Newsgroup sci.environment 103579

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In  <517ulg$1sj@peabody.colorado.edu>
    Robert Parson  (rparson@spot.Colorado.EDU)  said:
>   This group is getting worse with time.
Aurea prima sata est aetas ...
Meaning formerly the oxen had thicker heads  ;)
Jan Schloerer
jschloer@rzmain.rz.uni-ulm.de

charliew@hal-pc.org (charliew) writes:
>Rick,
>
>where the prof (who also never worked for a private company) 
Actually, one of the two Econ profs I had was previously employed by IBM.
>was spouting a bunch of b.s. that came out of some Harvard 
>MBA's book (who also never worked for a private company).
I find this very humourous, darkly so.  Ethics aside, I think
one of the greatest problems in American business today is the
MBA.  Typically they have been taught to concentrate on the
short-term, which often turns out to be penny-wise pound-foolish,
or rather quarter-wise, decade-foolish.
Robert
Morphis@physics.niu.edu
Real Men change diapers

In article <518vgl$s6f@newsy.ifm.liu.se>,
Magnus Redin  wrote:
>hatunen@netcom.com (DaveHatunen) writes:
>
>> No. Most hydroelectric turbines work on the principle of using
>> momentum change in the water to turn the turbine. The idea of using
>> velocity to produce energy is an astounding breakthrough, especially
>> since even the principle of conservation of units is flouted, with
>> length/time being converted to force*length.
>
>If only velocity matterd a ping-pong ball flying in 30 km/h would
>contain as much energy as a car going 30 km/h. 
>
>What you claim does not follow basic physics. Bounce a couple of balls
>of different weights, turn a dynamo by hand, read a few basic
>textbooks, perform a couple simple school experiments, THINK BY
>YOURSELF and figure out why both mass and velocity (giving momentum)
>matters. 
Um. I didn't claim it. I did use some irony though.
-- 
    ********** DAVE HATUNEN (hatunen@netcom.com) **********
    *               Daly City California                  *
    *   Between San Francisco and South San Francisco     *
    *******************************************************

In article <5192en$6c@ufo.ee.vill.edu>, Nick Pine  wrote:
>DaveHatunen  wrote:
>
>>...Most hydroelectric turbines work on the principle of using momentum
>>change in the water to turn the turbine.
>
>I don't know much about hydro, Dave, but I've always thought that what
>mattered here is that so many pounds of water moved from a higher place
>to a lower place, at the same velocity or less, and that slowing the
>water down didn't contribute much to the power produced. 
Momentum change is the mechanism that turns the wheel. Turbine outlets
are bigger than turbine inlets.
-- 
    ********** DAVE HATUNEN (hatunen@netcom.com) **********
    *               Daly City California                  *
    *   Between San Francisco and South San Francisco     *
    *******************************************************

On 11 Sep 96 05:43:40 in <00078078012A77EC@dol.net>, Frank Logullo spake 
thus...
>
>
>Need access to current 40 CFR 723.50 which deals with TSCA low volumn 
>exemption (LVE).  None of my bookmarks are leading me to the current 
CFR 
> - any help would be appreciated.
>Frank Logullo
Try http://www.epa.gov/docs/epacfr40/chapt-I.info/subch-R/
or
gopher://www.epa.gov/11/.data/epacfr40/chapt-I.info/subch-R/
-- 
Scott D. Benton
sdbenton@ppg.com
Optimism indicates that the situation has not been clearly understood.

In article <518ks6$jqu@pheidippides.axion.bt.co.uk>,
Tim Jebb  wrote:
[...]
>
>However, if certain areas of say, inner cities, were designated as 
>emission free vehicle zones, it would instantly create a demand for such 
>vehicles. Furthermore the demand would most likely come from people with 
>the cash to pay for the vehicles, and who would welcome the lack of 
>competition for road and parking space (I'm thinking here of business 
>districts).
Even more effective at reducing inner city air pollution would be to
declare them private-automobile-free zones.
[...]
-- 
    ********** DAVE HATUNEN (hatunen@netcom.com) **********
    *               Daly City California                  *
    *   Between San Francisco and South San Francisco     *
    *******************************************************

