Replies to post #28372 on Tornado Alley (PROG)

[F6]

(COMTEX) B: Climate: Earth brightens up ( United Press International )

BOULDER, Colo., May 16, 2005 (United Press International via COMTEX) -- The
25-year battle for clean air seems to be paying off in a brighter and possibly
warmer Earth.

There was a 4 percent to 6 percent decrease in the amount of solar radiation
reaching Earth's surface between the 1950s and the 1990s, said Chuck Long, a
senior scientist at the U.S. Department of Energy's Pacific Northwest National
Laboratory. Since 1990, however, solar energy reaching the surface has increased
about 4 percent.

Martin Wild, of the Institute for Atmospheric and Climate Science in Zurich, and
colleagues wrote in the May 6 issue of the journal Science that the Earth has
been brightening since at least the late 1980s. They do not state conclusively
it is the result of cleaning up emissions of dust and chemicals into the air,
but that is one strong contender.

"What caused it?" Long said rhetorically. "That's going to be complex to solve.
For that you need far more sophisticated measurements where you're making
long-term measurements of the cloud microphysical properties."

Ironically, U.S. and European success in reducing industrial and automotive air
pollution may be allowing more sunlight to reach the Earth, allowing the
greenhouse warming signal from the atmosphere to show up more clearly.

No one is certain of the cause of "global dimming," however. Other candidates
include changes in clouds, reaction to volcanic eruptions, and instrument
deficiencies.

Air pollution particles, atmospheric dust and other detritus in the air
generically are referred to as aerosols. These have a complex effect on climate,
sometimes absorbing sunlight before it reaches the surface, cooling things down.
Some particles, like black carbon emitted from smokestacks, tend to heat the
atmosphere.

In addition, these tiny particles can be the basis of cloud formation. Clouds,
in turn, have a complex and poorly understood impact on overall climate,
depending on the heights at which they form, how thick they are, how much water
vapor they contain, and so on.

When everything is factored in, though, aerosols tend to cool the atmosphere,
counteracting the global warming signal from carbon dioxide accumulation in the
atmosphere.

Lynn Russell, associate professor at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at
the University of California-San Diego, and colleagues wrote last year they
found a net cooling effect of 0.5 watts per meter square -- a little greater
than current climates models incorporate.

If, in fact, the aerosols are declining and are responsible for the brightening
of the Earth, more sunlight may be absorbed by greenhouse gases in the
atmosphere, unmasking the climate signal that has been cooled by those aerosols.

Earth's atmosphere is heated from the bottom up, like a pot of water on a stove.
So if the amount of energy reaching the Earth increases, you would expect the
atmosphere to heat up.

As with all things climate related, there are dissenters. Fred Singer, a
physicist and president of the Science & Environmental Policy Project, wrote in
his weekly newsletter: "If these observations are correct, it means that the
greenhouse effect is smaller than required to account for the small warming
trend observed by weather satellites. Hence a smaller climate sensitivity and a
reduced temperature estimate for 2100, an increase of less than 0.5 Celsius (0.9
degrees Fahrenheit)."

Long noted, however, nothing they found challenges the scientific consensus on
global warming -- quite the contrary.

"It actually helps to, in a sense, clear up some of the mystery because people
have been asking the question. We know that for decades now we have been dumping
more carbon dioxide and stuff into the atmosphere. And we have been looking for
a warming trend, and it wasn't very obvious," Long told Climate. "That could be
because the solar dimming was masking it."

The effects of any change like this are complex and poorly understood. The
amount of heat reflected back to the atmosphere to heat it from the bottom up
depends on the Earth's reflectivity or its albedo. The overall albedo of the
Earth is very poorly understood.

In another paper in the same issue of Science, University of Washington
atmospheric scientist Robert Charlson and colleagues wrote, "Albedo changes may
be as important as changes in greenhouse gases for determining changes in global
climate."

The albedo cannot be measured directly. Methods to do so include measuring
"earthshine" -- the amount of light from Earth reflected by the moon --
satellite observations, ground cloud cover measurements and others.

The trouble is the variation of albedo measurements is large.

