But I didn’t, and I wonder why …

Well, I did eventually cut my grass, but not till latter May. And it’s no wonder why — I’m slow to mow to start with, and the very rainy spring in the land south of Lake Erie this year often left the yard too soggy to mow.¹ But the lack of mowing had a benefit — a nice showing of wildflowers, with honeybees working them. And it saved some time and gasoline. So, I imagine I’ll let that yard grow again next year — especially since I found some advice on meadow care that suits me: “Mow once a year in early spring before new growth begins.”² That’s it. So that’s the plan.

Here are some pictures of the yard in bloom, 14 May 2011:

Golden Ragwort

Wild Blue Phlox

Ajuga, in Two Shades

Honeybee

What is the white flower among the grass?

Sources

(1) ‘Temperature and Precipitation Maps March – May 2011’ – National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration – National Climatic Data Center

(2) ‘Lawn Alternatives’ – Organic Gardening
Page 2: U.S. region-by-region advice

By Quinn Hungeski, TheParagraph.com, Copyright 2011

For comparison, here is a look back at other warm periods:⁹⁶

• The Medieval Warm Period (900-1400 A.D.) brought more warmth to northern Europe and some other regions of the Northern Hemisphere, but did not much raise average world-wide temperature. The highest average Northern Hemisphere temperatures during this period were about those of the mid-20th century.

• The Mid-Holocene Epcoh (6000 years ago) marked the peak warmth of the current natural inter-glacial period. Since then, the Earth should be gradually and naturally cooling towards the next ice age in 50,000 years or so. But today’s warming climate change has halted that trend for a while, and may even — with continued fossil fuel burning — cancel the next ice age.⁹⁷⁹⁸

• The Eemian Stage (120,000 years ago) was the prior inter-glacial period. Regular wobbles in the Earth’s orbit cause the coming and going of the Earth’s ice ages on about a 100,000 year cycle. The orbital wobbles affect the amount of solar radiation hitting the planet. When the solar radiation on the continents strengthens, it triggers the inter-glacial warming. After hundreds of years of warming, CO2, having maybe been flushed from the deep ocean, rises in the atmosphere, which amplifies the warming, driving the glaciers back towards the poles.⁹⁹

• The Pliocene Epoch (5.3 – 2.6 million years ago) was the last warm period before the glacial cycles started. Northern Hemisphere ice sheets had not yet formed, as high atmospheric CO2, the Earth’s orbital state, and constant El Nino winds and ocean currents likely kept them at bay.¹⁰⁰

• The Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (55 million years ago) was a big warming climate change (5 – 8°C over a few thousand years) from an already-warm climate. Somehow, a huge amount of greenhouse gas got up into the atmosphere, as clathrates in the ocean may have melted to free trapped methane, or a massive volcano may have heated up vast swaths of coal.¹⁰¹

• During the Mid-Cretaceous Age (120 to 90 million years ago) the Earth was very different. Rolling back 100 million years of continental drift, we find the continents clumped together, giving very different ocean currents and climatic rhythms. CO2 levels were at least twice today’s, and it was so warm that the tropical breadfruit tree likely grew in Greenland (55°N).

Each warm period has its own story, but today’s is not yet finished. The effects of today’s climate change could put heavy stress on human and other life that has gotten used to the more-or-less regular climate since the last ice age.¹⁰² As more CO2 is added to the atmosphere, the outlook for future life becomes more dire. Now, it is up to the human species to muster its social sense and clever wit, and stop the rise of CO2 in the atmosphere that it started.

Sources

⁹⁰ IPCC FAQ 6.2: Is the Current Climate Change Unusual Compared to Earlier Changes in Earth’s History?

⁹¹ IPCC FAQ 6.1: What Caused the Ice Ages and Other Important Climate Changes Before the Industrial Era?

… There are three fundamental ways the Earth’s radiation balance can change, thereby causing a climate change: (1) changing the incoming solar radiation (e.g., by changes in the Earth’s orbit or in the Sun itself), (2) changing the fraction of solar radiation that is reflected (this fraction is called the albedo – it can be changed, for example, by changes in cloud cover, small particles called aerosols or land cover), and (3) altering the longwave energy radiated back to space (e.g., by changes in greenhouse gas concentrations). In addition, local climate also depends on how heat is distributed by winds and ocean currents. All of these factors have played a role in past climate changes.

⁹² IPCC FAQ 2.1: How do Human Activities Contribute to Climate Change and How do They Compare with Natural Influences?

FAQ 2.1, Figure 2. Summary of the principal components of the radiative forcing of climate change. All these radiative forcings result from one or more factors that affect climate and are associated with human activities or natural processes as discussed in the text. The values represent the forcings in 2005 relative to the start of the industrial era (about 1750). Human activities cause significant changes in long-lived gases, ozone, water vapour, surface albedo, aerosols and contrails. The only increase in natural forcing of any significance between 1750 and 2005 occurred in solar irradiance. Positive forcings lead to warming of climate and negative forcings lead to a cooling. The thin black line attached to each coloured bar represents the range of uncertainty for the respective value. (Figure adapted from Figure 2.20 of this report.)

⁹³ IPCC FAQ 8.1: How Reliable Are the Models Used to Make Projections of Future Climate Change?

There is considerable confidence that climate models provide credible quantitative estimates of future climate change, particularly at continental scales and above. This confidence comes from the foundation of the models in accepted physical principles and from their ability to reproduce observed features of current climate and past climate changes. Confidence in model estimates is higher for some climate variables (e.g., temperature) than for others (e.g., precipitation). Over several decades of development, models have consistently provided a robust and unambiguous picture of significant climate warming in response to increasing greenhouse gases.

⁹⁴ ‘Bush on “The Fundamental Debate”’ – RealClimate.org, 2006-03-31

Data show that carbon dioxide levels are rising, they are now 30% higher than at any time during at least the past 650,000 years, and likely even the past several million years. This rise is caused entirely by human activities. This is also demonstrated beyond any reasonable doubt by data – for a start, we know how much CO2 we have emitted, and the observed rise is equal to 57% of this (the rest has been taken up by ocean and biosphere). That carbon dioxide acts as a greenhouse gas, trapping longwave radiation, is also a measured fact and well-established physics since the 19th Century. …

What about a “natural” explanation for the observed global warming? There is none. Indicators and measurements of solar activity show no increasing trend over the past 60 years. The orbital cycles, which cause the ice ages, would currently tend towards cooling, if anything. There is no remotely feasible alternative explanation for the observed warming published in the scientific literature.

