OK, that sub-heading must seem a tad bizarre! Let me explain. On Tuesday, Jean had an important visit to make down in Mesa, AZ on the outskirts of Phoenix. The first 65 miles, give or take, from Payson to Mesa are down along Highway 87.
At 11.20 we started on our return from Mesa planning on being early back home, say by 1pm at the latest. But 31 miles up the Northbound carriageway of Highway 87, we came to a halt. The road was closed due to an accident with a tanker. As our local newspaper, the Payson Roundup, put it,
The driver of the truck was taken by ambulance to a Scottsdale hospital with non life-threatening injuries. DPS has not ruled out speed as the cause of the crash. Photo by Andy Towle.
Due to a hazardous spill, Highway 87 was closed most of Tuesday, but reopened Wednesday morning after overnight clean up efforts, according to the Arizona Department of Public Safety.
Officials initially thought the roadway could be closed as many as two days due to the amount of oil spewed across both sides of the highway.
The highway closed down after a semi truck carrying oil used for paving rolled Tuesday afternoon near milepost 228, at the bottom of Slate Creek.
That resulted in us having to take a 170 mile detour and not arriving back until 4.30pm!
So what’s that got to do with the post for today? Simply that the implications of Tuesday spilled, like the tanker’s oil cargo, across into Wednesday and the long, thoughtful post I had in my mind to write got put on hold. Thus in its place is this republication of a recent release by Stanford School of Engineering at Stanford University. Apologies for another republished item but the article is relevant and interesting.
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WIND COULD MEET WORLD’S TOTAL POWER DEMAND – AND THEN SOME – BY 2030
Wind turbines near Livermore, CA.
HIGH RESOLUTION MODELS
In their study, Jacobson and Archer adapted the three-dimensional, atmosphere-ocean-land computer model known as GATOR-GCMOM to calculate the theoretical maximum wind power potential on the planet taking into account wind reduction by turbines. Their model assumed wind turbines could be installed anywhere and everywhere, without regard to societal, environmental, climatic or economic considerations.
The new paper contradicts two earlier studies that said wind potential falls far short of the aggressive goal because each turbine steals too much wind energy from other turbines, and that turbines introduce harmful climate consequences that would negate some of the positive aspects of renewable wind energy.
The new model provides a more sophisticated look than previously possible by separating winds in the atmosphere into hypothetical boxes stacked atop and beside one another. Each box has its own wind speed and weather. In their model, Jacobson and Archer exposed individual turbines to winds from several boxes at once, a degree of resolution earlier global models did not match.
“Modeling the climate consequences of wind turbines is complex science,” said Jacobson. “This software allows that level of detail for the first time.”
With a single model, the researchers were able to calculate the exposure of each wind turbine in the model to winds that vary in space and time. Additionally, the model extracts the correct amount of energy from the wind that gets claimed by the turbines, reducing the wind speed accordingly while conserving energy. It then calculates the effect of these wind speed changes on global temperatures, moisture, clouds and climate.
POTENTIAL APLENTY
Among the most promising things the researchers learned is that there is a lot of potential in the wind—hundreds of terawatts. At some point, however, the return on building new turbines plateaus, reaching a level in which no additional energy can be extracted even with the installation of more turbines.
“Each turbine reduces the amount of energy available for others,” Archer said. The reduction, however, becomes significant only when large numbers of turbines are installed, many more than would ever be needed.
“And that’s the point that was very important for us to find,” Archer said.
The researchers have dubbed this point the saturation wind power potential. The saturation potential, they say, is more than 250 terawatts if we could place an army of 100-meter-tall wind turbines across the entire land and water of planet Earth. Alternatively, if we place them only on land (minus Antarctica) and along the coastal ocean there is still some 80 terawatts available—about seven times the total power demand of all civilization. Hypothetical turbines operating in the jet streams six miles up in the atmosphere could extract as much as an additional 380 terawatts.
“We’re not saying, ‘Put turbines everywhere,’ but we have shown that there is no fundamental barrier to obtaining half or even several times the world’s all-purpose power from wind by 2030. The potential is there, if we can build enough turbines,” said Jacobson.
Mark Z. Jacobson, professor of civil and environmental engineering. Photo: Linda Cicero / Stanford News Service
HOW MANY TURBINES?
Knowing that the potential exists, the researchers turned their attention to how many turbines would be needed to meet half the world’s power demand—about 5.75 terawatts—in a 2030 clean-energy economy. To get there, they explored various scenarios of what they call the fixed wind power potential—the maximum power that can be extracted using a specific number of wind turbines.
Archer and Jacobson showed that four million 5-megawatt turbines operating at a height of 100 meters could supply as much 7.5 terawatts of power—well more than half the world’s all-purpose power demand—without significant negative affect on the climate.
“We have a long way to go. Today, we have installed a little over one percent of the wind power needed,” said Jacobson.
In terms of surface area, Jacobson and Archer would site half the four million turbines over water. The remaining two million would require a little more than one-half of one percent of the Earth’s land surface—about half the area of the State of Alaska. However, virtually none of this area would be used solely for wind, but could serve dual purposes as open space, farmland, ranchland, or wildlife preserve.