"In fact, the albedo change that is the equivalent of the enhanced greenhouse
effect is barely detectable by the available methods for measuring albedo," the
paper said.

The effect of aerosols on reflectivity are both direct and indirect, Casper
Ammann, a paleoclimatologist for the National Center for Atmospheric Research in
Boulder, told Climate. "If you have a whole bunch of aerosol and you start to
make clouds around them, what happens is that because you have more condensation
nuclei provided by these aerosols, the average cloud droplet size seems to be
smaller than if you do it under normal conditions."

Clouds with these smaller particles potentially can hang around longer.

"Quantification of the calculation of these indirect effects is extremely
complex," Ammann added.

Nothing in this work, however, suggests greenhouse warming is lessened.

"The moment that you stop or reduce the aerosol loads, this counter-effect is
diminished," Ammann said. "Therefore the greenhouse effect from the gases acts
more strongly, or shows its real face."

--

Climate is a weekly series examining the potential impact of global climate
change, by veteran environmental reporter Dan Whipple. E-mail:
[e-mail]

By DAN WHIPPLE

Copyright 2005 by United Press International.

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[F6]

New Theory Places Origin of Diabetes in an Age of Icy Hardships

By SANDRA BLAKESLEE
Published: May 17, 2005

When temperatures plummet, most people bundle up in thick sweaters, stay cozy indoors and stoke up on comfort food. But a provocative new theory suggests that thousands of years ago, juvenile diabetes may have evolved as a way to stay warm.

People with the disease, also known as Type 1 diabetes, have excessive amounts of sugar, or glucose, in their blood.

The theory argues that juvenile diabetes may have developed in ancestral people who lived in Northern Europe about 12,000 years ago when temperatures fell by 10 degrees Fahrenheit in just a few decades and an ice age arrived virtually overnight.

Archaeological evidence suggests countless people froze to death, while others fled south. But Dr. Sharon Moalem, an expert in evolutionary medicine at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York, believes that some people may have adapted to the extreme cold. High levels of blood glucose prevent cells and tissues from forming ice crystals, Dr. Moalem said. In other words, Type 1 diabetes would have prevented many of our ancestors from freezing to death.

The theory is described in the March 30 online edition of Medical Hypotheses, a journal devoted to publishing bold, even radical, biomedical theories that are potentially important to the development of medicine.

Dr. Clive Gamble, a professor of geography and an expert on ancient human migration at the University of London, said the theory supported a growing body of evidence that Europeans were descended from hunters with a tolerance to cold climates and not farmers from warm ones. "As a Brit," he said, "this makes perfect sense to me."

Dr. Robert Hegele, an expert on diabetes and genetics at the University of Western Ontario, said the theory was "an interesting attempt to contribute a new idea to help understand the pathogenesis of Type 1 diabetes." But, he added, it has a major shortcoming: it fails to address the autoimmune nature of the disease.

Most doctors who treat diabetes are extremely skeptical about the idea. In a typical comment, one doctor said, referring to a dangerous complication of diabetes: "Are they kidding? Type 1 diabetes would result in severe ketoacidosis and early death."

Not necessarily, Dr. Moalem said in an interview. Back then, life expectancy was about 25 years for many people. Those with high glucose in their blood did not live long enough to suffer complications. But they did live long enough, despite the extreme cold, to reproduce.

Today, when people live much longer, the ravages of high blood glucose are all too familiar. They include heart disease, stroke, kidney failure, high blood pressure, nerve damage, foot ulcers and gum disease.

Dr. Moalem advocates using an evolutionary perspective to understand why the body is not better designed and therefore why diseases exist at all. By looking at the ancient environments in which humans evolved, he says, it should be possible to see if certain illnesses offer protective advantages.

For example, some diseases have been linked to human pathogens. A disorder that leads to harmful levels of iron in the blood, hemochromatosis, protects against bubonic plague. Sickle cell anemia, a blood disorder, reduces the ability of the malaria parasite to destroy red blood cells. Cystic fibrosis combats typhoid fever. Tay-Sachs disease may have evolved to combat tuberculosis.