⁹⁵ IPCC FAQ 9.2: Can the Warming of the 20th Century be Explained by Natural Variability?

… Human activities over the last 100 years, particularly the burning of fossil fuels, have caused a rapid increase in carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. Before the industrial age, these gases had remained at near stable concentrations for thousands of years.

⁹⁶ ‘Paleoclimatic Data Before 2000 Years Ago’ – National Climate Data Center

⁹⁷ ‘The global cooling myth’ – RealClimate.org, 2005-01-14

Interpretations of future changes in the Earth’s orbit have changed somewhat. It now seems likely (Loutre and Berger, Climatic Change, 46: (1-2) 61-90 2000) that the current interglacial, based purely on natural forcing, would last for an exceptionally long time: perhaps 50,000 years.

⁹⁸ ‘The Long Thaw: How Humans are Changing the Next 100,000 Years of Earth’s Climate, David Archer Publisher’s description:

In The Long Thaw, David Archer, one of the world’s leading climatologists, predicts that if we continue to emit carbon dioxide we may eventually cancel the next ice age and raise the oceans by 50 meters.

Archer shows how just a few centuries of fossil-fuel use will cause not only a climate storm that will last a few hundred years, but dramatic climate changes that will last thousands. Carbon dioxide emitted today will be a problem for millennia. For the first time, humans have become major players in shaping the long-term climate. In fact, a planetwide thaw driven by humans has already begun. But despite the seriousness of the situation, Archer argues that it is still not too late to avert dangerous climate change–if humans can find a way to cooperate as never before.

⁹⁹ ‘What does the lag of CO2 behind temperature in ice cores tell us about global warming?’ – RealClimate.org, 2004-12-03

From studying all the available data (not just ice cores), the probable sequence of events at a termination goes something like this. Some (currently unknown) process causes Antarctica and the surrounding ocean to warm. This process also causes CO2 to start rising, about 800 years later. Then CO2 further warms the whole planet, because of its heat-trapping properties. This leads to even further CO2 release. So CO2 during ice ages should be thought of as a “feedback”, much like the feedback that results from putting a microphone too near to a loudspeaker.

In other words, CO2 does not initiate the warmings, but acts as an amplifier once they are underway. From model estimates, CO2 (along with other greenhouse gases CH4 and N2O) causes about half of the full glacial-to-interglacial warming.

¹⁰⁰ ‘Rolling up the circus tent: Dispatch #7’ – RealClimate, 2007-12-19

The Pliocene was the latest warm time in the Northern Hemisphere before the great glaciations of the Pleistocene closed in. To some extent, as we increase the atmosphere’s CO2 content, we are traveling backward in time so far as climate is concerned. Hence the Pliocene, which ended about two million years ago, has attracted a lot of attention as an analog climate for what may lie ahead. It’s not a perfect analogy, but the challenge of understanding Pliocene climate provides another test of the operation of model physics in a warm climate. …

… There was also a modelling talk by M. Vizcaino, evaluating several factors proposed to have accounted for Pliocene warmth. The ones that seem to contribute the most to conditions unfavorable for Northern Hemisphere glaciation are elevated CO2, the orbital configuration, and a permanent El Nino.

¹⁰¹ ‘Climate myths: It’s been far warmer in the past, what’s the big deal?’ – by David L Chandler, New Scientist, 16 May 2007

The warmest [“hothouse Earth” period] was probably the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM), which peaked about 55 million years ago. Global temperatures during this event may have warmed by 5°C to 8°C within a few thousand years, with the Arctic Ocean reaching a subtropical 23°C. Mass extinctions resulted.

The warming … was caused by the release of massive amounts of methane or CO2. It was thought to have come from the thawing of methane clathrates in deep ocean sediments, but the latest theory is that it was caused by a massive volcanic eruption that heated up coal deposits. In other words, the PETM is an example of catastrophic global warming triggered by the build-up of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.

¹⁰² ‘Climate myths: It’s too cold where I live – warming will be great’ by Michael Le Page, New Scientist, 16 May 2007

As global temperature climbs to 3°C above present levels – which is likely to happen before the end of this century if greenhouse emissions continue unabated – the consequences will become increasingly severe. More than a third of species face extinction. Agricultural yields will start to fall in many parts of the world. Millions of people will be at risk from coastal flooding. Heatwaves, droughts, floods and wildfires will take an ever greater toll.

There are two factors should borne in mind when thinking about the impacts. Firstly, even countries that escape the worst of the direct effects will feel the economic effects of what happens elsewhere. There may be social and political problems too, as migration increases and water becomes increasingly scarce in some regions.

By Quinn Hungeski – Posted at TheParagraph.com

155 million years ago, algae bloomed in a shallow sea, poisoning thousands of creatures.⁷¹ The belemnite came to feed on the dead creatures, and met the same fate. It sank into a sea floor rich in phosphorus, which within days — before the body could rot — mineralized in and around the body parts and saved the belemnite’s image.⁷² Somehow along the way, the ink sac came loose from the body, and the somewhat acidic water reacted with the melanin in the ink to make it solidify, and hold its full spatial shape inside the forming rock.⁷³⁷⁴ As the earth churned through the ages, the area of sea floor became the Oxford Clay in the south of Great Britain. In the 1840’s, railroad builders cut into the clay and came across the rich fossil bed. Many fine fossils were taken to London, where they were shattered by bombing in World War II.⁷² Through the years, with overgrowth and flooding, the location of the fossil bed became lost to scientists and the public — until Dr. Wilby’s crew went looking for it. They drilled here and there around Christian Malford, until they pulled up a core sample with a fossil.⁷⁰ Over ten days, they gathered many fossils, and cracked open one rock to find the belemnite’s ink sac.⁷⁵ The scientists took a piece of the solidified ink and mixed it with an ammonia solution to liquefy it for the “ultimate self-portrait”.

