Economics more metaphysical than mathematical
Ray Pennings
For the Calgary Herald
Sunday, May 25, 2008
Does it really matter who owns what? When foreign sovereign wealth funds, which these days are primarily rich Arab and Asian states, provide the lifeline to struggling North American banks, should we be thankful or worried?
The willingness to sell strategic assets is just one manifestation of the "short-termism" that characterizes so much of economic activity today. Not to be confused with responding quickly to new market information, "short-termism" refers to a focus on immediate earnings rather than a long-term strategy. Examples include the compromise of research and development or long-term investments, the invention and contortion of corporate structures, and even executive compensation schemes that reward short-term performance.
Not to excuse the responsibility of our corporate elites, but often less well considered is the burden -- and the power -- individuals bear in shaping the powers of the marketplace. Each of us, after all, represents a piece of the marketplace that, collectively, dictates the power of that market that shapes our economy. For instance, if most of us are feeling optimistic about our earnings prospects, that "mood" will lead market forecasters to feel confident that consumer spending levels will remain high or even increase. If most of us are feeling "bearish" and apprehensive about our prospects, forecasters will tend to believe we will be prone to saving money and paying down credit cards and therefore less likely to be active spenders.
Equally, our individual expectations regarding our investments will dictate how companies operate in order to meet investor expectations. If what we are looking for is a quick return on investment -- a short-term outlook -- public companies and stock markets will behave differently than if we are more interested in the performance of our investments over time -- a long-term outlook.
For many years now, some investment companies have offered "ethical" or "green" funds designed for individuals who want to get a sound return on their pensions or other investments, but aren't willing to do so if it means they will be profiting from the activities of companies they believe are not behaving in a fashion consistent with their values. Talisman's withdrawal from its holdings in Sudan is a clear example of the role values-based investors can play.
Few people understand this as completely as Jonathan Wellum, CEO, CIO and portfolio manager with AIC Ltd. Twice recognized as Canada's fund manager of the year and a former Top 40 under 40 designate, Wellum is a senior fellow with the Work Research Foundation. Somewhat uniquely for a financial analyst, he holds a master's degree in theology in addition to bachelor's degrees in business administration and in science.
Economics, according to Wellum's inaugural paper for WRF, is "really a metaphysical science rather than a mathematical one in which spiritual values and attitudes are more important that physical assets, and the morality and virtue of the populace are as foundational as the money supply." In Wellum's view, our present economic challenges are a barometer of our social values. "Why are we surprised by our short-termism when we are surrounded by an instant credit, mass consumption culture in which delayed gratification is ridiculed and mocked as outdated and irrelevant?"
Students of political science might be more familiar with this same theme, outlined by many thinkers, but explained succinctly by Thomas Jefferson in a 1792 letter to George Hammond when he said, "A nation, as a society, forms a moral person, and every member of it is personally responsible for his society." Substitute the word "market" for "society" and it's reasonably clear Jefferson and Wellum are speaking to the same issue.
Making long-term intergenerational decisions has important long-term implications, but requires a certain degree of self-sacrifice and philosophical perspective that seems in short supply in North America today. The CFA Institute warns that "an excessive short-term focus combined with insufficient regard for long-term strategy can tip the balance in value-destructive ways for market participants, undermine the market's credibility and discourage long-term value creation and investment."
The map of the world we grew up with -- the one with all the Commonwealth nations coloured in pink and dominated by the mass of the Soviet Union -- has changed radically. Just as profoundly, the geography of the new global economy continues to shift. And as it does, the shape it takes has everything to do with the economic power of our communal conscience.
Ray Pennings is vice-president of the Work Research Foundation, a think-tank specializing in the study of Canada's social architecture. www.wrf.ca.
© The Calgary Herald 2008
Environment and Spirituality
May 25, 2008
Op-Ed Columnist
Where Breathing Is Deadly
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
BADUI, China
China’s biggest health disaster isn’t the terrible Sichuan earthquake this month. It’s the air.
The quake killed at least 60,000 people, generating a response that has been heartwarming and inspiring, with even schoolchildren in China donating to the victims. Yet with little notice, somewhere between 300,000 and 400,000 Chinese die prematurely every year from the effects of outdoor air pollution, according to studies by Chinese and international agencies alike.
In short, roughly as many Chinese die every two months from the air as were killed in the earthquake. And the problem is becoming international: just as Californians can find Chinese-made shoes in their stores, they can now find Chinese-made haze in their skies.
This summer’s Beijing Olympics will showcase the most remarkable economic explosion in history, and also some of the world’s thickest pollution in both air and water. So I’ve returned to the Yellow River in western China’s Gansu Province to an isolated village that has haunted me since I saw it a decade ago.
Badui is known locally as the “village of dunces.” That’s because of the large number of mentally retarded people here — as well as the profusion of birth defects, skin rashes and physical deformities. Residents are sure that the problems result from a nearby fertilizer factory dumping effluent that taints their drinking water.
“Even if you’re afraid, you have to drink,” said Zhou Genger, the mother of a 15-year-old girl who is mentally retarded and has a hunchback. The girl, Kong Dongmei, mumbled unintelligibly, and Ms. Zhou said she had never been able to speak clearly.
Ms. Zhou pulled up the back of her daughter’s shirt, revealing a twisted, disfiguring mass of bones.
A 10-year-old neighbor girl named Hong Xia watched, her eyes filled with wonder at my camera. The neighbors say she, too, is retarded.
None of this is surprising: rural China is full of “cancer villages” caused by pollution from factories. Beijing’s air sometimes has a particulate concentration that is four times the level considered safe by the World Health Organization.
Scientists have tracked clouds of Chinese pollution as they drift over the Pacific and descend on America’s West Coast. The impact on American health is uncertain.
In fairness, China has been better than most other countries in curbing pollution, paying attention to the environment at a much earlier stage of development than the United States, Europe or Japan. Most impressive, in 2004, China embraced tighter fuel economy standards than the Bush administration was willing to accept at the time.
The city of Shanghai charges up to $7,000 for a license plate, thus reducing the number of new vehicles, and China has planted millions of trees and hugely expanded the use of natural gas to reduce emissions. If you look at what China’s leaders are doing, you wish that President Bush were half as green.
But then you peer into the Chinese haze — and despair. The economic boom is raising living standards hugely in many ways, but the toll of the resulting pollution can be brutal. The filth is prompting public protests, but the government has tightly curbed the civil society organizations that could help monitor pollution and keep it in check.
An environmental activist named Wu Lihong warned for years that Lake Tai, China’s third-largest freshwater lake, was endangered by chemical factories along its banks. Mr. Wu was proved right when the lake filled with toxins last summer — shortly after the authorities had sentenced him to three years in prison.
Here in Badui, the picture is as complex as China’s development itself. The government has taken action since my previous visit: the factory supposedly is no longer dumping pollutants, and the villages have been supplied with water that, in theory, is pure. The villagers don’t entirely believe this, but they acknowledge that their health problems have diminished.
Moreover, economic development has reached Badui. It is still poor, with a per-capita income of $100 a year, but there is now a rough dirt road to the village. On my last visit, there was only a footpath.
The road has increased economic opportunities. Farmers have dug ponds to raise fish that are trucked to the markets, but the fish are raised in water taken from the Yellow River just below the fertilizer factory. When I looked in one pond, the first thing I saw was a dead fish.
“We eat the fish ourselves,” said the village leader, Li Yuntang. “We worry about the chemicals, but we have to eat.” He said that as far as he knew, the fish had never been inspected for safety.
Now those fish from this dubious water are sold to unsuspecting residents in the city of Lanzhou. And the complexities and ambiguities about that progress offer a window into the shadings of China’s economic boom.
I invite you to comment on this column on my blog, www.nytimes.com/ontheground, and join me on Facebook at www.facebook.com/kristof.
Op-Ed Columnist
Where Breathing Is Deadly
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
BADUI, China
China’s biggest health disaster isn’t the terrible Sichuan earthquake this month. It’s the air.
The quake killed at least 60,000 people, generating a response that has been heartwarming and inspiring, with even schoolchildren in China donating to the victims. Yet with little notice, somewhere between 300,000 and 400,000 Chinese die prematurely every year from the effects of outdoor air pollution, according to studies by Chinese and international agencies alike.
In short, roughly as many Chinese die every two months from the air as were killed in the earthquake. And the problem is becoming international: just as Californians can find Chinese-made shoes in their stores, they can now find Chinese-made haze in their skies.
This summer’s Beijing Olympics will showcase the most remarkable economic explosion in history, and also some of the world’s thickest pollution in both air and water. So I’ve returned to the Yellow River in western China’s Gansu Province to an isolated village that has haunted me since I saw it a decade ago.
Badui is known locally as the “village of dunces.” That’s because of the large number of mentally retarded people here — as well as the profusion of birth defects, skin rashes and physical deformities. Residents are sure that the problems result from a nearby fertilizer factory dumping effluent that taints their drinking water.
“Even if you’re afraid, you have to drink,” said Zhou Genger, the mother of a 15-year-old girl who is mentally retarded and has a hunchback. The girl, Kong Dongmei, mumbled unintelligibly, and Ms. Zhou said she had never been able to speak clearly.
Ms. Zhou pulled up the back of her daughter’s shirt, revealing a twisted, disfiguring mass of bones.
A 10-year-old neighbor girl named Hong Xia watched, her eyes filled with wonder at my camera. The neighbors say she, too, is retarded.
None of this is surprising: rural China is full of “cancer villages” caused by pollution from factories. Beijing’s air sometimes has a particulate concentration that is four times the level considered safe by the World Health Organization.
Scientists have tracked clouds of Chinese pollution as they drift over the Pacific and descend on America’s West Coast. The impact on American health is uncertain.
In fairness, China has been better than most other countries in curbing pollution, paying attention to the environment at a much earlier stage of development than the United States, Europe or Japan. Most impressive, in 2004, China embraced tighter fuel economy standards than the Bush administration was willing to accept at the time.
The city of Shanghai charges up to $7,000 for a license plate, thus reducing the number of new vehicles, and China has planted millions of trees and hugely expanded the use of natural gas to reduce emissions. If you look at what China’s leaders are doing, you wish that President Bush were half as green.
But then you peer into the Chinese haze — and despair. The economic boom is raising living standards hugely in many ways, but the toll of the resulting pollution can be brutal. The filth is prompting public protests, but the government has tightly curbed the civil society organizations that could help monitor pollution and keep it in check.
An environmental activist named Wu Lihong warned for years that Lake Tai, China’s third-largest freshwater lake, was endangered by chemical factories along its banks. Mr. Wu was proved right when the lake filled with toxins last summer — shortly after the authorities had sentenced him to three years in prison.
Here in Badui, the picture is as complex as China’s development itself. The government has taken action since my previous visit: the factory supposedly is no longer dumping pollutants, and the villages have been supplied with water that, in theory, is pure. The villagers don’t entirely believe this, but they acknowledge that their health problems have diminished.
Moreover, economic development has reached Badui. It is still poor, with a per-capita income of $100 a year, but there is now a rough dirt road to the village. On my last visit, there was only a footpath.
The road has increased economic opportunities. Farmers have dug ponds to raise fish that are trucked to the markets, but the fish are raised in water taken from the Yellow River just below the fertilizer factory. When I looked in one pond, the first thing I saw was a dead fish.
“We eat the fish ourselves,” said the village leader, Li Yuntang. “We worry about the chemicals, but we have to eat.” He said that as far as he knew, the fish had never been inspected for safety.
Now those fish from this dubious water are sold to unsuspecting residents in the city of Lanzhou. And the complexities and ambiguities about that progress offer a window into the shadings of China’s economic boom.
I invite you to comment on this column on my blog, www.nytimes.com/ontheground, and join me on Facebook at www.facebook.com/kristof.
July 20, 2008
Op-Ed Columnist
9/11 and 4/11
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
I am reliably told by a Bush administration official that there is an old saying in Texas that goes like this: “If all you ever do is all you’ve ever done, then all you’ll ever get is all you ever got.”
Could anyone possibly come up with a better description of President Bush’s energy policy? America is in the midst of its worst energy crisis in years and what is the big decision our Decider has decided? Drum roll, please: Our Decider decided to lift the executive orders banning drilling for oil and natural gas off the country’s shoreline — even though he knew this was a meaningless gesture because a Congressional moratorium on drilling passed in 1981 remains in force.
The economist Paul Romer once said to me that “a crisis is a terrible thing to waste.” President Bush is well on his way to being remembered as the leader who wasted not one but two crises: 9/11 and 4/11. The average price of gasoline in the U.S. last week, according to the Energy Information Administration, was $4.11.
After 9/11, Mr. Bush had the chance to summon the country to a great nation-building project focused on breaking our addiction to oil. Instead, he told us to go shopping. After gasoline prices hit $4.11 last week, he had the chance to summon the country to a great nation-building project focused on clean energy. Instead, he told us to go drilling.
Neither shopping nor drilling is the solution to our problems.
What doesn’t the Bush crowd get? It’s this: We don’t have a “gasoline price problem.” We have an addiction problem. We are addicted to dirty fossil fuels, and this addiction is driving a whole set of toxic trends that are harming our nation and world in many different ways. It is intensifying global warming, creating runaway global demand for oil and gas, weakening our currency by shifting huge amounts of dollars abroad to pay for oil imports, widening “energy poverty” across Africa, destroying plants and animals at record rates and fostering ever-stronger petro-dictatorships in Iran, Russia and Venezuela.
When a person is addicted to crack cocaine, his problem is not that the price of crack is going up. His problem is what that crack addiction is doing to his whole body. The cure is not cheaper crack, which would only perpetuate the addiction and all the problems it is creating. The cure is to break the addiction.
Ditto for us. Our cure is not cheaper gasoline, but a clean energy system. And the key to building that is to keep the price of gasoline and coal — our crack — higher, not lower, so consumers are moved to break their addiction to these dirty fuels and inventors are moved to create clean alternatives.
I understand why consumers think we have a gasoline price problem — because they are immediately hurt by higher gas prices and the pump is where most people touch our energy system. They tend not to see the bigger picture. But that is why you have a president: to explain that and lay out a response.
Alas, we have a president and a vice president who deny that climate change is hurting our environmental body, who refuse to see the connection between the dollars we are shifting abroad and the rise of petro-dictators, who do not care about biodiversity loss and who are apparently untroubled by the sharp decline in the dollar, partly because of all the money we are paying for oil imports. So, they have chosen to define this as a “gasoline price crisis” — not an-addiction-to-a-fuel-that-is-badly-hurting-us-as-a-nation crisis.
If you want to know what an alternative strategy might look like, read the speech that Al Gore delivered on Thursday to the bipartisan Alliance for Climate Protection. Gore, the alliance’s chairman, called for a 10-year plan — the same amount of time John F. Kennedy set for getting us to the moon — to shift the entire country to “renewable energy and truly clean, carbon-free sources” to power our homes, factories and even transportation.
Mr. Gore proposed dramatically improving our national electricity grid and energy efficiency, while investing massively in clean solar, wind, geothermal and carbon-sequestered coal technologies that we know can work but just need to scale. To make the shift, he called for taxing carbon and offsetting that by reducing payroll taxes: Let’s “tax what we burn, not what we earn,” he said.
Whether you agree or not with Gore’s plan, at least he has a plan for dealing with the real problem we face — a multifaceted, multigenerational energy/environment/geopolitical problem.
This moment — $4.11 — represents Bush’s last chance for a legacy. It amazes me how inadequate his response has been. By hectoring the nation to simply drill for more oil, he has profoundly underestimated the challenges we face, misread the scale of the solutions required, underappreciated the American people’s willingness to sacrifice if presented with a real plan, and ignored the greatness that would accrue to our country if we led the world in clean power.
Op-Ed Columnist
9/11 and 4/11
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
I am reliably told by a Bush administration official that there is an old saying in Texas that goes like this: “If all you ever do is all you’ve ever done, then all you’ll ever get is all you ever got.”
Could anyone possibly come up with a better description of President Bush’s energy policy? America is in the midst of its worst energy crisis in years and what is the big decision our Decider has decided? Drum roll, please: Our Decider decided to lift the executive orders banning drilling for oil and natural gas off the country’s shoreline — even though he knew this was a meaningless gesture because a Congressional moratorium on drilling passed in 1981 remains in force.
The economist Paul Romer once said to me that “a crisis is a terrible thing to waste.” President Bush is well on his way to being remembered as the leader who wasted not one but two crises: 9/11 and 4/11. The average price of gasoline in the U.S. last week, according to the Energy Information Administration, was $4.11.
After 9/11, Mr. Bush had the chance to summon the country to a great nation-building project focused on breaking our addiction to oil. Instead, he told us to go shopping. After gasoline prices hit $4.11 last week, he had the chance to summon the country to a great nation-building project focused on clean energy. Instead, he told us to go drilling.
Neither shopping nor drilling is the solution to our problems.
What doesn’t the Bush crowd get? It’s this: We don’t have a “gasoline price problem.” We have an addiction problem. We are addicted to dirty fossil fuels, and this addiction is driving a whole set of toxic trends that are harming our nation and world in many different ways. It is intensifying global warming, creating runaway global demand for oil and gas, weakening our currency by shifting huge amounts of dollars abroad to pay for oil imports, widening “energy poverty” across Africa, destroying plants and animals at record rates and fostering ever-stronger petro-dictatorships in Iran, Russia and Venezuela.
When a person is addicted to crack cocaine, his problem is not that the price of crack is going up. His problem is what that crack addiction is doing to his whole body. The cure is not cheaper crack, which would only perpetuate the addiction and all the problems it is creating. The cure is to break the addiction.
Ditto for us. Our cure is not cheaper gasoline, but a clean energy system. And the key to building that is to keep the price of gasoline and coal — our crack — higher, not lower, so consumers are moved to break their addiction to these dirty fuels and inventors are moved to create clean alternatives.
I understand why consumers think we have a gasoline price problem — because they are immediately hurt by higher gas prices and the pump is where most people touch our energy system. They tend not to see the bigger picture. But that is why you have a president: to explain that and lay out a response.
Alas, we have a president and a vice president who deny that climate change is hurting our environmental body, who refuse to see the connection between the dollars we are shifting abroad and the rise of petro-dictators, who do not care about biodiversity loss and who are apparently untroubled by the sharp decline in the dollar, partly because of all the money we are paying for oil imports. So, they have chosen to define this as a “gasoline price crisis” — not an-addiction-to-a-fuel-that-is-badly-hurting-us-as-a-nation crisis.
If you want to know what an alternative strategy might look like, read the speech that Al Gore delivered on Thursday to the bipartisan Alliance for Climate Protection. Gore, the alliance’s chairman, called for a 10-year plan — the same amount of time John F. Kennedy set for getting us to the moon — to shift the entire country to “renewable energy and truly clean, carbon-free sources” to power our homes, factories and even transportation.
Mr. Gore proposed dramatically improving our national electricity grid and energy efficiency, while investing massively in clean solar, wind, geothermal and carbon-sequestered coal technologies that we know can work but just need to scale. To make the shift, he called for taxing carbon and offsetting that by reducing payroll taxes: Let’s “tax what we burn, not what we earn,” he said.
Whether you agree or not with Gore’s plan, at least he has a plan for dealing with the real problem we face — a multifaceted, multigenerational energy/environment/geopolitical problem.
This moment — $4.11 — represents Bush’s last chance for a legacy. It amazes me how inadequate his response has been. By hectoring the nation to simply drill for more oil, he has profoundly underestimated the challenges we face, misread the scale of the solutions required, underappreciated the American people’s willingness to sacrifice if presented with a real plan, and ignored the greatness that would accrue to our country if we led the world in clean power.
August 3, 2008
Op-Ed Columnist
The Iceman Cometh
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
Greenland Ice Sheet,
77 degrees 45 minutes N. latitude,
51 degrees 6 minutes W. longitude
Jorgen Peder Steffensen made me an offer I couldn’t refuse: “If you come to Copenhagen, I will show you a Christmas snow — a real Christmas snow, the snow that fell between 1 B.C. and 1 A.D.”
Now that’s an offer you don’t get every day! But then I don’t go to the Arctic Circle every day. “I can also show you a sample of the very last snow that fell right at the end of the last ice age, which was 11,700 years ago,” said Steffensen. Or, he asked me, “How would you like to see the air samples that contain the sulfuric traces of the Mount Vesuvius volcanic eruption” that buried Pompeii in A.D. 79?
Steffensen is an ice specialist and curator of the world’s most comprehensive collection of ice core samples, a kind of atmospheric DNA drilled out of the glaciers of Greenland and now preserved in refrigerated vaults in the Danish capital. The more and deeper scientists can drill the ice, the better the picture they can give of the climate in previous eras — and therefore the more we will understand about climate change.
Each layer of ice contains water and air bubbles that were trapped in the snow, which, when analyzed by expert scientists, reveal in great detail the temperature, the amount of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, the amount and origins of volcanic dust, and even the amount of sea salt in the air and therefore how close the glacier was to the ocean.
Imagine for a moment a freezer filled with such revealing ice cubes. Each ice cube represents one year’s atmospheric data beginning 150,000 years ago, which is how far back the current Greenland icecap dates. Well, Steffensen, his wife, Dorthe Dahl-Jensen, both of the Centre for Ice and Climate at the Niels Bohr Institute of the University of Copenhagen, and a team of international experts are assembling precisely that kind of freezer from ice cores drilled here in the far north of Greenland in the Arctic Circle.
I traveled to their newest camp with a group of experts led by Denmark’s minister of climate and energy, Connie Hedegaard, and including Rajendra Pachauri, the chairman of the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which shared last year’s Nobel Peace Prize with Al Gore. We flew in on a U.S. Air Force National Guard C-130, which landed on skis — not wheels — since the landing strip was just a plowed strip of ice and snow.
This is surely one of the most remarkable and isolated research stations in the world. Everywhere you look, you see a perfectly flat expanse of snow and ice stretching to the horizon. In fact, you can see so far in every direction that it feels as though you can see the curvature of the earth. The camp consists of a heated geodesic dome where the scientists eat, a dozen barely heated tents where they (and guests) sleep in insulated sleeping bags and an underground research laboratory, carved out of the ice, where they are installing the drill and ice lab equipment. Over the next three “summers,” they will unearth ice core samples all the way down to Greenland’s bedrock — roughly 1.5 miles, or the equivalent of 150,000 years of accumulated ice layers.
Their objective is to do something never done before: project a complete picture of the Greenland climate, from the ice age that lasted from 200,000 to 130,000 years ago, through the warming period known as the Eemian that lasted from 130,000 to 115,000 years ago, through the last ice age from 115,000 to 11,703 years ago, right up to the present warming period we’ve been in since. (Remember: the Earth is usually an ice ball; the warm interglacial periods are the exceptions.)
Their last drilling project here, which was completed in 2004, focused on the layers 14,500 to 11,000 years ago. That project is already causing a stir in the climate community. In an article just published in the journal Science Express, Dahl-Jensen’s team wrote about how it had discovered from the ice cores that the atmospheric circulation in the Northern Hemisphere over Greenland “changed abruptly” just as the last ice age ended around 11,700 years ago.
It seems to have been driven by a sudden change in monsoons in the tropics. The change was so abrupt that it warmed the Northern Hemisphere over Greenland by 10 degrees Celsius in just 50 years — a dramatic increase.
“It shows that our climate system has the ability to make very abrupt changes all by itself,” said Dahl-Jensen.
Some climate-change deniers would say that this proves that mankind is not important in changing the climate. Climate change experts, like Dahl-Jensen, say it’s not so simple: The climate is always changing, sometimes very abruptly, so the last thing that mankind should be doing is adding its own forcing actions — like pumping unprecedented amounts of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. Because you never know — you never know — what will tip the balance and send us hurdling into another abrupt change ... and into another era.
Op-Ed Columnist
The Iceman Cometh
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
Greenland Ice Sheet,
77 degrees 45 minutes N. latitude,
51 degrees 6 minutes W. longitude
Jorgen Peder Steffensen made me an offer I couldn’t refuse: “If you come to Copenhagen, I will show you a Christmas snow — a real Christmas snow, the snow that fell between 1 B.C. and 1 A.D.”
Now that’s an offer you don’t get every day! But then I don’t go to the Arctic Circle every day. “I can also show you a sample of the very last snow that fell right at the end of the last ice age, which was 11,700 years ago,” said Steffensen. Or, he asked me, “How would you like to see the air samples that contain the sulfuric traces of the Mount Vesuvius volcanic eruption” that buried Pompeii in A.D. 79?
Steffensen is an ice specialist and curator of the world’s most comprehensive collection of ice core samples, a kind of atmospheric DNA drilled out of the glaciers of Greenland and now preserved in refrigerated vaults in the Danish capital. The more and deeper scientists can drill the ice, the better the picture they can give of the climate in previous eras — and therefore the more we will understand about climate change.
Each layer of ice contains water and air bubbles that were trapped in the snow, which, when analyzed by expert scientists, reveal in great detail the temperature, the amount of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, the amount and origins of volcanic dust, and even the amount of sea salt in the air and therefore how close the glacier was to the ocean.
Imagine for a moment a freezer filled with such revealing ice cubes. Each ice cube represents one year’s atmospheric data beginning 150,000 years ago, which is how far back the current Greenland icecap dates. Well, Steffensen, his wife, Dorthe Dahl-Jensen, both of the Centre for Ice and Climate at the Niels Bohr Institute of the University of Copenhagen, and a team of international experts are assembling precisely that kind of freezer from ice cores drilled here in the far north of Greenland in the Arctic Circle.
I traveled to their newest camp with a group of experts led by Denmark’s minister of climate and energy, Connie Hedegaard, and including Rajendra Pachauri, the chairman of the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which shared last year’s Nobel Peace Prize with Al Gore. We flew in on a U.S. Air Force National Guard C-130, which landed on skis — not wheels — since the landing strip was just a plowed strip of ice and snow.
This is surely one of the most remarkable and isolated research stations in the world. Everywhere you look, you see a perfectly flat expanse of snow and ice stretching to the horizon. In fact, you can see so far in every direction that it feels as though you can see the curvature of the earth. The camp consists of a heated geodesic dome where the scientists eat, a dozen barely heated tents where they (and guests) sleep in insulated sleeping bags and an underground research laboratory, carved out of the ice, where they are installing the drill and ice lab equipment. Over the next three “summers,” they will unearth ice core samples all the way down to Greenland’s bedrock — roughly 1.5 miles, or the equivalent of 150,000 years of accumulated ice layers.
Their objective is to do something never done before: project a complete picture of the Greenland climate, from the ice age that lasted from 200,000 to 130,000 years ago, through the warming period known as the Eemian that lasted from 130,000 to 115,000 years ago, through the last ice age from 115,000 to 11,703 years ago, right up to the present warming period we’ve been in since. (Remember: the Earth is usually an ice ball; the warm interglacial periods are the exceptions.)
Their last drilling project here, which was completed in 2004, focused on the layers 14,500 to 11,000 years ago. That project is already causing a stir in the climate community. In an article just published in the journal Science Express, Dahl-Jensen’s team wrote about how it had discovered from the ice cores that the atmospheric circulation in the Northern Hemisphere over Greenland “changed abruptly” just as the last ice age ended around 11,700 years ago.
It seems to have been driven by a sudden change in monsoons in the tropics. The change was so abrupt that it warmed the Northern Hemisphere over Greenland by 10 degrees Celsius in just 50 years — a dramatic increase.
“It shows that our climate system has the ability to make very abrupt changes all by itself,” said Dahl-Jensen.
Some climate-change deniers would say that this proves that mankind is not important in changing the climate. Climate change experts, like Dahl-Jensen, say it’s not so simple: The climate is always changing, sometimes very abruptly, so the last thing that mankind should be doing is adding its own forcing actions — like pumping unprecedented amounts of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. Because you never know — you never know — what will tip the balance and send us hurdling into another abrupt change ... and into another era.
August 6, 2008
Op-Ed Columnist
Learning to Speak Climate
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
Ilulissat, Greenland
Sometimes you just wish you were a photographer. I simply do not have the words to describe the awesome majesty of Greenland’s Kangia Glacier, shedding massive icebergs the size of skyscrapers and slowly pushing them down the Ilulissat Fjord until they crash into the ocean off the west coast of Greenland. There, these natural ice sculptures float and bob around the glassy waters near here. You can sail between them in a fishing boat, listening to these white ice monsters crackle and break, heave and sigh, as if they were noisily protesting their fate.
You are entirely alone here amid the giant icebergs, save for the solitary halibut fisherman who floats by. Our Greenlandic boat skipper sidles up to the tiny fishing craft, where my hosts buy a few halibut right out of his nets, slice open the tender cheeks and cut me the freshest halibut sushi I’ve ever tasted. “Greenland fast food,” quips Kim Kielsen, Greenland’s minister of the environment.
We wash it down with Scotch whiskey cooled by a 5,000-year-old ice cube chipped off one of the floating glacier bits. Some countries have vintage whiskey. Some have vintage wine. Greenland has vintage ice.
Alas, though, I do not work for National Geographic. This is the opinion page. And my trip with Denmark’s minister of climate and energy, Connie Hedegaard, to see the effects of climate change on Greenland’s ice sheet leaves me with a very strong opinion: Our kids are going to be so angry with us one day.
