Nom nom nom!
Courtesy Alaina B. (Flickr)
Cheeseburgers. Watermelon. Grilled corn-on-the-cob. As the promise of warmer weather inches increasingly closer, I’m already dreaming of my favorite summer foods. (I mean, really, aren’t you?? Bet you are now…)
The world’s population is reaching 9 BILLION people, and we all have to eat! (I know, “Thank you, Captain Obvious.”) In the United States, almost everyone eats incredibly well by world standards. Globally, many families are lucky to share a bowl of rice for dinner. Meanwhile, crop yields aren’t keep up with increasing demand, so world food prices are rising everyday. The developing world already experiences a food shortage, but even in the developed West, we are not completely insulated against the effects of an escalating population on global food supply. Science confirms what our guts and pocket books are already telling us – we can’t keep biggering our population without seriously thinking about how we grow and eat our food.
So what are we going to do?? Don’t despair. Thankfully, great minds are thinking about the global food crisis and considering how to ensure food security throughout the world. Many of these ideas are published in Science magazine’s recent food security issue. Scientists play an important role in boosting crop yields by researching crops and farming methods that: 1) use little water, 2) don’t deplete the soil of nutrients, and 3) increase how much food is grown per seed. Engineers and technicians are also aiding the process: plant breeders are now using robots to streamline breeding programs, which allows researchers to introduce cool new traits that allow crops to fight fungi, weeds, and viruses that threaten to wipe out entire crops (in honor of St. Patrick’s Day 2010, remember the Irish Potato Famine?).
Fertilizer: Good or Bad?: Turns out the answer is neither all good or all bad! Plants need some nutrients, but humans often overdose crops, causing soil quality (and agriculture production) to degrade.
Courtesy FreeFoto.com
Caution! Myth-busting ahead: Fertilizer is the often-suggested solution to the global food crisis, but scientists say we only need to look as far as China to see why that’s not a solution, but rather part of the problem. China consumes 36% of the world’s manmade fertilizer, making it the world’s largest user. Nitrogen is a major component of fertilizer. Nitrogen is what scientists call a “limiting nutrient” meaning “the nutrient is rare, but plants need a minimum amount to live.” Research in China has shown that sometimes there is too much of a good thing; too much fertilizer actually causes healthy soil to get sick from a nitrogen overdose.
Ensuring the world’s food security poses cultural, economic, and psychological challenges as well as scientific ones. Solutions discussed in Science’s special issue include promoting traditional mixed crop-livestock systems, local development of relevant technologies, and eating less meat. One alternative suggested that’s going to (literally) be hard to swallow: substituting African caterpillars instead of steak and other meaty favorites. (I think that’s going to be a tough sell…)
You don’t have to go too far to find people tackling the problem of food security. Right here in Minnesota, at the University of Minnesota’s Institute on the Environment, the Global Landscape Initiative (GLI) program has a focus on agriculture and food systems. By studying how people use land for farming and other practices, GLI is seeking to understand how we might make better use of land to create a brighter future for humankind and the environment. Recently they made a sweet YouTube video to pose the BIG Question: Feast or Famine? I highly recommend you check it out.
Tags : Don't Leaf Me Behind!
in Diversity of Organisms and Biological Populations Change Over Time
An Instant Classic: Hey, Aesop, what if I told you Mr. Hare won the race?
Courtesy Milo Winter
You’re probably familiar with Aesop’s classic fable The Tortoise and the Hare: Mr. Hare challenges Mr. Tortoise to a foot race. Mr. Tortoise accepts. Mr. Hare dashes from the start line, but stops just before the finish line to take a nap. In the meantime, Mr. Tortoise plods along to win the race!! The moral of the story? University of Minnesota professor and Institute on the Environment resident fellow, Dr. Peter Reich’s award-winning take on the fable may surprise you.
Dr. Peter Reich: This guy studies leaves for a living.
