the red mullet

Save the children of Fukushima

2011-08-21T22:28:00.000-07:00

Evacuate FUKUSHIMA - 福島の子供を守れ by moonkaii

This is the end

2011-05-08T17:44:00.000-07:00

With this post the Red Mullet ends its run. There are 758 posts. Risa's getting old, 62 at next birthday in a few days, and she is concentrating more and more on hunkering down: farming, securing clean water and food, talking with the next generation of her family about skills they might need soon. You may, in your infinite wisdom, choose to do the same. Grounds for optimism concerning commons-based solutions have eroded away to almost nothing; and the current U.S. Congress is cheerfully busy pulling the plug in a very small boat on a very large ocean of potential for drastic population collapse.

Here is a piece by Noam Chomsky just out at Energy Bulletin; it's long. Do take time to go and read it in its entirety. Bye, now!

"IN THE sciences, you’re always going to find some people out at the fringes, maybe with good arguments but kind of at the fringes. But the overwhelming majority of scientists are pretty much agreed on the basic facts: that [global warming is] a serious phenomenon that’s going to grow even more serious, and we have to do something about it. There are divisions. The major division is between the basic international scientific consensus and those who say it doesn’t go far enough, it’s nowhere near dire enough. So, for example, this study that I mentioned, which is one of the major critical studies, saying it’s much too optimistic, they point out that they’re not taking account of factors that could make it very much worse. For example, they didn’t factor into the models the effect of melting of permafrost, which is beginning to happen. And it’s pretty well understood that it’s going to release a huge amount of methane, which is much more harmful to the environment than carbon dioxide is, and that could set off a major change for the worse.

more at Energy Bulletin

Convection events will increase

2011-05-02T14:31:00.000-07:00

The Effect of Climate Change on Tornado Frequency and Magnitude
Michael Pateman and Drew Vankat

from the abstract:

Our research project concerns the phenomena of tornadoes, their frequency and magnitude, and possible correlations between that and climate. Investigations will be made into the effect of events such as El Nino and La Nina in regards to tornado occurrence and strength. Research will be conducted with data from 1950 to 1999, and in several geographic regions: Texas, Nebraska, and Ohio. We hope this will give us both a broad overview of the topic, as well as more localized data showing what happens to locations regularly experiencing tornadoes, and those that lack much pronounced tornado activity. Relationships in our data could assist authorities in preparation for aid to families and businesses, as well as further strengthen the belief that we must reduce emission of harmful pollutants into the environment...

more at Miami University-Ohio

Taps

2011-04-07T22:40:00.000-07:00

"Both Indonesia and Egypt have seen relatively moderate declines in their ability to produce oil. Yet they have been eliminated from the ranks of oil exporting nations because of rising internal consumption. Indonesia’s net exports of oil have fallen steadily since their secondary peak production year in 1992. Egyptian net exports of oil have fallen steadily since their peak production year in 1993. So far, Saudi annual net exports of oil have fallen steadily since their peak production year in 2005.

Reviewing the population growth in figure 1) and all the evidence presented above it seems safe to predict that Saudi net exports of crude oil have entered terminal decline.

much more at The Oil Drum

Rehearsal

2011-04-04T11:06:00.000-07:00

"As we all know, the twin natural and human tragedies are having impacts beyond the Tohoku region where Fukushima lies, and the Greater Tokyo area. It has been difficult for Japan’s notoriously efficient industries to maintain production, given that they rely on just-in-time systems and which have supply plants (for needed parts) that are located in the zone impacted by these combined disasters. One example is in car production, where major firms have had to suspend work at their factories when key parts are no longer available from the affected region. The fragility of this system of industrial production is glaringly obvious and it is something that peak oil commentators have warned of multiple times.
These food and bottled water shortages, power cuts, fuel-rationing and breakdowns in just-in-time manufacturing have been anticipated by those who take peak oil seriously. It is almost as if eastern Japan is experiencing a peak oil rehearsal, although other regions of Japan are virtually unaffected. If proponents of peak oil are correct, then the rest of the world may experience something similar within the next 5 to 10 years, and hence it is important that we learn valuable lessons from Japan’s response to the current circumstances.

more by Brendan Barrett at Our World

The real tragedy of the commons

2011-03-26T22:22:00.000-07:00

Tragedy in life, as in literature, is not about death and destruction but about decision-making. Homer's Hector, like the Fukushima Fifty, is tragic (in a good way) because he follows his virtue. Most of those around him are tragic in other ways: through cupidity, avarice, or grievance.

