First Parish Unitarian Universalist Church of Arlington

Green Sanctuary/Climate Change Group

Past Months

Updates from Centers Reporting on Global Warming updated 3/5/2010
Reports updated 5/22/2010
Videos updated 2/24/2010
Media updated 7/24/2010
Talks & Appeals updated 1/3/2010
Personal Actions We Can Take

This Month
The Green Sanctuary Group

Regular Updates from Centers Reporting on Global Warming
- NOAA Climate Services Are Available
- U.S. Feeds One Quarter of its Grain to Cars While Hunger is on the Rise
- U.S. Car Fleet Shrank Four Million in 2009 - Entering Era of Decline by Lester R. Brown
- 2009
- U.S. Headed for Massive Decline in Carbon Emissions by Lester R. Brown
- Could Food Shortages Bring Down Civilization? by Lester R. Brown
- Plan B 4.0: Mobilizing to Save Civilization by Lester R. Brown
- Center for American Progress on Energy and Environment
- Rethinking Food Production for a World of Eight Billion by Lester R. Brown
- The Oil Intensity of Food by Lester R. Brown
- Melting Ice Could Lead to Massive Waves of Climate Refugees
- Shrinking Forests: The Many Costs

Reports on Research Papers and Policy Statements

Videos

Media

Talks & Appeals

Personal Actions We Can Take

Regular Updates from Centers Reporting on Global Warming

NOAA Climate Services Are Available

Click here to see the new Climate Services Portal offered by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. This site provides climate data and services to help with facing climate variability and change.

NOAA is a scientific agency within the United States Department of Commerce focused on the conditions of the oceans and the atmosphere. NOAA warns of dangerous weather, charts seas and skies, guides the use and protection of ocean and coastal resources, and conducts research to improve understanding and stewardship of the environment.

Earth Policy Institute: US Grain Used for Ethanol 1980-2009

U.S. Feeds One Quarter of its Grain to Cars While Hunger is on the Rise

The 107 million tons of grain that went to U.S. ethanol distilleries in 2009 was enough to feed 330 million people for one year at average world consumption levels. More than a quarter of the total U.S. grain crop was turned into ethanol to fuel cars last year. With 200 ethanol distilleries in the country set up to transform food into fuel, the amount of grain processed has tripled since 2004.

The United States looms large in the world food economy: it is far and away the world's leading grain exporter, exporting more than Argentina, Australia, Canada, and Russia combined. In a globalized food economy, increased demand for food to fuel American vehicles puts additional pressure on world food supplies.

...

Continuing to divert more food to fuel, as is now mandated by the U.S. federal government in its Renewable Fuel Standard, will likely only reinforce the disturbing rise in hunger. By subsidizing the production of ethanol, now to the tune of some $6 billion each year, U.S. taxpayers are in effect subsidizing rising food bills at home and around the world.

Click here to read more.

U.S. Car Fleet Shrank by Four Million in 2009 - Entering Era of Decline by Lester R. Brown

America's century-old love affair with the automobile may be coming to an end. The U.S. fleet has apparently peaked and started to decline. In 2009, the 14 million cars scrapped exceeded the 10 million new cars sold, shrinking the U.S. fleet by 4 million, or nearly 2 percent in one year. While this is widely associated with the recession, it is in fact caused by several converging forces.

Perhaps the most fundamental social trend affecting the future of the automobile is the declining interest in cars among young people. For those who grew up a half-century ago in a country that was still heavily rural, getting a driver's license and a car or a pickup was a rite of passage. Getting other teenagers into a car and driving around was a popular pastime.

In contrast, many of today's young people living in a more urban society learn to live without cars. They socialize on the Internet and on smart phones, not in cars. Many do not even bother to get a driver's license. This helps explain why, despite the largest U.S. teenage population ever, the number of teenagers with licenses, which peaked at 12 million in 1978, is now under 10 million. If this trend continues, the number of potential young car-buyers will continue to decline.

Click here to read more.

U.S. Headed for Massive Decline in Carbon Emissions by Lester R. Brown

The United States has ended a century of rising carbon emissions and has now entered a new energy era, one of declining emissions. Peak carbon is now history. What had appeared to be hopelessly difficult is happening at amazing speed.

Click here to read this Plan B Update.

Could Food Shortages Bring Down Civilization? by Lester R. Brown

"In early 2008, Saudi Arabia announced that, after being self-sufficient in wheat for over 20 years, the non-replenishable aquifer it had been pumping for irrigation was largely depleted," writes Lester R. Brown in his new book, Plan B 4.0: Mobilizing to Save Civilization (W.W. Norton & Company).

"In response, officials said they would reduce their wheat harvest by one eighth each year until production would cease entirely in 2016. The Saudis then plan to use their oil wealth to import virtually all the grain consumed by their Canada-sized population of nearly 30 million people," notes Brown, President and Founder of the Earth Policy Institute, a Washington, D.C.-based independent environmental research organization.

"The Saudis are unique in being so wholly dependent on irrigation," says Brown in Plan B 4.0. But other, far larger, grain producers such as India and China are facing irrigation water losses and could face grain production declines.

A World Bank study of India's water balance notes that 15 percent of its grain harvest is produced by overpumping. In human terms, 175 million Indians are being fed with grain produced from wells that will be going dry. The comparable number for China is 130 million. Among the many other countries facing harvest reductions from groundwater depletion are Pakistan, Iran, and Yemen.

"The tripling of world wheat, rice, and corn prices between mid-2006 and mid-2008 signaled our growing vulnerability to food shortages," says Brown. "It took the worst economic meltdown since the Great Depression to lower grain prices."

Click here to read more.

Plan B 4.0: Mobilizing to Save Civilization by Lester R. Brown

Why a new edition? A lot has changed on the renewable energy front in two years. Food, the weak link that brought down earlier civilizations, is the sector most affected by climate change. And it could bring our own civilization down if we stay with business as usual.

Please e-mail gogreen@firstparish.info if you want to order a copy. We order in bulk for First Parish to lower your cost.

Chapter 1: Selling Our Future

From time to time I go back and read about earlier civilizations that declined and collapsed, trying to understand the reasons for their demise. More often than not shrinking food supplies were responsible. For the Sumerians, rising salt levels in the soil—the result of a flaw in their irrigation system—brought down wheat and barley yields and eventually the civilization itself.

For the Mayans, soil erosion exacerbated by a series of intense droughts apparently undermined their food supply and their civilization. For other early civilizations that collapsed, it was often soil erosion and the resulting shrinkage in harvests that led to their decline.

Does our civilization face a similar fate? Until recently it did not seem possible. I resisted the idea that food shortages could also bring down our early twenty-first century global civilization. But our continuing failure to reverse the environmental trends that are undermining the world food economy forces me to conclude that if we continue with business as usual such a collapse is not only possible but likely.

Click here to read more.

Center for American Progress on Energy and Environment

RSS feeds are used to publish frequently updated works. The Center for American Progress' RSS Feeds on Energy and Environment have up to 30 current articles.

Rethinking Food Production for a World of Eight Billion by Lester R. Brown

In April 2005, the World Food Programme and the Chinese government jointly announced that food aid shipments to China would stop at the end of the year. For a country where a generation ago hundreds of millions of people were chronically hungry, this was a landmark achievement. Not only has China ended its dependence on food aid, but almost overnight it has become the world's third largest food aid donor.

The key to China's success was the economic reforms in 1978 that dismantled its system of agricultural collectives, known as production teams, and replaced them with family farms. In each village, the land was allocated among families, giving them long-term leases on their piece of land. The move harnessed the energy and ingenuity of China's rural population, raising the grain harvest by half from 1977 to 1986. With its fast-expanding economy raising incomes, with population growth slowing, and with the grain harvest climbing, China eradicated most of its hunger in less than a decade–in fact, it eradicated more hunger in a shorter period of time than any country in history.

While hunger has been disappearing in China, it has been spreading throughout much of the developing world, notably sub-Saharan Africa and parts of the Indian subcontinent. As a result, the number of people in developing countries who are hungry has increased from a recent historical low of 800 million in 1996 to over 1 billion today. Part of this recent rise can be attributed to higher food prices and the global economic crisis. In the absence of strong leadership, the number of hungry people in the world will rise even further, with children suffering the most.

Find out more about rethinking food production.

The Oil Intensity of Food by Lester R. Brown

Today we are an oil-based civilization, one that is totally dependent on a resource whose production will soon be falling. Since 1981, the quantity of oil extracted has exceeded new discoveries by an ever-widening margin. In 2008, the world pumped 31 billion barrels of oil but discovered fewer than 9 billion barrels of new oil. World reserves of conventional oil are in a free fall, dropping every year.

Discoveries of conventional oil total roughly 2 trillion barrels, of which 1 trillion have been extracted so far, with another trillion barrels to go. By themselves, however, these numbers miss a central point. As security analyst Michael Klare notes, the first trillion barrels was easy oil, "oil that's found on shore or near to shore; oil close to the surface and concentrated in large reservoirs; oil produced in friendly, safe, and welcoming places." The other half, Klare notes, is tough oil, "oil that's buried far offshore or deep underground; oil scattered in small, hard-to-find reservoirs; oil that must be obtained from unfriendly, politically dangerous, or hazardous places."

This prospect of peaking oil production has direct consequences for world food security, as modern agriculture depends heavily on the use of fossil fuels. Most tractors use gasoline or diesel fuel. Irrigation pumps use diesel fuel, natural gas, or coal-fired electricity. Fertilizer production is also energy-intensive. Natural gas is used to synthesize the basic ammonia building block in nitrogen fertilizers. The mining, manufacture, and international transport of phosphates and potash all depend on oil.

Melting Ice Could Lead to Massive Waves of Climate Refugees

Earth Policy Institute
Plan B Update
June 3, 2009

As the earth warms, the melting of the earth's two massive ice sheets — Antarctica and Greenland — could raise sea level enormously. If the Greenland ice sheet were to melt, it would raise sea level 7 meters (23 feet). Melting of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet would raise sea level 5 meters (16 feet). But even just partial melting of these ice sheets will have a dramatic effect on sea level rise. Senior scientists are noting that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) projections of sea level rise during this century of 18 to 59 centimeters are already obsolete and that a rise of 2 meters during this time is within range.

Shrinking Forests: The Many Costs

Earth Policy Institute
Plan B 3.0 Book Byte
April 7, 2009

At the beginning of the twentieth century, the earth's forested area was estimated at 5 billion hectares. Since then it has shrunk to just under 4 billion hectares, with the remaining forests rather evenly divided between tropical and subtropical forests in developing countries and temperate/boreal forests in industrial countries. Since 1990, the developing world has lost some 13 million hectares of forest a year. This loss of about 3 percent each decade is an area roughly the size of Greece. Meanwhile, the industrial world is actually gaining an estimated 5.6 million hectares of forestland each year, principally from abandoned cropland returning to forests on its own and from the spread of commercial forestry plantations. Thus, net forest loss worldwide exceeds 7 million hectares per year.

Unfortunately, even these official data from the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) do not reflect the gravity of the situation. For example, tropical forests that are clearcut or burned off rarely recover. They simply become wasteland or at best scrub forest, yet they still may be counted as "forest" in official forestry numbers. Plantations, too, count as forest area, yet they also are a far cry from the old-growth forest they sometimes replace.

Reports on Research Papers and Policy Statements

The Ratio of Record Highs to Lows is Likely to Increase Dramatically

This graphic shows the ratio of record daily highs to record daily lows observed at about 1,800 weather stations in the 48 contiguous United States from January 1950 through September 2009. Each bar shows the proportion of record highs (red) to record lows (blue) for each decade. The 1960s and 1970s saw slightly more record daily lows than highs, but in the last 30 years record highs have increasingly predominated, with the ratio now about two-to-one for the 48 states as a whole.

