Pottstown Climate March Planned for April 29

Make Way for the 'Super-Earths!'

They're in there somewhere around the center of the picture....

Lest you think, dear readers, that the summer doldrums would stop the march of science; and thus the march of science news with which we fill ...

This Saturday in Science...

...fear not, unless of course you're afraid of alien life forms....

The habitable zone of a nearby star is filled to the brim with planets that could support alien life, scientists announced today on June 25.

According to this story posted in Yahoo News:

An international team of scientists found three potentially habitable planets around the star Gliese 667C, a star 22 light-years from Earth that is orbited by at least six planets, and possibly as many as seven, researchers said. The three planet contenders for alien life are in the star's "habitable zone" — the temperature region around the star where liquid water could exist. Gliese 667C is part of a three-star system, so the planets could see three suns in their daytime skies.

The three potentially rocky planets in Gliese 667C's habitable zone are known as super-Earths — exoplanets that are less massive than Neptune but more massive than Earth. Their orbits make them possible candidates for hosting life, officials from the European Southern Observatory said in a statement.

Photo Stolen Shamelessly from The New York Times

How cool is this? Turanor Planetsolar, a 100-foot catamaran with solar panels covering the flat top deck, made a stop in New York City as it followed the Gulf Stream.

Meanwhile, back here on earth, a vehicle that makes use of our old familiar sun is going to be put to work doing research on our old familiar Earth.

We hear about it from this June 24 article in the venerable New York Times:

Last year, after it became the first solar-powered boat to circumnavigate the globe, the Turanor Planetsolar could have taken its 5,500 square feet of photovoltaic cells and eight tons of lithium-ion batteries and sailed off into the sunset.

Instead it is becoming a scientific research ship, at least for the summer. The boat, a 100-foot, $17 million catamaran that was dreamed up by a Swiss eco-adventurer and bankrolled by a German businessman, will cruise the Gulf Stream studying the role of atmospheric aerosols and phytoplankton in regulating climate, under the direction of Martin Beniston, a climatologist at the University of Geneva.

In some ways the boat is suited to research. Being completely powered by the sun — the high-efficiency solar cells charge the batteries that power electric motors connected to the craft’s twin propellers — it produces no emissions of carbon dioxide or other gases that could contaminate air samples. And the boat has no problem going slowly, if necessary, as it samples the water — average speed is a sluggish five knots.

And finally, in the category of well, do we have global warming or don't we? Is weather getting worse because of industrial pollution or despite it?

It's getting hard to keep track.

Check out this June 24 Times article by Justin Gillis in which he writes:

To the ever-growing list of ways humanity seems to have altered the earth, add another candidate: Air pollution may have had a major soothing influence on storm cycles in the North Atlantic.

Well, which is it? Pollution causes ocean warming;

or ocean cooling?

That is the finding of a paper published this week, suggesting that industrial pollution from North America and Europe through much of the 20th century may have altered clouds in ways that cooled the ocean surface. That, in turn, may have suppressed storms, and particularly major hurricanes, below the level that would have existed in a purely natural environment.

If the authors are right, the upturn in storms over the last couple of decades may be no accident. It could, instead, be at least partly a consequence of the clean air acts that have reduced pollution around the North Atlantic basin, thus returning the storm cycles to their more natural state....

As many people will recall, the North Atlantic was quiescent in the 1970s and 1980s, especially for major hurricanes, creating a false sense of security and encouraging coastal development. But starting in the 1990s, storminess increased sharply, and the new study says that may be because clean air laws had started to take effect.....

The main effect on storm patterns would have come from particles of sulfur dioxide that entered the air from the combustion of sulfur-laden fuels like coal and diesel. Water can condense on these particles, and a surfeit of them in the air can change the properties of clouds, causing them to be made up of finer droplets.

To which the scienctifically sophisticated among the Digital Notebook staff say: "what the what?"

Maybe the solar-powered research vessel can finally answer this.....

A Watery Saturday in Science

After the air we breathe, water is probably the most essential element to human existence and to life on earth.

(Fear not oh Saturday Scientists, we say "element" in the ancient, "fire, air, water, earth" sense. We know water is actually two elements, but even scientists can have a passing knowledge of history and mankind's mistakes.)

Speaking of mistakes, let's talk about our water, which we aren't treating very well these days.

Although ownership of water has spurred more than a few conflicts in dry places, and will again soon, we say "our" water only in the sense that without it, there won't be much of a "we" around to lament its loss.

