"... Last year, CO2 emissions in the US fell to an 18-year low, the lowest level since 1994, and C02 emissions from coal fell to a 26-year low, the lowest since 1986. Further, as the WSJ reported this week (“Rise in U.S. Gas Production Fuels Unexpected Plunge in Emissions“)
the US now leads the world in reducing CO2 emissions thanks to the
shale revolution. At the same time that America is using less coal and
more shale gas and reducing C02 emissions, Europe and Asia are becoming
more coal-dependent for electricity generation, and increasing C02
emissions.
Compared to the last time that CO2 emissions were at 2012′s levels —
back in 1994 — real GDP in 2012 was 55% higher and the US population was
17.5% larger, making the drop in greenhouse gas emissions to an 18-year
low in 2012 even more impressive. Adjusted for the population, CO2 emissions per capita last year were the lowest since 1964, almost 50 years ago (see chart above, data here and here).
According to Department of Energy forecasts, the decline in per capita
CO2 emissions is expected to continue so consistently that within about
20 years, greenhouse gas emissions per person in the US will be below
the level in 1949! ..."
Climate change may be happening more slowly than scientists thought. But the world still needs to deal with it.
IT MAY come as a surprise to a walrus wondering where all the Arctic’s summer sea ice has gone. It could be news to a Staten Islander still coming to terms with what he lost to Hurricane Sandy. But some scientists are arguing that man-made climate change is not quite so bad a threat as it appeared to be a few years ago. They point to various reasons for thinking that the planet’s “climate sensitivity”—the amount of warming that can be expected for a doubling in the carbon-dioxide level—may not be as high as was previously thought. The most obvious reason is that, despite a marked warming over the course of the 20th century, temperatures have not really risen over the past ten years.
It is not clear why climate change has “plateaued” (see article). It could be because of greater natural variability in the climate, because clouds dampen warming or because of some other little-understood mechanism in the almost infinitely complex climate system. But whatever the reason, some of the really ghastly scenarios—where the planet heated up by 4°C or more this century—are coming to look mercifully unlikely. Does that mean the world no longer has to worry?
No, for two reasons. ...
Here is a graph from the article:
Here is a another chart from The Mail Online showing actual temps versus the forecasted temps based on computer models. The article is written in the publications typical bombastic style but graph is nevertheless helpful:
I'm glad to see reputable publications like the Economist addressing this
development. It is clear to even the most casual observer that a plateau is
happening. To keep behaving as if it isn't there and that people who are drawing
attention to it are sinister does not help the public discourse. In fact,
embracing anomalies that are particularly problematic for a narrative you want
to communicate is key to making winning broad public support. As I've said
before, I don't question scientific thought that human behavior has an impact
on the environment. I do question our ability, to date, to appreciate the
complexity involved or the sensitivity to human behavior. Prudence is an
important value here.
One of the perpetual challenges in my career as a modeler of
biochemical systems has been the need to balance accuracy with
reliability. This paradox is not as strange as it seems. Typically when
you build a model you include a lot of approximations supposed to make
the modeling process easier; ideally you want a model to be as simple as
possible and contain as few parameters as possible. But this strategy
does not work all the time since sometimes it turns out that in your
drive for simplicity you have left a crucial factor out. So now you
include this crucial factor, only to find that the uncertainties in your
model go through the roof. What’s happening in such unfortunate cases
is that along with including the signal from the previously excluded
factors, you have also inevitably included a large amount of noise. This
noise can typically result from an incomplete knowledge of the factor,
either from calculation or from measurement. Modelers of every stripe
thus have to tread a fine balance between including as much of reality
as possibility as possible and making the model accurate enough for
quantitative explanation and prediction.
It seems that this is exactly the problem that has started bedeviling climate change models. A recent issue of Nature had a very interesting article
on what seems to be a wholly paradoxical feature of models used in
climate science; as the models are becoming increasingly realistic, they
are also becoming less accurate and predictive because of growing
uncertainties. I can only imagine this to be an excruciatingly painful
fact for climate modelers who seem to be facing the equivalent of the
Heisenberg uncertainty principle for their field. It’s an especially
worrisome time to deal with such issues since the modelers need to
include their predictions in the next IPCC report on climate change
which is due to be published this year. ...
A very interesting piece showing the challenges of forecasting the future with mathematical models. I liked this paragraph.
... But the lesson to take away from this dilemma is that crude models
sometimes work better than more realistic ones. My favorite quote about
models comes from the statistician George Box who said that “all models
are wrong, but some are useful”. It is a worthy endeavor to try to make
models more realistic, but it is even more important to make them
useful.
"... President Obama was also right, from a Millennials’ perspective, to
emphasize the need for America to become a leader in sustainable energy
technologies. Seventy-one percent of Millennials believe
America’s energy policy should focus on developing “alternative
sources of energy such as wind, solar and hydrogen technology; only a
quarter believes that it should focus on “expanding exploration and
production of oil, coal and natural gas.” Similarly, the RICN’s “Blueprint for a Millennial America,”
a report prepared by thousands of Millennials who participated in
their “Think 2040” project, placed the development and usage of
renewable sources of energy at the top of all other environmental
initiatives.
The participants’ proposed solutions to the challenge, however, were
not focused on the kind of top-down change so common to Boomers.
.Instead the proposals emphasized taking action at the community
level. No one, the RICN blueprint said , should be asked to “make
sacrifices without fully considering the cost to communities” whose
“texture” is most likely to be impacted dealing with the challenge.
Many politicians fail to notice this unique Millennial perspective.
Members of the generation disagree sharply with their elders on the
best way to address environmental challenges, preferring to tackle them
through individual initiative and grassroots action rather than a
heavy-handed top down bureaucratic approach. ..."
That last sentence gives me hope for the future. ;-)
Today is the day our advanced technological culture turns to a cute furry rodent in Pennsylvania for a weather forecast. (The only thing a groundhog foretells in my yard is that I'm probably going to need some new landscaping.) Happy Groundhog Day!
"In the course of our strategic planning work with clients, we've
identified the things that make the difference between visions that fall
flat and those that turn on. Here's a no-nonsense summary of those
elements that you can use as a guide when you develop your strategic
plan."
"In this way a conception of subsidiarity “from below” is focused on the location of sovereignty from the “bottom up” rather than on the delegation of authority from the “top down.” We see these variegated approaches to subsidiarity and sovereignty work out in diverse ways in later centuries. It is with these different lenses of subsidiarity “from above” and “from below” that we can better understand the developments of the Roman Catholic principle of subsidiarity as such and the neo-Calvinist articulation of “sphere sovereignty” in the late nineteenth century and beyond."
"Pally’s essay is framed around the thesis that these evangelicals have “left the right.” But left it for what? What she describes is really another vision of conservatism: church-based charity in lieu of a government safety net; exemptions from government regulation for religious groups; federal funding of religious activities; and persistent sexual puritanism. Perhaps it’s more accurate to say they’ve left the radical right and are in the process of creating a new religious right, stripped of harsh rhetoric but still undergirded by conservative ideology. Which is a movement worth chronicling, but not, as Pally intimates, as the new saviors of civility in our religiously-inflected politics."
"In the past scientists have warned that up to five per cent of species are at risk of dying-out as a result of climate change, deforestation and development.
But a new analysis by the University of New Zealand found that this figure was five times greater than reality because the number of animals living in the wild in the first place had been over estimated."
10. I've written before that fear is not an effective motivator for long term change. This is particularly true for some climate change and environmental activism. You need to make new behaviors fun and engaging. WWF appears to have taken this strategy to heart. (Hard to go wrong with anthropomorphized critters but maybe they should consider the article immediately above.)
From the time of Charles Darwin science has painted a picture of our earliest ancestor in the image of a chimpanzee. Scientific American editor Katherine Harmon explains how new fossil evidence is redrawing the lines of human evolution.
Actually, I think we already know who our first ancestor was.
12. For the most part (with a few exceptions), when it comes to movies, if you can't tell your story in less than two hours, then I think you didn't edit the movie well. Hollywood would apparently beg to differ. Why Movies Today Are Longer Than Ever Before
"The average of the highest-grossing films from 20 years ago is 118.4 minutes compared to this year's 141.6 minutes."
15. Okay purists, Rule Change Eliminates a Fake Pickoff. Pitchers will no longer be able to fake a throw to third before throwing to another base. Good idea or bad?
Fear-mongering exaggeration about effects of global warming distracts us from finding affordable and effective energy alternatives.
In his second inaugural address on Monday, President Obama laudably
promised to "respond to the threat of climate change." Unfortunately,
when the president described the urgent nature of the threat—the
"devastating impact of raging fires, and crippling drought, and more
powerful storms"—the scary examples suggested that he is contemplating
poor policies that don't point to any real, let alone smart, solutions.
Global warming is a problem that needs fixing, but exaggeration doesn't
help, and it often distracts us from simple, cheaper and smarter
solutions.
For starters, let's address the three horsemen of the climate apocalypse that Mr. Obama mentioned.
Historical analysis of wildfires around the world shows that since 1950 their numbers have decreased
globally by 15%. Estimates published in the Proceedings of the National
Academy of Sciences show that even with global warming proceeding
uninterrupted, the level of wildfires will continue to decline until
around midcentury and won't resume on the level of 1950—the worst for
fire—before the end of the century.
Claiming that droughts are a consequence of global warming is also
wrong. The world has not seen a general increase in drought. A study
published in Nature in November shows globally that "there has been
little change in drought over the past 60 years." The U.N. Climate Panel
in 2012 concluded: "Some regions of the world have experienced more
intense and longer droughts, in particular in southern Europe and West
Africa, but in some regions droughts have become less frequent, less
intense, or shorter, for example, in central North America and
northwestern Australia."
As for one of the favorites of
alarmism, hurricanes in recent years don't indicate that storms are
getting worse. Measured by total energy (Accumulated Cyclone Energy),
hurricane activity is at a low not encountered since the 1970s. The U.S.
is currently experiencing the longest absence of severe landfall
hurricanes in over a century—the last Category 3 or stronger storm was
Wilma, more than seven years ago. ...
... In the long run, the world needs to cut carbon dioxide because it causes
global warming. But if the main effort to cut emissions is through
subsidies for chic renewables like wind and solar power, virtually no
good will be achieved—at very high cost.
Instead of pouring money into subsidies and direct production support
of existing, inefficient green energy, President Obama should focus on
dramatically ramping up investments into the research and development of
green energy. Put another way, it is the difference between supporting
an inexpensive researcher who will discover more efficient, future solar
panels—and supporting a Solyndra at great expense to produce lots of
inefficient, present-technology solar panels.
When innovation eventually makes green
energy cheaper, everyone will implement it, including the Chinese. Such a
policy would likely do 500 times more good per dollar invested than
current subsidy schemes. But first let's drop the fear-mongering
exaggeration—and then focus on innovation.
... But what if climate change isn’t the disaster we fear but instead one
more obstacle that humans can meet, one that may spur innovation and
creativity as well as demand ever more resilience? What if it ultimately
improves life as we know it? ...
... It does not, however, follow that the future arc of these changes is
disastrous. Unwanted, unwelcome and uneasy? For sure. Potentially
lethal? Yes. But so much of the debate over the past 30 years has been
over what is causing climate change, and how to prevent more
change from happening, that comparatively less energy has been spent on
adapting to it. In part, those most focused on these issues, from Green
parties in Europe to environmentalists in the United States, have often
believed that any discussion of mitigating the effects of climate change
is tantamount to giving up on preventing it. That has led to a jeremiad
mentality, epitomized by Al Gore and the scathing warnings of what lies
ahead in his hugely influential 2006 film An Inconvenient Truth.
The advantage of that approach was that it alerted many to the
dangers of climate change; the disadvantage was that it scared people
into passivity and closed fruitful avenues to policies focused on
mitigating the effects rather than halting the trend. And while halting
the trend might have been feasible (just) 20 years ago, the most we can
achieve now is to reduce the rate and intensity of climate change until
the world’s population levels off sometime in the middle of the 21st
century. Activists can and should still focus on reducing global
emissions, but not at the expense of answering how we will live with the
change.
Perhaps in recognition of the need of a new paradigm, “resilience”
has quietly become a buzzword. The ever provocative Nassim Nicholas
Taleb in his recent book Antifragile argues that only
organizations capable of meeting crises can survive crises. In the wake
of Hurricane Sandy, counties and cities in the Northeast have been
contemplating how best to prepare for future weather shocks. That has
led to renewed appreciation for cities, such as Rotterdam, that have
long undertaken environmental planning organized around the notion that
floods will happen no matter what humans do. The challenge isn’t to find
a way to prevent floods; it’s to find a way to live with them.
The two approaches could not be more distinct: One warns of
catastrophe and attempts to steer away from it. One pragmatically
accepts that some undesirable things will happen no matter what.
Rotterdam has thus focused both on preventing as much flooding as
possible (floodgates) and on urban infrastructure that is as
flood-resistant as possible: power grids that have dispersed nodes,
waterproof insulation, even floating parts of the city in case of truly severe inundation.
