Word: rices
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...could be earnest to the point of comedy. Though he produced some striking portraits, as well as a haunting landscape of Manila lying in smoky ruins after World War II, pastoral paintings are most common in Amorsolo's prodigious body of work - think of rows of smiling women harvesting rice in verdant fields, with a vibrancy unpleasantly reminiscent of the chirpy Technicolor Hollywood musicals that were playing in Manila cinema halls during his lifetime. Not surprisingly, "a lot of [modern] artists felt Amorsolo's work was too romanticized and they rejected it," says...
...come from man-made sources, and the atmospheric concentration of methane has increased by around 150% since 1750, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Now there's new focus on a pair of methane sources that we usually don't think of as natural polluters: wetlands and rice paddies. (See pictures of the effects of global warming...
...Separating the factors that contribute to climate change from the things that help reverse it is not always easy because sometimes they're one and the same. Trees sop up CO2, for example, but when they die and decay they release it back into the air. Wetlands and rice paddies serve a similarly dual role for both CO2 and methane, acting as sources and sinks simultaneously. The challenge has been trying to tease out how those two functions balance out, but a new paper in the Jan. 14 issue of Science has provided some hard numbers. Using satellite data, investigators...
...warm, waterlogged soil of wetlands is prime habitat for the anaerobic microbes that produce methane - and in general, the warmer and wetter, the more the methane. Since rice paddies are kept underwater during the wet growing season in Southeast Asia and other major rice producing areas, paddies too serve as ideal factories for methane. "[The farmers] use controlled floods, and that's guaranteed to produce methane," says Palmer...
...atmosphere, releasing more methane and continuing in a dangerous feedback cycle. But if we're going to prevent that from happening, we're going to have to find a way other than reducing methane emissions from wetlands. Global food requirements mean that we can't cut back seriously on rice paddy cultivation, and wetlands are far too important to the environment as groundwater filters and buffers against coastal floods. "I just don't see any way to control methane emissions from wetlands," says Palmer. Instead, we'll need to focus on methane emissions from man-made sources - like landfills...