Rutger's English Blogg

 

Amazonas, like other tropical areas are much affected by this burning technique.

Not only flat areas are burned but also steep slopes and thus  soil erosion can accelerate.
On a Video a man in the Amazon is introduced who have found that it is possible to earn a living without burning the forest and he is about to teach others how to do this. This man is planting trees instead. Check the video that is available on this website: http://news.mongabay.com/2013/0131-hance-werber-interview.html    

There's also an interview with the filmmaker. Persons like Reynaldo are needed. Indians who once were frequent in the Amazon had its way of farming which among other things included that they buried charcoal in the soil and thus got it fertile. Some Indians still do the same but if Reynaldo is doing like that we will not know.

 

 

Use cattle wise, it's Allan's message. Many cattle graze intensively in larger herds but a short time in each place. This leaves trampled plants and much feces. the area recover itself and grows until it is time for the next round of cattle. As the picture shows.

 

 

This lecture was held in Dublin but this researcher has become more and more famous in the world. He shows that even if you do not let the animals graze in areas that have been overgrazed there will be more grass in the beginning but after a while it becomes as bad as before. What is missing are that many animals that are ruminants as well as our cattle graze intensively in an area for a short time, leaving behind much feces besides they tramled the soil. With much feces there will be a lot to do for all decomposers and the result are that both minerals and carbon compounds in the soil will increase, which means that it grows better afterwards. This benefits in particular grasses.

 

 

In the Alps, we see a similar trend in our time. Here the glaciers have been studied for a long time. Glaciers which advanced posed a danger to humans and the Little Ice Age caused despair in some Alpine valleys when glaciers advanced, killed trees and destroyed pastures. You can see two glaciers where the glacier front has been determined since the birth of Christ and their advance into the valleys reached maximum during the 1800s.

 

 

At the end of the era known as the Pliocene a period of major climatic fluctuations began and that period is still going on. In a few thousand years, there will be a new ice age.

 

We can determine ice ages further back through analysis of Antarctic ice. The ice encloses a little of the air in small bubbles. Also in sediment layers we find plankton shells from plankton species that are sensitive to temperature. How much there is of a given species depends on the water temperature and the water temperature is dependent on the solar radiation and the solar radiation is what ultimately controls the climate. Luckily we live in a warm period between cold spells. The last warm period is called the Holocene. This warm period had its optimum at least in the northern hemisphere during our Stone Age. All our glaciers melted and even the great Icelandic glaciers. The warming after Ice Age maximum came quickly and it was warmer over the world even if it was warmest in the northern hemisphere. During this time period  also the Sahara was green, but nothing lasts forever as you know.

 

The temperature went down and the glaciers began to re-form in different places, this is called neoglaciationen.
Why did the climate began to swing more in the late Pliocene and continued to swing throughout the Pleistocene? See picture for fluctuations between glacial and interglacial below.

 

 

 

 

The earth looked different at that time. The continents were on their way to their current place. Atlantic ocean was more narrow, the Mediterranean had not yet been formed, in Asia there was a great inland sea. India was about to collide with Asia and the Himalayas had not yet been formed. Look at the map.
But it was hot during this time. Much warmer. The ocean currents were different, the CO2 concentration was much higher. During certain periods of up to 2000 ppm.

 

 

 

When the Europeans arrived, they were lyrical about how much timber there were in these trees. With diligence and patience they began to chop down these trees so that today there are only 25% left of the original stock. It took many people to cut down these trees. Swedish lumberman  was sought for in this work.

 

The journey began north of Gothenburg on the main road E20 and then through the central parts of the city and the end was south on E20. On the chart, you can see the heat spots in Gothenburg but also the elevation effect.

 

 

 

 

Last time I wrote about these things was  december 18 after I read a new article published by NOAA in the U.S. It showed that the sealevelrise were not so high. Maybe even these 3 mm/år measured during the 80´s and 90´s are the result of the method of measurement  when they only used altimetry and not as the article showed that altimetry combined with measurements of ocean mass and Argo floats that measure ocean temperature gives a netter measurement.

The program from Science Radio Sweden interviewed some IPCC scientists who point out that in the early 1900's it was a slightly larger sea level rise than in the middle, but we had no great CO2 emissions. They also point out that there are natural variations and the relationship between the greenhouse effect and sea level rise is not so clear. Lennart Bengtsson also interviewed emphasizes that there is no acceleration in the sea level rise.
 
In the leaked report/draft of the IPCC, I discovered that Valentina Radic and Regine Hock are involved as co-author. It was these scholars who, having added approximately 120,000 glaciers in the models arrived at a probable sea level rise of 10-12 cm from the glacier melt by 2100.
http://rutgerstaaf.blogg.se/2012/november/havsytehojningen-till-ar-2100-2012-11-26.html

The article on NOAA:s site: The Budget of Recent Global Sea Level Rise 2005–2012
http://ibis.grdl.noaa.gov/SAT/SeaLevelRise/documents/NOAA_NESDIS_Sea_Level_Rise_Budget_Report_2012.pdf

In this paper, you will find the following table of sea level rise.