Far from signaling a resignation to climate change, resilience,
adaption and mitigation all shift energy away from holding back the tide
and toward innovation and creativity in meeting it. ...
I especially like the bolded portion below in thinking about complex human systems
... That approach is imperative not just for climate change but for multiple
areas that generate such anxiety about the future. The imbalance of the
financial system? Those are only made worse by the false belief that a
system could be created where such risks don’t exist; better to find
ways to mitigate the risks of a global interconnected financial system
than seek, Don Quixote-like, ways to eliminate risk. ...
Some provoactive stuff! I may not entirely agree with his assessment of particular risks but I think his strategy for addressing risk is right on.
I want to start with some apologies. For the record, here and upfront, I apologise for having spent several years ripping up GM crops. I am also sorry that I helped to start the anti-GM movement back in the mid 1990s, and that I thereby assisted in demonising an important technological option which can be used to benefit the environment.
As an environmentalist, and someone who believes that everyone in this world has a right to a healthy and nutritious diet of their choosing, I could not have chosen a more counter-productive path. I now regret it completely.
So I guess you’ll be wondering – what happened between 1995 and now that made me not only change my mind but come here and admit it? Well, the answer is fairly simple: I discovered science, and in the process I hope I became a better environmentalist.
When I first heard about Monsanto’s GM soya I knew exactly what I thought. Here was a big American corporation with a nasty track record, putting something new and experimental into our food without telling us. Mixing genes between species seemed to be about as unnatural as you can get – here was humankind acquiring too much technological power; something was bound to go horribly wrong. These genes would spread like some kind of living pollution. It was the stuff of nightmares.
These fears spread like wildfire, and within a few years GM was essentially banned in Europe, and our worries were exported by NGOs like Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth to Africa, India and the rest of Asia, where GM is still banned today. This was the most successful campaign I have ever been involved with.
This was also explicitly an anti-science movement. We employed a lot of imagery about scientists in their labs cackling demonically as they tinkered with the very building blocks of life. Hence the Frankenstein food tag – this absolutely was about deep-seated fears of scientific powers being used secretly for unnatural ends. What we didn’t realise at the time was that the real Frankenstein’s monster was not GM technology, but our reaction against it.
For me this anti-science environmentalism became increasingly inconsistent with my pro-science environmentalism with regard to climate change. I published my first book on global warming in 2004, and I was determined to make it scientifically credible rather than just a collection of anecdotes. ...
"... The first kind of Christianity avoids reactionary authoritarianism
but is often a therapeutic or vanilla mush that fails to ask anything of
anybody out of fear of giving offense. The second kind of Christianity
offers stern, clear moral directives that attract people seeking the
“specific instruction, even confrontation that calls us to grow in
discipleship” (p. 6), but disastrously embraces right-wing ideology and
baptizes that as the content of Christianity.
Both of these versions of Christianity are so deeply flawed, says
Stassen, that both are contributing to the alarming spread of secularism
in the U.S. The first version of Christianity is so thin as to lack any
particular reason why one would want to get out of bed on Sunday and go
to church; the second is so reactionary as to drive thoughtful people
into an anti-religious posture if they conclude that religion equals
right-wing authoritarianism.
I believe this is a stark but actually quite accurate depiction of
the primary problems afflicting the Protestantisms of the left and of
the right in the current U.S. setting. ..."
"While not exclusive to Latin America, the culture of family, support,
and living a life to spend time with your family, I think, is an
important part of Latin American culture that keeps people positive.
Being with those close to you and finding other friends and partners
that value that way of life is a key part of Latin American culture.
That might be the main reason why people remain positive: they are never
truly alone. Interestingly, many discussions and documentaries about
immigrant groups in the United States
show an internal conflict among many who move to the US and who do not
wish to lose their support systems in a new culture rooted in
individualism. While being motivated and entrepreneurial is valued, a
life being with your family, where you are never truly alone, is the
basis for many cultures in many parts of the world. Many new Americans
frown on the thought that children can detach themselves from their
family at 18 years of age. They believe people can only truly thrive as a
family."
"A Pew Internet Research Center survey released Thursday found that the
percentage of Americans aged 16 and older who read an e-book grew from
16 percent in 2011 to 23 percent this year. Readers of traditional books
dropped from 72 percent to 67 percent. Overall, those reading books of
any kind dropped from 78 percent to 75 percent, a shift Pew called
statistically insignificant."
Puerto Rico, Vermont, and Rhode Island are the only states (and territory) that saw a net decrease in population over the year.
The fastest growing region was the South (1.06% population growth) followed by the West (1.03% population growth).
North Dakota and the District of Columbia had the highest population growth, with 2.5% and 2.3% population growth, respectively. Texas, Wyoming, and Utah also saw major growth.
West Virginia and Maine are the only two states where people are dying faster than they are being born, with 0.93 and 0.99 births for each death.
Utah (3.44) and Alaska (3.33) had the highest birth to death ratio in 2012. That means 3.44 babies were born for each death in Utah.
Domestic migration determines the rate that people leave and enter states to and from other states. Per capita, more natives left New York, Illinois, New Jersey, Connecticut and Rhode Island to move somewhere else than any other states.
On the other hand, people flocked to North Dakota, D.C., Wyoming and South Carolina.
The states that had the highest rates of international migration — that is, the rate of immigrants coming in — were Hawaii, New Jersey, Florida, New York and D.C.
Puerto Rico is seeing a massive exodus — 1% of their population left last year.
15. When we think of transportation in the United States, few of us think about river and costal water transportation. Yet a great many goods and commodities are shipped on our rivers. The Midwest drought is having an impact on a major artery of that transportation network. The Mississippi River's Water Levels Are Dropping, And Could Shut Down Trade Next Week
"In other words, Americans are increasingly likely to have to purchase
and replace these goods some time soon as they get more and more worn
out. That's bullish for spending, jobs, and the economy as a whole."
"... Yet a few differences between the sexes do seem to hold up to scrutiny. One is spatial abilities. If men look at an object, for example, they are slightly faster at guessing what it would look like if it were rotated 180 degrees. There are plenty of women who do better than individual men. But overall there’s a stasticially significant difference in their average performance. This kind of difference carries over from one culture to another. It’s even detectable in babies. ...
... Whenever we reflect on human evolution, it pays to compare our species to other animals. And in the case of spatial abilities, the comparison is fascinating. Almost a century ago, the psychologist Helen Hubbet found that male rats could get through a maze faster than females. The difference can also be found in a number of other species. ...
... Clint and his colleagues propose a different explanation: male spatial ability is not an adaptation so much as a side effect. Males produce testosterone as they develop, and the hormone has a clear benefit in terms of reproduction, increasing male fertility. But testosterone also happens to produce a lot of side effects, including male pattern baldness and an increased chance of developing acne. It would be absurd to say acne was an adaptation favored by natural selection. The same goes for the male edge in spatial ability, Clint and his colleagues argue. They note that when male rats are castrated, they do worse at navigating a maze; when they are given shots of testosterone, they regain their skill. ..."
3. Four Harvard and MIT grads are experimenting with direct aid to the poor. "GiveDirectly, the brainchild of four Harvard and MIT graduate students, is so simple, it's genius. Give poor Kenyan families $1,000 -- and let them do whatever they want with it." Can 4 Economists Build the Most Economically Efficient Charity Ever?
"... Despite
its reputation as a leftwing utopia, Sweden is now a laboratory for
rightwing radicalism. Over the past 15 years a coalition of liberals and
conservatives has brought in for-profit free schools in education, has
sliced welfare to pay off the deficit and has privatised large parts of
the health service.
Their success is envied by the centre right
in Britain. Despite predictions of doom, Sweden's economy continues to
grow and its pro-business coalition has remained in power since 2006.
The last election was the first time since the war that a centre-right
government had been re-elected after serving a full term.
As the
state has been shrunk, the private sector has moved in. Göran Dahlgren, a
former head civil servant at the Swedish department of health and a
visiting professor at the University of Liverpool, says that "almost all
welfare services are now owned by private equity firms". ..."
"... We
have reached a point in our economy where it is becoming increasingly
clear that businesses are being measured not just for their profit, but
also for their impact. And I’m not just talking about writing a check or
funding a charity; I’m referring to business models for which community
involvement and inspirational brand building are the profit centers.
(Think Warby Parker, TOMS, and startups such as SOMA.) I recently went
to a conference where the founders of a startup posited a powerful idea:
the future of marketing is philanthropy. But I think the even bigger
idea is the future of business is morality. My grandfather saw this
early on.
At a time when the moral framework of America appears
to be fractured – or at the very least confused – businesses are in the
propitious position to espouse cultural standards that can help restore
values that our youth can use to build the next generation of positive
enterprise. In fact, whether businesses succeed in creating and
promoting positive cultures might determine whether they stay in
business at all. The future of business is morality, and the future is
now.
Whether it’s the job of the corporation or not to set the
moral tone for society, the expectation is trending towards companies
setting the right example for others to follow. With the sharp rise in
entrepreneurship, young companies have the opportunity to establish
strong cultures early on and share them with their communities. Money
must have a moral center, and from greater consciousness in business,
greater profit will follow. ..."
"New data show an increasing contribution of mental and behavioral disorders to deterioration in the health-related quality of life among teens in the U.S. and Canada over the past two decades, and increases elsewhere around the globe."
More people moved out of California in 2011 than moved in, according to the latest report from the U.S. Census Bureau, signaling that the Democrat-run state’s economic woes continue to drive residents away.
Most statisticians attribute California’s net loss of 100,000 people last year to its high cost of living, increased population density and troubling unemployment rate.
The widening middle class in Mexico is also encouraging some immigrants to remain in that country instead of moving to California.
Texas — home to lower taxes, less regulation and what the Manhattan Institute calls a “labor pool with the right skills at the right price” — is one of the most attractive destinations for companies departing from California, according to the Census Bureau. ...
"The country reported 85 executions in 2000 but only 43 in 2012, according to a new report released by the Death Penalty Information Center. Plus, far fewer people are being sentenced to death row in the first place. The year 2000 saw 224 new inmates sentenced to death, while 2012 saw only 78, according to the report."
15. Conor Friedersdorf at the Atlantic had a great piece Why 'If We Can Just Save One Child ...' Is a Bad Argument, referring to a statement President Obama made at Newtown, CT. When we deal with complex topics like gun control, we are always
talking about tradeoffs. For instance, I know how we can save more
than 30,000 lives. The were 32,367 traffic fatalities last
year. Let's set the speed limit to 5 miles per hour. Nearly all those lives would be saved. Should we do this "if we can save just
one more life"? I, like Friedersforf, am not advocating any particular
policy. I'm just pointing out the absurdity of making statements like this, as politicians often do.
"I found that the structural supports of evangelicalism are quivering as a
result of ground-shaking changes in American culture. Strategies that
served evangelicals well just 15 years ago are now self- destructive.
The more that evangelicals attempt to correct course, the more they
splinter their movement. In coming years we will see the old
evangelicalism whimper and wane."
He speaks of an Evangelical "collapse" having happened. That may be a bit premature but I think his articulation of trends is right.
... In short: We can now estimate, based on observations, how sensitive the temperature is to carbon dioxide. We do not need to rely heavily on unproven models. Comparing the trend in global temperature over the past 100-150 years with the change in "radiative forcing" (heating or cooling power) from carbon dioxide, aerosols and other sources, minus ocean heat uptake, can now give a good estimate of climate sensitivity.
The conclusion—taking the best observational estimates of the change in decadal-average global temperature between 1871-80 and 2002-11, and of the corresponding changes in forcing and ocean heat uptake—is this: A doubling of CO2 will lead to a warming of 1.6°-1.7°C (2.9°-3.1°F).
This is much lower than the IPCC's current best estimate, 3°C (5.4°F).
Mr. Lewis is an expert reviewer of the recently leaked draft of the IPCC's WG1 Scientific Report. The IPCC forbids him to quote from it, but he is privy to all the observational best estimates and uncertainty ranges the draft report gives. What he has told me is dynamite.
... That is an extraordinary claim and clearly requires extraordinary
evidence to support it. Much as I like Ridley (we swap stories and
information regularly) I’m not going to accept it on the basis of one
newspaper column. And Ridley wouldn’t expect me or you to either.
But if it is true then climate change stops being a looming diaster
threatening all we hold dear and becomes instead just a minor background
effect. One that we really don’t have to do anything particularly
active about at all: the advancing technologies of low or non-carbon
energy generation will take care of it all for us. ...
I share Worstall's caution but I also think that to
acknowledge that the earth is warming and humans play a contributing role,
something for which there seems to be strong agreement, doesn't tell you the
magnitude of the impact or what policy options are optimal. As I've pointed out
in early posts, the global average temperature has plateaued for more than a
decade. Violent hurricane activity has not increased. Arctic ice is melting,
although, as I understand it, it is summer ice not winter ice where the change
is being observed. Dueling scientists publish studies with partisans
cherry-picking the elements that are most supportive of their narrative. I do
not doubt that human behavior is having impact on the climate. But I am uncertain
of how robust climate models are and how serious the challenges are likely to
be.