We’ve charged their future on our Visa cards. We’ve added so many greenhouse gases to the atmosphere, for our generation’s growth, that our kids are likely going to spend a good part of their adulthood, maybe all of it, just dealing with the climate implications of our profligacy. And now our leaders are telling them the way out is “offshore drilling” for more climate-changing fossil fuels.
Madness. Sheer madness.
Most people assume that the effects of climate change are going to be felt through another big disaster, like Katrina. Not necessarily, says Minik Thorleif Rosing, a top geologist at Denmark’s National History Museum and one of my traveling companions. “Most people will actually feel climate change delivered to them by the postman,” he explains. It will come in the form of higher water bills, because of increased droughts in some areas; higher energy bills, because the use of fossil fuels becomes prohibitive; and higher insurance and mortgage rates, because of much more violently unpredictable weather.
Remember: climate change means “global weirding,” not just global warming.
Greenland is one of the best places to observe the effects of climate change. Because the world’s biggest island has just 55,000 people and no industry, the condition of its huge ice sheet — as well as its temperature, precipitation and winds — is influenced by the global atmospheric and ocean currents that converge here. Whatever happens in China or Brazil gets felt here. And because Greenlanders live close to nature, they are walking barometers of climate change.
That’s how I learned a new language here: “Climate-Speak.”
It’s easy to learn. There are only three phrases. The first is: “Just a few years ago ...” Just a few years ago you could dogsled in winter from Greenland, across a 40-mile ice bank, to Disko Island. But for the past few years, the rising winter temperatures in Greenland have melted that link. Now Disko is cut off. Put away the dogsled.
There has been a 30 percent increase in the melting of the Greenland ice sheet between 1979 and 2007, and in 2007, the melt was 10 percent bigger than in any previous year, said Konrad Steffen, director of the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences at the University of Colorado, which monitors the ice. Greenland is now losing 200 cubic kilometers of ice per year — from melt and ice sliding into the ocean from outlet glaciers along its edges — which far exceeds the volume of all the ice in the European Alps, he added. “Everything is happening faster than anticipated.”
The second phrase is: “I’ve never seen that before...” It rained in December and January in Ilulissat. This is well above the Arctic Circle! It’s not supposed to rain here in winter. Said Steffen: “Twenty years ago, if I had told the people of Ilulissat that it would rain at Christmas 2007, they would have just laughed at me. Today it is a reality.”
The third phrase is: “Well usually ...but now I don’t know anymore.” Traditional climate patterns that Greenland elders have known their whole lives have changed so quickly in some places that “the accumulated experience of older people is not as valuable as before,” said Rosing. The river that was always there is now dry. The glacier that always covered that hill has disappeared. The reindeer that were always there when the hunting season opened on Aug. 1 didn’t show up.
No wonder everyone here speaks climate now — your kids will, too, and sooner than they think.
Op-Ed Columnist
Learning to Speak Climate
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
Ilulissat, Greenland
Sometimes you just wish you were a photographer. I simply do not have the words to describe the awesome majesty of Greenland’s Kangia Glacier, shedding massive icebergs the size of skyscrapers and slowly pushing them down the Ilulissat Fjord until they crash into the ocean off the west coast of Greenland. There, these natural ice sculptures float and bob around the glassy waters near here. You can sail between them in a fishing boat, listening to these white ice monsters crackle and break, heave and sigh, as if they were noisily protesting their fate.
You are entirely alone here amid the giant icebergs, save for the solitary halibut fisherman who floats by. Our Greenlandic boat skipper sidles up to the tiny fishing craft, where my hosts buy a few halibut right out of his nets, slice open the tender cheeks and cut me the freshest halibut sushi I’ve ever tasted. “Greenland fast food,” quips Kim Kielsen, Greenland’s minister of the environment.
We wash it down with Scotch whiskey cooled by a 5,000-year-old ice cube chipped off one of the floating glacier bits. Some countries have vintage whiskey. Some have vintage wine. Greenland has vintage ice.
Alas, though, I do not work for National Geographic. This is the opinion page. And my trip with Denmark’s minister of climate and energy, Connie Hedegaard, to see the effects of climate change on Greenland’s ice sheet leaves me with a very strong opinion: Our kids are going to be so angry with us one day.
We’ve charged their future on our Visa cards. We’ve added so many greenhouse gases to the atmosphere, for our generation’s growth, that our kids are likely going to spend a good part of their adulthood, maybe all of it, just dealing with the climate implications of our profligacy. And now our leaders are telling them the way out is “offshore drilling” for more climate-changing fossil fuels.
Madness. Sheer madness.
Most people assume that the effects of climate change are going to be felt through another big disaster, like Katrina. Not necessarily, says Minik Thorleif Rosing, a top geologist at Denmark’s National History Museum and one of my traveling companions. “Most people will actually feel climate change delivered to them by the postman,” he explains. It will come in the form of higher water bills, because of increased droughts in some areas; higher energy bills, because the use of fossil fuels becomes prohibitive; and higher insurance and mortgage rates, because of much more violently unpredictable weather.
Remember: climate change means “global weirding,” not just global warming.
Greenland is one of the best places to observe the effects of climate change. Because the world’s biggest island has just 55,000 people and no industry, the condition of its huge ice sheet — as well as its temperature, precipitation and winds — is influenced by the global atmospheric and ocean currents that converge here. Whatever happens in China or Brazil gets felt here. And because Greenlanders live close to nature, they are walking barometers of climate change.
That’s how I learned a new language here: “Climate-Speak.”
It’s easy to learn. There are only three phrases. The first is: “Just a few years ago ...” Just a few years ago you could dogsled in winter from Greenland, across a 40-mile ice bank, to Disko Island. But for the past few years, the rising winter temperatures in Greenland have melted that link. Now Disko is cut off. Put away the dogsled.
There has been a 30 percent increase in the melting of the Greenland ice sheet between 1979 and 2007, and in 2007, the melt was 10 percent bigger than in any previous year, said Konrad Steffen, director of the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences at the University of Colorado, which monitors the ice. Greenland is now losing 200 cubic kilometers of ice per year — from melt and ice sliding into the ocean from outlet glaciers along its edges — which far exceeds the volume of all the ice in the European Alps, he added. “Everything is happening faster than anticipated.”
The second phrase is: “I’ve never seen that before...” It rained in December and January in Ilulissat. This is well above the Arctic Circle! It’s not supposed to rain here in winter. Said Steffen: “Twenty years ago, if I had told the people of Ilulissat that it would rain at Christmas 2007, they would have just laughed at me. Today it is a reality.”
The third phrase is: “Well usually ...but now I don’t know anymore.” Traditional climate patterns that Greenland elders have known their whole lives have changed so quickly in some places that “the accumulated experience of older people is not as valuable as before,” said Rosing. The river that was always there is now dry. The glacier that always covered that hill has disappeared. The reindeer that were always there when the hunting season opened on Aug. 1 didn’t show up.
No wonder everyone here speaks climate now — your kids will, too, and sooner than they think.
August 10, 2008
Op-Ed Columnist
Flush With Energy
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
Copenhagen
The Arctic Hotel in Ilulissat, Greenland, is a charming little place on the West Coast, but no one would ever confuse it for a Four Seasons — maybe a One Seasons. But when my wife and I walked back to our room after dinner the other night and turned down our dim hallway, the hall light went on. It was triggered by an energy-saving motion detector. Our toilet even had two different flushing powers depending on — how do I say this delicately — what exactly you’re flushing. A two-gear toilet! I’ve never found any of this at an American hotel. Oh, if only we could be as energy efficient as Greenland!
A day later, I flew back to Denmark. After appointments here in Copenhagen, I was riding in a car back to my hotel at the 6 p.m. rush hour. And boy, you knew it was rush hour because 50 percent of the traffic in every intersection was bicycles. That is roughly the percentage of Danes who use two-wheelers to go to and from work or school every day here. If I lived in a city that had dedicated bike lanes everywhere, including one to the airport, I’d go to work that way, too. It means less traffic, less pollution and less obesity.
What was most impressive about this day, though, was that it was raining. No matter. The Danes simply donned rain jackets and pants for biking. If only we could be as energy smart as Denmark!
Unlike America, Denmark, which was so badly hammered by the 1973 Arab oil embargo that it banned all Sunday driving for a while, responded to that crisis in such a sustained, focused and systematic way that today it is energy independent. (And it didn’t happen by Danish politicians making their people stupid by telling them the solution was simply more offshore drilling.)
What was the trick? To be sure, Denmark is much smaller than us and was lucky to discover some oil in the North Sea. But despite that, Danes imposed on themselves a set of gasoline taxes, CO2 taxes and building-and-appliance efficiency standards that allowed them to grow their economy — while barely growing their energy consumption — and gave birth to a Danish clean-power industry that is one of the most competitive in the world today. Denmark today gets nearly 20 percent of its electricity from wind. America? About 1 percent.
And did Danes suffer from their government shaping the market with energy taxes to stimulate innovations in clean power? In one word, said Connie Hedegaard, Denmark’s minister of climate and energy: “No.” It just forced them to innovate more — like the way Danes recycle waste heat from their coal-fired power plants and use it for home heating and hot water, or the way they incinerate their trash in central stations to provide home heating. (There are virtually no landfills here.)
There is little whining here about Denmark having $10-a-gallon gasoline because of high energy taxes. The shaping of the market with high energy standards and taxes on fossil fuels by the Danish government has actually had “a positive impact on job creation,” added Hedegaard. “For example, the wind industry — it was nothing in the 1970s. Today, one-third of all terrestrial wind turbines in the world come from Denmark.” In the last 10 years, Denmark’s exports of energy efficiency products have tripled. Energy technology exports rose 8 percent in 2007 to more than $10.5 billion in 2006, compared with a 2 percent rise in 2007 for Danish exports as a whole.
“It is one of our fastest-growing export areas,” said Hedegaard. It is one reason that unemployment in Denmark today is 1.6 percent. In 1973, said Hedegaard, “we got 99 percent of our energy from the Middle East. Today it is zero.”
Frankly, when you compare how America has responded to the 1973 oil shock and how Denmark has responded, we look pathetic.
“I have observed that in all other countries, including in America, people are complaining about how prices of [gasoline] are going up,” Denmark’s prime minister, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, told me. “The cure is not to reduce the price, but, on the contrary, to raise it even higher to break our addiction to oil. We are going to introduce a new tax reform in the direction of even higher taxation on energy and the revenue generated on that will be used to cut taxes on personal income — so we will improve incentives to work and improve incentives to save energy and develop renewable energy.”
Because it was smart taxes and incentives that spurred Danish energy companies to innovate, Ditlev Engel, the president of Vestas — Denmark’s and the world’s biggest wind turbine company — told me that he simply can’t understand how the U.S. Congress could have just failed to extend the production tax credits for wind development in America.
Why should you care?
“We’ve had 35 new competitors coming out of China in the last 18 months,” said Engel, “and not one out of the U.S.”
Op-Ed Columnist
Flush With Energy
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
Copenhagen
The Arctic Hotel in Ilulissat, Greenland, is a charming little place on the West Coast, but no one would ever confuse it for a Four Seasons — maybe a One Seasons. But when my wife and I walked back to our room after dinner the other night and turned down our dim hallway, the hall light went on. It was triggered by an energy-saving motion detector. Our toilet even had two different flushing powers depending on — how do I say this delicately — what exactly you’re flushing. A two-gear toilet! I’ve never found any of this at an American hotel. Oh, if only we could be as energy efficient as Greenland!
A day later, I flew back to Denmark. After appointments here in Copenhagen, I was riding in a car back to my hotel at the 6 p.m. rush hour. And boy, you knew it was rush hour because 50 percent of the traffic in every intersection was bicycles. That is roughly the percentage of Danes who use two-wheelers to go to and from work or school every day here. If I lived in a city that had dedicated bike lanes everywhere, including one to the airport, I’d go to work that way, too. It means less traffic, less pollution and less obesity.
What was most impressive about this day, though, was that it was raining. No matter. The Danes simply donned rain jackets and pants for biking. If only we could be as energy smart as Denmark!
Unlike America, Denmark, which was so badly hammered by the 1973 Arab oil embargo that it banned all Sunday driving for a while, responded to that crisis in such a sustained, focused and systematic way that today it is energy independent. (And it didn’t happen by Danish politicians making their people stupid by telling them the solution was simply more offshore drilling.)
What was the trick? To be sure, Denmark is much smaller than us and was lucky to discover some oil in the North Sea. But despite that, Danes imposed on themselves a set of gasoline taxes, CO2 taxes and building-and-appliance efficiency standards that allowed them to grow their economy — while barely growing their energy consumption — and gave birth to a Danish clean-power industry that is one of the most competitive in the world today. Denmark today gets nearly 20 percent of its electricity from wind. America? About 1 percent.
And did Danes suffer from their government shaping the market with energy taxes to stimulate innovations in clean power? In one word, said Connie Hedegaard, Denmark’s minister of climate and energy: “No.” It just forced them to innovate more — like the way Danes recycle waste heat from their coal-fired power plants and use it for home heating and hot water, or the way they incinerate their trash in central stations to provide home heating. (There are virtually no landfills here.)
There is little whining here about Denmark having $10-a-gallon gasoline because of high energy taxes. The shaping of the market with high energy standards and taxes on fossil fuels by the Danish government has actually had “a positive impact on job creation,” added Hedegaard. “For example, the wind industry — it was nothing in the 1970s. Today, one-third of all terrestrial wind turbines in the world come from Denmark.” In the last 10 years, Denmark’s exports of energy efficiency products have tripled. Energy technology exports rose 8 percent in 2007 to more than $10.5 billion in 2006, compared with a 2 percent rise in 2007 for Danish exports as a whole.
“It is one of our fastest-growing export areas,” said Hedegaard. It is one reason that unemployment in Denmark today is 1.6 percent. In 1973, said Hedegaard, “we got 99 percent of our energy from the Middle East. Today it is zero.”
Frankly, when you compare how America has responded to the 1973 oil shock and how Denmark has responded, we look pathetic.
“I have observed that in all other countries, including in America, people are complaining about how prices of [gasoline] are going up,” Denmark’s prime minister, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, told me. “The cure is not to reduce the price, but, on the contrary, to raise it even higher to break our addiction to oil. We are going to introduce a new tax reform in the direction of even higher taxation on energy and the revenue generated on that will be used to cut taxes on personal income — so we will improve incentives to work and improve incentives to save energy and develop renewable energy.”
Because it was smart taxes and incentives that spurred Danish energy companies to innovate, Ditlev Engel, the president of Vestas — Denmark’s and the world’s biggest wind turbine company — told me that he simply can’t understand how the U.S. Congress could have just failed to extend the production tax credits for wind development in America.
Why should you care?
“We’ve had 35 new competitors coming out of China in the last 18 months,” said Engel, “and not one out of the U.S.”
August 12, 2008
Scientist at Work: Diana Beresford-Kroeger
Advocating an Unusual Role for Trees
By JIM ROBBINS
MERRICKVILLE, Ontario — Diana Beresford-Kroeger pointed to a towering wafer ash tree near her home.
The tree is a chemical factory, she explained, and its products are part of a sophisticated survival strategy. The flowers contain terpene oils, which repel mammals that might feed on them. But the ash needs to attract pollinators, and so it has a powerful lactone fragrance that appeals to large butterflies and honeybees. The chemicals in the wafer ash, in turn, she said, provide chemical protection for the butterflies from birds, making them taste bitter.
Many similar unseen chemical relationships are going on in the world around us. “These are at the heart of connectivity in nature,” she said.
Ms. Beresford-Kroeger, 63, is a native of Ireland who has bachelor’s degrees in medical biochemistry and botany, and has worked as a Ph.D.-level researcher at the University of Ottawa school of medicine, where she published several papers on the chemistry of artificial blood. She calls herself a renegade scientist, however, because she tries to bring together aboriginal healing, Western medicine and botany to advocate an unusual role for trees.
She favors what she terms a bioplan, reforesting cities and rural areas with trees according to the medicinal, environmental, nutritional, pesticidal and herbicidal properties she claims for them, which she calls ecofunctions.
Wafer ash, for example, could be used in organic farming, she said, planted in hedgerows to attract butterflies away from crops. Black walnut and honey locusts could be planted along roads to absorb pollutants, she said.
“Her ideas are a rare, if not entirely new approach to natural history,” said Edward O. Wilson, a Harvard biologist who wrote the foreword for her 2003 book, “Arboretum America” (University of Michigan Press). “The science of selecting trees for different uses around the world has not been well studied.”
Miriam Rothschild, the British naturalist who died in 2005, wrote glowingly of Ms. Beresford-Kroeger’s idea of bioplanning and called it “one answer to ‘Silent Spring’ ” because it uses natural chemicals rather than synthetic ones.
But some of Ms. Beresford-Kroeger’s claims for the health effects of trees reach far outside the mainstream. Although some compounds found in trees do have medicinal properties and are the subject of research and treatment, she jumps beyond the evidence to say they also affect human health in their natural forms. The black walnut, for example, contains limonene, which is found in citrus fruit and elsewhere and has been shown to have anticancer effects in some studies of laboratory animals. Ms. Beresford-Kroeger has suggested, without evidence, that limonene inhaled in aerosol form by humans will help prevent cancer.
David Lemkay, the general manager of the Canadian Forestry Association, a nonprofit group that promotes the sustainable use of Canada’s forests, is familiar with her work. “She holds fast to the notion that if you are in the aura of a black walnut tree there’s a healing effect,” Mr. Lemkay said. “It needs more science to be able to say that.”
Memory Elvin-Lewis, a professor of botany at Washington University in St. Louis and co-author, with her husband, Walter H. Lewis, of “Medical Botany: Plants Affecting Human Health” (2003, John Wiley & Sons), said such a role for trees could be true. In India, she said, compounds from neem trees are said to have anti-inflammatory and antiviral properties and are planted around hospitals and sanitariums. “It’s not implausible,” Dr. Elvin-Lewis said; it simply hasn’t been studied.
On a more solid scientific footing, Ms. Beresford-Kroeger is also concerned about the fate of the Northern forests because of overharvest and the destruction of ecosystems. Federal scientists estimate more than 93 percent of old growth has been cut. As forests are fragmented, they dry out, losing wildlife and insect species. As a result, subtle relationships, the nerve system of biodiversity, are breaking down before they have been studied.
“In a walk through old growth forest, there are thousands if not millions of chemicals and their synergistic effects with one another,” she said. “What trees do chemically in the environment is something we’re only beginning to understand.”
Trees also absorb pollutants from the ground, comb particulates from the air and house beneficial insects.
Some studies support a role for trees in human health. A recent study by researchers at Columbia found that children in neighborhoods that are tree-lined have asthma rates a quarter less than in neighborhoods without trees. The Center for Urban Forest Research estimates that each tree removes 1.5 pounds of pollutants from the air. Trees are also used to remove mercury and other pollutants from the ground, something called phytoremediation. And, of course, trees store carbon dioxide, which mitigates global warming.
Dr. Wilson, at Harvard, said that more research into the role of trees in the ecosystem was imperative and that it was alarming how little was known. “We need more research of this kind to use the things we have, such as trees, to their fullest,” he said.
Both Dr. Wilson and Ms. Beresford-Kroeger proposed using stock from old-growth forests for planting new forest in the hopes of taking advantage of good genetics. “There’s an enormous difference between old-growth forests and tree plantations,” Dr. Wilson said.
Ms. Beresford-Kroeger is famous in Canadian horticulture circles for her sprawling gardens, which she maintains with her husband, Christian Kroeger, and are often open to the public. She has 60,000 daffodils, more than 100 rare hellebores from Turkey and Iran and extremely rare peonies from China that are dark brown with red leaves and smell like chocolate.
And she grows more than 100 types of trees, including rare fir trees and Siberian cherry trees, and disease-resistant chestnuts, elms and butternut.
Ms. Beresford-Kroeger recently completed the book “Arboretum Borealis” about the boreal forest in Canada, which cuts across the northern half of the country. Canadian officials have recently announced plans to preserve 55 million acres — roughly half. “Trees are a living miracle,” Ms. Beresford-Kroeger said. “Leaves can take in carbon dioxide and create oxygen. And all creatures must have oxygen.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/12/scien ... nted=print
*****
August 12, 2008
Prescriptions for Health, the Environmental Kind
By AMANDA SCHAFFER
In a bright studio at New York University, Natalie Jeremijenko welcomes visitors to her environmental health clinic. She wears a white lab coat with a rotated red cross on the pocket. A clipboard with intake forms hangs by the door.
Inside, circuit boards, respirators, light bulbs, bike helmets and books on green design clutter the high shelves. In front of a bamboo consultation desk sits a mock medicine cabinet, which turns out to be filled with power tools.
Dr. Jeremijenko, an Australian artist, designer and engineer, invites members of the public to the clinic to discuss personal environmental concerns like air and water quality. Sitting at the consultation desk, she also offers them concrete remedies or “prescriptions” for change, much as a medical clinic might offer prescriptions for drugs.
“It’s a widely familiar script,” said Dr. Jeremijenko, 41, who has a doctorate in engineering and is an assistant professor of visual art at N.Y.U. “People know how to ring up and make an appointment at their health clinic. But they don’t really know what to do about toxins in the air and global warming, right?
“So the whole thing is how do we translate the tremendous amount of anxiety and interest in addressing major environmental issues into something concrete that people can do whose effect is measurable and significant?”
Visitors to the clinic talk about an array of concerns, including contaminated land, polluted indoor air and dirty storm-water runoff. Dr. Jeremijenko typically gives them a primer on local environmental issues, especially the top polluters in their neighborhoods. Then she offers prescriptions that include an eclectic mix of green design, engineering and art — window treatments, maybe, or sunflowers, tadpoles or succulents.
“People are frustrated by their inability to cope with environmental problems in their apartments and their neighborhoods,” said George Thurston, a professor of environmental medicine at New York University School of Medicine. Dr. Jeremijenko, he continued, “provides a service that’s needed, educating people about what they’re up against and showing them that they can do something themselves while waiting for larger societal solutions.”
Dr. Jeremijenko has worked with scores of individuals and community groups since starting the clinic last fall. “I call them impatients,” she said — meaning that they don’t want to wait for legislative action.
She holds daily office hours at N.Y.U., but also runs periodic off-site clinics at sites around the city — “like the M*A*S*H field offices,” she said.
For instance, she met with “impatients” on the edge of the East River and took some of them out on a float made of two-liter soda bottles connected to a flexible polycarbonate sheet. Micah Roufa, who recently graduated from architectural school, was one of those present, though he said he chose to remain on solid ground.
Mr. Roufa owns a vacant lot in St. Louis that is contaminated with low levels of lead. He said he wanted to remedy that problem while using the space in a creative way and raising awareness about lead poisoning in the neighborhood.
Dr. Jeremijenko suggested planting a grid of sunflowers, along with a chemical agent called EDTA, to draw lead out of the soil. (EDTA is used to bind metals, making it easier for them to be taken up by plants; scientists caution that the approach requires technical care, because if too much of the chemical is added, a contaminant could migrate to neighboring property.)
Mr. Roufa planted the sunflowers this summer within an artistic grid of steel bars and glass orbs. “She has been a great guide and an inspiration,” he said.
Of all the concerns Dr. Jeremijenko hears about at the clinic, she said indoor air quality tops the list. For common pollutants like formaldehyde, benzene and toluene she typically prescribes the copious use of houseplants, which have been shown to absorb some chemicals.
With the designers Will Kavesh and Amelia Amon, she has also developed a system that uses solar energy to power customized L.E.D. lights, which promote plant growth while providing a light intended for human use. The sun’s energy is captured by a “solar awning,” which is a stretch of glass, fabric or stainless steel that can be fitted to an apartment or office window.
And Dr. Jeremijenko has a prescription for storm-water runoff, which can cause sewers to flood and can increase pollution in rivers: putting small plots of greenery, including mosses and grasses, in no-parking zones around the city. One such temporary plot, on Stuyvesant Street in the East Village, was called a “butterfly truck stop,” with plant life specifically designed to attract butterflies.
In past projects, Dr. Jeremijenko has coupled art and environmental activism. During the Republican National Convention in 2004, she organized a group of bicyclists to ride around New York wearing air-filtering masks, as an ironic comment on the government’s Clear Skies Initiative.
In 2006, as part of the Whitney Biennial, she installed a series of bird perches in the museum’s sculpture court. When birds landed on the perches, they set off computer sound files with comments on the interdependency of birds, other animals and people.
Dr. Jeremijenko’s work occupies a niche “between popular culture and high art, between art, science and engineering,” said Amanda McDonald Crowley, executive director of Eyebeam, an art and technology center in Chelsea. “In a sense it’s performance, in a sense it’s awareness raising, and in a sense it empowers an audience to take action.”
In March, Dr. Jeremijenko had environmental clinic hours at Eyebeam, where she distributed tadpoles named after government officials whose decisions affect water quality.
“Tadpoles are exquisite sensors of water quality,” she said, adding that she had already named a tadpole after Commissioner Pete Grannis of the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation.
“I had it in a sample of water from the Bronx River and, unfortunately it died,” she said. “But we’re going to resurrect him.”
Charles M. Marcus, professor of physics and director of the Center for Nanoscale Systems at Harvard, is a longtime admirer of Dr. Jeremijenko’s work. “So much of what environmentalism involves is things you shouldn’t do, and that can be very unsatisfying,” he said. “She’s addressing that head-on.
“She seems to be saying: ‘If you’re like me and you consider action and anxiety to be poles between which we navigate, then I can help get your hands dirty and I can help get you involved in doing something that will help with your mind and will help with the world.’ ”
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/12/healt ... nted=print
Scientist at Work: Diana Beresford-Kroeger
Advocating an Unusual Role for Trees
By JIM ROBBINS
MERRICKVILLE, Ontario — Diana Beresford-Kroeger pointed to a towering wafer ash tree near her home.
The tree is a chemical factory, she explained, and its products are part of a sophisticated survival strategy. The flowers contain terpene oils, which repel mammals that might feed on them. But the ash needs to attract pollinators, and so it has a powerful lactone fragrance that appeals to large butterflies and honeybees. The chemicals in the wafer ash, in turn, she said, provide chemical protection for the butterflies from birds, making them taste bitter.
Many similar unseen chemical relationships are going on in the world around us. “These are at the heart of connectivity in nature,” she said.
Ms. Beresford-Kroeger, 63, is a native of Ireland who has bachelor’s degrees in medical biochemistry and botany, and has worked as a Ph.D.-level researcher at the University of Ottawa school of medicine, where she published several papers on the chemistry of artificial blood. She calls herself a renegade scientist, however, because she tries to bring together aboriginal healing, Western medicine and botany to advocate an unusual role for trees.
She favors what she terms a bioplan, reforesting cities and rural areas with trees according to the medicinal, environmental, nutritional, pesticidal and herbicidal properties she claims for them, which she calls ecofunctions.
Wafer ash, for example, could be used in organic farming, she said, planted in hedgerows to attract butterflies away from crops. Black walnut and honey locusts could be planted along roads to absorb pollutants, she said.
“Her ideas are a rare, if not entirely new approach to natural history,” said Edward O. Wilson, a Harvard biologist who wrote the foreword for her 2003 book, “Arboretum America” (University of Michigan Press). “The science of selecting trees for different uses around the world has not been well studied.”
Miriam Rothschild, the British naturalist who died in 2005, wrote glowingly of Ms. Beresford-Kroeger’s idea of bioplanning and called it “one answer to ‘Silent Spring’ ” because it uses natural chemicals rather than synthetic ones.
But some of Ms. Beresford-Kroeger’s claims for the health effects of trees reach far outside the mainstream. Although some compounds found in trees do have medicinal properties and are the subject of research and treatment, she jumps beyond the evidence to say they also affect human health in their natural forms. The black walnut, for example, contains limonene, which is found in citrus fruit and elsewhere and has been shown to have anticancer effects in some studies of laboratory animals. Ms. Beresford-Kroeger has suggested, without evidence, that limonene inhaled in aerosol form by humans will help prevent cancer.
David Lemkay, the general manager of the Canadian Forestry Association, a nonprofit group that promotes the sustainable use of Canada’s forests, is familiar with her work. “She holds fast to the notion that if you are in the aura of a black walnut tree there’s a healing effect,” Mr. Lemkay said. “It needs more science to be able to say that.”
Memory Elvin-Lewis, a professor of botany at Washington University in St. Louis and co-author, with her husband, Walter H. Lewis, of “Medical Botany: Plants Affecting Human Health” (2003, John Wiley & Sons), said such a role for trees could be true. In India, she said, compounds from neem trees are said to have anti-inflammatory and antiviral properties and are planted around hospitals and sanitariums. “It’s not implausible,” Dr. Elvin-Lewis said; it simply hasn’t been studied.
On a more solid scientific footing, Ms. Beresford-Kroeger is also concerned about the fate of the Northern forests because of overharvest and the destruction of ecosystems. Federal scientists estimate more than 93 percent of old growth has been cut. As forests are fragmented, they dry out, losing wildlife and insect species. As a result, subtle relationships, the nerve system of biodiversity, are breaking down before they have been studied.
“In a walk through old growth forest, there are thousands if not millions of chemicals and their synergistic effects with one another,” she said. “What trees do chemically in the environment is something we’re only beginning to understand.”
