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Spark Advisors | Althea Womble

Flower Power Made Our Climate Grow

This is a startling and completely unexpected result. I am totally cognizant of the powerful role of transpiration in sustaining rainfall over ecology. The great tropical rainforests are convincing demonstrations. It is core to my proposal to restore the Sahara and the Asian dry lands.

That it was way more difficult before flowering plants was not obvious at all.

This suggests that upland habitat was typically dryer and way more extensive everywhere except local wetlands. Suddenly Northern Australia looks like home to dinosaurs and the whole remnant ecosystem.

This also suggests that flowering plants are way more proficient at absorbing carbon.

The rainforests would likely have been hugely constrained to their best drainage and wetlands with intervening dry highlands. The deserts may not have been much larger but plenty of land would have been seriously marginal. Again think about Australia.

Flower Power Makes Tropics Cooler, Wetter

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/06/100616133327.htm

ScienceDaily (July 19, 2010) — The world is a cooler, wetter place because of flowering plants, according to new climate simulation results published in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B. The effect is especially pronounced in the Amazon basin, where replacing flowering plants with non-flowering varieties would result in an 80 percent decrease in the area covered by the ever-wet rainforest.

The simulations demonstrate the importance of flowering-plant physiology to climate regulation in an ever-wet rainforest, regions where the dry season is short or non-existent, and where biodiversity is greatest.

"The vein density of leaves within the flowering plants is much, much higher than all other plants," said the study's lead author, C. Kevin Boyce, Associate Professor in Geophysical Sciences at the University of Chicago. "That actually matters physiologically for both taking in carbon dioxide from the atmosphere for photosynthesis and also the loss of water, which is transpiration. The two necessarily go together. You can't take in CO2 without losing water."

This higher vein density in the leaves means that flowering plants are highly efficient at transpiring water from the soil back into the sky, where it can return to Earth as rain.

"That whole recycling process is dependent upon transpiration, and transpiration would have been much, much lower in the absence of flowering plants," Boyce said. "We can know that because no leaves throughout the fossil record approach the vein densities seen in flowering plant leaves."

For most of biological history, there were no flowering plants -- known scientifically as angiosperms. They evolved about 120 million years ago, during the Cretaceous Period, and took another 20 million years to become prevalent. Flowering species were latecomers to the world of vascular plants, a group that includes ferns, club mosses, and confers. But angiosperms now enjoy a position of world domination among plants.

"They're basically everywhere and everything, unless you're talking about high altitudes and very high latitudes," Boyce said.

Dinosaurs walked the Earth when flowering plants evolved, and various studies have attempted to link the dinosaurs' extinction or at least their evolutionary paths to flowering plant evolution. "Those efforts are always very fuzzy, and none have gained much traction," Boyce said.

Boyce and Lee are, nevertheless, working toward simulating the climatic impact of flowering plant evolution in the prehistoric world. But simulating the Cretaceous Earth would be a complex undertaking because the planet was warmer, the continents sat in different alignments, and carbon- dioxide concentrations were different.

"The world now is really very different from the world 120 million years ago," Boyce said.

Building the Supercomputer Simulation

So as a first step, Boyce and co-author with Jung-Eun Lee, Postdoctoral Scholar in Geophysical Sciences at UChicago, examined the role of flowering plants in the modern world. Lee, an atmospheric scientist, adapted the National Center for Atmospheric Research Community Climate Model for the study.

Driven by more than one million lines of code, the simulations computed air motion over the entire globe at a resolution of 300 square kilometers (approximately 116 square miles). Lee ran the simulations on a supercomputer at the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center in Berkeley, Calif.

"The motion of air is dependent on temperature distribution, and the temperature distribution is dependent on how heat is distributed," Lee said. "Evapotranspiration is very important to solve this equation. That's why we have plants in the model."

The simulations showed the importance of flowering plants to water recycling. Rain falls, and plants drink it up and pass most of it out of their leaves and back into the sky.

In the simulations, replacing flowering plants with non-flowering plants in eastern North America reduced rainfall by up to 40 percent. The same replacement in the Amazon basin delayed onset of the monsoon from Oct. 26 to Jan. 10.