ibtimes.com

Most of the blogs I admire and follow have gone relatively quiet over the last couple of weeks. I think it may be that events have been overwhelming. Those of us who are news junkies have had our internal circuits fried, and those who avoid the news still check the news by checking our faces, and what they see, they suspect they don't want to ask about. So, family conversations are quiet and rather formal. So are conversations at stores and in parking lots. More than once, I've heard the remark: "people are being kinder to one another than usual." Except perhaps in places like Libya, but that connects obliquely to some of the things that will be said below.

I've been writing a post-apocalyptic novel, trying to bring my scant but eclectic knowledge of some life situations to an otherwise typical narrative (there are only so many plot lines, after all) -- but don't feel like tackling it at the moment. My characters are in the middle of a small war, and I've been putting them through a lot, but how do you keep hammering your fictional folk when vast numbers of real people are suddenly going through worse?

We've had M8+ sized earthquakes in our area before, the last one in 1700. It changed our coastline and drenched the shores of Japan. There have been two M6 earthquakes in the valley in my time here, only one of which I felt. I remember yelling at the boys, whom I suspected of wrestling in their bedroom and falling off the top bunk. But Beloved, who had lived in Southern California, said, "No, that's an earthquake."

A town to the south of us had brick walls spill out into the street and across the hoods of cars, grabbing the headlines. But I tend toward the personal. What caught my attention was a small item in the back pages of the paper a day or two later: a home in our county had burned to the ground because its chimney, in the attic, had shifted slightly, allowing sparks to escape. The family died.

We had just bought Stony Run. The house that burned was one we had previously considered buying. It came with more land, but was just a bit out of our price range and bit too long of a commute to work.

If we were to have a 6.0, as that quake was, a little closer to home, we'd stand to lose a lot of canning jars, a few kerosene lamps, gallon jars full of beans, oats and such, sitting on open shelves.

Or maybe the house. We do have wood heat.

We could tack little wood strips along the edges of the shelves, to keep things from walking off. And then hope never to face an M8+, though we're told there's a forty percent chance of that here by 2050.

Here at Stony Run we do have bug-out bags in case we survive anything rough on site, or ever need to relocate. They are only a shade fancier than those recommended by the federal government for everyone; and hopefully don't betray an unhealthy obsession with safety. Considering that in our eighteen years here, we haven't put those little speed bumps on our pantry shelves yet, I'd say we're pretty typical here in our attitude toward safety.

But, then, we're only one family. If we're wiped out like the one that bought that other house, some people will cry for awhile, but, as Robert Frost noted, "No more to build on there. And they, since they / Were not the one dead, turned to their affairs."

That's fair.

It's in the light of my own laxness that I think about nuclear power plant planning. Uranium 235 has issues. Plutonium has issues. So to derive benefit, i.e. lots and lots of electricity, from these extremely poisonous and temperamental materials, we (usually) surround them with water and keep the water flowing. And we build an incredibly strong tube to keep them in, and surround that with a strong box and surround that with another strong box, and have backup pumps to back up our backup pumps. Got those speed bumps in place, mmm hmm.

But the speed bumps aren't geared to events beyond what we're prepared to envision. We say, well, we might have an earthquake this size and a tsunami this high and we'll build to that standard. It should not surprise us that there will, from time to time, be surprises. Nature is what it is.

An earthquake happens. A tsunami happens. The survivors in Japan get that, and they rebuild. But many have said, of the invisible radioactivity in their air, in their water, on their spinach, and on their skin, that they are afraid. Death and destruction, well, okay, but this seems a bit much.

I think they're right, and I think many of the rest of us are right, to feel there's something different about a nuclear power plant failure than about plain old natural disasters. They understand tragedy.

Those criticizing the rest of us for paying attention to Fukushima Number One and its explosions and burnings and steamings are often the same people who were assuring us that would never happen to Fukushima Number One. And, y'know, it did. Ain't saying the earthquake isn't the greater -- many, many times greater -- disaster, this time around. But the nuke, it's ... it's something we did to ourselves. So the quality of the horror is just different, hence the seemingly disproportionate interest.