Rather than put all the turbines in a single location, Archer and Jacobson say it is best and most efficient to spread out wind farms in high-wind sites across the globe—the Gobi Desert, the American plains and the Sahara for example.
“The careful siting of wind farms will minimize costs and the overall impacts of a global wind infrastructure on the environment,” said Jacobson. “Regardless, as these results suggest, the saturation of wind power availability will not limit a clean-energy economy.”
Funding sources include National Science Foundation, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, and National Aeronautics and Space Administration high-end computing.
Andrew Myers is associate director of communications for the Stanford University School of Engineering.
Monday, September 10, 2012
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Let me close by pointing you to Mark Jacobson’s website.
An afterthought about the adventurous spirit of man.
While the focus on the manned exploration of space has declined significantly since those days of the Apollo missions, the spirit to explore has not diminished. This was underlined in spades by a recent post from the British blog Earth & Solar System that I have been subscribing to since a few weeks ago.
This blog reflects the research interests of the Isotope Cosmochemistry and Geochemistry Group at the University of Manchester. In our laboratories we study samples from comets, interstellar dust, interplanetary dust, Mars, the moon and asteroids to understand how the Earth and the Solar System were formed, how they evolved and became what we see today. We study the Earth and its chemistry to understand how it works, its mantle, crust, oceans and how we change it. We want to share and discuss what we find with everyone.
The blog is for sharing science and what we and other research groups discover as we do science in real time. Discussion, questioning and enquiry are good, but politics, and opinion that can’t be backed up by published scientific work are strictly off-limits and will be removed.
Yet another example of why integrity is the only way forward.
Anyway, the recent post that was published came into my ‘in-box’ on Monday and I wanted to share it with you. Primarily because the mainstream media have moved on and there is little ‘news’ about NASA’s Curiosity rover. That’s why this post is so fascinating and it’s reproduced on Learning from Dogs with the permission of Ashley King, the author.
The past week has seen NASAs Curiosity rover return more amazing images of the Gale crater, fire up its DAN and SAM instruments, and take its first steps towards Mt. Sharp.
Mastcam view south-west from the Bradbury landing site. The foreground is boulder-strewn and contains the edge of an impact crater. The layered rocks in the background form the base of Mt. Sharp (NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS).
The new images, captured using the 100mm telephoto lens of the Mastcam, provide a glimpse of the geological treats that await scientists at the base of Mt. Sharp. Of particular interest has been the identification of an unconformity, where two rocks in contact but of different ages indicate a break in the geological record. Satellite data suggests that the rocks lying below the unconformity contain hydrous minerals whilst those above are “dry”. It appears these rock units formed under very different environmental conditions.
Unconformity (marked by white dots) at Mt. Sharp (NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS).
Next, Curiosity had another driving lesson, this time positioning itself over one of the scour marks created during landing. This allowed the rover to continue testing the ChemCam and turn on the Dynamic Albedo of Neutrons (DAN) instrument, which will be used to search for water below the Martian surface. The Sample Analysis at Mars (SAM) instrument, comprising of a mass spectrometer, gas chromatograph and tunable laser spectrometer, was also gently woken up. SAM can measure the abundance of C compounds, H, N and O, elements associated with life, in atmospheric and powdered rock samples. A quick test of some Earth air trapped in the instrument since launch confirmed that it is working well and should soon be ready for Martian samples.
Curiosity has now completed four drives and is heading for Mt. Sharp. However, the first target is Glenelg, a rock outcrop 400m to the east of the Bradbury landing site, where it’s hoped Curiosity will start using its drill. Although the journey will take several weeks, Glenelg contains at least three different rock types that will help scientists piece together the geological history of Gale crater.
Leaving the Bradbury landing site. This Navcam image shows the tracks left in the Martian soil by Curiosity (NASA/JPL-Caltech).
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Makes a nice change to forget about the goings-on here on Planet Earth!
Like millions of others on this planet, I was held spellbound by the historic and epic moment of man placing his mark on another heavenly body, the Moon. I had been so wrapped up in NASA’s space missions that I took a holiday from work (I was working at the time for ICIANZ in Sydney, Australia) for the week of July 16th, 1969.
It was, of course, July 16th when the Apollo 11 Mission launched from the Kennedy Space Center culminating at precisely 20:17:39 UTC on July 20, 1969, the moment when the Lunar Module made lunar contact.
But in terms of me writing my own obituary for Neil, what could I offer?
Then a couple of items changed my mind.
Neil Armstrong (August 5, 1930 – August 25, 2012)
The first was reading the obituary printed in The Economist. I have long admired the many, many beautiful obituaries that have been published by this newspaper and this one was no exception. Take this extract from the Neil Armstrong obituary,
He had an engineer’s reserve, mixed with a natural shyness. Even among the other astronauts, not renowned for their excitability, he was known as the “Ice Commander”. Mike Collins, one of his crew-mates on the moon mission, mused that “Neil never transmits anything but the surface layer, and that only sparingly.” He once lost control of an unwieldy contraption nicknamed the Flying Bedstead that was designed to help astronauts train for the lunar landing. Ejecting only seconds before his craft hit the ground and exploded, he dusted himself off and coolly went back to his office for the rest of the day. There was work to be done.