Trees also absorb pollutants from the ground, comb particulates from the air and house beneficial insects.
Some studies support a role for trees in human health. A recent study by researchers at Columbia found that children in neighborhoods that are tree-lined have asthma rates a quarter less than in neighborhoods without trees. The Center for Urban Forest Research estimates that each tree removes 1.5 pounds of pollutants from the air. Trees are also used to remove mercury and other pollutants from the ground, something called phytoremediation. And, of course, trees store carbon dioxide, which mitigates global warming.
Dr. Wilson, at Harvard, said that more research into the role of trees in the ecosystem was imperative and that it was alarming how little was known. “We need more research of this kind to use the things we have, such as trees, to their fullest,” he said.
Both Dr. Wilson and Ms. Beresford-Kroeger proposed using stock from old-growth forests for planting new forest in the hopes of taking advantage of good genetics. “There’s an enormous difference between old-growth forests and tree plantations,” Dr. Wilson said.
Ms. Beresford-Kroeger is famous in Canadian horticulture circles for her sprawling gardens, which she maintains with her husband, Christian Kroeger, and are often open to the public. She has 60,000 daffodils, more than 100 rare hellebores from Turkey and Iran and extremely rare peonies from China that are dark brown with red leaves and smell like chocolate.
And she grows more than 100 types of trees, including rare fir trees and Siberian cherry trees, and disease-resistant chestnuts, elms and butternut.
Ms. Beresford-Kroeger recently completed the book “Arboretum Borealis” about the boreal forest in Canada, which cuts across the northern half of the country. Canadian officials have recently announced plans to preserve 55 million acres — roughly half. “Trees are a living miracle,” Ms. Beresford-Kroeger said. “Leaves can take in carbon dioxide and create oxygen. And all creatures must have oxygen.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/12/scien ... nted=print
*****
August 12, 2008
Prescriptions for Health, the Environmental Kind
By AMANDA SCHAFFER
In a bright studio at New York University, Natalie Jeremijenko welcomes visitors to her environmental health clinic. She wears a white lab coat with a rotated red cross on the pocket. A clipboard with intake forms hangs by the door.
Inside, circuit boards, respirators, light bulbs, bike helmets and books on green design clutter the high shelves. In front of a bamboo consultation desk sits a mock medicine cabinet, which turns out to be filled with power tools.
Dr. Jeremijenko, an Australian artist, designer and engineer, invites members of the public to the clinic to discuss personal environmental concerns like air and water quality. Sitting at the consultation desk, she also offers them concrete remedies or “prescriptions” for change, much as a medical clinic might offer prescriptions for drugs.
“It’s a widely familiar script,” said Dr. Jeremijenko, 41, who has a doctorate in engineering and is an assistant professor of visual art at N.Y.U. “People know how to ring up and make an appointment at their health clinic. But they don’t really know what to do about toxins in the air and global warming, right?
“So the whole thing is how do we translate the tremendous amount of anxiety and interest in addressing major environmental issues into something concrete that people can do whose effect is measurable and significant?”
Visitors to the clinic talk about an array of concerns, including contaminated land, polluted indoor air and dirty storm-water runoff. Dr. Jeremijenko typically gives them a primer on local environmental issues, especially the top polluters in their neighborhoods. Then she offers prescriptions that include an eclectic mix of green design, engineering and art — window treatments, maybe, or sunflowers, tadpoles or succulents.
“People are frustrated by their inability to cope with environmental problems in their apartments and their neighborhoods,” said George Thurston, a professor of environmental medicine at New York University School of Medicine. Dr. Jeremijenko, he continued, “provides a service that’s needed, educating people about what they’re up against and showing them that they can do something themselves while waiting for larger societal solutions.”
Dr. Jeremijenko has worked with scores of individuals and community groups since starting the clinic last fall. “I call them impatients,” she said — meaning that they don’t want to wait for legislative action.
She holds daily office hours at N.Y.U., but also runs periodic off-site clinics at sites around the city — “like the M*A*S*H field offices,” she said.
For instance, she met with “impatients” on the edge of the East River and took some of them out on a float made of two-liter soda bottles connected to a flexible polycarbonate sheet. Micah Roufa, who recently graduated from architectural school, was one of those present, though he said he chose to remain on solid ground.
Mr. Roufa owns a vacant lot in St. Louis that is contaminated with low levels of lead. He said he wanted to remedy that problem while using the space in a creative way and raising awareness about lead poisoning in the neighborhood.
Dr. Jeremijenko suggested planting a grid of sunflowers, along with a chemical agent called EDTA, to draw lead out of the soil. (EDTA is used to bind metals, making it easier for them to be taken up by plants; scientists caution that the approach requires technical care, because if too much of the chemical is added, a contaminant could migrate to neighboring property.)
Mr. Roufa planted the sunflowers this summer within an artistic grid of steel bars and glass orbs. “She has been a great guide and an inspiration,” he said.
Of all the concerns Dr. Jeremijenko hears about at the clinic, she said indoor air quality tops the list. For common pollutants like formaldehyde, benzene and toluene she typically prescribes the copious use of houseplants, which have been shown to absorb some chemicals.
With the designers Will Kavesh and Amelia Amon, she has also developed a system that uses solar energy to power customized L.E.D. lights, which promote plant growth while providing a light intended for human use. The sun’s energy is captured by a “solar awning,” which is a stretch of glass, fabric or stainless steel that can be fitted to an apartment or office window.
And Dr. Jeremijenko has a prescription for storm-water runoff, which can cause sewers to flood and can increase pollution in rivers: putting small plots of greenery, including mosses and grasses, in no-parking zones around the city. One such temporary plot, on Stuyvesant Street in the East Village, was called a “butterfly truck stop,” with plant life specifically designed to attract butterflies.
In past projects, Dr. Jeremijenko has coupled art and environmental activism. During the Republican National Convention in 2004, she organized a group of bicyclists to ride around New York wearing air-filtering masks, as an ironic comment on the government’s Clear Skies Initiative.
In 2006, as part of the Whitney Biennial, she installed a series of bird perches in the museum’s sculpture court. When birds landed on the perches, they set off computer sound files with comments on the interdependency of birds, other animals and people.
Dr. Jeremijenko’s work occupies a niche “between popular culture and high art, between art, science and engineering,” said Amanda McDonald Crowley, executive director of Eyebeam, an art and technology center in Chelsea. “In a sense it’s performance, in a sense it’s awareness raising, and in a sense it empowers an audience to take action.”
In March, Dr. Jeremijenko had environmental clinic hours at Eyebeam, where she distributed tadpoles named after government officials whose decisions affect water quality.
“Tadpoles are exquisite sensors of water quality,” she said, adding that she had already named a tadpole after Commissioner Pete Grannis of the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation.
“I had it in a sample of water from the Bronx River and, unfortunately it died,” she said. “But we’re going to resurrect him.”
Charles M. Marcus, professor of physics and director of the Center for Nanoscale Systems at Harvard, is a longtime admirer of Dr. Jeremijenko’s work. “So much of what environmentalism involves is things you shouldn’t do, and that can be very unsatisfying,” he said. “She’s addressing that head-on.
“She seems to be saying: ‘If you’re like me and you consider action and anxiety to be poles between which we navigate, then I can help get your hands dirty and I can help get you involved in doing something that will help with your mind and will help with the world.’ ”
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/12/healt ... nted=print
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/16/scien ... &th&emc=th
September 16, 2008
Weather History Offers Insight Into Global Warming
By ANTHONY DePALMA
NEW PALTZ, N.Y. — It is probably a good thing that the Mohonk Mountain House, the 19th-century resort, was built on Shawangunk conglomerate, a concrete-hard quartz rock. Otherwise, the path to the National Weather Service’s cooperative station here surely would have turned to dust by now.
Every day for the last 112 years, people have trekked up the same gray outcropping to dutifully record temperatures and weather conditions. In the process, they have compiled a remarkable data collection that has become a climatological treasure chest.
The problems that often haunt other weather records — the station is moved, buildings are constructed nearby or observers record data inconsistently — have not arisen here because so much of this place has been frozen in time. The weather has been taken in exactly the same place, in precisely the same way, by just a handful of the same dedicated people since Grover Cleveland was president.
For much of that time, those same weather observers have also made detailed records about recurring natural events, like the appearance of the first spring peeper or the first witch hazel bush to bud in the fall. Together, these two sets of data, meticulously collected in the same area, are beginning to offer up intriguing indicators about climate change — not about what is causing it but rather how it affects the lives of animals, plants, insects and birds.
It all starts with the daily ritual of “doing the weather,” which is what people at Mohonk House call the process of recording temperatures. One day in late summer, it was the turn of a gentle 61-year-old botanist turned naturalist named Paul C. Huth. As he has done most days for the last 34 years, around 4 p.m. Mr. Huth scrambled up the conglomerate outcropping in the shadow of Mohonk House, a National Historic Landmark about 90 miles north of New York City that has retained its 19th-century sensibility. Signs along the resort’s roads plead: “Slowly and Quietly Please.”
Mr. Huth opened the weather station, a louvered box about the size of a suitcase, and leaned in. He checked the high and low temperatures of the day on a pair of official Weather Service thermometers and then manually reset them. Besides the thermometers, the box contained a small flashlight, a can of lubricating oil and a plastic magnifying glass. Those thermometers can be hard to read in the rain.
If the procedure seems old-fashioned, that is just as it is intended. The temperatures that Mr. Huth recorded that day were the 41,152nd daily readings at this station, each taken exactly the same way. “Sometimes it feels like I’ve done most of them myself,” said Mr. Huth, who is one of only five people to have served as official weather observer at this station since the first reading was taken on Jan. 1, 1896.
That extremely limited number of observers greatly enhances the reliability, and therefore the value, of the data. Other weather stations have operated longer, but few match Mohonk’s consistency and reliability. “The quality of their observations is second to none on a number of counts,” said Raymond G. O’Keefe, a meteorologist at the National Weather Service office in Albany. “They’re very precise, they keep great records and they’ve done it for a very long time.”
Mohonk’s data stands apart from that of most other cooperative weather observers in other respects as well. The station has never been moved, and the resort, along with the area immediately surrounding the box, has hardly changed over time. Rain and snow are measured in the original brass rain gauge issued in 1896 by what was then known as the United States Weather Bureau. Mr. Huth also checks the temperature and pH of Mohonk Lake daily, and he measures the level of the lake according to its distance from the top of an iron bar that was bolted to the Shawangunk conglomerate in 1896.
The record shows that on this ridge in the Shawangunk Mountains, about 20 miles south of the better-known Catskills, the average annual temperature has risen 2.7 degrees in 112 years. Of the top 10 warmest years in that time, 7 have come since 1990. Both annual precipitation and annual snowfall have increased, and the growing season has lengthened by 10 days.
But what makes the data truly singular is how it parallels a vast collection of phenological observations taken at this same place, and by many of the same observers, since 1925.
Phenology is the science of natural occurrences, yearly events like the first snow, the first blooming of hepatica and the arrival of the first whippoorwill. Keeping diaries of such occurrences was a hobby of counts and lords in Europe, and there are records in Kyoto, Japan, of the flowering of cherry blossom trees dating back 900 years. Among the most notable American phenological records were those kept by Thomas Jefferson at Monticello and Henry David Thoreau at Walden Pond.
Today, phenology is recognized as an important, even critical, approach to understanding climate change. The National Phenology Network, with financing from the National Science Foundation and other agencies, has started an field campaign, called Project BudBurst (www.budburst.org), in which volunteers record the way 500 native plants are responding to climate change.
The phenology records at Mohonk House are, in many ways, a model for such observations. They were compiled, in large measure, by Mr. Huth and the naturalist he succeeded, Daniel Smiley Jr. Mr. Smiley, who died in 1989, was a beloved descendant of the two Quaker brothers who founded Mohonk House in 1869. He dedicated much of his life to keeping lists of everything he saw and heard on the mountain, collecting whatever was of interest to him and labeling it carefully for future use.
Mr. Smiley kept his phenology records as meticulously as he “did the weather” for more than 50 years, for which he earned the National Weather Service’s highest award, named for Thomas Jefferson.
He walked the extensive grounds of the resort making notes about every bird call he heard, every animal he saw, every budding flower and flowering tree. Back in his office, he transcribed those notes onto 3-by-5 cards (many early ones were written on the reverse side of the hotel’s old menu cards). Over time, he amassed more than 14,500 cards with notations like this one, from March 28, 1929, filed under “partridge”: “Near Duck Hawk ledge on Sky Top saw one ‘treading’ another, with great commotion down in a brush pile in a crevice, while a third looked on. Too dark for a picture.”
In 1978, the Smiley family carved out 6,500 of its acres around the hotel to form the Mohonk Preserve, the largest nonprofit nature preserve in New York State. In 1980, the preserve created a research center that was named for Mr. Smiley after he died in 1989. Mr. Smiley was an old-school amateur naturalist, but his observations have proved to be solid scientific evidence. For instance, when the hotel’s chlorination system started acting up in 1931, he began taking water temperature and acidity readings. He was surprised to find that the water was unusually acidic, a pH of around 4.5, but he did not know why and just filed away his notes. Jump ahead 40 years to the early 1970s, when acid rain became a concern. Mr. Smiley dug up his old notes and sent them to the Environmental Defense Fund, which used the data as a baseline for extended studies of acid rain.
Similarly, in the 1950s Mr. Smiley found on his walks that the use of DDT to control gypsy moths was killing all kinds of insects, and that the peregrine falcon had nearly disappeared from the Shawangunks. He ordered all spraying stopped on Mohonk land. Of course, DDT spraying was later banned.
Last year, Benjamin I. Cook, a climate modeler and post-doctoral fellow at the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, and his father, Edward R. Cook, a tree-ring specialist at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory who met Mr. Smiley in 1971 when he was a military policeman at West Point, published a study in The International Journal of Climatology. They analyzed Mohonk House data to determine how some overwintering birds, insects, animals and 19 species of plants had changed their habits in accord with changes in temperature.
The results showed how sensitive species can be to climate change, even though the climate data itself is mixed. Benjamin Cook said hepatica, bloodroot and red berried elder tended to show the strongest trends toward earlier flowering. And despite a general warming trend, there was no significant increase in the length of the frost-free season. Nonetheless, there were significantly more days without frost.
“This is more than just a normal January thaw,” Mr. Cook said. The increase in warmer days in winter sends false signals to plants and animals whose seasonal changes can be set off by the temporary warmth.
Intrigued by that initial dip into Mr. Smiley’s data, Mr. Cook next intends to look at migrating birds. Mr. Smiley observed that by the early 1980s many migrating species were arriving about a week earlier than they did in the 1920s, and many American robins had stopped migrating altogether.
As a climate modeler, Mr. Cook said he was used to having to correct for inconsistencies in weather records and biases in phenological observations. But he said the Mohonk records were so consistently reliable that there was little need for corrections.
“It was a kind of perfect storm of the Smiley family, with this strong ethos about the land and land preservation, and Dan Smiley himself, with that same ethos but a scientific mind,” Mr. Cook said. “We just happened to be in the right place at the right time. We were all just incredibly lucky.”
September 16, 2008
Weather History Offers Insight Into Global Warming
By ANTHONY DePALMA
NEW PALTZ, N.Y. — It is probably a good thing that the Mohonk Mountain House, the 19th-century resort, was built on Shawangunk conglomerate, a concrete-hard quartz rock. Otherwise, the path to the National Weather Service’s cooperative station here surely would have turned to dust by now.
Every day for the last 112 years, people have trekked up the same gray outcropping to dutifully record temperatures and weather conditions. In the process, they have compiled a remarkable data collection that has become a climatological treasure chest.
The problems that often haunt other weather records — the station is moved, buildings are constructed nearby or observers record data inconsistently — have not arisen here because so much of this place has been frozen in time. The weather has been taken in exactly the same place, in precisely the same way, by just a handful of the same dedicated people since Grover Cleveland was president.
For much of that time, those same weather observers have also made detailed records about recurring natural events, like the appearance of the first spring peeper or the first witch hazel bush to bud in the fall. Together, these two sets of data, meticulously collected in the same area, are beginning to offer up intriguing indicators about climate change — not about what is causing it but rather how it affects the lives of animals, plants, insects and birds.
It all starts with the daily ritual of “doing the weather,” which is what people at Mohonk House call the process of recording temperatures. One day in late summer, it was the turn of a gentle 61-year-old botanist turned naturalist named Paul C. Huth. As he has done most days for the last 34 years, around 4 p.m. Mr. Huth scrambled up the conglomerate outcropping in the shadow of Mohonk House, a National Historic Landmark about 90 miles north of New York City that has retained its 19th-century sensibility. Signs along the resort’s roads plead: “Slowly and Quietly Please.”
Mr. Huth opened the weather station, a louvered box about the size of a suitcase, and leaned in. He checked the high and low temperatures of the day on a pair of official Weather Service thermometers and then manually reset them. Besides the thermometers, the box contained a small flashlight, a can of lubricating oil and a plastic magnifying glass. Those thermometers can be hard to read in the rain.
If the procedure seems old-fashioned, that is just as it is intended. The temperatures that Mr. Huth recorded that day were the 41,152nd daily readings at this station, each taken exactly the same way. “Sometimes it feels like I’ve done most of them myself,” said Mr. Huth, who is one of only five people to have served as official weather observer at this station since the first reading was taken on Jan. 1, 1896.
That extremely limited number of observers greatly enhances the reliability, and therefore the value, of the data. Other weather stations have operated longer, but few match Mohonk’s consistency and reliability. “The quality of their observations is second to none on a number of counts,” said Raymond G. O’Keefe, a meteorologist at the National Weather Service office in Albany. “They’re very precise, they keep great records and they’ve done it for a very long time.”
Mohonk’s data stands apart from that of most other cooperative weather observers in other respects as well. The station has never been moved, and the resort, along with the area immediately surrounding the box, has hardly changed over time. Rain and snow are measured in the original brass rain gauge issued in 1896 by what was then known as the United States Weather Bureau. Mr. Huth also checks the temperature and pH of Mohonk Lake daily, and he measures the level of the lake according to its distance from the top of an iron bar that was bolted to the Shawangunk conglomerate in 1896.
The record shows that on this ridge in the Shawangunk Mountains, about 20 miles south of the better-known Catskills, the average annual temperature has risen 2.7 degrees in 112 years. Of the top 10 warmest years in that time, 7 have come since 1990. Both annual precipitation and annual snowfall have increased, and the growing season has lengthened by 10 days.
But what makes the data truly singular is how it parallels a vast collection of phenological observations taken at this same place, and by many of the same observers, since 1925.
Phenology is the science of natural occurrences, yearly events like the first snow, the first blooming of hepatica and the arrival of the first whippoorwill. Keeping diaries of such occurrences was a hobby of counts and lords in Europe, and there are records in Kyoto, Japan, of the flowering of cherry blossom trees dating back 900 years. Among the most notable American phenological records were those kept by Thomas Jefferson at Monticello and Henry David Thoreau at Walden Pond.
Today, phenology is recognized as an important, even critical, approach to understanding climate change. The National Phenology Network, with financing from the National Science Foundation and other agencies, has started an field campaign, called Project BudBurst (www.budburst.org), in which volunteers record the way 500 native plants are responding to climate change.
The phenology records at Mohonk House are, in many ways, a model for such observations. They were compiled, in large measure, by Mr. Huth and the naturalist he succeeded, Daniel Smiley Jr. Mr. Smiley, who died in 1989, was a beloved descendant of the two Quaker brothers who founded Mohonk House in 1869. He dedicated much of his life to keeping lists of everything he saw and heard on the mountain, collecting whatever was of interest to him and labeling it carefully for future use.
Mr. Smiley kept his phenology records as meticulously as he “did the weather” for more than 50 years, for which he earned the National Weather Service’s highest award, named for Thomas Jefferson.
He walked the extensive grounds of the resort making notes about every bird call he heard, every animal he saw, every budding flower and flowering tree. Back in his office, he transcribed those notes onto 3-by-5 cards (many early ones were written on the reverse side of the hotel’s old menu cards). Over time, he amassed more than 14,500 cards with notations like this one, from March 28, 1929, filed under “partridge”: “Near Duck Hawk ledge on Sky Top saw one ‘treading’ another, with great commotion down in a brush pile in a crevice, while a third looked on. Too dark for a picture.”
In 1978, the Smiley family carved out 6,500 of its acres around the hotel to form the Mohonk Preserve, the largest nonprofit nature preserve in New York State. In 1980, the preserve created a research center that was named for Mr. Smiley after he died in 1989. Mr. Smiley was an old-school amateur naturalist, but his observations have proved to be solid scientific evidence. For instance, when the hotel’s chlorination system started acting up in 1931, he began taking water temperature and acidity readings. He was surprised to find that the water was unusually acidic, a pH of around 4.5, but he did not know why and just filed away his notes. Jump ahead 40 years to the early 1970s, when acid rain became a concern. Mr. Smiley dug up his old notes and sent them to the Environmental Defense Fund, which used the data as a baseline for extended studies of acid rain.
Similarly, in the 1950s Mr. Smiley found on his walks that the use of DDT to control gypsy moths was killing all kinds of insects, and that the peregrine falcon had nearly disappeared from the Shawangunks. He ordered all spraying stopped on Mohonk land. Of course, DDT spraying was later banned.
Last year, Benjamin I. Cook, a climate modeler and post-doctoral fellow at the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, and his father, Edward R. Cook, a tree-ring specialist at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory who met Mr. Smiley in 1971 when he was a military policeman at West Point, published a study in The International Journal of Climatology. They analyzed Mohonk House data to determine how some overwintering birds, insects, animals and 19 species of plants had changed their habits in accord with changes in temperature.
The results showed how sensitive species can be to climate change, even though the climate data itself is mixed. Benjamin Cook said hepatica, bloodroot and red berried elder tended to show the strongest trends toward earlier flowering. And despite a general warming trend, there was no significant increase in the length of the frost-free season. Nonetheless, there were significantly more days without frost.
“This is more than just a normal January thaw,” Mr. Cook said. The increase in warmer days in winter sends false signals to plants and animals whose seasonal changes can be set off by the temporary warmth.
Intrigued by that initial dip into Mr. Smiley’s data, Mr. Cook next intends to look at migrating birds. Mr. Smiley observed that by the early 1980s many migrating species were arriving about a week earlier than they did in the 1920s, and many American robins had stopped migrating altogether.
As a climate modeler, Mr. Cook said he was used to having to correct for inconsistencies in weather records and biases in phenological observations. But he said the Mohonk records were so consistently reliable that there was little need for corrections.
“It was a kind of perfect storm of the Smiley family, with this strong ethos about the land and land preservation, and Dan Smiley himself, with that same ethos but a scientific mind,” Mr. Cook said. “We just happened to be in the right place at the right time. We were all just incredibly lucky.”
Electric cars await Vancouver green light
Bylaw will allow low-speed vehicles
Lena Sin
Canwest News Service
Sunday, September 28, 2008
The electric car movement is gaining momentum in Canada, with Vancouver set to become the first major Canadian city to allow the zero-emission vehicles on its streets.
If the bylaw to allow low-speed electric vehicles is passed by city council this week, Vancouver will become the second city in the country to adopt the little green cars.
The first to make it legal for the cars to travel on its roads was Oak Bay, B.C., a bedroom community of Victoria, which recently passed a bylaw.
"This is great -- it's a movement," said Don Chandler, president of the Vancouver Electric Vehicle Association. "It's been like the perfect storm. So much is happening at all levels." As an indication of the rising interest, Chandler points out that 50 new members showed up to the club at the last meeting.
"That's huge for a grassroots organization," he said.
The Vancouver bylaw, if passed on Tuesday, will allow low-speed electric vehicles to travel on any city street with a posted speed limit of 50 km/h or lower.
That would mean the cars could be on any street in Vancouver -- except bridges, which have a speed limit of 60 km/h.
"That's the only glitch," Chandler said. "How do you get downtown?" Chandler is proposing that the city consider allowing the cars in the right-hand lane on bridges.
Electric vehicles have been around for more than a century, but were quickly overshadowed by their gasoline-powered counterparts. But with global warming and rising oil prices now increasingly a concern, big automakers such as Chrysler and GM are rushing to put high-speed electric vehicles on the market by 2010.
Until then, the low-speed electric car is the most accessible low-carbon vehicle. Vancouver is already home to one dealer.
Transport Canada stipulates the vehicles must not be driven any faster than 40 km/h, although they can be technically manufactured to travel up to 60 km/h.
Ontario and Quebec have a pilot program to consider wider use of the cars, also known as "neighbourhood electric vehicles." The cars are in wide use in the United States and Europe.
© The Calgary Herald 2008
Bylaw will allow low-speed vehicles
Lena Sin
Canwest News Service
Sunday, September 28, 2008
The electric car movement is gaining momentum in Canada, with Vancouver set to become the first major Canadian city to allow the zero-emission vehicles on its streets.
If the bylaw to allow low-speed electric vehicles is passed by city council this week, Vancouver will become the second city in the country to adopt the little green cars.
The first to make it legal for the cars to travel on its roads was Oak Bay, B.C., a bedroom community of Victoria, which recently passed a bylaw.
"This is great -- it's a movement," said Don Chandler, president of the Vancouver Electric Vehicle Association. "It's been like the perfect storm. So much is happening at all levels." As an indication of the rising interest, Chandler points out that 50 new members showed up to the club at the last meeting.
"That's huge for a grassroots organization," he said.
The Vancouver bylaw, if passed on Tuesday, will allow low-speed electric vehicles to travel on any city street with a posted speed limit of 50 km/h or lower.
That would mean the cars could be on any street in Vancouver -- except bridges, which have a speed limit of 60 km/h.
"That's the only glitch," Chandler said. "How do you get downtown?" Chandler is proposing that the city consider allowing the cars in the right-hand lane on bridges.
Electric vehicles have been around for more than a century, but were quickly overshadowed by their gasoline-powered counterparts. But with global warming and rising oil prices now increasingly a concern, big automakers such as Chrysler and GM are rushing to put high-speed electric vehicles on the market by 2010.
Until then, the low-speed electric car is the most accessible low-carbon vehicle. Vancouver is already home to one dealer.
Transport Canada stipulates the vehicles must not be driven any faster than 40 km/h, although they can be technically manufactured to travel up to 60 km/h.
Ontario and Quebec have a pilot program to consider wider use of the cars, also known as "neighbourhood electric vehicles." The cars are in wide use in the United States and Europe.
© The Calgary Herald 2008
October 7, 2008
Audubon’s Species: Bird Art, in All Its Glory
By CORNELIA DEAN
There is a related multimedia linked at:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/07/scien ... &th&emc=th
In 1812, John James Audubon filled a wooden box with about 200 of his paintings of American birds and left it with a relative for safekeeping while he went off on one of his many trips. When he returned to retrieve the paintings, he discovered to his horror that they had been destroyed, shredded by nesting rats.
As he described it later, his first reaction was “a burning heat” in his brain, a headache so intense it kept him awake for days.
Then, though, he reconsidered. “I felt pleased,” he wrote, “that I might now make better drawings than before.”
We know the results — Audubon turned himself into the most famous practitioner of what some call “bird art.” Copies of his “Birds of America,” published section by section in the mid-19th century, are among the most valuable illustrated books.
But Audubon was only one of a number of naturalist artists who have made their careers portraying birds. And in his day, before cameras or reliable preservation techniques, bird artists gathered and recorded important scientific information about the ornithological world. For him, his colleagues and rivals, the ability to observe their surroundings and draw what they saw was not just a prerequisite for making and selling art. Observation and illustration were important tools of research.
Four new books illuminate the confluence of science, art and ornithology, which flowered perhaps most brilliantly in Audubon’s day, although it had ancient roots. The art of depicting birds emerged in the cave culture of Paleolithic times. The first drawing of a bird (that we know about) was of an owl, found on the wall of a cave in Vallon-Pont-d’Arc, France, in 1994.
And though sketching may have given way to the high-tech tools of zoology, the authors of three books agree that drawing and painting continue to be superior tools for people seeking to learn about birds. If you find that hard to believe, consider that many contemporary birders prefer the field guide drawings of Roger Tory Peterson and David Allen Sibley to guides relying on photography.
All three of these books are filled with glorious images of drawn and painted birds, fascinating anecdotes about how the images were made and odd facts. Edward Lear, for example, the master of the limerick, was an accomplished bird artist who considered this work his true calling.
But there is much more than beautiful images and bird-art trivia. In “Humans, Nature and Birds: Science Art From Cave Walls to Computer Screens” (Yale University Press, July 2008), Darryl Wheye, a California artist, and Donald Kennedy, an ecologist and emeritus president of Stanford, take a close look at humanity’s relationship with birds. Ms. Wheye and Dr. Kennedy, also the former editor of the journal Science, have collected bird art ranging from the cave painting of an owl to a portrait of the ivory-billed woodpecker, which appeared on the cover of Science in 2005 to accompany a report, much criticized since, that an ivorybill had been observed in an Arkansas swamp and that the species was not extinct after all.
They arrange this art not in chronological order or by species or geography, but in a kind of virtual “gallery” that tells, room by room, of birds as symbols, a natural resource, exemplars of important biological principles or as species useful in encouraging conservation. And they describe art that reveals bird behavior — individual, intraspecies and interspecies, including relations between birds and people.
