Rashid's Blog: A Place for Inquisitive Souls

No Sunspot, Mumblings of Mutiny

The sun continues quiet–eerily quiet. People are starting to notice.

Cooler weather has the blogosphere alight with speculation about the climate’s real changes. Short-term temperature moves fire up both camps. From Planet Gore:

Hopefully this will cool the hysteria in the U.S. Congress and parliaments around the world so that we can understand the science of our climate before we pursue policies that could wreck our economy and quality of life.

full story

Managing genetic resources on farms concerns the entire ecosystem, including cultivated crops, forages and agroforestry species, as well as their wild and weedy relatives that may be growing in nearby areas.There are many benefits from effective on farm genetic resources management programmes.

To find out more, keep scrolling down or click on the links below.

Conserving the processes of evolution and adaptation
Conserving and using diversity at different levels
Integrating farmers into a national plant genetic resources system
Improving the livelihoods of resource-poor farmers
Maintaining or increasing farmers’ control and access over genetic resources
Managing stress and change
Seed systems and diversity maintenance
Ecosystem services
Linking wild and cultivated systems

Conserving the processes of evolution and adaptation
The conservation and use of agrobiodiversity at all levels within local environments helps ensure that the ongoing processes of evolution and adaptation of crops to their environments are maintained within farming systems. This benefit is central to in situ management of genetic resources, as it is based on conserving and using not only existing germplasm but also the conditions that allow for the development of new germplasm.

See Source

An urban heat island (UHI) is a metropolitan area which is significantly warmer than its surroundings. The temperature difference usually is larger at night than during the day and larger in winter than in summer, and is most apparent when winds are weak. The main cause of the urban heat island is modification of the land surface by urban development; waste heat generated by energy usage is a secondary contributor. As population centres grow they tend to modify a greater and greater area of land and have a corresponding increase in average temperature. Partly as a result of the urban heat island effect, monthly rainfall is about 28% greater between 20-40 miles downwind of cities, compared with upwind Causes

here are several causes of a UHI, as outlined in Oke (1982). The principal reason for the night-time warming is (comparatively warm) buildings blocking the view to the (relatively cold) night sky (see thermal radiation). Two other reasons are changes in the thermal properties of surface materials and lack of evapotranspiration in urban areas. Materials commonly used in urban areas, such as concrete and asphalt, have significantly different thermal bulk properties (including heat capacity and thermal conductivity) and surface radiative properties (albedo and emissivity) than the surrounding rural areas. This causes a change in the energy balance of the urban area, often leading to higher temperatures than surrounding rural areas. The energy balance is also affected by the lack of vegetation in urban areas, which inhibits cooling by evapotranspiration.

Other causes of a UHI are due to geometric effects. The tall buildings within many urban areas provide multiple surfaces for the reflection and absorption of sunlight, increasing the efficiency with which urban areas are heated. This is called the “canyon effect“. Another effect of buildings is the blocking of wind, which also inhibits cooling by convection. Waste heat from air conditioning, industry, and other sources also contributes to the UHI. High levels of pollution in urban areas can also increase the UHI, as many forms of pollution change the radiative properties of the atmosphere.