charliew@hal-pc.org (charliew) writes:
>TL ADAMS  wrote:                                
>>G. Gordon, Ollie North, Warner, Milken, or all the rest.  
>>S&L; scandal stole money from me. Pru-Bache
>>stole money from me, why shouldn't the responsible party go
>>to jail.
>Unfortunately, there are practical aspects to your ethical 
>"high road".  
The discussion below is orders of magnitude different from 
behaving morally and ethically in the U.S..  Nearly all the examples
the Mr. Adams quoted were cases of fraud and greed, not merely
trying to stay competative and above the water.
>I get sick and tired of hearing what Germans in 
>Nazi Germany SHOULD have done once Hitler was in power.  That 
>place was a facist state.  Any dissenters were quickly lined 
>up against a wall and shot!  
No, many were shipped off to concentration camps.
>Furthermore, I can positively guarantee all of the 
>do-gooders out there who try to second guess history that 
>they would quickly act the same way in the same situation.
Well thank you Mr. Net.Psychic.  It might surprize you to know
that there are some very ethical, moral people out there in the
world, much like the people who risked their lives and their
families lives to hide Jews during WWII.
Some people will crumple, that is human nature but we can not
determine that until the time comes.
Robert
Morphis@physics.niu.edu
Real Men change diapers

tobis@skool.ssec.wisc.edu (Michael Tobis) writes:
> I thank Steinn for the reference. I tend to miss the important articles
Pleasure.
 ...
> I have looked at the figure in question, and with some trepidation at
> criticizing both Drs. Mitchell and Sigurdsson simultaneously my preliminary
> conclusion is that the plotted measure is not a very good one.
Hmm. There is a serious issue here, in that extracting a statistic
for goodness of fit from a heterogenous data set is a 
hazardous business.
> This is not to question Mitchell's conclusion that aerosol is an
> important term that should not be neglected in cnetury-scale predictions.
> However, the figure does not convince me that the predictive value of 
> GCMs without aerosol is negligible nor that the predictive value of
> the current models with aerosol is as solid as Sigurdsson proposes.
Just to clarify, I think the GHG+Aersol models are finally
getting the short time scale, regional effects correctly,
and hence the long term secular predictions are relatively
robust, whereas the GHG only models were, IMHO, failing
in that they were not providing statistically robust postdictions.
As I understand it, the problem with the GHG models only
was not just that the pattern correlation was formally zero,
but that it was becoming apparent their predicted forcing
would mismatch the observed track record by more than the
predicted error. In particular the GHG only models overpredict
net mean warming and this was becoming evident in the observations.
I don't the GHG+aerosols are a complete absolute perfect model,
I think they are adequate to the point of having prective power
and getting much of the essential physics right. There are
other, conceivable major, factors that need to be allowed for,
but my personal impression is that further refinements will
largely be just that.
> Since the early part of the record is effectively unforced, the oscillations
> before 1940 give an indication of the noisiness of the measure. The
> subsequent performance of either model is not obviously better ON THAT
> MEASURE than random. (The emphasis and wording are chosen so as to avoid
> being quoted out of context.)
My impression from listening to people from Hadley is that
they feel the "natural noise" - at least on 10-100 year timescales - 
is now fairly well characterised. The time series of pattern
correlation is then an important statistic to see the forcing
emerge from the noise.
> The measure is stated as follows: " Observed annual means were computed
> where there is at least one value in every month in a 5 degree grid box.
> Observed and simulated data were averaged on a 15 x 15 degree grid, and 
> decadal means firmed in grid boxes containing at least one annual 
> observed value. " 
> 
> The inhomeogeneity of the time series is an obvious flaw - remote
> regions (in practice polar and South Pacific) would be in the latter
> part of the series but not in the early part. But I see two other
> serious problems. Firstly, the equal weighting of 15x15 degree areas
> grossly overweights polar regions, when the data for those exists.
> It is in fact the case that the behavior of the high Arctic has not
> been in accordance with models in general, and perhaps with the 
> particular model used here, but equal weighting by latitude instead
> of by area would overvalue these errors. Secondly, the naive decadal
???? I don't understand your point. While the solar forcing is not
uniform in area, emissivity is, to first order, hence you must
weigh in the polar regions. Further, the _mean_ net change is
dominated by night time warming and polar warming, the predicted
tropical warming is low in both models. So a latitude weighter
statistic would bury the signal in the noise by giving excess
weight to regions where the intrinsic signal is lowest. No?
> binning shares the same problem as the raw MSU satellite data - short
> truncated records with points equally weighted are better measures of
> high frequency variation at the ends of the record than of low
> frequency variables of interest. A twenty year, triangularly weighted
> running average would be far more informative than decadal bins.
Do both and see if it makes a difference.
If you take the time series and are looking for a forcing, 
the advantage is that your statistic should improve as the
data is extended.
> Finally, conclusions drawn from a single model must be taken as
> preliminary, and from a single realization of the model more so.
> The intra-model variability needs to be addressed before firm conclusions
> can be obtained. 
That I know they have done. You can only put so much in
Nature, and I can't properly cite "viewgraph I saw at a
seminar three months ago".
> In short, I conclude that the poor performance in shown in Fig 3 of
> Mitchell et al, Nature 376 p 501 ff, 1995, is likely to due the
> weakness of the model metric rather than weakness of the specific
> realization of the specific model used, and that the latter weakness,
> if shown, would be insufficient to make the claim of "zero correlation".
I think you underestimate the rationale the modelers
went through to choose their metrics, and why this paper
appeared in Nature.
> I do not understand Sigurdsson's conclusion from that graph that the
> aerosol-included model performance is spectacularly better than that
> without aerosol. I believe that this is the case in fact, but do not
> see that as a clear conclusion from the graph.
"viewgraph I saw..."  - Sorry, but I don't know which of the
work done in the last 12 months that I saw is published. I don't
keep that close a tab on the field. All I know is it convinced
me, and I'm now starting to trust regional prediction of GCMs.
That is, my conclusions are not _just_ from that graph, but
from a number of other data.
> Finally, regarding the predictive value of existing models, my
> understanding is that there is general agreement among them in the
> latitudinal distribution of temperature change, but not as distributed
> along longitude. This is unsurprising given the geometry of the
> problem, and validates the use of crude two-dimensional models to
> give estimates of temperature sensitivity. Additionally, if surface warming 
> is taken as the performance metric, I still would claim that the correlation 
> between enhanced CO2 models and actual climate change is positive, though not
> yet statistically significant unless aerosol forcing is included.
The problem is that simple end point-end point correlation
is a poor statistic precisely because any change with the
right sign give a positive correlation (eg the baseline might
be anomalously cool, due to bad luck or natural forcing; or 
a pure GHG model might severly overpredict warming, but still
get positive correlation because there is some smaller warming).

