5,000 Years Ago

Every now and then a story comes along that effectively illuminates the long, uncertain history of humankind. Here's such a story, triggered by retreating glaciers, that hints at climate catastrophes thousands of years ago and the fate of one man unexpectedly trapped in ice in the prime of his life.

Do Something

Instead of sitting back passively, reading blogs and news items about the perils of global warming, consider taking positive and immediate climate action and participating in Step It Up 2007! It's now 63 days until April 14, 2007, the official National Day of Climate Action, and Step It Up Now! hopes to expand the 599 events planned in 46 states across the country even further.

What are they trying to accomplish? From their Web site:

This is our organizing hub for a National Day of Climate Action--April 14th, 2007. On this one spring day, there will be hundreds and hundreds of rallies all across the country. We hope to have gatherings in every state, and in many of America's most iconic places: on the levees in New Orleans, on top of the melting glaciers on Mt. Rainier, even underwater on the endangered coral reefs off Key West.

One of the supporters of this initiative, noted environmental author Bill McKibben sums up the sentiments behind the action in this way:

Every group will be saying the same thing: Step it up, Congress! Enact immediate cuts in carbon emissions, and pledge an 80% reduction by 2050. No half measures, no easy compromises-the time has come to take the real actions that can stabilize our climate.

As people gather, we'll link pictures of the protests together electronically via the web-before the weekend is out, we'll have the largest protest the country has ever seen, not in numbers but in extent. From every corner of the nation we'll start to shake things up.

We can sit back and wait for the predictions to come true. Or, we can turn back the forces that drive global warming through concentrated, committed, grassroots action. Which side of the equation would you like to be on?

Tags: global warming, climate change, Step It Up Now!, grassroots

The Greening of Garbage Trucks

Those big, belching trucks that collect your garbage while getting around 4 mpg may soon be replaced by hybrids that produce energy while braking, gain extra energy from stored hydraulic power while creeping around city streets, and shut off automatically when stopped. This same technology, being prototyped and tested in several cities, also makes sense for delivery vans, shuttle buses, and postal vehicles.

As reported by Frank Greve in a McClatchy Newspapers article, Hybrids could turn big U.S. truck fleets green, hybrid hydraulic vehicles capture up to 75 percent of braking energy, compared to the 25 percent that is typical of hybrid electric vehicles.

Right now, however, the purchase incentives are stalled by a crucial component that must be provided by the EPA:

Hybrid trucks seemed to get a major boost from Washington under the Energy Policy Act of 2005, which offers tax credits of up to $12,000 per hybrid truck to compensate for their higher price. The incentive was to start in January 2006, but hybrid makers and potential customers still can't count on it.

That's because the size of the tax credit, which the Internal Revenue Service oversees, depends on how much fuel a hybrid truck saves, and the EPA hasn't come out with a system to measure the fuel savings.

Fuel savings could be enormous once this hurdle is overcome.

Glimmerings of Hope for U.S. Climate Change Action

Serious action to contend with climate change has been seriously lacking in the U.S. for the last six years, squelched by the jackbooted dominance of the Bush administration and a compliant, Republican majority Congress. The first stirrings of action are appearing in the Congressional chambers, as David Roberts describes in this TomPaine.com article,
Going for Broke on Climate Change, but the pace and magnitude of this movement may not be as dramatic as befits the planetary challenge.

As Roberts says:

All the buzz has, for the first time in decades, awakened greens to the possibility of fundamental change. But they should remember that the interests of the planet and the interests of the new congressional leadership are not entirely in alignment. Right now, the overriding political objective for Pelosi and Reid is to position the party favorably for the 2008 elections. That means Getting Things Done, passing a bill to show that they, unlike their Republican predecessors, take global warming seriously.

But a climate-change bill that can pass through today's Congress—much less avoid a Bush veto—will inevitably be feeble. Worse, it could lock the U.S. into a slow, bureaucratic response and dampen public pressure to act.

The most promising bill, the Global Warming Pollution Reduction Act, introduced by Vermont's redoubtable Senator, Bernie Sanders, also has the most teeth. This bill proposes measures to reduce global warming pollutants by 80 percent by 2050.

Tags: global warming, climate change , Bernie Sanders, pollution

Tackling Global Climate Change

The American Solar Energy Society has issued a new report, Tackling Global Climate Change in the U.S.: Potential U.S. Carbon Emissions Reductions from Renewable Energy and Energy Efficency by 2030, that provides a comprehensive picture of the current energy problems and prospective solutions. Good light reading for a winter evening...

Tags: climate change, energy, global warming

Biofuels or Food Crops: Chile Decides

As a reminder that alternative energy solutions don't always present clear-cut scenarios, the government of Chile is struggling to decide whether or not to boost biofuels production nationally, a path that some environmentalists say would divert croplands better devoted to providing food to the nation. In this Inter Press Service News Agency article, Home-Grown Biofuels - Big Time?, Daniel Estrada lays out the issues, pro and con, and in the process frames many of the crucial issues surrounding the biofuels debate.