Spurred by a warming climate, daily record high temperatures occurred twice as often as record lows over the last decade across the continental United States, new research shows. The ratio of record highs to lows is likely to increase dramatically in coming decades if emissions of greenhouse gases continue to climb.

Increasing World-wide Urban Albedos to Offset CO2

On summer days, city air can be 5 or more degrees warmer than that in surrounding areas. Known as the “urban heat island effect,” it results in part from limited shade trees and the large surface area of pavement and dark roofing materials.

A study by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory researchers, Global cooling: Increasing World-Wide Urban Albedos to Offset CO2, examines the potential benefits of increasing the reflectivity of urban surfaces such as pavement and roofs.

The term "albedo" refers to the ability of a surface to reflect solar radiation. For example, fresh snow reflects 80% to 90% of the sunlight that falls on it, while a dark surface such as asphalt reflects just 4% and absorbs the rest. Light energy that is absorbed is later released in the environment, warming it.

The JOIDES Resolution, a Research Vessel that Ocean Scientists Use to Dig up Sediment from the Sea Floor

An Ominous Warning on the Effects of Ocean Acidification

A new study says the seas are acidifying ten times faster today than 55 million years ago when a mass extinction of marine species occurred. And, the study concludes, current changes in ocean chemistry due to the burning of fossil fuels may portend a new wave of die-offs.

In 2003, on a voyage to the southeastern Atlantic, scientists aboard the JOIDES Resolution brought up a particularly striking haul. They had drilled down into sediment that had formed on the sea floor over the course of millions of years. The oldest sediment in the drill was white. It had been formed by the calcium carbonate shells of single-celled organisms — the same kind of material that makes up the White Cliffs of Dover. But when the scientists examined the sediment that had formed 55 million years ago, the color changed in a geological blink of an eye.

"In the middle of this white sediment, there's this big plug of red clay," says Andy Ridgwell, an earth scientist at the University of Bristol.

In other words, the vast clouds of shelled creatures in the deep oceans had virtually disappeared. Many scientists now agree that this change was caused by a drastic drop of the ocean's pH level. The seawater became so corrosive that it ate away at the shells, along with other species with calcium carbonate in their bodies. It took hundreds of thousands of years for the oceans to recover from this crisis, and for the sea floor to turn from red back to white.

The clay that the crew of the JOIDES Resolution dredged up may be an ominous warning of what the future has in store. By spewing carbon dioxide into the air, we are now once again making the oceans more acidic.

USGS scientists are studying coastal and glacier change along the entire Antarctic coastline. This image identifies the southern portion of
the Antarctic Peninsula, which is one area studied as part of this project.

Disappearing Antarctic Ice Shelves Show Global Warming

More evidence that the world is warming comes from the US Geological Survey. The USGS reports that ice shelves are retreating in the southern section of the Antarctic Peninsula due to climate change. This could result in glacier retreat and sea-level rise if warming continues, threatening coastal communities and low-lying islands worldwide.

This research by the USGS is the first to document that every ice front in the southern part of the Antarctic Peninsula has been retreating overall from 1947 to 2009, with the most dramatic changes occurring since 1990. The USGS previously documented that the majority of ice fronts on the entire Peninsula have also retreated during the late 20th century and into the early 21st century.

The ice shelves are attached to the continent and already floating, holding in place the Antarctic ice sheet that covers about 98 percent of the Antarctic continent. As the ice shelves break off, it is easier for outlet glaciers and ice streams from the ice sheet to flow into the sea. The transition of that ice from land to the ocean is what raises sea level.

"This research is part of a larger ongoing USGS project that is for the first time studying the entire Antarctic coastline in detail, and this is important because the Antarctic ice sheet contains 91 percent of Earth's glacier ice," said USGS scientist Jane Ferrigno. "The loss of ice shelves is evidence of the effects of global warming. We need to be alert and continually understand and observe how our climate system is changing."

The Peninsula is one of Antarctica's most rapidly changing areas because it is farthest away from the South Pole, and its ice shelf loss may be a forecast of changes in other parts of Antarctica and the world if warming continues.

Decadal Temperature Trend, Together with the Annual Temps

A Listing of the Best Scientific Papers on Every Aspect of Climate Change

From Dr. Joseph Romm, editor of Climate Progress and a Senior Fellow at the American Progress: A quick post for those who've come here looking for that "listing of the best scientific papers on every aspect of climate change for anyone who wants a quick summary now" that Thomas Friedman wrote about on February 17th. For now let me update my review of the best papers in the past year.

I'm adding some of the best figures from those papers, too. For those who like their science delivered through videos, may I suggest the panel I hosted earlier this month, Video and PPTs of "The Science of Climate Change" with Dr. Christopher Field and Dr. Michael MacCracken (which is the source of the above figure showing the decadal temperature trend, together with the annual temps).

Click here to read more.

Drought in East Africa - Copyright Corbis

Health and Climate Change

Climate change already affects human health, and, if no action is taken, problems such as malnutrition, deaths and injury due to extreme weather conditions, and change in geographical distribution of disease vectors will worsen. This Series is the result of an international collaboration of scientists supported by a consortium of funding bodies coordinated by the Wellcome Trust, UK. The Comments and Articles make a strong case for linking climate and health goals, and provide a quantitative underpinning for this important health message.

Click here to read more.

The Copenhagen Diagnosis: Climate Science Report

The Copenhagen Diagnosis:
Updating the World on the Latest Climate Science

Climate change accelerating beyond expectations, urgent emissions reductions required, say leading scientists.

Global ice-sheets are melting at an increased rate, Arctic sea-ice is disappearing much faster than recently projected, and future sea-level rise is now expected to be much higher than previously forecast, according to a new global scientific synthesis prepared by some of the world's top climate scientists.

In a special report called The Copenhagen Diagnosis, the 26 researchers, most of whom are authors of published IPCC reports, conclude that several important aspects of climate change are occurring at the high end or even beyond the expectations of only a few years ago.

Among the points summarized in the report:

The ice sheets are both losing mass and thus contributing to sea level rise. This was not certain at the time of the IPCC report.

Arctic sea ice has declined faster than projected by IPCC.

Greenhouse gas concentrations have continued to track the upper bounds of IPCC projections.

Observed global temperature changes remain entirely in accord with IPCC projections, i.e. a human caused warming trend of about 0.2 ºC per decade with superimposed short-term natural variability.

Sea level has risen more than 5 centimeters over the past 15 years, about 80% higher than IPCC projections from 2001.

Perhaps most importantly, the report articulates a much clearer picture of what has to happen if the world wants to keep future warming within the reasonable threshold (2°C) that the European Union and the G8 nations have already agreed to in principle.

Click here to read more.

The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity (TEEB) study

Invest in Nature Now, Avoid Trillions in Later Costs

Investing billions today to protect threatened ecosystems and dwindling biodiversity would avoid trillions in damage over the long haul, according to a UN-backed report issued November 13th.

More than a billion of Earth's poorest denizens depend directly on coral reefs, forests, mangroves, aquifers and other forms of "natural capital" to eke out a living.

Unless world leaders take swift action to halt the accelerating depletion of these resources, the result could be hunger, conflict and environment refugees, the study warned.

Click here to read more.

Wide-spread melt ponds observed by NOAA's North Pole Web cam

Changing Arctic Affecting Air, Ocean, and Everything in Between

Scientists are seeing drastic changes in the Artic from just five years ago and at rates faster than anticipated.

Click here to read more.

A web of satellite tracks, from NASA's Ice, Cloud, and land Elevation Satellite, reveal areas of dynamic thinning (red) in
Antarctica and Greenland.

NASA Ice Satellite Maps Profound Polar Thinning

Researchers have used NASA's Ice, Cloud and Land Elevation Satellite (ICESat) to compose the most comprehensive picture of changing glaciers along the coast of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets.

A web of satellite tracks, from NASA's Ice, Cloud, and land Elevation Satellite, reveal areas of dynamic thinning (red) in Antarctica and Greenland. The new elevation maps show that all latitudes of the Greenland ice sheet are affected by dynamic thinning – the loss of ice due to accelerated ice flow to the ocean. The maps also show surprising, extensive thinning in Antarctica, affecting the ice sheet far inland. The study, led by Hamish Pritchard of the British Antarctic Survey in Cambridge, England, was published September 24 in Nature.

Click here to see more elevation maps and read more about them.

The report praises the web, which it singles out as 'the most powerful force for globalisation, democratisation, economic growth, and education in history'

2009 State of the Future
The planet's future: Climate change 'can cause civilisation to collapse'

Authoritative new study sets out a grim vision of shortages and violence – but amid all the gloom, there is some hope too.

An effort on the scale of the Apollo mission that sent men to the Moon is needed if humanity is to have a fighting chance of surviving the ravages of climate change. The stakes are high, as, without sustainable growth, "billions of people will be condemned to poverty and much of civilisation will collapse".

This is the stark warning from the biggest single report to look at the future of the planet. Backed by a diverse range of leading organisations such as Unesco, the World Bank, the US Army and the Rockefeller Foundation, the 2009 State of the Future report runs to 6,700 pages and draws on contributions from 2,700 experts around the globe. Click here to see a 10 page Executive Summary. The report's findings are described by Ban Ki-moon, Secretary-General of the UN, as providing "invaluable insights into the future for the United Nations, its member states, and civil society".

The impact of the global recession is a key theme, with researchers warning that global clean energy, food availability, poverty and the growth of democracy around the world are at "risk of getting worse due to the recession". The report adds: "Too many greedy and deceitful decisions led to a world recession and demonstrated the international interdependence of economics and ethics."

Although the future has been looking better for most of the world over the past 20 years, the global recession has lowered the State of the Future Index for the next 10 years. Half the world could face violence and unrest due to severe unemployment combined with scarce water, food and energy supplies and the cumulative effects of climate change.

And the authors of the report, produced by the Millennium Project – a think-tank formerly part of the World Federation of the United Nations Associations – set out a number of emerging environmental security issues. "The scope and scale of the future effects of climate change – ranging from changes in weather patterns to loss of livelihoods and disappearing states – has unprecedented implications for political and social stability."

But the authors suggest the threats could also provide the potential for a positive future for all. "The good news is that the global financial crisis and climate change planning may be helping humanity to move from its often selfish, self-centred adolescence to a more globally responsible adulthood... Many perceive the current economic disaster as an opportunity to invest in the next generation of greener technologies, to rethink economic and development assumptions, and to put the world on course for a better future."

Read more of this story. Its closing paragraph:

Jerome Glenn, director of the Millennium Project and one of the report's authors, said: "There are answers to our global challenges, but decisions are still not being made on the scale necessary to address them. Three great transitions would help both the world economy and its natural environment – to shift as much as possible from freshwater agriculture to saltwater agriculture; produce healthier meat without the need to grow animals [see In-vitro meat]; and replace gasoline cars with electric cars."

G8+5 Academies' Joint Statement: Climate change and the transformation of energy technologies for a low carbon future

A May 2009 statement by the National Academies of Science of 13 countries, including the United States, stated that:
"The need for urgent action to address climate change is now indisputable."

Wind could power the entire world

Wind turbines for power generation in Maui

Wind power may be the key to a clean energy revolution: a new study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science finds that wind power could provide for the entire world's current and future energy needs.