Alastair Mayer wrote:
> I don't have the numbers handy (perhaps somebody else does), but the
> risk per megawatt produced (a far more meaningful figure than risk/ton)
> is much greater for coal.  Even if you just count the number of people
> killed in automobiles at railroad crossings hit by coal trains.  Let
> alone all the poisons in coal ash. (Poisons like arsenic, which are
> toxic forever.)
Has anybody ever died in a uranium transport accident?
And don't forget the number of people killed or disabled mining the
coal.
Not just from accidents (or stupid f***-ups like not venting mines
properly) but things like black lung. Has anybody ever died in a
uranium mine accident?
And there are just loads of things we could be doing with all those
carbon compounds in coal other than putting a match to them.
-- 
The preceding are my opinions alone and have nothing
whatever to do with my employer.  I don't even know what my
employer thinks. I'm not even real sure who the CEO is.
Dan Evens

Does anyone know of contractors in the Los Angeles area who have 
geoprobe units for soil testing and sampling?  How about environmental 
laboratories for soil sample analysis?  Please e-mail info to Connie 
at CERI@dallas.net.  Thanks!!!

Jonathan Baron (baron@cattell.psych.upenn.edu) wrote:
: make the environmental benefits of nuclear power negligible.  A
: colleague of mine told me of study that showed this, but I didn't
: see the study, so I don't know how much it was influenced by
: wishful thinking resulting from a prior bias against nuclear
: power.  However, in principle the argument did not seem crazy.
: One would need to see the numbers.  (He who refuses to do
: arithmetic .....)
The argument is ludicrous. If the energy of construction were so high
as to make the carbon contribution of the nuclear plant significant, then
there would be no reason to build the plant at all. Sometimes the amount of
arithmetic you need to do is quite small.
mt