... But Kloor isn’t really talking about politics. Rather, I think, it’s how
we conceive of the environment and environmentalism. The message of the
modernist greens is: in a world of 7 billion plus people, all of
whom want (and deserve) to live modern, consuming lives, we need to be
pragmatic about how we use—and how much we protect—nature. We don’t have any other choice, so we’d better start dealing with the realities on the ground.
The realist in me thinks the modernist greens are right. There are simply too many of us,
and we want too much, for our footprint on the Earth to get anything
but bigger. And I’m cheered by the scientists and thinkers who suggest
that we might be able to have it all—a huge, thriving human population,
and an environment that can support it—as long as we plan right. What’s
more, I’m very conscious that industrialization and globalization have
largely been forces for good, expanding human access to wealth, health
and longevity. There’s no better time in history to be human being.
Industrialization is not going to be rolled back—and it shouldn’t be.
There’s also a larger social shift at work that’s altering our concept of nature. Today more human beings live in cities
than live in the countryside, and that proportion will only grow in the
future: by 2050, as many as three-quarters of the estimated 10 billion
people on Earth will live in urban areas. This is a historic change—as
recently as 1800 just 2% of the world’s population lived in cities—and
it’s a sign that humanity, inevitably, is decoupling from nature. I
suspect that’s true even of environmentalists, who are just as likely as
anyone else to come into contact with what passes for wilderness these
days more in a managed park than untrammeled rainforest or woodland.
For a lot of us, “environmental issues” increasingly have to do with
improving urban life—think cleaner mass transit or access to organic
food in farmer’s markets. As the writer Emma Marris argued in her book Rambunctious Garden,
environmentalism needs to stop drawing simplistic lines between what’s
natural and what’s manmade—with the former always good and the latter
always bad—and learn to celebrate the biodiversity that’s in our
backyards. ...
(Reuters) - The amount of land needed to grow crops worldwide is at a peak, and a geographical area more than twice the size of France will be able to return to its natural state by 2060 as a result of rising yields and slower population growth, a group of experts said on Monday.
Their report, conflicting with United Nations
studies that say more cropland will be needed in coming decades to
avert hunger and price spikes as the world population rises above 7
billion, said humanity had reached what it called "Peak Farmland".
More crops for use as biofuels and increased meat consumption in emerging economies such as China and India, demanding more cropland to feed livestock, would not offset a fall from the peak driven by improved yields, it calculated.
If the report is accurate, the land freed up from crop farming would be some 10 percent of what is currently in use - equivalent to 2.5 times the size of France, Europe's biggest country bar Russia, or more than all the arable land now utilized in China.
"We
believe that humanity has reached Peak Farmland, and that a large net
global restoration of land to nature is ready to begin," said Jesse
Ausubel, director of the Program for the Human Environment at the
Rockefeller University in New York.
"Happily,
the cause is not exhaustion of arable land, as many had feared, but
rather moderation of population and tastes and ingenuity of farmers," he
wrote in a speech about the study he led in the journal Population and
Development Review. ...
WASHINGTON
(AP) -- A growing majority of Americans think global warming is occurring, that
it will become a serious problem and that the U.S. government should do
something about it, a new Associated Press-GfK poll finds. …
… The poll found 4 out of every 5 Americans said climate
change will be a serious problem for the United States if nothing is done about
it. That's up from 73 percent when the same question was asked in 2009. …
“Good
news! People are finally coming around to believing what scientists have been
telling us all along!” I can just hear some folks declaring. Hold that thought
for a moment. The article goes on to say:
…
The biggest change in the polling is among people who trust scientists only a
little or not at all. About 1 in 3 of the people surveyed fell into that
category. …
…
[John] Krosnick [Stanford social psychologist],
who consulted with The Associated Press on the poll questions, said the changes
the poll shows aren't in the hard-core "anti-warming" deniers, but in
the next group, who had serious doubts.
"They don't believe
what the scientists say, they believe what the thermometers say," Krosnick
said. "Events are helping these people see what scientists thought they
had been seeing all along." …
The rise in belief in global
warming does not stem from science, but inductive reasoning based on heuristics
… relying on personal experience as evidence of a broader reality. It is possible this
will be the warmest year on record in the United States but more moderate
globally. People in the United States look at their thermometers and see warmer
temperatures. The news shows super-storm Sandy. Therefore, from experience in our
particular context it is reasoned that
there is a global trend.
The irony is that average
global temperatures haven’t changed much for more than a decade. Global hurricanes
and cyclones that make landfall are not more prevalent, as has been predicted. In fact, the last four
years have been quite mild. I’m not making the case that climate change isn’t
happening. Climate models don’t necessarily preclude plateaus in change. Rather
I’m saying that if you are a skeptic, then recent trends should bolster
skeptical interpretations. Yet, because of personal experience, some science
skeptics are extrapolating from their narrow context to global realities. Furthermore,
another survey finds that One
in three Americans see extreme weather as a sign of biblical end times. This
is not good news for science.
But I want to suggest that
there is more to the story than this. Many true believers in climate change
insist that the science is settled on this matter and no further dissent may be
tolerated. Yet, as I have written about earlier, some of these folks are
staunch skeptics about the safety of genetically modified crops and nuclear
power, despite what the scientific community says. (see Why
Are Environmentalists Taking Anti-Science Positions? and The
Anti-Science Left) The issue is not so much that they are persuaded by
science, as it is that claiming scientific authority for conclusions reached by
other means (heuristics? ideology?) is rhetorically useful. This is not good
news for science either.
Any number of futurists
have written about this challenge. For our entire human history, individual lives were
consumed with challenges that were immediately present to us … like shelter from
the elements and not becoming prey for some animal. But with the recent explosion
in knowledge, technology, and economics, many of the imminent threats we face
have been tamed and the new challenges we face are vastly more complex. Over
reliance on heuristic models and rigid ideological sense-making strategies,
once essential, can become obstacles to good decisions. The challenge for the next several
generations is going to be learning how to develop social institutions that
effectively reflect on and address complex challenges.
... Across the nation, conservation groups in partnership with ranchers
are using cattle to restore native plant species by grazing invasive
grasses. Other groups are working with fishermen to fish sustainably,
and using logging and mining profits to pave way for forest and salmon
restoration.
"There's been a shift to working more with
industries," said Lynn Huntsinger, professor of rangeland ecology at the
University of California, Berkeley. "This is a human landscape. We need
food, we need wood, people are crazy about eating salmon. Working
closely with those who produce on the land offers opportunities for ...
teaching them about conservation."
In the past, conservationists
relied on purchasing land and setting it aside, away from human
activity. Logging, ranching or mining were seen as harmful and
incompatible with preservation.
But in recent years, the use of
conservation easements to retire development rights on private land has
exploded. The easements, which cost a fraction of what it would cost to
buy the property, allow landowners to continue working the land. ...
ead more here: http://www.kansascity.com/2012/12/15/3967248/conservationists-team-up-with.html#storylink=cpy
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1. Pray for Egypt Today!
More than 50 million Egyptians are voting today on a constitution that would be a giant step backward for Egypt and much of the Middle East, marginalizing women and religious minorities. A nation that has historically been a voice of moderation, the largest Muslim nation in the region, will likely move toward becoming an Islamist state. Remember to pray for Egypt. (See the Economist'sThe Founding Brothers)
2. Our prayers are with families of the victims at the Sandy Hook elementary school. Grace and peace to the entire community.
Traffic deaths in the USA continued their historic decline last year,
falling to the lowest level since 1949, the government announced
Monday.
A total of 32,367 motorists, bicyclists and pedestrians died in 2011,
a 1.9% decrease from 2010. Last year’s toll represents a 26% decline
from 2005, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA)
said. ...
... The trend has emerged in big cities like New York and Los Angeles, as
well as smaller places like Anchorage, Alaska, and Kearney, Neb. The
state of Mississippi has also registered a drop, but only among white
students.
“It’s been nothing but bad news for 30 years, so the fact that we have
any good news is a big story,” said Dr. Thomas Farley, the health
commissioner in New York City, which reported a 5.5 percent decline in
the number of obese schoolchildren from 2007 to 2011....
....The experiment, in April, used a disabled form of the virus that causes AIDS to reprogram Emma’s immune system genetically to kill cancer cells. ...
... The research is still in its early stages, and many questions remain.
The researchers are not entirely sure why the treatment works, or why it
sometimes fails. One patient had a remission after being treated only
twice, and even then the reaction was so delayed that it took the
researchers by surprise. For the patients who had no response
whatsoever, the team suspects a flawed batch of T-cells. The child who
had a temporary remission apparently relapsed because not all of her
leukemic cells had the marker that was targeted by the altered T-cells. ...
....In 2011, 1.4 million chlamydia infections were reported to the CDC.
The rate of cases per 100,000 people increased 8%, to 457.6 in 2011 from
423.6 in 2010.
The CDC reported 321,849 gonorrhea infections. The
rate increased 4% to 104.2 cases per 100,000 in 2011 from 100.2 in
2010. Like chlamydia, gonorrhea can lead to pelvic inflammatory disease,
a major cause of infertility in women.
Last year, 13,970 primary and secondary syphilis cases were reported. The rate of 4.5 cases per 100,000 was unchanged from 2010. ...
7. You may be bilingual but can you write in two languages, one with each hand, at the same time?!
10. Kevin Drum of Mother Jones speculates on why liberals have more exaggerated perceptions of political differences. We Are More Alike Than We Think
11. A surprising "right to work" bill was signed into law in Michigan, of all places. That has spurred a lot of debate about unions and the right to work. Michael Kinsley wrote a thoughtful piece opposing RTW, The Liberal Case Against Right-to-Work Laws. David Henderson has piece in support of RTW, The Economics of "Right to Work".
12. Slate has a piece about The Great Schism in the Environmental Movement.
Keith Kloor opines on the division between mondernist environmentalists
(or eco-pragmatists) and conservation traditionalists.
...
Modernist greens don't dispute the ecological tumult associated with the
Anthropocene. But this is the world as it is, they say, so we might as
well reconcile the needs of people with the needs of nature. To this
end, Kareiva advises conservationists to craft "a new vision of a planet
in which nature—forests, wetlands, diverse species, and other ancient
ecosystems—exists amid a wide variety of modern, human landscapes."
This
shift in thinking is already under way. For example, ecologists
increasingly appreciate (and study) the diversity of species and
importance of ecosystem services in cities, giving rise to the
discipline of urban ecology. That was unthinkable at the dawn of the
modern environmental movement 50 years ago, when greens loathed cities
as the antithesis of wilderness. ...
13. One of the creepiest Twilight Zone episodes I remember from my
childhood was when this woman ends up trapped in a department store at
night. The mannequins begin calling to her. She discovers she is actually a mannequin who
has over stayed her time out in the world and it is time for the next
mannequin to spend some time outside the store. This story confirms my worst nightmares: In Some Stores, the Mannequins Are Watching You
15. One of the biggest concerns about fracking technology is the enormous amount of water it uses. A company has figured out how to recycle water so that far less water is used in the fracking process. Solving fracking's biggest problem
... 3D printing represents the latest version of what industry experts call
"additive manufacturing" — a way to turn practically any computer
designs into real objects by building them up layer-by-layer using
plastics, metals or other materials. The technology could end up
affecting every major industry — aerospace, defense, medicine, transportation, food, fashion — and have an even bigger impact on U.S. manufacturing than the robot revolution. ...
20. Michael Cheshire has a great piece in Leadership Journal on "What I learned about grace and redemption through my friendship with a Christian pariah." Going To Hell with Ted Haggard
".... A while back I was having a business lunch at a sports bar in the
Denver area with a close atheist friend. He's a great guy and a very
deep thinker. During lunch, he pointed at the large TV screen on the
wall. It was set to a channel recapping Ted's fall. He pointed his
finger at the HD and said, "That is the reason I will not become a
Christian. Many of the things you say make sense, Mike, but that's what
keeps me away."
It was well after the story had died down, so I had to study the screen
to see what my friend was talking about. I assumed he was referring to
Ted's hypocrisy. "Hey man, not all of us do things like that," I
responded. He laughed and said, "Michael, you just proved my point. See,
that guy said sorry a long time ago. Even his wife and kids stayed and
forgave him, but all you Christians still seem to hate him. You guys
can't forgive him and let him back into your good graces. Every time you
talk to me about God, you explain that he will take me as I am. You say
he forgives all my failures and will restore my hope, and as long as I
stay outside the church, you say God wants to forgive me. But that guy
failed while he was one of you, and most of you are still vicious to
him." Then he uttered words that left me reeling: "You Christians eat
your own. Always have. Always will."
He was running late for a meeting and had to take off. I, however, could
barely move. I studied the TV and read the caption as a well-known
religious leader kept shoveling dirt on a man who had admitted he was
unclean. And at that moment, my heart started to change. I began to
distance myself from my previously harsh statements and tried to
understand what Ted and his family must have been through. When I
brought up the topic to other men and women I love and respect, the very
mention of Haggard's name made our conversations toxic. Their reactions
were visceral."