Then the beautiful words that bring the obituary to a close,
Earth’s beauty
Over half a century, the man who never admitted surprise was surprised to observe the fading of America’s space programme. The Apollo project was one of the mightiest achievements of the potent combination of big government and big science, but such enterprises came to seem alien as well as unaffordable. Mr Armstrong, who after his flight imagined bases all over the moon, sadly supposed that the public had lost interest when there was no more cold-war competition.
Yet the flights had one huge unintended consequence: they transformed attitudes towards Earth itself. He too had been astonished to see his own planet, “quite beautiful”, remote and very blue, covered with a white lace of clouds. His reserve, after all, was not limitless. One photograph showed him in the module after he and Buzz Aldrin had completed their moon-walk, kicking and jumping their way across the vast, sandy, silver surface towards the strangely close horizon. He is dressed in his spacesuit, sports a three-day beard, and is clearly exhausted. On his face is a grin of purest exhilaration.
” … they transformed attitudes towards Earth itself. He too had been astonished to see his own planet, “quite beautiful”, remote and very blue, covered with a white lace of clouds.” For that reason alone, we need to celebrate the achievement of the Apollo 11 mission for putting our own planet into perspective within the enormity of the universe.
The second item that persuaded me to write this was a wonderful historic insight into how a potential catastrophy on the surface of the Moon would have been handled by President Nixon. This historic item was published on Carl Milner’s blog the other day, the specific item being What if the Moon Landing Failed? Republished with the very kind permission of Carl.
When Richard Nixon was the President of the United States, they had a speech ready for him to deliver to the world just in case the 1969 moon landing had ended in disaster. In fact many experts believed there was a big chance that Neil Armstrong and Edwin ‘Buzz’ Aldrin could have really gotten stuck on the moon. It’s something we don’t really think about now because we all know it was such a success. American Archives have unearthed the speech that would have been delivered if the late great Armstrong and Aldrin had never made it back to earth. This is such a great piece of history that I thought I might never see.
Give it a read, It’s such a moving and well prepared speech, and such a good thing that President Nixon never had to delivered it.
So, as with millions of others, I am delighted that this speech remained unspoken and instead we experienced: “At 5:35 p.m. (US EDT), Armstrong and Aldrin successfully docked and rejoined Collins, and at 12:56 a.m. on July 22 Apollo 11 began its journey home, safely splashing down in the Pacific Ocean at 12:50 p.m. on July 24.”
Neil Armstrong’s legacy is not only being part of the wonderful team that allowed man to make the first footprint on the Moon but also bringing into our human consciousness that this blue, wonderful planet we all live on is the only home we have.
First Full-View Photo of Earth Photograph courtesy NASA Johnson Space Center This famous “Blue Marble” shot represents the first photograph in which Earth is in full view. The picture was taken on December 7, 1972, as the Apollo 17 crew left Earth’s orbit for the moon. With the sun at their backs, the crew had a perfectly lit view of the blue planet.
Strikes me that celebrating July 20th each year as Blue Planet Day might not be a bad idea! Any takers? Now that would be a legacy for Neil!
Regular readers will know that I subscribe to the blog Naked Capitalism masterminded by Yves Smith. Some time ago, there was a link on NK to a story about how a tiny Chihuahua dog rescued some missing girls. It seemed like a good opportunity to take a closer look at this most magical aspect of a dog’s qualities.
First to that story.
I saw it on the Care2 website, from which I quote the following:
A 3-year-old chihuahua named Bell is an unexpected hero after finding three young girls who became lost for hours in the woods in Newnan, Georgia, on Monday.
CBS Atlanta reports that, on Monday, 8-year-old Carlie and 5-year-old Lacey Parga went for a walk with their dog Lucy down a cul-de-sac on trails near their neighborhood.
What started as a casual stroll became an unintended, and at times frightening, experience. As Carlie tells CBS, ‘”We tried to find our way out of the woods. We kept following paths and stuff and we got lost.” Indeed, they became scared that they were only to get more and more lost.
Carlie’s father, David Parga, noted that it wasn’t characteristic of them to wander off and, after searching for them but not hearing them respond, he contacted police and firefighters. Neighbors joined them including Carvin Young who thought to take Bell, who plays with the girls every day and knew their scent. Bell was able to lead searchers to the girls.
The full story on the Care2 website is here and on the CBS website here.
So what is it about the nose of the dog? A dog has more than 220 million olfactory receptors in its nose, while humans have only five million, making dogs’ sense of smell a thousand times greater. Frankly, trying to get one’s intellect around precisely what having a sense of smell one thousand times greater than a human means is tough! So on to another story.
17 Dogs, 3 Generations, 70 Years. There’s one constant… …the family dog.
After moving to Wellesley, Massachusetts for an anchor job with a major television sports network, Kevin began taking his German Shepherd, Beverly, for walks in the surrounding neighborhoods. They developed a route that included historic Atwood Street. Beverly kept veering toward one house in particular that had also caught Kevin’s eye previously, thinking it looked familiar but not knowing the reason.
After talking to a close family relative who had also once lived in Wellesley, Kevin was shocked to discover that the memorable house had once been a childhood home to his father, Bob Walsh, before WWII. After digging through old family photos that had been tucked away for years, Kevin uncovered a picture of his father as a toddler with his family on the house’s front porch, complete with their first family dog, Dee Dee.