Among other things, they note that birds as icons are a contradictory lot. They embody wisdom (owls) and stupidity (dodos); peace (doves) and war (eagles); freedom (in flight) and enforced propriety (when caged).
“Birds: The Art of Ornithology” (Rizzoli, April 2008), by Jonathan Elphick, an eminent British ornithologist, is a more conventional, and exhaustive, survey of bird art from the work of medieval weavers to artists painting today. If your knowledge of bird art is limited to Audubon, Sibley and Peterson, the parade of characters who walk across its pages will be a revelation.
Lear, for example, was celebrated for his art, Mr. Elphick writes, describing his lithograph of a gaudy scarlet macaw as illustrating “the individual character he gave to his bird subjects without sacrificing scientific objectivity.” But Lear’s prosperous family lost its money when he was a child, and he struggled as a bird artist for patronage and other support. Worse, his vision faded, immensely complicating his work.
Audubon prided himself on working “from life,” but, like his contemporaries, he usually worked with birds he killed. When he could not get a live golden eagle to hold still, Mr. Elphick recounts, he contemplated letting it go. Instead he stabbed it through the heart and posed it to produce one of his most famous images: a golden eagle carrying off a snowshoe hare.
Drawing and painting were almost the least of the troubles of early bird artists. Field trips in those days were rugged. And once they had made their art, the artists often faced formidable difficulty reproducing it in high-quality (and marketable) form. In the early 19th century, for example, reliable printing houses were few and far between.
How Audubon’s art developed is a theme of an introductory essay by the historian Richard Rhodes in “Audubon: Early Drawings” (Harvard University Press, September 2008), which reproduces one of the few extant collections of his early work, the Harris collection at Harvard. These drawings are interesting not just because of their seemingly naïve charm, but also because of their great technical distance from the work produced in “Birds of America.” In this collection, the birds appear in more or less stilted poses, usually in profile. They appear almost always on an otherwise empty page. Audubon offers terse notes to describe their habits, a practice he dropped in “Birds.”
Even today, scientists sometimes consult Audubon, Lear and other early practitioners of bird art to learn about extinct species like the Carolina parakeet, the subject of another famous Audubon image. Or they look for hints of how the habitats or habits of surviving species might have changed since the 18th or 19th centuries.
These books might seem to make the case that photography has nothing to contribute to the science and art of ornithology. But a fourth new book, “Egg and Nest” (Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, September 2008), by Rosamond Purcell, Linnea S. Hall and René Corado, is a most effective rebuttal. It collects photographs that Rosamond Purcell made at the Western Foundation of Vertebrate Zoology in Camarillo, Calif., a natural history collection specializing in the eggs and nests of birds from around the world.
In an essay, the naturalist Bernd Heinrich offers his explanation for, as he calls it, “the allure of eggs and nests.” Ms. Hall, the director of the foundation, and Mr. Corado, its collections manager, offer detailed explanations of which bird laid each egg or built each nest and descriptions of how collectors gather specimens and preserve eggs by “blowing” out their contents. They even provide an X-ray of a gravid kiwi, its body seemingly filled by an egg, and explain that kiwis lay one egg at a time, “the largest eggs relative to their body size of any living birds.”
If you are wondering why anyone would spend a life in a pursuit as eccentric as collecting eggs and nests, Ms. Purcell’s work will tell you. She selected a range of specimens, eggs brightly colored and plain, and nests made conventionally of twigs or of materials as bizarre as nails. Then she photographed them in natural light.
Her luminous results explain without words why people have been collecting eggs and nests for centuries.
****
Quarter of world's mammals at risk
Humans mainly to blame in bleak study
Margaret Munro
Canwest News Service
Tuesday, October 07, 2008
The Earth is an increasingly bleak place for animals, according to a massive global study that concludes a quarter of the 5,487 wild mammal species on the planet are threatened with extinction.
And one species -- humans -- are largely responsible for the crisis, according to the grim report released Monday at a World Conservation Congress in Spain. The state of the world's mammals report is the most comprehensive ever. It is the result of a collaborative five-year effort by more than 1,700 experts in 130 countries including Canada, who collected information on the animals' distribution, habitats, ecology, threats and human use.
It covers everything from the tiniest mammal, the bumblebee bat, to the largest, the blue whale, along with the 349 newly described species found since 1992. The researchers conclude that not only are one in four mammal species threatened with extinction, but more than half of all mammal populations are declining.
"Our results paint a bleak picture of the global status of mammals worldwide," the team concludes in its report, to be published in the journal Science later this week.
While "depressing," the researchers say the findings should be empowering. The comprehensive data amassed "can and should be used to inform strategies for addressing this crisis," and identifying priority species and areas for conservation.
They say time is running out for more than a thousand species.
"The staggering component of this study is that it shows one of four mammals species could be gone in the foreseeable future," says co-author Andrew Derocher, a leading bear biologist at the University of Alberta. "And the pace of the disappearance seems to be increasing at a phenomenal rate."
The situation is particularly dire for land animals in Asia, because of the combined impact of overhunting and habitat destruction, says the report, noting that 79 per cent of the monkeys and other primate species in the region are threatened with extinction.
And marine mammals are "victims of our increasingly intensive use of the oceans" with whales, porpoises and other marine mammals getting tangled in fishing nets, hauled in as "by-catch," or hit by vessels, the report says.
The scientists sum it up saying of the 4,651 species for which enough data is available, 1,139, or 25 per cent, are now threatened with extinction. Marine species are a particular concern, with an estimated 36 per cent of species threatened. Species not classified as threatened are not necessarily safe, they say, noting 323 mammals are classified as "near" threatened. And for 52 per cent of all species for which data exist, trends show the populations declining.
On a more positive note, at least five per cent of currently threatened species, such as the European bison and black-footed ferret, have stable or increasing populations. But the overall trend does not bode well for the world's animals, says the report, noting the situation will "likely deteriorate further in the near future" unless steps are taken to conserve the animals and habitat they depend on.
Mammals in North America are not as heavily hunted as they are in other parts of the world, but Derocher and other co-authors say Canada has little to be smug about. Many once common animals, such as the grizzlies, wolves and bison that used to roam across much of North American, have been wiped out on much of their Canadian range. And creatures such as the woodland caribou herds from Labrador to B.C., marmots on Vancouver Island and badgers across the prairies are in serious trouble, as is the iconic polar bear, which depends on the disappearing Arctic for survival.
"Canada is a well developed, advanced and very wealthy nation, yet we are still slipping behind on many species," says Derocher.
The study confirms that the most threatened species are large, long lived, animals that tend to be hunted -- primates, hippos, bison, bears, pigs and hogs. The least threatened are small creatures like rodents, moles and bats.
The key to saving many animals is habitat conservation, says co-author Marco Festa-Bianchet, at Quebec's Universite de Sherbrooke, who studies large animals like bighorn sheep and mountain goats.
National parks and conservation areas are not nearly sufficient and Canada's species-at-risk legislation is "extremely weak" and failing to protect many threatened animals, says Festa-Bianchet, past chair of the Committee on the Status of Endangered Wildlife in Canada.
© The Calgary Herald 2008
Audubon’s Species: Bird Art, in All Its Glory
By CORNELIA DEAN
There is a related multimedia linked at:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/07/scien ... &th&emc=th
In 1812, John James Audubon filled a wooden box with about 200 of his paintings of American birds and left it with a relative for safekeeping while he went off on one of his many trips. When he returned to retrieve the paintings, he discovered to his horror that they had been destroyed, shredded by nesting rats.
As he described it later, his first reaction was “a burning heat” in his brain, a headache so intense it kept him awake for days.
Then, though, he reconsidered. “I felt pleased,” he wrote, “that I might now make better drawings than before.”
We know the results — Audubon turned himself into the most famous practitioner of what some call “bird art.” Copies of his “Birds of America,” published section by section in the mid-19th century, are among the most valuable illustrated books.
But Audubon was only one of a number of naturalist artists who have made their careers portraying birds. And in his day, before cameras or reliable preservation techniques, bird artists gathered and recorded important scientific information about the ornithological world. For him, his colleagues and rivals, the ability to observe their surroundings and draw what they saw was not just a prerequisite for making and selling art. Observation and illustration were important tools of research.
Four new books illuminate the confluence of science, art and ornithology, which flowered perhaps most brilliantly in Audubon’s day, although it had ancient roots. The art of depicting birds emerged in the cave culture of Paleolithic times. The first drawing of a bird (that we know about) was of an owl, found on the wall of a cave in Vallon-Pont-d’Arc, France, in 1994.
And though sketching may have given way to the high-tech tools of zoology, the authors of three books agree that drawing and painting continue to be superior tools for people seeking to learn about birds. If you find that hard to believe, consider that many contemporary birders prefer the field guide drawings of Roger Tory Peterson and David Allen Sibley to guides relying on photography.
All three of these books are filled with glorious images of drawn and painted birds, fascinating anecdotes about how the images were made and odd facts. Edward Lear, for example, the master of the limerick, was an accomplished bird artist who considered this work his true calling.
But there is much more than beautiful images and bird-art trivia. In “Humans, Nature and Birds: Science Art From Cave Walls to Computer Screens” (Yale University Press, July 2008), Darryl Wheye, a California artist, and Donald Kennedy, an ecologist and emeritus president of Stanford, take a close look at humanity’s relationship with birds. Ms. Wheye and Dr. Kennedy, also the former editor of the journal Science, have collected bird art ranging from the cave painting of an owl to a portrait of the ivory-billed woodpecker, which appeared on the cover of Science in 2005 to accompany a report, much criticized since, that an ivorybill had been observed in an Arkansas swamp and that the species was not extinct after all.
They arrange this art not in chronological order or by species or geography, but in a kind of virtual “gallery” that tells, room by room, of birds as symbols, a natural resource, exemplars of important biological principles or as species useful in encouraging conservation. And they describe art that reveals bird behavior — individual, intraspecies and interspecies, including relations between birds and people.
Among other things, they note that birds as icons are a contradictory lot. They embody wisdom (owls) and stupidity (dodos); peace (doves) and war (eagles); freedom (in flight) and enforced propriety (when caged).
“Birds: The Art of Ornithology” (Rizzoli, April 2008), by Jonathan Elphick, an eminent British ornithologist, is a more conventional, and exhaustive, survey of bird art from the work of medieval weavers to artists painting today. If your knowledge of bird art is limited to Audubon, Sibley and Peterson, the parade of characters who walk across its pages will be a revelation.
Lear, for example, was celebrated for his art, Mr. Elphick writes, describing his lithograph of a gaudy scarlet macaw as illustrating “the individual character he gave to his bird subjects without sacrificing scientific objectivity.” But Lear’s prosperous family lost its money when he was a child, and he struggled as a bird artist for patronage and other support. Worse, his vision faded, immensely complicating his work.
Audubon prided himself on working “from life,” but, like his contemporaries, he usually worked with birds he killed. When he could not get a live golden eagle to hold still, Mr. Elphick recounts, he contemplated letting it go. Instead he stabbed it through the heart and posed it to produce one of his most famous images: a golden eagle carrying off a snowshoe hare.
Drawing and painting were almost the least of the troubles of early bird artists. Field trips in those days were rugged. And once they had made their art, the artists often faced formidable difficulty reproducing it in high-quality (and marketable) form. In the early 19th century, for example, reliable printing houses were few and far between.
How Audubon’s art developed is a theme of an introductory essay by the historian Richard Rhodes in “Audubon: Early Drawings” (Harvard University Press, September 2008), which reproduces one of the few extant collections of his early work, the Harris collection at Harvard. These drawings are interesting not just because of their seemingly naïve charm, but also because of their great technical distance from the work produced in “Birds of America.” In this collection, the birds appear in more or less stilted poses, usually in profile. They appear almost always on an otherwise empty page. Audubon offers terse notes to describe their habits, a practice he dropped in “Birds.”
Even today, scientists sometimes consult Audubon, Lear and other early practitioners of bird art to learn about extinct species like the Carolina parakeet, the subject of another famous Audubon image. Or they look for hints of how the habitats or habits of surviving species might have changed since the 18th or 19th centuries.
These books might seem to make the case that photography has nothing to contribute to the science and art of ornithology. But a fourth new book, “Egg and Nest” (Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, September 2008), by Rosamond Purcell, Linnea S. Hall and René Corado, is a most effective rebuttal. It collects photographs that Rosamond Purcell made at the Western Foundation of Vertebrate Zoology in Camarillo, Calif., a natural history collection specializing in the eggs and nests of birds from around the world.
In an essay, the naturalist Bernd Heinrich offers his explanation for, as he calls it, “the allure of eggs and nests.” Ms. Hall, the director of the foundation, and Mr. Corado, its collections manager, offer detailed explanations of which bird laid each egg or built each nest and descriptions of how collectors gather specimens and preserve eggs by “blowing” out their contents. They even provide an X-ray of a gravid kiwi, its body seemingly filled by an egg, and explain that kiwis lay one egg at a time, “the largest eggs relative to their body size of any living birds.”
If you are wondering why anyone would spend a life in a pursuit as eccentric as collecting eggs and nests, Ms. Purcell’s work will tell you. She selected a range of specimens, eggs brightly colored and plain, and nests made conventionally of twigs or of materials as bizarre as nails. Then she photographed them in natural light.
Her luminous results explain without words why people have been collecting eggs and nests for centuries.
****
Quarter of world's mammals at risk
Humans mainly to blame in bleak study
Margaret Munro
Canwest News Service
Tuesday, October 07, 2008
The Earth is an increasingly bleak place for animals, according to a massive global study that concludes a quarter of the 5,487 wild mammal species on the planet are threatened with extinction.
And one species -- humans -- are largely responsible for the crisis, according to the grim report released Monday at a World Conservation Congress in Spain. The state of the world's mammals report is the most comprehensive ever. It is the result of a collaborative five-year effort by more than 1,700 experts in 130 countries including Canada, who collected information on the animals' distribution, habitats, ecology, threats and human use.
It covers everything from the tiniest mammal, the bumblebee bat, to the largest, the blue whale, along with the 349 newly described species found since 1992. The researchers conclude that not only are one in four mammal species threatened with extinction, but more than half of all mammal populations are declining.
"Our results paint a bleak picture of the global status of mammals worldwide," the team concludes in its report, to be published in the journal Science later this week.
While "depressing," the researchers say the findings should be empowering. The comprehensive data amassed "can and should be used to inform strategies for addressing this crisis," and identifying priority species and areas for conservation.
They say time is running out for more than a thousand species.
"The staggering component of this study is that it shows one of four mammals species could be gone in the foreseeable future," says co-author Andrew Derocher, a leading bear biologist at the University of Alberta. "And the pace of the disappearance seems to be increasing at a phenomenal rate."
The situation is particularly dire for land animals in Asia, because of the combined impact of overhunting and habitat destruction, says the report, noting that 79 per cent of the monkeys and other primate species in the region are threatened with extinction.
And marine mammals are "victims of our increasingly intensive use of the oceans" with whales, porpoises and other marine mammals getting tangled in fishing nets, hauled in as "by-catch," or hit by vessels, the report says.
The scientists sum it up saying of the 4,651 species for which enough data is available, 1,139, or 25 per cent, are now threatened with extinction. Marine species are a particular concern, with an estimated 36 per cent of species threatened. Species not classified as threatened are not necessarily safe, they say, noting 323 mammals are classified as "near" threatened. And for 52 per cent of all species for which data exist, trends show the populations declining.
On a more positive note, at least five per cent of currently threatened species, such as the European bison and black-footed ferret, have stable or increasing populations. But the overall trend does not bode well for the world's animals, says the report, noting the situation will "likely deteriorate further in the near future" unless steps are taken to conserve the animals and habitat they depend on.
Mammals in North America are not as heavily hunted as they are in other parts of the world, but Derocher and other co-authors say Canada has little to be smug about. Many once common animals, such as the grizzlies, wolves and bison that used to roam across much of North American, have been wiped out on much of their Canadian range. And creatures such as the woodland caribou herds from Labrador to B.C., marmots on Vancouver Island and badgers across the prairies are in serious trouble, as is the iconic polar bear, which depends on the disappearing Arctic for survival.
"Canada is a well developed, advanced and very wealthy nation, yet we are still slipping behind on many species," says Derocher.
The study confirms that the most threatened species are large, long lived, animals that tend to be hunted -- primates, hippos, bison, bears, pigs and hogs. The least threatened are small creatures like rodents, moles and bats.
The key to saving many animals is habitat conservation, says co-author Marco Festa-Bianchet, at Quebec's Universite de Sherbrooke, who studies large animals like bighorn sheep and mountain goats.
National parks and conservation areas are not nearly sufficient and Canada's species-at-risk legislation is "extremely weak" and failing to protect many threatened animals, says Festa-Bianchet, past chair of the Committee on the Status of Endangered Wildlife in Canada.
© The Calgary Herald 2008
Scientists glimpse at mankind's future
Report examines potential results of climate change
Alister Doyle
Reuters
Tuesday, October 14, 2008
Refugees are moving to Antarctica by 2030, the Olympics are held only in cyberspace and central Australia has been abandoned as too dry, according to exotic scenarios for climate change revealed on Monday.
British-based Forum for the Future, a charitable think-tank, and researchers from Hewlett-Packard Labs, said they wanted to stir debate about how to avert the worst effects of global warming by presenting a radical set of possible futures.
"Climate change will affect the economy at least as much as the 'credit crunch,' " their report said.
The scenarios range from a shift to greater energy efficiency, where desalination plants run on solar power help turn the Sahara green, to one where refugees are moving to Antarctica because of rising temperatures.
"We still have the chance to alter the future," Peter Madden, head of the Forum, told Reuters. "This is what the world could be like and some of these options are not very pleasant."
He said the crystal-ball survey did not seek to project what was most likely to happen, just some of the possibilities.
It gave the following five scenarios:
- Efficiency first: Technological innovation will help solve climate change and spur strong growth and consumerism. The Sahara is green and the eastern seaboard of the United States, for instance, is "protected by eco-concrete wall that generates power from waves and tidal surges."
- Service transformation: Sky-high prices for emitting carbon dioxide have led to a shift to a service-based economy. People no longer own cars but use bicycles. "Central Australia and
Oklahoma have been abandoned due to water shortages. Athletes stay at home in the world's first virtual Olympics, competing against each other in virtual space with billions of spectators."
- Redefining progress: A global depression from 2009-18 forces people into more modest lifestyles and focus on well-being and quality of life. In the United States, people "do 25 hours of work a week and up to 10 hours voluntary work."
- Environmental war economy: The world has failed to act on climate change, world trade has collapsed after oil prices break through $400 a barrel. Electrical appliances get automatically turned off when households exceed energy quotas. Refugees are moving to Antarctica, with the population set to reach 3.5 million people by 2040.
- Protectionist world: Globalization is in retreat after a poorly co-ordinated response to climate change. Morocco has been asked to join the European Union in exchange for exclusive access to solar energy supplies until 2050.
© The Calgary Herald 2008
Report examines potential results of climate change
Alister Doyle
Reuters
Tuesday, October 14, 2008
Refugees are moving to Antarctica by 2030, the Olympics are held only in cyberspace and central Australia has been abandoned as too dry, according to exotic scenarios for climate change revealed on Monday.
British-based Forum for the Future, a charitable think-tank, and researchers from Hewlett-Packard Labs, said they wanted to stir debate about how to avert the worst effects of global warming by presenting a radical set of possible futures.
"Climate change will affect the economy at least as much as the 'credit crunch,' " their report said.
The scenarios range from a shift to greater energy efficiency, where desalination plants run on solar power help turn the Sahara green, to one where refugees are moving to Antarctica because of rising temperatures.
"We still have the chance to alter the future," Peter Madden, head of the Forum, told Reuters. "This is what the world could be like and some of these options are not very pleasant."
He said the crystal-ball survey did not seek to project what was most likely to happen, just some of the possibilities.
It gave the following five scenarios:
- Efficiency first: Technological innovation will help solve climate change and spur strong growth and consumerism. The Sahara is green and the eastern seaboard of the United States, for instance, is "protected by eco-concrete wall that generates power from waves and tidal surges."
- Service transformation: Sky-high prices for emitting carbon dioxide have led to a shift to a service-based economy. People no longer own cars but use bicycles. "Central Australia and
Oklahoma have been abandoned due to water shortages. Athletes stay at home in the world's first virtual Olympics, competing against each other in virtual space with billions of spectators."
- Redefining progress: A global depression from 2009-18 forces people into more modest lifestyles and focus on well-being and quality of life. In the United States, people "do 25 hours of work a week and up to 10 hours voluntary work."
- Environmental war economy: The world has failed to act on climate change, world trade has collapsed after oil prices break through $400 a barrel. Electrical appliances get automatically turned off when households exceed energy quotas. Refugees are moving to Antarctica, with the population set to reach 3.5 million people by 2040.
- Protectionist world: Globalization is in retreat after a poorly co-ordinated response to climate change. Morocco has been asked to join the European Union in exchange for exclusive access to solar energy supplies until 2050.
© The Calgary Herald 2008
Museum joins climate fray
Exhibit aims to separate facts, fears
Claudia Parsons
Reuters
Wednesday, October 15, 2008
One of America's most renowned science museums dives into politics again this week with a new exhibition on climate change curators say is an effort to separate fact from fear.
Three years after tackling the divisive issue of evolution in an exhibition on Charles Darwin, the American Museum of Natural History in New York is mounting a show called "Climate Change: The Threat to Life and A New Energy Future."
A UN climate panel, comprising hundreds of scientists and policy-makers, found last year with 90 per cent certainty that climate change is spurred by human activities, specifically the burning of fossil fuels that release climate-warming carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.
But some people remain skeptical that human activity is responsible. Among them is Republican vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin, who cast doubt on the cause of global warming during a debate this month.
Curator Edmond Mathez said when he proposed the exhibition a few years ago, he was frustrated that public awareness did not match the alarm felt by scientists.
"The news media was presenting climate change as a controversial issue, which is complete nonsense, it's not (controversial)," Mathez told Reuters Tuesday at a preview of the exhibition, which opens Saturday.
"I'm sure there are some people that will condemn it out of hand," he said. "What's important to me as a scientist is my colleagues will walk through here and say we did it correctly, that we present the issue objectively."
He said scientists are inclined to be skeptical, so it is remarkable so many agree on the causes of climate change.
"There's always a group of people that are simply not going to believe it, and it's not clear to me that many of those actually know very much about the science."
Mathez said comments by Palin questioning the cause of climate change "border on irresponsible."
Museum president Ellen Futter said the museum has a history of tackling issues "at the nexus of science and society."
"Although scientists . . . still can't predict with precision exactly which impacts will take place where, how frequently and to what degree, there is now overwhelming scientific consensus, 90 per cent of scientists agree, that there is an urgent need to address the problem," she said.
The show examines causes and effects of climate change as well as possible ways to slow it down, such as boosting the use of nuclear, wind and solar power.
© The Calgary Herald 2008
Exhibit aims to separate facts, fears
Claudia Parsons
Reuters
Wednesday, October 15, 2008
One of America's most renowned science museums dives into politics again this week with a new exhibition on climate change curators say is an effort to separate fact from fear.
Three years after tackling the divisive issue of evolution in an exhibition on Charles Darwin, the American Museum of Natural History in New York is mounting a show called "Climate Change: The Threat to Life and A New Energy Future."
A UN climate panel, comprising hundreds of scientists and policy-makers, found last year with 90 per cent certainty that climate change is spurred by human activities, specifically the burning of fossil fuels that release climate-warming carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.
But some people remain skeptical that human activity is responsible. Among them is Republican vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin, who cast doubt on the cause of global warming during a debate this month.
Curator Edmond Mathez said when he proposed the exhibition a few years ago, he was frustrated that public awareness did not match the alarm felt by scientists.
"The news media was presenting climate change as a controversial issue, which is complete nonsense, it's not (controversial)," Mathez told Reuters Tuesday at a preview of the exhibition, which opens Saturday.
"I'm sure there are some people that will condemn it out of hand," he said. "What's important to me as a scientist is my colleagues will walk through here and say we did it correctly, that we present the issue objectively."
He said scientists are inclined to be skeptical, so it is remarkable so many agree on the causes of climate change.
"There's always a group of people that are simply not going to believe it, and it's not clear to me that many of those actually know very much about the science."
Mathez said comments by Palin questioning the cause of climate change "border on irresponsible."
Museum president Ellen Futter said the museum has a history of tackling issues "at the nexus of science and society."
"Although scientists . . . still can't predict with precision exactly which impacts will take place where, how frequently and to what degree, there is now overwhelming scientific consensus, 90 per cent of scientists agree, that there is an urgent need to address the problem," she said.
The show examines causes and effects of climate change as well as possible ways to slow it down, such as boosting the use of nuclear, wind and solar power.
© The Calgary Herald 2008
October 15, 2008
Editorial Observer
Watching the Numbers and Charting the Losses — of Species
By VERLYN KLINKENBORG
Like everyone, I have been reading the graphs and looking at the numbers that measure the convulsions in the global financial markets. And as I do, I keep hearing the echo of another frightening set of numbers — the ones that gauge the precipitous declines in the species that surround us. The financial markets will eventually come back, but not the species we are squandering.
Last week in Barcelona, Spain, the International Union for the Conservation of Nature released results of a global survey of mammal populations. It concluded that at least a quarter of mammal species are headed toward extinction in the near future. Don’t think of this as an across-the-board culling of mammals, of everything from elephants to the minutest of shrews. The first ones to go will be the big ones. And among the big ones, the first to go will be primates, which are already grievously threatened. Nearly 80 percent of the primate species in southern and southeastern Asia are immediately threatened.
The causes are almost all directly related to human activity, including, for marine mammals, the growing threat of ocean acidification, as the oceans absorb the carbon dioxide we emit.
The numbers are not much better for other categories of life. At least 22 percent of reptile species are at risk of extinction. Perhaps 40 percent of North American freshwater fish are threatened. In Europe, 45 percent of the most common bird species are rapidly declining in numbers, and so are the most common bird species in North America. Similar losses are expected among plants. What is especially worrying is how much the rate of decline has increased over the past half-century as the human population has increased.
These numbers are shocking in their own right. But they don’t begin to tell the whole story. These are projections for the most familiar, best studied, most easily counted plants and animals, which, all told, make up less than 4 percent of the species on Earth. It is only reasonable to assume that many, if not most, of the legions of uncounted species are doing as poorly.
What complicates matters further is a simple lesson we might also draw from the present financial crisis: everything is connected. No species goes down on its own, not without affecting the larger biological community. We emerged, as a species, from the very biodiversity we are destroying. At times it seems as though the human experiment is to see how many species we can do without. As experiments go, it is morally untenable and will end badly for us.
The good news here is the same good news as always — the resilience of nature. Given even the slightest chance, declining species often find a way to recover. But the bad news is also the same bad news — human irresponsibility. In our myopic pursuits, we characteristically overlook the possibility of giving species the chance to recover.
We are watching a global, international effort to stabilize the financial markets. It will take a similar effort to begin to slow the rate at which species are declining. The bottom line is that what is good for biodiversity is also good for humanity. This includes protecting habitat and finding ways to reduce human pressure on other species. It also includes a concerted effort to slow climate change, which, unchecked, could have a devastating impact on the entire planet.
What we need, really, is a new ability to think selfishly in a slightly different way. Instead of saving the Sumatran orangutan or the Iberian lynx for itself, it may make more sense to think of saving them for ourselves — not as resources to be harvested somewhere down the road or even as repositories of genetic difference, but as essential elements in the biological complexity from which we arose and in which we thrive.
Without them, we are diminished.
Editorial Observer
Watching the Numbers and Charting the Losses — of Species
By VERLYN KLINKENBORG
Like everyone, I have been reading the graphs and looking at the numbers that measure the convulsions in the global financial markets. And as I do, I keep hearing the echo of another frightening set of numbers — the ones that gauge the precipitous declines in the species that surround us. The financial markets will eventually come back, but not the species we are squandering.
Last week in Barcelona, Spain, the International Union for the Conservation of Nature released results of a global survey of mammal populations. It concluded that at least a quarter of mammal species are headed toward extinction in the near future. Don’t think of this as an across-the-board culling of mammals, of everything from elephants to the minutest of shrews. The first ones to go will be the big ones. And among the big ones, the first to go will be primates, which are already grievously threatened. Nearly 80 percent of the primate species in southern and southeastern Asia are immediately threatened.
The causes are almost all directly related to human activity, including, for marine mammals, the growing threat of ocean acidification, as the oceans absorb the carbon dioxide we emit.
The numbers are not much better for other categories of life. At least 22 percent of reptile species are at risk of extinction. Perhaps 40 percent of North American freshwater fish are threatened. In Europe, 45 percent of the most common bird species are rapidly declining in numbers, and so are the most common bird species in North America. Similar losses are expected among plants. What is especially worrying is how much the rate of decline has increased over the past half-century as the human population has increased.
These numbers are shocking in their own right. But they don’t begin to tell the whole story. These are projections for the most familiar, best studied, most easily counted plants and animals, which, all told, make up less than 4 percent of the species on Earth. It is only reasonable to assume that many, if not most, of the legions of uncounted species are doing as poorly.