Tags: biofuels, energy

Worst Polluters Eschew Warming Pact

A rallying cry from French President Jacques Chirac to create a new organization for dealing with global warming threats drew 45 nations across the planet, as detailed in this Boston Globe article. Unfortunately, the worst polluters (the United States, China, and India) refused to sign on.

The call from Chirac comes in the face of the depressingly negative threat scenarios contained in the latest report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. As discussed in the article:

The world's scientists and other international leaders also said now that the science is so well documented, action is clearly the next step.

"It is time now to hear from the world's policy makers," Tim Wirth, president of the United Nations Foundation, said Friday. "The so-called and long-overstated 'debate' about global warming is now over."

Once more for emphasis: action is clearly the next step.

Tags: global warming, climate change, IPCC report

Disinformation for Dollars

In a move that clearly indicates the utter desperation of the global warming deniers, the American Enterprise Institute (a thinktank financed largely by ExxonMobil) is offering $10,000 a shot to scientists and economists who write articles that cast doubt on the latest report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The most recent report from this organization detailed harsher consequences if global warming is not reversed.

Science correspondent Ian Sample in a Guardian Unlimited article described the situation in these terms:

The AEI has received more than $1.6m from ExxonMobil and more than 20 of its staff have worked as consultants to the Bush administration. Lee Raymond, a former head of ExxonMobil, is the vice-chairman of AEI's board of trustees.

The letters, sent to scientists in Britain, the US and elsewhere, attack the UN's panel as "resistant to reasonable criticism and dissent and prone to summary conclusions that are poorly supported by the analytical work" and ask for essays that "thoughtfully explore the limitations of climate model outputs".

When all else fails, the oil industry knows the value of deep pockets and how to use them.

Tags: global warming, lobbying, climate change, IPCC report

A Vision of Hell

Mark Lyman, author of the upcoming Six Degrees: Our Future on a Hotter Planet, paints a grim picture of life on earth at the end of the century if we don't curb greenhouse gas emissions. In a commentary in The Independent, Lyman's tone is less than cheery as he describes hell on earth:

An eco-alarmist fantasy? Unfortunately not - having spent the past three years combing the scientific literature for clues to how life will change as the planet heats up, I know that life on a 6C-warmer globe would be almost unimaginably hellish. A clue to just how unpleasant things can get is contained within a narrow layer of strata recently exposed at a rock quarry in China, dating from the end of the Permian period, 251 million years ago. For reasons that are still not properly understood, temperatures rose by 6C over just a few thousand years, dramatically changing the climate and wiping out up to 95 per cent of species alive at the time. The end-Permian mass extinction was the worst ever: the closest that this planet has ever come to becoming just another lifeless rock orbiting the sun. Only one large land animal survived the bottleneck: the pig-like Lystrosaurus, which for millions of years after the disaster had the globe pretty much to itself.

Clues as to how the world looks in a long-term extreme greenhouse state also come from the Cretaceous period, 144 to 65 million years ago, when there was no ice on either pole and much of Europe and North America was flooded by the higher seas. Tropical crocodiles swam in the Canadian high Arctic, whilst breadfruit trees grew in Greenland. The oceans were incredibly hot: in the tropical Atlantic they may have reached 42C, whilst at the North Pole itself, the oceans were as warm as the Mediterranean is today. The tropics and sub-tropics were so hot that no forests grew, and desert belts probably extended into the heart of modern-day Europe.

Why does he base this scenario on six degrees?

In the latest report from the IPCC, if greenhouse gas emissions continue unchecked till the end of the century, global warming will raise the average temperature of the planet an additional 6.4 degrees C. It doesn't sound like much until you take a sober look back in time at past temperature indicators.

Related tags: global warming

Human Behavior and Global Warming

As the planet warming forecasts escalate and the developed nations start paying attention, the depth of the problem is evident, but the necessary solutions are still unpalatable to the governments, industries, and those who support unfettered capitalism as the economic system of choice.

As Jean-Marcel Bouguereau, Editor in Chief of Nouvel Observateur, points out (in an opinion piece reposted at Truthout.org):

Suddenly, people are sounding the alarm everywhere. Not without some hypocrisy. Even George Bush mentions, thanks to new technologies, a "post-Kyoto strategy" - while he's refused to sign that protocol. And in Davos, the heads of companies have just salved their collective conscience by increasing the numbers of debates and roundtables on climate change. But only 20 percent of them consider protection of the environment to be a priority. These company bosses know that the break with growth that the Rome Club advocated as far back as 1972 is a death sentence for a capitalism that can't allow itself a drastic reduction in production and material consumption. It's a whole different economy that must be put into effect, based on other values.

Three big obstacles to curbing global warming that typically play bit parts to the energy use issue need to be faced if we're going to make serious progress:

1. An economic system built around the notion of unlimited growth (the creed of the cancer cell)

2. Growing population pressures around the world and the resulting implications on resources and energy use

3. The increasing appetite for meat consumption across the world (this piece, Hard to Swallow, touches on the impacts)

Energy use is important, but it's not the whole story, and I'll explore some of the related issues in future entries.

