Weather, climate, my cousin and I

Oceasn breaks thru from the bay side on Hattaras Island

Hurricane Irene created more damage in Western Mass and Vermont than it did on the Cape, but that's where I was-- in Wellfleet-- when the storm hit.  Although little rain fell, on Sunday we had sustained winds of 30 miles an hour and gusts up to 70 miles an hour.  But a couple of days before that, I knew Irene had been battering the Outer Banks of North Carolina, where my cousin and her partner lived. Turned out that she's OK, and her house stood, with minor damage.  Hattaras Island, however, was hit hard.

Wellfleet's Mayo Beach --on the bay side!- sea foam in foreground

 This year I've found myself tallying a lifetime of weather.  Probably my list isn't much different from other New Englanders-- flooding, blizzards, heat waves, hurricanes-- but I've experienced blizzards and floods while living alone in the woods, when I had moments of wondering if I'd make it through.  I didn't, however, ever expect to be looking at a tornado barreling up State Street straight toward me.  

I hope never to know a forest fire, a major earthquake or a tsunami.  I hope New England never suffers a drought as lengthy as what Texas is experiencing.  But I have a feeling that I'll have a few more major weather events to add to my tally in the next few years.

Here's quick explanation of the relationship between weather and climate change 

Relocatable houses: one adaptation to climate change

One coastal section of Australia is saying, you can't build a house by the sea unless you can move it if need be.  of course this is adaptation to climate change, not a solution, but  we're going to need both.




Photo from Aldseley's photostream at Flickr.

global warming state by state

Measure thirty years' worth of average temperatures from 1971 to year 200.  Now do the same thirty year measurement from 1981 to 2010 and compare the difference.  The state that's seen the biggest temperature increase?  Colorado.  But all of the Rocky Mountain states have seen big increases, and there isn't a single state in the country that isn't warmer now than 30 years ago.  Summit County Citizens Voice.

While large parts of the U.S. government, including a majority in Congress, continue to deny the reality of climate change, the U.S. Forest Service is not among them.  The service gets to see the reality up close.  See here for a list of the climate change presentations available on their site.

Wildfire Today has a report on climate change and wildfires.  Read it and weep.  In thirty years, there may be no forests left in Yellowstone National Park.

Biomass Incinerator: Springfield City Council finally hearing our opposition?

 Last Tuesday, Election Day, dozens of us flyered polling places in Springfield MA, urging voters to call their city councilors and say "NO!" to the wood-burning incinerator being proposed by Palmer Renewable Energy (PRE).  By the end of the week we had won over the remaining ward councilors, some of whom were going to sponsor a resolution for the December meeting, and then we received a message from at-large Council Tom Ashe, saying he was going to sponsor two resolutions for tonight-- one calling for a Full Environmental Impact Report of the proposal and the other saying that PRE has to come back to the City Council before their amended proposal is approved again.  Of course, PRE has to go back before the council in any case, which maybe Councilor Ashe doesn't know.

More than a dozen of us are signed up for the speak-out portion of the council meeting tonight.  We'll be focusing on the health impact a plant like this will have on our community.  We didn't expect to stick around for the rest of the meeting, but now that there's actually a resolution, we'll stay and see what happens.

I am not so naive as to think our battle is won-- the developers are smarmy and they'll have plenty to say-- but it's a step in the right direction.  I'll post about the results and next steps.


"We are talking about two grand projects in dispute. On the one side is the project of capital and imperialism, which signifies looting, which signifies death, and which signifies all of the false solutions to climate change that we reject entirely.

We assert that we need to change the system and not the climate. We assume the construction of another project: the project of life. A project based on principles that defend life, the Mother Earth, and that is based on another model of social, economic, political and cultural development. That is why we are here."
-Itelvina Masioli, a Brazilian leader of the international small farmer movement, La Via Campesina, speaking on April 20, 2010, at the People's World Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth in Cochabamba, Bolivia. Ronnie Cummins is attending the summit as a representative of the OCA.  Organic Consumers Organization

Photo from the City Project at Flickr.

Climate change legislation dead for now

 Three of the four lead editorials in the New York Times this morning bemoan the death of climate change legislation in Congress for this year.  I've been somewhat torn between the position of "Pass the bill, it's better than nothing" and "The bill is lousy, why institutionalize bad policy?"