I look at our pantry shelves and say, why haven't we put those strips down yet? Or built cabinet doors? Have I done all I can to ensure our chimney will survive a six? How about a seven? It's a cost-benefit thing. On our small scale -- five people, now down to two, getting on in years -- the consequences are not very wide-ranging. On the scale of a pressure-water reactor or, as it turns out, a boiling-water reactor, they can be quite serious.

It was interesting to watch the nuclear industry's apologists trying to spin the Fukushima Daiichi disaster -- and it is one -- as innocuous, proof of the safety of nuclear, and so on -- falling back from one "oh, pooh" to the next as the intransigent materials bubbled, seethed, and blew. Sharon Astyk put it very well by citing the leader of the kidnappers in The Princess Bride: "Inconceivable!" he kept shouting, as his fate stalked him.

I'm sorry apologists, but The Onion really got it right. Nuclear is clean until it isn't. Just as Nature is benign until it isn't. And while Nature is unavoidable, nuclear is not. It's a choice. Our being absolutely dependent on it at the moment, as can also be said for fossil fuels, does not require of us that we regard that dependency as inevitable forever. We may allow ourselves (gasp!) the luxury of seeking alternatives.

The argument for the inevitability of nuclear and coal and oil ("we can't feed ourselves if we don't use them") springs from truths about our current situation: there are a lot of us, we have certain expectations about how to live; there are going to be more of us soon and more of us will have those expectations. True truths. But that doesn't mean the house can't or won't burn down if we keep using these energy sources. So it's worth noting that those who most loudly and insistently extol these energy sources to us -- as industry employees or as retainers of those industries in think tanks or Congressional offices -- are not thinking of our welfare. Did they tell us not to build in flood plains, behind low seawalls, or on fault lines? The non-debate, the shouting down of those who question, is about the enclosure of the commons. What's it all in aid of? Plutocracy.

Landowners in England from Tudor times into the nineteenth century chased subsistence farmers and subsistence farming, the basis of village culture, from the land in favor of pasturing sheep for the export of wool. This led to concentration of labor in cities, just in time to staff the industrial revolution, thus enriching the landowners -- now factory owners -- further. The incorporation of finance, science, law, and politics into the industrial revolution led to the re-purposing of journalism as media and advertising to enforce the norm of modern materialist consumerism: all voices to speak as one on behalf of plutocracy. It is from the plutocrats that you will hear of the inevitability of nuclear, and it is from the plutocrats that you will hear of the safety of nuclear, and it is from the plutocrats that you will hear of the acceptability of the risks of nuclear.

Criticism of the nuclear or fossil-fuel narrative is revolutionary, as it resists the plutocratic narrative, which masks the essential fact of enclosure of the commons, the transfer of value (money in the present instance) from all to a few, or, after awhile, from poor to rich. Consumerism is the current face of enclosure: we make it, we create your need for it, we pay you a little for helping us make it and charge you a lot to obtain it. Anti-materialism, anti-consumerism, localism, organic, decentralist, subsistence, union, even gay and feminist are words to make any plutocrat frown, as they are words that may turn our faces from the constant stream of assurances flowing from their publicists and publicans: sell (your time) low, buy (our crap) high.

At this point someone usually waves off the argument dismissively, saying, "socialism." Excuse me, Stalin was just a particularly efficient plutocrat. I'd espouse communalism as a form of subsistence culture, but I make a terrible communard. A good enough peasant woman, maybe. Let's stick to the business at hand.

When discussing the safety of nuclear, by all means do look to the facts. Help us understand the distances, the half-life, the normal background radiation levels. Note that most meltdowns don't salt our fields ten thousand miles away with isotopes, or empty out cities of thirteen million souls, or end civilizations. Most earthquakes don't either. But they can. Again, earthquakes happen; a nuclear accident is preventable. Nobody forced y'all to put that thing on one of the most seismically active seashores on the planet.

Plutocrats never do anything for no reason. The extraordinary effort going into the "nuclear is safe" mantra must have some kind of payoff, or so much money would not be spent on it. Our benefit is not the payoff.

Nuclear, compared to other ways of getting an erg, is extraordinarily expensive. Costs -- from the locating and mining of uranium, sickening the miners -- to voluminous safety regulations that are necessary (yet inadequate) -- to the planned and as yet still unimplemented long-term storage of fuels -- to the health consequences of accidents (because no one instance of cancer can be proven beyond a reasonable doubt to be traceable to a particular release of gas in a covered-up accident) -- are externalized to the federal, state and local governments, health care systems, and insurance companies, who must then raise their taxes, fees and rates to us.