What complicates matters further is a simple lesson we might also draw from the present financial crisis: everything is connected. No species goes down on its own, not without affecting the larger biological community. We emerged, as a species, from the very biodiversity we are destroying. At times it seems as though the human experiment is to see how many species we can do without. As experiments go, it is morally untenable and will end badly for us.
The good news here is the same good news as always — the resilience of nature. Given even the slightest chance, declining species often find a way to recover. But the bad news is also the same bad news — human irresponsibility. In our myopic pursuits, we characteristically overlook the possibility of giving species the chance to recover.
We are watching a global, international effort to stabilize the financial markets. It will take a similar effort to begin to slow the rate at which species are declining. The bottom line is that what is good for biodiversity is also good for humanity. This includes protecting habitat and finding ways to reduce human pressure on other species. It also includes a concerted effort to slow climate change, which, unchecked, could have a devastating impact on the entire planet.
What we need, really, is a new ability to think selfishly in a slightly different way. Instead of saving the Sumatran orangutan or the Iberian lynx for itself, it may make more sense to think of saving them for ourselves — not as resources to be harvested somewhere down the road or even as repositories of genetic difference, but as essential elements in the biological complexity from which we arose and in which we thrive.
Without them, we are diminished.
November 14, 2008
U.N. Reports Pollution Threat in Asia
By ANDREW JACOBS
BEIJING — A noxious cocktail of soot, smog and toxic chemicals is blotting out the sun, fouling the lungs of millions of people and altering weather patterns in large parts of Asia, according to a report released Thursday by the United Nations.
The byproduct of automobiles, slash-and-burn agriculture, cooking on dung or wood fires and coal-fired power plants, these plumes rise over southern Africa, the Amazon basin and North America. But they are most pronounced in Asia, where so-called atmospheric brown clouds are dramatically reducing sunlight in many Chinese cities and leading to decreased crop yields in swaths of rural India, say a team of more than a dozen scientists who have been studying the problem since 2002.
“The imperative to act has never been clearer,” said Achim Steiner, executive director of the United Nations Environment Program, in Beijing, which the report identified as one of the world’s most polluted cities, and where the report was released.
The brownish haze, sometimes in a layer more than a mile thick and clearly visible from airplanes, stretches from the Arabian Peninsula to the Yellow Sea. In the spring, it sweeps past North and South Korea and Japan. Sometimes the cloud drifts as far east as California.
The report identified 13 cities as brown-cloud hot spots, among them Bangkok, Cairo, New Delhi, Tehran and Seoul, South Korea.
It was issued on a day when Beijing’s own famously polluted skies were unusually clear. On Wednesday, by contrast, the capital was shrouded in a thick, throat-stinging haze that is the byproduct of heavy industry, coal-burning home heaters and the 3.5 million cars that clog the city’s roads.
Last month, the government reintroduced some of the traffic restrictions that were imposed on Beijing during the Olympics; the rules forced private cars to stay off the road one day a week and sidelined 30 percent of government vehicles on any given day. Over all, officials say the new measures have removed 800,000 cars from the roads.
According to the United Nations report, smog blocks from 10 percent to 25 percent of the sunlight that should be reaching the city’s streets. The report also singled out the southern city of Guangzhou, where soot and dust have dimmed natural light by 20 percent since the 1970s.
In fact, the scientists who worked on the report said the blanket of haze might be temporarily offsetting some warming from the simultaneous buildup of greenhouse gases by reflecting solar energy away from the earth. Greenhouse gases, by contrast, tend to trap the warmth of the sun and lead to a rise in ocean temperatures.
Climate scientists say that similar plumes from industrialization of wealthy countries after World War II probably blunted global warming through the 1970s. Pollution laws largely removed that pall.
Rain can cleanse the skies, but some of the black grime that falls to earth ends up on the surface of the Himalayan glaciers that are the source of water for billions of people in China, India and Pakistan. As a result, the glaciers that feed into the Yangtze, Ganges, Indus and Yellow Rivers are absorbing more sunlight and melting more rapidly, researchers say.
According to the Chinese Academy of Sciences, these glaciers have shrunk by 5 percent since the 1950s and, at the current rate of retreat, could shrink by an additional 75 percent by 2050.
“We used to think of this brown cloud as a regional problem, but now we realize its impact is much greater,” said Veerabhadran Ramanathan, who led the United Nations scientific panel. “When we see the smog one day and not the next, it just means it’s blown somewhere else.”
Although the clouds’ overall impact is not entirely understood, Mr. Ramanathan, a professor of climate and ocean sciences at the University of California, San Diego, said they might be affecting precipitation in parts of India and Southeast Asia, where monsoon rainfall has been decreasing in recent decades, and central China, where devastating floods have become more frequent.
He said that some studies suggested that the plumes of soot that blot out the sun have led to a 5 percent decline in the growth rate of rice harvests across Asia since the 1960s.
For those who breathe the toxic mix, the impact can be deadly. Henning Rodhe, a professor of chemical meteorology at Stockholm University, estimates that 340,000 people in China and India die each year from cardiovascular and respiratory diseases that can be traced to the emissions from coal-burning factories, diesel trucks and wood-burning stoves. “The impacts on health alone is a reason to reduce these brown clouds,” he said.
Andrew C. Revkin contributed reporting from New York.
U.N. Reports Pollution Threat in Asia
By ANDREW JACOBS
BEIJING — A noxious cocktail of soot, smog and toxic chemicals is blotting out the sun, fouling the lungs of millions of people and altering weather patterns in large parts of Asia, according to a report released Thursday by the United Nations.
The byproduct of automobiles, slash-and-burn agriculture, cooking on dung or wood fires and coal-fired power plants, these plumes rise over southern Africa, the Amazon basin and North America. But they are most pronounced in Asia, where so-called atmospheric brown clouds are dramatically reducing sunlight in many Chinese cities and leading to decreased crop yields in swaths of rural India, say a team of more than a dozen scientists who have been studying the problem since 2002.
“The imperative to act has never been clearer,” said Achim Steiner, executive director of the United Nations Environment Program, in Beijing, which the report identified as one of the world’s most polluted cities, and where the report was released.
The brownish haze, sometimes in a layer more than a mile thick and clearly visible from airplanes, stretches from the Arabian Peninsula to the Yellow Sea. In the spring, it sweeps past North and South Korea and Japan. Sometimes the cloud drifts as far east as California.
The report identified 13 cities as brown-cloud hot spots, among them Bangkok, Cairo, New Delhi, Tehran and Seoul, South Korea.
It was issued on a day when Beijing’s own famously polluted skies were unusually clear. On Wednesday, by contrast, the capital was shrouded in a thick, throat-stinging haze that is the byproduct of heavy industry, coal-burning home heaters and the 3.5 million cars that clog the city’s roads.
Last month, the government reintroduced some of the traffic restrictions that were imposed on Beijing during the Olympics; the rules forced private cars to stay off the road one day a week and sidelined 30 percent of government vehicles on any given day. Over all, officials say the new measures have removed 800,000 cars from the roads.
According to the United Nations report, smog blocks from 10 percent to 25 percent of the sunlight that should be reaching the city’s streets. The report also singled out the southern city of Guangzhou, where soot and dust have dimmed natural light by 20 percent since the 1970s.
In fact, the scientists who worked on the report said the blanket of haze might be temporarily offsetting some warming from the simultaneous buildup of greenhouse gases by reflecting solar energy away from the earth. Greenhouse gases, by contrast, tend to trap the warmth of the sun and lead to a rise in ocean temperatures.
Climate scientists say that similar plumes from industrialization of wealthy countries after World War II probably blunted global warming through the 1970s. Pollution laws largely removed that pall.
Rain can cleanse the skies, but some of the black grime that falls to earth ends up on the surface of the Himalayan glaciers that are the source of water for billions of people in China, India and Pakistan. As a result, the glaciers that feed into the Yangtze, Ganges, Indus and Yellow Rivers are absorbing more sunlight and melting more rapidly, researchers say.
According to the Chinese Academy of Sciences, these glaciers have shrunk by 5 percent since the 1950s and, at the current rate of retreat, could shrink by an additional 75 percent by 2050.
“We used to think of this brown cloud as a regional problem, but now we realize its impact is much greater,” said Veerabhadran Ramanathan, who led the United Nations scientific panel. “When we see the smog one day and not the next, it just means it’s blown somewhere else.”
Although the clouds’ overall impact is not entirely understood, Mr. Ramanathan, a professor of climate and ocean sciences at the University of California, San Diego, said they might be affecting precipitation in parts of India and Southeast Asia, where monsoon rainfall has been decreasing in recent decades, and central China, where devastating floods have become more frequent.
He said that some studies suggested that the plumes of soot that blot out the sun have led to a 5 percent decline in the growth rate of rice harvests across Asia since the 1960s.
For those who breathe the toxic mix, the impact can be deadly. Henning Rodhe, a professor of chemical meteorology at Stockholm University, estimates that 340,000 people in China and India die each year from cardiovascular and respiratory diseases that can be traced to the emissions from coal-burning factories, diesel trucks and wood-burning stoves. “The impacts on health alone is a reason to reduce these brown clouds,” he said.
Andrew C. Revkin contributed reporting from New York.
Automakers in race to abandon fossil fuels
Reese Halter
Calgary Herald
Sunday, November 16, 2008
With a global fleet of over 700 million automobiles, burning fossil fuels is not only expensive, but it contributes to at least 20 per cent of the rising greenhouse gases on Earth.
Clean air is essential for all life around the globe. Our bodies need oxygen that air contains -- not dust, fumes, smoke or any other particulates that may be floating in the air. Pollutants damage our lungs and make it harder for them to work.
Automobile executives understand this concept and along with the volatile OPEC oil prices, they have made some significant inroads to wean our society from its insatiable dependence of fossil fuels.
Most of us are familiar with Toyota's Prius. It combines a gasoline powered internal combustion engine with a nickel-metal hydride battery-powered electric motor. At up to 25 km/h, the Prius runs near silently on its electric motor. At higher speeds, the combustion engine kicks-in giving it 5.1 litres/100 km fuel economy.
Toyota is to be congratulated because in addition to recently celebrating its one-millionth sale of Prius over the past five years they have single handily prevented 4.5 million tonnes of CO2 from being omitted.
Mercedes-Benz and BMW recently unveiled in Paris their new full-size luxury hybrid models with long-lasting lithium batteries, the S400 Blue Hybrid and the 7-Series hybrid, respectively. The S-400 is powered by 275-horsepower, 3.5-litre V-6 and a 15 kilowatt electric motor and a lithium battery pack.
The second biggest car company in the world, General Motors, has taken some significant lumps lately, but don't believe for a second that U.S. pride and innovative technology is going to take a back seat to its overseas competition: quite the opposite.
GMs Chevrolet 2009 Silverado pick-up truck has a "two-mode" hybrid system. One mode allows the use of electric drive or gas-engine power, or a mix of the two, for lighter loads and lower speeds; the second uses an electric boost for efficient highway traveling or hauling heavy items. This new line of Silverado gets over 48 km/litre.
Both BMW and Honda have developed cars for hydrogen fuel. The BMW Hydrogen Series 7 car combines oxygen in a fuel cell to produce electricity to power electric motors, as does the Honda FCX Clarity. So far, the shortcoming resides in the fact that there are only about 150 hydrogen-refueling stations worldwide.
In 1991, Sony changed the electronic world. They switched their battery pack to utilize lithium-ion and so began a quiet revolution in electronics. Today, all cellphones; laptops and now electric cars are powered by this technology, which is set to burgeon one more time.
Plug-in hybrid electric vehicles have lower CO2 emissions than regular cars even if the electricity they are charged with is generated using soon to be antiquated fossil fuels.
Savvy investors including General Electric and Google and the country of Israel are betting on the emerging global solar play to power the new generation of electric automobiles. After all, if trillions of leaves across the face of the Earth can harness the sun's energy then why can't we follow nature's flawless model.
The Tesla Roadster has a 248 horsepower electric engine, which is powered by a 450-kilogram lithium-ion battery. This snazzy sports car has the ability to accelerate from 0 to 100 km/h in less than four seconds. Tesla's CO2 footprint is less than two cents per kilometre as compared with gasoline costs ($3.60 California), which is more than eight cents.
Renault will be releasing 40,000 mid-sized electric sedans called Fluence in early 2011. GMs electric Volt, which boasts an incredible 161 km/litre and can be charged at home, is slated for release of 10,000 cars in early 2010.
Mitsubishi is also ready to release its electric car with powerful lithium batteries -- the i-MiEV also has an astonishing 161 km/litre efficiency.
Subaru's R1e electric car is a real beauty. This good-looking two-seater was developed in partnership with Tokyo Electric Company and is currently in trials in New York City. It zips along at 115 km/h with a range of about 95 kilometres between charges. A 15-minute quick charge will rejuvenate the battery by 80 per cent and a full over-night charge using a standard household electrical outlet takes eight hours.
The service life of the Subaru high-density, lithium-ion battery is about 10 years or 210,000 kilometres.
What is clear is that an unstoppable automobile race has begun. Automobile pollution and dependence upon 19-century fossil fuels will soon be a thing of the past.
In the meantime, consider planting a tree for every member of your family. Remember that in a year's time, one mature tree gives off enough oxygen for a family of four and at the same time trees help suck out of the air CO2 -- a potent rising greenhouse gas.
Reese Halter is a public speaker and founder of the international conservation institute Global Forest Science. He can be contacted through www.DrReese.com
© The Calgary Herald 2008
Reese Halter
Calgary Herald
Sunday, November 16, 2008
With a global fleet of over 700 million automobiles, burning fossil fuels is not only expensive, but it contributes to at least 20 per cent of the rising greenhouse gases on Earth.
Clean air is essential for all life around the globe. Our bodies need oxygen that air contains -- not dust, fumes, smoke or any other particulates that may be floating in the air. Pollutants damage our lungs and make it harder for them to work.
Automobile executives understand this concept and along with the volatile OPEC oil prices, they have made some significant inroads to wean our society from its insatiable dependence of fossil fuels.
Most of us are familiar with Toyota's Prius. It combines a gasoline powered internal combustion engine with a nickel-metal hydride battery-powered electric motor. At up to 25 km/h, the Prius runs near silently on its electric motor. At higher speeds, the combustion engine kicks-in giving it 5.1 litres/100 km fuel economy.
Toyota is to be congratulated because in addition to recently celebrating its one-millionth sale of Prius over the past five years they have single handily prevented 4.5 million tonnes of CO2 from being omitted.
Mercedes-Benz and BMW recently unveiled in Paris their new full-size luxury hybrid models with long-lasting lithium batteries, the S400 Blue Hybrid and the 7-Series hybrid, respectively. The S-400 is powered by 275-horsepower, 3.5-litre V-6 and a 15 kilowatt electric motor and a lithium battery pack.
The second biggest car company in the world, General Motors, has taken some significant lumps lately, but don't believe for a second that U.S. pride and innovative technology is going to take a back seat to its overseas competition: quite the opposite.
GMs Chevrolet 2009 Silverado pick-up truck has a "two-mode" hybrid system. One mode allows the use of electric drive or gas-engine power, or a mix of the two, for lighter loads and lower speeds; the second uses an electric boost for efficient highway traveling or hauling heavy items. This new line of Silverado gets over 48 km/litre.
Both BMW and Honda have developed cars for hydrogen fuel. The BMW Hydrogen Series 7 car combines oxygen in a fuel cell to produce electricity to power electric motors, as does the Honda FCX Clarity. So far, the shortcoming resides in the fact that there are only about 150 hydrogen-refueling stations worldwide.
In 1991, Sony changed the electronic world. They switched their battery pack to utilize lithium-ion and so began a quiet revolution in electronics. Today, all cellphones; laptops and now electric cars are powered by this technology, which is set to burgeon one more time.
Plug-in hybrid electric vehicles have lower CO2 emissions than regular cars even if the electricity they are charged with is generated using soon to be antiquated fossil fuels.
Savvy investors including General Electric and Google and the country of Israel are betting on the emerging global solar play to power the new generation of electric automobiles. After all, if trillions of leaves across the face of the Earth can harness the sun's energy then why can't we follow nature's flawless model.
The Tesla Roadster has a 248 horsepower electric engine, which is powered by a 450-kilogram lithium-ion battery. This snazzy sports car has the ability to accelerate from 0 to 100 km/h in less than four seconds. Tesla's CO2 footprint is less than two cents per kilometre as compared with gasoline costs ($3.60 California), which is more than eight cents.
Renault will be releasing 40,000 mid-sized electric sedans called Fluence in early 2011. GMs electric Volt, which boasts an incredible 161 km/litre and can be charged at home, is slated for release of 10,000 cars in early 2010.
Mitsubishi is also ready to release its electric car with powerful lithium batteries -- the i-MiEV also has an astonishing 161 km/litre efficiency.
Subaru's R1e electric car is a real beauty. This good-looking two-seater was developed in partnership with Tokyo Electric Company and is currently in trials in New York City. It zips along at 115 km/h with a range of about 95 kilometres between charges. A 15-minute quick charge will rejuvenate the battery by 80 per cent and a full over-night charge using a standard household electrical outlet takes eight hours.
The service life of the Subaru high-density, lithium-ion battery is about 10 years or 210,000 kilometres.
What is clear is that an unstoppable automobile race has begun. Automobile pollution and dependence upon 19-century fossil fuels will soon be a thing of the past.
In the meantime, consider planting a tree for every member of your family. Remember that in a year's time, one mature tree gives off enough oxygen for a family of four and at the same time trees help suck out of the air CO2 -- a potent rising greenhouse gas.
Reese Halter is a public speaker and founder of the international conservation institute Global Forest Science. He can be contacted through www.DrReese.com
© The Calgary Herald 2008
November 18, 2008
Congo Violence Reaches Endangered Mountain Gorillas
By JEFFREY GETTLEMAN
BULENGO, Congo — Jean-Marie Serundori wakes up every morning with gorillas on his mind.
“I wash my face, I stare at the mountains and I think of them,” he said. “They are like our cousins.”
But Mr. Serundori, a Congolese wildlife ranger entrusted with protecting some of the most majestic — and most endangered — animals on the planet, is far from the broad-backed mountain gorillas he loves.
Instead, he is stuck in a wet and filthy camp for internally displaced people where the only wildlife are the cockroaches that scurry across the mud floors. He is one of the hundreds of thousands of people left idle and destitute by eastern Congo’s most recent spasm of violence, and the consequences in this case may be dire and irreversible.
Eastern Congo is home to almost a third of the world’s last 700 wild mountain gorillas (the rest are in nearby areas of Rwanda and Uganda). Now, there are no trained rangers to protect them. More than 240 Congolese game wardens have been run off their posts, including some who narrowly escaped a surging rebel advance last month and slogged through the jungle for three days living off leaves and scoopfuls of mud for hydration.
“We figured if the gorillas can eat leaves, so can we,” said Sekibibi Desire, who is staying in a tent near the other rangers.
This is just the latest crisis within a crisis. Congo’s gorillas happen to live in one of the most contested, blood-soaked pieces of turf in one of the most contested, blood-soaked corners of Africa. Their home, Virunga National Park, is high ground — with mist-shrouded mountains and pointy volcanoes — along the porous Congo-Rwanda border, where rebels are suspected of smuggling in weapons from Rwanda. Last year in Virunga, 10 gorillas were killed, some shot in the back of the head, execution style, park officials said.
The park used to be a naturalist’s paradise, home to more than 2,000 species of plants, 706 types of birds and 218 varieties of mammals, including three great apes: the mountain gorilla, the lowland gorilla and chimpanzees.
Now Virunga is a war zone.
Rebel soldiers command the hilltops. Government soldiers fire mortars at them, blowing up precious gorilla habitat that is rapidly disappearing anyway because of deforestation and an illegal charcoal trade.
“Armed groups hide in the park, they train in the park, and most importantly, they eat in the park,” said Samantha Newport, a spokeswoman for Virunga National Park.
Ms. Newport said that two years ago, at one of the lakes in the park, a local militia went on a hippopotamus-hunting rampage, machine-gunning hundreds of hippopotamuses for their meat.
“The lake turned red,” she said.
Eastern Congo has been stuck in a vise of bloodshed for more than a decade. The trouble began in 1994, with the genocide in Rwanda, which killed 800,000 people and sent waves of refugees into Congo, along with bloodthirsty militias. Since then, various armed groups and neighboring nations have battled for control of this stunningly beautiful land, loaded with gold, diamonds and other precious resources. Last month, a rebel force widely suspected of being supported by Rwanda routed government troops near the strategic city of Goma and was poised to capture it, when the rebels declared a cease-fire.
That cease-fire remains shaky. On Sunday, the same day that the rebels’ leader, Laurent Nkunda, vowed to stick to the truce, heavy fighting broke out north of Goma. Congolese troops fired rockets. The rebels responded with mortar bombs. Once again, game wardens were caught in the middle. Some of their families have even been shot.
Last month, the 14-year-old daughter of a ranger was shot in the stomach during a firefight near a ranger post deep in the forest. “I put her in my arms and just ran,” said her father, Mberabagabo Rukundaguhaya. “I thought she was dead.” She lived, though it is not clear when her family will be able to go home.
Officials with Virunga National Park are urging the rebels and government troops to allow them to return to work. The rebels insist the gorillas are safe.
“We are protecting them,” said Babu Amani, a rebel spokesman.
Mr. Serundori said that in his 20 years as a ranger, he has seen the gorillas more than 100 times.
“But what always impresses me is how fragile they are,” he said. “They could be wiped out — in a minute.”
France Moves to Add Troops
UNITED NATIONS — France began circulating a draft resolution on Monday that would temporarily authorize an additional 3,085 troops and police officers for the peacekeeping mission in the Congo to protect civilians in the eastern part of the country.
Congo Violence Reaches Endangered Mountain Gorillas
By JEFFREY GETTLEMAN
BULENGO, Congo — Jean-Marie Serundori wakes up every morning with gorillas on his mind.
“I wash my face, I stare at the mountains and I think of them,” he said. “They are like our cousins.”
But Mr. Serundori, a Congolese wildlife ranger entrusted with protecting some of the most majestic — and most endangered — animals on the planet, is far from the broad-backed mountain gorillas he loves.
Instead, he is stuck in a wet and filthy camp for internally displaced people where the only wildlife are the cockroaches that scurry across the mud floors. He is one of the hundreds of thousands of people left idle and destitute by eastern Congo’s most recent spasm of violence, and the consequences in this case may be dire and irreversible.
Eastern Congo is home to almost a third of the world’s last 700 wild mountain gorillas (the rest are in nearby areas of Rwanda and Uganda). Now, there are no trained rangers to protect them. More than 240 Congolese game wardens have been run off their posts, including some who narrowly escaped a surging rebel advance last month and slogged through the jungle for three days living off leaves and scoopfuls of mud for hydration.
“We figured if the gorillas can eat leaves, so can we,” said Sekibibi Desire, who is staying in a tent near the other rangers.
This is just the latest crisis within a crisis. Congo’s gorillas happen to live in one of the most contested, blood-soaked pieces of turf in one of the most contested, blood-soaked corners of Africa. Their home, Virunga National Park, is high ground — with mist-shrouded mountains and pointy volcanoes — along the porous Congo-Rwanda border, where rebels are suspected of smuggling in weapons from Rwanda. Last year in Virunga, 10 gorillas were killed, some shot in the back of the head, execution style, park officials said.
The park used to be a naturalist’s paradise, home to more than 2,000 species of plants, 706 types of birds and 218 varieties of mammals, including three great apes: the mountain gorilla, the lowland gorilla and chimpanzees.
Now Virunga is a war zone.
Rebel soldiers command the hilltops. Government soldiers fire mortars at them, blowing up precious gorilla habitat that is rapidly disappearing anyway because of deforestation and an illegal charcoal trade.
“Armed groups hide in the park, they train in the park, and most importantly, they eat in the park,” said Samantha Newport, a spokeswoman for Virunga National Park.
Ms. Newport said that two years ago, at one of the lakes in the park, a local militia went on a hippopotamus-hunting rampage, machine-gunning hundreds of hippopotamuses for their meat.
“The lake turned red,” she said.
Eastern Congo has been stuck in a vise of bloodshed for more than a decade. The trouble began in 1994, with the genocide in Rwanda, which killed 800,000 people and sent waves of refugees into Congo, along with bloodthirsty militias. Since then, various armed groups and neighboring nations have battled for control of this stunningly beautiful land, loaded with gold, diamonds and other precious resources. Last month, a rebel force widely suspected of being supported by Rwanda routed government troops near the strategic city of Goma and was poised to capture it, when the rebels declared a cease-fire.
That cease-fire remains shaky. On Sunday, the same day that the rebels’ leader, Laurent Nkunda, vowed to stick to the truce, heavy fighting broke out north of Goma. Congolese troops fired rockets. The rebels responded with mortar bombs. Once again, game wardens were caught in the middle. Some of their families have even been shot.
Last month, the 14-year-old daughter of a ranger was shot in the stomach during a firefight near a ranger post deep in the forest. “I put her in my arms and just ran,” said her father, Mberabagabo Rukundaguhaya. “I thought she was dead.” She lived, though it is not clear when her family will be able to go home.
Officials with Virunga National Park are urging the rebels and government troops to allow them to return to work. The rebels insist the gorillas are safe.
“We are protecting them,” said Babu Amani, a rebel spokesman.
Mr. Serundori said that in his 20 years as a ranger, he has seen the gorillas more than 100 times.
“But what always impresses me is how fragile they are,” he said. “They could be wiped out — in a minute.”
France Moves to Add Troops
UNITED NATIONS — France began circulating a draft resolution on Monday that would temporarily authorize an additional 3,085 troops and police officers for the peacekeeping mission in the Congo to protect civilians in the eastern part of the country.
Electric car revolution coming
Mike De Souza
Canwest News Service
Tuesday, November 25, 2008
http://www.canada.com/components/print. ... d&sponsor=
CREDIT: Fred Prouser, Reuters
A Chevrolet Volt plug-in electric car and others like it will make up the five per cent of clean vehicles expected on roads in the next decade, says a federal task force.
One in every 20 new cars sold in Canada should be electrically powered within a decade, say members of a task force that today is to deliver a progress report to the Harper government about the future of plug-in vehicles.
The group was set up by the government last winter to design Canada's Electric Vehicle and Technology Road Map for shifting the transportation industry away from fossil fuels.
"It'sgoingtobeanelectricvehiclerevolution," saidMichaelElwood, chairperson of the task force and vice-president of marketing at Azure Dynamics, which specializes in electric and hybrid electric drive technology. "Hybrid electric, plug-in hybrid electric and electric vehicles are all part of the equation," he said.
The group includes a wide range of stakeholders, including automakers Ford and General Motors as well as the Canadian Auto Workers union, academic institutions such as the University of Manitoba and utility companies Hydro Quebec and Manitoba Hydro. It's expected to submit its final recommendations next February.
"Anything is possible and everything is being worked on and the sooner we dedicate resources to the advancement of this (industry), the better," said Elwood.
The group set its five per cent target last summer, after reviewing a technical analysis of the industry submitted to Natural Resources Canada in June. The goal would be the equivalent of 80,000 to 125,000 electric vehicles sold yearly.
A Canadian industry spokesperson said the Big Three North American car manufacturers are moving toward new hybrid or electric technologies in their models, but progress depends on consumer demand, securing loan guarantees from the government during an economic downturn and the price of gasoline at the pumps.
"The industry is almost in the midst of the biggest revolutionary technology turnaroundin its history," saidMarkNantais, president of the Canadian Vehicle Manufacturing Association.
"Probably one of the worst nightmares wouldbetobringforwardthistechnology in a low energy cost environment."
Bob Oliver, director of the transportationprogramatPollutionProbe, saidsome ofthemainchallengesincluderesearching better technologies for more powerful, longer-lasting batteries and ensuring that there is sufficient infrastructure in place for people to charge their vehicles on the road. But he believes it's possible to exceed the five per cent target.
© The Calgary Herald 2008
****
November 25, 2008
Slump May Limit Moves on Clean Energy
By ELISABETH ROSENTHAL
Just as the world seemed poised to combat global warming more aggressively, the economic slump and plunging prices of coal and oil are upending plans to wean businesses and consumers from fossil fuel.
From Italy to China, the threat to jobs, profits and government tax revenues posed by the financial crisis has cast doubt on commitments to cap emissions or phase out polluting factories.
Automakers, especially Detroit’s Big Three, face collapsing sales, threatening their plans to invest heavily in more fuel-efficient cars. And with gas prices now around $2 a gallon in the United States, struggling consumers may be less inclined than they once were to trade in their gas-guzzling models in any case.
President-elect Barack Obama and the European Union have vowed to stick to commitments to cap emissions of carbon dioxide and invest in new green technologies, arguing that government action could stimulate the economy and create new jobs in producing sustainable energy.
But as the United Nations prepares to gather the world’s environment ministers in Poznan, Poland, next week to try to agree on a new treaty to reduce emissions, both the political will and the economic underpinnings for a much more assertive strategy appear shakier than they did even a few weeks ago.
More...
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/25/world ... nted=print
Mike De Souza
Canwest News Service
Tuesday, November 25, 2008
http://www.canada.com/components/print. ... d&sponsor=
CREDIT: Fred Prouser, Reuters
A Chevrolet Volt plug-in electric car and others like it will make up the five per cent of clean vehicles expected on roads in the next decade, says a federal task force.