Courtesy Regents of the University of Minnesota
Dr. Reich studies leaves. In particular, Dr. Reich has discovered three characteristics of leaves that allow researchers to identify where and how plants live: longevity, productivity, and nitrogen content. Longevity measures how old a leaf lives. Did you know leaves in the tropics live only 5-6 weeks whereas Canadian spruce leaves can live up to 18 years old? Productivity measures how much sugar the leaf makes (yes, leaves make sugar called “glucose,” which nearly every animal uses to fuel their body – that’s why your momma tells you to eat your vegetables!). Finally, nitrogen is like a vitamin for plants: they need it to grow big and strong. How much nitrogen a leaf has is important because it determines how much energy a plant can make.
Canadian Spruce: If these leaves were human, they could be legal adults!
Courtesy Steven J. Baskauf
Tropical Leaves: These guys may look BIG, but they are not going to be around for long.
Courtesy Flickr
What about the moral of The Tortoise and the Hare? Dr. Reich’s research says there are basically two types of leaves: ones that are like Mr. Tortoise and ones like Mr. Hare. Tortoise-like leaves work slowly, but steadily. They’re the marathon runners of the leaf world. Hare-like leaves work really fast! But they can’t keep it up for long. They’re sprinters. Could you run a marathon at your top sprinting speed? Probably not, and neither can leaves be both ultra-fast and long-lasting at the same time. Instead, leaves “tradeoff” speed for endurance. Like human runners, leaves don’t have to be all fast and short-lived or all slow and long-lived; they can fall somewhere inbetween and be medium speed and medium-lived.
So who cares about marathon and sprinting leaves anyway? Lots of people! Dr. Reich just won the BBVA Frontiers of Knowledge Award in recognition of this important research. Being able to group the thousands of plants out in the world into a handful of groups is allowing scientists to do incredible research that can be used around the world.
For example, Dr. Reich’s newest research is looking at the different responses of tortoise-leaves versus hare-leaves to changing environments, such as higher levels of carbon dioxide in the air caused by climate change. As each generation of leaves reproduces, new genetic combinations are created. New genetic traits that are helpful to the plant’s survival are passed on to the next generation. The more genetic combinations created, the better chance a species has of “finding” the right traits in a changing environment. This is where Dr. Reich’s interpretation of the moral of The Tortoise and the Hare may surprise you: because hare-leaves have fast, short lives, they reproduce more genetic combinations and are better able to deal with change. Tortoise-leaves will struggle more to adapt. That is, for leaves, slow and steady does not always win the race!
Want to know more?? Dr. Reich recently gave a lecture as part of the Institute on the Environment’s Frontiers on the Environment series. You can hear it here.
The capital of New Rubbishland: Little Filthington.
Courtesy brutalLike The Highlander, there can be only one Trashlantis.
And yet, the presence of another garbage island has been declared, in the Atlantic Ocean this time. (The quick Trashlantis disclaimer: it's not really an island or a continent, or something you could even see from the the surface. It's lots and lots of tiny bits of floating plastic. Just thought we'd go over that again.)
The patch spans about 16 degrees of latitude, and it shall henceforth be known as... New Rubbishland.
(Good looking out, Gene.)
Underwater, or “internal” waves, unlike the familiar wind-generated surface waves, occur due to density stratification often generated by coastal tides. These internal wave can lead to redistribution of nutrients and minerals. Internal waves can also cause vertical “velocity shear”, intensifying the vertical mixing process within the water column and bringing suspended particles and nutrients to the surface. Understanding and tracking these internal waves is another way to monitor the vital signs of an estuary.
Internal waves
Courtesy CMOP
CMOP successfully launched its new autonomous underwater vehicles (AUV) to help scientists gain a better understanding of the Columbia River estuary. One of the first studies to use these vehicles will be directed at internal waves. Craig McNeil, oceanographer from the Applied Physics Laboratory at the University of Washington and CMOP investigator, is using AUV’s to study the generation and propagation of internal waves in the Columbia River estuary and plume. He's interested in the physics of internal waves and mixing near the sea surface and the sea floor.