Nearly all animal fossils are rock impressions of the slower-to-rot hard body parts, like bone and shell, and there are only a few fossil beds in the world with impressions of soft body parts. And it is rarer still to find fossil original material — like cephalapod ink — from an organism. “It’s absolutely incredible to find something like this,” said Dr. Wilby — and the story made quite a stir. But such a story also made a stir in the nineteenth century, as was noted in 1884 in The standard natural history:⁷³

The ink is not readily decomposed; on the contrary it is occasionally found fossil in the rocks along with the remains of the animal which produced it. So well has it been preserved that in one celebrated instance a naturalist drew the portrait of a fossil squid with the sepia derived from its fossil, but not fossilized ink-bag.

the fossil ink sac — BNPS

Fossil belemnite with fish in grasp. — Palaeo News Files

Artist’s conception of belemnites on the prowl — BNPS

Wilby’s crew strikes paydirt in an ammonite fossil. — British Geological Survey

Sources

⁷⁰ ‘After 150m years as a fossil, Belemnotheutis antiquus takes up its pen’ — The Times, 2009-08-19

⁷¹ ‘The Fossil Treasure Hunt’ – British Geological Survey

⁷² ‘Calamari killing field – fossils found in sea that covered middle England’ By Paul Eccleston, Paleonews, 2008-08-21

⁷³ ‘Fossil squid ink story has whiskers’ by Ray Girvan, JSBlog, 2009-08-25

⁷⁴ ‘155million years old and still inky: The perfectly preserved squid fossil amazing scientists’ – by David Derbyshire, Daily Mail, 2009-08-19

⁷⁵ ‘Scientists draw squid using its 150 million-year-old fossilised ink’ By Murray Wardrop, The Telegraph, 19 Aug 2009

By Quinn Hungeski – Posted at G.N.N. & TheParagraph.com

Further Reading

‘Fossil Fuel Global Warming More Certain than Ever’ The Paragraph, 2005-10-16

Links

RC Wiki: “An index for debunking of various popular media occurrences of climate-related nonsense.”

RealClimate: “Climate science from climate scientists.”

Sources

²⁰ ‘IPCC, 2007: Summary for Policymakers – Climate Change 2007: The Physical Science Basis’ – pdf file

Global atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide have increased markedly as a result of human activities since 1750 and now far exceed pre-industrial values determined from ice cores spanning many thousands of years. The global increases in carbon dioxide concentration are due primarily to fossil fuel use and land use change, while those of methane and nitrous oxide are primarily due to agriculture.
~~~
The understanding of anthropogenic warming and cooling infl uences on climate has improved since the TAR, leading to very high confidence7 that the global average net effect of human activities since 1750 has been one of warming, with a radiative forcing of +1.6 [+0.6 to +2.4] Watts per square meter.
~~~
Warming of the climate system is unequivocal, as is now evident from observations of increases in global average air and ocean temperatures, widespread melting of snow and ice, and rising global average sea level.
~~~
At continental, regional and ocean basin scales, numerous long-term changes in climate have been observed. These include changes in arctic temperatures and ice, widespread changes in precipitation amounts, ocean salinity, wind patterns and aspects of extreme weather including droughts, heavy precipitation, heat waves and the intensity of tropical cyclones.
~~~
There is now higher confidence in projected patterns of warming and other regional-scale features, including changes in wind patterns, precipitation and some aspects of extremes and of ice.

²¹ ‘Put a Tiger In Your Think Tank’ Mother Jones May/June 2005 Issue

ExxonMobil has pumped more than $8 million [from 2000 to 2003] into more than 40 think tanks; media outlets; and consumer, religious, and even civil rights groups that preach skepticism about the oncoming climate catastrophe.

²² ‘Some Like It Hot’ By Chris Mooney, Mother Jones May/June 2005 Issue

²³ ‘‘How to Talk to a Climate Skeptic – Global warming is a hoax’ by Coby Beck

Here is a list of organizations that accept anthropogenic global warming as real and scientifically well-supported:

• NASA’s Goddard Institute of Space Studies
• National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration
• Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
• National Academy of Sciences
• State of the Canadian Cryosphere
• Environmental Protection Agency
• The Royal Society of the UK
• American Geophysical Union
• American Meteorological Society
• American Institute of Physics
• National Center for Atmospheric Research
• American Meteorological Society
• Canadian Meteorological and Oceanographic Society

²⁴ ‘How to Talk to a Climate Skeptic – Greenland used to be green’ by Coby Beck

First, Greenland is part of a single region. It can not be necessarily taken to represent a global climate shift. See the post on the Medieval Warm Period for a global perspective on this time period. Briefly, the available proxy evidence indicates that global warmth during this period was not particularly pronounced, though some regions may have experienced greater warming than others.

…

Instead of hunting whales in kayaks, [the Vikings] farmed cattle, goats, and sheep — despite having to keep them in a barn 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, for a full 5 months out of the year. It was a constant challenge to get enough fodder for the winter. Starvation of the animals was frequent, emaciation routine. Grazing requirements and growing fodder for the winter led to over-production of pastures, erosion, and the need to go further and further afield to sustain the animals. Deforestation for pastures and firewood proceeded at unsustainable rates. After a couple of centuries, it led to such desperate measures as cutting precious sod for housing construction and even burning it for cooking and heating fuel.

When finally confronted with several severe winters in a row, they, along with the little remaining livestock, simply starved before spring arrived.

²⁵ ‘Swindled!’ by William and Gavin, RealClimate, 9 March 2007

On Thursday March 8th [2007], the UK TV Channel 4 aired a programme titled “The Great Global Warming Swindle”. We were hoping for important revelations and final proof that we have all been hornswoggled by the climate Illuminati, but it just repeated the usual specious claims we hear all the time.

A microbial fuel cell taps into the energy that soil microbes generate when they break down organic matter. Literally, this is energy from dirt: no special microbes or conditions are needed other than enough moisture for the bugs to do their work.

Essentially all you do is dig a hole, layer an anode, some soil, sand and a cathode — and connect the anode and cathode to a circuit board to charge a battery that can power an LED (light emitting diode) light, run a radio or charge a mobile phone.