To estimate the earth's capacity for wind power, the researchers first sectioned the globe into areas of approximately 3,300 square kilometers (1,274 square miles) and surveyed local wind speeds every six hours. They imagined 2.5 megawatt turbines crisscrossing the terrestrial globe, excluding "areas classified as forested, areas occupied by permanent snow or ice, areas covered by water, and areas identified as either developed or urban," according to the paper. They also included the possibility of 3.6 megawatt offshore wind turbines, but restricted them to 50 nautical miles off the coast and to oceans depths less than 200 meters.

Using these criteria the researchers found that wind energy could not only supply all of the world's energy requirements, but it could provide over forty times the world's current electrical consumption and over five times the global use of total energy needs.

Revised MIT climate model sounds alarm

New analysis shows warming could be double previous estimates

The most comprehensive modeling yet carried out on the likelihood of how much hotter the Earth's climate will get in this century shows that without rapid and massive action, the problem will be about twice as severe as previously estimated six years ago — and could be even worse than that.

The new projections, published this month in the American Meteorological Society's Journal of Climate, indicate a median probability of surface warming of 5.2 degrees Celsius by 2100, with a 90 percent probability range of 3.5 to 7.4 degrees. This can be compared to a median projected increase in the 2003 study of just 2.4 degrees. The difference is caused by several factors rather than any single big change. Among these are improved economic modeling and newer economic data showing less chance of low emissions than had been projected in the earlier scenarios. Other changes include accounting for the past masking of underlying warming by the cooling induced by 20th century volcanoes, and for emissions of soot, which can add to the warming effect. In addition, measurements of deep ocean temperature rises, which enable estimates of how fast heat and carbon dioxide are removed from the atmosphere and transferred to the ocean depths, imply lower transfer rates than previously estimated.

Wind power is the most promising alternative source of energy

Wind power is the most promising alternative source of energy, according to Stanford Professor Mark Jacobson. Jacobson has conducted the first quantitative, scientific evaluation of the proposed, major, energy-related solutions by assessing not only their potential for delivering energy for electricity and vehicles, but also their impacts on global warming, human health, energy security, water supply, space requirements, wildlife, water pollution, reliability and sustainability. His findings indicate that the options that are getting the most attention are between 25 to 1,000 times more polluting than the best available options.

Target Atmospheric CO2: Where Should Humanity Aim?

Humanity must find a path to reduced atmospheric carbon dioxide, to less than the amount in the air today, if climate disasters are to be averted, according to a study recently published in Open Atmospheric Science Journal by a group of ten scientists from the United States, the United Kingdom and France. They argue that such a path is feasible, but requires a prompt moratorium on new coal use that does not capture CO2 and phase-out of existing coal emissions by 2030.

"There is a bright side to this conclusion" according to the Goddard Institute for Space Studies' James Hansen, lead author on the study, "by following a path that leads to a lower CO2 amount we can alleviate a number of problems that had begun to seem inevitable, such as increased storm intensities, expanded desertification, loss of coral reefs, and loss of mountain glaciers that supply fresh water to hundreds of millions of people."

Videos

Climate Science Isn't New — Just New to the Public

This old film clip is mostly worth checking out because it’s a lot of fun, but also notice how startlingly modern the science is. Climate research has come a long way way in the last few decades, but the basic mechanism of climate change is fairly simple and has been understood in broad outline for more than half a century.

Andy Revkin highlights an educational video — The Unchained Goddess — produced by Frank Capra in 1958 and featuring voice work by Mel Blanc:

Concord Rally at North Bridge

On October 24th hundreds of environmental activists gathered at the landmark Old North Bridge in Concord for a regional energy-revolution rally. This rally was meant to send a message to world leaders meeting in Copenhagen to craft a new international treaty for cutting carbon dioxide emissions. Click here to see pictures from the Concord rally.

The rally in Concord was one of 5,248 rallies in 181 Countries, a part of International Climate Action Day, masterminded by environmentalist/author Bill McKibben's 350.org group. The group's goal was to hammer home the importance of the number 350 - as in 350 parts per million, the amount of carbon dioxide most scientists say can be in the atmosphere and still allow for a stable climate for future generations.

Watch Ross Gelbspan’s Video on Climate Change and the Fossil-Fuel Disinformation Campaign

Investigative journalist Ross Gelbspan has a new video out. As the pace of global warming kicks into overdrive, the hollow optimism of climate activists, along with the desperate responses of some of the world's most prominent climate scientists, is preventing us from focusing on the survival requirements of the human enterprise. Our survival will depend increasingly on our willingness to come together as a global community. Click here to read his text.

This video takes some time to load. You know it is loading when the Play button on the lower left changes to Pause.

The Story of Cap and Trade

Annie Leonard, creator of The Story of Stuff, a popular web video that argues against consumerism, released a new video on cap and trade. Like her earlier effort, The Story of Cap-and-Trade features engaging narration and cute, easy-to-understand comic sketches to explain an extremely complex issue. Watch video here.

The problem? Leonard vastly oversimplifies cap and trade and its problems. The video blames the current difficulties surrounding cap and trade entirely on the policy itself, not the lawmakers and special interest groups seeking to load the legislation with exceptions and giveaways. The problems she highlights would dog any proposal to address climate change in the US. If Congress suddenly adopted a carbon tax, the coal, oil, and gas lobbies, aided by their favorite senators, would carve out gaping loopholes for their industries. The policy isn't the real villain here—it's the politics.

— By Kate Sheppard, Mother Jones

More by her here. Both points are worth looking at. Annie's is more fun.

Entergy CEO: We're Cheating Our Children Out of Their Future

Participants in a Clean Energy Economy Forum at the White House on 10/7/09 included J. Wayne Leonard, the Chairman and CEO of Entergy Corporation, the utility giant based in New Orleans. Speaking at the White House event, Leonard called for action on climate change and clean energy not just for economic reasons but starkly moral ones:

We are virtually certain that climate change is occurring, and occurring because of man's activities. We're virtually certain the probability distribution curve is all bad. There's no good things that's going to come of this. But what's uncertain is exactly which one of those things are going to occur and in what time frame. In the probability distribution curve is about a 50% probability that about half of all species will become extinct or be subject to extinction over this period of time. What we will never know on an ex ante basis is whether or not man be one of those casualties or not.

We condemn Wall Street for taking risks with our economy — risks that all of you are trying very hard to reverse — but at the same time we're taking exactly the same kind of risks, with no upside whatsoever, with regard to our climate, failing to practice even the basic risk management techniques in terms of climate change reduction.

Click here to watch J. Wayne Leonard at the White House Clean Energy Economy Forum.

Clean Power: Building a New Clean Energy Economy, April 13, 2009

Proposed federal rules aimed at promoting clean energy, combating climate change and creating new "green-collar" jobs was the focus of a policy forum on April 13 at MIT featuring several of the key Washington players who are working to get them approved.

The event, "Clean Power: Building a New Clean Energy Economy," features remarks by U.S. Rep. Edward Markey of Massachusetts, chair of the Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming and the Energy and Environment Subcommittee of the Energy and Commerce Committee; Carol Browner, the former Environmental Protection Agency administrator who is now President Barack Obama's assistant for energy and climate change; and John Holdren '65, director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy.

This video shows the entire forum. Each speaker's talk lasts about 15 minutes and is followed by a question & answer session.

The Story of Stuff

The 20-minute documentary presents a critical vision of the consumerist society. It "exposes the connections between a huge number of environmental and social issues, and calls us together to create a more sustainable and just world."

Some of its assertions are:

"... more than 50% of our federal tax money is now going to the military, ..."
"Of the 100 largest economies on earth now, 51 are corporations."
"We have 5% of the world's population but we're consuming 30% of the world's resources and creating 30% of the world's waste."
"80% of the planet's original forests are gone."
"In the Amazon alone, we're losing 2000 trees a minute."
"Each of us in the U.S. is targeted with more than 3,000 advertisements a day."
"Each of us in the United States makes 4 1/2 pounds of garbage a day."
"Dioxin is the most toxic man made substance known to science. And incinerators are the number one source of dioxin."

It also quotes what Victor Lebow said in 1955:

"Our enormously productive economy... demands that we make consumption our way of life, that we convert the buying and use of goods into rituals, that we seek our spiritual satisfaction, our ego satisfaction, in consumption... we need things consumed, burned up, replaced and discarded at an ever-accelerating rate."

Wake Up, Freak Out – then Get a Grip

It's much, much later than you think.

This really isn't about polar bears any more. At this very moment, the fate of civilization itself hangs in the balance.

It turns out that the way we have been calculating the future impacts of climate change up to now has been missing a really important piece of the picture. It seems we are now dangerously close to the tipping point in the world's climate system; this is the point of no return, after which truly catastrophic changes become inevitable.

Wake Up, Freak Out – then Get a Grip is a 12½ minute, animated film about climate change by Leo Murray.

Media

The American Power Act Cuts Pollution and Helps American Families

Why do we need comprehensive clean energy legislation? What types of measures are included in the draft American Power Act? How will these provisions help American families?

President Obama has released a statement on the Kerry-Lieberman American Power Act. So have a number of veterans and retired military experts.

Paul Krugman: Building a Green Economy

Smog in Shenyang in northeast China’s Liaoning Province

If you listen to climate scientists - and despite the relentless campaign to discredit their work, you should - it is long past time to do something about emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases. If we continue with business as usual, they say, we are facing a rise in global temperatures that will be little short of apocalyptic. And to avoid that apocalypse, we have to wean our economy from the use of fossil fuels, coal above all.

But is it possible to make drastic cuts in greenhouse-gas emissions without destroying our economy?

The Nation: The Case for EPA Action

A dangerous assault on the EPA is gathering momentum

On April 1 the Environmental Protection Agency established rules restricting greenhouse gas emissions from cars and trucks, starting in 2012.

This is the first of what could become a sweeping series of regulations stemming from the agency's conclusion that greenhouse gases harm human health. If the EPA were to act robustly, it could achieve significant and immediate greenhouse gas emissions reductions using nothing more than existing laws and current technology. Doing so would signal to a waiting world that America is serious about addressing climate change.

But a dangerous assault on the agency is gathering momentum in Congress, corporate boardrooms, the media and the courts. The swarm of counterattacks all seek to strip the EPA of its power to regulate greenhouse gas emissions from stationary sources like coal-fired power plants. Some legislative proposals would even undo the EPA's finding that greenhouse gases are hazardous, taking the EPA out of the climate fight altogether.

Wonkish at first glance, the fight over EPA rulemaking may be the most important environmental battle in a generation. The UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says rich countries like the United States must cut emissions 25 to 40 percent below 1990 levels by 2020—only ten years away—and thereafter make precipitous cuts to almost zero emissions. If we don't act now, average global temperatures will likely increase by more than 2 degrees Celsius and trigger self-compounding runaway climate change, resulting in a massive rise in sea levels, devastated agriculture and attendant social chaos. Not one of the climate change bills up for discussion meets this threshold, and it is looking increasingly unlikely that Congress will be able to pass any comprehensive climate change legislation this session. The failures of Congress and the harrowing facts of climate science mean that aggressive and immediate EPA action is essential.

White House Finalizes Historic Vehicle Standards to Save Oil, Cut Pollution, and Create Jobs

On April 1 he White House finalized new clean car rules from the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and Department of Transportation, securing the largest boost in fuel economy in decades and, for the first time, using the Clean Air Act to require reductions in the amount of heat-trapping emissions from cars and light trucks.