"Rainforest deforestation has long been shown to have a somewhat similar effect," Boyce said. Transpiration drops along with loss of rainforest, "and you actually lose rainfall because of it."

Studies in recent decades have suggested a link between the diversity of organisms of all types, flowering plants included, to the abundance of rainfall and the vastness of tropical forests. Flowering plants, it seems, foster and perpetuate their own diversity, and simultaneously bolster the diversity of animals and other plants generally. Indeed, multiple lineages of plants and animals flourished shortly after flowering plants began dominating tropical ecosystems.

The climate-altering physiology of flowering plants might partly explain this phenomenon, Boyce said. "There would have been rainforests before flowering plants existed, but they would have been much smaller," he said.

Popular thinking about how to improve food systems for the better often misses the point, according to the results of a three-year global study of salmon production systems. Rather than pushing for organic or land-based production, or worrying about simple metrics such as "food miles," the study finds that the world can achieve greater environmental benefits by focusing on improvements to key aspects of production and distribution.
For example, what farmed salmon are fed, how wild salmon are caught and the choice to buy frozen over fresh matters more than organic vs. conventional or wild vs. farmed when considering global-scale environmental impacts such as climate change, ozone depletion, loss of critical habitat, and ocean acidification.
 The study is the world's first comprehensive global-scale look at a major food commodity from a full life cycle perspective, and the researchers examined everything -- how salmon are caught in the wild, what they're fed when farmed, how they're transported, how they're consumed, and how all of this contributes to both environmental degradation and socioeconomic benefits.
Article continues: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/11/091124152803.htm
Posted by Justin at 8:23 AM 0 comments

Eating and Living Healthy

Food is fuel. Consider the gasoline that you put in your car. The best gasoline treats your engine better than the cut rate version at the same station.

In the same way, good foods like fruits and vegetables, proteins in the form of lean meat and nuts will serve your body much better than a diet of highly processed, chemically treated foods that are loaded with sugar.

Benefits

The benefits of choosing an apple and cheese for a snack over a package of donuts are more than just inner maintenance and health.

Your skin looks better. Your weight is manageable. You can concentrate better, sleep more soundly, and in general, have more energy and maintain a happier mood.

Children, teenagers, and pregnant women who are in the processing of growing need to focus their attentions on getting at least 5 servings of fruits and vegetables and eliminating white, processed breads in favor of whole-grain breads.

In general, sugar snacks should be avoided. Fat, on the other hand, should not. If you focus on eating well, a normal amount of fat in your diet is necessary for joint maintenance and skin health.

Have Breakfast

Your body has gone without food or nutrients for at least eight hours while you slept and most of the nutrients have moved out of your system. In order to have the energy and right amount of nutrients to begin your day, breakfast can help with giving the extra boost that you need.

Start the day with a complete and nitrous meal. Fruits and vegetables, as well as grains, can add an extra boost of nutritious value and energy to the beginning of your day. Dairy products and protein can also help to increase your energy levels.

This doesn't mean that you have to have an extra-large meal in the morning, however it does mean that you should find foods that will settle with your stomach and provide a beginning of nutrition for the day.

Eating healthy and watching your weight are not the only things you need to consider in having a healthy lifestyle.

- Exercise. This should be done at least four or five times a week. This helps your body to build muscle in several different areas, helps you to lose weight and can prevent illnesses and disease.

- Take vitamins and supplements. Paying attention to where your body doesn't feel balanced is important as well. Once you have determined this, you can balance it out through vitamins and supplements.

- Sleep. If you are sleep deprived, it causes your body to begin to shut down. Make sure that you feel rested and are getting the right amount of sleep. This will allow your body to work at a consistent and full speed every day.

Make a Plan

Healthy living starts with recognizing how you are living currently.

If it helps you, keep a journal to track how often you eat and how much time and exertion you expend on tasks that raise your heart rate.

From there, you can see more clearly where you need to cut, add, or alter your current living patterns.

By Mike Herman