21. Leonardo Bonucci got a yellow card for faking collision during a
soccer game. It should have been a red card. No one deserves to be a professional soccer player with acting skills
this bad!
... From 2009 to 2013, key changes in the AEO [Annual Energy Outlook] include:
Downward revisions in the economic growth outlook, which dampens energy demand growth
Lower transportation sector consumption of conventional fuels based on updated fuel economy standards, increased penetration of alternative fuels, and more modest growth in light-duty vehicle miles traveled
Generally higher energy prices, with the notable exception of natural gas, where recent and projected prices reflect the development of shale gas resources
Slower growth in electricity demand and increased use of low-carbon fuels for generation
Increased use of natural gas
Power sector transformation, based on decarbonization of the generation mix, occurs because natural gas and renewables gain market share at the expense of coal, reflecting:
Resource economics—high domestic production of natural gas at historically low prices, reflecting increased production of shale gas
Regulation—updated state renewable portfolio standards and efficiency standards, and cap-and-trade provisions of California Assembly Bill 32, as well as implementation of federal policies to reduce sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxide emissions, the Mercury and Air Toxics Standards and other policies and measures at local, state, and federal levels
AP has a story summarizing Global Trends 2030, a report put out by the U.S. Intelligence community.
... The study said that in
a best-case scenario, Americans, together with nearly two-thirds of the
world's population, will be middle class, mostly living in cities,
connected by advanced technology, protected by advanced health care and
linked by countries that work together, perhaps with the United States
and China cooperating to lead the way.
Violent
acts of terrorism will also be less frequent as the U.S. drawdown in
troops from Iraq and Afghanistan robs extremist ideologies of a rallying
cry to spur attacks. But that will likely be replaced by acts like
cyber-terrorism, wreaking havoc on an economy with a keystroke, the
study's authors say.
In countries where there are declining birth rates and an aging population like the U.S., economic growth may slow.
"Aging
countries will face an uphill battle in maintaining living standards,"
Kojm said. "So too will China, because its median age will be higher
than the U.S. by 2030."
The rising populations
of disenfranchised youth in places like Nigeria and Pakistan may lead
to conflict over water and food, with "nearly half of the world's
population ... experiencing severe water stress," the report said.
Africa and the Middle East will be most at risk, but China and India are
also vulnerable.
That instability could lead
to conflict and contribute to global economic collapse, especially if
combined with rapid climate change that could make it harder for
governments to feed global populations, the authors warn.
That's
the grimmest among the "Potential Worlds" the report sketches for 2030.
Under the heading "Stalled Engines," in the "most plausible worst-case
scenario, the risks of interstate conflict increase," the report said.
"The U.S. draws inward and globalization stalls." ...
Here is the overview from the report:
Over the next two decades, the relative power of major international
actors will shift markedly. Around 2030, after nearly a century as the
preeminent global economic power, the United States will be surpassed
by China as the world’s largest economy. With its trade in goods
expected to nearly double that of the U.S. and Europe, China’s
international economic clout will reach new heights. By 2030, India
will become the world’s most populous country and third-largest economy,
while Brazil’s economy will rank fourth in size. India and Brazil will
join China at the high table of 21st century international
politics alongside the United States, even as the relative weight of
Russia and Japan diminishes. The European economy will remain in the
top tier, but it is not clear whether Europe will be able to act with
common purpose to leverage this source of strength.
With its enhanced economic base, Beijing could rival Washington in
overall military spending, even as a slowing Chinese economy and
internal political conflict complicate China’s ability to lead
internationally. The United States will remain primus inter pares
in light of its continued advantages across the full spectrum of
national power and the legacy benefits of its leadership. It will,
however, be operating in a post-Western world in which the bulk of
global economic power is held by countries whose per capita incomes are
far below those of the traditional great powers. This reality will
leave China, India, Brazil, and other players focused on internal
development and domestic challenges, torn between their desire to be
global powers and their interest in free-riding on Western management of
the international system.
How will the rise of the rest impact the international system? The National Intelligence Council’s draft Global Trends 2030: Alternative Worlds maps out three broad scenarios:
Reverse Engines. Under this scenario, the
international system would consist of several powerful countries — but
no single state or bloc of states would have the political or economic
leverage to drive the international community toward collective action.
Such a world, characterized by a global vacuum of power, assumes that
the United States will no longer be willing or capable of sustaining the
predominant leadership role it has assumed since 1945. With no other
country able to step in to replace the U.S. as a global leader, the
resulting divergence of interests would lead to fragmentation and the
inability of great powers to work cooperatively to solve global issues.
Mercantilism and protectionism could lead economic globalization to go
into reverse, constraining technological breakthroughs required to
manage scarce global resources. Conflict and disorder would follow.
Great Power Convergence. An alternative scenario is
what the NIC calls a “fusion” world, in which major powers work
together to adopt and enforce a set of globally accepted rules and
norms. As U.S. predominance over the international system recedes, other
emerging powers would step in to assume greater responsibility for the
management of international affairs commensurate with their swelling
economic might. Emerging powers emerge as full stakeholders in a global
order that is transformed by power shifts but remains liberal and
pluralistic. Great power concert (perhaps enabled by democratization in
China) to meet global challenges increases the stability of the
international system even as power is diffused within it. U.S.
resilience enables it to create enduring partnerships with rising powers
to sustain the basis of liberal order. Technological advances create
new possibilities for joint management of key global challenges,
rewarding positive-sum behavior by the great powers.
Multipolar Divergence—U.S. Primacy. A third
scenario, one the NIC calls “fragmentation,” involves a multipolar
system characterized by a divergence of views among great powers that
challenges global governance. The United States would continue to
maintain disproportionate global influence and leverage that influence
to address global challenges by working through coalitions of
like-minded states. A multispeed global economy accelerates the
diffusion of power but an alternative coalition to the West does not
form, with developing giants consumed by their domestic challenges –
even as the global middle class explodes in ways that transform politics
within the rising powers. With inclusive global institutions
effectively stalemated, the United States instead turns to its old and
new allies in Europe and Asia, who would continue to see Washington as
their partner of choice in advancing the norms and rules of a liberal
order. The risk of conflict increases with the continued rise of new
powers like China and the rapid pace of technological change.
One key conclusion of the NIC study is that the future role of the
United States in the international system is a decisive variable in
determining what kind of “alternative world” will exist in 2030. The
choices U.S. leaders make – about how to marshal (and preserve) domestic
resources, how vigorously to assert U.S. military and economic
leadership overseas, and how much to invest in alliances old and new –
will be central to determining which of the above pathways the
international system will follow over the coming 20 years. To a certain
extent, the answer to the question of how the “rise of the rest”
impacts the U.S.-led international system is that it is not up to them…
so much as it is up to us.
... Here’s what I bet goes on when this question is posed—and I want to
say up front that I think this way myself. I do not like long lines and
traffic jams. I do not like that I have to drive 60 minutes to get to a
decent natural area or that when I get to the Cascades for my hike, I’m
likely to run into dozens of others on the same trail. I do not like how
built up our coastline has become and how hard it is to get access to
beaches. And so on.
In other words, I do not like the impact of “too many people” on my
personal happiness. Rarely do we admit that this is the basis of our
concerns about human population. Instead, we couch them in terms of
“exceeding the Earth’s carrying capacity” or “causing the extinction of
species.” ...
... And when we so easily jump to the conclusion there are too many
people on the planet, what solutions does it suggest? Who should be
eliminated? Who should not be allowed to have children? And who gets to
decide? Is it really that there are too many people on the planet? Or is
it more about the kinds of settlements and economies we have built?
Lastly, the entire notion of too many people neglects those studies
showing that large numbers of people, especially concentrations of
people in cities, are engines for innovation and cultural advances. (4)
For example, new patents and inventions overwhelmingly come from
cities—and the larger the city, the more patents and inventions are
produced. ...
... More importantly, the question of whether there are too many people
is the wrong one for conservationists to ask. The right questions are:
What quality of life do we want all people on the planet to share? And
how can we achieve that quality of life while preserving as many species
and ecosystems as possible?
Conservation of nature has a lot to contribute to answering those
questions and to enhancing that quality of life. So don’t automatically
nod in agreement when a colleague says: “The problem is, there are too
many people on the planet.” People can be the solution as well as the
problem.
It is popular these days to decry consumerism ... and rightly so. Voices in our world tell us that our life consists of the
products we buy and the things we own. It is materialism.
But the irony is that many consumerism critics fall prey to is their own form
of materialism. They see human beings primarily as subtracting from a fixed
stock of resources. Human beings are parasitic, adding nothing. Reduce the number of humans and you save the planet.
Human beings do not just consume, though that is part of our reality. All forms of life consume. But human beings also add to the world in a way that other beings in the
created order do not. They add creativity and intelligence to the world. With
creativity and intelligence come beauty, ingenuity, community, and flourishing.
There are challenges. Through
unlocking powers of productivity and exchange we have found we can radically
improve the material status of people around the world. But we find we have to
adapt our methods and perspectives to sustain the changes we have made ... doing more and more
with less and less, as we minimize our destructive impact. We have to find ways to be stewards of the world that recognize more than just our material quality of life. As Christians, we
know that sin often twists our creativity and intelligence toward destructive behavior. The answer to these challenges is not to dehumanize people by framing them in materialistic terms as consumption units. Rather it is to work
toward unlocking and unleashing the creativity and intelligence of everyone as
we work for a flourishing shalom-filled world.
This [United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization] report, Innovations in Sustainable Agriculture: Supporting Climate-Friendly Food Production,
discusses six sustainable approaches to land and water use, in both
rural and urban areas, that are helping farmers and other food producers
mitigate or adapt to climate change—and often both. They are:
Building Soil Fertility: Alternatives to
heavy chemical use in agriculture, such as avoiding unnecessary tilling
or raising both crops and livestock on the same land, can help to
drastically reduce the total amount of energy expended to produce a crop
or animal, reducing overall emissions.
Agroforestry: Because trees remove carbon
dioxide from the atmosphere, keeping them on farms whenever possible can
help mitigate climate change. Agroforestry also keeps the soil
healthier and more resilient by maximizing the amount of organic matter,
microorganisms, and moisture held within it. Agroforestry also provides
shade for livestock and certain crops, and creates habitats for animals
and insects, such as bees, that pollinate many crops.
Urban Farming:Growing food in
cities can mitigate the greenhouse gas emissions released from the
transport, processing, and storage of food destined for urban
populations. Urban agriculture also increases the total area of
non-paved land in cities, making urban landscapes more resilient to
flooding and other weather shocks, while improving the aesthetic value
of these landscapes.
Cover Cropping/Green Manure:Cover
cropping, also known as green manure, is the practice of strategically
planting crops that will deliver a range of benefits to a farming
system, and often plowing these crops into the soil instead of
harvesting their organic matter. Planting cover crops improves soil
fertility and moisture by making soil less vulnerable to drought or heat
waves. Cover crops also serve as a critical deterrent against pests and
diseases that affect crops or livestock, such as corn root worm or Rift
Valley fever, particularly as warmer temperatures enable these
organisms to survive in environments that were previously too cold for
them.
Improving Water Conservation and Recycling:
Innovations in water conservation, including recycling wastewater in
cities, using precise watering techniques such as drip irrigation rather
than sprinklers, and catching and storing rainwater, all help to reduce
the global strain on already-scarce water resources.
Preserving Biodiversity and Indigenous Breeds:Growing
diverse and locally adapted indigenous crops, such as yams, quinoa, and
cassava, can provide a source of income and improve farmers’ chances of
withstanding the effects of climate change, such as heat stress,
drought, and the expansion of disease and pest populations. Preserving
plant and animal biodiversity also reduces farmers’ overreliance on a
small number of commodity crops that make them vulnerable to shifts in
global markets.
By tapping into the multitude of climate-friendly farming practices
that already exist, agriculture can continue to provide food for the
world’s population, as well as be a source of livelihood for the 1.3
billion people who rely on farming for income and sustenance. If
agriculture is to play a positive role in the global fight against
climate change, however, agricultural practices that mitigate or adapt
to climate change will need to receive increased research, attention,
and investment in the coming years.
This is a good piece about the growing challenges of fresh water supplies around the world. After detialing at length the challenges the article concludes:
... But the picture may not be as bad as it seems. While the projections about the growing global water crisis drastically underestimate how bad things really are, says Upmanu Lall, director of the Water Center at Columbia University, they also underestimate the scale of waste and the water efficiency improvements that could make adaptation easier.
"Things could actually be worse than what these guys are putting out," says Professor Lall. "They are too optimistic about the current situation compared to what it actually is. And they're too pessimistic about the situation for the future ... I do see a way to get there."
That's what he's learned from much of his work on water issues in India, which he calls "a basket case for water." He adds: "You could actually eliminate water stress in India if you were just a little bit smarter about which places you were procuring which crops from."