Gary B. Jackson wrote:
> 
> I thought some of you would like to know that,
> Eclipse Software has designed (2) very unique software programs for
> Authoring and maintaining MSDS sheets.
>     1. "MSDS Wizard", the authoring program, has all drop down windows
> for quick selection of information to design the document.
>     2. "MSDS Scan Wizard", the maintenance program, has the feature of
> scanning the original document directly into the program, thus instant
> organization, and elimination of up to 95% of the workload of
> maintaining them.
> 
> Please visit their home page at
>     http://www.eclipsesoft.com
> and download the software for your review.
>               -OR-
> call them direct and order the literature and demo disks directly....
> at ...   800-582-2471
> Gary
> 
conversely for maintaning sheets you can get the sigma aldrich cd 
database.
-- 
Bruce Musgrove
bmusgr@mednet.swmed.edu
"Always reach for new heights. Use the drapes, that is what they are 
there for."
from the musings of Master Meow

Mike Pelletier wrote:
  The problem is that the public is scared of nuclear
> >power, and elected officials are afraid of the public.
> 
> According to a survey conducted several months ago, the problem is
> not that the public is scared of nuclear power, it's that the majority
> of the public thinks that the public is scared of nuclear power.
> 
As a member of that public, and a Former Navy Sub Nuke (ELT), who 
currently works in Radiation safety, I must say its not Nuclear power 
that scares me, but rather the way development, construction and 
operation is handled here in the US.
There is no such thing as  standardization of design, which drives costs 
up as each utility designs its own "custom" power plant.  This same 
problem makes it very hard to learn from our mistakes and correct them.
There are too many companies without the expertise who worked on and 
built power plants,  "redesigning" as they went (without approval), 
compromising safety.
Regulatory attempts in the US are also a nightmarish joke. Reporting and 
resolution of problems are not encouraged, and concerned personnel who 
attempt to report problems that need to be resolved are hounded 
unmercifully with virtually no recourse for action, encouraging a SGt 
Schultz attitude ("I SAW NOTHING!" Hogans Heroes).
I realize this may start a flame war. That is not my intention. If you 
disagree, vent away ON THE NEWSGROUP PLEASE!
-- 
Bruce Musgrove
bmusgr@mednet.swmed.edu
"Always reach for new heights. Use the drapes, that is what they are 
there for."
from the musings of Master Meow

Mike, I didn't crosspost my original message, and there is no need to cross
post the replies.  I'm crossposting this one only to point out that this
topic has nothing to do with a sci newsgroup, almost nothing to do with
ca.environment.  Maybe the mountain bikers care, but that is about it.
Could we at least keep the discussion localized to avoid wasting everyone's
time.
In article 6BF6@pacbell.net, Mike Vandeman  writes:
> Bill Zaumen wrote:
> > 
> First of all, I was usually the ONLY person protesting the project, so I know
> there were no MTBers there to help.
> 
Hmmmmm.  You mean MTBers aren't any more likely than anyone else to protest
a project that only you think was worth protesting, and then you infer something
about MTBers in general?
> 
> Fourth, when I approached the East Bay Bicycle Coalition about opposing highway
> construction, they TOLD me they weren't interested (Alex Zuckerman, to be specific).
Alex Zuckerman is a senior citizen.  I met him once or twice, and he seems like
a really nice person, but I'd be surprised if he is a serious MTBer.
The EBBC is not specifically a mountain bike organization, and probably has
its hands full already and can't afford the resources to take on something that
you and only you apparently care about.
Bill --- own opinion, not my employer's.

 Since Sam says that he's not particularly interested in "going over
 this again", and since I'm not either, I'm not responding to his
 post other than to say that I disagree violently with it.

> "Bikers are not excluded from trail use! They are just not allowed to
> bring abike along!" , what do you think bikers do?  We bike. 
This whole thing is a "use" issue, not a "discrimination" issue
though. You - the human being are not being discriminated against. It
is the equipment you want to use that is being forbidden. This is not
my definition of discrimination (as in "whites only" signs, or someone
being fired because they're considered too old even though they are
doing their job just fine). A law prohibiting a gun-owner from
carrying his weapon into a public building is not discriminating
against the person - only his gun. He is still a gun-owner, but he
must leave his gun in the car if he wants to walk into the bank.