The risk is offset onto the majority, so that the benefit will flow to the few. How very like the financial industry! Which, when caught shorting the public at large, demanded and got the largest bailouts in the history of the world.

"Enclosure of the commons." It's a good tool; it will tell you who's whom much better than "left" versus "right." And make quite a hash of the claim of a great many bright but rather grasping people to be anything that could be called "conservative." Owning a Lexus doesn't conserve an effing thing.

So I am willing to listen to informed discussion of energy and science, of food and the well-being of humankind; and I get that I am not a genius and that this or that nuclear (or petroleum) scientist is one. But let us not pretend that snarking about safety counts as informed discussion. Too many of the souls of those doing the snarking have been bought and paid for.

The well of dialogue has beeen poisoned. Let's hope it doesn't glow in the dark for the next twenty thousand years.

[update, May 22, 2011: radiation levels in Tokyo. 'K?]

Dry gets drier, wet gets wetter as forecast

2011-03-26T21:58:00.000-07:00

"Mar. 24 (Bloomberg) — The worst Texas drought in 44 years is damaging the state’s wheat crop and forcing ranchers to reduce cattle herds, as rising demand for U.S. food sends grain and meat prices higher.

Texas, the biggest U.S. cattle producer and second-largest winter-wheat grower, got just 4.7 inches (12 centimeters) of rain on average in the five months through February, the least for the period since 1967, State Climatologist John Nielsen- Gammon said. More than half the wheat fields and pastures were rated in poor or very poor condition on March 20.

Dry conditions extending to Oklahoma, Kansas and Colorado may cut crop yields in the U.S., the world’s largest exporter, as too much moisture threatens fields in North Dakota and in Canada

more at Infinite Unknown

Hot topic

2011-03-16T08:45:00.000-07:00

ibtimes.com
"The US has been trying to rekindle its industry for 30 years, but no company has been able to obtain private finance without massive support from the US government through loan guarantees. It should be noted that the French nuclear network, often cited as the benchmark for the industry, was built entirely by finance at first provided, and then written off, by the French government. The low cost of French electricity to local consumers is not quite what it seems, and will be tested when the country needs to replace its fleet in coming decades.

more at Crikey

What I regard as an even-handed view. This stuff is not and will never be benign, and even though it's not as nasty, in any once instance, as CNN's drama queens make it out to be, its costs, those admitted and those hidden, make it the least affordable solution to energy needs ever. Time to start taking stock of other approaches than coal and nuclear.

Further reading:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-12762608

Commercial fishing's diminishing returns

2011-03-14T07:48:00.000-07:00


americanprogress.org

Luckily, with all the radiation drifting out to sea (and perhaps heading for the American West), we already cleaned out most of the fish. So Now there's nothing to worry about. Right? Right?

Seed greed

2011-03-09T18:35:00.000-08:00

"Monsanto, Dow, BASF, Bayer, Syngenta and DuPont control the global seed, pesticide and agricultural biotechnology markets. This kind of historically unprecedented power over world agriculture enables them to:
control the agricultural research agenda;
dictate trade agreements & agricultural policies;
position their technologies as the “science-based” solution to increase crop yields, feed the hungry and save the planet;
escape democratic & regulatory controls;
subvert competitive markets;
…and in the process, intimidate, impoverish and disempower farmers, undermine food security and make historic profits - even in the midst of a global food crisis.

more at panna.org

And your chicken

2011-03-09T08:13:00.000-08:00

A post by Michale Bomford at Energy Bulletin goes over the issue of food miles as seen by, presumably, the average locavore. As you can see from this chart:

food miles are a vanishingly small part of American energy expenditure. Household storage and processing of foods accounts for more than four times as much energy.

If we want to impact energy use by our food choices, the author says, we should perhaps look at the processing and packaging costs. This is a chart of the calories of energy expenditure devoted to food categories, regardless of distance traveled:

Cut out the top row, and you'll eat better. And, as it happens, cut out the top row and you'll pump less carbon into the atmosphere. Win-win!

I think this is true as far as it goes. I also think, though, that the article is harder on locavores than it needs to be. Wheat from my local farmer, goes the thinking, yields little energy savings compared to wheat from a distance; we should really only think of the wheat itself in terms of its advantage over Twinkies and Pepsi.