Kevin’s father had been writing short stories about all of their family dogs through the years, but never knew about the photo. Its discovery was the pivotal moment that offered proof that the Walsh family’s journey with dogs had come back to the exact place where it started.
They’ve turned this story, along with other dog tales, into a book called Follow the Dog Home: How a Simple Walk Unleashed an Incredible Family Journey.
Dog’s nose leads family to back long lost old home, site unseen. German Shepherd, Beverly, is chronicled on WCVB TV’s news magazine show Chronicle. 70 years later, the family goes back “home” for stunning reunion and photograph.
A wonderful investment in studying America’s ecology is just starting.
I am indebted to The Economist for including in their issue of the 25th August a story about NEON, something I had previously not heard about.
It was then an easy step to locate the main website for the National Ecological Observatory Network, or NEON. (Just an aside that I can’t resist – NEON is such a fabulous acronym that one wonders how much push and shove there was to come up with the full name that also fitted the word ‘NEON’! Sorry, it’s just me!)
Anyway, back to the plot. The following video gives a very good idea of the projects aims. When I watched it, I found it inspiring because it seemed a solid example of how the nation, that is the USA, is starting to recognise that evolving to a new, sustainable way of life has to be built on good science. NEON strikes me as excellent science. You watch the video and see if you come to the same conclusion.
There’s also a comprehensive introduction to the project from which I will republish this,
In an era of dramatic changes in land use and other human activities, we must understand how the biosphere – the living part of earth – is changing in response to human activities. Humans depend on a diverse set of biosphere services and products, including air, water, food, fiber, and fuel. Enhancements or disruptions of these services could alter the quality of human life in many parts of the world.
To help us understand how we can maintain our quality of life on this planet, we must develop a more holistic understanding of how biosphere services and products are interlinked with human impacts. This cannot be investigated using disconnected studies on individual sites or over short periods of observation. Further, existing monitoring programs that collect data to meet natural resource management objectives are not designed to address climate change and other new, complex environmental challenges.
NEON, the first continental-scale ecological observatory, will provide comprehensive data that will allow scientists to address these issues.
Later on there’s more detail, as follows,
NEON has partitioned the U. S. into 20 eco-climatic domains, each of which represents different regions of vegetation, landforms, climate, and ecosystem performance. In those domains, NEON will collect site-based data about climate and atmosphere, soils and streams and ponds, and a variety of organisms. Additionally, NEON will provide a wealth of regional and national-scale data from airborne observationsand geographical data collected by Federal agencies and processed by NEON to be accessible and useful to the ecological research community. NEON will also manage a long-term multi-site stream experiment and provide a platform for future observations and experiments proposed by the scientific community.
The data collected and generated across NEON’s network – all day, every day, over a period of 30 years — will be synthesized into information products that can be used to describe changes in the nation’s ecosystem through space and time. It will be readily available in many formats to scientists, educators, students, decision makers and the general public.
For some reason I couldn’t find on the NEON website the informative map that was included in The Economist so I grabbed that one, and offer it below:
These eco-climatic domains are fully described here on the NEON website.
The benefits of this fabulous project are described thus, “The data NEON collects and provides will focus on how land use change, climate change and invasive species affect the structure and function of our ecosystems. Obtaining this kind of data over a long-term period is crucial to improving ecological forecast models. The Observatory will enable a virtual network of researchers and environmental managers to collaborate, coordinate research, and address ecological challenges at regional, national and continental scales by providing comparable information across sites and regions.”
As they say in business, if you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it! So reading in the above the sentence, ‘Obtaining this kind of data over a long-term period is crucial to improving ecological forecast models.‘ is cheering to the soul.
The United States quite rightly gets a huge bashing over it CO2 emissions but to condemn the USA for that and not to applaud this sort of wonderful research is utterly unjustified. As I have hinted before, America has, more than any other country in the world, the energy to make things better over the coming years.
As Professor Sir Robert Watson highlighted here recently said, ‘… deep cuts in CO2 emissions are possible using innovative technologies without harming economic recovery.’
The mistake we all make is to look behind us and think the future will be the same.
Let me start with something that is not really news. Not news in the sense that it has been very widely reported. I’m speaking of the probability, the high probability, that this year’s summer ice area in the Arctic will be a record low, with all the implications that this carries. Let me refer to a recent BBC news item that included a stunningly powerful chart.
Scientists at the US National Snow and Ice Data Center said data showed that the sea ice extent was tracking below the previous record low, set in 2007.
Latest figures show that on 13 August ice extent was 483,000 sq km (186,000 sq miles) below the previous record low for the same date five years ago.
The ice is expected to continue melting until mid- to late September.
“A new daily record… would be likely by the end of August,” the centre’s lead scientist, Ted Scambos, told Reuters.
“Chances are it will cross the previous record while we are still in ice retreat.”
The US National Snow and Ice Data Center may be found here.
So to the piece that generated the title of this post, the future of the car.