Less Water, More Problems

Of particular interest to our species is fresh water, which comprises only about 3 percent of all water on earth.

And only about 1.3 percent of it is easily accessible on the surface in lakes and rivers.

The Ogallala Aquifer

About 30 percent of the planet's fresh water is underground, but not to worry, we're messing that up too.

Consider, the Ogallala Aquifer, a vast but shallow groundwater deposit that stretches from South Dakota to Texas and supplies about 30 percent of all irrigation water in the United States.

In 2009, the U.S. Geological Survey reported that the Ogallala Aquifer in the eight-state area of the Great Plains contained 2.9 billion acre-feet of water.

Well it's emptying fast. 

Formed by melting glaciers, we are consuming it for water hungry crops at a faster rate than the high plains intermittent rains could ever hope to replenish it.

Remember the Dust Bowl? You will when it returns.

As Mort Rosenblum wrote in "America's Profligate Ways with Water" for The New York Times on May 24, the Ogallala: 

... could run dry within a generation if not poisoned earlier by an oil pipeline spill.

Elsewhere, commercial farmers buy costly new pumps and work them hard to amortize them before it’s too late. Industry gulps down all it can; city dwellers water lawns with little thought for tomorrow. And now the fracking that so many people embrace consumes and contaminates huge amounts of water.

Farmers, particularly Agri-Business farmers who see water and farmland as a resource to be plundered, not sustained, are among the most guilty.

Irrigation consumes 60 percent of the world's freshwater.

As much as 50 percent of water pumped for irrigation is lost to evaporation, evapotranspiration and leaks.

"When oil prices rose, speculators bought huge tracts to grow corn for biofuel. Corn takes three times more water than sorghum but fetches a higher price. Pivotal irrigator hoses project streams that allow farmers to squander hundreds, or thousands, of gallons per minute," wrote Rosenblum.

He added: "Back in 1985, Boutros Boutros Ghali, then Egypt’s foreign minister, remarked, 'The next war in the Middle East will be fought over water, not politics.'"

A 'Protein Factory' That's No Longer Working

In some ways, that war has already begun -- at least on the other life forms which also depend on fresh water.

The Irriwaddy dolphin is related to Orcas.

Consider the case of the Irriwaddy dolphin.

Native to the Mekong and several other rivers in Asia, it lives in brackish water where fresh water and salt water meet.

And, as a species, it is dying, a metaphor for it's entire namesake river, which is also dying, particularly in terms of its harvest.
As Jeff Opperman, a freshwater scientist with The Nature Conservancy, reported in The New York Times on May 23, the fish on which the dolphin, and the humans along the Mekong's shores, depend are dwindling, both in number and size.
Because so many people are taking so much fish from so many places by so many methods, this assertion is hard to prove scientifically, although Opperman said he heard it all along the river as he traveled its course.

"2.1 million tons of fish is the most solid and accepted estimate," for what the river, or the "protein factory" as he calls it, produces.

By best estimates, harvest from just one location, Tonle Sap, had almost doubled from 1940 to 1995, while the number of people fishing has quadrupled during that period, cutting the catch per-fisher in half, Opperman wrote.

Pretty simple math.

Overfishing? What's that?

Fixed resource, more withdrawal, equals lower output, or shortage. 

But hell, we're already doing it in the oceans, which should we behave any differently inland?

The Census of Marine Life, a decade-long international survey of ocean life completed in 2010, estimated that 90 percent of the big fish had disappeared from the world's oceans, victims primarily of overfishing, CNN reported in March.

Bottom-trawling destroys reefs, which in turn destroys

the places where the fish we ear are born. Brilliant.

The situation is even worse in Southeast Asia. In Indonesia, people are now fishing for juvenile fish and protein that they can grind into fishmeal and use as feed for coastal prawn farms. "It's heading towards an end game," laments Callum Roberts, a marine biologist with York University in the United Kingdom.

Much of the over-fishing is the result of bottom trawling, which not only picks up huge numbers of fish, but destroys the coral beds which serve as nurseries for untold species we hope to later eat -- a self-defeating strategy if ever there was one.

"The disturbing truth is that humans are having unrecognized impacts on every part of the ocean, and there is much we have not seen that will disappear before we ever get a chance," Ron O'Dor, a senior scientist with the Census of Marine Life who is also a professor of marine biology at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Canada, told CNN.

Poisoning Our Own Food Supply

Not content to make rivers and oceans barren of fish, we are also ensuring those that are still with us, live in a continually more poisoned environment, making their survival, and ours, even more challenging.