In article ,
D. Braun  wrote:
>Wow. Some people never give up. Repeating the same lies over and over,
>with a sprinkling of laughable allegations is really weak, Gary.  Is this
>a humor piece? See below.
 Probably a troll, actually; as "morphis" points out the headers
 are forged.
>On Wed, 11 Sep 1996, Gary wrote:
>> 	It is the free Clorine radical that is responsable for the hole
>> in the Ozone.  R12 does break down into this, but the worlds oceans
>> produce 100 times more Clorine every year than all the R12 that had been
>> made. So why do you blame R12?
>
>Right out of Dixxee Lee Ray's book
 Mmm, no. If he'd gotten it from Dixy Lee Ray he'd have "chloride ions"
 instead of 'Clorine radical' and he'd be obsessing about volcanoes
 rather than oceans. 
------
Robert
"When new scientific developments impinge on society, business and
 politics, mechanisms other than the scientific method come into play.
 Sometimes it works this way: Scientist A publishes an article. Interest
 group B, with or without distorting the article, uses it to advance its 
 cause and makes demands that conflict with the interests of group C.
 Group C hastily attacks A's person and motives. Both C and A feel
 outraged. Typically, neither B nor C uanderstands the science of the 
 original article. On the other hand, when X files a lawsuit against Y
 and newspaper reporters ask Y for comment, the usual answer is, "No
 comment until I have studied their suit." Surely this is a better model
 for C to follow when A's science is used as a weapon by B. However, if
 one person assumes the role of both A and B, that person is in
 politics already. In the long run, application of the scientific method found
 that space shuttles do not harm ozone and that chlorofluorocarbons caused
the Antarctic ozone hole, regardless of politics on both sides of both issues."
 H. S. Johnston, _Atmospheric Ozone_, Ann. Rev. Phys. Chem. _43_, 1-32, 1992.

DaveHatunen wrote:
> No. Most hydroelectric turbines work on the principle of using momentum
> change in the water to turn the turbine. The idea of using velocity to
> produce energy is an astounding breakthrough, especially since even the
> principle of conservation of units is flouted, with length/time being
> converted to force*length.
	Okay.  Momentum.  Mass * velocity.  Momentum change (assuming
constant mass)  dmv/dt (I am assuming change with respect to time).
dmv/dt for constant mass is equal to mdv/dt.  dv/dt is also known
as acceleration.  ma=F  I create a force on a mechanical system and
allow that force to be applied through a distance (the rotation of
the turbine) and I get work.  Now.  What is the difference between
this and using "velocity"?  Is the mass of the water somehow not involved?
	We build dams to store energy in the form of water with a
gravitational potential.  This is potential energy.  We convert the water's 
potential energy to kinetic energy and attempt to use this kinetic 
energy by transfering it to a mechanical system (turbines, wheels,
etc).  When we do this the water loses kinetic energy and the
mechanical system gains it.  If you get it all, the water stops
moving.  (I assume you have coverted all of the potential energy
to kinetic energy or otherwise lost it in the conversion process).
No dam I know of completely stops the water through its turbines (it
tends to get in the way of the water behind it).  So, your "astounding"
breakthrough really can only be either 1) more efficient conversion
from potential to kinetic or 2) more complete capture of the kinetic 
(i.e. the water comes out at a lower velocity).  
	I strongly suspect #2.  Something tells me you're not lowering
the temperature of the water. Now you may be preventing the conversion
of potential energy into increased temperature water.  I guess I would
just be surprised that this was much of an improvement.
					Kevin

In article 005@pm1-66.hal-pc.org, charliew@hal-pc.org (charliew) writes:
>>Basic absorption characteristics of CO2 molecules combined 
>to
>>the laws of thermodynamics. There is no need for 
>sophisticated
>>climate models to *know* that warming is occuring. In
>>fact it was the observation that the planet was much
>>warmer than expected that led to the discovery of
>>the greenhouse effect in the first place.
>
>The planet is much warmer than expected compared to Mars.  It 
>is VERY much cooler than expected compared to Venus.
No, the planet was observed to much warmer than was expected from basic
radiation calculations not by comparison to other planets.
Some mechanism had to be thought of to account for the 
discrepency hence the initial discovery of the greenhouse effect.
True other planets also exhibit the same effect to a greater
or lesser extent thus giving further corroboration.
>(cut)
>>
>>We *DO* have results.
>>These *DO* validate the models.
>>As with *any* field of science the predictions come with a 
>certain
>>amount of uncertainty. As more data becomes available then 
>the
>>predictive power of the models will improve however they 
>will
>>always contain uncertainties ie the validation process is
>>*never* complete. This is the fundamental principle of the
>>scientific method that you are misrepresenting to make your
>>point. Science is an open ended process so to ask
>>for the science to be complete before you take any
>>notice of it is to reject science all together.
>
>In your words, not mine.
No, in your words.
You painted a slightly but significantly distorted picture 
of the scientific method in which you described a sequence of
steps each one conditional on the previous being complete.
You then went on to claim that those scientists who
offered predictions in advance of the events their
models were predicting abandonning the scientific method.
>  I don't need an absolute answer on 
>this one.  A high degree of statistical significance along 
>with a modest amount of predictive capabilities will satisfy 
>me.
Things which you know to be impossible.
This allows you to reject the science while maintaining an
outward appearence of rationality.
>  By the way, why do you hate it so much when people don't 
>share the same opinion as yourself?
>
Its not a matter of opinion it is a matter of fact. 
---
Pete Owens
P.Owens@dl.ac.uk 

