By S. T., on July 27th, 2010
 What was the first rule of Fight Club? Don’t talk about it. What was the first rule of Climate Change legislation? Don’t call it that. Call it “energy legislation”.
This is what Sen. Harry Reid plans to do, except now, at this point, that’s all it will be. It is not nearly enough to fight climate change.
Our hopes for a climate change bill in 2010 are gone. The situation was the same last year, and it’s incredible that we are saying the same thing this year, considering the mine disasters and the massive oil spill off our coast. It’s a situation that is nearly beyond belief.
There are a lot of reasons why this happened. According to Senator Bernie Sanders, who appears every Friday on the Thom Hartmann radio show, in large part the blame lies with the lack of will to get it done in the Congress. From DemocracyNow last Friday, the blame lies with President Obama, who did not fight for a climate bill, and broke another campaign promise: that climate and energy would be addressed with common sense and science. Didn’t happen. Instead, politics controlled how the various climate and energy bills were dealt with from start to finish. After the Shirley Sherrod debacle, I think I know why — this White House reacts less to science and more to the”gotcha” right-wing media. If you have a government who reacts more to the media than the people, you won’t get things done that need to be done. The media is nearly brain-dead on climate change. They choose to create time-wasting debates and other crises to mislead the public and prolong problems, instead of doing journalism.
As Senate Dems Give Up on Climate Bill, What Does the Future Hold for US Climate and Energy Policy?
Amy Goodman of DemocracyNow! interviewed environmental leaders and writers last Friday in her attempts to find out what the BEG (Big Environmental Groups) are going to do now that climate change legislation is dead in the U.S. Here is part of the interview. You can read and listen to the entire segment here. Read on for how Climate Change is like Fight Club.
Continue Reading → How Climate Change is Like Fight Club
By S. T., on June 18th, 2010
 Nahanni Johnstone and her 8-year old daughter Chloe, both covered with oil during a Global Day of Action demonstration in Toronto June 17, 2010. Organized by the At the Table Coalition. The use of fossil fuels is destroying our home (Earth) in more ways than one. Maybe it would help if more people thought of the Earth as their home, instead of thinking of it as a giant, endless planet.
Astronauts know the Earth is small and finite, compared to the vastness of space, and even compared to giant planets like Jupiter. Yet soon the Earth will have to support 9 billion people, many of them people who think nothing of using up whatever they can, as fast as they can.
I heard a talk by Senator Bill Nelson of Florida on EarthBeat Radio this week. His topic was offshore oil drilling, and he is against most offshore drilling. He has a unique perspective because not only is he a law maker but he was once an astronaut, and has been up on shuttle missions. He talked about viewing the earth from the space shuttle and seeing the whole earth as “home”.
From his perspective, there are many reasons for being against offshore drilling, off the coast of Florida. One of them is that you can’t have drilling platforms out in the waters of the Atlantic, when it’s our biggest military training ground, where things fall from the sky and blow up on a regular basis. I’m not in favor of the ocean being used as a dumping ground for NASA and the U.S. military, but he has a point. Nelson is also someone who thinks we need to act on climate change, and get off oil as a source of fuel as soon as we can. You can hear his talk in the EarthBeat show here, in the second half of their podcast.
Continue Reading → Lack of Political Will on Climate Bill Even Now
By S. T., on March 1st, 2010
Despite the inability of the U.S. Congress to get much done recently, Al Gore is still fighting for climate change legislation. What he is fighting for is what he feels is politically possible, but it’s probably not going to be adequate to stop our climate from changing. Gore says there is a new bill being drafted and a bipartisan group of senators is working on its content. Just the fact that it’s bipartisan is bad news — Republicans tend to not believe that anything needs to be done about climate change, but they want jobs to result from some type of bill.
If this is the bill that contains allowing drilling for oil and lots of money for carbon capture and sequestration technology, it’s worthless. Coal will never be clean. The use of it has to simply stop. Oil will never be clean. We need to stop drilling for it and use instead some of the many kinds of clean and really renewable energies that are available to us today, right now. Our Congress seems to be unaware of the ramifications of climate change and even unaware of the importance of renewable energy, so I have little hope they will pass anything meaningful that addresses climate change. For that reason, I’m not going to call my Congressman. (What’s the point?) Instead, I’m going to send an email to Al Gore (through his action fund) and tell him to use his influence to fight harder for a real climate bill, not one that includes the fallacy of “clean coal” and drilling for more oil.