Forget the threat of terrorists poisoning our water supplies or food supplies, society is on track to take care of it in just a few years without their help.

(One must wonder why our government spends billions to create security agencies to protect the nation's food and water supply from terrorists and, with the other hand, permits and aids corporations in activities which have the same result -- and throws in a tax break just for good measure. But that's a subject for another blog post.)
"Globally, the most prevalent water quality problem is eutrophication, a result of high-nutrient loads (mainly phosphorus and nitrogen), which substantially impairs beneficial uses of water," reports UNESCO, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization.

"Projected food production needs and increasing wastewater effluents associated with an increasing population over the next three decades suggest a 10 percent to 15 percent increase in the river input of nitrogen loads into coastal ecosystems."

(Need you be reminded that coastal ecosystems are where 80 to 90 percent of all ocean fish breed? You'll recall those as a primary food source for a species close to our heart -- humans.)

UNESCO again:

Sewage treatment? What's that? Does it cost money?

More than 80% of sewage in developing countries is discharged untreated, polluting rivers, lakes and coastal areas. 

Many industries – some of them known to be heavily polluting (such as leather and chemicals) – are moving from high-income countries to emerging market economies.

You'll know those "developing countries" as the places that are taking our jobs because there, well, companies don't have to deal with all those pesky living wage, safety and environmental regulations.

Water Has a Sense of Irony

Fortunately, there's humor to be found in this situation.

You see, while we poison the water we can see and threaten our own existence, our other activities are ensuring we'll have more freshwater than we know what to do with.

Remember those percentages up top?

Well nearly 70 percent of the planet's freshwater is locked up in snow, ice, glaciers and the polar ice caps.

"We're out of here!" Sincerely, The Russians.

You can see where this is going already can't you clever reader?

Yup, believe in humans causing climate change or not, one fact is irrefutable.

The ice caps are melting.

Even the Russians believe it.

As The Washington Post reported on May 24, the Russians are packing up a scientific monitoring station on a floating slap of ice that was supposed to stay until September because .... wait for it .... it's melting too fast to be safe.

This quote from a March 26 Post report pretty much says it all:

After plunging to its lowest level on record in September, Arctic sea ice extent mounted an impressive recovery this winter. But its maximum, reached March 15, still ranked 6th lowest on record. All ten of the lowest maximums on record (since 1979) have occurred in the last 10 years. (Underlining emphasis courtesy of The Digital Notebook).

In case that hasn't convinced you. Consider this from the same report:

Between 2003 and 2012 alone, Arctic sea ice volume dropped 9 percent in the winter according to the United Kingdom’s Natural Environment Research Council.

The summer shrinkage in volume has been even more stunning.

“Findings based on observations from a European Space Agency satellite, published online in Geophysical Research Letters, show that the Arctic has lost more than a third of summer sea-ice volume since a decade ago, when a U.S. satellite collected similar data,” reported the University of Washington in February.

That means more fresh water.

That's good, right?

Well, consider: Not only will the freshwater act as a pollutant, diluting the salinity

Melting ice caps is a good thing right?
Well, unless you lived in this city.

of the oceans, further stressing those already over-stressed marine species, but well, more water means less land ... along the shore .... where more than 50 percent of Americans live.

So, not so much.

So practices which ruin fresh water, and threaten our survival as a species, are actually causing the release of fresh water which will threaten our survival as a species.

You have to appreciate the cyclical nature of it ... kind of like the water cycle.

And, if history is any teacher, we will respond as we always do.

We will not change our ways, and try to reverse this self-destructive course. Instead, we will fight each other over what scarce water remains.

Boutros Boutros Ghali was right, but his vision was too limited.

The war will not be limited to the Middle East.

Blogger Evan Brandt knows a thing or two about water having several years ago written an award-winning five-day series about water for The Mercury called "Ebb and Flow."

(Sadly, the technical promise of the past not being terribly well kept at The Mercury, a link to that masterpiece is not available.)

Earth Science for Earth Day

It's Saturday and that mean's its time for another thrilling installment of 

This Saturday in Science!

Due to the proximity of Earth Day (it's on Monday in case you didn't know) this

Monday is Earth Day people.

week's installment will be devoted to all things Earth, including the planet itself, it's weather and the plants and animals that live on it.

Let's begin with the controversy -- Global Warming (or "Climate Change" as the more moderate among us like to say).

Every winter, it snows, and we say "what global warming? It's cold here. Now. In winter."