Well, sure. But the locavores I know aren't really perseverating on food miles; they're thinking of encouraging the local farmers to grow something besides grass seed or hybrid poplars. Even if we succeed in doing this, the available farm land in our county can feed only about nine percent of us (currently we're running about five per cent); so if the world transportation system were to become disrupted, there would be, to put it mildly, problems. There are going to be many things for us to think through; USDA charts are contexted within a framework that's in danger of shifting into unknown territory.

So I would say, yah, eat low on that inverted pyramid. It's good for you and good for the "planet." But continue cultivating your relationship with your local farmer, your neighbors, your woodstove, your candle, your well, your potatoes, your beans, your squash, your apple trees, and your chicken.

Oilquake

2011-03-08T00:54:00.000-08:00

"...if the world can’t switch to other energy sources, there will be petroleum starvation.
The Guardian
In other words, if one traces a reasonable trajectory from current developments in the Middle East, the handwriting is already on the wall. Since no other area is capable of replacing the Middle East as the world’s premier oil exporter, the oil economy will shrivel -- and with it, the global economy as a whole. Consider the recent rise in the price of oil just a faint and early tremor heralding the oilquake to come. Oil won’t disappear from international markets, but in the coming decades it will never reach the volumes needed to satisfy projected world demand, which means that, sooner rather than later, scarcity will become the dominant market condition. Only the rapid development of alternative sources of energy and a dramatic reduction in oil consumption might spare the world the most severe economic repercussions.

more by Michael Klare at TomDispatch

Hard times

2011-03-05T11:11:00.000-08:00

New York Times. Click below for slide show.

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/world/africa/2011-libya-slide-show.html?ref=middleeast

Hard times. Gaddafi in effect controls the actions of both loyal troops and the opposition by holding Tripoli hostage -- everyone has family there. A lose-lose situation. When asked if they want UN or NATO help, the people unanimously say: "Are you kidding? Look at Iraq." To some extent, these horrors are the legacy of the neocons; to some extent that legacy is also the legacy of a corporately manufactured and sustained worldwide thirst for oil, without which we no longer know how to grow or move food.

Going, going, gone

2011-03-04T14:05:00.000-08:00

Abstract

Has the Earth’s sixth mass extinction already arrived?

Anthony D. Barnosky,1, 2, 3 Nicholas Matzke,1 Susumu Tomiya,1, 2, 3 Guinevere O. U. Wogan,1, 3 Brian Swartz,1, 2 Tiago B. Quental,1, 2, 5 Charles Marshall,1, 2 Jenny L. McGuire,1, 2, 3, 6 Emily L. Lindsey,1, 2
Kaitlin C. Maguire,1, 2 Ben Mersey 1, 4 & Elizabeth A. Ferrer

Palaeontologists characterize mass extinctions as times when the Earth loses more than three-quarters of its species in a geologically short interval, as has happened only five times in the past 540 million years or so. Biologists now suggest that a sixth mass extinction may be under way, given the known species losses over the past few centuries and millennia. Here we review how differences between fossil and modern data and the addition of recently available palaeontological information influence our understanding of the current extinction crisis. Our results confirm that current extinction rates are higher than would be expected from the fossil record, highlighting the need for effective conservation measures.

See at Nature Subs. or purchase req.

Eating down to the cob

2011-03-03T09:16:00.000-08:00

"Not good:
Global food prices increased for the eighth consecutive month in February, with prices of all commodity groups monitored rising again, except for sugar, FAO said today.

FAO expects a tightening of the global cereal supply and demand balance in 2010/11. In the face of a growing demand and a decline in world cereal production in 2010, global cereal stocks this year are expected to fall sharply because of a decline in inventories of wheat and coarse grains. International cereal prices have increased sharply with export prices of major grains up at least 70 percent from February last year.

More at Early Warning by Stuart Staniford

FOURTH investigation; still no NOAA bad faith found

2011-02-25T22:58:00.000-08:00

"WASHINGTON – A Republican-led federal probe of climate scientists at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration found no evidence that they manipulated data, after leaked e-mails in 2009 sparked the "climategate" controversy.

The investigation was conducted by the inspector general of the Commerce Department. It reviewed the 1,073 leaked messages, particularly the 289 that were exchanged with NOAA scientists, and interviewed NOAA chief Jane Lubchenco and her staff about them.