McNeil said,
“Scientists speculate that some bottom following internal waves have closed circulations that traps water and biology. The AUVs will help us sample these waves so we can better understand these complex mixing mechanisms.”
One upcoming experiment will study the dynamics of the freshwater plume as it spreads out over the denser saltwater of the coastal ocean. Of particular interest is to compare measured observations with theoretical predictions. McNeil will program the vehicles to travel into the advancing plume and navigate through the plume front. This will allow CMOP to study the progression of internal waves that are known to be generated at the advancing plume front and determine their propagation speed.
Watch researchers deploy the AUV: Watch Craig, Troy, and Trina deploy the AUV in the Columbia River.
Courtesy CMOP
Before those measurements could take place, McNeil needed to test the vehicles’ capabilities in the field. Along with oceanographer Trina Litchendorf and field engineer Troy Swanson, McNeil tested the vehicle in Lake Washington over the winter months. By spring the team was ready to take it through its paces in the Columbia River estuary.
They traveled to Astoria, Oregon, and met up with CMOP’s field team for the vehicle’s first mission in the river. They decided initial tests would be conducted during slack tide due to the limits of the vehicle in strong currents. The mission was based on tidal cycle information supplied by CMOP’s cyber-team. The expected velocities during slack tide would be less than 0.5 m/s or about 1 knot, which was in the acceptable range for the vehicles
The vehicle was deployed near the first transponder set by the team in the North Channel of the Columbia River. There it performed a compass calibration and proceeded to its first designated waypoint. To make sure it was on track, McNeil monitored the vehicle’s position with a device called the Ranger. The Ranger's transponder receives status updates from the vehicle.
Water temperature map: This figure shows a map of water temperature recorded by the CTD on the AUV during its first mission in the North Channel of the Columbia River estuary westward of the Astoria Bridge.
Courtesy CMOP
The results of the mission were a success. The vehicle traveled upon its designated coordinates and collected salinity and temperature data. Now the team has a better understanding of how to control the vehicle’s navigation in the river, which means it will be able to perform longer missions.
McNeil and his team will now use the AUVs to study various physical processes in the Columbia River estuary, including internal waves, currents, and mixing of various biogeochemical components of the water; all of these adding to our understanding of the estuary’s vital signs.
More photos of the AUV deployment: More photos of the AUV deployment
Courtesy CMOP
Estuaries are coastal areas in which rivers and oceans meet. Thus, they include both fresh and salt water, each of which support different ecological communities of plants and animals, large and small. Salinity (“saltiness”) of the estuary is a measure of its health--a vital sign--for those communities.
In some cases, salt-water from the ocean side of the estuary can begin to “intrude” on an area previously dominated by fresh water. It is important to be able to measure and monitor this aspect estuary health.
CMOP has developed a remote sensing device that opens the way for scientists to better understand and predict salinity intrusions in estuaries.
Circuit analog for dipole source on river bed
Courtesy CMOP
Oceanographer Thomas Sanford, Ph.D., and his team from the Applied Physics Laboratory at the University of Washington, have developed a bottom-mounted instrument for measuring electrical conductivity in the water column, which can be transformed into salinity readings.
The current process for measuring salinity involves sensors that provide “point” observations. Sanford’s instrument provides measurements of integrated salinities across the entire water column, allowing a more representative description of salinity intrusion.
How does it work?
Sanford’s approach is to produce a low-frequency electrical current and measure the resulting electric field at a nearby dipole receiver. The received electrical field is a function of the electrical conductivity of the water column and the sediments.