In Africa, 74% of the population is off the electric grid. Lebônê‘s website describes the problem:x³

… Imagine a village at night in which students are walking to distant highways to study under streetlights, where small merchants are investing half of their resources to pay for kerosene lighting to run their operations, and where emergency health workers, if operating at all, are trying to stitch up wounds and perform surgeries by candlelight. …

A Lebônê MFC electric unit can replace a kerosene lamp for $10 and a cubic meter of dirt. Units can be easily linked to multiply energy output. The underground system works through day and night, in wind and calm, is rugged, simple, lasts for years, and can be made in the region where it is used. This month, Lebônê won a $200,000 World Bank grant in the Lighting Africa competition held in Accra, Ghana. Lebônê will use that money as it begins field studies in the foothills of Kilimanjaro in July. It plans a large-scale product rollout in Tanzania for 2009.

Video from floor of Accra conference; Interview with Hugo Van Vuuren starts at 1:00

Sources

¹ Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences press release – May 14, 2008

² ‘Literally, This Is Energy From Dirt’ – Interview with Lebônê founder Hugo Van Vuuren, IPS News Agency

³ Lebônê – The Problem

By Quinn Hungeski – Posted at G.N.N. & TheParagraph.com

Update: 2007-12-12 – There was a break in the clouds tonight. I had 12×60 binoculars and a view of Perseus from the city — but I could not see the comet.

The blue disk marks Comet Holmes. The circles mark the left-end of the “W” and the Pleiades. The nearest bright star to the comet is Mirfak, the brightest in Perseus. map elements program by John Walker

2007-11-29, Marshall Twp., Pennsylvania

Sources

⁵⁰ ‘Comet Holmes Beckons Skygazers Worldwide’ – Alan MacRobert, Sky & Telescope

⁵¹ ‘Rare Event: Easy-to-See Comet Holmes’ By Joe Rao, SPACE.com Skywatching Columnist posted: 30 October 2007

_M74, The Phantom Galaxy – NASA, ESA, and the Hubble Heritage (STScI/AURA)-ESA/Hubble Collaboration_

Being inside of it, we can’t take a picture of the whole Milky Way. But we can make a picture of it from our inside views, including those of space telescopes.x⁴¹ Unlike M74, the Milky Way has a distinct central bar of stars.

_The Milky Way – NASA/JPL-Caltech/R. Hurt (SSC)_

APOD (Astronomy Picture of the Day)

Sources

⁴⁰ ‘Holiday Wishes from the Hubble Space Telescope’ – The Hubble Heritage Project

⁴¹ ‘Milky Way Bar’ – Spitzer Space Telescope, NASA

“The Great Desert is frequented by roving bands of Indians who have no fixed places of residence but roam from place to place in quest of game.” – Geographical, Statistical and Historical Map of Arkansas Territory by Major Stephen H. Long, Topographical Engineers from the Carey and Lea’s Atlas of 1822 / full map 3184×2703 pixels

The Ogallala Aquifer holds as much water, but spreads over an area seven times the size of Lake Huron. – BLUE: Unconsolidated sand and gravel aquifers at or near the land surface. – YELLOW: Semiconsolidated sand and gravel aquifers. – GRAY: Sand and gravel aquifers of alluvial and glacial origin are north of the line of continental glaciation. Source: USGS

Circles formed by center pivot irrigation in Kearny County, KS. Source: Kansas Geological Survey

Sunflower crop in North Dakota. Source: USDA

Sunflowers ready to harvest in eastern Colorado. Source: Denver Post / Andy Cross

Sources

³⁰ ‘Report of the Great Plains Drought Area Committee, August 27, 1936’ [newdeal.feri.org/hopkins/hop27.htm] See maps of ground cover, rainfall and wind speed.

³¹ ‘Ogallala Aquifer’ – Wikipedia [en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ogallala_Aquifer] “Much of the plains region is semi-arid with steady winds that hasten evaporation of surface water and precipitation.”

³² ‘American buffalo, (Bison bison)’ – U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service “Because the great herds were nearly gone before any organized attempts were made to survey populations, we may never know just how many buffalo once roamed North America, although estimates range from 30 to 75 million. “The moving multitude…darkened the whole plains,” wrote Lewis and Clark, who encountered a herd at South Dakota’s White River in 1806.”

³³ ‘Geographical, Statistical and Historical Map of Arkansas Territory by Major Stephen H. Long, Topographical Engineers from the Carey and Lea’s Atlas of 1822’ – The University of Tulsa

“… It is essentially the map documenting Major Stephen H. Long’s 1819-1820 expedition. …”

The Long map became a “master map,” to be built upon and added to by a generation of cartographers …

…

The delineation of the area as a desert, unsuitable for sustainable agriculture such as was known to Long, a man from New Hampshire, illustrates how the expectations Americans had for the West were turned upside-down when confronted with its realities. The western Plains were not the farmer’s garden or paradise as imagined by Thomas Jefferson; the area was exceedingly arid with unbroken grasslands compared to the wet, green and timbered east.

³⁴ ‘High noon at the Ogallala aquifer’ by Jacques Leslie, Salon.com
“One of the largest underground repositories of water in the world, the Ogallala stretches from Texas to South Dakota and once held more water than Lake Huron. That was a century ago, before the advent of cheap electric pumps gave farmers the power to lift water hundreds of feet”

³⁵ ‘The Good Earth’ by David McConnell [www.mhhe.com/earthsci/geology/mcconnell/demo/hpaq.htm]

… Approximately 170,000 wells draw water from the aquifer that has brought prosperity to an area described by Major Stephen Long in 1819 as “almost wholly unfit for cultivation and . . . uninhabited by people depending upon agriculture for their subsistence.” The aquifer covers an area of 480,000 square kilometers, making it the largest area of irrigation-sustained cropland in the world.

…

… the aquifer contains “fossil” water, the product of a wetter ancient climate associated with the end of the last ice age. There is no sufficient contemporary source for water to recharge the whole aquifer although substantial recharge does occur in some areas from streams (e.g. Platte River, Nebraska) and from irrigation projects supplied with surface waters.

³⁶ ‘Aquifer’ – Wikipedia [en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aquifer#Misconception]

A common misconception is that groundwater exists in underground rivers (e.g. caves where water flows freely underground). This is only sometimes true in eroded limestone areas known as karst topography which make up only a small percentage of Earth’s area. More usual is that the pore spaces of rocks in the subsurface are simply saturated with water — like a kitchen sponge — which can be pumped out …

The beach provides a model to help visualize an actual aquifer. If a hole is dug into the sand, very wet or saturated sand will be located at a shallow depth. This hole is a crude well, the wet sand represents an aquifer, and the level to which the water rises in this hole represents the water table.