If the theory is true, Type 1 diabetes, which strikes an estimated 29,000 young Americans each year, will be the first disease shown to have that evolved to protect people from the effects of rapid climate change.

Diabetes comes in two types: Type 1 diabetes occurs when the immune system destroys cells that produce insulin, a hormone that helps deliver glucose throughout the body; Type 2 occurs when cells throughout the body do not respond to normal amounts of insulin. Without insulin, glucose builds up into the blood. Type 2 diabetes is found all over the world, Dr. Moalem said, mostly in older overweight people. But Type 1 diabetes shows an inexplicable pattern. It is most prevalent in people descended from Northern Europeans. Finland and Sweden have extremely high rates of the disease. But it is rare in African, Asian and Hispanic populations. American Indians and Alaska Natives almost never get it unless they have significant Caucasian heritage.

Type 1 diabetes is diagnosed more often in winter than in summer. In those with the disease, blood glucose rises in colder months, regardless of diet. But in warmer climates, blood glucose does not vary with the seasons.

When families with a genetic susceptibility to the disease move south to warm climates, fewer people develop diabetes.

Numerous genes confer susceptibility to Type 1 diabetes, Dr. Moalem said. Risk factors are inherited from both parents. Beyond that, most experts believe that something in the environment may help set off the illness, like a virus.

Or cold air. Cold may turn on one or more metabolic pathways involved in the genesis of Type 1 diabetes, Dr. Moalem said. In fact, many of the metabolic changes seen in Type 1 diabetes mirror those seen in animals that are tolerant to cold.

Dr. Kenneth Storey, a biochemist at Carleton University in Ottawa, studies the wood frog, which is found in higher latitudes throughout the Northern Hemisphere, including the Arctic Circle. "The frog is the size of your thumb," he said.

As soon as its skin begins to freeze in winter, its liver begins pouring glucose into its blood. This depresses the freezing point of body fluids, rather like a slushy beverage, and places a protective barrier around proteins.

Eventually the frog produces so much glucose that its tissues are completely protected from the cold. It freezes solid, with no heartbeat, no circulation, no breathing, no muscle movement. In the spring, the frog thaws out and resumes normal life. Its diabetes is reversible.

Humans and other animals exposed to cold will first shiver to get extra heat, Dr. Moalem said. But after a while, they generate more heat by burning a special form of fat: brown adipose tissue. The ability of this tissue to produce heat depends on having a large amount of glucose. Insulin is not required. Thus, being diabetic would help shunt glucose from the blood toward the heat-making pathway of the brown adipose tissue.

Mice and rats exposed to cold become insulin resistant, Dr. Moalem said. And high sugar grapes produced in cold regions, used in so-called ice wines, produce high levels of sugar to ward off freezing.

Most adaptations to cold would have evolved gradually, as microbes, plants and animals learned to cope with changing climates, Dr. Moalem said. But ice cores from Greenland reveal a unique period in human history that could have forced people living in Northern Europe to adapt quickly or die.

The climate, particularly in Europe, began to cool 14,000 years ago. About 12,600 years ago, conditions worsened. Huge drops in temperature occurred over decades. Glacial-like conditions lasted 1,300 years in a period called the Younger Dryas.

While northern Asia underwent glaciation at the same time, it does not appear to have happened with the same speed and ferocity, Dr. Moalem said, perhaps explaining why Inuits and other populations that have long histories of living in frigid climates did not develop similar protective responses to cold.

Rather, they developed a different kind of defense against famine, called thrifty genes. People with such genes gain weight if they eat more than 1,000 calories a day. In today's calorie rich world, that might predispose them to Type 2 diabetes.

People living in the frigidity of far Northern Europe could have done three things, Dr. Moalem said. They could have tried to outrun the cold, or to build better shelters and cover themselves with animal skins, or to undergo biological adaptations.

Gene mutations take a long time to accumulate, Dr. Moalem said. But so-called epigenetic factors, which change the expression patterns of genes without altering their basic structure, can produce adaptations in just a few generations.

Dr. Gamble of London said that archaeological evidence supported a large and rapid depopulation of Northern and Western Europe that coincided with the rapid cooling and the spread of thick glacial ice of the Younger Dryas. Humans huddled in Iberia, awaiting a warmer climate.