 

Testosterone is important not only to develop big muscles but it is also crucial for the development of sexual characteristics, ie to become a man. Without this hormone, all XY fetuses will become like the picture of today. This applies to all mammals. They begin their development towards becoming women/females but in XY fetuses a testosterone shower will come. In humans, at six weeks of age. This shower forces the development on a different track and it becomes a man / male. The testosterone comes from a gland in the fetal body that develops early and then become testes. The opposite is also possible. An XX fetuses may have been exposed to too much testosterone and then it will be a man, even if chromosomer set is XX.
 
Prospective physicians must consider this situation. Imagine you're sitting there as a doctor with a woman on a visit and she comes to you because she does not get pregnant. She wonders why, and you do a number of tests routinely. You also tests her genetically, the chromosomes she has. The answer from the lab is that she has XY set in terms of sex chromosomes and that she is sterile. What do you say to her then? Are you going to say bluntly that she is genetically a man?
 
 
The recommendation for medical student is that you have to be careful with the information and maybe say something like "sorry you have a chromosome damage so you can not have children." Now this is not very common but it does occur.
 
What has happened is that there has been a mutation that made the cell receptors for testosterone immune and the testosterone message can´t get forward and then the development continue along the basic pattern to make a woman. A woman with a female brain and a full female body apart from a couple of dwarf testicles that may appear in a woman's labia.
 
The biological significance of gender development has begun to be denied from a certain direction. Gender research do not agree that sex is a biological construction. Sex says it is a social construction. "Gender researchers' mean then that the children should grow up with gender-neutral toys. As a biologist, I can´t understand this and most people experienced in life think it is obvious that it is biology that determines.

 

Sex is determined by biology but considering that all begins its development towards becoming a women / female and for it to be males, the development must change onto another track with the help of hormones. It is not difficult to understand that there may be errors in this development. An example of this is that boys are affected more often by different disorders than girls. But you can not just rely on these cases that not completed a full development because then you end up wrong.

Gender-neutral upbringing is written about in the media and some preschools provide gender-neutral upbringing and there you use gender-neutral toys.
 
http://www.sodermalmsforskolor.se/egalia/extern/genuspolicy.htm A swedish preschool writes on their site.
 
"We believe that when we in society in general talk about "male" and "female" so are these words heavily influenced by myths about sex. At Egalia believe that the traditional notions of "feminine" and "masculine" has affected humans to separate us according to sex., we find that even small children in the community are aware of the differences in the sexes and what is considered appropriate for girls and boys. This limits as us men and women's in lifes choices and we at Egalia believe we have an important task to change this."  "On Egalia all toys, books, materials, and treatment of children and adults thought are from a gender equality perspective."
 
An ad that tries to be gender neutral. Why is not spiderman pink in his attire?

 

 

This is a Swedish Koenigsegg, a car från "Skåne", the southern part of Sweden, the world's coolest sports car! An engine with over 1000 hp, more than what you really need.

 

 

These fires are terrifying in its size and fire trucks are so small. In 2009 173 people died in the fires, the highest number ever. But in 1851 in the month of February fire ravaged five million hectares of land. This year, about 200 000 ha have been damaged by fire so far. It is hot, dry and plenty of combustible material om the ground. What has happened is unfortunately nothing new. When I traveled in Australia Jan / Feb. 1975, I learned that there had recently been major fires even in Tasmania. In rural areas, people have no wells because the water is salt. In the country there are at each house large water tanks in which they collect water from the roof and then use it for drinking water. There were the people who had not had time to go away from the fire and to save themselves they crawled down into the water tanks. Unfortunately, instead they were cooked in these tanks. So severe was the fire.

 

 

According to many newspapers the new scale are of up to 54 degrees, but it does not mean as some newspapers write that it has been up to 54 degrees. I can´t find this map in Australia's weather service site.
This is how their map looks like. The map shows that there was substantial heat over large areas.http://www.bom.gov.au/jsp/awap/temp/index.jsp?colour=colour&time=latest&step=0&map=maxextrm%2Fhi&period=daily&area=nat

 

 

Welcome back to my blog and "God Fortsättning" of the new year. During my Christmas leave from school my good friend Lesli that is responsable for programming Lagmansnatursida have found some beutiful nature photographs that we are allowed to use and written comments to these. We plan to make an English version of "Picture of the Day" and the blog. This is the first attemt.

Here in Västergötland, it is very mild and we don´t not need so much firewood as we did in december. But one must be careful not to think that this is something typical in our world.

According to Snow Lab / Rutgers University more than 50 million square km of Earth's surface was covered by snow in the last week of december. It is not far from the record. It is only in our part of the world that it is different. It will be interesting to see how the rest of the winter unfolds.

Cool ice pictures from China at this link. Northen China has experienced vey cold weather.
http://www.sipa.com/en/feature/2510055/cold-weather-in-china-jan-2013/page/1/SN/ENTERTAINMENT

Over 1000 ship frozen in the sea ice due to the severe cold in Laizhou Bay to the east of Bejing
http://www.dw.de/record-chill-grips-china/a-16501388