Quasi-static electrical analog circuit: The quasi-static electrical analog circuit for electric currents divided between the parallel resistors of saline water (Rw ) and the sediment (Rs ) is such that: Vr /Is = CRwRs /(Rw + Rs ) = C(Σw + Σs )-1 , ∴ Σw = CIs/Vr – Σs, where Σw is the conductance (vertical integral of σ) of the river, C is an empirical calibration value, Is is the source current, Vr is the receiver voltage and Σs is the conductance of the sediments
Courtesy CMOP
Sanford’s team deployed the system in the Columbia River estuary before and during a flood tide. At the same time, they took measurements with a CTD, a standard oceanography-sampling device that reads Conductivity, Temperature and Depth. As the layer of seawater thickened, they observed the decreased resistance of the water column caused the receiver voltage to decrease.
Previous studies in the Columbia River had demonstrated a tight correlation between electrical conductivity and salinity. This correlation permits the conversion of electrical conductivity to salinity. Sanford’s team collected a time series of water-column electrical conductivity that they converted to salinity. The inferred salinity was shown to agree with the salinity readings from the CTD.
Vertically integrated salinity: Observed vertically integrated salinity from CTD casts (red dots) compared to that inferred from the electrical measurements using the electrical conductance time series fitted to the equation: Sw = 8.82*(CIs/Vr -Σs ), where C is an empirical coefficient equal to 43, Is is source current and Vr is observed electric field and Σs an offset caused by leakage into the sediments equal to 8. Blue dots are observed electrical conductance and the continuous curve is the electrical conductance, both converted by salinity by the factor 8.82 psu/S/m.
Courtesy CMOP
What's next?
CMOP researchers are looking at Sanford’s new sensor as an opportunity to better explain processes as diverse as internal waves, estuarine turbidity, and summer blooms of phytoplankton (tiny mobile plants that sometimes collect in massive “blooms” in surface waters in estuaries). They expect to improve computer models that are designed to depict the variable conditions of the estuary, and anticipate changes associated with climate and human impact. Once demonstrated for the Columbia River, the new sensor has the potential to be used in estuaries around the world.
One way to determine the health of an estuary is to test some of its “vital signs”. Important vital signs in rivers and estuaries include things that affect the quality of the water for the health of the various living organisms that call that water home. If there are toxic materials, or even too much of a good thing, like oxygen, organism throughout the food chain can suffer.
One such vital sign can be the development in rivers and estuaries of “red tides”. This term is used to describe large “blooms” of phytoplankton in coastal waters. Phytoplankton are tiny floating plants. They obtain energy through the process of photosynthesis and must therefore live in the well-lit surface layer, where they account for half the photosynthetic activity on our planet. “Red tides” don’t have to be either red or associated with tides, but they concern scientists, because they can produce toxins that can overwhelm other organisms in the water.
Plankton bloom: Plankton bloom flows under Astoria bridge.
Courtesy Alex Derr, CMOP
CMOP is studying a plankton bloom that is dominated by one type of organism called Myrionecta rubra. The organism is technically a eukaryotic protist, a single-celled organism that floats in the water column. Under certain environmental conditions, the cells grow exponentially to millions of cells per liter of water within a few days. The cells are red and the shear numbers of them reflect the sun’s light and enhance their red color in the water.
Myrionecta rubra
Courtesy CMOP
CMOP researchers Herfort and Peterson traveled to Astoria to collect samples of the plankton bloom. They gathered samples in both the dense red water and in clear patches of water. These samples helped them compare the conditions in the water and the influences the red tide organism might have on its environment.
CMOP scientists have already analyzed several samples collected during previous year’s blooms. Herfort and Zuber use molecular biology techniques to look at the genetic fingerprints of these organisms and others associated with the bloom. This molecular work is carried out in collaboration with Lee Ann McCue Ph.D., a scientist from Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, who performs genetic sequence analysis. Herfort said, “Our data will improve our understanding of the ecological impact of Myrionecta rubra bloom on the Columbia River estuary.”
Red tide, close-up
Courtesy CMOP
Eventually whatever caused the Myrionecta rubra to grow rapidly will change and they will no longer have a source of nutrients. Peterson stated, “When they die, they decompose and bacteria can feed on the decomposed material. This growth of bacteria then draws down the oxygen in the water around them while they are respiring”. So while the bloom itself is not toxic in this case, here’s where another vital sign comes in: the bacteria’s respiration may have a harmful effect to other species, by depleting oxygen available to them. (Due to a great deal of water flow and flushing in the Columbia River, this is currently not a danger.)