"To paraphrase the vice president, this is a really big deal," said Jim Kliesch, a senior engineer in the Union of Concerned Scientists’ Clean Vehicles Program. "Because of these standards, Americans will drive vehicles that save them money at the pump, cut the country’s oil dependence, and produce a lot less global warming pollution."

The joint rule will boost the average fleetwide fuel economy of new vehicles sold in the United States to 34.1 miles per gallon by model year 2016. The standards also set national global warming pollution standards for vehicles at 250 grams per mile, roughly 25 percent less than the emissions produced by today's average new vehicle.

According to a Union of Concerned Scientists analysis, the new rule will:

Reduce U.S. oil consumption by 1.2 million barrels per day by h2020 more petroleum than the United States presently imports from Saudi Arabia and Kuwait combined;
Cut global warming emissions by 209 million metric tons in 2020, the equivalent of taking nearly 31 million of today's cars and light trucks off the road that year;
Save drivers $34 billion in 2020 even after they pay the cost of vehicle technology improvements. (This is based on $2.75 per gallon. If gas prices spike to $4 a gallon again, the new standards would save drivers $58 billion in 2020.)
Create up to 20,000 new jobs in the auto industry and up to 200,000 nationwide by 2020.

Energy Autonomy – Watch Out for the 4th Revolution!

Al Gore raised some alarming questions about climate change in his Oscar-winning 2006 film "An Inconvenient Truth" that a German filmmaker has now tried to provide some answers for in a new documentary.

Carl Fechner's "The Fourth Revolution - Energy Autonomy" is an attempt to show how the world could be getting all its energy from renewable sources in 30 years — and help slow the climate change that Gore warned about in his blockbuster film.

An unabashedly provocative look at renewable energy in countries from the United States, Germany, Denmark, China, Mali and Bangladesh, Fechner's new film has attracted rave reviews and fierce criticism in Germany since it opened last week.

More info here.

Picture credit: energyautonomy

Bottled Wind Could Be as Constant as Coal

Wind power has made incredible inroads into the U.S. energy system thanks to big, efficient machines standing hundreds of feet tall. But the future of wind power may be underground.

In the abandoned mines and sandstones of the Midwest, compressed-air storage ventures are trying to convert the intermittent motions of the air into the kind of steady power that could displace coal.

Compressed-air energy storage plants use compressors to store electricity generated when it’s not needed. The air, pumped into large underground formations, is like a spring that’s been squeezed, and when it’s needed, it can deliver a large percentage of the energy that it received.

The first and only such plant in the United States went online in 1991, and though the technology didn’t take off, it did prove that it worked. And now, combining cheap wind energy and compressed-air storage could create a potent new force in the electricity markets.

Science Stunner: Vast East Siberian Arctic Shelf Methane Stores Destabilizing and Venting

Methane is leaking from the East Siberian Arctic Shelf into the atmosphere at an alarming rate.

NSF issues world a wake-up call: "Release of even a fraction of the methane stored in the shelf could trigger abrupt climate warming."

Methane release from the not-so-perma-frost is the most dangerous amplifying feedback in the entire carbon cycle. Research published in Friday’s journal Science finds a key "lid" on "the large sub-sea permafrost carbon reservoir" near Eastern Siberia "is clearly perforated, and sedimentary CH4 [methane] is escaping to the atmosphere."

Scientists learned last year that the permafrost permamelt contains a staggering "1.5 trillion tons of frozen carbon, about twice as much carbon as contained in the atmosphere," much of which would be released as methane. Methane is is 25 times as potent a heat-trapping gas as CO2 over a 100 year time horizon, but 72 times as potent over 20 years!

The carbon is locked in a freezer in the part of the planet warming up the fastest. Half the land-based permafrost would vanish by mid-century on our current emissions path. No climate model currently incorporates the amplifying feedback from methane released by a defrosting tundra.

The new Science study, led by University of Alaska’s International Arctic Research Centre and the Russian Academy of Sciences, is "Extensive Methane Venting to the Atmosphere from Sediments of the East Siberian Arctic Shelf" (subs. req’d). The must-read National Science Foundation press release (click here), warns "Release of even a fraction of the methane stored in the shelf could trigger abrupt climate warming." The NSF is normally a very staid organization. If they are worried, everybody should be.

It is increasingly clear that if the world strays significantly above 450 ppm atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide for any length of time, we will find it unimaginably difficult to stop short of 800 to 1000 ppm.

Click here to read more about the study and see a video of the lead author.

Comment on the Study: Arctic Methane on the Move?

Methane is like the radical wing of the carbon cycle, in today’s atmosphere a stronger greenhouse gas per molecule than CO2, and an atmospheric concentration that can change more quickly than CO2 can. There has been a lot of press coverage of a new paper in Science this week called “Extensive methane venting to the atmosphere from sediments of the East Siberian Arctic Shelf”, which comes on the heels of a handful of interrelated methane papers in the last year or so. Is now the time to get frightened?

No. CO2 is plenty to be frightened of, while methane is frosting on the cake. Imagine you are in a Toyota on the highway at 60 miles per hour approaching stopped traffic, and you find that the brake pedal is broken. This is CO2. Then you figure out that the accelerator has also jammed, so that by the time you hit the truck in front of you, you will be going 90 miles per hour instead of 60. This is methane. Is now the time to get worried? No, you should already have been worried by the broken brake pedal. Methane sells newspapers, but it’s not the big story, nor does it look to be a game changer to the big story, which is CO2.

Click here to read more about this comment on the study.

The Nation: The Wrong Kind of Green

Why did America's leading environmental groups jet to Copenhagen and lobby for policies that will lead to the faster death of the rainforests—and runaway global warming? Why are their lobbyists on Capitol Hill dismissing the only real solutions to climate change as "unworkable" and "unrealistic," as though they were just another sooty tentacle of Big Coal?

At first glance, these questions will seem bizarre. Groups like Conservation International are among the most trusted "brands" in America, pledged to protect and defend nature. Yet as we confront the biggest ecological crisis in human history, many of the green organizations meant to be leading the fight are busy shoveling up hard cash from the world's worst polluters—and burying science-based environmentalism in return. Sometimes the corruption is subtle; sometimes it is blatant. In the middle of a swirl of bogus climate scandals trumped up by deniers, here is the real Climategate, waiting to be exposed.

Boston Globe Op-Ed by Kerry Emanuel: Climate Changes Are Proven Fact

What We Know About Climate Change, by Kerry Emanuel, MIT Press

Outside scientific forums, contemporary discussions of the phenomenon of global warming are now so heated that one wonders whether they are contributing to the phenomenon itself.

With all the interest in alleged misdeeds of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and hacked email exchanges among climate scientists, it is easy to lose track of the compelling strands of scientific evidence that have led almost all climate scientists to conclude that mankind is altering climate in potentially dangerous ways. Recent suggestions by gubernatorial candidate Charles Baker that the scientific community is split on this issue have unfortunately added fuel to this largely manufactured debate.

A few essential points are undisputed among climate scientists. First, the surface temperature of the Earth is roughly 60 F higher than it would otherwise be thanks to a few greenhouse gasses that collectively make up only about 3 percent of the mass of our atmosphere.

Second, the concentrations of the two most important long-lived greenhouse gases, carbon dioxide and methane, have been increasing since the dawn of the industrial era; carbon dioxide alone has increased by about 40 percent. These increases have been brought about by fossil fuel combustion and changes in land use.

Third, in the absence of any feedbacks except for temperature itself, doubling carbon dioxide would increase the global average surface temperature by about 1.8 F. And fourth, global temperatures have been rising for roughly the past century and have so far increased by about 1.4 F. The rate of rise of surface temperature is consistent with predictions of human-caused global warming that date back to the 19th century and is larger than any natural change we have been able to discern for at least the past 1,000 years.

Click here to read more.

At a $13 million plant, Perdue turns tons of chicken manure into fertilizer

Manure Becomes Pollutant as Its Volume Grows Unmanageable

Nearly 40 years after the first Earth Day, this is irony: The United States has reduced the manmade pollutants that left its waterways dead, discolored, and occasionally flammable.

But now, it has managed to smother the same waters with the most natural stuff in the world. Animal manure, a byproduct as old as agriculture, has become an unlikely modern pollution problem, scientists and environmentalists say. The country simply has more dung than it can handle: Crowded together at a new breed of megafarms, livestock produce three times as much waste as people, more than can be recycled as fertilizer for nearby fields.

That excess manure gives off air pollutants, and it is the country's fastest-growing large source of methane, a greenhouse gas.

As the World Burns
How Big Oil and Big Coal Mounted One of the Most Aggressive Lobbying Campaigns in History to Block Progress on Global Warming

This was supposed to be the transformative moment on global warming, the tipping point when America proved to the world that capitalism has a conscience, that we take the fate of the planet seriously. According to the script, Congress would pass a landmark bill committing the U.S. to deep cuts in carbon emissions. President Obama would then arrive in Copenhagen for the international climate summit, armed with the moral and political capital he needed to challenge the rest of the world to do the same. After all, wasn't this the kind of bold move the Norwegians were anticipating when they awarded Obama the Nobel Peace Prize?

As we now know, it didn't work out that way. Obama arrived in Copenhagen last month without any legislation committing the U.S. to reduce carbon pollution. Instead of reaching agreement on how to stop cooking the planet, the summit devolved into bickering over who bears the most blame for turning up the heat. The world once again missed an opportunity to avert disaster — and the delay is likely to have deadly consequences. In recent years, we have moved from talking about the possibility of climate change to watching it unfold before our eyes. The Arctic is melting, wildfires are turning into infernos, warm-weather insects are devouring forests, droughts are getting longer and more lethal. And the more we learn about climate change, the more it becomes apparent how enormous the risks are. Just a few years ago, researchers estimated that sea levels would likely rise 17 inches by 2100. Now they believe it could be three feet or more — a cataclysmic shift that would doom many of the world's cities, including London and New Orleans, and create tens of millions of climate refugees.

Wal-Mart will ask suppliers to rethink how they package and transport products like bread.

Wal-Mart Vows Major Cuts in Carbon Emissions by 2015

Wal-Mart officials have vowed to cut the company’s greenhouse gas emissions by 20 million metric tons by 2015, a sweeping strategy by the retail giant to reduce the carbon footprint of its network of suppliers and stores. Company leaders say the cuts will more than offset the expected growth of its carbon emissions globally, and represent the equivalent of taking 3.8 million cars off the road. Initially the company will target the suppliers and producers that emit the highest levels of carbon dioxide. Matt Kistler, senior vice president of sustainability, said initiatives will include cutting the CO2 emissions within the company’s massive transportation operation and reducing waste for fresh foods. Last year, the company introduced a sustainability index of its products, rating them on a range of factors, including their carbon footprint and the amount of water used in production. Five years ago, the company introduced a strategy to produce zero waste, sell greener products, and switch to renewable sources of energy.

Geothermal Energy
Earth's Own Heat Could Provide Vast Amounts of Clean Electricity

Grants recently awarded to MIT researchers by the U.S. Department of Energy (DoE) could help to pave the way for a method of generating electricity that produces no greenhouse gas emissions, and that could become a major contributor to meeting the world's energy needs.

Most energy analysts agree that geothermal energy tapping the heat of bedrock deep underground to generate electricity has enormous potential because it is available all the time, almost anywhere on Earth, and there is enough of it available, in theory, to supply all of the world's energy needs for many centuries. But there are still some unanswered questions about it that require further research. DoE last year awarded $336 million in grants to help resolve the remaining uncertainties, and three of those grants, totaling more than $2 million, went to MIT researchers.

Click here to read more.

