What's the story, morning glory?

Al Gore, who I really respect as both a person and as a lawmaker, is ticking me off. He wrote an editorial for the New York Times (available here) and in it he says,

Consider this tale of two planets. Earth and Venus are almost exactly the same size, and have almost exactly the same amount of carbon. The difference is that most of the carbon on Earth is in the ground — having been deposited there by various forms of life over the last 600 million years — and most of the carbon on Venus is in the atmosphere.

As a result, while the average temperature on Earth is a pleasant 59 degrees, the average temperature on Venus is 867 degrees. True, Venus is closer to the Sun than we are, but the fault is not in our star; Venus is three times hotter on average than Mercury, which is right next to the Sun. It’s the carbon dioxide.

Okay, I'm all about saving the Earth and reducing the amount of CO2 we humans disgorge into the atmosphere, but comparing the Earth and Venus to make your point? The effects of global warming are going to require an awful lot of adjustment, and, should we handle those impacts poorly, will very probably lead to much war, famine, and generally bad behavior on the part of us humans. Are we going to turn into Venus? No. Definitely not.

So, what are the expected impacts of anthropogenic global warming, you may ask. The impact I'm most interested in is the impact on aridity. It's expected that the southwestern US will become more dry under a warmer climate regime. Droughts will be longer and more severe, and the "average" moisture state will be closer to that experienced during the dust bowl in the 1930's than it will be to today.

Temperatures will increase more in the northern latitudes than nearer the equator, meaning the effects of global warming will be more pronounced as one moves toward the poles. Some species will undoubtedly go extinct as their habitats become inhospitable (like the pika), but probably fewer than if the climate cool precipitously (at least, if previous abrupt warming periods are any indication). More likely, though, the individuals in some species will grow smaller, and others (though again, fewer than if climate were cooling) will grow larger. We humans have carved up the landscape with our agriculture and cities, so it'll be harder for species to move the way they normally would, and that will likely tax some species into extinction that would otherwise have made it. It's likely the growing ranges of many food species we rely on will shift, and probably not to wider ranges in the US. Growing season temperatures on average won't shift up that much, but the number and intensity of high heat stress days is likely to increase--something every bit as important for determining whether a given crop year is successful and productive or not.

We'll loose a lot of coastal areas, but that's happened before, quite a few times, actually, and eventually won't be much of an issue. The main problem with that is there are a lot of people who will likely be displaced initially, and they will likely, even in the best of reactions and circumstances, be forced to live in even closer proximity than they currently do. This proximity will probably be great for the diseases that rely on proximity for communication from person to person, but not really for the people forced to live together. Speaking of diseases, many of the diseases and vectors that are most pernicious to us humans are winter-killed in the north. Warmer winter temperatures will encourage diseases like malaria to make a reappearance in the states, and we're already seeing infestations of wasps that successfully overwinter across the south. Eventually a new equilibrium will be reached between vector and host (us), but in the mean time, a lot of people will probably die.

Personally, I think the real life consequences of global warming are sufficiently scary without invoking Venus, Mr. Gore.

Isopropanol--least favorite alcohol EVER!

I have a very short, but rather bad history with isopropanol. I'm sure it's a great alcohol, possessing many admirable qualities and useful in any number of applications--just nothing that helps me. In fact, I seem rather adept at using it in ways that make life that much more difficult.

For instance, I once accidentally added isopropanol to a liquid-liquid extraction I was doing to collect data for my master's. I was using water and hexane, and meant to get hexane, but picked up the bottle next to it, which just happened to be isopropanol. I added it to about half the samples before realizing the phases weren't separating as they should. Just my luck, every phase was miscible. I don't think there was a compound in the lab short of dirt I could have picked that would have been a worse thing to accidentally add.

Today, I was trying to clean up some spilled sodium iodide that spilled on a balance. I used water first, then decided I wanted to use the balance, so I sprayed alcohol on it to encourage it to dry faster. Not just any alcohol, mind you, but isopropanol. I watched, horrified as the isopropanol fumes rolled down over the iodine-covered plastic, reacted with the left-over iodine and stained the balance a dark yellow. Does ethanol do this? No, of course not. Only isopropanol. Grr.

Friendship bread

My neighbor upstairs gave me her starter for Amish friendship bread because she and her husband and child were going on vacation, so last night I went out and spent a bunch of money buying little things like measuring spoons (yes, I'm still outfitting my new place--probably will be for a while) and this morning I dutifully made the bread. I was expecting it to take about an hour and a half (half an hour to mix, an hour to bake), which was really only sort of okay (I had to make a CV to send in with a proposal and both were due today), but I started at about 7:30 this morning and thought that would give me plenty of time. So, I mixed up the batter and then realized I didn't have any crisco or pam to grease my bread pans. Grr. I was just going to walk over to the grocery store quickly and buy crisco, but on the way passed a yard sale where they had a stool I was very much interested in (stools are amazingly expensive, and the chair I have is rediculously short for my table). Since I live in the world of the cashless, I had, you guessed it, no cash. The lady wasn't going to take a cheque, so I went home, grabbed my checkbook, drove to the grocery store hoping they would take an out of state cheque and give me cash back, found out they would (YES!), got money, and went back to the yard sale, where the stool was still waiting. The three ladies were all very nice, and I stood around and talked to them for a while, completely forgetting about both my bread and my waiting CV, and ended up buying the stool, two books (Shel Silverstein's "A light in the Attic" and "The Giving Tree", each for $1--score!), and a cool set of stacking toys with frogs on them.

I finally got home and baked the bread. by this time it was oh, about 10:30 or so. After an hour of baking, I tested the bread to see if it was done. It wasn't so I let it go for another 15 minutes (it was REALLY not done) and tested again. Still not done. 10 minutes after that, I gave it another five, and decided the moist crumbs that came out on the toothpick meant it was probably okay. So, I pulled it out of the oven and let it cool. It sort of fell a bit in the middle, but that's not all that unusual for quick breads, right? I tried very to turn the bread out onto a cooling rack, but it wouldn't budge, so I tried gently loosening the sides with a knife. Still no luck. So, then I turned it over and started banging on the bottom of the pan (always a good choice, no?) and finally got it to move. Or, perhaps more accurately, I got the middle of the bread to move. The part of the bread that was still gooey and underdone, because, as it turns out, the hour and a half of baking hadn't actually cooked the thing. So, now I have pieces of Amish friendship bread, pried oh so indelicately from the non-stick pan, all over my kitchen counter.

Anyone want to be my friend?