One in every 20 new cars sold in Canada should be electrically powered within a decade, say members of a task force that today is to deliver a progress report to the Harper government about the future of plug-in vehicles.
The group was set up by the government last winter to design Canada's Electric Vehicle and Technology Road Map for shifting the transportation industry away from fossil fuels.
"It'sgoingtobeanelectricvehiclerevolution," saidMichaelElwood, chairperson of the task force and vice-president of marketing at Azure Dynamics, which specializes in electric and hybrid electric drive technology. "Hybrid electric, plug-in hybrid electric and electric vehicles are all part of the equation," he said.
The group includes a wide range of stakeholders, including automakers Ford and General Motors as well as the Canadian Auto Workers union, academic institutions such as the University of Manitoba and utility companies Hydro Quebec and Manitoba Hydro. It's expected to submit its final recommendations next February.
"Anything is possible and everything is being worked on and the sooner we dedicate resources to the advancement of this (industry), the better," said Elwood.
The group set its five per cent target last summer, after reviewing a technical analysis of the industry submitted to Natural Resources Canada in June. The goal would be the equivalent of 80,000 to 125,000 electric vehicles sold yearly.
A Canadian industry spokesperson said the Big Three North American car manufacturers are moving toward new hybrid or electric technologies in their models, but progress depends on consumer demand, securing loan guarantees from the government during an economic downturn and the price of gasoline at the pumps.
"The industry is almost in the midst of the biggest revolutionary technology turnaroundin its history," saidMarkNantais, president of the Canadian Vehicle Manufacturing Association.
"Probably one of the worst nightmares wouldbetobringforwardthistechnology in a low energy cost environment."
Bob Oliver, director of the transportationprogramatPollutionProbe, saidsome ofthemainchallengesincluderesearching better technologies for more powerful, longer-lasting batteries and ensuring that there is sufficient infrastructure in place for people to charge their vehicles on the road. But he believes it's possible to exceed the five per cent target.
© The Calgary Herald 2008
****
November 25, 2008
Slump May Limit Moves on Clean Energy
By ELISABETH ROSENTHAL
Just as the world seemed poised to combat global warming more aggressively, the economic slump and plunging prices of coal and oil are upending plans to wean businesses and consumers from fossil fuel.
From Italy to China, the threat to jobs, profits and government tax revenues posed by the financial crisis has cast doubt on commitments to cap emissions or phase out polluting factories.
Automakers, especially Detroit’s Big Three, face collapsing sales, threatening their plans to invest heavily in more fuel-efficient cars. And with gas prices now around $2 a gallon in the United States, struggling consumers may be less inclined than they once were to trade in their gas-guzzling models in any case.
President-elect Barack Obama and the European Union have vowed to stick to commitments to cap emissions of carbon dioxide and invest in new green technologies, arguing that government action could stimulate the economy and create new jobs in producing sustainable energy.
But as the United Nations prepares to gather the world’s environment ministers in Poznan, Poland, next week to try to agree on a new treaty to reduce emissions, both the political will and the economic underpinnings for a much more assertive strategy appear shakier than they did even a few weeks ago.
More...
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/25/world ... nted=print
December 27, 2008
The Energy Challenge
No Furnaces but Heat Aplenty in ‘Passive Houses’
By ELISABETH ROSENTHAL
DARMSTADT, Germany — From the outside, there is nothing unusual about the stylish new gray and orange row houses in the Kranichstein District, with wreaths on the doors and Christmas lights twinkling through a freezing drizzle. But these houses are part of a revolution in building design: There are no drafts, no cold tile floors, no snuggling under blankets until the furnace kicks in. There is, in fact, no furnace.
In Berthold Kaufmann’s home, there is, to be fair, one radiator for emergency backup in the living room — but it is not in use. Even on the coldest nights in central Germany, Mr. Kaufmann’s new “passive house” and others of this design get all the heat and hot water they need from the amount of energy that would be needed to run a hair dryer.
“You don’t think about temperature — the house just adjusts,” said Mr. Kaufmann, watching his 2-year-old daughter, dressed in a T-shirt, tuck into her sausage in the spacious living room, whose glass doors open to a patio. His new home uses about one-twentieth the heating energy of his parents’ home of roughly the same size, he said.
Architects in many countries, in attempts to meet new energy efficiency standards like the Leadership in Environmental and Energy Design standard in the United States, are designing homes with better insulation and high-efficiency appliances, as well as tapping into alternative sources of power, like solar panels and wind turbines.
The concept of the passive house, pioneered in this city of 140,000 outside Frankfurt, approaches the challenge from a different angle. Using ultrathick insulation and complex doors and windows, the architect engineers a home encased in an airtight shell, so that barely any heat escapes and barely any cold seeps in. That means a passive house can be warmed not only by the sun, but also by the heat from appliances and even from occupants’ bodies.
And in Germany, passive houses cost only about 5 to 7 percent more to build than conventional houses.
Decades ago, attempts at creating sealed solar-heated homes failed, because of stagnant air and mold. But new passive houses use an ingenious central ventilation system. The warm air going out passes side by side with clean, cold air coming in, exchanging heat with 90 percent efficiency.
“The myth before was that to be warm you had to have heating. Our goal is to create a warm house without energy demand,” said Wolfgang Hasper, an engineer at the Passivhaus Institut in Darmstadt. “This is not about wearing thick pullovers, turning the thermostat down and putting up with drafts. It’s about being comfortable with less energy input, and we do this by recycling heating.”
There are now an estimated 15,000 passive houses around the world, the vast majority built in the past few years in German-speaking countries or Scandinavia.
The first passive home was built here in 1991 by Wolfgang Feist, a local physicist, but diffusion of the idea was slowed by language. The courses and literature were mostly in German, and even now the components are mass-produced only in this part of the world.
The industry is thriving in Germany, however — for example, schools in Frankfurt are built with the technique.
Moreover, its popularity is spreading. The European Commission is promoting passive-house building, and the European Parliament has proposed that new buildings meet passive-house standards by 2011.
The United States Army, long a presence in this part of Germany, is considering passive-house barracks.
“Awareness is skyrocketing; it’s hard for us to keep up with requests,” Mr. Hasper said.
Nabih Tahan, a California architect who worked in Austria for 11 years, is completing one of the first passive houses in the United States for his family in Berkeley. He heads a group of 70 Bay Area architects and engineers working to encourage wider acceptance of the standards. “This is a recipe for energy that makes sense to people,” Mr. Tahan said. “Why not reuse this heat you get for free?”
Ironically, however, when California inspectors were examining the Berkeley home to determine whether it met “green” building codes (it did), he could not get credit for the heat exchanger, a device that is still uncommon in the United States. “When you think about passive-house standards, you start looking at buildings in a different way,” he said.
Buildings that are certified hermetically sealed may sound suffocating. (To meet the standard, a building must pass a “blow test” showing that it loses minimal air under pressure.) In fact, passive houses have plenty of windows — though far more face south than north — and all can be opened.
Inside, a passive home does have a slightly different gestalt from conventional houses, just as an electric car drives differently from its gas-using cousin. There is a kind of spaceship-like uniformity of air and temperature. The air from outside all goes through HEPA filters before entering the rooms. The cement floor of the basement isn’t cold. The walls and the air are basically the same temperature.
Look closer and there are technical differences: When the windows are swung open, you see their layers of glass and gas, as well as the elaborate seals around the edges. A small, grated duct near the ceiling in the living room brings in clean air. In the basement there is no furnace, but instead what looks like a giant Styrofoam cooler, containing the heat exchanger.
Passive houses need no human tinkering, but most architects put in a switch with three settings, which can be turned down for vacations, or up to circulate air for a party (though you can also just open the windows). “We’ve found it’s very important to people that they feel they can influence the system,” Mr. Hasper said.
The houses may be too radical for those who treasure an experience like drinking hot chocolate in a cold kitchen. But not for others. “I grew up in a great old house that was always 10 degrees too cold, so I knew I wanted to make something different,” said Georg W. Zielke, who built his first passive house here, for his family, in 2003 and now designs no other kinds of buildings.
In Germany the added construction costs of passive houses are modest and, because of their growing popularity and an ever larger array of attractive off-the-shelf components, are shrinking.
But the sophisticated windows and heat-exchange ventilation systems needed to make passive houses work properly are not readily available in the United States. So the construction of passive houses in the United States, at least initially, is likely to entail a higher price differential.
Moreover, the kinds of home construction popular in the United States are more difficult to adapt to the standard: residential buildings tend not to have built-in ventilation systems of any kind, and sliding windows are hard to seal.
Dr. Feist’s original passive house — a boxy white building with four apartments — looks like the science project that it was intended to be. But new passive houses come in many shapes and styles. The Passivhaus Institut, which he founded a decade ago, continues to conduct research, teaches architects, and tests homes to make sure they meet standards. It now has affiliates in Britain and the United States.
Still, there are challenges to broader adoption even in Europe.
Because a successful passive house requires the interplay of the building, the sun and the climate, architects need to be careful about site selection. Passive-house heating might not work in a shady valley in Switzerland, or on an urban street with no south-facing wall. Researchers are looking into whether the concept will work in warmer climates — where a heat exchanger could be used in reverse, to keep cool air in and warm air out.
And those who want passive-house mansions may be disappointed. Compact shapes are simpler to seal, while sprawling homes are difficult to insulate and heat.
Most passive houses allow about 500 square feet per person, a comfortable though not expansive living space. Mr. Hasper said people who wanted thousands of square feet per person should look for another design.
“Anyone who feels they need that much space to live,” he said, “well, that’s a different discussion.”
Photo and links to more articles on the subject at:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/27/world ... ?th&emc=th
The Energy Challenge
No Furnaces but Heat Aplenty in ‘Passive Houses’
By ELISABETH ROSENTHAL
DARMSTADT, Germany — From the outside, there is nothing unusual about the stylish new gray and orange row houses in the Kranichstein District, with wreaths on the doors and Christmas lights twinkling through a freezing drizzle. But these houses are part of a revolution in building design: There are no drafts, no cold tile floors, no snuggling under blankets until the furnace kicks in. There is, in fact, no furnace.
In Berthold Kaufmann’s home, there is, to be fair, one radiator for emergency backup in the living room — but it is not in use. Even on the coldest nights in central Germany, Mr. Kaufmann’s new “passive house” and others of this design get all the heat and hot water they need from the amount of energy that would be needed to run a hair dryer.
“You don’t think about temperature — the house just adjusts,” said Mr. Kaufmann, watching his 2-year-old daughter, dressed in a T-shirt, tuck into her sausage in the spacious living room, whose glass doors open to a patio. His new home uses about one-twentieth the heating energy of his parents’ home of roughly the same size, he said.
Architects in many countries, in attempts to meet new energy efficiency standards like the Leadership in Environmental and Energy Design standard in the United States, are designing homes with better insulation and high-efficiency appliances, as well as tapping into alternative sources of power, like solar panels and wind turbines.
The concept of the passive house, pioneered in this city of 140,000 outside Frankfurt, approaches the challenge from a different angle. Using ultrathick insulation and complex doors and windows, the architect engineers a home encased in an airtight shell, so that barely any heat escapes and barely any cold seeps in. That means a passive house can be warmed not only by the sun, but also by the heat from appliances and even from occupants’ bodies.
And in Germany, passive houses cost only about 5 to 7 percent more to build than conventional houses.
Decades ago, attempts at creating sealed solar-heated homes failed, because of stagnant air and mold. But new passive houses use an ingenious central ventilation system. The warm air going out passes side by side with clean, cold air coming in, exchanging heat with 90 percent efficiency.
“The myth before was that to be warm you had to have heating. Our goal is to create a warm house without energy demand,” said Wolfgang Hasper, an engineer at the Passivhaus Institut in Darmstadt. “This is not about wearing thick pullovers, turning the thermostat down and putting up with drafts. It’s about being comfortable with less energy input, and we do this by recycling heating.”
There are now an estimated 15,000 passive houses around the world, the vast majority built in the past few years in German-speaking countries or Scandinavia.
The first passive home was built here in 1991 by Wolfgang Feist, a local physicist, but diffusion of the idea was slowed by language. The courses and literature were mostly in German, and even now the components are mass-produced only in this part of the world.
The industry is thriving in Germany, however — for example, schools in Frankfurt are built with the technique.
Moreover, its popularity is spreading. The European Commission is promoting passive-house building, and the European Parliament has proposed that new buildings meet passive-house standards by 2011.
The United States Army, long a presence in this part of Germany, is considering passive-house barracks.
“Awareness is skyrocketing; it’s hard for us to keep up with requests,” Mr. Hasper said.
Nabih Tahan, a California architect who worked in Austria for 11 years, is completing one of the first passive houses in the United States for his family in Berkeley. He heads a group of 70 Bay Area architects and engineers working to encourage wider acceptance of the standards. “This is a recipe for energy that makes sense to people,” Mr. Tahan said. “Why not reuse this heat you get for free?”
Ironically, however, when California inspectors were examining the Berkeley home to determine whether it met “green” building codes (it did), he could not get credit for the heat exchanger, a device that is still uncommon in the United States. “When you think about passive-house standards, you start looking at buildings in a different way,” he said.
Buildings that are certified hermetically sealed may sound suffocating. (To meet the standard, a building must pass a “blow test” showing that it loses minimal air under pressure.) In fact, passive houses have plenty of windows — though far more face south than north — and all can be opened.
Inside, a passive home does have a slightly different gestalt from conventional houses, just as an electric car drives differently from its gas-using cousin. There is a kind of spaceship-like uniformity of air and temperature. The air from outside all goes through HEPA filters before entering the rooms. The cement floor of the basement isn’t cold. The walls and the air are basically the same temperature.
Look closer and there are technical differences: When the windows are swung open, you see their layers of glass and gas, as well as the elaborate seals around the edges. A small, grated duct near the ceiling in the living room brings in clean air. In the basement there is no furnace, but instead what looks like a giant Styrofoam cooler, containing the heat exchanger.
Passive houses need no human tinkering, but most architects put in a switch with three settings, which can be turned down for vacations, or up to circulate air for a party (though you can also just open the windows). “We’ve found it’s very important to people that they feel they can influence the system,” Mr. Hasper said.
The houses may be too radical for those who treasure an experience like drinking hot chocolate in a cold kitchen. But not for others. “I grew up in a great old house that was always 10 degrees too cold, so I knew I wanted to make something different,” said Georg W. Zielke, who built his first passive house here, for his family, in 2003 and now designs no other kinds of buildings.
In Germany the added construction costs of passive houses are modest and, because of their growing popularity and an ever larger array of attractive off-the-shelf components, are shrinking.
But the sophisticated windows and heat-exchange ventilation systems needed to make passive houses work properly are not readily available in the United States. So the construction of passive houses in the United States, at least initially, is likely to entail a higher price differential.
Moreover, the kinds of home construction popular in the United States are more difficult to adapt to the standard: residential buildings tend not to have built-in ventilation systems of any kind, and sliding windows are hard to seal.
Dr. Feist’s original passive house — a boxy white building with four apartments — looks like the science project that it was intended to be. But new passive houses come in many shapes and styles. The Passivhaus Institut, which he founded a decade ago, continues to conduct research, teaches architects, and tests homes to make sure they meet standards. It now has affiliates in Britain and the United States.
Still, there are challenges to broader adoption even in Europe.
Because a successful passive house requires the interplay of the building, the sun and the climate, architects need to be careful about site selection. Passive-house heating might not work in a shady valley in Switzerland, or on an urban street with no south-facing wall. Researchers are looking into whether the concept will work in warmer climates — where a heat exchanger could be used in reverse, to keep cool air in and warm air out.
And those who want passive-house mansions may be disappointed. Compact shapes are simpler to seal, while sprawling homes are difficult to insulate and heat.
Most passive houses allow about 500 square feet per person, a comfortable though not expansive living space. Mr. Hasper said people who wanted thousands of square feet per person should look for another design.
“Anyone who feels they need that much space to live,” he said, “well, that’s a different discussion.”
Photo and links to more articles on the subject at:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/27/world ... ?th&emc=th
Prince Charles set to visit South America on eco-tour
Herald News ServicesFebruary 14, 2009
Britain's heir to the throne, Prince Charles, is to visit the Amazon and the Galapagos Islands next month on a mission promoting environmental preservation, British officials said Friday.
The prince, accompanied by his wife Camilla, will travel to Chile, Brazil and Ecuador between March 8 and 17, the respective British embassies and the prince's office in London said in statements.
"The visit will focus on the theme of climate change, one of the U. K. governments highest foreign policy priorities in 2009," a statement from the British Embassy in Brazil said.
"Environmental sustainability and protection will be the central issues of the visit. This reflects The Prince of Wales' long-standing interest and expertise in this field."
Prince Charles, 60, is to begin the tour with a three-day stop in Chile, where he will focus on bilateral ties, including military ones, the diplomatic mission there said.
March 11 to 15, he will be in Brazil, where he will give a key speech on environmental preservation and visit the Amazon forest, Rio de Janeiro and Brasilia.
The prince is to round out the trip with a voyage to the Galapagos Islands, off Ecuador. That visit will mark the 200th anniversary of the birth of Charles Darwin, the Briton who formulated his evolution theory from research in the archipelago.
© Copyright (c) The Calgary Herald
Herald News ServicesFebruary 14, 2009
Britain's heir to the throne, Prince Charles, is to visit the Amazon and the Galapagos Islands next month on a mission promoting environmental preservation, British officials said Friday.
The prince, accompanied by his wife Camilla, will travel to Chile, Brazil and Ecuador between March 8 and 17, the respective British embassies and the prince's office in London said in statements.
"The visit will focus on the theme of climate change, one of the U. K. governments highest foreign policy priorities in 2009," a statement from the British Embassy in Brazil said.
"Environmental sustainability and protection will be the central issues of the visit. This reflects The Prince of Wales' long-standing interest and expertise in this field."
Prince Charles, 60, is to begin the tour with a three-day stop in Chile, where he will focus on bilateral ties, including military ones, the diplomatic mission there said.
March 11 to 15, he will be in Brazil, where he will give a key speech on environmental preservation and visit the Amazon forest, Rio de Janeiro and Brasilia.
The prince is to round out the trip with a voyage to the Galapagos Islands, off Ecuador. That visit will mark the 200th anniversary of the birth of Charles Darwin, the Briton who formulated his evolution theory from research in the archipelago.
© Copyright (c) The Calgary Herald
February 15, 2009
Op-Ed Columnist
Yes, They Could. So They Did.
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
New Delhi
So I am attending the Energy and Resources Institute climate conference in New Delhi, and during the afternoon session two young American women — along with one of their mothers — proposition me.
“Hey, Mr. Friedman,” they say, “would you like to take a little spin around New Delhi in our car?”
Oh, I say, I’ve heard that line before. Ah, they say, but you haven’t seen this car before. It’s a plug-in electric car that is also powered by rooftop solar panels — and the two young women, recent Yale grads, had just driven it all over India in a “climate caravan” to highlight the solutions to global warming being developed by Indian companies, communities, campuses and innovators, as well as to inspire others to take action.
They ask me if I want to drive, but I have visions of being stopped by the cops and ending up in a New Delhi jail. Not to worry, they tell me. Indian cops have been stopping them all across India. First, they ask to see driver’s licenses, then they inquire about how the green car’s solar roof manages to provide 10 percent of its mileage — and then they try to buy the car.
We head off down Panchsheel Marg, one of New Delhi’s main streets. The ladies want to show me something. The U.S. Embassy and the Chinese Embassy are both located on Panchsheel, directly across from each other. They asked me to check out the rooftops of each embassy. What do I notice? Let’s see ... The U.S. Embassy’s roof is loaded with antennae and listening gear. The Chinese Embassy’s roof is loaded with ... new Chinese-made solar hot-water heaters.
You couldn’t make this up.
But trying to do something about it was just one of many reasons my hosts, Caroline Howe, 23, a mechanical engineer on leave from the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, and Alexis Ringwald, a Fulbright scholar in India and now a solar entrepreneur, joined with Kartikeya Singh, who was starting the Indian Youth Climate Network, or IYCN, to connect young climate leaders in India, a country coming under increasing global pressure to manage its carbon footprint.
“India is full of climate innovators, so spread out across this huge country that many people don’t get to see that these solutions are working right now,” said Howe. “We wanted to find a way to bring people together around existing solutions to inspire more action and more innovation. There’s no time left to just talk about the problem.”
Howe and Ringwald thought the best way to do that might be a climate solutions road tour, using modified electric cars from India’s Reva Electric Car Company, whose C.E.O. Ringwald knew. They persuaded him to donate three of his cars and to retrofit them with longer-life batteries that could travel 90 miles on a single six-hour charge — and to lay on a solar roof that would extend them farther.
Between Jan. 1 and Feb. 5, they drove the cars on a 2,100-mile trip from Chennai to New Delhi, stopping in 15 cities and dozens of villages, training Indian students to start their own climate action programs and filming 20 videos of India’s top home-grown energy innovations. They also brought along a solar-powered band, plus a luggage truck that ran on plant oil extracted from jatropha and pongamia, plants locally grown on wasteland. A Bollywood dance group joined at different stops and a Czech who learned about their trip on YouTube hopped on with his truck that ran on vegetable-oil waste.
Deepa Gupta, 21, a co-founder of IYCN, told The Hindustan Times that the trip opened her eyes to just how many indigenous energy solutions were budding in India — “like organic farming in Andhra Pradesh, or using neem and garlic as pesticides, or the kind of recycling in slums, such as Dharavi. We saw things already in place, like the Gadhia solar plant in Valsad, Gujarat, where steam is used for cooking and you can feed almost 50,000 people in one go.” (See: www.indiaclimatesolutions.com.)
At Rajpipla, in Gujarat, when they stopped at a local prince’s palace to recharge their cars, they discovered that his business was cultivating worms and selling them as eco-friendly alternatives to chemical fertilizers.
I met Howe and Ringwald after a tiring day, but I have to admit that as soon as they started telling me their story it really made me smile. After a year of watching adults engage in devastating recklessness in the financial markets and depressing fecklessness in the global climate talks, it’s refreshing to know that the world keeps minting idealistic young people who are not waiting for governments to act, but are starting their own projects and driving innovation.
“Why did this tour happen?” asked Ringwald. “Why this mad, insane plan to travel across India in a caravan of solar electric cars and jatropha trucks with solar music, art, dance and a potent message for climate solutions? Well ... the world needs crazy ideas to change things, because the conventional way of thinking is not working anymore.”
Op-Ed Columnist
Yes, They Could. So They Did.
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
New Delhi
So I am attending the Energy and Resources Institute climate conference in New Delhi, and during the afternoon session two young American women — along with one of their mothers — proposition me.
“Hey, Mr. Friedman,” they say, “would you like to take a little spin around New Delhi in our car?”
Oh, I say, I’ve heard that line before. Ah, they say, but you haven’t seen this car before. It’s a plug-in electric car that is also powered by rooftop solar panels — and the two young women, recent Yale grads, had just driven it all over India in a “climate caravan” to highlight the solutions to global warming being developed by Indian companies, communities, campuses and innovators, as well as to inspire others to take action.
They ask me if I want to drive, but I have visions of being stopped by the cops and ending up in a New Delhi jail. Not to worry, they tell me. Indian cops have been stopping them all across India. First, they ask to see driver’s licenses, then they inquire about how the green car’s solar roof manages to provide 10 percent of its mileage — and then they try to buy the car.
We head off down Panchsheel Marg, one of New Delhi’s main streets. The ladies want to show me something. The U.S. Embassy and the Chinese Embassy are both located on Panchsheel, directly across from each other. They asked me to check out the rooftops of each embassy. What do I notice? Let’s see ... The U.S. Embassy’s roof is loaded with antennae and listening gear. The Chinese Embassy’s roof is loaded with ... new Chinese-made solar hot-water heaters.
You couldn’t make this up.
But trying to do something about it was just one of many reasons my hosts, Caroline Howe, 23, a mechanical engineer on leave from the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, and Alexis Ringwald, a Fulbright scholar in India and now a solar entrepreneur, joined with Kartikeya Singh, who was starting the Indian Youth Climate Network, or IYCN, to connect young climate leaders in India, a country coming under increasing global pressure to manage its carbon footprint.
“India is full of climate innovators, so spread out across this huge country that many people don’t get to see that these solutions are working right now,” said Howe. “We wanted to find a way to bring people together around existing solutions to inspire more action and more innovation. There’s no time left to just talk about the problem.”
Howe and Ringwald thought the best way to do that might be a climate solutions road tour, using modified electric cars from India’s Reva Electric Car Company, whose C.E.O. Ringwald knew. They persuaded him to donate three of his cars and to retrofit them with longer-life batteries that could travel 90 miles on a single six-hour charge — and to lay on a solar roof that would extend them farther.
Between Jan. 1 and Feb. 5, they drove the cars on a 2,100-mile trip from Chennai to New Delhi, stopping in 15 cities and dozens of villages, training Indian students to start their own climate action programs and filming 20 videos of India’s top home-grown energy innovations. They also brought along a solar-powered band, plus a luggage truck that ran on plant oil extracted from jatropha and pongamia, plants locally grown on wasteland. A Bollywood dance group joined at different stops and a Czech who learned about their trip on YouTube hopped on with his truck that ran on vegetable-oil waste.
Deepa Gupta, 21, a co-founder of IYCN, told The Hindustan Times that the trip opened her eyes to just how many indigenous energy solutions were budding in India — “like organic farming in Andhra Pradesh, or using neem and garlic as pesticides, or the kind of recycling in slums, such as Dharavi. We saw things already in place, like the Gadhia solar plant in Valsad, Gujarat, where steam is used for cooking and you can feed almost 50,000 people in one go.” (See: www.indiaclimatesolutions.com.)
At Rajpipla, in Gujarat, when they stopped at a local prince’s palace to recharge their cars, they discovered that his business was cultivating worms and selling them as eco-friendly alternatives to chemical fertilizers.
I met Howe and Ringwald after a tiring day, but I have to admit that as soon as they started telling me their story it really made me smile. After a year of watching adults engage in devastating recklessness in the financial markets and depressing fecklessness in the global climate talks, it’s refreshing to know that the world keeps minting idealistic young people who are not waiting for governments to act, but are starting their own projects and driving innovation.
“Why did this tour happen?” asked Ringwald. “Why this mad, insane plan to travel across India in a caravan of solar electric cars and jatropha trucks with solar music, art, dance and a potent message for climate solutions? Well ... the world needs crazy ideas to change things, because the conventional way of thinking is not working anymore.”
February 16, 2009
Editorial
400 Miles North
There is an interesting and potentially tragic purity in the way other life forms respond to our warming climate. They do not debate the matter. They simply shift as the contours of their habitat shift. Even the distribution of slow-moving species — like trees — is changing. And more mobile species? They offer vivid testimony about the alterations in our world.
According to the Audubon Society, data from the past 40 years of the annual Christmas Bird Count — a three-week census of American bird populations — shows a striking northward movement among a majority of species. This is not just a movement of individuals. It’s the migration of an entire population.
The boreal chickadee has moved 280 miles north, almost out of the range of the lower 48 states. The marbled murrelet, a seabird that breeds inland, has moved 360 miles north. The wild turkey has gone about 400.
These population shifts make it look as though many bird species can easily adjust to a warming world. And some of these shifts may be opportunistic in nature — taking advantage of open ground and new food sources in regions that used to be snowed over in winter. But ultimately birds cannot migrate out of their habitats.
A boreal species pushed farther and farther north comes eventually to the end of the plants (which move far more slowly) that it depends upon for food. A grassland species cannot simply decide to become a woodland species. And birds do not simply push northward over unchanging terrain beneath them. The entire species mix that defines suitable habitat is changing as well, bringing with it the risk of extinction.
The important thing to remember — as we notice an absence of purple finches at our feeders — is that we are not merely witnesses of these striking shifts. We are the cause of them, and it is our responsibility to do all we can to mitigate them.
Editorial
400 Miles North
There is an interesting and potentially tragic purity in the way other life forms respond to our warming climate. They do not debate the matter. They simply shift as the contours of their habitat shift. Even the distribution of slow-moving species — like trees — is changing. And more mobile species? They offer vivid testimony about the alterations in our world.
According to the Audubon Society, data from the past 40 years of the annual Christmas Bird Count — a three-week census of American bird populations — shows a striking northward movement among a majority of species. This is not just a movement of individuals. It’s the migration of an entire population.
The boreal chickadee has moved 280 miles north, almost out of the range of the lower 48 states. The marbled murrelet, a seabird that breeds inland, has moved 360 miles north. The wild turkey has gone about 400.
These population shifts make it look as though many bird species can easily adjust to a warming world. And some of these shifts may be opportunistic in nature — taking advantage of open ground and new food sources in regions that used to be snowed over in winter. But ultimately birds cannot migrate out of their habitats.
A boreal species pushed farther and farther north comes eventually to the end of the plants (which move far more slowly) that it depends upon for food. A grassland species cannot simply decide to become a woodland species. And birds do not simply push northward over unchanging terrain beneath them. The entire species mix that defines suitable habitat is changing as well, bringing with it the risk of extinction.
