Albedo: abetted or abated?"Runaway Heat" (SN: 11/12/05, p. 312) makes the point that shrub shrub, any woody, perennial, bushy plant that branches into several stems or trunks at the base and is smaller than a tree. Shrubs are an important feature of permanent landscape planting, being used for formal decorative groups, hedges, screens, and background intrusion into tundra reduces albedo albedo (ălbē`dō), reflectivity of the surface of a planet, moon, asteroid, or other celestial body that does not shine by its own light. Albedo is measured as the fraction of incident light that the surface reflects back in all directions. , the percentage of reflected light, but doesn't report actual impact on ground temperature. Albedo itself is not a good indicator of waste heat. Much of the extra absorbed sun energy is used by the shrubs for photosynthesis and the fixing of carbon and thus is unavailable for heating the environment. I hope this detail was addressed in the field experiment with accurate ground and ambient-air temperature measurements. The effect of the albedo alone may not tell the whole story. BOB PETTIT For the baseball player, see . Robert E. Lee "Bob" Pettit (born December 12, 1932, in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, U.S.) is a retired American professional basketball player. He played 11 seasons in the NBA, all with the Milwaukee/St. Louis Hawks (1954-1965). , CORVALLIS, ORE. Some experiments suggest that even though the shrubs sequester sequester v. to keep separate or apart. In so-called "high-profile" criminal prosecutions (involving major crimes, events, or persons given wide publicity) the jury is sometimes "sequestered" in a hotel without access to news media, the general public or their carbon, the soil beneath loses even more, resulting in a net loss of carbon.--S. PERKINS |
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