Science, he says, is part of the solution: Agricultural efficiency can be drastically improved with a better mix of what is grown where, accounting for geography, water constraints, and income; governments will have a role to play in setting economic signals to promote conservation and the right mix of crops, and regulation to ensure access in urban and rural areas; cheap soil-moisture sensors could improve agricultural water efficiency by 10 to 15 percent by reducing waste in irrigation systems; recycled waste water could save in the billions of dollars that the US spends purifying water up to drinking quality even though only 10 percent is used for drinking and cooking; flood-control systems can be repurposed to store water.
But most important, says Lall, "the economics of it has to be sorted out." Water allocations for personal consumption and ecological preservation should be protected, he said, but about 75 percent of water consumed globally should be subject to more competitive pricing. In a sense, he argues, water should be treated like oil, allowing developers a guaranteed allocation as an incentive to develop it. About a quarter of water supplies should be protected to ensure people have water for drinking and to preserve ecology, he says. But everyone – from the home-owner watering the lawn to big industry and agriculture – should pay more for water.
Instability, conflict, and economic stagnation may be the prod societies need before they adapt, says Lall.
He deems the US system for allocating water rights as "not too bad." Where those rights were not tradable, he says, "things are a mess."
Some states – Arizona, California, Idaho, and Texas – have water banks that facilitate leases between rights-holders and users. But since these water banks don't incorporate forecasting, they fail to make deals until a drought begins. What the US needs, says Lall, is a national water policy that incorporates forecasts, trading mechanisms, options, and the coordinated use of both surface and ground-water resources.
While the tools and strategies exist to cope with the impending pressures of a warmer and more populous planet, Lall says, "the question is, will we do it right?"
I think another possibility as that as water prices rise, desalinization technologies beceome more attractive. A high percentage of the world population lives withing 100 miles of an ocean. The technology is not capable of addressing our present challenges but as technology advances and water costs rise, I suspect this will become part of the solution as well.
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1. When I was a kid, I used to watch Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom on Saturdays. That was the beginning of my life-long appreciation for big cats. One of the organizations we support is the Turperntine Creek Wildlife Refuge for big cats in Arkansas. Check out this Nat Geo super slo-mo video of a running cheetah. Be sure to go to minute 5:00, and see him from the front. His head barely moves. Just amazing!
7. If you are a man, getting along with the in-laws means you have 20% higher chance of not getting divorced. If you are a woman, getting along well the in-laws makes you 20% more likely to get divorced. Getting Along With The In-Laws Makes Women More Likely To Divorce
"The Supreme Court announced Friday it would review a case testing whether human genes may be patented, in a dispute weighing patents associated with human genes known to detect early signs of breast and ovarian cancer. A 2009 lawsuit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union claimed among other things the First Amendment is at stake because the patents are so broad they bar scientists from examining and comparing the BRCA1 and BRCA2 genes at the center of the dispute. In short, the patents issued more than a decade ago cover any new scientific methods of looking at these human genes that might be developed by others."
I am guessing there are some bioethics questions to consider here as well. ;-)
15. 4.5 billion years of the earth's evolution in as if it happened in 24 hours.
"The Pew Research Center announced Nov. 29 that the U.S.
birth rate fell to its lowest level since at least 1920, when reliable
record-keeping began. That was true—but not news. The National Center
for Health Statistics reported that way back on Oct. 3.
What was
news was Pew’s analysis of the government data, which showed that the
birth rate decline was greatest among immigrant women. “We were the
first to point that out,” Gretchen Livingston, the lead author of Pew’s
report, said in an interview. ..."
... New research shows that Catholics now report the lowest proportion of
"strongly affiliated" followers among major American religious
traditions, while the data indicates that evangelicals are increasingly
devout and committed to their faith.
According to Philip Schwadel, a sociologist at the University of
Nebraska-Lincoln, in the 1970s there was only a five-point difference
between how strongly Catholics and evangelicals felt about their
religion.
By 2010, he said, that "intensity gap" had grown to around 20 points,
with some 56 percent of evangelicals describing themselves as "strongly
affiliated" with their religion compared with 35 percent of Catholics.
Even mainline Protestants reported a higher level of religious intensity
than Catholics, at 39 percent. ..."
"Indeed, for America’s Amish, much is changing. The Amish are, by one measure, the fastest-growing faith community in the US. Yet as their numbers grow, the land available to support the agrarian lifestyle that underpins their faith is shrinking, gobbled up by the encroachment of exurban mansions and their multidoor garages.
The result is, in some ways, a gradual redefinition of what it means to be Amish. Some in the younger generation are looking for new ways to make a living on smaller and smaller slices of land. Others are looking beyond the Amish heartland of Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Indiana, seeking more space in states such as Texas, Maine, and Montana."
21. Finally, one of the things I found interesting about the presidential election was Team Romney's seeming confidence they were winning. I think every candidate who is losing often tries to spin things positively until the very end but I had the sense that Team Romney wasn't faking it. They believed they were winning. I think post-election analysis is revealing that was true. From The New RepbulicThe Internal Polls That Made Mitt Romney Think He'd Win
The first crack in a firewall that has protected big coal for decades.
Since the 1990s, small bands of Appalachian residents, regional environmental groups, and more recently the EPA have fought what often seemed like a futile battle against mountaintop-removal mining, the radical practice of blowing the tops off mountains to get at the coal seams underneath. The coal companies, backed by local political establishments and conservative jurists skeptical of possible regulatory overreach, have fended off multiple attempts to shut down mountaintop operations. As a result, an ever-widening swath of Appalachian peaks and valleys has been obliterated: approximately 2,200 square miles, according to the EPA, in what is likely a conservative estimate because the footprint often extends beyond the permit zones. That’s an area almost the size of Delaware.
That expanse kept growing as the battles mostly went in coal’s favor. Until this month, that is, when environmental groups won a decisive legal victory over a coal company. It may prove to be turning point in the war over the mountaintops, and for the future of coal.
On Nov. 15, St. Louis-based Patriot Coal agreed to phase out its mountaintop excavations and redirect its efforts back to underground mining. Adding a symbolic punch, Patriot agreed to decommission its two draglines—enormous boom excavators that do the actual mountaintop demolitions—and can sell them only on the condition that they’re never used in the Appalachian coalfields again. Coal executives usually shrug off complaints about mountaintop-removal impacts as the grumbling of dilettantes and naysayers who don’t understand the need for mining jobs. Yet here was the practically unheard-of spectacle of Patriot’s CEO, Ben Hatfield, acknowledging that mountaintop removal affected both people and ecology: “Patriot Coal recognizes that our mining operations impact the communities in which we operate in significant ways, and we are committed to maximizing the benefits of this agreement for our stakeholders, including our employees and neighbors," Hatfield said in court. "We believe the proposed settlement will result in a reduction of our environmental footprint." ...
As you can see, some of the worst declines in life expectancy are in moutain top mining areas of Kentucky and West Virginia. Allen Johnson of Christians for the Mountains makes the, as does this article, that this strongly connected to the mining operations.
Finally, the United States is beginning to take energy efficiency seriously. ...
... The Negawatt is the general principle of cutting electricity
consumption without necessarily reducing energy usage through things
like energy efficiency. Lovins first introduced it in the keynote
address to the 1989 Green Energy Conference in Montreal:
Imagine being able to save half the
electricity for free and still get the same or better services! … You
get the same amount of light as before, with 8 percent as much energy
overall—but it looks better and you can see better. … In the space
conditioning case—heating and cooling—you get improved comfort. ... It
is doing more with less.
The Negawatt itself is a theoretical unit of power measuring energy
saved—Lovins came up with the idea after seeing megawatt misspelled with
an n and deciding that this was a potentially useful
conceptualization. It sounds self-evident now that you could reduce
electricity consumption not by cutting back on energy usage but by
improving energy efficiency standards and modernizing antiquated power
sources. But the concept was revolutionary at the time. A major problem
with getting people to understand the environmental and cost-savings
benefits of energy efficiency was a perverse incentives structure that
rewarded power companies based on amount of electricity sold, not for
how much of a needed service it was providing. Lovins described the
dilemma as such:
There isn't any demand for electricity for
its own sake. What people want is the services it provides. …
Nonetheless, most of our utilities have gotten into the habit of
thinking they're in the kilowatt-hour business, so they should sell
more. … For some reason, it's hard for them to get used to the idea that
it's perfectly all right to sell less electricity, and so bring in less
revenue, as long as costs go down more than revenues do.
Though Lovins brought the idea to the fore of the environmental
policy discussion, he wasn’t the first to articulate the issue: In 1982,
California devised an inspired solution, called decoupling,
to this problem. The idea was that the state would reverse the
incentive structure by establishing the revenue rate that the power
company would need to meet in order to return a profit, along with a separate
target for electricity production needed. Any revenue over the target
amount would be returned to customers, while anything below would be
added on to the following year’s bills. This meant that greater
efficiency could actually return greater profit.
Decoupling is largely credited
with making California the most energy efficient and environmentally
friendly state in the country. But a mere disincentive to keep utilities
companies from pegging profits to electricity usage was not enough, so
the state launched a second program called “decoupling plus” in 2007 in order to incentivize
power companies to lower their electricity production. Through this
program, regulators set savings targets, and customers are asked to pay
fees to help provide the down payment for power companies to meet these
targets. Regulators then calculate long-term economic savings of this
efficiency. If the utilities meet or surpass their targeted electricity
savings, they get a cut of the projected savings. If they don’t meet the
targets, the utilities pay a fine.
In 2007, California was still the only state in the union to have even a
basic decoupling system in place. In the last five years, though, there
has been a decoupling revolution across the country. By the start of
2011, 27 states and the District of Columbia
had adopted gas decoupling, electric decoupling, or both. While the
incentive programs are not yet in place in the vast majority of these
states, at least the initial roadblock of the bad incentive structure
has been largely removed.
Dr Peter Stott, Head of Climate Monitoring and Attribution at the Met Office,
said the past decade has been the warmest on record.
But he pointed out that warming has slowed down since 2000, in comparison to
the rapid warming of the world since the 1970s.
“Although the first decade of the 21st century was the warmest on record,
warming has not been as rapid since 2000 as over the longer period since the
1970s,” he said.
Scott is hedging with "... has not been as rapid ..." In short, the warming trend line from 2001 to 2012 is negligible to none. So if by "global warming" we mean a more or less relentess upward trendline over a period of a few years ...a decade in this case ..., then there was no global warming.
However, Scott also reminds us:
“Dr Stott warned that global warming could speed up again at any time, and
insisted that the general pattern of warming is not in doubt."
A momentary plateau of a few years does not negate a long-term trend. So if by "global warming" we mean a more or less relentess upward trendline over a period of more than a few years, then there is global warming. So is there global warming? No and yes.
But this raises an important question? When does a short-term trend become a long-term trend, prompting a rethink about climate models? Ten years? Twenty years? Fifty years? Last month, Judith Curry, in response to constroversial reports about the global warming plateau, explained that climate models typically do not predict decade long stalls in global warming. (See: ‘Pause’ : Waving the Italian Flag) She reports that prominent scientists have said that a plateau or decline in global temperatures of fifteen or more years would be grounds for rethinking climate models. The last eleven years have been flat, and even going back fifteen years to 1997, the rate of warming is much slower than models suggested they would be. She is not disputing long-term warming but she is suggesting that climate models may not be as robust as advertised. It will be interesting to see how the climate science community responds if the trend of the past decade continues for three or four more years, or how skeptics respond if temperatures begin to soar in the same timeframe.
After the loss of 10 million American lives in the Three-Mile Island
calamity in 1979, the death of 2 billion in the Chernobyl holocaust in
1986 and, now, the abandonment of all of northern Japan following the
death of millions in last year's Fukushima nuclear catastrophe, it is
hardly surprising that the world's biggest users of nuclear power are
shutting their plants down.
Oh, wait a minute. Nobody died in the Three-Mile Island calamity, 28
plant workers were killed, and 15 other people subsequently died of
thyroid cancer in the Chernobyl holocaust, and nobody died in the
Fukushima catastrophe. In fact, northern Japan has not been evacuated
after all. But never mind all that. Governments really are shutting down
their nuclear plants. ...
She explains that Japan has closed their 50 nuclear reactors for inspections and the government promises to close them permanently by 2040, replacing them with renewable energy. Angela Merkel wants to close German plants by 2022. France is proposing to scale back their nuclear sector.
She concludes:
The Greens prattle about replacing nuclear power with renewables,
which might happen in the distant future. But the brutal truth for now
is that closing down the nuclear plants will lead to a sharp rise in
greenhouse gas emissions.
Fortunately, their superstitious fears are largely absent in more
sophisticated parts of the world. Only four new nuclear reactors are
under construction in the European Union, and only one in the United
States, but there are 61 being built elsewhere. Over two-thirds of them
are being built in the BRICs (Brazil, Russia, India and China), where
economies are growing fast.
But it's not enough to outweigh the closure of so many nuclear plants
in the developed world, at least in the short run. India may be aiming
at getting 50 percent of its energy from nuclear power by 2050, for
example, but the fact is that only 3.7 percent of its electricity is
nuclear right now. So the price of nuclear fuel has collapsed in the
past four years, and uranium mine openings and expansions have been
cancelled.