³⁷ ‘GROUND WATER ATLAS of the UNITED STATES’ – United States Geological Survey [capp.water.usgs.gov/gwa/ch_d/D-text2.html]

… the velocity of water that moves through the aquifer is estimated to average about 1 foot per day.” [At that rate, to go 400 miles, as does the Arkansas River through Kansas, would take 5786 years.]

…

The potential yield of wells is greater than 750 gallons per minute in most of Nebraska and large parts of Kansas. A well capable of producing 750 gallons per minute can irrigate 125 acres and effectively supply one center-pivot irrigation system.

³⁸ ‘GROUND WATER FOR HOUSEHOLD WATER SUPPLY IN RURAL AMERICA: PRIVATE WELLS OR PUBLIC SYSTEMS?’ – Andrew W. Stone, American Ground Water Trust, Concord, NH 03301, USA [www.agwt.org/Education_Papers/RuralWaterInUSA.pdf] “The evolution of drilling technology in the late 1870s was important for opening up much of the Midwest and High Plains, especially in those areas where few rivers were perennial. … Once drilling machines, and wind powered pumps became economically available, settlement patterns were changed by the almost ubiquitous availability of ground water for domestic water use.”

³⁹ ‘Mining Water’ by Richard Cowen, University of California, Davis [www-geology.ucdavis.edu/~cowen/~GEL115/115CH18miningwater.html]

Cheap deep drilling for water wells became available only in the 1930s, and powerful submerged electric pumps were invented just as the government provided Federally subsidized installation of electric power on farms all across the Plains. As the United States came out of the Depression years into a highly stimulated wartime economy, farmers were encouraged by cheap loans and strong crop prices to maximize production. Deep drilling and irrigation with Ogallala water became economic options for the first time, but the generally wet years of the 1940s did not require much additional water for irrigation. Some innovative farmers were rewarded for their enterprise by bumper crops, but for many others the natural rainfall gave a good return.

Ogallala water allowed the agricultural transformation of the High Plains in the 1950s. Renewed drought led to major well drilling, especially on the Texas High Plains. With the technology now well established, the water pumped and the acreage irrigated increased dramatically. …

⁴⁰ ‘Hugh Hammond Bennett Stopped Further Dust Bowls’ – TheParagraph.com [theparagraph.com/2007/01/hugh-hammond-bennett-stopped-further-dust-bowls]

⁴¹ ‘The High Plains’ – Bureau of Land Management Environmental Education

… Approximately 90 percent of the water pumped from the Ogallala Aquifer is used for irrigation. Precipitation and surface streams replenish the aquifer, but surface streams in the arid High Plains are sparse and many are ephemeral, wet only at certain times of the year. Because of the heavy demand for water and the slow replenishment rate, the average water level of the aquifer declined nearly 3 m between 1940 and 1980, then another 30 cm in the 1980s. Better water management and new technologies have helped to slow this depletion. However, greater efforts will be needed to ensure that the water levels in the aquifer stabilize.

⁴² ‘Kansas Ground Water’ – Kansas Geological Survey

In terms of measured declines in the water table, a 10-foot (3-m) decline has been common across much of western Kansas. The much greater declines – in some cases the water table is now 200 feet (60 m) below its level prior to irrigation – are mostly centered in southwestern and west-central Kansas, where irrigation development has been greatest and the amount of water in the aquifer [in Kansas] has been greatest.

⁴³ ‘Farmers’ tower of power’ By Jeremy P. Meyer, Denver Post, 10/02/2006

For three decades, farmer Dennis Coryell has seen the amount of water that can be pumped from his field’s well drop from 1,200 gallons a minute to 600 gallons a minute.

…

“Sunflowers just take less water, less overall input,” he said. “They are a real hardy crop. They produce well under arid conditions.”

A native to Colorado’s Eastern Plains, sunflowers need about 30 percent less water than corn and 50 percent less than hay, said Ron Meyer, a CSU Cooperative Extension agronomist.

“It’s probably the fastest-growing crop in Colorado,” Meyer said. “A couple of years ago, we had 80,000 acres. Last year, we had 215,000 acres.”

⁴⁴ ‘High Plains Sunflower Production Handbook’ – Colorado State University – Kansas State University – University of Nebraska – University / USDA–ARS—Central Great Plains Research Station, Akron, Colorado – pdf

Sunflower has an extensive root system that is capable of using large amounts of available soil water from deep in the soil profile. In a detailed study of sunflower root development and soil water use in Kansas, researchers found 87 to 96 percent of observed roots in the sampled soil profile were above 65 inches, although some roots were found as deep as 106 inches.

The double helix nebula. (The image uses false colors because the eye is not sensitive to infrared light.) The spots are infrared-luminous stars, mostly red giants and red supergiants. Many other stars are present in this region, but are too dim to appear even in this sensitive infrared image. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA

Sources

¹ ‘Astronomers Report Unprecedented Double Helix Nebula Near Center of the Milky Way’ – UCLA News, March 15, 2006

² Great Observatories program’ – Wikipedia

Spitzer is quite difficult or impossible to replicate with ground telescopes, and had few orbiting predecessors. Spitzer was not an order of magnitude larger than its latest predecessor, ISO (the Infrared Space Observatory). However, Spitzer’s instruments took advantage of the rapid advances in infrared detector technology at the time. Combined with its slightly larger aperture, favorable fields of view, and longer life, science return will be unprecedented. Infrared observations are useful for cool objects which do not emit much visible light, or objects obscured by dust at visible light wavelengths.

³ Great Observatories program, Synergies’ – Wikipedia

The ability of Spitzer to see though dust and thick gases is good for galactic nuclei observations. Massive objects at the hearts of galaxies shine in X-rays, gamma rays, and radio waves, but infrared studies into these clouded regions can reveal the number and positions of objects.

