TheBanyanTree: Banyan

[Dale Parish]

Too many coincidences to ignore.  Last night, the Jason Alliance of Southeast Texas, in which I’m not a trainer like all the rest, but arm candy and luggage bearer, set down in Kona, HI.  When we got our rental vans and traversed to the condos in which we are to stay, we found they’d stuck us in four separate condos— Botree, Sandalwood, Tamarind and Banyan.  Cindy and I ended up in Banyan.  

This morning, after a casual breakfast at the Lava Java Bakery, we crossed the island again and went to the Mauna Loa NOAA Atmospheric Observatory, where Aiden showed us all the research that is going on in the facility.  I had read about the observatory in _An Inconvenient Truth_ a while back, but didn’t know about all the other research that’s ongoing there— the CO2 monitoring is only one of 79 different projects at present.  Not to mention that the NOAA staff there also take samples for other foreign entities in return for the other entities taking samples for them at various locations around the planet.  

One of the things on the CO2 monitoring I found interesting were the cycles chart— some may have seen it as I know it’s been in the news media after Gore’s book was released.  There are annual fluctuations in the amount of CO2 monitored that are very stable down through all the years monitored.  Aiden asked us if any of us knew what those fluctuations were, then, showed us graphs overlaying the same measurements made at Alaska, American Samoa and Greenland with the Hawaii measurement.  He pointed out that the American Samoa measurement, which had the least fluctuation, was in the southern hemisphere, where as the rest were all in the northern hemisphere, but that the Hawaii, American Samoa and Alaska measurements were very near the same longitude.  Nine science teachers had some widely spaced guesses, but the answer turns out to be that it is the planet’s respiration— that the boreal forests of the northern hemisphere are the cause.  Deciduous trees loose their leaves and do not turn CO2 into O2 during our winter, and the evergreens production of O2 is greatly reduced, so that the CO2 levels rise during our winter and start their annual reduction in our spring when the trees resume photosynthesis, which removes CO2 from the atmosphere and releases is back as O2.  

A lot of the other measurements going on at the facility I found interesting.  They also measure volcanic aerosols using lasers, to correlate the percentages of solar radiation that is blocked by aerosols.  Many of the measurements are made every few seconds and analyzed in Boulder Colorado.  Some measurements are made daily, some monthly.  No analysis is done at the facility— all the data is sent to other facilities for analysis.  

After we left the NOAA facility, we traveled to Hilo for lunch at Pineapple’s— really good food.  But upon leaving Pineapple’s, we started back and passed a really beautiful banyan tree in Hilo.  

Just had to write.

Hugs,
Dale 
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Dale M. Parish
628 Parish RD
Orange TX 77632-0264