More people die from coal pollution each day than have been killed by
50 years of nuclear power operations – and that's just from lung
disease. If you include future deaths from burning fossil fuels, closing
down nuclear power stations is sheer madness. Welcome to the Middle
Ages.
Many of
the existing plants, like Fukushima, are second generation nuclear power. Third
generation nuclear power is much safer. Fourth generation, projected to come
online in about twenty years will be even safer, more efficient, and generate
wasted that must be protected a few hundred years instead of millennia. There
is reason to believe that even better methods are in the offing. What an irony
that those countries that have been the most adamant about reducing greenhouse
gas emissions may become the biggest stumbling block to curbing them.
In recent months, I've linked a graph that shows that CO2 emissions from energy production have dropped to 1990 levels in the United States, mostly because of natural gas replacing coal power. That's the good news if you want to reduce CO2. But here is the challenge presented in the two graphs by Jordan Wiessmann.
A polemical new book, Science Left Behind, argues persuasively that there is less than meets the eye in self-righteous claims by Democrats that they represent the “pro-science party.” Jon Entine, Director of the Genetic Literacy Project, reports:
The debate over which political party, Democrat or Republican, is more
faithful to science has been a hot button topic since the 1990s. ...
... A slew of books and articles
from left-leaning science writers—which means most of the science
journalism establishment—has elevated the popular narrative that
Democrats adhere faithfully to the inspiration of Newton, Galileo, Bacon
and Darwin while Republicans look more to ethereal authorities for
their application of the scientific method.
But now, Alex Berezow and Hank Campbell, co-authors of Science Left Behind: Feel-Good Fallacies and the Rise of the Anti-Scientific Left,
make a nuanced and convincing counter argument: Ludditism is not a
partisan issue. In fact, on many of the most critical issues of our
time, the “progressive” perspective is often rooted in out-dated,
anti-empirical, junk science paradigms that threaten innovation—and are
beginning to unnerve the most scientifically minded thinkers on the
left. ...
... The central thesis of Science Left Behind—that the left’s
view of science has drifted decisively from empiricism into ideology—has
now emerged as a genuine debate within the left community. This
contentiousness became very public over the past month as “progressives”
debated the merits of California Proposition 37, which would have
mandated labeling of foods containing genetically modified organisms.
For the political left, suspicion of biotechnology in general and
more specifically the rejection of genetically modified crops as
environmentally hazardous and GM foods as health hazards are now
canonical. Almost every major activist environmental NGO supported Prop
37. But their contention that biotech crops and foods posted unusual
environmental or health hazards is not based on science. In fact,
fanning fears about biotech crops and foods has become a scandalous
leftwing obsession. It’s an anti-science mindset, argues Keith Kloor, a
frequent contributor to the Washington Post-owned, liberal online magazine Slate:
“[F]earsare stoked by prominent environmental
groups, supposed food-safety watchdogs, and influential food columnists;
that dodgy science is laundered by well-respected scholars and
propaganda is treated credulously by legendary journalists; and that
progressive media outlets, which often decry the scurrilous rhetoric
that warps the climate debate, serve up a comparable agitprop when it
comes to GMOs,” Kloors wrote. “In short, I’ve learned that the
emotionally charged, politicized discourse on GMOs is mired in the kind
of fever swamps that have polluted climate science beyond recognition.”
This soft conspiracy, promoted by mainstream Democrats, infects a
broad array of science issues and highlights the religious-like iconic
beliefs of the left (as Kloor has noted): Nature is sacred, big business
is dangerous and corrupt, technology can cause more problems than it
helps solve, the world is on the verge of an eco-apocalypse, and we need
more precaution, regulation and legislation. I call it enviro-romanticism, a criticism documented in distressing detail in Science Left Behind. ...
... As George Monbiot, one of the United Kingdom’s most prominent
environmental writers recently concluded when discussing the left’s
contradictory and increasingly anti-environmental energy policy, “[T]he
environmental movement to which I belong has done more harm to the
planet’s living systems than climate change deniers have ever achieved.”
We could all benefit from the emergence of what I call “science
independents”—those who base their views on data and evidence rather
than partisan leanings and litmus tests. ...
I think the challenge is that all of us tend to latch on to science that confirms our experience and ideology. We are dismissive when it doesn't. We need better models for incorporating science into discussions in the public square.
After 30 years of debate, scientists believe they've discovered the
trigger for the last great freeze of the Earth, some 12,900 years ago.
They say they've established that the flood waters from the melting
of the enormous Laurentide Ice Sheet flowed northwest into the Arctic
first, weakening ocean thermohaline circulation and cooling global climate.
If instead it had flowed east into the St Lawrence River valley,
they say, Earth's climate would have remained relatively unchanged.
"This episode was the last time the Earth underwent a major cooling,
so understanding exactly what caused it is very important for
understanding how our modern-day climate might change in the future,"
says University of Massachusetts Amherst geoscientist Alan Condron. ...
... "Our results are particularly relevant for how we model the melting of
the Greenland and Antarctic Ice sheets now and in the future. It is
apparent from our results that climate scientists
are artificially introducing fresh water into their models over large
parts of the ocean that freshwater would never have reached," says
Condron. ...
On issues ranging from genetically modified crops to nuclear power, environmentalists are increasingly refusing to listen to scientific arguments that challenge standard green positions. This approach risks weakening the environmental movement and empowering climate contrarians.
From Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring
to James Hansen’s modern-day tales of climate apocalypse,
environmentalists have long looked to good science and good scientists
and embraced their findings. Often we have had to run hard to keep up
with the crescendo of warnings coming out of academia about the perils
facing the world. A generation ago, biologist Paul Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb and systems analysts Dennis and Donella Meadows’ The Limits to Growth
shocked us with their stark visions of where the world was headed. No
wide-eyed greenie had predicted the opening of an ozone hole before the
pipe-smoking boffins of the British Antarctic Survey spotted it when
looking skyward back in 1985. On issues ranging from ocean acidification
and tipping points in the Arctic to the dangers of nanotechnology, the
scientists have always gotten there first — and the environmentalists
have followed.
And yet, recently, the environment movement seems to have been turning
up on the wrong side of the scientific argument. We have been making
claims that simply do not stand up. We are accused of being
anti-science — and not without reason. A few, even close friends, have
begun to compare this casual contempt for science with the tactics of
climate contrarians.
That should hurt.
Three current issues suggest that the risks of myopic adherence to
ideology over rational debate are real: genetically modified (GM) crops,
nuclear power, and shale gas development. The conventional green
position is that we should be opposed to all three. Yet the voices of
those with genuine environmental credentials, but who take a different
view, are being drowned out by sometimes abusive and irrational
argument. ...
The environmental movement is a diverse coalition of people. You can't make
a blanket statement about any movement this large. There are two significant
groups that make up this coalition that I expect explain this inconsistency
between embracing science on some things and not on others.
First, I think there is a segment that is simply anti-technological,
anti-21st Century living. They have a natural aversion to much of 21st Century
existence and want to return to a far less technological (read
"natural") existence. That climate science (and the frequently
attached moralism about the evils of consumerism) would dovetail with their
ideology of bucolic bliss is a welcomed happenstance. It gives legitimization
to their cause against those who embrace the modern socio-economic order. GM crops
and nuclear power do just the opposite. These would enable the current despised
structures to continue and grow. Thus, their embrace of climate change science
has little to do with a rigorous understanding and commitment to science.
Second, there is another segment that sees economic freedom as unjust and destructive
and wants more centralized control over the global economy. Climate science can
be effectively be used to support that vision. The case is made that our
current competing economies are leading us to global catastrophe. Political and
economic freedom need to be curtailed on a global scale by centralized
authorities who will rationally manage world affairs. GM crops and nuclear
power offer the opportunity to adapt to current challenges without a
significant reordering of the world order. Once again, the commitment is not so
much to science as it is to using science as debate tool to achieve an
ideological end.
I'm not saying that these are by any means the only two groups backing
environmental measures. I am saying that these are two groups that do have
meaningful influence on what happens within the environmental movement.
An author who makes a case in book length form, similar to what Fred Pearce
is making here, is Seymour Garte in Where
We Stand: A Surprising Look at the Real State of Our Planet. He is another
scientist who is fully persuaded about anthropogenic global warming. He is optimistic
about solutions but sees the anti-science, anti-technology, crowd as a real
problem.
Energy and green energy were hot topics during the presidential debates, but climate change didn't come up once. The candidates may be avoiding the issue because voters don't want to hear a difficult message.
... "National elections should be a time when our nation considers the
great challenges and opportunities the next President will face," opines
the website ClimateSilence.org,
a project of Forecast the Facts and Friends of the Earth Action aimed
at pushing the issue into campaigns. "But the climate conversation of
2012 has been defined by a deafening silence."
The candidates talked about energy and green energy, but always with regard to jobs, never about the climate. Why?
The
easy answer is that it's not good politics. What candidate wants to
talk about emissions when voters are worried about jobs? Who wants to
tackle carbon taxes when many Americans are struggling to pay the taxes
they already owe?
The deeper question is: Do Americans want their candidates to talk about climate change? The answer seems to be: No.
It's
probably not climate skepticism that's the main barrier here. Polls
show that over time Americans are increasingly convinced by the science
showing that the climate is warming, and they do see a link with human
activity. The ranks of the "climate deniers" are thinning, albeit
slowly.
The bigger challenge may be that to many voters the problem seems all too real and unsolvable – something to fear because we can't fix it. ...
Two other factors may also point to why, despite a growing
number of people believing climate change is a problem, they are not motivated.
First, recent reports that there has been no significant warming in the past
sixteen years (The
REALLY inconvenient truths about global warming) decreases a sense of urgency.
A plateau doesn't necessarily invalidate climate change models (as models have
never predicted a linear ascent) but it can dissipate a sense of urgency.
Second, is this graph:
This wasn’t anticipated. A purpose of the Kyoto Accords was
to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to 1990 levels. We are there with the
biggest contributor to the problem. All that is to say, the dynamics have
shifted. Finding the sweet spot between apathy and overwhelming citizens to the
point of demoralization has been a challenge for those who champion the need
for changes.
What do you think? Why was the topic not debated? Do you think CSM article is offering a good analysis?
(And, by the way, since this is a controversial topic, let me highlight my newly minted comment policy you now see linked at the top of the column to the right. Long-time commenters here do such a great job. I'm hoping we can preserve that tradition as new folks join in.)
... So, what do we do? One path forward for the nuclear industry is through the construction of Small Modular Reactors (SMRs). SMRs are nuclear reactors that are intentionally designed to be less than 300-megawatts, or about one-third of the size of conventional large reactor. By making them small, they have several key benefits not available to large reactors. These issues are discussed at length in a
new American Security Project (ASP) report, “Small Modular Reactors: A Possible Path Forward for Nuclear Power.”
First, SMRs offer flexibility. Since they are small, they can be added to the electric grid incrementally. Slow incremental additions better match the slow energy demand growth in the United States, which is projected to be less than 1% per year. Utilities have little interest in building a huge nuclear reactor when demand is not rising quickly enough to justify the investment.
Second, SMRs are designed with several safety features that are an improvement over large reactors. By using simpler designs with fewer coolant pipes and components, the risk of a safety accident declines.
Third, and perhaps most importantly, SMRs have an advantage in cost over large reactors. While a typical large reactor can cost between $6 and $9 billion, an SMR has an estimated price tag of only $250 million for a 100-megawatt reactor. With smaller
upfront costs and shorter construction timeframes, utilities can get loans with lower interest rates.
Despite these advantages, no SMR has been constructed to date. Why isn’t the industry building SMRs right now? The biggest obstacle for SMRs is that the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) has licensed no SMR design.
A second impediment is the lack of a track record on performance. Without an example to point to, the burden is on the nuclear industry to prove that the advantages of SMRs discussed above are indeed an improvement over conventional reactors. Until the first plant moves ahead, uncertainty remains.
A third problem is low natural gas prices. The nuclear industry remains bullish on their prospects over the long-term, and with assets that last 60 years, it is essential to not get swept up in the latest hype. However, low natural gas prices present real problems for industry, at least in the near-term. ...
"Science is full of surprises. Chemist Paul Edmiston's search for a new
way to detect explosives at airports, instead, led to the creation of
what's now called "Osorb," swellable, organically-modified silica, or
glass, capable of absorbing oil and other contaminants from water. Osorb
has become the principal product of a company in Wooster called
ABSMaterials, where Edmiston is now chief scientist. With support from
the National Science Foundation (NSF), Edmiston and his colleagues at
ABSMaterials are developing water remediation technologies for cities
and industries -- everything from storm water to agricultural runoff.
Municipal water systems and companies in several U.S. states and
Canadian provinces are using Osorb. ABSMaterials is creating formulas to
address various contaminants, including hydrocarbons, pharmaceuticals,
pesticides, herbicides, chlorinated solvents and endocrine disruptors."
Advocates of 'vertical farming' say growing crops in urban high-rises will eventually be both greener and cheaper.