Well this winter, there weren't much snow to fuel that argument, here or in places that really depend on it, like the drought-starved western states.

In February it became clear that there would only be slim snowpack to break the drought's grip. As The New York Times reported in this article:

Lakes are half full and mountain snows are thin, omens of another summer of drought and wildfire. Complicating matters, many of the worst-hit states have even less water on hand than a year ago, raising the specter of shortages and rationing that could inflict another year of losses on struggling farms.

Reservoir levels have fallen sharply in Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico and Nevada. The soil is drier than normal. And while a few recent snowstorms have cheered skiers, the snowpack is so thin in parts of Colorado that the government has declared an “extreme drought” around the ski havens of Vail and Aspen.

“It’s approaching a critical situation,” said Mike Hungenberg, who grows carrots and cabbage on a 3,000-acre farm in Northern Colorado. There is so little water available this year, he said, that he may scale back his planting by a third, and sow less thirsty crops, like beans.

“A year ago we went into the spring season with most of the reservoirs full,” Mr. Hungenberg said. “This year, you’re going in with basically everything empty.”

Thank goodness this whole global warming thing is just a hoax....

It snowed in Jerusalem this year. In Jerusalem!

And hey, global warming can't be real. China experienced the coldest winter in nearly 30 years.

Which is perhaps why "climate change" is the more appropriate term.

It's not so much warming per se, but radical change in normal weather patterns.

As The New York Times reported in January, the evidence is piling up that around the world, extreme weather is the new normal.

China is enduring its coldest winter in nearly 30 years. Brazil is in the grip of a dreadful heat spell. Eastern Russia is so freezing — minus 50 degrees Fahrenheit, and counting — that the traffic lights recently stopped working in the city of Yakutsk.

Things are really heating up down under...

Bush fires are raging across Australia, fueled by a record-shattering heat wave. Pakistan was inundated by unexpected flooding in September. A vicious storm bringing rain, snow and floods just struck the Middle East. And in the United States, scientists confirmed this week what people could have figured out simply by going outside: last year was the hottest since records began.

According to Omar Baddour, chief of the data management applications division at the World Meteorological Organization, in Geneva, such events are increasing in intensity as well as frequency, a sign that climate change is not just about rising temperatures, but also about intense, unpleasant, anomalous weather of all kinds.

In Australia, the first eight days of 2013 were among the 20 hottest on record.

Every decade since the 1950s has been hotter in Australia than the one before, said Mark Stafford Smith, science director of the Climate Adaptation Flagship at the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization.

To the north, the extremes have swung the other way, with a band of cold settling across Russia and Northern Europe, bringing thick snow and howling winds to Stockholm, Helsinki and Moscow. (Incongruously, there were also severe snowstorms in Sicily and southern Italy for the first time since World War II; in December, tornadoes and waterspouts struck the Italian coast.)

And then there are the bees.

Stinging aside, bees are an integral part of our food chain and provide crucial pollination services to farmers throughout the world.

Well, they're dying.

As many as half the hives kept by commercial beekeepers died in 2012.
Over the past seven years, the honeybee die-off, known as "colony collapse disorder,"has claimed 5,650,000 hives, valued at $1.61 billion. Italy, France, Slovenia and Germany have taken action to limit the use of bee-killing pesticides. But here in the U.S.? The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is getting ready to approve a deadly new neonicotinoid called Sulfoxaflor.

This bee looks kind of angry to me....

Several environmental groups have filed a lawsuit against the EPA, claiming the agency has failed in its obligation to protect one of the Earth's most vital pollinators from dangerous pesticides.

The Organic Consumers Association urges people to: Take Action Today:
Tell Congress to Ban Neonicotinoid Pesticides before They Devastate the U. S. Bee Population
http://www.organicconsumers.org/ocaactions.cfm?actionnum=8662

RSVP: Swarm the EPA on Earth Day
http://salsa3.salsalabs.com/o/50865/p/salsa/event/common/public/?event_KEY=70684

Here is more reporting from the Times:

Last year, researchers identified a virus as a major cause of the die-off; the latest suspect is a class of pesticides called neonicotinoids, which are used to protect common agricultural seeds, including corn. The insecticides are systemic, which means they persist throughout the life of the plant. Scientists have demonstrated that exposure to these chemicals damages bees’ brain function, including their ability to home in on the hive.

The data here is a little old, but it just shows how long 

this problem has been growing or, rather, shrinking.

