Race for the Rain Forest - #63

You and your 283 friends have supported 1,991,613.3 square feet!

Marine Wetlands habitat supported: 60,397.0 square feet.
You have supported: (0.0)
Your 283 friends have supported: (60,397.0)

American Prairie habitat supported: 37,849.0 square feet.
You have supported: (10,417.3)
Your 283 friends have supported: (27,431.7)

Rainforest habitat supported: 1,893,367.3 square feet.
You have supported: (163,064.6)
Your 283 friends have supported: (1,730,302.7)

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1 Aktbird57 .. 1202 45.717 acres

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whoops

thump

thank you dear merry

Wishing Danon and Teeny ~

Thank you Stradee, for your wishes. However, I don't have birthdays now. I have Pass Over once per year. grin

Besides, my actual BD is next month 9-17-05
Yeah, I'm a virgin.

But, Happy Birthday Teeny

clk'd..............................

pwayfarer, hi ya! where's piffka?

ehBeth, how's Aa faring? <very cool dancer art>

Danon, and a very smart one i'd say. <smile>

sumac, thanks for the terrific articles!

Merry, sending a note with you for the prez.

Sending good thoughts for Maggie's safety.

Hi ya Husker!

Merry,

White House? Should we be envious? Nah.....

Great dance art.

shimmy, shimmy, bump, grind

Clicked.

aktbird57 - You and your 283 friends have supported 1,993,837.6 square feet!

Marine Wetlands habitat supported: 60,678.0 square feet.
You have supported: (0.0)
Your 283 friends have supported: (60,678.0)

American Prairie habitat supported: 37,849.0 square feet.
You have supported: (10,417.3)
Your 283 friends have supported: (27,431.7)

Rainforest habitat supported: 1,895,310.6 square feet.
You have supported: (163,111.4)
Your 283 friends have supported: (1,732,199.2)

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1 Aktbird57 .. 1203 45.770 acres

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great to see everyone shimmying along at teeny's birthday party - lovely start to a new thread

hello all. clicked in.

Hello all, also.

Clicked in.

Morn'g wayfarer and sumac,

clk'd................................

g'day wildclickers

clicked

You and your 283 friends have supported 1,994,493.2 square feet!

Marine Wetlands habitat supported: 61,005.8 square feet.
You have supported: (0.0)
Your 283 friends have supported: (61,005.8)

American Prairie habitat supported: 37,919.2 square feet.
You have supported: (10,440.7)
Your 283 friends have supported: (27,478.5)

Rainforest habitat supported: 1,895,568.2 square feet.
You have supported: (163,134.8)
Your 283 friends have supported: (1,732,433.4)

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went back to the fair today
all that talk of feet ^^^ is killin' me

Colo. Scientist Quits Global Warming Panel Tue Aug 23,10:10 PM ET



Colorado State University scientist Roger Pielke Sr. has resigned from a Bush administration science advisory team in a disagreement over research into the causes of global warming.

Pielke, who is also the state climatologist, said the Climate Change Science Program had minimized evidence that factors other than greenhouse gases can contribute to global warming.

Pielke also said other members of the team went behind his back to rewrite a final chapter of its report. Pielke said he was the primary author of the original chapter.

Pielke said he agrees with many other researchers that human activity is changing the climate in significant ways, but he has focused on such factors as clearing land for cities and agriculture, which he said can affect temperature, wind and humidity.

"I think each member of the committee is an outstanding scientist, and each is sincere ... but they're missing the broader view we need to have of climate change," Pielke said.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/08/18/AR2005081801842.html?referrer=email&referrer=email

NOAA Cites Threats to U.S., Pacific Coral Reefs

By Juliet Eilperin
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, August 19, 2005; Page A11

Coral reefs in U.S. waters and the Pacific are under stress from both humans and nature, according to a national assessment released yesterday by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

A combination of overfishing, pollution, disease and climate change is threatening the health of coral reefs everywhere from the Florida Keys to Palau, said the report, which covers 14 areas in the United States and its territories.


"We see a decline in our overall ecosystems," said Mark Monaco, biogeography program manager for NOAA's Ocean Service. "We're very concerned about the future of these delicate ecosystems."

Reefs nearest populated areas, such as the Florida Keys, are under increasing stress, researchers found, whereas more remote areas, including the northwestern Hawaiian Islands, are doing better. In Hawaii, federal officials have removed fishing nets and other debris that had been damaging the reefs and are considering making much of the area off-limits to fishing and other human activities.