Want to see where your food might come from in the future? Look up.
The seeds of an agricultural revolution are taking root in cities
around the world—a movement that boosters say will change the way that
urbanites get their produce and solve some of the world's biggest
environmental problems along the way.
It's called vertical farming, and it's based on one simple principle:
Instead of trucking food from farms into cities, grow it as close to
home as possible—in urban greenhouses that stretch upward instead of
sprawling outward.
The idea is flowering in many forms. There's the 12-story triangular
building going up in Sweden, where plants will travel on tracks from the
top floor to the bottom to take advantage of sunlight and make
harvesting easier. Then there's the onetime meatpacking plant in Chicago
where vegetables are grown on floating rafts, nourished by waste from
nearby fish tanks. And the farms dotted across the U.S. that hang their
crops in the air, spraying the roots with nutrients, so they don't have
to bring in soil or water tanks for the plants.
However vertical farming is implemented, advocates say the immediate
benefits will be easy to see. There won't be as many delivery trucks
guzzling fuel and belching out exhaust, and city dwellers will get
easier access to fresh, healthy food.
Looking further, proponents say vertical farming could bring even bigger
and more sweeping changes. Farming indoors could reduce the use of
pesticides and herbicides, which pollute the environment in agricultural
runoff. Preserving or reclaiming more natural ecosystems like forests
could help slow climate change. And the more food we produce indoors,
the less susceptible we are to environmental crises that disrupt crops
and send prices skyrocketing, like the drought that devastated this
year's U.S. corn crop. ...
PRAGUE – Campaigners on important but complex issues, annoyed by the
length of time required for public deliberations, often react by
exaggerating their claims, hoping to force a single solution to the
forefront of public debate. But, however well intentioned, scaring the
public into a predetermined solution often backfires: when people
eventually realize that they have been misled, they lose confidence and
interest.
Last month, there were two examples of this in a single week. On
September 19, the French researcher Gilles-Eric Séralini attempted to
fuel public opposition to genetically modified foods by showing the public
how GM corn, with and without the pesticide Roundup, caused huge tumors
and early death in 200 rats that had consumed it over two years. ...
Lomborg highlights the throughly bogus nature of the study and it funding and notes:
Moreover, Séralini’s results contradict the latest meta-study
of 24 long-term studies (up to two years and five generations), which
found that the data do “not suggest any health hazards” and display “no
statistically significant differences” between GM and conventional food.
Why is this important?
This debacle matters because many GM crops provide tangible benefits for
people and the environment. They enable farmers to produce higher
yields with fewer inputs (such as pesticides), so that more food can be
produced from existing farmland. That, in turn, implies less human encroachment into natural ecosystems,
enabling greater biodiversity. But, of course, Séralini’s pictures of
cancer-addled rats munching GM corn have instead been burned into the
public imagination.
Then there was a climate change report:
The Séralini fiasco was only a
week old when, on September 26, the Climate Vulnerability Forum, a
group of countries led by Bangladesh, launched the second edition of its
Global Vulnerability Monitor.
Headlines about the launch were truly alarming: Over the next 18 years,
global warming would kill 100 million people and cost the economy
upwards of $6.7 trillion annually.
These
public messages were highly misleading – and clearly intended to shock
and disturb. The vast majority of deaths discussed in the report did not
actually result from global warming. Outdoor air pollution – caused by
fossil-fuel combustion, not by global warming – contributed to 30% of
all deaths cited in the study. And 60% of the total deaths reflect the
burning of biomass (such as animal dung and crop residues) for cooking
and heating, which has no relation to either fossil fuels or global
warming.
In
total, the study exaggerated more than 12-fold the number of deaths
that could possibly be attributed to climate change, and it more than
quadrupled the potential economic costs, simply to grab attention. ...
He goes on:
Likewise, overcoming the
burden of indoor air pollution will happen only when people can use
kerosene, propane, and grid-based electricity. If the Global Vulnerability Monitor’s
recommendation to cut back on fossil fuels were taken seriously, the
result would be slower economic growth and continued reliance on dung,
cardboard, and other low-grade fuels, thereby prolonging the suffering
that results from indoor air pollution.
Generally, technologies are judged on their net benefits, not on
the claim that they are harmless: The good effects of, say, the
automobile and aspirin outweigh their dangers. ...
He goes on to explain that despite sensationalist stories about the negative impact of GM foods, the scientific peer-reviewed scientific data doesn't support it. The substantial benefits get short shrift:
... So to redress the balance [of negative coverage], I thought I'd look up the estimated
benefits of genetically modified crops. After 15 years of GM
planting, there's ample opportunity-with 17 million farmers on
almost 400 million acres in 29 countries on six continents-to count
the gains from genetic modification of crop plants. A recent comprehensive report by Graham Brookes and
Peter Barfoot for a British firm, PG Economics, gives some rough
numbers. (The study was funded by Monsanto, which
has major operations in biotech, but the authors say the research
was independent of the company and published in two peer-reviewed
journals.)
The most obvious benefit is yield increase. In 2010, the report
estimates, the world's corn crop was 31 million tons larger and the
soybean crop 14 million tons larger than it would have been without
the use of biotech crops. The direct effect on farm incomes was an
increase of $14 billion, more than half of which went to farmers in
developing countries (especially those growing insect-resistant
cotton). ...
He goes on to note benefits like less fuel usage, better health and safety for workers, shorter growing cycles, better quality of food, and nearly 1 billion less pounds of pesticide being used. Furthermore, because of several factors, there is less carbon-diosice emission. His final paragraph is the kicker.
There is a rich irony here. The rapidly growing use of shale gas
in the U.S. has also driven down carbon-dioxide emissions by
replacing coal in the generation of electricity. U.S. carbon
emissions are falling so fast they are now back to levels last seen
in the 1990s. So the two technologies most reliably and stridently
opposed by the environmental movement-genetic modification and
fracking-have been the two technologies that most reliably cut
carbon emissions.
And to that final paragraph I might add the observation that many of those
who are the most adamant about catastrophic anthropogenic climate change being
unassailable science are most resistant to science that points the great
benefits and relatively small downsides of things like GM crops and fourth
generation nuclear power.
Climate scientists will tell you droughts and other extreme weather
events is the new normal. One way or another, farming needs to adapt to a
new reality. A possible solution is vertical farming. Imagine taking a
bunch of greenhouses, stacking them one on top of each other, and
plunking it down in a city. Once dismissed as an expensive and
unrealistic idea, vertical farms are now cropping up around the world,
but huge challenges still face the young industry. Day 6 producer
Dominic Girard looks into this growing food trend. Click "Read More" for
all kinds of info related to this story.
Go to the site to listen to the radio piece. Here is a short video about vertical farming.
Carbon dioxide emissions in the U.S. are at their lowest level in 20 years. It’s not because of wind or solar power.
... But, beyond this well-trodden battlefield, something amazing has
happened: Carbon-dioxide emissions in the United States have dropped to
their lowest level in 20 years. Estimating on the basis of data from the
US Energy Information Agency
from the first five months of 2012, this year’s expected CO2 emissions
have declined by more than 800 million tons, or 14 percent from their
peak in 2007.
The cause is an unprecedented switch to natural gas, which emits 45
percent less carbon per energy unit. The U.S. used to generate about
half its electricity from coal, and roughly 20 percent from gas. Over
the past five years, those numbers have changed, first slowly and now
dramatically: In April of this year, coal’s share in power generation
plummeted to just 32 percent, on par with gas. ...
... The reduction is even more impressive when one considers that 57 million
additional energy consumers were added to the U.S. population over the
past two decades. Indeed, U.S. carbon emissions have dropped about 20
percent per capita, and are now at their lowest level since Dwight D. Eisenhower left the White House in 1961. ...
... This flies in the face of conventional thinking, which continues to
claim that mandating carbon reductions—through cap-and-trade or a carbon
tax—is the only way to combat climate change.
But, based on Europe’s experience, such policies are precisely the wrong
way to address global warming. Since 1990, the EU has heavily
subsidized solar and wind energy at a cost of more than $20 billion
annually. Yet its per capita CO2 emissions have
fallen by less than half of the reduction achieved in the U.S.—even in
percentage terms, the U.S. is now doing better. ...
... Climate economists repeatedly have pointed out that such energy
innovation is the most effective climate solution, because it is the
surest way to drive the price of future green energy sources below that
of fossil fuels. By contrast, subsidizing current, ineffective solar
power or ethanol mostly wastes money while benefiting special interests. ...
Managing irrigation pumps and water systems is a difficult and costly
task for many farmers in developing countries. The amount of time and
energy farmers spend watering their crops often compromises time that
could otherwise be used for family and community obligations. It also
compromises their safety at night, when they are most vulnerable to
animal predators. A new innovation from the India based company, Ossian Agro Automation, called Nano Ganesh
seeks to transform the way farmers manage their water systems by giving
them the freedom to turn pumps on and off, from any location, with
their mobile phone. ...
... In 2008 Ostwal altered the technology so that it could function over
an unlimited range granting farmers the flexibility to start and stop
the flow of water from anywhere there is a mobile connection.
Nano Ganesh also allows farmers to check the availability of
electricity to the pump and verify the on and off status of its
operation. Both of these features offer cost-saving benefits to farmers
who otherwise may not be able to shut their pumps off before their
fields have become overly saturated. This is important for two reasons.
One is that over-watering can lead to soil erosion
and nutrient depletion. The second reason is that the inability to
remotely shut-off water pumps leads to unintentional water and
electricity waste. With the help of Nano Ganesh farmers will be able to
conserve water and electricity more effectively. This will minimize the
environmental and financial costs of farming. In fact, the product description
suggests that farmers can recover the cost of the technology in just 11
days from the water and electricity savings it will produce. ...
(Reuters) -
Burnt, buried or frozen and turned to powder are some of the options for
dealing with the remains of a loved one whose last wishes include
lessening death's environmental impact.
Our demise can have a big
environmental impact. Around three quarters of people in the United
Kingdom alone are cremated after they die but cremation uses about the
same amount of domestic energy as a person uses in a month.
Globally,
cremation emits over 6.8 million metric tons of carbon dioxide every
year, accounting for around 0.02 percent of world carbon dioxide
emissions, experts estimate.
It
also causes mercury pollution when tooth fillings are vaporized.
Currently, up to 16 percent of all mercury emitted in the United Kingdom
comes from crematoria, which could rise to 25 percent by 2020 without
any action, according to government figures.
The
UK government is forcing cremators to fit mercury filters by the end of
2012 to halve mercury emissions although statistics are not yet
available on progress towards this goal. ...
“Water right now is a strain on this
planet more than carbon,” Dow Chemical Co. (DOW) Chief Executive Officer
Andrew Liveris said in an interview this month in London. “We mismanage
water terribly. It's going to be a big issue.”
But one method is growing as a way to tackle the issue.
According to Global Water Intelligence, desalination is set to become
a $17 billion industry by 2016. Just this year, it jumped to $8.9
billion from $5 billion last year. And as even more water is demanded
for energy processes like fracking, it will nearly double in four years.
Desalination equipment turns ocean water into fresh water. The process, according to Bloomberg,
dates back to the ancient Greeks and Romans, but it was not to become
an industry until post-World War II. The first plant in the U.S. was
located in Freeport, Texas and built by Dow Chemical Co. (NYSE: DOW) in
1961.
The process of reverse osmosis, using a membrane to remove salt, was
used in the 1990s. Though it still costs ten times as much as
traditional water sources, the cost was reduced by half since its
conception to $1 per cubic meter.
The majority of the world's desalination plants are currently in the
Middle East. There are 30 plants in China and eight in India, though
both nations have more planned for the near future.
While traditional distillation remains the most common technique,
reverse osmosis still has about 45% of the distillation market. But a
new process in the works called forward osmosis cuts down on the amount
of heat and energy necessary for the process, and it could reduce the
cost by 30% according to Modern Water Plc (LON: MWG), a company that
uses the process. ...
Instead of using reverse osmosis, which requires high-pressure pumps to force water through semi-permeable membranes, the Siemens engineers turned to electrochemical desalination.
As a result of an R&D initiative that commenced in October 2008, a
demonstration plant was built in Singapore to treat seawater to drinking
water quality. The results show that the new process reduces desalting
energy by over 50 percent compared to best available technology. The
next step for Siemens is to set up a full-scale system in cooperation
with Singapore's national water agency PUB by 2013.
However, to desalinate it for potable use is an extremely
energy-intensive process. "Our new technology marks a revolution in
seawater desalination," said Ruediger Knauf, Vice President of Siemens
Water Technologies' Global R&D.
"The results of our pilot facility show that the new process not only
functions in the laboratory but also on a larger scale in the field.
Because of its high energy efficiency and thus good CO2 footprint,
electrochemical seawater desalination can play a major role in regions
suffering from freshwater shortages." ...
That doesn't mean it's not healthier. How our obsession with organics' "healthiness" led us away from the term's roots.
But from Stanford University comes new research suggesting what we
should have known all along: organic food isn't actually more nutritious
than
traditionally-farmed goods.