On the 17th August, I wrote an article highlighting the fact that the U.S. leads the world in cutting CO2 emissions. That was endorsed by an item published on the U.S. Energy Information Administration’s (EIA) website, that said,
U.S. carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions resulting from energy use during the first quarter of 2012 were the lowest in two decades for any January-March period. Normally, CO2 emissions during the year are highest in the first quarter because of strong demand for heat produced by fossil fuels. However, CO2 emissions during January-March 2012 were low due to a combination of three factors:
A mild winter that reduced household heating demand and therefore energy use
A decline in coal-fired electricity generation, due largely to historically low natural gas prices
Reduced gasoline demand
It was the last item that caught my eye. Because it resonated with an article on Chris Martensen’s Peak Prosperity blog just over a week ago. That article, written by Gregor Macdonald, was called The Demise of the Car.
About a third of the way into the article, Gregor writes,
But it’s not just India that has incorrectly invested in automobile transport. The other giant of Asia, China, has also placed large resources into auto-highway infrastructure.
It appears that at least a decade ago, the developing world made the same assumption about future oil prices as was made in Western countries. The now infamous 1999 Economist cover, Drowning in Oil, reflected the pervasive, status-quo view that the global adoption of the car could continue indefinitely. A decade later, however, we find that after oil’s extraordinary price revolution, the global automobile industry is now starved for growth.
Then a little further down in this interesting article there is this,
More broadly, however, global governments are captured by sunk-cost decision making as the past 60-70 years of highway infrastructure investment is now a legacy just too painful to leave behind. Interestingly, whether citizens and governments want to face this reality or not, features of the oil economy are already going away as infrastructure is increasingly stranded. Moreover, there are cultural shifts now coming into play as young people are no longer buying cars – in the first instance because they can’t afford them, and in the second instance because it’s increasingly no longer necessary to own a car to be part of one’s group. See this piece from Atlantic Cities:
Youth culture was once car culture. Teens cruised their Thunderbirds to the local drive-in, Springsteen fantasized about racing down Thunder Road, and Ferris Bueller staged a jailbreak from the ‘burbs in a red Ferrari. Cars were Friday night. Cars were Hollywood. Yet these days, they can’t even compete with an iPhone – or so car makers, and the people who analyze them for a living, seem to fear. As Bloomberg reported this morning, many in the auto industry “are concerned that financially pressed young people who connect online instead of in person could hold down peak demand by 2 million units each year.” In other words, Generation Y may be happy to give up their wheels as long as they have the web. And in the long term, that could mean Americans will buy just 15 million cars and trucks each year, instead of around 17 million.
If future car sales in the US will be limited by the loss of 2 million purchases just from young people alone, then the US can hardly expect to return to even 15 million car and truck sales per year. US sales have only recovered to 14 million. (And that looks very much like the peak for the reflationary 2009-2012 period)
Indeed, the migration from suburbs back to the cities, the resurrection of rail, and the fact that oil will never be cheap again puts economies – and culture – on a newly defined path to other forms of transport and other ways of working.
It’s a long and interesting article that demonstrates an old truth, no better put than in this quotation reputed to have been said by John F. Kennedy,
Change is the law of life. And those who look only to the past or present are certain to miss the future.
A closer look at the excellent work undertaken by Dr. Krista Varady.
Back on the 16th I wrote a post that was a follow-up to the previous day’s post about living a long life. My follow-up was called, hardly surprisingly, Postscript to Long Life post.
In that follow-up post, I wrote this,
Over on the Healthy Fellow blogsite, there’s an interview with Dr. Varady. The web link of that interview is here and crossing over and reading the full interview is much recommended. Here’s a taste, pardon the pun, of that interview:
JP: Can you help explain the distinctions between alternate day fasting and caloric restriction?
Dr. Varady: Caloric restriction is basically daily calorie restriction where an individual would restrict themselves by about 15% to 40% of their energy needs daily. So basically every single day you’re undergoing the same amount of restriction, whereas alternate day fasting involves a fast day wherein the individual would only eat 25% of their energy needs. So about 500 calories or so and that’s alternated with something called a “feed day” where the individual would eat ad libitum – so as much as they want. However in our studies we show that people end up losing weight because they can’t fully make up for the lack of food on the fast day on the feed day.
I’ve been in touch with JP wondering if I might have permission to republish the full interview. Unfortunately that wasn’t possible. However JP did say that republishing a couple of paragraphs would be fine and I’m going to be cheeky in adding a couple to the one I already published above!
Anyway, before inserting those paragraphs, let me set the scene. A very quick web search comes across the fact that Dr. Varady is an Assistant Professor at the UIC College of Applied Health Sciences. Her research work is described thus,
Research Interests
Dr. Varady, PhD
My research investigates the ability of novel dietary restriction strategies to facilitate weight loss and decrease cardiovascular risk in obese subjects. The most common dietary restriction protocol implemented is daily calorie restriction (CR), which involves reducing energy intake by 15 to 40% of needs daily. Another dietary restriction regimen employed, although far less commonly, is alternate day fasting (ADF). ADF regimens include a “feed day” where food is consumed ad-libitum over 24-h, alternated with a “fast day”, where food intake is partially or completely reduced for 24-h. ADF regimens were created to increase adherence to dietary restriction protocols since these regimens only require energy restriction every other day, rather than every day, as with CR. Recent findings from our lab demonstrate that ADF is an effective means of facilitating weight loss and improving several indicators of cardiovascular disease risk in overweight and obese subjects. Our findings also show that changes in adipose tissue physiology during weight loss may mediate these improvements in vascular health.