The important thing to remember — as we notice an absence of purple finches at our feeders — is that we are not merely witnesses of these striking shifts. We are the cause of them, and it is our responsibility to do all we can to mitigate them.
March 15, 2009
Op-Ed Columnist
The Next Really Cool Thing
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
San Francisco
If you hang around the renewable-energy business for long, you’ll hear a lot of tall tales. You’ll hear about someone who’s invented a process to convert coal into vegetable oil in his garage and someone else who has a duck in his basement that paddles a wheel, blows up a balloon, turns a turbine and creates enough electricity to power his doghouse.
Hang around long enough and you’ll even hear that in another 10 or 20 years hydrogen-powered cars or fusion energy will be a commercial reality. If I had a dime for every time I’ve heard one of those stories, I could buy my own space shuttle. No wonder cynics often say that viable fusion energy or hydrogen-powered cars are “20 years away and always will be.”
But what if this time is different? What if a laser-powered fusion energy power plant that would have all the reliability of coal, without the carbon dioxide, all the cleanliness of wind and solar, without having to worry about the sun not shining or the wind not blowing, and all the scale of nuclear, without all the waste, was indeed just 10 years away or less? That would be a holy cow game-changer.
Are we there?
That is the tantalizing question I was left with after visiting the recently completed National Ignition Facility, or N.I.F., at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, 50 miles east of San Francisco. The government-funded N.I.F. consists of 192 giant lasers — which can deliver 50 times more energy than any previous fusion laser system. They’re all housed in a 10-story building the size of three football fields — the rather dull cover to a vast internal steel forest of laser beams that must be what the engine room of Star Trek’s U.S.S. Enterprise space ship looked like.
I began my tour there with the N.I.F. director, Edward Moses. He was holding up a tiny gold can the size of a Tylenol tablet, and inside it was plastic pellet, the size of a single peppercorn, that would be filled with frozen hydrogen.
The way the N.I.F. works is that all 192 lasers pour their energy into a target chamber, which looks like a giant, spherical, steel bathysphere that you would normally use for deep-sea exploration. At the center of this target chamber is that gold can with its frozen hydrogen pellet. Once one of those pellets is heated and compressed by the lasers, it reaches temperatures over 800 million degrees Fahrenheit, “far greater than exists at the center of our sun,” said Moses.
More importantly, each crushed pellet gives off a burst of energy that can then be harnessed to heat up liquid salt and produce massive amounts of steam to drive a turbine and create electricity for your home — just like coal does today. Only this energy would be carbon-free, globally available, safe and secure and could be integrated seamlessly into our current electric grid.
Last Monday at 3 a.m., for the first time, all 192 lasers were fired at high energy precisely at once — no small feat — at the target chamber’s empty core. That was a major step toward “ignition” — turning that hydrogen pellet into a miniature sun on earth. The next step — which the N.I.F. expects to achieve some time in the next two to three years — is to prove that it can, under lab conditions, repeatedly fire its 192 lasers at multiple hydrogen pellets and produce more energy from the pellets than the laser energy that is injected. That’s called “energy gain.”
“That,” explained Moses, “is what Einstein meant when he declared that E=mc2. By using lasers, we can unleash tremendous amounts of energy from tiny amounts of mass.”
Once the lab proves that it can get energy gain from this laser-driven process, the next step (if it can secure government and private funding) would be to set up a pilot fusion energy power plant that would prove that any local power utility could have its own miniature sun — on a commercial basis. A pilot would cost about $10 billion — the same as a new nuclear power plant.
I don’t know if they can pull this off; some scientists are skeptical. Laboratory-scale nuclear fusion and energy gain is really hard. But here’s what I do know: President Obama’s stimulus package has given a terrific boost to renewable energy. It will pay lasting benefits. And we need to keep working on all forms of solar, geothermal and wind power. They work. And the more they get deployed, the more their costs will go down.
But, in addition, we need to make a few big bets on potential game-changers. I am talking about systems that could give us abundant, clean, reliable electrons and drive massive innovation in big lasers, materials science, nuclear physics and chemistry that would benefit, energize and renew many U.S. industries.
At the pace we’re going with the technologies we have, without some game-changers, climate change is going to have its way with us. Yes, we’ll still need coal for some time. But let’s make sure that we aren’t just chasing the fantasy that we can “clean up” coal, when our real future depends on birthing new technologies that can replace it.
Op-Ed Columnist
The Next Really Cool Thing
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
San Francisco
If you hang around the renewable-energy business for long, you’ll hear a lot of tall tales. You’ll hear about someone who’s invented a process to convert coal into vegetable oil in his garage and someone else who has a duck in his basement that paddles a wheel, blows up a balloon, turns a turbine and creates enough electricity to power his doghouse.
Hang around long enough and you’ll even hear that in another 10 or 20 years hydrogen-powered cars or fusion energy will be a commercial reality. If I had a dime for every time I’ve heard one of those stories, I could buy my own space shuttle. No wonder cynics often say that viable fusion energy or hydrogen-powered cars are “20 years away and always will be.”
But what if this time is different? What if a laser-powered fusion energy power plant that would have all the reliability of coal, without the carbon dioxide, all the cleanliness of wind and solar, without having to worry about the sun not shining or the wind not blowing, and all the scale of nuclear, without all the waste, was indeed just 10 years away or less? That would be a holy cow game-changer.
Are we there?
That is the tantalizing question I was left with after visiting the recently completed National Ignition Facility, or N.I.F., at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, 50 miles east of San Francisco. The government-funded N.I.F. consists of 192 giant lasers — which can deliver 50 times more energy than any previous fusion laser system. They’re all housed in a 10-story building the size of three football fields — the rather dull cover to a vast internal steel forest of laser beams that must be what the engine room of Star Trek’s U.S.S. Enterprise space ship looked like.
I began my tour there with the N.I.F. director, Edward Moses. He was holding up a tiny gold can the size of a Tylenol tablet, and inside it was plastic pellet, the size of a single peppercorn, that would be filled with frozen hydrogen.
The way the N.I.F. works is that all 192 lasers pour their energy into a target chamber, which looks like a giant, spherical, steel bathysphere that you would normally use for deep-sea exploration. At the center of this target chamber is that gold can with its frozen hydrogen pellet. Once one of those pellets is heated and compressed by the lasers, it reaches temperatures over 800 million degrees Fahrenheit, “far greater than exists at the center of our sun,” said Moses.
More importantly, each crushed pellet gives off a burst of energy that can then be harnessed to heat up liquid salt and produce massive amounts of steam to drive a turbine and create electricity for your home — just like coal does today. Only this energy would be carbon-free, globally available, safe and secure and could be integrated seamlessly into our current electric grid.
Last Monday at 3 a.m., for the first time, all 192 lasers were fired at high energy precisely at once — no small feat — at the target chamber’s empty core. That was a major step toward “ignition” — turning that hydrogen pellet into a miniature sun on earth. The next step — which the N.I.F. expects to achieve some time in the next two to three years — is to prove that it can, under lab conditions, repeatedly fire its 192 lasers at multiple hydrogen pellets and produce more energy from the pellets than the laser energy that is injected. That’s called “energy gain.”
“That,” explained Moses, “is what Einstein meant when he declared that E=mc2. By using lasers, we can unleash tremendous amounts of energy from tiny amounts of mass.”
Once the lab proves that it can get energy gain from this laser-driven process, the next step (if it can secure government and private funding) would be to set up a pilot fusion energy power plant that would prove that any local power utility could have its own miniature sun — on a commercial basis. A pilot would cost about $10 billion — the same as a new nuclear power plant.
I don’t know if they can pull this off; some scientists are skeptical. Laboratory-scale nuclear fusion and energy gain is really hard. But here’s what I do know: President Obama’s stimulus package has given a terrific boost to renewable energy. It will pay lasting benefits. And we need to keep working on all forms of solar, geothermal and wind power. They work. And the more they get deployed, the more their costs will go down.
But, in addition, we need to make a few big bets on potential game-changers. I am talking about systems that could give us abundant, clean, reliable electrons and drive massive innovation in big lasers, materials science, nuclear physics and chemistry that would benefit, energize and renew many U.S. industries.
At the pace we’re going with the technologies we have, without some game-changers, climate change is going to have its way with us. Yes, we’ll still need coal for some time. But let’s make sure that we aren’t just chasing the fantasy that we can “clean up” coal, when our real future depends on birthing new technologies that can replace it.
April 1, 2009
Editorial
State of the Birds
Ken Salazar, the secretary of the interior, released a new, nationwide survey last month that assesses the state of bird populations in America. The news is grievous. Over all, a third of the bird species in this country are endangered, threatened or in serious decline.
There is special concern for grassland birds — whose habitat has been vanishing steadily for decades — for birds in Hawaii, where a variety of species face a variety of threats, and for coastal species. The good news is that wherever nature is allowed to recover, especially in the case of wetland birds, it shows its usual resilience.
But there is no glossing over these staggering losses, and there is no dismissing what they mean. There is nothing accidental or inevitable about the vanishing of these birds. However unintentional, it is the direct result of human activity — of development, of global warming, of air and water pollution and of our failure to set aside the habitat these birds need to flourish. Every threatened species reveals some aspect of our lives that could be adjusted.
The survey also shows that where humans have made an effort — as with migratory waterfowl and with endangered species like the peregrine falcon — good things have happened, with some species recovering even as others declined. This in turn argues that the programs now in place to protect habitat should not only be spared the budgetary wrecking ball but also expanded — most conspicuously those managed by the Agriculture Department that seek to preserve wetlands and prairie grasslands as well as the Interior Department’s Land and Water Conservation Fund.
The remarkable recovery of ducks and geese and other wetland species — thanks to strong conservation efforts — should remind us of what is possible. The only other outcome is too grim to consider — a landscape steadily emptying of birds.
Editorial
State of the Birds
Ken Salazar, the secretary of the interior, released a new, nationwide survey last month that assesses the state of bird populations in America. The news is grievous. Over all, a third of the bird species in this country are endangered, threatened or in serious decline.
There is special concern for grassland birds — whose habitat has been vanishing steadily for decades — for birds in Hawaii, where a variety of species face a variety of threats, and for coastal species. The good news is that wherever nature is allowed to recover, especially in the case of wetland birds, it shows its usual resilience.
But there is no glossing over these staggering losses, and there is no dismissing what they mean. There is nothing accidental or inevitable about the vanishing of these birds. However unintentional, it is the direct result of human activity — of development, of global warming, of air and water pollution and of our failure to set aside the habitat these birds need to flourish. Every threatened species reveals some aspect of our lives that could be adjusted.
The survey also shows that where humans have made an effort — as with migratory waterfowl and with endangered species like the peregrine falcon — good things have happened, with some species recovering even as others declined. This in turn argues that the programs now in place to protect habitat should not only be spared the budgetary wrecking ball but also expanded — most conspicuously those managed by the Agriculture Department that seek to preserve wetlands and prairie grasslands as well as the Interior Department’s Land and Water Conservation Fund.
The remarkable recovery of ducks and geese and other wetland species — thanks to strong conservation efforts — should remind us of what is possible. The only other outcome is too grim to consider — a landscape steadily emptying of birds.
There is a related multimedia linked at:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/16/scien ... grees.html
April 16, 2009
By Degrees
Third-World Stove Soot Is Target in Climate Fight
By ELISABETH ROSENTHAL
KOHLUA, India — “It’s hard to believe that this is what’s melting the glaciers,” said Dr. Veerabhadran Ramanathan, one of the world’s leading climate scientists, as he weaved through a warren of mud brick huts, each containing a mud cookstove pouring soot into the atmosphere.
As women in ragged saris of a thousand hues bake bread and stew lentils in the early evening over fires fueled by twigs and dung, children cough from the dense smoke that fills their homes. Black grime coats the undersides of thatched roofs. At dawn, a brown cloud stretches over the landscape like a diaphanous dirty blanket.
In Kohlua, in central India, with no cars and little electricity, emissions of carbon dioxide, the main heat-trapping gas linked to global warming, are near zero. But soot — also known as black carbon — from tens of thousands of villages like this one in developing countries is emerging as a major and previously unappreciated source of global climate change.
While carbon dioxide may be the No. 1 contributor to rising global temperatures, scientists say, black carbon has emerged as an important No. 2, with recent studies estimating that it is responsible for 18 percent of the planet’s warming, compared with 40 percent for carbon dioxide. Decreasing black carbon emissions would be a relatively cheap way to significantly rein in global warming — especially in the short term, climate experts say. Replacing primitive cooking stoves with modern versions that emit far less soot could provide a much-needed stopgap, while nations struggle with the more difficult task of enacting programs and developing technologies to curb carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuels.
In fact, reducing black carbon is one of a number of relatively quick and simple climate fixes using existing technologies — often called “low hanging fruit” — that scientists say should be plucked immediately to avert the worst projected consequences of global warming. “It is clear to any person who cares about climate change that this will have a huge impact on the global environment,” said Dr. Ramanathan, a professor of climate science at the Scripps Institute of Oceanography, who is working with the Energy and Resources Institute in New Delhi on a project to help poor families acquire new stoves.
“In terms of climate change we’re driving fast toward a cliff, and this could buy us time,” said Dr. Ramanathan, who left India 40 years ago but returned to his native land for the project.
Better still, decreasing soot could have a rapid effect. Unlike carbon dioxide, which lingers in the atmosphere for years, soot stays there for a few weeks. Converting to low-soot cookstoves would remove the warming effects of black carbon quickly, while shutting a coal plant takes years to substantially reduce global CO2 concentrations.
But the awareness of black carbon’s role in climate change has come so recently that it was not even mentioned as a warming agent in the 2007 summary report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that pronounced the evidence for global warming to be “unequivocal.” Mark Z. Jacobson, professor of environmental engineering at Stanford, said that the fact that black carbon was not included in international climate efforts was “bizarre,” but “partly reflects how new the idea is.” The United Nations is trying to figure out how to include black carbon in climate change programs, as is the federal government.
In Asia and Africa, cookstoves produce the bulk of black carbon, although it also emanates from diesel engines and coal plants there. In the United States and Europe, black carbon emissions have already been reduced significantly by filters and scrubbers.
Like tiny heat-absorbing black sweaters, soot particles warm the air and melt the ice by absorbing the sun’s heat when they settle on glaciers. One recent study estimated that black carbon might account for as much as half of Arctic warming. While the particles tend to settle over time and do not have the global reach of greenhouse gases, they do travel, scientists now realize. Soot from India has been found in the Maldive Islands and on the Tibetan Plateau; from the United States, it travels to the Arctic. The environmental and geopolitical implications of soot emissions are enormous. Himalayan glaciers are expected to lose 75 percent of their ice by 2020, according to Prof. Syed Iqbal Hasnain, a glacier specialist from the Indian state of Sikkim.
These glaciers are the source of most of the major rivers in Asia. The short-term result of glacial melt is severe flooding in mountain communities. The number of floods from glacial lakes is already rising sharply, Professor Hasnain said. Once the glaciers shrink, Asia’s big rivers will run low or dry for part of the year, and desperate battles over water are certain to ensue in a region already rife with conflict.
Doctors have long railed against black carbon for its devastating health effects in poor countries. The combination of health and environmental benefits means that reducing soot provides a “very big bang for your buck,” said Erika Rosenthal, a senior lawyer at Earth Justice, a Washington organization. “Now it’s in everybody’s self-interest to deal with things like cookstoves — not just because hundreds of thousands of women and children far away are dying prematurely.”
In the United States, black carbon emissions are indirectly monitored and minimized through federal and state programs that limit small particulate emissions, a category of particles damaging to human health that includes black carbon. But in March, a bill was introduced in Congress that would require the Environmental Protection Agency to specifically regulate black carbon and direct aid to black carbon reduction projects abroad, including introducing cookstoves in 20 million homes. The new stoves cost about $20 and use solar power or are more efficient. Soot is reduced by more than 90 percent. The solar stoves do not use wood or dung. Other new stoves simply burn fuel more cleanly, generally by pulverizing the fuel first and adding a small fan that improves combustion.
That remote rural villages like Kohlua could play an integral role in tackling the warming crisis is hard to imagine. There are no cars — the village chief’s ancient white Jeep sits highly polished but unused in front of his house, a museum piece. There is no running water and only intermittent electricity, which powers a few light bulbs.
The 1,500 residents here grow wheat, mustard and potatoes and work as day laborers in Agra, home of the Taj Majal, about two hours away by bus.
They earn about $2 a day and, for the most part, have not heard about climate change. But they have noticed frequent droughts in recent years that scientists say may be linked to global warming. Crops ripen earlier and rot more frequently than they did 10 years ago. The villagers are aware, too, that black carbon can corrode. In Agra, cookstoves and diesel engines are forbidden in the area around the Taj Majal, because soot damages the precious facade.
Still, replacing hundreds of millions of cookstoves — the source of heat, food and sterile water — is not a simple matter. “I’m sure they’d look nice, but I’d have to see them, to try them,” said Chetram Jatrav, as she squatted by her cookstove making tea and a flatbread called roti. Her three children were coughing.
She would like a stove that “made less smoke and used less fuel” but cannot afford one, she said, pushing a dung cake bought for one rupee into the fire. She had just bought her first rolling pin so her flatbread could come out “nice and round,” as her children had seen in elementary school. Equally important, the open fires of cookstoves give some of the traditional foods their taste. Urging these villagers to make roti in a solar cooker meets the same mix of rational and irrational resistance as telling an Italian that risotto tastes just fine if cooked in the microwave.
In March, the cookstove project, called Surya, began “market testing” six alternative cookers in villages, in part to quantify their benefits. Already, the researchers fret that the new stoves look like scientific instruments and are fragile; one broke when a villager pushed twigs in too hard.
But if black carbon is ever to be addressed on a large scale, acceptance of the new stoves is crucial. “I’m not going to go to the villagers and say CO2 is rising, and in 50 years you might have floods,” said Dr. Ibrahim Rehman, Dr. Ramanathan’s collaborator at the Energy and Resources Institute. “I’ll tell her about the lungs and her kids and I know it will help with climate change as well.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/16/scien ... grees.html
April 16, 2009
By Degrees
Third-World Stove Soot Is Target in Climate Fight
By ELISABETH ROSENTHAL
KOHLUA, India — “It’s hard to believe that this is what’s melting the glaciers,” said Dr. Veerabhadran Ramanathan, one of the world’s leading climate scientists, as he weaved through a warren of mud brick huts, each containing a mud cookstove pouring soot into the atmosphere.
As women in ragged saris of a thousand hues bake bread and stew lentils in the early evening over fires fueled by twigs and dung, children cough from the dense smoke that fills their homes. Black grime coats the undersides of thatched roofs. At dawn, a brown cloud stretches over the landscape like a diaphanous dirty blanket.
In Kohlua, in central India, with no cars and little electricity, emissions of carbon dioxide, the main heat-trapping gas linked to global warming, are near zero. But soot — also known as black carbon — from tens of thousands of villages like this one in developing countries is emerging as a major and previously unappreciated source of global climate change.
While carbon dioxide may be the No. 1 contributor to rising global temperatures, scientists say, black carbon has emerged as an important No. 2, with recent studies estimating that it is responsible for 18 percent of the planet’s warming, compared with 40 percent for carbon dioxide. Decreasing black carbon emissions would be a relatively cheap way to significantly rein in global warming — especially in the short term, climate experts say. Replacing primitive cooking stoves with modern versions that emit far less soot could provide a much-needed stopgap, while nations struggle with the more difficult task of enacting programs and developing technologies to curb carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuels.
In fact, reducing black carbon is one of a number of relatively quick and simple climate fixes using existing technologies — often called “low hanging fruit” — that scientists say should be plucked immediately to avert the worst projected consequences of global warming. “It is clear to any person who cares about climate change that this will have a huge impact on the global environment,” said Dr. Ramanathan, a professor of climate science at the Scripps Institute of Oceanography, who is working with the Energy and Resources Institute in New Delhi on a project to help poor families acquire new stoves.
“In terms of climate change we’re driving fast toward a cliff, and this could buy us time,” said Dr. Ramanathan, who left India 40 years ago but returned to his native land for the project.
Better still, decreasing soot could have a rapid effect. Unlike carbon dioxide, which lingers in the atmosphere for years, soot stays there for a few weeks. Converting to low-soot cookstoves would remove the warming effects of black carbon quickly, while shutting a coal plant takes years to substantially reduce global CO2 concentrations.
But the awareness of black carbon’s role in climate change has come so recently that it was not even mentioned as a warming agent in the 2007 summary report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that pronounced the evidence for global warming to be “unequivocal.” Mark Z. Jacobson, professor of environmental engineering at Stanford, said that the fact that black carbon was not included in international climate efforts was “bizarre,” but “partly reflects how new the idea is.” The United Nations is trying to figure out how to include black carbon in climate change programs, as is the federal government.
In Asia and Africa, cookstoves produce the bulk of black carbon, although it also emanates from diesel engines and coal plants there. In the United States and Europe, black carbon emissions have already been reduced significantly by filters and scrubbers.
Like tiny heat-absorbing black sweaters, soot particles warm the air and melt the ice by absorbing the sun’s heat when they settle on glaciers. One recent study estimated that black carbon might account for as much as half of Arctic warming. While the particles tend to settle over time and do not have the global reach of greenhouse gases, they do travel, scientists now realize. Soot from India has been found in the Maldive Islands and on the Tibetan Plateau; from the United States, it travels to the Arctic. The environmental and geopolitical implications of soot emissions are enormous. Himalayan glaciers are expected to lose 75 percent of their ice by 2020, according to Prof. Syed Iqbal Hasnain, a glacier specialist from the Indian state of Sikkim.
These glaciers are the source of most of the major rivers in Asia. The short-term result of glacial melt is severe flooding in mountain communities. The number of floods from glacial lakes is already rising sharply, Professor Hasnain said. Once the glaciers shrink, Asia’s big rivers will run low or dry for part of the year, and desperate battles over water are certain to ensue in a region already rife with conflict.
Doctors have long railed against black carbon for its devastating health effects in poor countries. The combination of health and environmental benefits means that reducing soot provides a “very big bang for your buck,” said Erika Rosenthal, a senior lawyer at Earth Justice, a Washington organization. “Now it’s in everybody’s self-interest to deal with things like cookstoves — not just because hundreds of thousands of women and children far away are dying prematurely.”
In the United States, black carbon emissions are indirectly monitored and minimized through federal and state programs that limit small particulate emissions, a category of particles damaging to human health that includes black carbon. But in March, a bill was introduced in Congress that would require the Environmental Protection Agency to specifically regulate black carbon and direct aid to black carbon reduction projects abroad, including introducing cookstoves in 20 million homes. The new stoves cost about $20 and use solar power or are more efficient. Soot is reduced by more than 90 percent. The solar stoves do not use wood or dung. Other new stoves simply burn fuel more cleanly, generally by pulverizing the fuel first and adding a small fan that improves combustion.
That remote rural villages like Kohlua could play an integral role in tackling the warming crisis is hard to imagine. There are no cars — the village chief’s ancient white Jeep sits highly polished but unused in front of his house, a museum piece. There is no running water and only intermittent electricity, which powers a few light bulbs.
The 1,500 residents here grow wheat, mustard and potatoes and work as day laborers in Agra, home of the Taj Majal, about two hours away by bus.
They earn about $2 a day and, for the most part, have not heard about climate change. But they have noticed frequent droughts in recent years that scientists say may be linked to global warming. Crops ripen earlier and rot more frequently than they did 10 years ago. The villagers are aware, too, that black carbon can corrode. In Agra, cookstoves and diesel engines are forbidden in the area around the Taj Majal, because soot damages the precious facade.
Still, replacing hundreds of millions of cookstoves — the source of heat, food and sterile water — is not a simple matter. “I’m sure they’d look nice, but I’d have to see them, to try them,” said Chetram Jatrav, as she squatted by her cookstove making tea and a flatbread called roti. Her three children were coughing.
She would like a stove that “made less smoke and used less fuel” but cannot afford one, she said, pushing a dung cake bought for one rupee into the fire. She had just bought her first rolling pin so her flatbread could come out “nice and round,” as her children had seen in elementary school. Equally important, the open fires of cookstoves give some of the traditional foods their taste. Urging these villagers to make roti in a solar cooker meets the same mix of rational and irrational resistance as telling an Italian that risotto tastes just fine if cooked in the microwave.
In March, the cookstove project, called Surya, began “market testing” six alternative cookers in villages, in part to quantify their benefits. Already, the researchers fret that the new stoves look like scientific instruments and are fragile; one broke when a villager pushed twigs in too hard.
But if black carbon is ever to be addressed on a large scale, acceptance of the new stoves is crucial. “I’m not going to go to the villagers and say CO2 is rising, and in 50 years you might have floods,” said Dr. Ibrahim Rehman, Dr. Ramanathan’s collaborator at the Energy and Resources Institute. “I’ll tell her about the lungs and her kids and I know it will help with climate change as well.”
Nature's lessons not wasted inside corporate strategy
By Reese Halter, Calgary HeraldApril 19, 2009
A number of businesses around the globe are adopting the concept that all waste is lost profit.
Photograph by: Herald Archive, Getty Images, Calgary Herald
http://www.calgaryherald.com/Technology ... story.html
Nature has a warehouse of proven principles and a research and development laboratory with four billion years of product development. Many corporations draw their ideas, information and inspiration from ecosystems such as prairies, coral reefs and ancient forests. When we follow nature's blueprint, economic, social and environmental abundance occurs. We know that in living systems the behaviour of the parts operates to benefit the entire system. In forests, for instance, specialists (species with unique as opposed to general requirements) find it to their advantage toco-operate with one another. As it turns out, these specialists use fewer resources and in some cases extend their longevity.
A number of businesses around the globe are mimicking natural systems, reducing waste, creating new products and employing millions of workers.
In the early 1950s, Bill Coors, the grandson of the founder of Adolph Coors Co., discovered that "all pollution and all waste are lost profit."
He observed that industrial companies were taking raw materials and fuels from nature, cycling products through the economy and then generating tons of garbage. In turn, the garbage was polluting the groundwater. An "open loop" system exploits nature's resources and deposits waste at both ends. A"closed loop" economy, on the other hand, is one where the full array of costs is accounted for within a system and the only way to do business. Companies and consumers are rewarded for reducing waste. And the environment is safeguarded.
In 1952, to control liquid waste from the brewery, Coors built Colorado's first biological waste-water treatment plant, which also treats waste waters of Golden, Colo.
Bill Coors initiated a penny for every Coors aluminum can returned for recycling and he opened the nation's first aluminum recycling centres offering "cash for cans."CoorsTek, a subsidiary of Coors, manufactures advanced technical ceramics using nature's model for smart design, by embedding hardness, strength, insulation and durability into its products. Another subsidiary Graphic Packaging uses clever technology to reduce ink by as much as 90 per cent and solvent by 100 per cent while producing bolder graphics.
By following nature's blueprint, many corporations believe the most valuable forms of capital in the learning organizations are knowledge, gained through feedback and learning, and changes in design--adaptation. Toyota Corp. has effectively used its labour force for ideas. In 1982, for example, its workforce made over two million suggestions, that's more than two every month per employee, and 95 per cent of them were implemented.
Technology enables humankind to do more with less. From 1973 to 1990, society learned how to create more real value per unit of energy consumed. By 1990, about a third of the energy and material services were delivered from innovation and efficiency.
The chipmaker Intel has advanced its microchip design through innovation as each successive generation of chips holds more information. In effect, Intel has been very successful by emulating nature's blueprint. For billions of years nature has replaced consumption by design.
Dow Chemical also utilizes nature's model and in 1982 it began encouraging employees to find ways to reduce pollution. By 1992, 700 projects were underway reducing waste around the globe and saving the company millions of dollars.
DuPont, another chemical titan has been reducing its CO2 emissions worldwide, striving for a zero-emission target by 2020.Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing, a company that specializes in coatings and adhesives has been following nature's path for decades, solving their own environmental problems and implementing Pollution Prevention Pays.
By 2000, 4,650 employees had prevented about 750 million kilograms of pollution and saving the company over $825 million. Moreover, the company has reduced water losses by 82 per cent, volatile organic compounds in emissions by 88 per cent, solid wastes by 24 per cent and rates of waste generation by 35 per cent.
Business, like nature, is a living system--creative, productive and resilient. All waste is lost profit, all value is created by design and adaptation--the ability to learn--is crucial for survival.
Reese halter is a public speaker and founder of the international conservation institute global forest science. He can be ContaCted at www. at www.drreese.Com
© Copyright (c) The Calgary Herald
By Reese Halter, Calgary HeraldApril 19, 2009
A number of businesses around the globe are adopting the concept that all waste is lost profit.
Photograph by: Herald Archive, Getty Images, Calgary Herald
http://www.calgaryherald.com/Technology ... story.html
Nature has a warehouse of proven principles and a research and development laboratory with four billion years of product development. Many corporations draw their ideas, information and inspiration from ecosystems such as prairies, coral reefs and ancient forests. When we follow nature's blueprint, economic, social and environmental abundance occurs. We know that in living systems the behaviour of the parts operates to benefit the entire system. In forests, for instance, specialists (species with unique as opposed to general requirements) find it to their advantage toco-operate with one another. As it turns out, these specialists use fewer resources and in some cases extend their longevity.
A number of businesses around the globe are mimicking natural systems, reducing waste, creating new products and employing millions of workers.