Some people appear to have ended up in Sardinia, which today has a high rate of Type 1 diabetes, Dr. Moalem said. An analysis of the Y chromosome indicates common genetic roots between modern Sardinians and ancient Northern Europeans.

The idea that Type 1 diabetes is an adaptation to extreme cold needs much more research, Dr. Moalem said. Cause and effect have not been proved.

But it is not too early to explore biological solutions used by cold-tolerant animals in dealing with the complications of high blood sugar. Plants and microbes adapted to extreme cold might also produce molecules that could help treat Type 1 diabetes, he said.

Dr. Storey found three genes in the wood frog that turned on in response to freezing. He is now putting those genes into mammalian cells to see what happens.

Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/17/health/17diab.html

[F6]

(COMTEX) B: Arctic explorers call off expedition after treacherous conditions
( Chicago Tribune )

NEW YORK, Jun 08, 2005 (Chicago Tribune - Knight Ridder/Tribune News Service
via COMTEX) -- The close encounters with polar bears were bad enough, but for
two would-be North Pole trekkers, the early breakup of ice on the Arctic Ocean
was an unforeseen development that forced them to call off their expedition last
week.

Lonnie Dupre and Eric Larsen set out on May 10 from Cape Arctichesky in Siberia
in an attempt to make the first-ever summer crossing of the Arctic Ocean, a
1,200-mile journey they expected would take four months.

But the early breakup of the ice forced the two men, who hauled two modified
canoes with them, to spend an inordinate amount of time switching back and forth
from traveling on cross-country skis to paddling across "leads," or sections of
open ocean between ice floes.

All the while, the ice was drifting to the southeast, away from the pole. Like
trying to go up a down escalator, the two men sometimes found themselves farther
south at day's end then they had been in the morning.

"We just determined it was fruitless to keep pushing forward under such odds,"
Dupre, 44, an experienced polar traveler, said in an interview after flying back
from Russia over the weekend. "We felt we'd done the best we could. Everest
wasn't climbed on the very first try either."

The pair hoped not only to establish a new record in polar exploration but also
to call attention to climate change, which has been blamed for melting glaciers
and shrinking the ice caps at the top and bottom of the world. One of the
sponsors of their expedition was the environmental group Greenpeace.

Because of the attention their effort received, not only from the media but also
as indicated by visits to their Web site, oneworldexpedition.com, they refused
to call their thwarted expedition a failure.

"If only one person's mind was turned around about global warming, that's fine,"
said Dupre, who added that the two men may try a different trek next summer,
starting at the North Pole and traveling to Greenland.

Dupre, whose previous treks include circumnavigating the 6,500-mile coast of
Greenland, said the sketchy information about summer ice movements on the
Russian side of the Arctic Ocean indicated that the ice usually moves to the
northwest, toward the pole.

But after an unusually warm winter, during which the polar ice cap did not get
as thick as it usually does, the ice started moving in the opposite direction as
it broke up.

"You can never link one specific winter to global warming," said Dupre,
resisting the temptation to blame the phenomenon they were trying to highlight
for the expedition's woes. "But we can say it was extremely unusual for the ice
to be breaking up that early."

Even if they made decent progress during the day, the southward drift of the ice
would erase much of their gains while they slept. When they were airlifted off
the ice last Friday by a Russian helicopter, they had traveled 150 miles in 24
days, but they were only 45 miles north of their starting point.

Dupre and Larsen, a dog-sled racer, had counted on bigger patches of solid ice
so they could ski for longer stretches. Instead, they encountered a great deal
of "brash" ice - broken chunks of ice that could not support their weight but
were too close together to paddle through. Often, they ended up swimming through
the ice.

"The conditions were just so frightening," said Larsen, who celebrated his 34th
birthday during the expedition. "It felt like the ice was trying to swallow us."

To make matters more difficult, snowstorms dumped fresh snow on the ice most
days, making it difficult to discern the condition of the underlying ice and to
break a path with their skis.