⁴ ‘The Double Helix Nebula: a magnetic torsional wave propagating out of the Galactic centre’ – Mark Morris, Keven Uchida, and Tuan Do

Comments: Accepted for publication in Nature. 13 pages, 3 figures. Includes supplementary material

Radioastronomical studies have indicated that the magnetic field in the central few hundred parsecs of our Milky Way Galaxy has a dipolar geometry and a strength substantially larger than elsewhere in the Galaxy, with estimates ranging up to a milligauss. A strong, large-scale magnetic field can affect the Galactic orbits of molecular clouds by exerting a drag on them, it can inhibit star formation, and it can guide a wind of cosmic rays away from the central region, so a characterization of the magnetic field at the Galactic center is important for understanding much of the activity there. Here, we report Spitzer Space Telescope observations of an unprecedented infrared nebula having the morphology of an intertwined double helix. This feature is located about 100 pc from the Galaxy’s dynamical centre toward positive Galactic latitude, and its axis is oriented perpendicular to the Galactic plane. The observed segment is about 25 pc in length, and contains about 1.25 full turns of each of the two continuous, helically wound strands. We interpret this feature as a torsional Alfven wave propagating vertically away from the Galactic disk, driven by rotation of the magnetized circumnuclear gas disk. As such, it offers a new morphological probe of the Galactic center magnetic field. The direct connection between the circumnuclear disk and the double helix is ambiguous, but the MSX images show a possible meandering channel that warrants further investigation.

In 1972 NASA launched Uhuru, the first satellite x-ray observatory, from off the coast of Kenya. Uhuru tracked x-rays coming from Cygnus X-1, one star of a binary star system⁴. X-rays shoot from a dense, crunched star as it pulls and heats matter from its companion star. The fast flicker of the x-rays and the wobble in the spectral picture of the companion star showed that Cygnus X-1 has extremely small size and large mass, and made it our first black hole candidate⁵.

In 1937, in suburban Chicago, Grote Reber used his homemade backyard radio telescope to identify a strong source of radio waves in Cygnus¹⁶. In 1951 Walter Baade focused the big Palomar telescope on the radio source in Cygnus A to take spectral pictures. The pictures showed emission lines indicating very high energy and a red-shift indicating very great distance – to another galaxy¹⁴. Further radio wave observations showed opposing plumes of particles from Cygnus A several times larger than the galaxy itself. In 1961 Fred Hoyle and William Fowler proposed that such radio galaxies were due to collapse of the mass of ten million to a hundred million suns, and by the late 1960’s the idea of super-massive black holes at galactic cores took hold⁷. In 1974 scientists at the main National Radio Astronomy Observatory facility, in Green Bank, West Virginia, detected a strong radio source, which they named Sagittarius A* (pronounced “A-star”), at the center of the Milky Way⁶.

In 1990 NASA sent space shuttle Discovery to launch the Hubble telescope, the first of its four “great observatories”, each detecting a different radiation band – infra-red, visible light, x-rays and gamma rays. In 1994 Hubble, the visible light observatory, found a spiral-shaped disk of hot gas revolving rapidly around the core of the M87 galaxy, just as material would revolve around a super-massive black hole⁸. In 1999, space shuttle Columbia astronauts launched the Chandra x-ray observatory (named after Chandrasekhar). Chandra soon detected x-rays from the center of the Milky Way, giving further evidence that Sagittarius A* is a super-massive black hole⁹.

In 2002, the European Southern Observatory announced the result of ten years of observation of stars near the center of the Milky Way. One star, S2, was found to sling around Sagittarius A* in a close, fifteen-year orbit – the tight orbit that a star would have around a super-massive black hole¹⁰. In November 2005, using the National Science Foundation’s Very Large Baseline Array of synchronized radio telescopes spread across the continent, scientists showed the closest picture yet of Sagittarius A*x¹¹. Science agencies in Europe and North America are now building a larger and more detailed radio telescope array, the Atacama Large Millimeter Array (ALMA). With ALMA we may see right up to the event horizon, the very “shadow” of the Milky Way’s central black hole¹²x¹³.

Grote Reber’s homemade backyard radio telescope (Photo: NRAO)

Cygnus A galaxy radio jets & plumes, VLA radio image.

The center of the Milky Way, Chandra x-ray image.
Credit: X-ray: NASA/CXC/MIT/F.K.Baganoff et al.; Illustration: NASA/CXC/M.Weiss

The center of the Milky Way, VLA radio image.
Sagittarius A* is the bright white dot at center.
CREDIT: NRAO/AUI/NSF, Jun-Hui Zhao, W.M. Goss

Sagittarius, Cleveland, Sept. 21, 9:00pm edt

Electromagnetic Radiation Spectrum

short waves, high frequency
Gamma Rays
X-Rays
Ultra-violet
Visible
Infra-red
Microwave
Radio
long waves, low frequency

Note: wavelength x frequency = speed of light

Star Life Cycles

Sources

¹ ‘Dark Stars (1783)’ – Thinkquest.org

The concept of black holes was first introduced over two centuries ago. In 1783, Reverend John Mitchell, an amateur British astronomer, proposed that gravity could affect light as well as matter. Mitchell showed that an object with the density of the sun, yet five hundred times larger would exert a gravitational pull so great that “all light emitted from such a body would be made to return toward it.”

In 1795, Pierre-Simon Laplace, a French physicist who independently reached the same conclusions, reasoned that: “it is therefore possible that the greatest luminous bodies in the universe are on this account invisible.”

Both Mitchell and Laplace believed that the escape velocity, the speed necessary to escape the star’s gravity, for a sufficently large star would be greater than the speed of light. Because light could not escape from the gravitational pull, the dark star would appear invisible to an observer against the night sky. Both theories were based on Newton’s theory of gravitation and corpuscular light.

For many years afterward, the idea of an object with enough gravity to keep itself invisible was discarded by many scientists because in 1799 Thomas Young demonstrated that light acted as a wave. It would take another century before the idea of black holes would come back into the light.

² ‘Schwarzschild’s Solution (1916)’ – Thinkquest.org

The modern concept of the black hole was introduced in 1916. Briefly following the release of Einstein’s General Relativity, Karl Schwarzschild, a German physicist, discovered a mathematical solution to Einstein’s field equations that described the gravitational field of a point mass while fighting for the German army in World War I. Schwarzschild died several months later from a rare disease contracted during the war.

