable garden or market garden. It addresses the basics like testing the soil, but also gives great summary information on advanced practices like how different types of vegetables respond to various colors of plastic mulch.
One nice feature of this publication is the careful way it is formatted on the pages. Each topic starts on a fresh page. If you need to print a copy of just one section, it is set up to print out that way.
Link:http://blogs.mcall.com/master_gardeners/2010/08/new-guide-book-on-vegetable-gardening.html
Atmospheric Dialectics: A Critical Theory of Climate Change
“To provide for the permanence of life of the population of each nation of humanity that inhabits the planet Earth is the primary and essential function of politics.”
It would unfortunately not be entirely absurd to claim climate change to be the greatest social problem of the twenty-first century. Short of the historical development and proliferation of nuclear weapons, nothing else seems to pose such a dire threat to human welfare as do the projected consequences of climate change; a recent report released by The Lancet, [3] for example, claims it to constitute the greatest threat to human health in this century. The dialectics of dangerous anthropogenic interference with the global climate and the greenhouse effect—which itself dialectically has allowed for the emergence and evolution of life on Earth for nearly four billion years—represents a problematic that, in Dussel’s view[4], joins the mass persistence of global material poverty in constituting the final limit to the age of modernity, the capitalist mode of production, and political liberalism.
Such a conclusion follows from the climatological evidence provided in recent years by Mark Lynas, a British environmental journalist who seems to have assiduously read through and synthesized thousands of reports and studies released by climatologists regarding the various threats posed by climate change and compiled them in his 2008 book Six Degrees: Our Future on a Hotter Planet, published by National Geographic. Besides introductory and concluding chapters, Six Degrees is comprised of six chapters, each of which deals with some of the possible socio-environmental changes that will accompany each degree-Celsius increase in the global average temperature that may come about during the current century as a result of human-caused carbon and other greenhouse gases emissions. If more or less correct in its science[5], Lynas’s Six Degrees surely represents a decidedly important contribution to the advancement of social knowledge, and to praxis in defense of life itself more generally. As such, then, it surely should be read and thoughtfully considered by a wide audience, especially those who, in identifying themselves as revolutionary leftists, seek the instauration in history of liberated existence—a project that could find its determinate negation in the ‘realization’ of catastrophic climate change. What this essay sets out to do, then, is to review the breadth of potential negations that Lynas finds in the prospect of climate change and then to discuss some contributions that leftist[6] political thought might have for these problems. I deal here mostly just with climate change, which should in no way be taken to suggest that I find unimportant other socio-environmental problems—it is merely to claim climate change to be perhaps the most pressing problem, and one that hence deserves the treatment that follows.
Link:http://news.infoshop.org/article.php?story=2010climate-th
Tomato Varieties
There are five different varieties of tomatoes.
1. Classic Tomatoes
2. Cherry and Cocktail Tomatoes
3. Plum and Baby plum Tomatoes
4. Beef Tomatoes
5. Vine or Truss Tomatoes
Brief description of each variety
1. Classic Tomatoes
These are the familiar, round variety and are the most popular type of tomato.
Ideal for: salads, grilling, baking or frying and used as a cooking ingredient for soups and sauces.
2. Cherry and cocktail Tomatoes
Cherry tomatoes are the smallest and cocktail tomatoes slightly larger. Both are very sweet and have a concentrated flavour. Most cherry tomatoes are red, but golden, orange and yellow varieties are also available.
Ideal for: Cherry tomatoes are delicious eaten whole and raw, or cooked.
Cocktail tomatoes can be halved for salads, or skewered whole for grilling.
3. Plum and Baby plum Tomatoes
These Tomatoes have a distinctive oval shape. Their flesh is firm and they have less liquid in the centre.
Ideal for: They are the natural choice for pizzas and pasta dishes and their fleshy texture makes them ideal for the barbecue.
4. Beef Tomatoes
These are larger than the traditional round tomato. There is a range of beef tomatoes available, varying in their shape and texture.
Ideal for: Stuffing and baking.
5. Vine or Truss Tomatoes
These may be of any of the types mentioned above but are marketed still attached to the fruiting stem.
The description vine tomatoes may be confused with the term vine-ripened tomatoes. The latter refers to any tomatoes which are picked when ripe, i.e. they ripen on the plant. This gives optimum flavour, but makes the fruit more perishable.
Link:http://coirgreen.blogspot.com
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