Lee Wasserman's editorial comes the closest to explaining why the bill died.  His fourth point is the one that hit most home to me-- ma7ybe because it's the one point activists can do something to change:

Thread No. 4: The public sits it out. American history has few examples of presidents or Congresses upending entrenched interests without public pressure forcing their hand. Teddy Roosevelt is on Mount Rushmore for a reason.
Citizens wouldn’t support an approach they couldn’t understand to solve a problem our leaders refused to acknowledge. Even the earth’s flagging ability to support life as we know it couldn’t stir a public outcry. The loudest voices insisted that leaders in Washington do nothing.
They obliged.

We need an analysis that can place such apparently disparate pieces of our lives as the cost of good food, the prevalence of McDonald's and Burger King, lack of jobs and public transportation, winter heating costs, the upsurge in asthma and the BP oil spill into a single picture.  We've got work to do.

Photo from Squiffy's House of Fun.

New England Climate Summer

This week bicyclers from Students for a Just and Stable Future passed through Springfield on their New England Climate Summer tour.  We got them over to Gardening the Community and hooked them up with the Springfield Institute for a short bike tour of the city's North End.

On Thursday, they gave a presentation on climate change at the Forest Park Library and showed the following short film.  I'm going to watch it several times more until I really understand the feedback mechanisms that are bringing our climate so close to the tipping point.

Hope to see a lot more of these folks next year!

The law of unintended consequences as applied to the hole in the ozone

Some people remember exactly where they were the day the first men walked on the moon; I happen to remember exactly where I was when I first heard there was a hole in the ozone layer: summer, 1985, sitting at a picnic table at Nickerson State Park in Brewster, with my radio tuned to All Things Considered..  A hole in the ozone?  Inconceivable!

How quickly we can become accustomed to truly bad news, especially if the consequences are not immediately apparent-- although the nearly 1,000,000 U.S. residents who discovered they had skin cancer in 1985 would certainly disagree with me.   1985 was also the year that President Ronald Reagan declared the first National Skin Cancer Detection and Prevention Week, although he'd spent the first three years of his administration fighting regulation of chlorofluorocarbons, the chief but not sole cause of ozone thinning and, at the time, ubiquitous in aerosol sprays and air conditioning units.

So who's kept track of the hole in the ozone layer, which at times can be nearly twice the size of the continental U.S.?  (This is not a tidy little hole, by the way, with clear margins, but instead manifests as gradations in thinning.) Many of us remember the slow phase-out of  chlorofluorocarbons; we hoped the ozone layer could begin to repair itself.

That repair is slowly happening, although at the current rate, we won't reach pre-1980 levels until at least 2060.  But it turns out this good news has its dark side: in the Antarctic, high winds caused by the hole created moist, bright, fluffy clouds which also shielded the Antarctic from some of the effects of global warming, according to researchers published in today's Geophysical Research Letters,  The New York Times covered this report on January 25, as well as that of a dissenting voice, who feels that the effects of global warming itself will keep the high winds blowing, protecting the Antarctic.  Is this a good thing or a bad thing?  Gee, can't we have it all?  A repaired ozone hole and a reduction of global warming?
Graphics from The Ozone Hole

500 million households cook over an open fire

Want to see the climate change calendar set back by a decade or two?  And at a cost of only $15 billion?

Wired magazine reports that those households could use "clean stoves," at a cost of only $30 each.  Open fires produce black carbon.  Black carbon is thought to be responsible for nearl half of the 3.4 degree temperature increase in the Arctic since 1890.

It's not always the "big ideas" that can make a big difference.

Photo from Wayne Dixon Photography's photostream at Flickr.

Paint It White, Swine/Bird Flu and other sundry

Would you support using $3 billion in stimulus money to paint roofs white? Before you consign this idea to the trashbin of pork barrel projects, a new study estimates that painting surfaces white or light colored in warm parts of the world could entirely offset the carbon emissions of every car on the planet for the next twenty years! (Let's not use that as an excuse, though, to do nothing about improving fuel efficiency of our cars.) Miller-McCune.

Is factory farming creating a breeding ground for the next flu pandemic? Looks that way. It's not the animals per se but they way they they are raised, kept, bred and slaughtered that's dangerous.



A number of people I know are switching to "free-range" eggs, not only because of concerns about animal well-being, but also because the eggs are supposed to be better for you. But beware-- all is often not what it seems on these free-range farms-- check out HumaneMyth for a look into several free-range farms.