NITTY-GRITTY OF EMISSIONS: The International Energy Agency figures that a major investment in new electricity generation from renewable resources,
particularly wind power, is part of how nations could collectively achieve an atmospheric concentration of greenhouse gas of no more than 450 ppm

IEA: Energy Revolution Required to Combat Climate Change
The International Energy Agency has analyzed exactly what it would take to limit greenhouse gases in the atmosphere

Revolutionizing the energy industry to achieve a target concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere of no more than 450 parts per million (ppm) would require building 17 nuclear power plants a year between now and 2030; 17,000 wind turbines a year; or two hydropower dams on the scale of Three Gorges Dam in China, according to the International Energy Agency. Such an effort would require an investment of $10.5 trillion during the next 20 years but would ultimately yield savings of $8.6 trillion, the IEA estimated.

Click here to read more.

On Issues Like Global Warming and Evolution, Scientists Need to Speak Up

The battle over the science of global warming has long been a street fight between mainstream researchers and skeptics. But never have the scientists received such a deep wound as when, in late November, a large trove of e-mails and documents stolen from the Climatic Research Unit at Britain's University of East Anglia were released onto the Web.

In the ensuing "Climategate" scandal, scientists were accused of withholding information, suppressing dissent, manipulating data and more. But while the controversy has receded, it may have done lasting damage to science's reputation: Last month, a Washington Post-ABC News poll found that 40 percent of Americans distrust what scientists say about the environment, a considerable increase from April 2007. Meanwhile, public belief in the science of global warming is in decline.

The central lesson of Climategate is not that climate science is corrupt. The leaked e-mails do nothing to disprove the scientific consensus on global warming. Instead, the controversy highlights that in a world of blogs, cable news and talk radio, scientists are poorly equipped to communicate their knowledge and, especially, to respond when science comes under attack.

Click here to read more.

New Study: Global Temperatures Could Rise More

Global temperatures could rise substantially more because of increases in carbon dioxide in the atmosphere than previously thought, according to a new study by US and Chinese scientists released January 20.

The researchers used a long-term model for assessing climate change, confirming a similar British study released this month that said calculations for man-made global warming may be underestimated by between 30 and 50 percent.

Using sediment drilled from the ocean floor, the scientists' reconstruction of carbon dioxide concentrations found that "a relatively small rise in CO2 levels was associated with substantial global warming 4.5 million years ago."

They also found that the global temperature was between two and three degrees Celsius (3.6 and 5.4 degrees Fahrenheit) higher than today even though carbon dioxide levels were similar to the current ones.

Click here to read more.

WashPost-ABC Poll Finds Strong Support for Global Warming Reductions Despite Relentless Big Oil and Anti-Science Attacks

The Washington Post-ABC News Poll published 12/18/2009 demonstrates yet again that the American people want action to "regulate the release of greenhouse gases from sources like power plants, cars and factories in an effort to reduce global warming." Respondents supported this statement by more than two to one (65 percent favor, 29 percent oppose). This poll was conducted December 10-13, at the height of the trumped up brouhaha over stolen emails from a British climate research institution. These findings are consistent with the Associated Press-Stanford University poll released on Tuesday.

The WP-ABC poll found that three of five Americans would support reductions in greenhouse gas pollution even it "raised your monthly expenses by 10 dollars a month." And 55 percent would still support reductions if it "raised your monthly energy expenses by 25 dollars a month."

Click here to read more.

Addressing Global Warming: 7 Ways New Legislation Gets it Right

Bipartisan legislation introduced last week by Senators Maria Cantwell (WA) and Susan Collins (ME) addresses many of the problems with the cap-and-trade approach that has dominated the climate change debate in Congress. Find out more about the Carbon Limits and Energy for America's Renewal (CLEAR) Act and the seven ways that this bill gets it right in addressing the U.S. contribution to global warming here.

Don't Let the Climate Doubters Fool You
Alan I. Leshner, CEO of the American Association for the Advancement of Science

Don't be fooled about climate science. In April, 1994 — long after scientists had clearly demonstrated the addictive quality and devastating health impacts of cigarette smoking — seven chief executives of major tobacco companies denied the evidence, swearing under oath that nicotine was not addictive.

Now, the American public is again being subjected to those kinds of denials, this time about global climate change. While former Alaska governor Sarah Palin wrote in her Dec. 9 op-ed that she did not deny the "reality of some changes in climate," she distorted the clear scientific evidence that Earth's climate is changing, largely as a result of human behaviors. She also badly confused the concepts of daily weather changes and long-term climate trends when she wrote that "while we recognize the occurrence of these natural, cyclical environmental trends, we can't say with assurance that man's activities cause weather changes." Her statement inaccurately suggests that short-term weather fluctuations must be consistent with long-term climate patterns. And it is the long-term patterns that are a cause for concern.

Click here to read more.

Bill McKibben, Why Copenhagen May Be a Disaster

Let me be blunt about what amazes me when it comes to global warming. In the U.S., it's largely an issue for Democrats, "progressives," liberals, the left, and I simply don't get that. Never have. If the word "conservative" means anything, the key to it must be that word at its heart, "conserve"; that is, the keeping or not squandering of what already is, especially what's most valuable.

Don't think for a minute that global warming will destroy planet Earth. It's already made it through worse moments than ours, and worse climate conditions than industrial civilization has to offer. Planet Earth has no sense of time. Give it 10 million, 20 million, 100 million years, and it will reconstitute itself in some fashion and spin on, life included, until our sun gives out. But the way things are going, we may not do so well.

Click here to read more.

EPA Finds Carbon Pollution a Serious Danger Requiring Regulation

The Environmental Protection Agency on December 7 issued a final ruling that greenhouse gases posed a danger to human health and the environment, paving the way for regulation of carbon dioxide emissions.

"This is very significant in the sense that if ... the Senate fails to adopt legislation (on emissions), then the administration will have the authority to regulate," Yvo de Boer, head of the U.N. Climate Change Secretariat, told Reuters in Copenhagen.

Click here to read more.

An Affordable Truth

Nobelist Krugman on Copenhagen: "A deal there would save the planet at a price we can easily afford — and it would actually help us in our current economic predicament." Read more here.

For scientific background see Joseph Romm's comments on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) definitive 2007 synthesis report of the scientific literature. You can read his comments at Introduction to climate economics: Why even strong climate action has such a low total cost — one tenth of a penny on the dollar.

Audio of Press Call on "Climate Science: Setting the Record Straight"

Memo to Climate Science community: When illegal email hackers give you lemons, make some lemonade.

In a Physics World article, "Publicize or perish," I pointed out "The scientific community is failing miserably in communicating the potential catastrophe of climate change." Of course, that isn't entirely the scientific community's fault. The media — especially senior editors who decide what stories to pursue — tend to take the view that they covered climate science back in 2007 with the IPCC report, so it's been hard to get the media interested in another story on climate science. Well, now they are very interested.

For that reason, I helped organize a press call today for with three leading climate scientists:

Professor Michael Mann, Director of the Penn State's Earth Systems Science Center, author of more than 120 studies in professional journals and a new book, Dire Predictions.
Dr. Gavin Schmidt, climate modeler at NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies. He is the author of more than 60 studies, and author of Climate change: Picturing the Science.
Professor Michael Oppenheimer, Director of the Program in Science, Technology and Environmental Policy at Princeton. He has authored more than 100 articles.

You can see excerpts and listen to the full audio here.

— Dr. Joseph Romm is the editor of Climate Progress and a Senior Fellow at the American Progress.

TIME Magazine Says "Climate McCarthyism Must Stop"

Climategate and Climate McCarthyism are both symptomatic of efforts to narrow the public debate. Now that such heavy-handed efforts have narrowed the scientific debate and may have seriously damaged the credibility of climate science, prominent climate scientists and others are beginning to speak out against the politicization of climate science and Climate McCarthyism.

Click here to read more.

The Carbon Bathtub

Here's a visual representation from National Geographic of a bathtub metaphor: "It's simple, really: As long as we pour CO² into the atmosphere faster than nature drains it out, the planet warms. And that extra carbon takes a long time to drain out of the tub." In this metaphor, 350ppm is where the water level ought to be - a delicate balance between what we are putting into the atmosphere, and what the Earth can absorb each year. Right now, the tap is open way too far. Click on the image to see it full size.

Release of the World Energy Outlook 2009 (WEO) at a press conference in London on Tuesday 10 November.

Fossil Fuel Use Must Peak by 2020, Warns IEA

The International Energy Agency warned on 11/10/09 that the world's use of fossil fuels will have to peak by 2020 if it is to escape a dangerous spike in global temperatures.

Fatih Birol, the IEA's chief economist, said at the launch of the agency's annual flagship World Energy Outlook: "This would be a revolution. This revolution could only take place if there is a financial signal to the energy industry." He added: "We need a deal in Copenhagen. We need a signal for the energy industry. Without that, nothing will move."

Click here to read more.

Climate Change: Four Degrees of Devastation

"Two degrees C is already gone as a target," said Chris West of the University of Oxford's UK Climate Impacts Programme.

"Four degrees C is definitely possible...This is the biggest challenge in our history," West told participants at the "4 Degrees and Beyond, International Climate Science Conference" at the University of Oxford on September 28.

A four-degree C overall increase means a world where temperatures will be two degrees warmer in some places, 12 degrees and more in others, making them uninhabitable.

It is a world with a one- to two-metre sea level rise by 2100, leaving hundreds of millions homeless. This will head to 12 metres in the coming centuries as the Greenland and Western Antarctic ice sheets melt, according to papers presented at the conference in Oxford.

Four degrees of warming would be hotter than any time in the last 30 million years, and it could happen as soon as 2060 to 2070.

"Political reality must be grounded in physical reality or it's completely useless," John Schellnhuber, director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, told the conference.

Schellnhuber recently briefed U.S. officials from the Barack Obama administration, but he says they chided him that his findings were "not grounded in political reality" and that "the Senate will never agree to this".

He had told them that the U.S. must reduce its emissions from its current 20 tonnes of carbon per person average to zero tonnes per person by 2020 to have an even chance of stabilising the climate around two degrees C.

Click here to read more.

The International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge, Science, and Technology for Development (IAASTD)
has taken a realistic look at the problem of feeding the world

Room for Debate: Can Biotech Food Cure World Hunger?

With food prices remaining high in developing countries, the United Nations estimates that the number of hungry people around the world could increase by 100 million in 2009 and pass the one billion mark. A summit of world leaders in Rome scheduled for November will set an agenda for ways to reduce hunger and increase investment in agriculture development in poor countries.

What factors will make a difference in future food production?

Click here to read more.

Father Rodney Torbic, the priest at the St. George Serbian Orthodox Church, lives across the road from Hatfield's Ferry and sees people suffering.

Cleansing the Air at the Expense of Waterways

Coal plants are moving to scrub pollutants from their smokestacks, but the contaminants are increasingly finding their way into water instead.

Click here to read more.

Yes We Can (Pass Climate Change Legislation)

Efforts to pass a comprehensive energy and global warming bill got a big boost over the weekend when Sens. John Kerry (D-Mass.) and Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) defined a broad bipartisan agreement on legislation that they think can pass the Senate.

The two senators had signaled to reporters last week that they were working toward consensus on one of the signature items of the Obama administration's domestic agenda. And they took it a step further with a joint op-ed published October 10th in The New York Times that highlighted their military service and the link between the economy, national security and climate change and energy.

"The odds of a Senate climate bill just jumped through the roof," Joe Romm, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, wrote Oct. 11th on his blog, Climate Progress. "Now the Senate needs to get off its butt and get this done."