Current research activities
Developing novel diet and exercise regimens to facilitate weight loss and decrease cardiovascular disease risk in humans; Examining the intermediate role of adipose tissue in mediating the cardio-protective effects of diet and exercise; Investigating the behavioral factors that influence adherence to dietary restriction strategies.
So this is one lady that ought to understand the effects of what we shovel down our mouths. OK, on to that interview. From Part One, I selected this exchange,
JP: How long does it generally take for people to adapt to this new way of eating?
Dr. Varady: A lot of the subjects were saying that for the first two weeks it was pretty tough to basically change from a 3 meal a day eating pattern to just eating 1 meal a day and then 3 slightly bigger meals the next day. But they said that about after two weeks they totally got used to it and weren’t that hungry on the fast day anymore. They could undergo these really long periods of fasting without really feeling deprived. The other interesting thing that they were telling us was with regard to the feed day. The people didn’t binge. They only ate about 100% to 110% of their calorie needs.
Then from the second part of the interview, JP underlines an important point, “The truth of the matter is that research into ADF is still in its infancy and Dr. Varady is the first person to admit it. ” I then went on to select this exchange between JP and Dr. Varady,
JP: It seems as though ADF provides a very broad array of health benefits. Do you have a theory about why this is possible?
Dr. Varady: In the human data the main thing you see is weight loss. Even if it’s done in normal weight people. The minute you start losing weight you all of a sudden see an improvement in the majority of these factors. A lot of the effects of alternate day fasting are mediated through weight loss. Losing weight is so tightly correlated with your blood pressure, your cholesterol levels and heart rate, etc.
Fasting May Reduce Age-Related Disease Risk Factors
So this is not something of trivial interest, it’s serious research that could have a remarkable effect on the huge problems of obesity and poor diet that affect millions. Do yourself a favour and read the interview now. Part One and Part Two.
Finally, in that post on the 16th, I owned up to having got my weight down to 161.6 lbs (73.30 kgs). Now here we are having completed my third week of 5:2 fasting and last Saturday morning my weight was 159.0 lbs (72.12 kgs). The routine is very comfortable and as Dr. Varady mentioned, there is no sense of wanting to binge after the two days of fasting.
Just about the most fundamental requirement in life!
I subscribe to the Mother Nature Network website and recently in their ’round robin’ was this item, A Breath of Fresh Air. It’s all about the role of plants inside the home for improving the quality of the air we breathe. Thought, dear reader, that you would enjoy this.
15 houseplants for improving indoor air quality
Photo: ivama/Flickr
A breath of fresh air
In the late ’80s, NASA and the Associated Landscape Contractors of America studied houseplants as a way to purify the air in space facilities. They found several plants that filter out common volatile organic compounds (VOCs). Lucky for us the plants can also help clean indoor air on Earth, which is typically far more polluted than outdoor air. Other studies have since been published in the Journal of American Society of Horticultural Science furtherproving the science. Want to see the best flowers? Just click through the buttons above to see all 15 plants. (Text: Julie Knapp)<
The image above is just one of 17, each with details of how they contribute to cleaner, less toxic, air. So don’t delay, click here and read all about them yourself. Here’s an example of the presentation from picture number 16.
Peace lily (Spathiphyllum)
Shade and weekly watering are all the peace lily needs to survive and produce blooms. It topped NASA’s list for removing all three of most common VOCs — formaldehyde, benzeneand trichloroethylene. It can also combat toluene and xylene.
A stark reminder that more of the same will hurt us.
On the 14th August I published a post with the title of From feeling to doing. The post was a 15-minute video presented by David Roberts of Grist showing, in essence, how fundamentally simple was the issue of climate change and how profound the implications if we didn’t halt the rise in the temperature of Planet Earth.
I’m not going to insert that video in this post because you can click on the link above and do that yourself. What I will do is to draw your attention to the accompanying article on Grist under the title of Climate change is simple: We do something or we’re screwed. That article includes the slides that were in the video, such as this one:
So with that in mind, here’s what the BBC published on their news website yesterday morning,
Science advisor warns climate target ‘out the window’
By Pallab Ghosh, Science correspondent, BBC News
One of the Government’s most senior scientific advisors has said that efforts to stop a sharp rise in global temperatures were now unrealistic.
Professor Sir Robert Watson said that the hope of restricting the average temperature rise to 2C was “out the window”.
He said that the rise could be as high as 5C – with dire conseqences.
Professor Watson added the Chancellor, George Osborne, should back efforts to cut the UK’s CO2 emissions.
He said: “I have to look back (on the outcome of sucessive climate change summits) Copenhagen, Cancun and Durban and say that I can’t be overly optimistic.
“To be quite candid the idea of a 2C target is largely out of the window.”
As the BBC points out Professor Watson is a highly respected and world renown scientist on climate change policy and is currently Chief Scientist at the Department for Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA) and a former Chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Professor Watson was also with the World Bank and an advisor to former Vice President Al Gore. The BBC item goes on,
Professor Watson, who is due to step down from his role at Defra next month, suggested that the Chancellor, George Osborne, reconsider his opposition to tough measures to reduce carbon dioxide emissions.