"There's a lot of good management going on," said Jeannette Waddell, a NOAA marine biologist, noting that the government is collecting coral reef data from federal, state, territory and local partners. "Now we can really begin to understand what's out there."

Some reef managers are struggling to combat natural forces, such as coral bleaching, as well as human influences. (Bleaching occurs when warmer seas drive out tiny, one-celled algae that live within the coral and help sustain it.)

Billy Causey, superintendent of the Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary, said the area suffered from two serious episodes of bleaching, in 1997 and 1998, followed by damage from Hurricane Georges in 1998. The reef lost 30 percent of its living coral as a result.

"The good news is, we have not seen an appreciable decline since then. The bad news is, we have not seen an increase," Causey said. "Coral reefs are showing the greatest amount of damage in our lifetime compared to any other marine environment."

Sanctuary officials, he added, are doing a better job of anticipating strains on the reef, using an early detection system for coral bleaching developed by Mote Marine Laboratory in Sarasota, Fla. They now alert area dive shops that swimmers need to take precautions when reefs are under stress.

This is SO cool. See paragraph near the end which addresses whether this would have a disadvantage to the lake.


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washingtonpost.com
From Lake Depths, a Blast of Cool for Consumers

By Chantal Martineau
Special to The Washington Post
Monday, August 29, 2005; A06

Back in the 1940s, when Robert Tamblyn was working at Toronto's Eaton Centre department store, he noticed that it had tapped the city's water main -- illegally -- to rig up a system that fanned the chilly water through a network of pipes to cool the women's evening-wear department.

It was years before the city's water commissioner wised up. And years more before Tamblyn had the idea of applying the same concept in a bigger way.

"Air conditioning was a whole new word up here in the 1940s," says Tamblyn, the engineer many credit with developing an alternative technology -- lake-source cooling -- in North America.

He has helped devise large-scale, energy-efficient cooling systems for the city of Toronto and Cornell University's Ithaca campus. The city system, the largest of its kind, began operating last summer.

The first successful citywide venture was set up in Stockholm in 1995, but its capacity is less than half of Toronto's.

Unlike the department store's jury-rigged setup, Toronto's taps directly into the icy waters at the bottom of Lake Ontario.

It works by drawing water from 272 feet below the surface, where temperatures hover around 40 degrees Fahrenheit year-round. The coldness of the lake water is transferred via heat exchangers to a separate, closed water supply that loops around downtown Toronto and to participating office towers. Thirty-five buildings have already signed on to the project, including the Hudson's Bay Co.'s 1 million-square-foot retail outlet and 32-story head office. The company predicts it will save $416,000 a year on energy with the system.

Next year, several legislative buildings will be connected to the network.

Launched by Enwave District Energy, a public-private partnership, the new system will be able to cool more than 20 million square feet when it reaches full capacity. Participating buildings can expect to reduce the amount of energy used for cooling by an average of 75 percent, officials say.

Dennis Fotinos, Enwave's president, said the system will ultimately eliminate 40,000 tons a year of carbon dioxide emissions that conventional air conditioning would produce, and free more than 59 megawatts of electricity from the Ontario power grid.

"The more demands you can take off an already overburdened power grid in the northeastern U.S. and Ontario through initiatives like this, the less likely you're going to have power surges that cause blackouts," Fotinos said. "It's cheaper to reduce demand than build new supply."

Conventional air conditioning systems in high-rise buildings use electrically powered chillers in the basement to cool circulating water before pumping it upward and fanning it out over each floor. As the water rises, it absorbs heat, much of which is dissipated into the air by cooling towers on the roof before the water is returned to the basement to repeat the cycle.

With lake-source cooling, the chillers in the basement and cooling tower on the roof are obsolete. After heat exchangers use the lake water to lower the temperature of the cooling water, a central pumping station sends the cooling water around the city loop, branching off to each building. The cooling water eventually returns to each building's basement, where other heat exchangers extract some of the heat before sending it back to the pumping station to repeat the cycle.

The project got the green light several years ago, after Toronto residents began complaining about foul drinking water. The city's water commission gave Enwave permission to tap the lake to fulfill Tamblyn's vision of a cooling system under a deal that would also bring clean drinking water to the city through the 3.5-mile-long intake pipes the company wanted to build.

Enwave's long pipes draw water from depths untouched by the sun and most contaminants, allowing the city to save on purification. But at 40 degrees, deep-lake water would give people a doozy of a headache if they drank it directly, and it would cost a small fortune to heat up for bathing.