In Love with the Lusty Wind

Kelpie Wilson is one of my favorite environmental writers, always in the thick of the issues, deeply informed, and not afraid to mix it up a little or confront the opposition directly to get a point across. Her interview style is equally illuminating. In this Truthout interview with wind energy expert Randall Tinkerman, the conversation meanders naturally from the differences in European and American wind power approaches to the viability of some of the latest technologies. Tinkerman has strong opinions on futuristic technologies:

Globally, we need to fill the existing areas of strong resources with the technology that is available or on the drawing boards today. That still requires a large commitment to be accomplished. When we have windpower meeting 20 percent of global use, we can begin to explore some of the more exotic technologies at the fringes of our expertise.

As an example, many people support micro-turbines on buildings as part of our energy future. From an architectural standpoint, that may be cool, and from a showcasing of renewables standpoint, that may be effective. However, given that the cost of energy from the turbines is so much higher, (people like to build where the winds are weakest, not strongest) why not just have city-dwellers invest in the cost-effective modern rural turbines, and ship the power back home?

Lots of good information packed into this interview, providing a revealing snapshot of wind power today.

California 100 Years Hence

Having lived in California for a number of years (before moving to Vermont), this article struck home with unusual forcefulness. It's one thing to speculate on the perils of global warming in the abstract or through effects-laden spectacles like The Day After Tomorrow. It something else entirely to hear sober planners and scientists describing San Francisco and Oakland International airports completely under water, flood surges that would place major highways under several feet of water, and beaches and wetlands disappearing as sea walls go up to try to keep the rising waters away.

At the Golden Gate Bridge, the Pacific Ocean crept seven inches higher during the past century, as global warming melted glaciers and expanded ocean waters.

According to the article, rising waters are proceeding at a pace equal to the worst-case scenarios predicted by scientist, which translates to a three-foot rise within a century.

This is disturbing news for anyone who lives near a coastal area, which includes a growing percentage of the world's population.

The number of people living within 60 miles of coastlines will increase by about 35 percent compared to 1995, the mapmakers say.

This type of migration will expose 2.75 billion people to coastal threats from global warming such as sea level rise and stronger hurricanes in addition to other natural disasters like tsunamis. A reminder of the risks of seaside living came this week in the form of a tsunami that killed at least 350 people and devastated many on Indonesia's Java Island.

One more indication of how inexplicable human behavior can be...

Grass May Surpass Corn as Ideal Biofuel

Soya and corn are the crops usually mentioned in discussions about biofuels, but a group of Minnesta researchers found that grasses, such as wild lupine and goldenrod, offer a carbon-negative alternative. In a special report in New Scientist, Humble grasses may be the best source of biofuel, the research team focused on mixed-species agriculture plots left fallow. The more grass species present, the higher the potential energy yield.

How to Save Trillions of Dollars

While the few remaining global warming skeptics always cite costs as the reason for not immediately imposing measures to reduce global warming gases, a recent study by Tufts University indicates that the savings of taking action now could be enormous when weighed against the costs of catastrophic effects of climate change. Reuters summarized the potential savings indicated by Tufts in this piece, Climate Change Inaction Will Cost Trillions: Study.

Honda Fuel Cell Prototype Breaks Stereotypes

Always an innovator in fuel efficiency, Honda has some new tricks that clean up diesel power and advance fuel cell technology: Honda Shows Off Cleaner Diesel, Streamlined Fuel-Cell Cars.

105 MPG Moonbeam

Out of Camden, Maine comes a homebuilt 105 MPG microcar demonstrating that Yankee ingenuity is alive and well as the downslope of the peak oil era approaches. Powered by a 150cc four-stroke engine, the Moonbeam was fabricated by Jory Squibb for $2339 in materials and a 1000 hours worth of labor. For hauling groceries or traveling around town, this microcar, based on a Honda Elite motor scooter, has a lot going for it.

Action on global warming

Bill McKibben, one of the earliest and most articulate writers on the issues of global warming, notes that Haggling Over Global Warming may be finally giving way to direct action in a number of areas. The question is: which are the best directions to devote our attention given the magnitude of the crisis and the divergence of opinion. As always, Mr. McKibben provides a sound rationale for moving forward on the central issue of our day.

Methane from Permafrost Raises Global Warming Ante

A new phenomenon that affects calculations about increasing greenhouse gases is causing concern about climate scientists. As permafrost melts in various locales around the world, methane is released, a greenhouse gas that has 23 times the heat-trapping capability of carbon dioxide. The risk of dramatically accelerating temperatures is considerable.

Vermont Walk Against Global Warming

Vermonters get involved in the movement to do something real about global warming, as described in this Burlington Free Press story, Vermont Walk Against Global Warming.

Honey, We Killed the Planet

Nicholas Von Hoffman writing for The Nation speculates on the day (maybe only 40 years hence) when the last remaining stores of oil will sit in the basements of the rich, like vintage wine, as the planet becomes a vastly different place for humans. Read it and weep: Honey, We Killed the Planet.