Mr Osborne has said that the UK’s ambitious targets for CO2 should be relaxed so as not to drive businesses to countries which have set themselves much lower targets.
“I would say to George Osborne, ‘work with the public sector. Work with the public on behavior change. Let’s demonstrate to the rest of the world that we can make significant progress here” Professor Watson argues that the UK and Germany should continue to take the lead in driving efforts to reach an effective international treaty.
Hurt Poorest
“If we carry on the way we are there is a 50-50 chance that we will get to a 3 degree rise,” he said.
“I wouldn’t rule out a 5 degree world and that would be quite serious for the people of the world especially the poorest. We need more political will than we currently have”.
It shows that the impact on human health, the availability of food and water, the loss of coastlines becomes progressively worse as the average temperature of the planet rises.
The 2C target was agreed at the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change meeting in 2010.
The majority of countries though prefer a lower target of 1.5C.
Professor Watson added that deep cuts in CO2 emissions are possible using innovative technologies without harming economic recovery.
“This doesn’t take a revolution in energy technology, an evolution would get us there.”
What I would add to this report that has been widely circulated is that while it’s natural to assume, ‘We need more political will than we currently have‘, that political will flows from the will of the people.
Take the effect of a 4C rise, as David Roberts explains,
Which is described in the Grist article as,
Here’s the edition of the Royal Society journal that came out of the conference on 4 degrees C of warming. Read through it and see if you think “hell on earth” is an exaggeration. Desertification, water shortages, agricultural disruptions, rising sea levels, vanishing coral, tropical forest die-offs, mass species extinctions, oh my. Kevin Anderson, one of the lead scientists involved, was moved to say that “a 4 degrees C future is incompatible with an organized global community, is likely to be beyond ‘adaptation’, is devastating to the majority of ecosystems, and has a high probability of not being stable.”
So come on people, get real! Make sure that the democratic systems work and that our leaders know the sort of change that has to take place. As the wise Professor highlighted, ‘… deep cuts in CO2 emissions are possible using innovative technologies without harming economic recovery.’ Sort of makes sense to me. How about you?
The U.S. leads the world in cutting CO2 emissions — so why aren’t we talking about it?
On the 31st July, I republished a TomGram from William deBuys that showed some pretty frightening aspects of climate change in the South-West USA. Then there was the video on the 10th August, last Friday, that spelt out in very clear ways how the world is in a new, unfamiliar place. It would be so easy to think it’s all going to hell in a handbasket. So a change of tone.
There was an article on Grist by David Roberts about the US leading the world in cutting CO2 emissions. David kindly gave me permission to republish it on Learning from Dogs.
U.S. leads the world in cutting CO2 emissions — so why aren’t we talking about it?
By David RobertsContrary to popular belief, the U.S. is making progress on climate change.We have cut our carbon emissions more than any other country in the world in recent years — 7.7 percent since 2006. U.S. emissions fell 1.9 percent last year and are projected to fall 1.9 percent again this year, which will put us back at 1996 levels. It will not be easy to achieve the reductions Obama promised in Copenhagen — 17 percent (from 2005 levels) by 2020 — but that goal no longer looks out of reach, even in the absence of comprehensive legislation.
Why isn’t this extraordinary story a bigger deal in U.S. politics? You’d think Obama would be boasting about it! Turns out, though, it’s a little awkward for him, since several of the drivers responsible are things for which he can’t (or might not want to) take credit.
Awkward: that whole recession thing
First off there’s the Great Recession, which flattened electricity demand in 2008. It has never recovered — in fact, in part due to 2011′s mild winter, it has even declined slightly:
Click to embiggen.
For obvious reasons, boasting about the environmental benefits of the recession is not something Obama’s eager to do.
Awkward: frack-o-mania
The second big driver is the glut of cheap natural gas, which is currently trading at the 10-year low of about $3 per million British thermal units. This is absolutely crushing coal, the biggest source of CO2 in the electric sector:
The share of U.S. electricity that comes from coal is forecast to fall below 40% for the year, its lowest level since World War II. Four years ago, it was 50%. By the end of this decade, it is likely to be near 30%.
Here’s U.S. electricity generation from 2000-2012. Look how dramatic coal’s recent plunge is:
Click to embiggen.
In April, coal and natural gas both contributed 32 percent to the U.S. electricity mix — equal for the first time since EIA started collecting data in the ’70s. This is, as Alexis Madrigal emphasizes, an extraordinary shift, unprecedented in the history of the U.S. electrical system.
It’s helpful to Obama to be able to point to cheap natural gas when people accuse his EPA of killing coal. And it’s helpful in his effort to claim “all of the above.” But fracking’s potential environmental and health impacts has quickly made it a flash point with his environmental base (and his Hollywood base), so it’s at the very least a fraught subject.
Awkward: Kenyan socialist EPA sharia tyranny
A less significant driver of the switch from coal to natural gas is the EPA’s long overdue rollout of new or tightened clean-air rules on mercury, SO2 and NOx, and CO2. Those rules may do more work later on down the line when/if natural gas prices rise again, but for now the best analysis [PDF] shows that natural gas is doing most of the work killing coal. Nonetheless, EPA regs have proven a source of potent right-wing attacks on Obama and he’s probably not eager to call undue attention to them.