Today Gore sent out this email:
Winston Churchill said, “Sometimes doing your best is not good enough. Sometimes you must do what is required.”
Now is that time. Our elected officials must rise to face the challenge of the climate crisis. And we must demand that they do what is required before it is too late.
That’s what I wrote yesterday in the New York Times, and today I need your help to make sure our Senators pass a strong climate bill this year. The good news is we could be very close. A bipartisan group of Senators is drafting a bill right now that could be introduced within weeks — and critical negotiations over its content are taking place right now.
Continue Reading → Al Gore is Not Giving Up
By S. T., on October 11th, 2009
At the risk of stating the obvious, weather is not the same thing as global warming, but it is certainly affected by it. Right now the weather is so wacky where I live that it’s hard to believe. We have an inch of snow on the ground here in Minnesota as of October 11th. Forget the stereotype of Minnesota — it’s very unusual for it to be this cold here this early. Much of the weather around the world right now is abnormally wet and stormy. This may or may not be part of climate change, but it’s amazing to see snow on the ground here with green grass and green trees. Monday’s forecast here in the upper Midwest is an official “winter storm warning” with up to 3″ of snow predicted! In this type of cooler than normal weather, it’s hard to convince people of “global warming” if they are already skeptical. But weather is just weather, and it’s local. Regional and local weather should not be confused with global warming. In parts of the world it’s much hotter than normal. Global warming is based on the average world near-surface air temperature, not the temperature in your neighborhood. The Arctic especially has seen a lot of warming in recent years. Just keep that in mind when people complain about cold weather where they happen to live.
 The Miocene Era Today we know: You would have to go back at least 15 million years to find carbon dioxide levels on Earth as high as they are today, a UCLA scientist reported on Oct. 8 in the online edition of the journal Science.
Prediction: A devastating four-degree Celsius rise in global average temperature is possible in 50-60 years, climate scientists now believe. It could go even higher unless we act now.
“The last time carbon dioxide levels were apparently as high as they are today . . . global temperatures were 5 to 10 degrees Fahrenheit higher than they are today, the sea level was approximately 75 to 120 feet higher than today, there was no permanent sea ice cap in the Arctic and very little ice on Antarctica and Greenland,” said the paper’s lead author, Aradhna Tripati, a UCLA assistant professor in the department of Earth and space sciences. . . .
“Carbon dioxide is a potent greenhouse gas, and geological observations that we now have for the last 20 million years lend strong support to the idea that carbon dioxide is an important agent for driving climate change throughout Earth’s history,” she said.
 Aradhna Tripati. (Credit: Image courtesy of UCLA) By analyzing the chemistry of bubbles of ancient air trapped in Antarctic ice, scientists have been able to determine the composition of Earth’s atmosphere going back as far as 800,000 years, and they have developed a good understanding of how carbon dioxide levels have varied in the atmosphere since that time. But there has been little agreement before this study on how to reconstruct carbon dioxide levels prior to 800,000 years ago.
Tripati, before joining UCLA’s faculty, was part of a research team at England’s University of Oxford that developed a new technique to assess carbon dioxide levels in the much more distant past — by studying the ratio of the chemical element boron to calcium in the shells of ancient single-celled marine algae. Tripati has now used this method to determine the amount of carbon dioxide in Earth’s atmosphere as far back as 20 million years ago. . . . .
“A slightly shocking finding,” Tripati said, “is that the only time in the last 20 million years that we find evidence for carbon dioxide levels similar to the modern level of 387 parts per million was 15 to 20 million years ago, when the planet was dramatically different.”
Levels of carbon dioxide have varied only between 180 and 300 parts per million over the last 800,000 years — until recent decades, said Tripati, who is also a member of UCLA’s Institute of Geophysics and Planetary Physics. It has been known that modern-day levels of carbon dioxide are unprecedented over the last 800,000 years, but the finding that modern levels have not been reached in the last 15 million years is new. (Levels are currently at about 390 ppm).
Prior to the Industrial Revolution of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the carbon dioxide level was about 280 parts per million, Tripati said. That figure had changed very little over the previous 1,000 years. But since the Industrial Revolution, the carbon dioxide level has been rising and is likely to soar unless action is taken to reverse the trend, Tripati said.