This commentary is from E&E Publishing.

Turbines rise above the former Bethlehem Steel Mill in Lackawanna, N.Y. The federal government hopes to convert more abandoned industrial sites such as this to industrial-scale solar and wind facilities. Photo courtesy First Wind.

Green Shoots Rise from Brownfields

The Daily Climate reports that President Obama and Congress are pushing to identify thousands of contaminated landfills and abandoned mines — 'brownfields' that could be repurposed to house wind farms, solar arrays, and geothermal power plants. Using already disturbed lands would help avoid conflicts between renewable energy developers and environmental groups concerned about impacts to wildlife habitat. 'In the next decade there's going to be a lot of renewable energy built, and all that has to go somewhere,' said Jessica Goad, an energy and climate change policy fellow for The Wilderness Society. 'We don't want to see these industrial facilities placed on land that's pristine. We love the idea of brownfields for renewable energy development because it relieves the (development) pressure on undisturbed places. The Environmental Protection Agency and the National Renewable Energy Laboratory have identified nearly 4,100 contaminated sites deemed economically suitable for wind and solar power development, as well as biomass. Included are 5 million acres suitable for photovoltaic or concentrated solar power development, and 500,000 acres for wind power. These sites, if fully developed, have the potential to produce 950,000 megawatts — more than the country's total power needs in 2007, according to EPA data.

New Report Details Costs of Cutting Greenhouse Gas Emissions

With enough technological advances, the world could get to a dramatically lower level of greenhouse gas emissions at a cost of between one and three percent of global GDP per year, according to a report issued Tuesday by a group of economists. That price tag is in line with previous economic estimates aimed at meeting more modest climate goals.

Click here to read more.

Blog Action Day is an annual event that unites the world's bloggers in posting about the same issue on the same day on their own blogs with the aim of sparking discussion around an issue of global importance. This year Change.org, a blog network for social issues, has taken over responsibility for Blog Action Day.

"Given the urgency of the issue of climate change and the upcoming international climate negotiations in Copenhagen this December, we think the blogosphere has the unique opportunity to mobilize millions of people around expressing support for finding a sustainable solution to the climate crisis."

Click on blogactionday.org to see the website.

Financial Times: Scientists Find Fresh Warming Signs

While the politicians talk, scientists continue to discover disturbing evidence of climate change. Two important studies appear on 9/24 in the journal Nature.

One shows long-term changes in El Niño, the periodic warming of the tropical Pacific ocean that affects weather worldwide.

The other study uses laser beams from satellites to show unexpectedly rapid thinning of glaciers in Antarctica and Greenland.

Click here to read more.

Google Earth Climate Change 3D Map Unveiled

Google is using its Google Earth mapping tool to simulate on a 3D map of the world the predicted effects of climate change until the year 2100.

Sydney Morning Herald: Google Earth Climate Change

nature: Energy in the Twenty-First Century

The need for abundant energy sources that do not rely on fossil fuels is one of the great technological challenges of the twenty-first century — fundamental to further economic development and some measure of climate stability. This collection of feature articles from Nature looks at the technologies and science base needed to meet the challenge of clean energy on a global scale, taking in everything from artificial photosynthesis to hybrid cars, and from nuclear power to biofuel shrubs.

Read the collection free online.

Study links humans to warming in the Arctic

Human-generated greenhouse gas emissions have helped reverse a 2,000-year trend of cooling in the Arctic, prompting warmer average temperatures in the past decade that now rank higher than at any time since 1 B.C., according to a study published September 3rd in the online version of the journal Science.

The analysis provides one of the broadest pictures to date of how industrial emissions have shifted the Arctic's longstanding climate patterns. Coupled with a separate report on the region issued Wednesday by the World Wildlife Fund, it suggests human-induced changes could transform not only the Arctic but climate conditions across the globe.

"It's basically saying the greenhouse gas emissions are overwhelming the system," said David Schneider, one of the article's coauthors.

The study involved 30 researchers from the United States, Britain, Denmark, Norway, Canada, and Finland and reconstructs the Arctic's climate in the distant past. One of the study's authors is Raymond Bradley, director of the Climate System Research Center at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.

Some skeptics have argued that the fact that Earth wobbles in its axis of rotation has helped determine recent warming, rather than human activity. But the new study shows that this wobble - which affects how much sunlight Earth receives in the middle of the summer - actually accounts for a long-term cooling trend in the Arctic, which has been reversed only in the past half-century.

Cool Engineering

As politicians and governments squabble over the painful measures required to reduce man-made emissions of carbon dioxide – the main cause of global warming – we are hearing a lot more about technical fixes for climate change. Scientists and engineers are proposing a bewildering range of options for cooling the world, which go under the general name of geo-engineering; some are outlandish (such as mirrors in orbit to reflect sunshine away from Earth) and some more mundane (painting surfaces white).

With some politicians expressing enthusiasm, there is a risk that too much momentum will build up behind geo-engineering.

Click here to read more.

Re-engineering the earth

The Atlantic's July/August issue has an article on climate engineering.

As the threat of global warming grows more urgent, a few scientists are considering radical—and possibly extremely dangerous—schemes for reengineering the climate by brute force. Their ideas are technologically plausible and quite cheap. So cheap, in fact, that a rich and committed environmentalist could act on them tomorrow. And that's the scariest part.

Climate engineering

A New York Times science article of 8/11/09 considered the benefis of climate engineering. It referenced a recent article that is refutted in the RealClimate article below. The refutation discusses the many dangers of geoengineering.

A biased economic analysis of geoengineering

RealClimate guest commentary by Alan Robock, Rutgers University, is summarized here.

Bjorn Lomborg’s Climate Consensus Center just released an un-refereed report on geoengineering, An Analysis of Climate Engineering as a Response to Global Warming by J Eric Bickel and Lee Lane.

Bickel and Lane ignore the effects of ocean acidification from continued CO2 emissions, dismissing this as a lost cause. Even without global warming, reducing CO2 emissions is needed to do the best we can to save the ocean. The costs of this continuing damage to the planet, which geoengineering will do nothing to address, are ignored in the analysis in this report. And without mitigation, “solar radiation management” (SRM) would need to be continued for hundreds of years. If it were stopped, by the loss of interest or means by society, the resulting rapid warming would be much more dangerous than the gradual warming we are now experiencing.

Bickel and Lane do not even mention several potential negative effects of SRM, including getting rid of blue skies, huge reductions in solar power from systems using direct solar radiation, or ruining terrestrial optical astronomy. They imply that SRM technologies will work perfectly, and ignore unknown unknowns.

Click here to read more.

Protesting at Climate Ground Zero

Click here to see this Tomgram along with Climate Disobedience: Is a New "Seattle" in the Making?, both by Mark Engler.

We're so past the Roman Empire by now that it's probably time to update the phrase "fiddling while Rome burns." What about, for instance, "writing fake letters ostensibly from real non-profit groups to weaken a climate-change bill while the planet burns"? It's true. According to the New York Times, the American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity (ACCCE), a coal industry and utilities trade group, "indirectly hired" a lobbying firm that did just that, sending piteous letters to congressional representatives from, for instance, the Albemarle-Charlottesville chapter of the N.A.A.C.P, claiming: "Many of our members are on tight budgets, and the sizes of their monthly utility bills are important expense items." (Hilary Shelton, the N.A.A.C.P.'s perfectly real senior vice president for advocacy and policy, "called the fake letters 'outrageous.'")

To add insult to injury (or is it to fiddling?), the ACCCE then hired the very lobbying firm that hired the subcontractor that sent out those letters to run a million-dollar campaign to influence Democratic congressional representatives to give the coal industry yet more concessions via further "grass-roots" efforts. ("We're not going to throw the baby out with the bath water here," commented a Coalition spokesperson.) To anyone who has been following the health-care debate, the tactics to be wielded will surely sound remarkably familiar: "The new project will use 225,000 volunteers dubbed 'America's Power Army.' They will visit town hall meetings, fairs and other functions attended by members of Congress and ask questions about energy policy."

As for that burning planet, while the ACCCE's hirees fiddle, the Millennium Project, a Washington-based think-tank supported by the U.N. and other organizations, just issued "2009 State of the Future," a massive 6,700-page report that called on 2,700 experts from 30 countries. With its focus on the condition (perilous) of our burning planet, it got hardly any attention in this country. The report lays out the seven terrors of the world, of which it ranks climate change as number one, and warns that, in the not-so-long run, civilization itself may be at stake. The report also calls for an Apollo Project-style decade-long effort—by China and the U.S. in particular—to tackle the various issues surrounding climate change.

A lot of young people, assumedly thinking about their futures and those of their children in a way their elders have consistently refused to do, have begun to address climate change directly. It's no social movement version of an Apollo Project. Not yet. But Mark Engler, author of How to Rule the World: The Coming Battle Over the Global Economy, sees possibilities. Tom

The conflict in southern Sudan, which has killed and displaced tens of thousands of people, is partly a result of drought in Darfur

Climate Change Seen as Threat to U.S. Security

NY Times, Washington – The changing global climate will pose profound strategic challenges to the United States in coming decades, raising the prospect of military intervention to deal with the effects of violent storms, drought, mass migration and pandemics, military and intelligence analysts say.

Such climate-induced crises could topple governments, feed terrorist movements or destabilize entire regions, say the analysts, experts at the Pentagon and intelligence agencies who for the first time are taking a serious look at the national security implications of climate change.

Recent war games and intelligence studies conclude that over the next 20 to 30 years, vulnerable regions, particularly sub-Saharan Africa, the Middle East and South and Southeast Asia, will face the prospect of food shortages, water crises and catastrophic flooding driven by climate change that could demand an American humanitarian relief or military response.

Much of the public and political debate on global warming has focused on finding substitutes for fossil fuels, reducing emissions that contribute to greenhouse gases and furthering negotiations toward an international climate treaty – not potential security challenges.

But a growing number of policy makers say that the world's rising temperatures, surging seas and melting glaciers are a direct threat to the national interest.

If the United States does not lead the world in reducing fossil-fuel consumption and thus emissions of global warming gases, proponents of this view say, a series of global environmental, social, political and possibly military crises loom that the nation will urgently have to address.

This argument could prove a fulcrum for debate in the Senate next month when it takes up climate and energy legislation passed in June by the House.

Artist Art Banksy has satirized modern meat production

In-Vitro Meat: Would Lab-Burgers Be Better for Us and the Planet?

(CNN) — Meat is murder? Well, perhaps not for much longer.

A group of scientists is working to grow real animal protein in the laboratory, which they not only claim is better for animal welfare, but healthier for people and the planet. It sounds like science fiction, but this technology to create in-vitro meat could be changing global diets within ten years.

"Cultured meat would have a lot of advantages," said Jason Matheny of research group New Harvest. "We could precisely control the amount of fat in meat. We could make ground beef with an ideal fatty acid ratio — a hamburger that prevents heart attacks instead of causing them."

But it isn't just the possibility of creating designer ground beef with the fat profile of salmon that drives Matheny's work. Meat and livestock farming is also the source of many human diseases, which he claims would be far less common when the product is raised in laboratory conditions.

"We could reduce the risks of diseases like swine flu, avian flu, 'mad cow disease', or contamination from Salmonella," he told CNN. "We could produce meat in sterile conditions that are impossible in conventional animal farms and slaughterhouses. And when we grow only the meat we can eat, it's more efficient. There's no need to grow the whole animal and lose 75 to 95 percent of what we feed it."