The system's central heat exchangers solve that problem by extracting the coldness from the lake water to cool the air conditioning supply and then sending the warmed lake water to the city's drinking-water supply. The cooling-water loop is a closed system, and the two supplies never mix.

At Cornell, W.S. "Lanny" Joyce, founder of its Lake Source Cooling Project, said the university began looking for alternatives after the 1987 Montreal Protocol restricted the use of chlorofluorocarbons widely used in air conditioning systems at the time.

"An institutional body like us, we figured we'd be around for at least another 135 years. So we needed a long-term solution," said Joyce, Cornell's manager of engineering, planning and energy management.

The university system was designed to last 100 years -- typical air conditioners have a life span of 15 to 20 years -- to justify the initial investment of $58 million. Since it started in 2000, the project has reduced campus cooling costs by 87 percent.

Lake-source cooling could raise its own environmental issues if it returned large quantities of warmed water to the lake, potentially harming marine life or promoting the growth of organisms that could cause contamination. Enwave avoids that by sending the warmed water to the drinking supply.

"The temperature of deep water doesn't fluctuate over the year, so it can be a consistent, low-energy source of cooling anytime of year," says Rob Watson, a senior scientist at the Natural Resources Defense Council in New York. "But if an entire city did this, you might have thermal pollution issues."

The high cost of setting up such systems, however, has kept them on the fringes of mainstream energy management.

Toronto's initial investment of $148 million mostly went toward laying three miles of piping beneath city streets and installing three intake lines to feed deep-lake water to the system.

Several U.S. communities along the West Coast are researching deep-source cooling, and Hawaii has an Ocean Thermal Energy Conversion plan underway. It will rely on seawater, which, because of tides and currents, must be drawn from far greater depths -- about 3,000 feet -- to get consistently cold temperatures.

But it takes more than a dense population next to a big, cold body of water for deep-source cooling to work.

"The factor that helps make it cost effective is if your local electricity costs are high," said Joyce, citing the Pacific Northwest as an example of a poor candidate for lake-source cooling because of cheap hydroelectricity there.

"Honolulu's electricity prices are at least twice the national average," he noted. "And they run nearly a full load every day of the year. They're the ultimate customer."
© 2005 The Washington Post Company

Yup. Looks like we'll get a heaping helping of rain from late Tuesday into early Thursday. We're smack dab on the midline of the 3 day forecast.

At least we're starting above sea level, not like poor old New Orleans.

teeny has a sister living in Pass Christian (pronounced Crist-e-anne)

It's a beautiful city right on the beach between Bay St Louis and Gulfport, MS.

clk'd

That is a scary place to be right now.

<hoping Teeny's family is ok>

Some of those islands will be no more.

Clicked.

A very scary situation for our friends living anywhere near New Orleans.
<sending lots of prayers and good wishes for their safety>

From the ICC...

Something all the wildclickers can do <especially those retired volunteers> is sign-up for the coastal clean-up scheduled for September 17th. <dan, there's an internatioanl event happenin' on your birthday!>

Twenty years ago, a lady from Texas named Linda Maraniss, was strolling along the beach on a quiet summers day - and decided on a course of action that would remove the debris cluttering the landscape.
She rounded up 3000 of her closest friends and relatives, removing 124 tons of debri. Thus began the ICC - international coastal cleanup-
Cumulatively, more than 5.8 million volunteers in over 120 countries have picked up over 100 million pounds of debri!

Marine debris can be an eyesore, no doubt. But debris also presents much more serious concerns that the ICC is helping to solve. Consider these facts:

* Human health hazards abound at our beaches and need to be removed. For example, last year's volunteers removed 13,441 syringes!

* Some debris items contain dangerous chemicals and become more likely to spill them over time. Personal computers, for example, contain chromium, mercury, and lead.

* Marine debris can injure and kill wildlife. For example, sea turtles mistake plastic bags for jellyfish and ingest them--blocking their digestive systems. And many creatures bear scars or die from entanglement in fishing line and other debris.

I urge you to join our thousands of volunteers for this important
one-day event on September 17, 2005. We clean up beaches, lakes, and rivers in all U.S.
states and territories -- and most countries around the world, so
there's bound to be a cleanup site near you.

Most Cleanups only last a few hours and you can sign up as a group or
individual volunteer. With your help, we can make the 20th Anniversary
Cleanup the most successful ever.

Sign Up Today!

http://www.oceanconservancy.org/site/R?i=j3ssl2OWBI6lrfPSMAkJbQ