I have barely had time to skim the WGIII volume of _Climate 
Change 1995_, but there is some nice work on integrated 
assessment models (IAM).  Among the many models reviewed is 
IMAGE 2.0 developed in the Netherlands.  The model is 
available on-line for interactive noodling at:
http://sedac.ciesin.org/mva

DESIGN CONTEST GERMAN FEDERAL ENVIRONMENT MINISTRY
WIN A 160 PENTIUM
http://www.bmu.de/designwettbewerb.htm

In article 619232@nntp.televar.com, dewey@televar.com (Dewey Burbank) writes:
>>
>This brings up an issue that I have been struggling with in my attempts to
>understand the debate on climate change.  I can not fully grasp the
>meaningfulness of "average" global temperature.  Where I live, the temperature
>has a diurnal variability of roughly 25degC and a seasonal variability of
>about 50degC.  The local flora and fauna are well adapted to these extremes.
I think you will find that your local flora and fauna are highly
stressed at these extremes. In part their fitness to survive in
that particular environmental niche is determined by their
ability to just survive these extremes while their competitors just fail
to.
Even if (and this is extremely unlikely to be the case) the impact
of a 2.5 degree warming was uniformly spread such that everywhere
became 2.5 degrees warmer than it would otherwise have been
all of the time this would imply both greater magnitudes of extereme
and longer periods of extreme - the latter is probably more critical.
>My simplistic question is: What difference would a 2.5degC change make?
In fact the small difference in mean would be composed of
a large number of changes of different magnitude. A few
places would become cooler while others would become much warmer.
There are also the knock on effects to the rest of the climate 
system with different patterns of rainfall, wind and so on.
>Especially when averaged over a time period of a century?  This equates to 100
>generations for annual flora, and several (perhaps tens) of generations of
>fauna.
This is very very short in evolutionary timescales.
>  Granted these are fast on an evolutionary scale, but we are not
>talking about evolution, but rather adaptation.
Evolution is the mechanism for adapton for most species.
>  In my mind, the distinction
>is important, because life forms on earth are enormously adaptable to
>short-term changes in habitat.  
>
>It just seems to me that the changes that are being predicted are uncertain
>and probably insignificant in the Grand Scheme of Things.
Well to put the magnitude in context the world was only 5 degrees cooler
during the last ice age. We are not talking about the end of
life as we no it but that certainly implies significant
environmental and economic disruption. 
---
Pete Owens
P.Owens@dl.ac.uk 

Mike Vandeman wrote:
> 
> There you go again, lying through your teeth. Bikers are NOT excluded from trail
> use! They are just not allowed to bring a bike along! Where did you learn how to
> think?
What is your definition of a biker?  I bet you think you are so cute
with that one.  You have used that time and time again to avoid tackling
the real issue.  Why can't you deal with the real issue head on?
Rob
-- 
email:                           |"You can't take life too seriously,
rhorvati@ae0119.pd8.ford.com     | you don't get out alive." Buggs Bunny

test

In article <3237711A.6C3C@pacbell.net>,
	Mike Vandeman   wrote:
>Does anyone know where I might find some strong connections between
>religion and the protection of wildlife? I have long thought that the
>Golden Rule needs to be expanded to include other species.
>
>The only name I can think of is St. Thomas Aquinas. Didn't he preach
>to birds?
>
>Surely there must be a book on this....
Judaism has an extensive religious-legal structure regarding the
care and humane treatment of domestic and wild animals.  Some simple
examples include commandments to shoo the mother bird away from
the nest before taking her eggs, to feed your animals before you
feed yourself, and so on.
Check the Judaica section of your local bookstore, they might have
something in stock along these lines, although you may have to look
for subsections of broader books.
	-Mike Pelletier.