This solution, known as Schwarzschild Geometry, describes the space and time around any spherical mass including the distance from the center of a sphere at which light cannot escape. This distance is known as the Schwarzschild Radius (rs). If the mass of an object is entirely inside the Schwarzschild Radius, we have a perfectly spherical, non-rotating black hole.

³ ‘Limits of Gravity (1930-1939)’ – Thinkquest.org

For some time, black holes would remain only an incarnation of relativity. How could such an object actually exist in nature? The answer lies in the death of a star.

In 1930, Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, an Indian physicist, calculated the mass limit (1.4 solar masses) of a star by which its gravitational collapse would be prevented by the exclusion principle for electrons and become a white dwarf. A white dwarf with mass greater than this limit is unable to support itself against its own gravitational pull and crunches into a neutron star.

In 1939, J.R. Oppenheimer, an American scientist, calculated that maximum mass limit of a neutron star is about 3.2 solar masses. Oppenheimer proposed that in a star with mass over this limit, gravity would be unopposed and the star would become a black hole. Oppenheimer would later abandon his work on black holes to help build the atomic bomb during World War 2.

⁴ ‘Major Milestones In X-ray Astronomy’ by WKT

Date: December 1970 to March 1973
Vehicle/Mission: Uhuru X-ray satellite
Agency/Country: NASA
Instruments/Detectors: Proportional counters (2 -20 keV)
Mirror Description: No mirrors
Highlights: Uhuru, the first satellite dedicated to the observation of cosmic X-ray sources, was equipped with a sensitive proportional counter attached to a viewing pipe to locate the sources. It expanded the number of known sources to more than 400, showed that X-ray stars are neutron stars or black holes accreting matter from companions in binary star systems, and discovered X-rays from hot gas in galaxy clusters.

⁵ ‘Cygnus X-1 (A Black Hole)’ – Thinkquest.org

In 1972, an invisible X-ray source from the constellation Cygnus was first detected by X-ray observatory Uhuru (Swahili for “freedom”) and named Cygnus X-1. The X-ray source was found to orbit every 5.6 days around its companion HDE 226868, a blue supergiant with 30 solar masses.

Why was Cygnus X-1 considered a black hole? For starters, Cygnus X-1 flickers at less than a thousandth of a second bursts. For an object to flicker, light must travel all the way across its surface. So if light travels 300 kilometers per thousandth of a second, that must mean that Cygnus X-1 is much smaller than our planet.

Second, HDE 226868’s spectral lines wobble because of the gravitational pull of Cygnus X-1. In order for that to be possible, scientists estimate that Cygnus X-1 must have at least 7 or more solar masses, putting its mass way beyond the Oppenheimer-Volkoff Limit for a neutron star.

⁶ Radio Astronomers Lift ‘Fog’ On Milky Way’s Dark Heart; Black Hole Fits Inside Earth’s Orbit – Science Daily, April 2, 2004

Sagittarius A* was discovered in February of 1974 by Bruce Balick, now at the University of Washington, and Robert Brown, now director of the National Astronomy and Ionospheric Center at Cornell University. It has been shown conclusively to be the center of the Milky Way, around which the rest of the Galaxy rotates.

…

In March 2004, 55 astronomers gathered at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory facility in Green Bank, West Virginia, for a scientific conference celebrating the discovery of Sagittarius A* at Green Bank 30 years ago. At this conference, the scientists unveiled a commemorative plaque on one of the discovery telescopes.

⁷ ‘ Giants in the galaxy cores’ – Southampton General Relativity Explorer

An outstanding example is M87, a strong radio source that has been identified with an elliptical galaxy about 50 million light years away. Matter is ejected at relativistic speed from the centre of this galaxy in two gigantic jets that extend for 2600 light years from the core. The energy radiated through the jets is equivalent to that released in something like 10 million supernova explosions! What central engine could lead to the release of such awesome power? The explanation that caught on was the idea that the AGNs are the manifestation of gigantic black holes located at the heart of distant galaxies. In a paper that appeared in Nature on March 16 1961, Hoyle and Fowler suggested that the radiated energy ought to signal the collapse of some kind of superstar.

Our present opinion is that only through the contraction of a mass of 10-100 million solar-masses to the relativity limit can the energies of the strongest sources be obtained. (Hoyle and Fowler 1961)

This was an intriguing proposal, but it was difficult to see how collapse could be the explanation for the observed jets. The gravitational collapse of even such an enormous congregation of matter would only last a day or so, but the jets were evidence of ongoing emission for more than a million years! Whatever the central object was, it must be able to radiate continually for a very long time. Realizing this, Ya B Zeldovich and Igor Novikov envisaged a model based on a some kind of supermassive compact object powered by accretion. They argued that the mass of such an object must be of the order of 100 million solar masses if the luminosity is to be smaller that the Eddington limit (at which radiation pressure balances the pull of gravitation and thus prevents further accretion). Within this model even the strongest observed sources could be fuelled by accretion of just a few solar masses worth of material per year. The idea seemed plausible and a few years later (in 1969) Donald Lynden-Bell suggested that the central object in an active galaxy is a supermassive black hole feeding off of an accretion disk.

⁸ ‘Hubble Confirms Existence of Massive Black Hole at Heart of Active Galaxy’ – Hubblesite.org

Astronomers using the Hubble telescope have found seemingly conclusive evidence for a massive black hole in the center of the giant elliptical galaxy M87, located 50 million light-years from Earth in the constellation Virgo. Earlier observations suggested that the black hole was present, but they were not decisive.

This observation provides very strong support for the existence of gravitationally collapsed objects, which were predicted 80 years ago by Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity. This image shows a spiral-shaped disk of hot gas in the core of M87. Hubble measurements indicate that the disk’s rapid rotation is strong evidence that it contains a massive black hole. A black hole is so massive and compact that nothing can escape its gravitational pull, not even light.

⁹ ‘A Monster in the Middle’ – NASA

If Sag A* really does harbor a black hole, it ought to shine as an X-ray source. The X-rays would come from hot gas in an accretion disk swirling into the dense gravitational field of the hole. Previous X-ray satellites lacked the combined resolution and sensitivity to make this basic test. But now, thanks to the Chandra X-ray Observatory, astronomers finally have the data they’ve been waiting for.