What's next?
Unanswered questions that CMOP researchers are exploring include:
- Is the Myrionecta rubra an important “vital sign” for the estuary?
- What controls the timing and behavior of the bloom?
The CMOP research team wants to start answering these and other questions by using a combination of physiological studies, molecular work, and observations and simulations from their end-to-end coastal margin observatory (SATURN). They hope this will provide clues about the factors that lead to plankton blooms, and ultimately improve the ability to predict these events.
Like imaginary detectives Carmen San Diego and Inspector Gadget, Will Steger travels the Earth in search of clues that point towards a changing climate.
Not many of us imagine spending our vacation in some of the coldest and most remote regions of the world, but Arctic explorer Will Steger (see http://www.willstegerfoundation.org/index.php/our-founder) has spent the last 45 years doing just that. Using his passion for extreme exploring and background in science and education, Steger’s chilly trips to Greenland, Antarctica, and the North Pole have taken him into the middle of the global climate change debate.
Will Steger, Climate Change Detective and Arctic Explorer
Courtesy Will Steger
The Earth’s icy poles are among the first and most dramatically affected areas of global climate change (see "What's the big deal about polar climate change?" below). Few humans have set foot in these important ecological systems and witnessed the changing landscapes as Steger has. Small wonder when you consider what makes his explorations “extreme.” Can you imagine waking up to -38°F temperatures in a tent buried under last night’s snowfall only to have trouble starting your camp stove because of the low-oxygen level? After you warm up enough to tunnel yourself out of your igloo, you still have to pack up your gear, wake up the dogsled team, and travel miles over huge snowdrifts (see http://www.willsteger.com/content/view/107/95/). That's intense!
“What’s the big deal about polar climate change?”
(see http://www.epa.gov/climatechange/effects/polarregions.html)
Albedo: Land and Ocean vs. Ice Surfaces
Courtesy The M Factory, Inc.
Ice acts like a mirror by reflecting sunlight. On the other hand, ocean and land surfaces act like sponges by absorbing sunlight. Surfaces that reflect sunlight, like ice, stay cool, but surfaces that absorb sunlight, like ocean and land surfaces, get warm. How much a surface reflects or absorbs sunlight is called its “albedo.”
The Earth’s icy poles are among the first and most dramatically affected areas of global climate change because rising temperatures melt ice and expose land and ocean surfaces. Can you guess what happens next? Remember that land and ocean surfaces absorb sunlight and get warm. This means that these newly exposed surfaces further absorb sunlight, get warmer, and melt more ice. This process is an example of what scientists call “positive feedback systems,” which is a fancy way of saying, “once the process starts, it creates more and more of the same results.”
Finally, want a chance to see and hear Will Steger, climate change detective and Arctic explorer, in person? You're in luck! On February 24th from noon to 1pm, Steger will be speaking at the University of Minnesota’s St. Paul Student Center as part of the Institute on the Environment’s lecture series, Frontiers in the Environment. The event is free and open to the public. For more information please see the lecture series’ homepage http://environment.umn.edu/news_events/events/frontiers.html
‘Climate change’…we just can’t get away from it these days. Carbon everywhere, rising ocean levels, floods, droughts, and never-ending ‘Seinfeld’ reruns…make it stop! To us regular folks though, the evidence isn't really seen in the day-to-day. So as Jerry would say, ”What’s the deal?”
Just like castles made of sand: USGS researcher Ben Jones measuring AK coastal erosion on the Beaufort Sea.
Courtesy Christopher Arp, USGS
Well skeptics, read on. According to researchers with the Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research (INSTAAR) at the University of Colorado, parts of the US are literally falling into the sea due to factors associated with climate change. Sure, coastal erosion happens, but this is getting ridiculous.