Here in Western Mass, I've been getting my eggs from The Country Hen, a small farm in Hubbardston, MA, which offers tours of the farm, and I'll definitely be heading up there this spring to see it with my own eyes. The smaller, more local farms are the ones most likely, I think, to be able to use best practices.

For a bit of good news, scientists believe they've discovered the underlying cause of Colony Collapse Disorder, which has been decimating bee populations in the U.S. and Europe, and which has now moved to Japan and other countries. According to Science Daily, the parasite Nosema Ceranae has been found in suffering bee colonies, and treated with success.

However, the Organic Consumers Association, which has been tracking Colony Collapse Disorder closely, thinks there's more to the disorder than just a parasite. Like other factory farmed animals, bees have been overtreated with antibiotics, bred to an abnormally large size, and stressed by being transported around the country. Just like those flu victims who have succumbed to their illness, "underlying causes" probably create a greater susceptibility to the Nosema parasite. Stay tuned.

Photo from Maryatexitzero's photostream at Flickr.

Is Paris (San Diego, Florida, etc.) Burning?

Bill Dusty commented about my last post that liberals worry too much. Bill likes to give me a (minor) hard time; I was going to point out to Bill that only the post before, I had appreciated a heron on Loon Pond, taking time to stop and smell the roses (which really shouldn't still be blooming in October).

But actually, an article from today's New York Times says it all better...

---

October 26, 2007

U.N. Warns of Urgent Environmental Problems

By JAMES KANTER

PARIS, Oct. 25 — The human population is living far beyond its means and inflicting damage to the environment that could pass points of no return, according to a major report being issued today by the United Nations.

Climate Change, the rate of extinction of species, and the challenge of feeding a growing population are among the threats putting humanity at risk, according to the United Nations Environment Program in its fourth Global Environmental Outlook since 1997.

“The human population is now so large that the amount of resources needed to sustain it exceeds what is available at current consumption patterns,” Achim Steiner, the executive director of the Environment Program, said in a telephone interview. Efficient use of resources and reducing waste now are “among the greatest challenges at the beginning in of 21st century,” he said.

The program described its report, which is prepared by 388 experts and scientists, as the broadest and deepest of those the United Nations has issued on the environment and called it “the final wake-up call to the international community.”

Over the last two decades the world population has increased by almost 34 percent, to 6.7 billion from 5 billion. But the land available to each person is shrinking, from 19.5 acres in 1900 to 5 acres by 2005, and is projected to drop to 4 acres by 2050, the report said.

Population growth combined with unsustainable consumption has resulted in an increasingly stressed planet where natural disasters and environmental degradation endanger millions of human beings as well as plant and animal species, the report said.

Persistent problems identified by the report include a rapid rise of so-called dead zones, where marine life no longer can be supported due to depleted oxygen levels from pollutants such as fertilizers, as well as the resurgence of diseases linked with environmental degradation.

The report comes two decades after a commission chaired by the former Norwegian prime minister warned that the survival of humanity was at stake from unsustainable development.

Mr. Steiner said many of the problems the Brundtland Commission identified are even more acute because not enough had been done to stop environmental degradation while flows of goods, services, people, technologies and workers has expanded, even to isolated populations.

He did, however, identify pockets of hope, noting that Western European governments had taken effective measures to reduce air pollutants and that Brazil had made efforts to roll back some deforestation in the Amazon. He said an international treaty to tackle the hole in the earth’s ozone layer had led to the phasing out 95 percent of ozone-damaging chemicals.

Mr. Steiner said parts of Africa could reach an environmental tipping point if changing rainfall patterns stemming from climate change turned semi-arid zones into arid zones and made agriculture that sustains millions of people much harder.

Mr. Steiner said another tipping point could occur in India and China if Himalayan glaciers shrink so much that they no longer supply adequate amounts of water to populations in those countries.

He also warned of a global collapse of all species being fished by 2050, if fishing around the world continued at its present pace.

The report said 250 percent more fish are being caught than the oceans can produce in a sustainable manner, and that global fish stocks classed as collapsed had roughly doubled to 30 per cent over the past 20 years.

The report said that current changes in biodiversity were the fastest in human history, with species becoming extinct a hundred times faster than the rate in the fossil record. It said 12 percent of birds are threatened with extinction; for mammals the figure is 23 percent and for amphibians it is more than 30 percent.

The report said concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere were about one-third greater than 20 years ago, and that the threat from climate change now was so urgent that only very large cuts in greenhouse gases of 60 to 80 percent could stop irreversible change.