Conventional meat production is also hard on the environment. The contribution of livestock to climate change was recently highlighted by the United Nations' report, Livestock's Long Shadow, while groups such as Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth have demonstrated how soy farming for animal feed contributes to the destruction of the Amazon.

In this context Matheny believes his project could significantly cut the environmental impact of meat production — using much less water and producing far fewer greenhouse gases.

"We could reduce the environmental footprint of meat, which currently contributes more to global warming than the entire transportation sector," says Matheny.

Preliminary results from a study by Hanna Tuomisto, at the Wildlife Conservation Research Unit, University of Oxford, suggest that cultured meat would reduce the carbon emissions of meat production by more than 80 percent.

The Financial Times

How to End America's Deadly Coal Addiction
by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.

Published: July 19 2009

Converting rapidly from coal-generated energy to gas is President Barack Obama's most obvious first step towards saving our planet and jump-starting our economy. A revolution in natural gas production over the past two years has left America awash with natural gas and has made it possible to eliminate most of our dependence on deadly, destructive coal practically overnight – and without the expense of building new power plants.

Whatever the slick campaign financed by the powerful coal barons might claim, coal is neither cheap nor clean. Ozone and particulates from coal plants kill tens of thousands of Americans each year and cause widespread illnesses and disease. Acid rain has destroyed millions of acres of valuable forests and sterilised one in five Adirondack lakes. Neurotoxic mercury raining from these plants has contaminated fish in every state and poisons over a million American women and children annually. Coal industry strip mines have already destroyed 500 mountains in Appalachia, buried 2,000 miles of rivers and streams and will soon have flattened an area the size of Delaware. Finally, coal, which supplies 46 per cent of our electric power, is the most important source of America's greenhouse gases.

America's cornucopia of renewables and the recent maturation of solar, geothermal and wind technologies will allow us to meet most of our energy needs with clean, cheap, green power. In the short term, natural gas is an obvious bridge fuel to the "new" energy economy.

Since 2007, the discovery of vast supplies of deep shale gas in the US, along with advanced extraction methods, have created stable supply and predictably low prices for most of the next century. Of the 1,000 gigawatts of generating capacity currently needed to meet national energy demand, 336 are coal-fired. Surprisingly, America has more gas generation capacity – 450 gigawatts – than it does for coal.

However, public regulators generally require utilities to dispatch coal-generated power in preference to gas. For that reason, high-efficiency gas plants are in operation only 36 per cent of the time. By changing the dispatch rule nationally to require that whenever coal and gas plants are competing head-to-head, gas generation must be utilised first, we could quickly reduce coal generation and achieve massive emissions reductions.

In an instant, this simple change could eliminate three-quarters of America's coal-burning generators and save a fortune in energy costs. Around 920 US coal plants – 78 per cent of the total – are small (generating less than half a gigawatt), antiquated and horrendously inefficient. Their average age is 45 years, with many over 75. They tend to be located amidst dense populations and in poor neighbourhoods to lethal effect.

These ancient plants burn 20 per cent more coal per megawatt hour than modern large coal units and are 60 to 75 per cent less fuel-efficient than combined cycle gas plants. They account for only 21 per cent of America's electric power but almost half the sector's emissions. Properly assessed, the costs of operation, maintenance, capital improvements and repair of these antiquated facilities make them far more expensive to run than natural gas plants. However, irrational energy sector pricing structures make it possible for many plant operators to pass those costs to the public and make choices based exclusively on fuel costs, which in the case of coal appear deceptively cheap because of massive subsidies.

Mothballing or throttling back these plants would mean huge savings to the public and eliminate the need for more than 350m tons of coal, including all 30m tons harvested through mountain-top removal. Their closure would reduce US mercury emissions by 20-25 per cent, dramatically cut deadly particulate matter and the pollutants that cause acid rain, and slash America's CO2 from power plants by 20 per cent – an amount greater than the entire reduction envisaged in the first years of the pending climate change legislation at a fraction of the cost.

To quickly gain further economic and environmental advantages, the larger, newer coal plants that remain in operation should be required to co-fire with natural gas. Many of these plants are already connected to gas pipelines and can easily be adapted to burn gas as 15 to 20 per cent of their fuel. Such co-firing dramatically reduces forced outages and maintenance costs and can be the most cost effective way to reduce CO2 emissions.

Natural gas comes with its own set of environmental caveats. It is a carbon-based fuel and its extraction from shale, the most significant new source, if not managed carefully, can have serious water, land use and wildlife impacts, especially in the hands of irresponsible producers and lax regulators. But those impacts can be mitigated by careful regulation and are dwarfed by the disaster of coal.

The writer is president of Waterkeeper Alliance

Elizabeth Kolbert Profiles "The Catastrophist" in June 29 New Yorker (Registration required.)

A few months ago, James Hansen, the director of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS), in Manhattan, joined a protest outside the Capitol Power Plant, in Washington, D.C. Thirty years ago, Hansen, who is sixty-eight, created one of the world's first climate models, nicknamed Model Zero, which he used to predict most of what has happened in the climate since. Hansen has now concluded, partly on the basis of his latest modeling efforts and partly on the basis of observations made by other scientists, that the threat of global warming is far greater than even he had suspected. Unless immediate action is taken–including the shutdown of all the world's coal plants within the next two decades–the planet will be committed to climate change on a scale society won't be able to cope with. Hansen grew up in Denison, Iowa, and he obtained a Ph.D. in physics from the University of Iowa. From there he went directly to work at GISS, where he studied Venusian clouds. In 1981, he became the director of GISS. He published a paper forecasting increased temperatures in the following decades and his insights were immediately recognized by the scientific community.

The article describes a talk Hansen gave on climate change at the state capitol in Concord, New Hampshire. What is now happening, Hansen said, is carbon dioxide is being pumped into the air some ten thousand times faster than natural weathering processes can remove it. There's no precise term for the level of carbon dioxide that will assure a climate disaster; the best scientists have come up with is "dangerous anthropogenic interference," or D.A.I. Hansen estimates the dangerous amount of carbon dioxide to be no more than three hundred and fifty parts per million. The bad news is that carbon dioxide levels have already reached three hundred and eighty-five parts per million. Hansen argues that the only way we can constrain the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is to drastically decrease the use of coal. But if Hansen's anxieties about D.A.I. and coal are broadly shared, he is still, among climate scientists, an outlier. The article describes the cap-and-trade system, which Hansen argues is essentially a sham. In order to stabilize carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere, annual emissions around the globe would have to be cut by something on the order of three-quarters. So far, there's no evidence that anyone is willing to take the necessary steps.

May 17 Los Angeles Times: Can 350.org Save the World?

The Obama administration is valiantly helping to push a bill through Congress that would finally set a cap on U.S. carbon emissions. Introduced by Reps. Henry A. Waxman (D-Beverly Hills) and Edward J. Markey (D-Mass.), it has the support of most environmental groups and represents the culmination of years of hard lobbying work. And if the leaks coming out of the committee are correct, it's watered down with lots of loopholes and compromises. These concessions are clearly necessary to win passage, but they may also limit the speed and breadth of the legislation's impact.

The trouble is, physics and chemistry aren't adjusting their schedule to fit our political and economic convenience. Each week brings new accounts of crashing ice sheets and spreading droughts. The scientific journal Nature said in its April 30 cover story that "a growing number of scientists agree that the CO2 challenge is even greater than had been previously thought."

The Guardian: Cleaner Air From Reduced Emissions Could Save Millions of Lives

A power generating station in Sun Valley, California

Johannes Bollen, one of the authors of a report for the Netherlands Environment Agency, said 100 million early deaths could be prevented by cutting global emissions by 50% by 2050, a target consistent with those being considered internationally.

The report predicts that, by 2050, about 100 million premature deaths caused by respiratory health problems linked to air pollution could be avoided through measures such as low emission cars. The economic benefits of saving those lives in developing countries such as China and India could also strengthen the negotiating hand of the UK and Europe at a crucial UN climate summit in Copenhagen this December.

Los Angeles Times: Wind turbines could more than meet U.S. electricity needs, report says

The Interior Department report, which looks at the potential of wind turbines off the U.S. coast, is part of the government's process to chart a course for offshore energy development.

Simply harnessing the wind in relatively shallow waters – the most accessible and technically feasible sites for offshore turbines – could produce at least 20% of the power demand for most coastal states, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar said, unveiling a report by the Minerals Management Service that details the potential for oil, gas and renewable development on the outer continental shelf.

The biggest wind potential lies off the nation's Atlantic coast, which the Interior report estimates could produce 1,000 gigawatts of electricity – enough to meet a quarter of the national demand.

The report also notes large potential in the Pacific, including off the California coast, but said the area presented technical challenges.

The Financial Times on Ban Ki-moon and Al Gore: Green growth is essential to any stimulus

Economic stimulus is the order of the day. This is as it must be, as governments around the world struggle to jump-start the global economy. But even as leaders address the immediate need to stimulate the economy, so too must they act jointly to ensure that the new de facto economic model being developed is sustainable for the planet and our future on it.

What we need is both stimulus and long-term investments that accomplish two objectives simultaneously with one global economic policy response – a policy that addresses our urgent and immediate economic and social needs and that launches a new green global economy. In short, we need to make "growing green" our mantra.

Ban Ki-moon is UN secretary-general. Al Gore is former US vice-president.

The Financial Times on Global Warming Nearing 'Critical Threshold'

Chris Field of Stanford University, a senior member of the IPCC, told the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science that the unexpectedly rapid increase in the burning of fossil fuels, especially coal, since 2000 would have dire consequences because of "feedback loops" in the global climate.

"We are looking now at a future climate that's beyond anything we've considered seriously in climate model simulations," Prof Field said.

Prof Field warned that there were early signs of melting in the Arctic tundra and increased fires in tropical forests – over and above deliberate deforestation – that could add billions of tons of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere.

"There is a real risk that human-caused climate change will accelerate the release of carbon dioxide from forest and tundra ecosystems, which have been storing a lot of carbon for thousands of years," Prof Field said.

"We don't want to cross a critical threshold where this massive release of carbon starts to run on autopilot."

However, there was optimism at the AAAS meeting – based on the professed determination of the new US administration to promote effective action, both in its domestic energy policies and in taking a lead in international climate change negotiations.

MIT's Technology Review on why the grid needs radical improvement

The world faces immense challenges ahead as power from renewable sources, mainly wind and solar, starts to play a bigger role. To make use of this clean energy, we'll need more transmission lines that can transport power from one region to another and connect energy–hungry cities with the remote areas where much of our renewable power is likely to be generated. We'll also need far smarter controls throughout the distribution system — technologies that can store extra electricity from wind farms in the batteries of plug-in hybrid cars, for example, or remotely turn power-hungry appliances on and off as the energy supply rises and falls.

In the U.S. our outdated grid prevents wind farms from getting built. The existing transmission system doesn't have the capacity to get the amount of electricity that would be generated by wind farms and solar farms to the parts of the country that need it. In many states there's no particular urgency to move things along because the state has all the power it needs. Most of the applications for grid connections are simply waiting in line, some stymied by the lack of infrastructure and others by bureaucratic and regulatory delays.

Time Magazine on America's Untapped Energy Resource: Boosting Efficiency

This may sound too good to be true, but the U.S. has a renewable-energy resource that is perfectly clean, remarkably cheap, surprisingly abundant and immediately available. It has astounding potential to reduce the carbon emissions that threaten our planet, the dependence on foreign oil that threatens our security and the energy costs that threaten our wallets. Unlike coal and petroleum, it doesn't pollute; unlike solar and wind, it doesn't depend on the weather; unlike ethanol, it doesn't accelerate deforestation or inflate food prices; unlike nuclear plants, it doesn't raise uncomfortable questions about meltdowns or terrorist attacks or radioactive-waste storage, and it doesn't take a decade to build. It isn't what-if like hydrogen, clean coal and tidal power; it's already proven to be workable, scalable and cost-effective. And we don't need to import it.