How do they know? Over two years, a team of researchers from CU and USGS used weather stations, GPS data, wave intensity/water temperature sensors, and time-lapse cameras to record coastal erosion between Point Borrow and Prudhoe Bay, Alaska during the summer months when the sea ice is out. In these videos, you can watch the coast crumble to the sea. That's right, you can actually see the Alaskan coast fall apart before your eyes! (watch the video)
Affected coastline: Alaska's endangered coast, with Beaufort Sea to the North.
Courtesy Goodle Maps, edited by Prescott Esquire
Why is this a big deal? It used to be that this coast would lose a handful of yards each year during the short summer season, but more recently, this coast is falling apart on the order of 30-45 feet annually. That means that between the time INSTAAR started looking at this problem and today, the coast has lost almost the length of a whole football field! And, according to the video linked above, that’s valuable real estate for migrating birds and other critters. In addition to habitat loss, think about it: our country, the US, literally falling apart. Lame.
How is this all going down? The biggest factor is the coast itself. The soil is usually 50-80% ice; the rest is silt and mossy plant material. Now, imagine a brick building where all the mortar (stuff between the bricks) melts away and you have an idea of what happens to this soil when summer heats up.
But it’s more than that: Robert Anderson, researcher with INSTAAR and CU Geographic guru tells us that there is a TRIPLE-WHAMMY at play where each ‘whammy’ works together towards coastal carnage.
Whammy 1: Longer the ice is away, the more soil melting occurs (more melting=more destruction).
Whammy 2: Longer the sea ice is away, the warmer the ocean gets (up to 60ºF, warmest temp. on record…ever).
Whammy 3: Further back the ice melts, the bigger the waves can get (called the “fetch effect”).
More stuff: The buzz on this one is crazy, just Google “Alaskan coastal erosion”. USGS did a study up there in 2007 (USGS article), Nat Geo has got another video, even Reuters is on this story. Anderson’s paper is still pending, but the researchers have presented these findings at annual American Geophysical Union meetings in ‘08 and ’09 (abstract). Check it out and let me know what you think.
An electromagnetic gun: What's it for shooting? Disks, mostly.
Courtesy ScienceApeOh, you thought I forgot about the Geoengineering Extravaganza I promised, after just one entry? Did JGordon forget? Or is he just demonstrating a tremendous lack of respect for the Science Buzz audience?
Neither, respected friends, neither. First of all, I’ve never forgotten anything in my life. (This is in case anything I do eventually relates to someone else owing me money.) And I think I’ve demonstrated my respect for y’all over the years.
No, what happened was this: on Tuesday evening, my sock caught on a nail sticking out of my kitchen floor, and I went down like a redwood. Dried or decomposing pieces of food cushioned the fall for most of my body, but I’m afraid my face landed squarely in the mousetrap, which I had just baited with fresh poison. Luckily the trap pinned my lips shut before I ate too much of the poison, but I mix some potent poisons, and it only took a little to put me out.
My poisons are designed to remove a mouse from consciousness for anywhere from a week to several months, long enough for me to shave them, and ensure that they wake up somewhere frighteningly unfamiliar, like Thailand, or inside of someone recovering from major surgery.
At any rate, I was out for almost all of yesterday. It’s good that I woke up when I did, because I was covered with mice, but I’m afraid I just never found the opportunity to do another geoengineering post.
Until now.
So, let us continue with the “forget about the greenhouse gases, and just cool this place off, now!” theories. That is, those theories that could reduce the amount of absorbed heat (from the sun) rather than reduce what’s storing the heat (greenhouse gases). It’s called solar radiation management, and it includes a wide range of potential projects. And I shall now introduce you to several, starting with the most weaksauce of them, and moving on to something with giant space guns.