In a widelypublicized and discussed analysis of more than 200 studies comparing organic to regular food products, researchers have found
that organics don't have more vitamins or minerals (with the lone
exception of phosphorus, which we all get in sufficient amounts
anyway). Nor do they have an appreciable effect when it comes to heading
off food-borne
illness, although the germs found in conventional meat do have a
higher chance of being drug-resistant (more on that in a bit)....
... It's worth keeping in mind that organic refers only to a
particular method of production; while switching to organic foods
can be good for you insofar as doing so helps you avoid nasty things
like chemicals and additives, there's nothing in the organic foods
themselves that gives them an
inherent nutritional advantage over non-organics. In other
words, it's not wrong to say organic food is "healthier" than
non-organics. It's just unrealistic to think that your organic diet is
slowly turning you into Clark Kent. ...
... For all the attention devoted to the ways organic is better for you, we should remember that organic
began chiefly as an argument about the
environment. From the agency's perspective, to buy organic is to
respect the land your food came from. It means taking pains to ensure
that your farms
remain bountiful and productive, even decades from now. The case is
one part self-interest over the long term, and one part a statement of
ethics. Not
really what you'd expect from a mechanical bureaucratic institution.
Buying organic is also a statement about public health. Nowhere is
this clearer than in the case of antibiotics. Conventional farms have
been putting the
stuff in animal feed for decades -- even though we've known since the 1970s
about the health hazards that the animal use of antibiotics poses
for humans. Reducing society's chances of inadvertently creating a
superbug is a good
reason to purchase organic foods.
There are the more immediate health benefits of buying organic:
you'll avoid the chemicals, preservatives, and hormones that
conventional farms often use
to treat their foods. ...
... And then there's the reason many people find most compelling of all: the
health of workers in the field. For some consumers, buying organic is a
human-rights issue. ...
... Growth rings tell how old the sectioned tree was. But when Swetnam holds
up one, he points to something else: fire scars. They're black marks,
about the size of a fingernail clipping, left by fires. ...
... Scars from thousands of sections show how often fires burned in the
Southwest. It was every five or 10 years, mostly — small fires that
consumed grass and shrubs and small seedlings, but left the big
Ponderosa pine and Douglas fir just fine. This was the norm.
Then something happened.
"Around 1890 or 1900, it stops," Swetnam says. "We call it the Smokey Bear effect."
Settlers
brought livestock that ate the grass, so fires had little fuel. Then
when the U.S. Forest Service was formed, its marching orders were "no
fires."
And it was the experts who approved the all-out ban on fires in the Southwest. They got it wrong.
That's the view of fire historian Stephen Pyne.
"The irony here is that the argument for setting these areas aside as
national forests and parks was, to a large extent, to protect them from
fire," Pyne says. "Instead, over time they became the major habitat for
free-burning fire."
So instead of a few
dozen trees per acre, the Southwestern mountains of New Mexico, Arizona,
Colorado and Utah are now choked with trees of all sizes, and grass and
shrubs. Essentially, it's fuel.
And now
fires are burning bigger and hotter. They're not just damaging forests —
they're wiping them out. Last year, more than 74,000 wildfires burned
over 8.7 million acres in the U.S.
That included the huge Wallow fire in Arizona.
"It burned more than 40,000 acres in the first eight hours," says Swetnam, the tree ring expert. "A tornado of fire."
Fires in the Southwest have been getting bigger and bigger over the past two decades.
"Now the fire behaviors are just off the charts," Swetnam says. "I mean,
they are extraordinary. Actually, I think in some cases, they're fire
behavior that probably these forests haven't seen in millennia or maybe
even tens of thousands of years." ...
... "The choice is not whether or not these forests burn," Armstrong says.
"The choice is how they burn. What kind of intensity are we going to see
those burn at?" ...
PITTSBURGH (AP) — In a surprising turnaround, the amount of carbon dioxide being released into the atmosphere in the U.S. has fallen dramatically to its lowest level in 20 years, and government officials say the biggest reason is that cheap and plentiful natural gas has led many power plant operators to switch from dirtier-burning coal.
Many of the world's leading climate scientists didn't see the drop coming, in large part because it happened as a result of market forces rather than direct government action against carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas that traps heat in the atmosphere.
Michael Mann, director of the Earth System Science Center at Penn State University, said the shift away from coal is reason for "cautious optimism" about potential ways to deal with climate change. He said it demonstrates that "ultimately people follow their wallets" on global warming.
"There's a very clear lesson here. What it shows is that if you make a cleaner energy source cheaper, you will displace dirtier sources," said Roger Pielke Jr., a climate expert at the University of Colorado.
In a little-noticed technical report, the U.S. Energy Information Agency, a part of the Energy Department, said this month that energy related U.S. CO2 emissions for the first four months of this year fell to about 1992 levels. Energy emissions make up about 98 percent of the total. The Associated Press contacted environmental experts, scientists and utility companies and learned that virtually everyone believes the shift could have major long-term implications for U.S. energy policy.
While conservation efforts, the lagging economy and greater use of renewable energy are factors in the CO2 decline, the drop-off is due mainly to low-priced natural gas, the agency said. ...
My take on CO2 has been that we incentivize conversion to natural gas in the short to medium term. That will provide intermeidate relief. Continue to let the market do its thing on finding alternative energy options and less carbon producing production processes in manufacturing. Longer term, but starting now, move to nuclear power. There goes your CO2 problem. I'm glad to see that the first phases of the Kronicler's plan to save the world are being implemented. ;-)
Using compressed air to power cars is something people have experimented with since at least 1840. That's when two French men named Andraud and Tessie tested such a gaseous vehicle on a track. The eco-friendly automobile "worked well," reports the air-car lobby, which exists, "but the idea was not pursued further. "
Why not? Perhaps because making a practical, well-working model is damnably hard. But India's Tata Motors is pushing the technology forward, inch by inch, with its project to build "Airpods" – zero-pollution, cute-as-a-bug smartcars that zip along at 40 m.p.h. via the magic of squeezed air. ...
... So what does this auto of the future look like? Following the smartcar trend, sort of like it stumbled off the set of Disney's Cars. The mid-sized model fits three passengers, although one must face backward like he's being punished for something, and is streamlined almost to the point of becoming a sphere. Its tank can hold 175 liters of air, which a driver gets either at a specialized fueling station or by activating an onboard electric motor to suck it in. Its makers say that filling er' up will cost a paltry €1, and that a full tank of air can last for roughly 125 miles. ...
... Two new books, however, say local food isn't necessarily more eco-friendly, even though it travels fewer miles. They cite research showing long-distance transportation accounts for only about 4% of the greenhouse gas emissions in food production; most occur at the farm itself through the use of tractors and other equipment and materials.
So if you want to buy local food for its freshness or to support area farmers, fine, but don't do it to save the planet, conclude researchers from the Union of Concerned Scientists, an environmental group. Their two-year study, "Cooler Smarter," was published this spring. ...
... Another book goes even further in debunking local-food "myths." Its title, The Locavore's Dilemma: In Praise of the 10,000-mile Diet, plays off Michael Pollan's best seller, The Omnivore's Dilemma.
Co-author Pierre Desrochers, a geography professor at the University of Toronto-Mississauga, says large farms growing crops suited to their region are better for the environment because they use less energy per item and grow more food on less land. He says they offer economic benefits, too: lower prices.
Desrochers, who says he has received no funding from agri-business, has no problem with hobby farmers but doesn't want government supporting local food (or, for that matter, ethanol and sugar). Though kids may learn from community gardens, he says, they're better off learning computer and job skills. ...
There are good reasons for wanting to eat local food but reducing carbon footprints isn't one of them. It may actually increase carbon outputs. Large agricultural firms have streamlined the costs of getting food from field to market. A big part of that is reducing energy costs in transportation. Shipping a semi load or rail car load of produce over hundreds of miles is much less expensive and less energy intensive per item than having forty pickup trucks driving produce around to local small markets ... where, I might add, buyers then have to make a trip in addition to their visit to the grocery store, thus adding even more carbon output. Not thinking through the secondary and tertiary impacts of economic choices often has unintended consequences but romantic notions of bucollic bliss frequently overwhelm cool heads.
It's time for conservatives to compete with liberals to devise the best, most cost-effective climate solutions.
... For too long, the U.S. has had two camps talking past each other on this issue. One camp tended to preach and derided questions about climate science as evidence of bad motivation. The other camp claimed that climate science was an academic scam designed to get more funding, and that advocates for action were out to strangle economic growth. Charges of bad faith on both sides—and a heavy dose of partisan politics—saw to it that constructive conversation rarely occurred.
If both sides can now begin to agree on some basic propositions, maybe we can restart the discussion. Here are two:
The first will be uncomfortable for skeptics, but it is unfortunately true: Dramatic alterations to the climate are here and likely to get worse—with profound damage to the economy—unless sustained action is taken. As the Economist recently editorialized about the melting Arctic: "It is a stunning illustration of global warming, the cause of the melt. It also contains grave warnings of its dangers. The world would be mad to ignore them."
The second proposition will be uncomfortable for supporters of climate action, but it is also true: Some proposed climate solutions, if not well designed or thoughtfully implemented, could damage the economy and stifle short-term growth. As much as environmentalists feel a justifiable urgency to solve this problem, we cannot ignore the economic impact of any proposed action, especially on those at the bottom of the pyramid. For any policy to succeed, it must work with the market, not against it. ...
I think one of the biggest obstacles to effective discussion on the this topic was the way too many earlier climateactivists opportunistically used climate change to advance pre-existing political agendas. A few months ago I read Michael Hulme's book Why We Disagree About Climate Change. He writes about his own lifelong metamorphous in how he sees the topic. He admits that when he was teaching environmental classes in England in the late 1980's, that he regularly interjected is own anti-Thatcher politics, using climate change to advance his political agenda. He was hardly alone. His political and environmental views have not changed much but he now regrets how he politicized the issue early on.
Ultimately, if you are a left-leaning climate activist, you have to ask whether it is more important to score political points for an ideological agenda (talking about how stupid and evil conservatives are while patting yourself on the back for your superior intellect) or find ways to achieve broad-based consensus on prudent actions to take. If the choice is the former, then clearly climate change itself is not as big an issue as you say it is. You allow political gamemanship to trump prudent change.
... A big emphasis for sustainable agriculture of the sort Bahnson and Wirzba promote is the notion of “working with the land.” If a particular region is mostly savannah, say, or rain forest, then agricultural methods and crops appropriate to those regions should be used. Fair enough, as a matter of baseline practical wisdom. But there is also a theological and philosophical claim being made: God made this land savannah or rain forest, and therefore an effort to transform the landscape into a different kind of biome is an affront to the integrity of creation.
Here we run into a significant problem: what is savannah today might have been a swamp, or a sea, or a desert, or a forest, or an ice sheet during other periods of geological time. Part of God’s design for creation is that it constantly changes and that biomes continually flux and adapt. That is the genius of evolution. The notion that reconciling with creation requires preservation of a particular biome as it appears at some moment in geological time therefore seems to me highly problematic.
I should be clear that I am not here agreeing with Christian global warming skeptics who think polluting the atmosphere with globs of carbon is nothing to be alarmed about because creation will adapt. That’s nonsense. We humans are capable of transforming the land in terribly harmful ways, even catastrophic ways. But transformation-qua-transformation isn’t unnatural – it’s how the world is made. ...
I'm continually intrigued by what I can only call sloppy thinking when it comes to Christian scholars reflecting on evironmental ethics. Authors who readily embrace an ancient earth view and affirm evolution invoke a narrative of a literal creation of the natural order 6,000 years to make claims about environmental ethics. To in any way alter things from what they are now is somehow an afront to the way God intended them to be (according to the narrative) and yet for four billion years the earth has been constantly changing (which they say they affirm). I don't get how someone holds these two views of reality together in their head at the same time.
... Every year the International Energy Agency (IEA) calculates humanity's CO2 pollution from burning fossil fuels. And once again, the overall story line is one of ever-increasing emissions:
"Global carbon-dioxide emissions from fossil-fuel combustion reached arecord high of 31.6 gigatonnes in 2011."
The world has yet to figure out how to stop the relentless increase in climate pollution. But mixed in with all the bad news there was one shining ray of hope. One of the biggest obstacles to climate action may be shifting. As the IEA highlighted:
"US emissions have now fallen by 430 Mt (7.7%) since 2006, the largest reduction of all countries or regions. This development has arisen from lower oil use in the transport sector … and a substantial shift from coal to gas in the power sector."
How big is a cut of 430 million tonnes of CO2? It's equal to all CO2 from all Canadians outside Alberta. From a US perspective, it's equal to eliminating the combined emissions of ten western states: Alaska, Washington, Oregon, Idaho, Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota, Wyoming, Utah and Nevada.
It seems the planet's biggest all-time CO2 polluter is finally reducing its emissions.
Not only that, but as my top chart shows, US CO2 emissions are falling even faster than what President Obama pledged in the global Copenhagen Accord. ...
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