"We had initially planned to have one person lead for the first four hours (of
travel) every day and then the other person would take the lead for the last
four hours," Larsen said. "But being in the lead was really difficult because it
was really hard to break a trail, and it was mentally draining because it's your
responsibility to pick a trail, and you wonder if you're making the right
decision."

The team quickly switched to two-hour shifts.

Soon after embarking on their expedition, the men realized they were not the
only mammals on the ice. On about the fourth day, they had the first of four
brushes with polar bears. As they were setting up their tent, Dupre spotted a
bear stalking Larsen. They scared the bear away with small explosive flares
fired from a pencil-like launcher.

But their most horrifying encounter came on about the tenth day of their trek,
when a 10-foot male seemed intent on entering their tent, despite the pencil
flares. Finally, on their fifth try, a flare exploded beneath the bear, and it
fled.

"Without those deterrents, there's no question we wouldn't be here today because
his intent was to kill us," said Dupre. "You could see the determination in his
eyes."

Despite those moments of terror, however, Larsen came to appreciate the bears'
ease of movement, slipping in and out of the water and crossing the ice without
the laborious struggles Dupre and Larsen endured.

"These are just amazing animals that are very well adapted to their
environment," Larsen said. "If the ice continues melting, someday there won't be
any left. And that's their home."

---

By Stevenson Swanson
Chicago Tribune

CONTACT: Visit the Chicago Tribune on the Internet at
http://www.chicagotribune.com/

Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune Information Services.

(C) 2005 Chicago Tribune

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*** end of story ***

[easymoney101]

White House sexed-down climate change reports
By Lucy Sherriff

Published Thursday 9th June 2005 10:36 GMT

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/06/09/white_house_climate_report/
Official White House policy documents on climate change were altered by a
former oil-industry lobbyist to play down the link between greenhouse
gases and global warming, it emerged yesterday.

Philip Cooney, the chief of staff for the White House council on
environmental quality, altered several draft reports in 2002 and 2003,
after they had been approved by government scientists, despite having no
scientific background himself. Much of his editing made it into final
versions of reports.


Many of the changes were very simple. For instance, in one case he added
the words "significant and fundamental" before the word "uncertainties. In
another, he added the word "extremely" to the sentence: "The attribution
of the causes of biological and ecological changes to climate change or
variability is extremely difficult."

Others were more blatant. According to the New York Times, Cooney deleted
an entire paragraph dealing with the impact of global warming on glaciers
and the polar ice cap from a 2002 report that discussed the effect global
warming might have on flooding and water availability. Cooney noted in the
margins that the paragraph "straying from research strategy into
speculative findings/musings."

In all cases, the amendments cast doubt on scientific results that are
increasingly accepted as robust by the scientific community, and by the
general populace.

Cooney is a lawyer by training, with a degree in economics. Before going
to work at the White House, Cooney was the climate team leader at the
American Petroleum Institute, a trade body that represents the oil
industry's interests.

The documents came to light via a non-profit organisation that provides
legal assistance to government whistle blowers. The Government
Accountability Project is representing Rick Piltz, formerly a senior
associate in the office that issued the reports. Piltz resigned from his
position in March.

"Each administration has a policy position on climate change," he wrote in
a document reported by The New York Times. "But I have not seen a
situation like the one that has developed under this administration during
the past four years, in which politicization by the White House has fed
back directly into the science program in such a way as to undermine the
credibility and integrity of the program."

White House officials deny that they are politicising science.

At a press conference this week, President Bush told reporters he believed
America is at the forefront of research into climate change. Asked whether
he thought climate change was caused by man, he replied: "I've always said
it's a serious long-term issue that needs to be dealt with. My
administration isn't waiting around to deal with it; we're acting. We want
to know more about it. Easier to solve a problem when you know a lot about
it."

Meanwhile, academics from 11 countries, including the US and Britain,
distributed an open letter saying: "The scientific understanding of
climate change is now sufficiently clear to justify nations taking prompt
action."

UK Prime Minister Tony Blair has been in the US trying to persuade Bush to
commit the US to reducing its greenhouse emissions. The president has
called for voluntary measures, but has made no firm promises.