When I call something “weaksauce,” I don’t mean to imply that it’s a bad idea, only that it doesn’t involve huge guns, or giant sulfur-spewing zepellins. Sort of like how cool roofs are weaksauce. Cool roofs have come up on the Buzz before. The idea is that by simply having lighter-colored roofs, more sunlight and heat is reflected back away from the Earth. And, aside from the planet heating up a little less, your house heats up a little less too, so you don’t have to use as much energy on air conditioning, and the power companies don’t have to burn as much coal, etc. Pretty neat, huh?
Unfortunately, it’d be pretty tricky to get enough people to have reflective roofs for it to make much of a difference to global temperatures—otherwise the cooling would just be local, and who cares about that, right? Plus… no giant guns, or anything.
Not like the plans to build a sunshade in space. They have guns.
Remember that season finale episode of The Simpsons, where Mr. Burns built a giant metal shade to block the Sun from Springfield? I hope you do, because some scientists are actually proposing something like that, but on a larger scale, and in space. Like, massive mirrored satellites. Or there’s the plan mentioned in this Atlantic article (which I’ve linked to before)—A professor at the University of Arizona proposes building 20 giant electromagnetic guns (rail guns?), each more than a mile long, with the purpose of firing Frisbee-sized ceramic disks into space. Each gun would fire 180,000 disks a minute, 24 hours a day, for 10 years. At that point, there should be enough disks suspended “at the gravitational midpoint between the Earth and the Sun,” that sunlight headed toward Earth would be significantly scattered… lowering the planet’s temperature. Unfortunately, the technology for these guns doesn’t exist, it would be really expensive, and it would kind of last forever. Also, one gets the feeling that this professor is just trying to make a point. On the other hand… giant disk guns.
And then there are the middle ground plans, like cloud enhancement. The idea there is to make the clouds puffier and whiter by blasting seawater up into the air with special ships. These nice, white clouds would, again, reflect more sunlight away from the Earth, cooling things down. It shouldn’t last forever, and who doesn’t like puffy white clouds? Unfortunately, it ain’t cheap, and as with all most of the other solar radiation management plans, we don’t know exactly what all the repercussions would be. Clouds are just clouds, right? Yes, but clouds affect how much rain we get, and who gets it, and how much plants photosynthesize, and so forth and so forth. And the plan is slightly less gunny than the space-sunshade thing.
Next time we’ll move on to “carbon-removal projects.” But right now I have to get the taste of mouse blood out of my mouth. (It’s an ingredient in the poison.)
$40,000 car to revolutionize American commute
in Energy Transformations, Scientific Enterprise, Motion, and Human Organism
This jump is brought to you by: Joy.
Courtesy tbonzzz_6Get your bells out, everybody, and ring them! The Chevy Volt is here! (In a year.)
GM released new details today about its new gas and electric hybrid car, the Chevy Volt. Using a plug-in battery (as opposed to current, unmodified hybrid cars, which recharge only via the gas engine), GM claims that the Volt should be able to achieve approximately 320 miles to the gallon during city driving. Estimates haven’t been completed for combined city and highway driving, by officials are confident that fuel economy will remain in the triple digits.
The car should have a range of about 40 miles, using its battery alone, at which point the gas engine would kick in. Nearly 80% of Americans, however, commute less than 40 miles each day, so most of the expended energy could come from the electrical grid (the car will plug into a standard outlet), instead of from gasoline.
GM’s chief executive calls the Volt a “game changer.”
Finally, a game-changing American car. Not like those sissy Prius drivers, making smug environmental statements by purchasing impractically expensive vehicles. Sure, the Volt will be entering the game about 9 years late, but it does so with the confidence that every environmentally conscious working-class American with $40,000 to drop on a sweet new car will… wait, what?
What about the rest of GM’s 2010 lineup? They’re cutting more than half of their 30+ mpg cars? But a few Volts on the road should bring that fleet average up, right?
And GM is pushing for environmental responsibility in other areas, at least, right? Oh, they’re pulling out of a partnership that collects toxic mercury from their old scrapped cars?
Well, it was a nice thought. And it’s comforting to hear someone say something like “game changer” now and again.
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