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OK, not directly. But as if we needed another reason why increased levels of carbon dioxide caused by global warming is generally bad, recent studies have shown that undesirable plants such as Poison Ivy love CO2. It makes them grow faster and bigger, more resilient to pesticides, and their irritant even stronger. Basically, more CO2 makes Poison Ivy into the cockroach of the plant world. I got a bad case of Poison Ivy a couple summers back and it was a major drag, so poison ivy sucks big time, and anything that makes it stronger is bad…very bad. (Alright, I know poison ivy is not harmful to most non-human animals and is an important part of the eco-system, blah blah blah).
But…wait a minute. Don’t all plants love CO2? Wouldn’t many plants thrive in a warmer climate with higher levels of CO2? Why just poison ivy? I did a quick search and came up with a lot of anti-global warming sites that said rising CO2 levels was cyclical and natural. (There’s something about the “Global Warming Is A Myth!” pushers that make me feel like they are trying to get me to join a cult, or buy a drug that will ultimately do nothing but cause explosive diarrhea, or a buy a pet that will destroy your life if you feed it after midnight).
But then I found an article on Yale Global Online about a study that global warming spurs asthma and allergies, since increased levels of CO2 seems to make invasive plants in particular, such as ragweed, even stronger.
So spread the word. Global warming will give you a disgusting rash – so let’s do our part to be more eco-friendly. Seriously, people. Nobody likes to be itchy.
Read more about global warming on nrdc.org >>
As long as I’m blogging about strange natural occurrences and things disappearing…
I just read that a 100-foot deep, five-acre glacial lake in the southern Andes is suddenly a huge crater – as if someone decided to drain it. Park rangers in Chile’s Bernando O’Higgins National Park found an empty crater with glaciers strewn about where the lake used to be. Read about it & see pictures on cnn.com >>
Geologists don’t have any solid theories yet – one guess is that cracks mysteriously appeared at the bottom of the lake. Hmmm, I wonder what’s going to disappear next?
I was watching a great documentary series “The Galapagos” on the National Geographic Channel, saw some Galapagos bees pollinating away, and realized I never found out what happened to those missing bees from this past winter so I did some googling.
As you’ve probably heard, this past winter, millions of honey bees mysteriously vanished without a trace in over 20 states, which has much more dire consequences than a shortage of honey. More than 90 crops in the U.S. depend on their pollination, worth about $14 billion a year to the economy. Bees directly & indirectly affect about 1/3 of the typical American’s diet – the healthier part, that is. Source: New York Times “Losing Their Buzz”>>)
Despite the sequence of the entire honey bee genome being published in October 2006 to better understand these insects, and a House Hearing called in March to pinpoint the cause of this disappearance, currently called “colony collapse disorder” or “CCD,” nobody has come up with a definite reason why this happened. There are of course, tons of theories from viruses, stress, pesticides causing disorientation, global warming to alien abduction.
Curious to see if there have been any developments on this phenomenon, I did a quick news search, and have so far only come up with an article about scientists in Ontario, Canada, getting funding in late May to solve the bee mystery. (read it on cbc news >>) And then I saw on The Daily Green that Beekeeper Kim Flottum, editor of Bee Culture Magazine, blogged that there’s no buzz on CCD, and that the summer hives are looking good (I’ll take his word for it, he seems like he’s a Jedi Master of Beekeepers). So I’ve gathered that as of yet, this issue is still unsolved. I’m very curious to see if and when they come up with an answer.
My theory? The pesticides were stressing out the bees, making them loopy and thus easier to herd and persuade. The aliens took this chance to abduct the bees because they are mad about global warming. (We’re wrecking the planet and there’s no point in invading earth and taking over it anymore and they have to look elsewhere.)
Learn more about Colony Collapse Disorder on Wikipedia >>
Extending above the photosphere or visible surface of the Sun, the faint, tenuous solar corona can’t be easily seen from Earth, but it is measured to be hundreds of times hotter than the photosphere itself. The clusters of the majestic, hot coronal loops span 30 or more times the diameter of planet Earth.
Music produced by the Sun’s Atmosphere? A picture forms in my mind of a future in which the privileged few dress to the nines and hop on privately chartered space shuttles for a night at the Solar Opera. The guests would be seated in a hovering amphitheatre specially designed to withstand the sun’s heat and filter its rays, optimized for a spectacular, literally out-of-this-world light & sound show… The reality is a bit less romantic, but still pretty amazing.
Astronomers recorded sound waves emitted by the looping magnetic fields along the Sun’s outer regions, or the corona, which carries magnetic sound waves. Unfortunately, we humans can’t hear these sounds since our hearing range is between 20 to 20,000 hertz, while the solar sound waves are more along the lines of milli-hertz-a-thousandth of a hertz.
I don’t quite understand all of this, as to my chagrin, I’m not smart enough to grasp astrophysics, but I’m going to try my best to break down what I do understand in layman’s terms:
One of the astronomers likens this phenomenon to the solar energy plucking a guitar string. Explosive events at the sun’s surface produce acoustic waves that bounce back and forth between the ends of the loops, setting up “standing waves.” So imagine a guitar string being plucked by microflares (tiny, frequently occurring solar flares) which produce sound waves that reach tens of miles, traveling at speeds of 45,000 – 90,000 miles per hour, releasing the energy equivalent to millions of hydrogen bombs. (Considering that the speed of sound on Earth at sea level in static conditions is about 761 miles per hour, it boggles the mind!)
Forget the opera, this sounds like one hell of a badass rock concert. Too bad we can’t hear it.
This study will be presented at this week’s Royal Astronomical Society’s National Astronomy Meeting in Lancashire, England. Read more about this on Yahoo News >>
The above photo was taken from: http://www.watersheds.org/nature/gallery3/pages/TinyFrog.htm
I’m in upstate NY right now, and I just noticed today that the annual chorus of adorable “peeping” could be heard from the breeding ground of the little frogs dubbed “spring peepers”. The sound is just so cute (they sound like the chirping of chicks). I’ve actually never ventured into the soggy grounds where they hang out to catch a glimpse of them, but here’s what I found out about my little amphibian friends who create such a lovely audio ambiance when I open my windows, heralding the start of spring.
The Spring Peeper, or the Pseudacris crucifer, is a small tree frog very common throughout eastern America. They’re nocturnal, and only grow to a full size of up to 0.75 to 1.5 inches long. Their very loud, high pitched mating call gives them the nickname, “spring peepers.” The peeper has a vocal sac under its chin. To make the peeping sound, the frog fills the sac with air (like a balloon), and then pushes the air out, producing two peeping sounds (one sound when the air goes in and one when the air goes out). Sometimes, a peeper makes sounds while sitting in holes or crevices in the soil; the hole acts like a megaphone, making the sound even louder.
To hear sound clips and learn more, click here or check out the wikipedia article. Peep Peep! Happy Spring!