A group of researchers led by Frederick K. Baganoff and colleagues from Pennsylvania State University announced last month that a faint X-ray source, newly detected by Chandra, may be the long-sought X-ray emission from a supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way.

“The race to be the first to detect X-rays from Sagittarius A* is one of the hottest and longest running in all of X-ray astronomy,” Baganoff said. “Theorists are eager to hear the results of our observation so they can test their ideas.”

Chandra’s remarkable detection of this X-ray source has placed astronomers within a couple of years of a coveted prize: measuring the spectrum of energy produced by Sagittarius A* to determine in detail how the supermassive black hole that powers it works.

As the high energy X rays stream away from the vicinity of the black hole, they heat the blanketing gas to temperatures of a few million degrees, and the blanket absorbs some of the X rays from the central source. This produces dark stripes, or absorption lines in the X-ray spectrum. Bright stripes or emission lines due to emission from the blanketing gas are also present. Since each element has its own unique structure, these lines can be read like a cosmic bar code to take inventory of the gas. The team was able to determine what atoms the gas contains and how many, the number of electrons each atom has retained in the hostile environment of the black hole, and how the gas is moving there. They found lines from eight different elements including carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, and iron. The amount of this gas was found to be about 100 times greater than that found with optical and ultraviolet observations.

¹⁰ ‘Star Orbiting Massive Milky Way Centre Approaches to within 17 Light-Hours’ – European Southern Observatory

No event like this one has ever been recorded . These unique data show unambiguously that S2 is moving along an elliptical orbit with SgrA* at one focus, i.e. S2 orbits SgrA* like the Earth orbits the Sun, cf. the right panel of PR Photo 23c/02 .

The superb data also allow a precise determination of the orbital parameters (shape, size, etc.). It turns out that S2 reached its closest distance to SgrA* in the spring of 2002, at which moment it was only 17 light-hours <5> away from the radio source, or just 3 times the Sun-Pluto distance. It was then moving at more than 5000 km/s, or nearly two hundred times the speed of the Earth in its orbit around the Sun. The orbital period is 15.2 years. The orbit is rather elongated – the eccentricity is 0.87 – indicating that S2 is about 10 light-days away from the central mass at the most distant orbital point <7>.

¹¹ ‘Astronomers Get Closest Look Yet At Milky Way’s Mysterious Core’ – National Radio Astronomy Observatory

The astronomers used the VLBA to measure the size of an object called Sagittarius A* (pronounced “A-star”) that marks the exact center of our Galaxy. Last year, a different team announced that their measurements showed the object would fit inside the complete circle of Earth’s orbit around the Sun. Shen and his team, by observing at a higher radio frequency, measured Sagittarius A* as half that size.

A mass equal to four million Suns is known to lie within Sagittarius A*, and the new measurement makes the case for a black hole even more compelling than it was previously. Scientists simply don’t know of any long-lasting object other than a black hole that could contain this much mass in such a small area. However, they would like to see even stronger proof of a black hole.

…

In a few years, when the Atacama Large Millimeter Array (ALMA) comes on line, it may be used in conjunction with other millimeter-wave telescopes to make the higher-frequency observations that will reveal the telltale black-hole shadow.

¹² ALMA Partners

The Atacama Large Millimeter Array (ALMA) is an international astronomy facility. ALMA is an equal partnership between Europe and North America, in cooperation with the Republic of Chile, and is funded in North America by the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) in cooperation with the National Research Council of Canada (NRC), and in Europe by the European Southern Observatory (ESO) and Spain. ALMA construction and operations are led on behalf of North America by the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO), which is managed by Associated Universities, Inc. (AUI), and on behalf of Europe by ESO.

¹³ ‘A Quest to See a Black Hole’s Shadow’ – Space.com

Astronomers have already detected radiation from hot spots just outside the black hole, and they believe that these will paint a background against which the black hole’s profile, or shadow, will stand out.

¹⁴ ‘Cygnus A, Quasars, and Quandaries’ – The Chandra Chronicles, March 13, 2001

When Walter Baade and Rudolph Minkowski obtained the spectrum of Cygnus A, they found what they considered to be proof of colliding galaxies: emission lines that indicated they were produced by gas in a high state of excitation.

…

The spectrum also showed that the emission lines were all red-shifted by the same amount. This in itself was not unexpected, since two decades earlier Edwin Hubble and his colleagues had shown that the spectra of distant galaxies would show a red-shift proportional to their distance. The difficulty was that the measured red-shift implied that Cygnus A was very distant — possibly 1 billion light years distant!

…

It has the shape of a great cosmic dumbbell, with two huge lobes of high-energy particles located over half a million light years apart. The galaxy, which is several times smaller than the lobes, is located in the middle. It was beginning to look as if the radiation from Cygnus A was not due to galaxies in collision, but to some mysterious explosive process where high-energy particles were being blown out of the galaxy!

¹⁵ ‘Black Holes and Time Machines’ By Sir Martin Rees, Astronomer Royal

The term ‘black hole’ itself was not coined until 1968, when John Wheeler described how an infalling object ‘becomes dimmer millisecond by millisecond…light and particles incident from outside …go down the black hole only to add to its mass and increase its gravitational attraction.’

¹⁶ ‘The Discovery of Cygnus A’ – The Chandra Chronicles, January 31, 2001

In 1946, many engineers and scientists in the United Kingdom and Australia used the talents and technology acquired during World War II to explore the sky with radio telescopes. They were especially interested in a region in the constellation Cygnus which had been identified as a strong source of radio waves by radio astronomy pioneer Grote Reber, who had used a $2,000 homemade radio telescope in his back yard in Wheaton, Illinois to make a radio map of the Milky Way.

…

Francis Graham Smith used an improved radio telescope in Cambridge, England to get a much more accurate position of Cygnus A. Smith airmailed his results at once to Walter Baade at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. Within a few weeks, Baade was in the observing cage of the 200 inch telescope on Palomar Mountain. He focused the powerful telescope on the position given by Smith, and took two photographs, one in blue and one in yellow light. The next afternoon, he developed the photographs.

“I knew something was unusual the moment I examined the negatives,” Baade recalled. “There were galaxies all over the plate, more than two hundred of them, and the brightest was at the center. It showed signs of tidal distortion, gravitational pull between the two nuclei — I had never seen anything like it before.