Continue Reading → Two Plus Two Degrees More = Climate Devastation
By S. T., on May 2nd, 2009
The climate forum of the “major economies” in Washington was held last week, and the media coverage was meager. The Wall Street Journal painted a pessimistic picture:
“Another big meeting of climate-change diplomats has come and gone, and once again, journalists are struggling to understand what exactly was accomplished.
At a briefing with journalists, Yvo de Boer, head of the United Nations Climate Change Secretariat, caused chortles when – in response to a question about what the diplomats had agreed to – he said “it’s undeniably correct that this was the first meeting.” After the laughter died down, Mr. de Boer said the main achievement had been “to allow people to get comfortable” with one another and set the agenda for more meetings later this year.” Read more — Monsieur Obama: You could do better on CO2 targets
US News was more optimistic:
“Major developing countries like China are doing far more to address climate change than most Americans realize, the top climate change official at the United Nations said yesterday after a meeting in Washington of ministers from the world’s biggest greenhouse gas emitters.
The two-day meeting, requested by President Obama, brought together officials from 16 of the world’s major economic powers—the United States, the European Union, China, and India, among others—for a special, intimate round of negotiations as they work toward signing a new climate change treaty with the rest of the world by the end of the year.”
Yvo de Boer, the U.N.’s climate chief, called the meeting “very positive and constructive” and said it was “helped tremendously” by the support of Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. “There was a recognition around the table that this is a global crisis that cannot be solved without a global response,” de Boer said. “There is a universal recognition that the whole world needs to act on this.”
Such words, however, seem to fly in the face of what many U.S. lawmakers are saying about the rest of the world. . . “
It was critical, and that criticism will give the right-wing U.S. lawmakers an excuse to put off doing anything about climate change.
Continue Reading → News Coverage of the World Economies Climate Forum
By S. T., on February 19th, 2009
 We already have Frankenfood — vegetables, fruit, and grains, genetically engineered to produce the maximum growth in the least amount of time with the maximum size, shape, etc., for transport. That’s why we get funny-tasting bananas and tasteless strawberries and squarish, pinkish tomatoes that travel well but taste like nothing. Is engineering of nature a trend we want to carry out on a planetary scale with our climate? We might not have a choice in the matter, say some scientists, due to America’s incredible procrastination on the crisis of climate change.
A “Frankenplanet” scenario might be necessary to take the existing C02 out of the atmosphere because we need to keep C02 levels at 350ppm and we are currently at 386ppm. Some scientists have suggested CCS — carbon capture and sequestration, to remove the C02. Some scientists are suggesting planting more plants to absorb the C02 and act as a “carbon sink”. Others are suggesting bio-char. Biochar is biomass burned at low levels of heat to make charcoal and then bury it in the soil to take it out of the carbon cycle. It seems like a huge job, but it’s what NASA scientist James Hansen recommends. Those are the sane suggestions.
Other scientists are recommending even stranger things to save our atmosphere from runaway climate change, like geoengineering. That’s a very drastic remedy, but consider that we aren’t doing anything at all about climate change, you can see why it might be necessary. And, all this supposes that we stop putting C02 into the air. This is the biggest problem and it’s not happening. Geoengineering is back in the news recently in articles published by the on-line magazine Yale Environment 360 and by The Economist .
In the photo above you can see a “dead zone”. It’s a zone of water off our coasts that contains insufficient oxygen for fish and other life to exist in it. These dead zones are caused by pollution, runoff and too much carbon in the water, because the ocean is a big carbon sink too, and it’s nearly saturated with carbon. So these dead zones are popping up all over the world and they are getting bigger every year. Geoengineering seems like it might be necessary after all, if we are ever to stop the spread of these dead zones and to get carbon out of the air.
Geoengineering is not necessarily a crazy idea by itself, but when combined with this fact it is: we could avoid it by acting now on climate change, — but we won’t. Endless meetings around the world is not “action”. Action would involve an immediate cap on C02 with a target date that might seem impossible but isn’t, because we’d do it. But our government doesn’t have the cojones to do that, so scientists must work on ways to reflect sunlight on a planetary scale in case of an “emergency”. Quick, planet-wide sunlight reflection. That’s really the crazy part.
Continue Reading → Geoengineering Might be Necessary
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