Climate Change at Proctor

This week in APES our assignment is to submit a photo blog on climate change that we see throughout campus. Is there evidence that it is or is not occurring, or perhaps both?

While spending time on campus it is very hard for me to be observant enough to notice climate change and wether or not it is happening. This is my third year at Proctor and wile spending the last couple days walking around campus I can't see and immediate climate change, but I can compare what I see this year with past years.

Recently I have been noticing the lack of snow fall. 'As an Easter Skier how could you right?' So I looked into it. According to RichLeftko, a website I found with average snow falls says the New Hampshire state average snow fall (since they had started keeping data) was 69.75" per year. This winter we have counted just under 29" as an average. I know winter is not over, but Im not convinced we are getting 40 more inches in March.

Lack of snow fall seen on the turf fields (February)

With this crazy winter, I have noticed a dramatic change from last year. In the last two years, we have seen two dramatic winters. Last year was dramatically cold and this year, the opposite, dramatically warm. As a result of the brutally warm temperatures I have seen the small run off stream from the blackwater river you cross on your way to the ski hill is not frozen in mid February.

Unfrozen stream at the ski hill (February)

With this above average warm air it is almost impossible for water to freeze. Especially with the sudden increases and decreases in temperatures. This December in New Hampshire was a record breaking warm month. As you can see in the WMUR calendar, all of the red days are above average, blue is below and gray is average. This calendar goes to show the dramatic winter we are having. 

December 2015, Warmest ever

Both examples I have brought up here are reasons to believe Climate Change is happening, But Climate is defined as; "an area's long-term atmospheric conditions" While Weather is defined as; "the state of the atmosphere with respect to wind, temperature, pressure, and perspiration on a short term basis."

With the last two winters New Hampshire has seen, it is safe to say it it neither evidence of climate change or global warming, but 'Extreme Weather' where storms happen on a larger scale and become magnified. The extreme weather can be both snow storms and heat waves.

Change is inevitable, but are we speeding it up? What can we do so slow it down?

Lets stop warm winters like this from ever happening again. 

I know the Proctor ski hill will be happy with that!

All photos taken by Eric Bonewald

Calendar photo taken by WMUR

A Journey to Recycle Circle

On one cold Feb. 13th afternoon I took a trip to my local New London, Transfer Station. (Because of my tight schedule with skiing I was unable to attend the trip to the andover Transfer station.) I pulled in on a street named Recycle Circle and was immediately welcomed by the sight of the hustle and bustle of the 17 cars full of trash trying to be emptied at the same time.




With my absence of class the day my D block APES class visited Andover, I decided to reach out to my town Public Works Director to answer a few questions that I had on my local, town transfer station. 





I had five specific questions that I was curious about to enhance my understanding of my town transfer station.

     1. What percent of all the waste in the town is recovered through recycling? (Last year, New London recycled about 23% of our waste stream.)

Recycling (Pre-sort drop off)

     2. How many people does the transfer station usually see daily? (On average the town sees 300 vehicles per day. It can fluctuate due to the seasons. Summer and get up to 500 vehicles per day.)

     3. Is there a certain type of recycling system that we have? (New London uses a drop off system. Home owners need to pre-sort recyclables and the town will then process them separately.)

The recycling building

     4. Where does the trash go? Landfill or Incineration? (Trash from New London goes to a landfill in Berlin NH.)

Trash shoot into an 18 wheeler

     5. What are the items the town struggles with getting rid of the most? (Richard Lee, New London Public Works Director, told me that the items the town struggles most with is generally  all recyclables, but paper is the larges struggle to get rid of.)




Even though my experience was slightly different and didn't take place in a class setting I believe that my time spent at the New London transfer station was valuable. While the New London and Andover transfer stations hold similarities they also hold major differences. In Andover, the town runs on Single stream recycling which is zero sort, and all recyclables can get thrown together. In New London, the town runs on a pre-sort system where all recyclables must be sorted by the home owner. As a result to the different styles of recycling Andover recovers 72% of its waste while New London only recovers 23% of waste. I strongly believe this is due to the single stream recycling Andover uses which takes up less space, takes up less time, and takes up less energy.

In New London, the waste that is not recovered it eventually transported to a landfill in Berlin NH, while Andover's waste is brought to an incinerator. Both methods work to get rid of the trash we produce, but neither are 100% clean and 100% safe for the environment.



My takeaway from this experience is that recycling in a major part in the battle to our global trash problem. As a community we must reduce and reuse as much as possible to give our planet the best chance of survival. Also through comparing the Andover and New London transfer stations, I can now say that I am a believer in the single stream recycling, and will hope to do further research and data collection that I can use to help my town make an informed and factual decision on our recycling choices. Maybe New London has been doing it wrong all along.

The benefit of recycling 

All photos taken by Eric Bonewald

Chasing the Inversion

For the last week I have been thinking of ideas for my Chasing the Inversion photo blog. Even being a day student and spending time away from campus every day I was struggling with a circumstance to photograph. With the option to attend polar swim on Friday Feb. 12th not being available, I started to explore other options.

My inability to capture a moment of Inversion I resorted to my past summer when I spent time skiing in Chile. While the ski trip was one of the most amazing opportunities I have ever been a part of, it was also one of the most eye opening.

The ski resort, El Colorado

When walking through the Santiago airport in Chile, I could see through the large bay windows, the poor and depressed city. Through the large sliding glass doors we were abruptly hit with a thick layer of what looked to me to be fog or smoke. Come to find out it was smog.

For the last week or so in my D block APES class we have been discussing Air pollution and have been focused on the differences in smog. There are two major types of smog,  Brown and Gray Smog. By researching a little bit about Santiago as a city I have learned that the smog I was experiencing was Brown Smog, also known as photochemical smog.

This picture you can see in the upper right corner the smog covering the city of Santiago Chile.

This Picture above shows the Photochemical Smog that is covering the city of Santiago. Photochemical Smog is mainly produced by vehicle use and combustion in urban areas. This smog is produced when sunlight drives a series of reactions involving primary pollutants. Due to the sunlight Photochemical Smog regularly peaks in the afternoon, after both rush hour and a long day of sunshine.

Mountains surrounding the city of Santiago

As the pictures show the city is surrounded by large mountains which help trap in the smog. The way thermal inversion works is, warm air sits above the cold air on the ground. The warm air contains and pushes the pollution down below the layer of warmth. This creates smog. In a sense, the pollutants become trapped with no way out above the clouds and continue to build until the weather changes. Because of the mountains surrounding the city, it adds another constraint to the pollution from the sides. Not only can the smog go up, but it can't even go sideways.


As the trip was fun and I got to do what I loved, skiing, I realized how different rural New Hampshire is from a dirty, poor and depressed urban city like Santiago. So what can I do? More importantly, what can we do? As the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) sets standards for emissions nation wide, we can still help out and do our part by reducing our car use by car pooling and riding bikes, and continue to find cleaner ways to supply us with power and run our factories.

DO YOUR PART, REDUSE YOUR EMISSIONS. 

I CHALLENGE YOU, WHAT CAN YOU DO?

Help preserve this precious earth.


All Photos taken by Eric Bonewald