The New York Times: As More People Eat Meat, a Bid to Cut Emissions

“It's an area that's been largely overlooked,” said Dr. Rajendra Pachauri, head of the Nobel Prize-winning United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. He says people should eat less meat to control their carbon footprints. “We haven't come to grips with agricultural emissions”.

The trillions of farm animals around the world generate 18 percent of the emissions that are raising global temperatures, according to United Nations estimates, more even than from cars, buses and airplanes. The Lancet medical journal supported his suggestion to eat less red meat to control global emissions, noting that Westerners eat more meat than is healthy anyway. Producing a pound of beef creates 11 times as much greenhouse gas emission as a pound of chicken and 100 times more than a pound of carrots, according to Lantmannen, the Swedish group.

“I'm not sure that the system we have for livestock can be sustainable,” said Dr. Pachauri. A sober scientist, he suggests that “the most attractive” near-term solution is for everyone simply to “reduce meat consumption,” a change he says would have more effect than switching to a hybrid car.

Greening the Ghetto: Can a remedy serve for both global warming and poverty?
by Elizabeth Kolbert

Van Jones career is covered in the Jan 12, 2009, issue of The New Yorker.

“The floor has been torn out from under the American people. That's the bad news. People are losing their jobs, their homes, their pensions, their 401(k)s. But I know from my personal life sometimes something really bad has to happen before something really good can happen. It's when you get dumped or fired or fail that test that you have to look at yourself and figure out, What am I going to do now? And we're at that moment. Sometimes a breakdown can lead to a breakthrough.”

In November Jones spoke at Greenbuild, at the Boston Convention and Exhibition Center, to nearly a thousand peoplearchitects, engineers, construction managers, and city planners.

“It's not that we have a President who's black; it's that for the first time we have a President who's green.

It may be very hard for many of you to build all the things you want to. We may not be able to build anything, but we can rebuild everything. And you have knowledge. You have the wisdom to take the biggest bite out of carbon and to fuel the job creation that we need.

If we come together and get this done, we will have achieved something quite extraordinary. We will have achieved something greater than Barack Obama has. What gave him the audacity of hope? You did. Even when the government wasn't interested in green buildings, even when your local city council didn't know what you were talking about, you had the audacity to keep pushing anyway, to keep raising standards anyway, to keep trying to make a difference anyway. He saw that audacity in you.”

A special report in The Economist on the sea: Troubled Waters

So far, the rising sea levels, dying corals and spreading algal blooms are only minor distractions for most people. A few more hurricanes like Katrina, a few dramatic floods in the coastal cities of the rich world, perhaps even the shutting down of a part of the world's great conveyor belt of ocean currents, especially if it were the one that warms up western Europe: any of these would catch the attention of policymakers. The trouble is that by then it may be too late.

The Financial Times: Just as the Obama team offers fresh impetus on climate change,
the economic crisis threatens to hold up a new global treaty

In Poznan, Poland, Ban Ki-moon, secretary-general of the UN, told delegates at the December UN talks on a successor treaty to the Kyoto protocol: “Yes, the economic crisis is serious. Yet, when it comes to climate change, the stakes are even higher. The climate crisis affects our potential prosperity and our peoples' lives, both now and far into the future.”

Consider the words of a scientist, Rajendra Pachauri, who last year accepted the Nobel Prize on behalf of the IPCC, which he heads: "If there's no action before 2012, that's too late. What we do in the next two to three years will determine our future. This is the defining moment."

Talks

A Conversation with James Hansen

You can see a video of the Climate Crisis Coalition interview with James Hansen here.

James Hansen has also come out with his first book, Storms of My Grandchildren: The Truth About the Coming Climate Catastrophe and Our Last Chance to Save Humanity.

Dr. Hansen is the world's most credible voice on the subject of climate change. His climate predictions have come true again and again. He first warned Congress about global warming in 1988. Coincidentally, this was also the last year that the CO2 level in the atmosphere was 350 ppm, the maximum level that his and other's research currently finds to be safe.

Our country's failure to respond adequately in the following two decades has motivated him to also take up the role of communicator. He has done countless interviews, attended protests, and now has come out with this book.

Hansen paints a devastating picture of what will happen in the next few decades if we follow the course we're on. But he is also an optimist, showing that there is still time to do what we need to save life on the planet. Urgent action is needed, and this book will help create the groundswell we need to save humanity from a dire fate more imminent than we had supposed.

UUA Advocacy on Climate Change/Energy

One of the lessons that we learned from the climate change/energy bill in the House is that our representatives were not hearing from enough people who wanted to see a stronger version of the bill. Those who want to weaken and/or derail the bill are spending tens of thousands of dollars, lying about the costs to consumers, and in some cases even fraudulently misrepresenting organizations of color. The Senate has just broken for August recess, which means they are in their home states to listen to their constituents. NOW is the time to make our side heard. See this blog post for more information and resources, or visit 1Sky's website for courses of action.

Strategies to Address Global Warming & Is Sundance Kid a Criminal? by Jim Hansen

Failure to achieve the actions needed to stabilize global climate will result in great intergenerational injustice. The young and unborn in both developed and developing countries would bear full consequences of actions of prior generations. We need to help young people draw attention to this great injustice.

Our global climate is nearing tipping points. Changes are beginning to appear, and there is a potential for rapid changes with effects that would be irreversible – if we do not promptly slow fossil fuel emissions during the next few decades.

Tipping points are fed by amplifying feedbacks. As Arctic sea ice melts, the darker ocean absorbs more sunlight and speeds melting. As tundra melts, methane a strong greenhouse gas, is released, causing more warming. As species are pressured and exterminated by shifting climate zones, ecosystems can collapse, destroying more species.

We already have caused atmospheric carbon dioxide to increase from 280 to 387 ppm (parts per million). What science has revealed in the past few years is that the safe level of carbon dioxide in the long run is no more than 350 ppm. The optimum CO2 level to support civilization may be less than 350 ppm, but more precise knowledge is not needed immediately for the purpose of establishing present policies.

The conclusion that CO2 must be reduced to a level <350 ppm was startling at first, but obvious in retrospect. Earth's history shows that an atmospheric CO2 amount of say 450 ppm eventually would yield dramatic changes, including sea level tens of meters (> 60 feet) higher than today. For reference, 450 ppm yields global warming about 2°C (3.6°F) above the preindustrial level. Such a level of atmospheric CO2 and global warming imply that we would hand our children and grandchildren a condition that would run out of their control, a situation that should be unacceptable to humanity.

Read more about strategies to address global warming.

Jane Lubchenco interview on NPR: "Ocean acidity has increased by 30%" thanks to human emissions.

Global warming is a major threat to life in the oceans — and humans who depend on that life. As one recent study found:

Global warming may create "dead zones" in the ocean that would be devoid of fish and seafood and endure for up to two millennia ...

Its authors say deep cuts in the world's carbon emissions are needed to brake a trend capable of wrecking the marine ecosystem and depriving future generations of the harvest of the seas.

Jane Lubchenco — Obama's choice for administrator of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) — discussed the threat to the ocean from global warming in a long interview on NPR's Diane Rehm show. You can catch it here.

The 2008 UUA General-Assembly Ware Lecture by Van Jones called for us to invent and invest our way out of our addiction to carbon-based fuels. He pointed to many ways in which a response could help bring energy use down while adding millions of jobs. He called for a Green New Deal.

"If we stand together now, insist that we build a green economy, strong enough to lift people out of poverty, strong enough to end forever the need for oil wars and resource wars, and bring this country together, we will do more than the politicians talk about when they say 'we got to take America back.' If we do our work right and well, we will do more than take America back. For the first time in 40 years, we are going to take America forward!"

On July 17th Al Gore gave A Generational Challenge to Repower America speech at George Washington University's Constitution Hall in Washington D.C. The speech outlines his vision of how the United States needs another 'moon shot' to solve the intertwined problems of climate change and energy independence.

"We're borrowing money from China to buy oil from the Persian Gulf to burn it in ways that destroy the planet. Every bit of that's got to change. ... Today I challenge our nation to commit to producing 100 percent of our electricity from renewable energy and truly clean carbon-free sources within 10 years."

Many of us now have copies of Lester Brown's book, Plan B 3.0: Mobilizing to Save Civilization. On February 24, 2008, Lester Brown gave a compelling talk at Cary Hall in Lexington about his book. He was introduced by our own Representative Ed Markey, Congress' leading voice on addressing global warming, and by Kevin Knoblock, President of the Union of Concerned Scientists. To hear this important topic explained by the author himself, watch Lester Brown's talk!

You can also watch Dr. James Hansen, of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies at Columbia University, speak about his latest findings. On June 1, 2008, at Cary Hall in Lexington he explained the pressing need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions within the next couple of years or face the consequences of a very different climate. He wrote recently, "If humanity wishes to preserve a planet similar to that on which civilization developed and to which life on Earth is adapted, paleoclimate evidence and ongoing climate change suggest that CO2 will need to be reduced from its current 385 ppm to at most 350 ppm."

Dr. Mark Bowen also spoke about his book on how Hansen's efforts to speak openly about the importance of reducing greenhouse gases was impeded by political appointees at NASA, who attempted to censor or alter Hansen's reports and writings.

Other Proposals

James Hansen's Personal Appeal to Barack and Michelle Obama

James Hansen speaks in July 2008 at the National Press Club

James Hansen, one of the world's top climate scientists, has written a personal new year appeal to Barack and Michelle Obama, warning of the "profound disconnect" between public policy on climate change and the magnitude of the problem. Hansen's recommendations are:

Moratorium on and phasing out of coal power stations without carbon capture, what Hansen calls the "sine qua non for solving the climate problem". Coal CO2 emissions are the same as those of other fossil fuels combined.
Raising the price of emissions via a "carbon tax and 100% dividend". This is a tax mechanism to "decarbonise" the economy without a net take from taxpayers. Low carbon users are rewarded while high users are punished.
Urgent research on "fourth generation" nuclear power with international co-operation. This offers one of the best options for nearly carbon-free power, according to Hansen. It would also help to solve the nuclear waste problem by using that material as fuel.

350 Is the Crucial Number for the Planet

As Dr. James Hansen explained, 350 is the red line for human beings, the most important number on the planet. The most recent science tells us that unless we can reduce the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere to 350 parts per million, we will cause huge and irreversible damage to the earth. See 350.org for ways to follow this important international campaign to unite the world around the number 350. It was founded by Bill McKibben, a well-known author and environmentalist from Vermont.

Personal Actions We Can Take

For finding personal ways to start saving carbon now, we recommend the Consumer Reports Global Warming Solutions Center. There you will find solutions for improving energy efficiency at home and on the road.

The Massachusetts Water Resources Authority guide to reducing the use of hazardous household products also helps you improve our environment. Read this booklet to learn about less toxic alternatives and proper disposal of hazardous household products.

The Green Sanctuary Group

The Green Sanctuary Group is exploring what it would take to become a "Green Sanctuary." More information on the Green Sanctuaries movement can be found at UU Ministry for Earth.

Please stop by the social justice table at coffee/friendship hour if you have an interest in working on issues concerning global climate change or email gogreen@firstparish.info . If you want to write a letter to a politician calling for social action, names and addresses of representatives are here.

— David Landskov

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