Thus: silence in the political world
So: given the fact that the decline in emissions is driven, at least in the conventional narrative, by an explosion in fossil fuel production, a recession, and a series of EPA regulations, it’s not hard to see why Obama isn’t eager to put it front and center. It’s got a little something for everyone to hate.
And of course the right isn’t eager to talk about it either, since conservative dogma tells us that there’s no way to grow the economy and shrink CO2 emissions at the same time … and yet, uh, that’s what’s happening. At the end of 2012, our economy will be much larger than it was in 1996, yet its carbon emissions will be the same. If conservatives acknowledge that it’s possible to loosen the link between climate pollution and economic growth, they’ll have to explain why we shouldn’t do a whole lot more of it.
Still, while the story has remained largely sub rosa in political media, there are several overlooked details that paint a happier picture than the conventional one above. There’s more to this story than natural gas and recession.
Happy: Coal’s getting its ass kicked by activists
First, it isn’t just natural gas and EPA taking coal out — it’s the kick-ass anti-coal movement! Fighting tooth-and-nail, plant-by-plant, it has blocked new construction and shut down over 100 existing plants.
The campaign has been so disciplined and successful that it’s drawn the support of NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who does not typically invest his own money in feel-good symbolism. He expects accountability and he’s getting it. Like the man said, “Ending coal power production is the right thing to do.”
Happy: Clean energy is happening
Renewable energy still represents a small portion of U.S. electricity generation, but that fact obscures its outsized impact. The U.S. doesn’t need to add a ton of renewables for things to start shaking loose.
Here’s growth over the last decade:
Click to embiggen.
One thing that jumps out is that renewables are growing much faster in some places than others. South Dakota now gets 22 percent of its electricity from wind, Iowa 19 percent. The top two states in total installed wind are Kansas and Texas. The top two for wind jobs are Iowa and Texas. That’s three red states and a deeply purple one — a wedge separating clean energy from the climate culture wars. That portends accelerating changes in the political economy.
Also driving changes in political economy: 29 states and D.C. now have mandatory renewable energy standards.
And renewables don’t have to get that big to start making waves. The sun shines most when the most electricity is being used — “peak demand” — so it serves to sharply reduce peak prices. Turns out that’s where utilities make a lot of their money. U.S. utilities are being forced to crank off coal plants when peak prices drop and then crank them back on afterwards.
It is no fun to turn coal plants on and off — it’s slow, laborious, and kills their economics. More and more, utility managers are turning toward upgraded, smarter grids and more flexible, responsive “mid-load” plants (i.e. natural gas). By hacking off peak prices, renewables will make the dynamics even worse for coal, well before they reach a large proportion of total electricity.
So renewables are a bigger part of this story than they appear, and getting bigger.
Happy: Demand is leveling off long-term
It’s not just the recession that’s bringing down U.S. energy demand — the leveling off of demand is a long-term trend. The U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) projects energy use will grow quite slowly through 2035:
Click to embiggen.
And this is almost certainly conservative: EIA doesn’t model policy changes, underestimates the role of technology, ignores rising fossil fuel prices, and is incapable of predicting cultural shifts.
For instance, few projections anticipated the sharp decline in driving in the U.S., which has been driven (ahem) as much by cultural and demographic factors as by economics.
Or consider the dramatic progress in energy use in buildings, which was also not anticipated by EIA. From Architecture 2030 comes this graph, which compares the EIA Annual Energy Outlook (AEO) projections on U.S. building stock from 2005 with the ones from 2012:
Click to embiggen.
The growth in U.S. building stock is slowing (in part — but only in part! — due to the recession), but growth in building energy consumption is dramatically slowing, thanks to advances in energy efficiency technology. EIA now expects CO2 emissions from the building sector to decline by 2035. That’s a pretty big change from going up by over 50 percent!
And that’s just with straight-line projections. If “best available demand technologies” are deployed, it looks like this:
Click to embiggen.
It’s within our reach to reduce the CO2 emissions of the building sector almost 22 percent! Given that building standards are one of the few areas of bipartisan agreement on energy these days, it’s not crazy to think that we’ll get closer to the latter projections than the former.
And the EIA projections for building energy consumption, Architecture 2030 notes, do not incorporate “sustainable planning applications or passive heating and cooling, natural ventilation, daylighting, or spatial configuration and site design strategies,” all of which are gaining in popularity and sophistication.
In short, there’s reason to think the demand-side story is similar to the supply-side story: official projections are dramatically underestimating potential.
Worry, but be happy
To sum up: yes, the explosive growth of natural gas and the Great Recession played a big part in U.S. climate emissions declining in recent years. And either of them could reverse in years to come. But they are not the whole story. There are real transitions underway — seedlings that can be watered and fertilized.
As Brad Plumer notes, America’s modest progress to date still leaves the world on a pathway to climate catastrophe. But it also shows that projections are not destiny. Things can change, and quickly.
Let me just pick out two sentences from near the end, “But they are not the whole story. There are real transitions underway — seedlings that can be watered and fertilized.”
It serves as a very good reminder that many people are voting with their feet, so to speak, and making a difference.
By Pallab Ghosh, Science correspondent, BBC News
Learning from Dogs 