The manufacturers of these chemicals — notably Syngenta and Bayer CropScience — have claimed again and again that they are safe. And it is true that bees face other stresses. Even so, beekeepers managed to keep their hives relatively healthy before the increased use of neonicotinoids began in 2005.

No doubt those same claims were made about DDT's, until they were proven wrong by people who did not stand to make money by their continued manufacture.

(Today's note of irony: It was the effects of DDT and Rachael Carson's landmark book, "Silent Spring," which kicked off the environmental movement and gave us the Earth Day we will mark on Monday.)

So if it all seems like more than we can handle, what can we do?

Well, we can plant trees.

Our forests can help make a difference.

A 40-acre woodlot of 50-year-old trees takes in 30,000 pounds of carbon dioxide sequestered per acre,” according to Timothy J. Fahey, professor of ecology in the department of natural resources at Cornell University. “The forest would be emitting about 22,000 pounds of oxygen.”

The above and below, again, courtesy of The New York Times:

“Every little bit matters,” he said. “In the grand scheme of things, forests in the northeastern United States are counteracting a considerable amount of fossil fuel burning by cars, slowing down the rate at which the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide is accumulating in the atmosphere.”

The contribution varies with the age of the forest and the species involved. There is no real rule of thumb on the difference between conifers and deciduous trees, Dr. Fahey said. Some conifers grow faster, providing more impact sooner.

The Environmental Protection Agency has calculated the amount of carbon dioxide emitted by the average car as of 2007 at about five metric tons, more than 11,000 pounds, so a single acre of woodlot would be countering the emissions of about 2.7 cars. For 40 acres, that would be about 109 cars.

As U.S. Senator Mark Udall, Democrat of Colorado, said when asked about the drought out west: “Mother Nature is testing us.”

Lately, I'm not so sure we're going to pass it.

If You Can't Stand the Heat, Get Out Your Wallet

Nati Harnik/Associated Press

Rows of corn stalks in a field south of Blair, Neb., this week. The drought-damaged field was cut down for silage. Can you afford higher food prices?

So it's hot.

It's summer, it's what we should expect right?

Well, it's becoming increasingly clear that not only is it hotter than it ever used to be, but that we have only ourselves to blame.

A National Audubon Society chart of how the greenhouse effect
is making our world warmer.

This comes as no surprise to scientists or those who believe scientists who tell them things they don't want to hear.

It does come as a shock to those living in the fairy land where it's all-natural, it will all be fine and stopping the climate from changing the face of the earth is not more important than jobs (read corporate profits).

Reuters reported yesterday that a new report due out in 2014 will contain evidence that not only is global warming -- climate change, fucked up weather, whatever want to call it -- our fault, but we can now find evidence our carbon footprint can be tied to specific events.

Thanks humans. Thanks a lot.

We're seeing a great deal of progress in attributing a human fingerprint to the probability of particular events or series of events," said Christopher Field, co-chairman of a U.N. report due in 2014 about the impacts of climate change."

"A report by Field's U.N. group last year showed that more weather extremes that can be linked to greenhouse warming, such as the number of high temperature extremes and the fact that the rising fraction of rainfall falls in downpours," according to Reuters.

From the Reuters report: Experts have long blamed a build-up of greenhouse gas emissions for raising worldwide temperatures and causing desertification, floods, droughts, heatwaves, more powerful storms and rising sea levels.

But until recently they have said that naturally very hot, wet, cold, dry or windy weather might explain any single extreme event, like the current drought in the United States or a rare melt of ice in Greenland in July.

But for some extremes, that is now changing.

NOAA's map of the 2011 heatwave in Texas

A study this month, for instance, showed that greenhouse gas emissions had raised the chances of the severe heatwave in Texas in 2011 and unusual heat in Britain in late 2011. Other studies of extremes are under way.

Growing evidence that the dice are loaded towards ever more severe local weather may make it easier for experts to explain global warming to the public, pin down costs and guide investments in everything from roads to flood defenses.

"One of the ironies of climate change is that we have more papers published on the costs of climate change in 2100 than we have published on the costs today. I think that is ridiculous," said Myles Allen, head of climate research at Oxford University's Environmental Change Institute.

"We can't (work out current costs) without being able to make the link to extreme weather," he said. "And once you've worked out how much it costs that raises the question of who is going to pay."

In just a few days this year, areas of the Greenland ice sheet that have
never shown any signs of melt before, did so.

Personally, I think the answer to that is pretty clear. You and I are going to pay, and in ways we might not have expected.