In the early 1950s, Bill Coors, the grandson of the founder of Adolph Coors Co., discovered that "all pollution and all waste are lost profit."
He observed that industrial companies were taking raw materials and fuels from nature, cycling products through the economy and then generating tons of garbage. In turn, the garbage was polluting the groundwater. An "open loop" system exploits nature's resources and deposits waste at both ends. A"closed loop" economy, on the other hand, is one where the full array of costs is accounted for within a system and the only way to do business. Companies and consumers are rewarded for reducing waste. And the environment is safeguarded.
In 1952, to control liquid waste from the brewery, Coors built Colorado's first biological waste-water treatment plant, which also treats waste waters of Golden, Colo.
Bill Coors initiated a penny for every Coors aluminum can returned for recycling and he opened the nation's first aluminum recycling centres offering "cash for cans."CoorsTek, a subsidiary of Coors, manufactures advanced technical ceramics using nature's model for smart design, by embedding hardness, strength, insulation and durability into its products. Another subsidiary Graphic Packaging uses clever technology to reduce ink by as much as 90 per cent and solvent by 100 per cent while producing bolder graphics.
By following nature's blueprint, many corporations believe the most valuable forms of capital in the learning organizations are knowledge, gained through feedback and learning, and changes in design--adaptation. Toyota Corp. has effectively used its labour force for ideas. In 1982, for example, its workforce made over two million suggestions, that's more than two every month per employee, and 95 per cent of them were implemented.
Technology enables humankind to do more with less. From 1973 to 1990, society learned how to create more real value per unit of energy consumed. By 1990, about a third of the energy and material services were delivered from innovation and efficiency.
The chipmaker Intel has advanced its microchip design through innovation as each successive generation of chips holds more information. In effect, Intel has been very successful by emulating nature's blueprint. For billions of years nature has replaced consumption by design.
Dow Chemical also utilizes nature's model and in 1982 it began encouraging employees to find ways to reduce pollution. By 1992, 700 projects were underway reducing waste around the globe and saving the company millions of dollars.
DuPont, another chemical titan has been reducing its CO2 emissions worldwide, striving for a zero-emission target by 2020.Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing, a company that specializes in coatings and adhesives has been following nature's path for decades, solving their own environmental problems and implementing Pollution Prevention Pays.
By 2000, 4,650 employees had prevented about 750 million kilograms of pollution and saving the company over $825 million. Moreover, the company has reduced water losses by 82 per cent, volatile organic compounds in emissions by 88 per cent, solid wastes by 24 per cent and rates of waste generation by 35 per cent.
Business, like nature, is a living system--creative, productive and resilient. All waste is lost profit, all value is created by design and adaptation--the ability to learn--is crucial for survival.
Reese halter is a public speaker and founder of the international conservation institute global forest science. He can be ContaCted at www. at www.drreese.Com
© Copyright (c) The Calgary Herald
Royal eco-push hits big screen
Herald News Services
April 21, 2009
Prince Charles is writing a book and making a film warning of the threat to the environment posed by Big Business.
The project puts the prince on a collision course with industrialists and bankers he accuses of endangering nature in pursuit of profit. The prince has waived his author's fee, but his foundation will receive an undisclosed share of the royalties.
"I believe that true sustain-ability depends upon us shifting our perception and widening our focus, so that we understand, again, that we have a sacred duty of stewardship of the natural order of things," the prince said. "In some of our actions we behave as if we were masters of nature and, in others, as mere bystanders.
"If we could rediscover that sense of harmony, that sense of being a part of, rather than apart from nature, we would perhaps be less likely to see the world as some sort of gigantic production system, capable of ever-increasing outputs for our benefit--at no cost."
© Copyright (c) The Calgary Herald
Herald News Services
April 21, 2009
Prince Charles is writing a book and making a film warning of the threat to the environment posed by Big Business.
The project puts the prince on a collision course with industrialists and bankers he accuses of endangering nature in pursuit of profit. The prince has waived his author's fee, but his foundation will receive an undisclosed share of the royalties.
"I believe that true sustain-ability depends upon us shifting our perception and widening our focus, so that we understand, again, that we have a sacred duty of stewardship of the natural order of things," the prince said. "In some of our actions we behave as if we were masters of nature and, in others, as mere bystanders.
"If we could rediscover that sense of harmony, that sense of being a part of, rather than apart from nature, we would perhaps be less likely to see the world as some sort of gigantic production system, capable of ever-increasing outputs for our benefit--at no cost."
© Copyright (c) The Calgary Herald
Alim Khamisa wins first annual Environmental Innovation Challenge
April 22, 2009
Posted by ismailimail in Canada, Ismaili Muslims in the News, North America.
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Prepared and published by volunteers of Ottawa Ismaili Newsletter team:
Congratulations to Alim Khamisa for winning Carleton University’s inaugural Environmental Innovation Challenge! The Challenge is intended to encourage undergraduate and graduate students to produce innovative and practical plans that may address local and global environmental problems. Working in partnership with another student, Alim submitted a proposal for a clean and cost-effective means for breaking down polyurethane waste. As this excerpt from Alim’s proposal explains, “Biodegradation of polyurethanes is an environmentally safe and cost-effective way of dealing with the increasing number of problems associated with the disposal of polyurethanes (PU). Worldwide, only 10% of the total PU waste is recycled which means a massive amount of PU is currently filling landfill sites and even worse - it takes as long as 1000 years for PU to naturally degrade. Current mechanical and chemical methods of recycling or degrading PU are of high cost, energy demanding, and polluting due to the release of toxic by-products..There is great potential in taking the idea of an enzymatically based degradation process for polyurethane to the market because of its advantages of being cost-effective, less polluting, and environmentally friendly.If we, the western societies implement a process like this one, we can act as role models to the rest of the world, especially to third world countries and developing nations.”
The competition carries a cash prize of $1000, with $500 allocated to a charitable organization of the winners’ choice. Alim and his partner agreed that the $500 would go to the AKDN because of the organization’s work in economic and environmental sustainable development.
Alim is now carrying the proposal forward independently, participating in the Technology Venture Challenge, an Eastern Ontario competition well known to those in Ottawa’s technology sector. Successfully proceeding to the semi-final round, Alim has been working with a mentor, Mr. David Mann, former Vice President of Emerging Business Technology Investments at Nortel and past Chair of the Ottawa Centre for Research and Innovation, to refine and further develop the business proposal in hopes of making it to the final round. Out of 35 submissions, only 13 advanced to the semi-final-if the proposal makes it to the final round, there is a good possibility of obtaining funding from investors and governmental organizations for research and development.
Good luck to Alim in this exciting project and congratulations on this great accomplishment.
Further information about Carleton’s Environmental Innovation Challenge can be found at:
http://www.carletoninnovation.com/eic/
Information about the Technology Venture Challenge can be obtained at:
http://www.techvc.org/
http://ismailimail.wordpress.com/2009/0 ... challenge/
April 22, 2009
Posted by ismailimail in Canada, Ismaili Muslims in the News, North America.
trackback
Prepared and published by volunteers of Ottawa Ismaili Newsletter team:
Congratulations to Alim Khamisa for winning Carleton University’s inaugural Environmental Innovation Challenge! The Challenge is intended to encourage undergraduate and graduate students to produce innovative and practical plans that may address local and global environmental problems. Working in partnership with another student, Alim submitted a proposal for a clean and cost-effective means for breaking down polyurethane waste. As this excerpt from Alim’s proposal explains, “Biodegradation of polyurethanes is an environmentally safe and cost-effective way of dealing with the increasing number of problems associated with the disposal of polyurethanes (PU). Worldwide, only 10% of the total PU waste is recycled which means a massive amount of PU is currently filling landfill sites and even worse - it takes as long as 1000 years for PU to naturally degrade. Current mechanical and chemical methods of recycling or degrading PU are of high cost, energy demanding, and polluting due to the release of toxic by-products..There is great potential in taking the idea of an enzymatically based degradation process for polyurethane to the market because of its advantages of being cost-effective, less polluting, and environmentally friendly.If we, the western societies implement a process like this one, we can act as role models to the rest of the world, especially to third world countries and developing nations.”
The competition carries a cash prize of $1000, with $500 allocated to a charitable organization of the winners’ choice. Alim and his partner agreed that the $500 would go to the AKDN because of the organization’s work in economic and environmental sustainable development.
Alim is now carrying the proposal forward independently, participating in the Technology Venture Challenge, an Eastern Ontario competition well known to those in Ottawa’s technology sector. Successfully proceeding to the semi-final round, Alim has been working with a mentor, Mr. David Mann, former Vice President of Emerging Business Technology Investments at Nortel and past Chair of the Ottawa Centre for Research and Innovation, to refine and further develop the business proposal in hopes of making it to the final round. Out of 35 submissions, only 13 advanced to the semi-final-if the proposal makes it to the final round, there is a good possibility of obtaining funding from investors and governmental organizations for research and development.
Good luck to Alim in this exciting project and congratulations on this great accomplishment.
Further information about Carleton’s Environmental Innovation Challenge can be found at:
http://www.carletoninnovation.com/eic/
Information about the Technology Venture Challenge can be obtained at:
http://www.techvc.org/
http://ismailimail.wordpress.com/2009/0 ... challenge/
There is a related multimedia and more at:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/12/scien ... uburb.html
May 12, 2009
In German Suburb, Life Goes On Without Cars
By ELISABETH ROSENTHAL
VAUBAN, Germany — Residents of this upscale community are suburban pioneers, going where few soccer moms or commuting executives have ever gone before: they have given up their cars.
Street parking, driveways and home garages are generally forbidden in this experimental new district on the outskirts of Freiburg, near the French and Swiss borders. Vauban’s streets are completely “car-free” — except the main thoroughfare, where the tram to downtown Freiburg runs, and a few streets on one edge of the community. Car ownership is allowed, but there are only two places to park — large garages at the edge of the development, where a car-owner buys a space, for $40,000, along with a home.
As a result, 70 percent of Vauban’s families do not own cars, and 57 percent sold a car to move here. “When I had a car I was always tense. I’m much happier this way,” said Heidrun Walter, a media trainer and mother of two, as she walked verdant streets where the swish of bicycles and the chatter of wandering children drown out the occasional distant motor.
Vauban, completed in 2006, is an example of a growing trend in Europe, the United States and elsewhere to separate suburban life from auto use, as a component of a movement called “smart planning.”
Automobiles are the linchpin of suburbs, where middle-class families from Chicago to Shanghai tend to make their homes. And that, experts say, is a huge impediment to current efforts to drastically reduce greenhouse gas emissions from tailpipes, and thus to reduce global warming. Passenger cars are responsible for 12 percent of greenhouse gas emissions in Europe — a proportion that is growing, according to the European Environment Agency — and up to 50 percent in some car-intensive areas in the United States.
While there have been efforts in the past two decades to make cities denser, and better for walking, planners are now taking the concept to the suburbs and focusing specifically on environmental benefits like reducing emissions. Vauban, home to 5,500 residents within a rectangular square mile, may be the most advanced experiment in low-car suburban life. But its basic precepts are being adopted around the world in attempts to make suburbs more compact and more accessible to public transportation, with less space for parking. In this new approach, stores are placed a walk away, on a main street, rather than in malls along some distant highway.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/12/scien ... uburb.html
May 12, 2009
In German Suburb, Life Goes On Without Cars
By ELISABETH ROSENTHAL
VAUBAN, Germany — Residents of this upscale community are suburban pioneers, going where few soccer moms or commuting executives have ever gone before: they have given up their cars.
Street parking, driveways and home garages are generally forbidden in this experimental new district on the outskirts of Freiburg, near the French and Swiss borders. Vauban’s streets are completely “car-free” — except the main thoroughfare, where the tram to downtown Freiburg runs, and a few streets on one edge of the community. Car ownership is allowed, but there are only two places to park — large garages at the edge of the development, where a car-owner buys a space, for $40,000, along with a home.
As a result, 70 percent of Vauban’s families do not own cars, and 57 percent sold a car to move here. “When I had a car I was always tense. I’m much happier this way,” said Heidrun Walter, a media trainer and mother of two, as she walked verdant streets where the swish of bicycles and the chatter of wandering children drown out the occasional distant motor.
Vauban, completed in 2006, is an example of a growing trend in Europe, the United States and elsewhere to separate suburban life from auto use, as a component of a movement called “smart planning.”
Automobiles are the linchpin of suburbs, where middle-class families from Chicago to Shanghai tend to make their homes. And that, experts say, is a huge impediment to current efforts to drastically reduce greenhouse gas emissions from tailpipes, and thus to reduce global warming. Passenger cars are responsible for 12 percent of greenhouse gas emissions in Europe — a proportion that is growing, according to the European Environment Agency — and up to 50 percent in some car-intensive areas in the United States.
While there have been efforts in the past two decades to make cities denser, and better for walking, planners are now taking the concept to the suburbs and focusing specifically on environmental benefits like reducing emissions. Vauban, home to 5,500 residents within a rectangular square mile, may be the most advanced experiment in low-car suburban life. But its basic precepts are being adopted around the world in attempts to make suburbs more compact and more accessible to public transportation, with less space for parking. In this new approach, stores are placed a walk away, on a main street, rather than in malls along some distant highway.
Is man-made global warming real?
By Nigel Hannaford, Calgary HeraldMay 23, 2009
After the Narnian winter we've just had, a reasonable person could easily agree with controversial Friends of Science spokesman Dr. Tim Ball on this much: Global warming is just another unfulfilled government promise.
So, why are we still preparing to spend money on it? Good question.
Ball is controversial because the retired science professor bucks the prevailing wisdom on global warming, calls the science behind it wrong, and questions the good faith of the governmental agencies promoting it. He gets flak. He also gives it, as he did Thursday to a crowd of 400 at Calgary's Metropolitan Centre, in an event sponsored by a reinvigorated Friends of Science, and the Frontier Centre for Public Policy. For instance, the idea that carbon dioxide generated by human activity is unnaturally warming the atmosphere through some supposed greenhouse effect is not (and never was) supported by facts that were reasonably easy to obtain. Want to know where the problem is? It's cycles related to solar activity.
At the risk of bastardizing a sophisticated presentation, the dots join like this. The sun is constantly emitting cosmic rays: Those that reach the Earth stimulate cloud creation, which has a cooling effect. But, when the sunspot cycle is active, the flow of cosmic rays is disrupted, fewer reach Earth's atmosphere, cloud cover is diminished, and the Earth warms.
It was seven years ago that local Friends advocate Albert Jacobs laid this out for the Herald editorial board. At that point, it was more of a prediction, as the solar cycle was popping and some interpretations of global temperature data suggested ambient temperatures were rising. Since then though, the sun has gone quiet and the last seven years of satellite data show a distinct cooling trend--even as CO2 levels continue to rise.
Yes, there's still melting in the Arctic. But is that more of a delayed reaction, not unlike a cast iron frying pan that stays hot for a while after it has been removed from the heat?
Could be. Not a bad evidence-based prediction, anyway. And before Canada diverts billions of dollars to CO2 reduction, you'd think it would make reasonably sure.
So, the Friends are back after a few years of discouraged retirement, trying to reopen the warming-science debate their opponents say should remain forever closed.
Most of the Calgary-based group of geologists are old enough to have lived through a few distinct eras of climate change themselves. Some can even remember the celebrated patrols through the Northwest Passage of the RCMP schooner St. Roch during the Second World War, which is another way of saying that the Earth's climate being as prone to change as it is, this isn't the first time the Arctic has thawed sufficiently to be navigable. (Indeed, Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen made it through in 1903-06, and the Vikings got as far as Ellesmere Island a thousand years ago, before things cooled again.)
Initially, the group got traction. At that ed-board meeting, Jacobs pointed out that core samples from ancient ice packs showed atmospheric CO2 levels trailed, rather than preceded a rise in temperature: The bubbles you see in boiling water are the release of air held in solution at lower temperatures, and as the seas warm, they too give up dissolved gases, CO2 included.
And, did we know the global-warming crowd relied on computer modelling more than observation, and that the guide for policy-makers prepared by the UN's International Panel on Climate Change was written by bureaucrats, and was not in fact the lowest common denominator of the views of 1,700 scientists, just the ones the bureaucrats liked? We did not, but it sounded possible: We had just learned Canada's Kyoto targets had been decided by "think of a number"methods intended to embarrass the Yanks at an international gathering.
The Friends, in short, made a good case and while I didn't feel qualified to adjudicate it, it seemed to me that somebody who was, should.
But, that never happened. Instead, a well-funded global warming lobby steamrollered the world's governments and mainstream media, Canada's among them.
Indeed, it became professionally suspect to be a "climate-change denier." Oil companies one might have expected to argue the science, rolled over: Business is business. The provincial government listened, once, but figured they couldn't fight the gathering consensus and in Ottawa, the new Conservative government quickly realized that in any contest between ice-cores and cuddly polar bear cubs, the votes were with the bears.
And after that, there was the inconvenient Al Gore who, despite fostering a film loaded with misinformed or dangerously stretched data, rode the wave of future rising sea levels to an Oscar.
"It was," Ball told a Calgary audience Thursday, "the greatest scientific deception in history."
The Friends want to raise $500,000 to take their show to the airwaves.
I wish 'em luck. And a fair hearing.
nhannaford@theherald.can-west.com
© Copyright (c) The Calgary Herald
http://www.calgaryherald.com/news/made+ ... story.html
By Nigel Hannaford, Calgary HeraldMay 23, 2009
After the Narnian winter we've just had, a reasonable person could easily agree with controversial Friends of Science spokesman Dr. Tim Ball on this much: Global warming is just another unfulfilled government promise.
So, why are we still preparing to spend money on it? Good question.
Ball is controversial because the retired science professor bucks the prevailing wisdom on global warming, calls the science behind it wrong, and questions the good faith of the governmental agencies promoting it. He gets flak. He also gives it, as he did Thursday to a crowd of 400 at Calgary's Metropolitan Centre, in an event sponsored by a reinvigorated Friends of Science, and the Frontier Centre for Public Policy. For instance, the idea that carbon dioxide generated by human activity is unnaturally warming the atmosphere through some supposed greenhouse effect is not (and never was) supported by facts that were reasonably easy to obtain. Want to know where the problem is? It's cycles related to solar activity.
At the risk of bastardizing a sophisticated presentation, the dots join like this. The sun is constantly emitting cosmic rays: Those that reach the Earth stimulate cloud creation, which has a cooling effect. But, when the sunspot cycle is active, the flow of cosmic rays is disrupted, fewer reach Earth's atmosphere, cloud cover is diminished, and the Earth warms.
It was seven years ago that local Friends advocate Albert Jacobs laid this out for the Herald editorial board. At that point, it was more of a prediction, as the solar cycle was popping and some interpretations of global temperature data suggested ambient temperatures were rising. Since then though, the sun has gone quiet and the last seven years of satellite data show a distinct cooling trend--even as CO2 levels continue to rise.
Yes, there's still melting in the Arctic. But is that more of a delayed reaction, not unlike a cast iron frying pan that stays hot for a while after it has been removed from the heat?
Could be. Not a bad evidence-based prediction, anyway. And before Canada diverts billions of dollars to CO2 reduction, you'd think it would make reasonably sure.
So, the Friends are back after a few years of discouraged retirement, trying to reopen the warming-science debate their opponents say should remain forever closed.
Most of the Calgary-based group of geologists are old enough to have lived through a few distinct eras of climate change themselves. Some can even remember the celebrated patrols through the Northwest Passage of the RCMP schooner St. Roch during the Second World War, which is another way of saying that the Earth's climate being as prone to change as it is, this isn't the first time the Arctic has thawed sufficiently to be navigable. (Indeed, Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen made it through in 1903-06, and the Vikings got as far as Ellesmere Island a thousand years ago, before things cooled again.)
Initially, the group got traction. At that ed-board meeting, Jacobs pointed out that core samples from ancient ice packs showed atmospheric CO2 levels trailed, rather than preceded a rise in temperature: The bubbles you see in boiling water are the release of air held in solution at lower temperatures, and as the seas warm, they too give up dissolved gases, CO2 included.
And, did we know the global-warming crowd relied on computer modelling more than observation, and that the guide for policy-makers prepared by the UN's International Panel on Climate Change was written by bureaucrats, and was not in fact the lowest common denominator of the views of 1,700 scientists, just the ones the bureaucrats liked? We did not, but it sounded possible: We had just learned Canada's Kyoto targets had been decided by "think of a number"methods intended to embarrass the Yanks at an international gathering.
The Friends, in short, made a good case and while I didn't feel qualified to adjudicate it, it seemed to me that somebody who was, should.
But, that never happened. Instead, a well-funded global warming lobby steamrollered the world's governments and mainstream media, Canada's among them.
Indeed, it became professionally suspect to be a "climate-change denier." Oil companies one might have expected to argue the science, rolled over: Business is business. The provincial government listened, once, but figured they couldn't fight the gathering consensus and in Ottawa, the new Conservative government quickly realized that in any contest between ice-cores and cuddly polar bear cubs, the votes were with the bears.
And after that, there was the inconvenient Al Gore who, despite fostering a film loaded with misinformed or dangerously stretched data, rode the wave of future rising sea levels to an Oscar.
"It was," Ball told a Calgary audience Thursday, "the greatest scientific deception in history."
The Friends want to raise $500,000 to take their show to the airwaves.
I wish 'em luck. And a fair hearing.
nhannaford@theherald.can-west.com
© Copyright (c) The Calgary Herald
http://www.calgaryherald.com/news/made+ ... story.html
June 28, 2009
It’s Time to Learn From Frogs
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
Some of the first eerie signs of a potential health catastrophe came as bizarre deformities in water animals, often in their sexual organs.
Frogs, salamanders and other amphibians began to sprout extra legs. In heavily polluted Lake Apopka, one of the largest lakes in Florida, male alligators developed stunted genitals.
In the Potomac watershed near Washington, male smallmouth bass have rapidly transformed into “intersex fish” that display female characteristics. This was discovered only in 2003, but the latest survey found that more than 80 percent of the male smallmouth bass in the Potomac are producing eggs.
Now scientists are connecting the dots with evidence of increasing abnormalities among humans, particularly large increases in numbers of genital deformities among newborn boys. For example, up to 7 percent of boys are now born with undescended testicles, although this often self-corrects over time. And up to 1 percent of boys in the United States are now born with hypospadias, in which the urethra exits the penis improperly, such as at the base rather than the tip.
Apprehension is growing among many scientists that the cause of all this may be a class of chemicals called endocrine disruptors. They are very widely used in agriculture, industry and consumer products. Some also enter the water supply when estrogens in human urine — compounded when a woman is on the pill — pass through sewage systems and then through water treatment plants.
These endocrine disruptors have complex effects on the human body, particularly during fetal development of males.
“A lot of these compounds act as weak estrogen, so that’s why developing males — whether smallmouth bass or humans — tend to be more sensitive,” said Robert Lawrence, a professor of environmental health sciences at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. “It’s scary, very scary.”
The scientific case is still far from proven, as chemical companies emphasize, and the uncertainties for humans are vast. But there is accumulating evidence that male sperm count is dropping and that genital abnormalities in newborn boys are increasing. Some studies show correlations between these abnormalities and mothers who have greater exposure to these chemicals during pregnancy, through everything from hair spray to the water they drink.
Endocrine disruptors also affect females. It is now well established that DES, a synthetic estrogen given to many pregnant women from the 1930s to the 1970s to prevent miscarriages, caused abnormalities in the children. They seemed fine at birth, but girls born to those women have been more likely to develop misshaped sexual organs and cancer.
There is also some evidence from both humans and monkeys that endometriosis, a gynecological disorder, is linked to exposure to endocrine disruptors. Researchers also suspect that the disruptors can cause early puberty in girls.
A rush of new research has also tied endocrine disruptors to obesity, insulin resistance and diabetes, in both animals and humans. For example, mice exposed in utero even to low doses of endocrine disruptors appear normal at first but develop excess abdominal body fat as adults.
Among some scientists, there is real apprehension at the new findings — nothing is more terrifying than reading The Journal of Pediatric Urology — but there hasn’t been much public notice or government action.
This month, the Endocrine Society, an organization of scientists specializing in this field, issued a landmark 50-page statement. It should be a wake-up call.
“We present the evidence that endocrine disruptors have effects on male and female reproduction, breast development and cancer, prostate cancer, neuroendocrinology, thyroid, metabolism and obesity, and cardiovascular endocrinology,” the society declared.
“The rise in the incidence in obesity,” it added, “matches the rise in the use and distribution of industrial chemicals that may be playing a role in generation of obesity.”
The Environmental Protection Agency is moving toward screening endocrine disrupting chemicals, but at a glacial pace. For now, these chemicals continue to be widely used in agricultural pesticides and industrial compounds. Everybody is exposed.
“We should be concerned,” said Dr. Ted Schettler of the Science and Environmental Health Network. “This can influence brain development, sperm counts or susceptibility to cancer, even where the animal at birth seems perfectly normal.”
The most notorious example of water pollution occurred in 1969, when the Cuyahoga River in Ohio caught fire and helped shock America into adopting the Clean Water Act. Since then, complacency has taken hold.
Those deformed frogs and intersex fish — not to mention the growing number of deformities in newborn boys — should jolt us once again.
I invite you to comment on this column on my blog, On the Ground. Please also join me on Facebook, watch my YouTube videos and follow me on Twitter.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/28/opini ... nted=print
It’s Time to Learn From Frogs
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
Some of the first eerie signs of a potential health catastrophe came as bizarre deformities in water animals, often in their sexual organs.
Frogs, salamanders and other amphibians began to sprout extra legs. In heavily polluted Lake Apopka, one of the largest lakes in Florida, male alligators developed stunted genitals.
In the Potomac watershed near Washington, male smallmouth bass have rapidly transformed into “intersex fish” that display female characteristics. This was discovered only in 2003, but the latest survey found that more than 80 percent of the male smallmouth bass in the Potomac are producing eggs.
Now scientists are connecting the dots with evidence of increasing abnormalities among humans, particularly large increases in numbers of genital deformities among newborn boys. For example, up to 7 percent of boys are now born with undescended testicles, although this often self-corrects over time. And up to 1 percent of boys in the United States are now born with hypospadias, in which the urethra exits the penis improperly, such as at the base rather than the tip.
Apprehension is growing among many scientists that the cause of all this may be a class of chemicals called endocrine disruptors. They are very widely used in agriculture, industry and consumer products. Some also enter the water supply when estrogens in human urine — compounded when a woman is on the pill — pass through sewage systems and then through water treatment plants.
These endocrine disruptors have complex effects on the human body, particularly during fetal development of males.
“A lot of these compounds act as weak estrogen, so that’s why developing males — whether smallmouth bass or humans — tend to be more sensitive,” said Robert Lawrence, a professor of environmental health sciences at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. “It’s scary, very scary.”
The scientific case is still far from proven, as chemical companies emphasize, and the uncertainties for humans are vast. But there is accumulating evidence that male sperm count is dropping and that genital abnormalities in newborn boys are increasing. Some studies show correlations between these abnormalities and mothers who have greater exposure to these chemicals during pregnancy, through everything from hair spray to the water they drink.
Endocrine disruptors also affect females. It is now well established that DES, a synthetic estrogen given to many pregnant women from the 1930s to the 1970s to prevent miscarriages, caused abnormalities in the children. They seemed fine at birth, but girls born to those women have been more likely to develop misshaped sexual organs and cancer.
There is also some evidence from both humans and monkeys that endometriosis, a gynecological disorder, is linked to exposure to endocrine disruptors. Researchers also suspect that the disruptors can cause early puberty in girls.
A rush of new research has also tied endocrine disruptors to obesity, insulin resistance and diabetes, in both animals and humans. For example, mice exposed in utero even to low doses of endocrine disruptors appear normal at first but develop excess abdominal body fat as adults.
Among some scientists, there is real apprehension at the new findings — nothing is more terrifying than reading The Journal of Pediatric Urology — but there hasn’t been much public notice or government action.
This month, the Endocrine Society, an organization of scientists specializing in this field, issued a landmark 50-page statement. It should be a wake-up call.
“We present the evidence that endocrine disruptors have effects on male and female reproduction, breast development and cancer, prostate cancer, neuroendocrinology, thyroid, metabolism and obesity, and cardiovascular endocrinology,” the society declared.
“The rise in the incidence in obesity,” it added, “matches the rise in the use and distribution of industrial chemicals that may be playing a role in generation of obesity.”
The Environmental Protection Agency is moving toward screening endocrine disrupting chemicals, but at a glacial pace. For now, these chemicals continue to be widely used in agricultural pesticides and industrial compounds. Everybody is exposed.
“We should be concerned,” said Dr. Ted Schettler of the Science and Environmental Health Network. “This can influence brain development, sperm counts or susceptibility to cancer, even where the animal at birth seems perfectly normal.”
The most notorious example of water pollution occurred in 1969, when the Cuyahoga River in Ohio caught fire and helped shock America into adopting the Clean Water Act. Since then, complacency has taken hold.
Those deformed frogs and intersex fish — not to mention the growing number of deformities in newborn boys — should jolt us once again.
I invite you to comment on this column on my blog, On the Ground. Please also join me on Facebook, watch my YouTube videos and follow me on Twitter.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/28/opini ... nted=print