Sure, if you have a beach house on a barrier island in New Jersey, you may find it underwater in your lifetime or your children's, but you'll bail it out and rebuild it over and over again before it slips beneath the waves for the final time.

But for those of us without a beach house, we'll pay in other, more essential ways.

Like the 'freaky' storm that blew through the region Thursday. If one of those trees falls on your house, you'll have to pay to have it removed and to fix your house.

Kevin Hoffman/The Mercury

Thursday's "freaky" storm knocked
down this tree on W. Chestnut St.

And if one of those trees falls on some wires and knocks out power, you will have to pay to replace everything in your refrigerator or freezer.

Speaking of food, you'll soon be paying more for it anyway and you can thank global warming for that too.

As the New York Times reported Wednesday, the drought in the mid-west is now so bad, that prices for food basics will increase by 4 to 5 percent next year, just because of the loss of so much of the corn crop.

In fact, "more than half of the country was under moderate to extreme drought in June, the largest area of the contiguous United States affected by such dryness in nearly 60 years. Nearly 1,300 counties across 29 states have been declared federal disaster areas," the Times reported.

"The drought is now affecting 88 percent of the corn crop, a staple of processed foods and animal feed as well as the nation’s leading farm export," the Times reported.

"The drought comes along with heat. So far, 2012 is the hottest year ever recorded in the United States, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, whose records date to 1895," the Times reported (emphasis mine).

"That has sapped the production of corn, soybeans and other crops, afflicting poultry and livestock in turn," thus higher prices for beef and pork as well as vegetables.

2012 is already the hottest year ever recorded in the U.S.

Another way we'll pay is for new roads and, maybe, new or shored up nuclear power plants.

Also on Wednesday, the Times reported on how extreme weather conditions like heat, floods and wind storms, are taking their toll on the nation's infrastructure, infrastructure not designed to withstand such extremes.

"On a single day this month here, a US Airways regional jet became stuck in asphalt that had softened in 100-degree temperatures, and a subway train derailed after the heat stretched the track so far that it kinked — inserting a sharp angle into a stretch that was supposed to be straight. In East Texas, heat and drought have had a startling effect on the clay-rich soils under highways, which “just shrink like crazy,” leading to “horrendous cracking,” said Tom Scullion, senior research engineer with the Texas Transportation Institute at Texas A&M University. In Northeastern and Midwestern states, he said, unusually high heat is causing highway sections to expand beyond their design limits, press against each other and “pop up,” creating jarring and even hazardous speed bumps."

We know a thing or two about that.

A buckled section of road in North Carolina. How long before this
happens again on Route 422?

Just last month, in Upper Providence, Route 422 cracked under the extreme and very early heat wave that hit us.

And, in Limerick, it happened last year too, at just about this time.

Then there's the matter of nuclear power plants. We have one of those as well.

"In the Chicago area, a twin-unit nuclear plant had to get special permission to keep operating this month because the pond it uses for cooling water rose to 102 degrees; its license to operate allows it to go only to 100. According to the Midwest Independent System Operator, the grid operator for the region, a different power plant had had to shut because the body of water from which it draws its cooling water had dropped so low that the intake pipe became high and dry; another had to cut back generation because cooling water was too warm."

At the Limerick Generating Station, the cooling water is provided for most of the year by the Schuylkill River, on whose shores the plant is built.

The Schuylkill River intake of the Limerick nuclear plant.

But during the warmer months, when the river, also a drinking water source for more than one million Americans,is low and warm, the plant must draw water from the Delaware River, piping it over to Perkiomen Creek and then over to the plant.

For eight years, Exelon has been pumping water from an abandoned coal mine and from a reservoir near the river's headwaters, into the Schuylkill to augment the flow, and allow the company to pull more water from the Schuylkill than originally envisioned.

On Aug. 28, the Delaware River Basin Commission which has jurisdiction over such experiments, will hold a public hearing at Sunnybrook Ballroom in Lower Pottsgrove on a proposal to make that practice permanent.

Whether rising temperatures made this move necessary -- or will ultimately prove it moot -- is unknown.

Of course, not everything is global warming's fault -- although it is often still our own fault.

Unprecedented floods in Thailand last year, for instance, that caused $45 billion in damage according to a World Bank estimate, were caused by people hemming in rivers and raising water levels rather than by climate change, a study showed, Reuters reported.

And as our food prices go up because of a drought in the Mid-West, we should ask ourselves: Why we are building houses in Lancaster County, home to some of the most fertile, best farming soil in the world, where, currently, there is no drought?