"We did not find any evidence that NOAA inappropriately manipulated data," the inspector general concluded in a recent report. It also cleared Lucbhenco for testifying before Congress that the e-mails did not weaken the science of climate change.

The probe was requested by Sen. James Inhofe of Oklahoma, the top Republican on the environment committee, who has called global warming "the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people."

The e-mails were stolen in late 2009 from the Climatic Research Unit at Britain's University of East Anglia. Inhofe and other climate change skeptics suggested it was proof of a conspiracy to corroborate a near-unanimous consensus among scientists that the earth is warming due in part to human activities.

The investigation is the latest in a series of prior probes that exonerated the scientists of any misconduct. They were also cleared by Pennsylvania State University, the InterAcademy Council, National Research Council and the British House of Commons.

more at Raw Story

Flipping out

2011-02-23T10:18:00.000-08:00

Most things turn out "okay" about half the time. Take a penny. Call heads "Greener." Now hold it in your palm, note whether it's heads or tails, and toss it. See? sometimes it's "greener on the other side" than where you were before the toss! This is why plant communities and animals move around; because they might get lucky. It's why they have multiple offspring, too; some might get lucky even if the others don't. It's also why mutations are significant; an oddity might turn out to be the Next Big Thing. Due to the Second Law of Thermodynamics, to stand still, even in a perceived equilibrium, ultimately leads to a systemic failure. So these movements and changes are a matter of survival. This is evolution in a nutshell, and it takes a religious fanatic not to get it. Much of what is going on in politics today is rooted in refusal to make the coin toss -- and is a last-ditch stand against basic science.

A sea of troubles

2011-02-19T11:51:00.000-08:00

WASHINGTON (AFP) – Climate change could increase exposure to water-borne diseases originating in oceans, lakes and coastal ecosystems, and the impact could be felt within 10 years, US scientists told a conference in Washington on Saturday.

Several studies have shown that shifts brought about by climate change make ocean and freshwater environments more susceptible to toxic algae blooms and allow harmful microbes and bacteria to proliferate, researchers from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said.

more at Raw Story

got future?

2011-02-18T15:06:00.000-08:00

Okay ... I'll bite ...

It's a gas in the Arctic

2011-02-17T17:34:00.000-08:00

Here's another. These abstracts have been coming thick and fast lately. And if they are from peer-reviewed science journals, they're not telling you not to worry about greenhouse gas emissions. Another h/t to Joe Romm.

Amount and timing of permafrost carbon release in response to climate warming. In: Tellus Series B Chemical and Physical Meterology
KEVIN SCHAEFER1,*, TINGJUN ZHANG1, LORI BRUHWILER2, ANDREW P. BARRETT1 Article first published online: 15 FEB 2011
DOI: 10.1111/j.1600-0889.2011.00527.x

The thaw and release of carbon currently frozen in permafrost will increase atmospheric CO₂ concentrations and amplify surface warming to initiate a positive permafrost carbon feedback (PCF) on climate. We use surface weather from three global climate models based on the moderate warming, A1B Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change emissions scenario and the SiBCASA land surface model to estimate the strength and timing of the PCF and associated uncertainty. By 2200, we predict a 29–59% decrease in permafrost area and a 53–97 cm increase in active layer thickness. By 2200, the PCF strength in terms of cumulative permafrost carbon flux to the atmosphere is 190 ± 64 Gt C. This estimate may be low because it does not account for amplified surface warming due to the PCF itself and excludes some discontinuous permafrost regions where SiBCASA did not simulate permafrost. We predict that the PCF will change the arctic from a carbon sink to a source after the mid-2020s and is strong enough to cancel 42–88% of the total global land sink. The thaw and decay of permafrost carbon is irreversible and accounting for the PCF will require larger reductions in fossil fuel emissions to reach a target atmospheric CO₂ concentration.

Emphasis added. So, shall we add these NOAA and NSIDC people to our burgeoning list of socialist climate conspirators?

I think it's going to rain

2011-02-16T19:19:00.000-08:00

Here's a little abstract from Nature for ya (h/t Joe Romm)

Human contribution to more-intense precipitation extremes

Seung-Ki Min,1 Xuebin Zhang,1 Francis W. Zwiers 1, 3 & Gabriele C. Hegerl 2
Affiliations Contributions Corresponding authors

Journal name:NatureVolume: 470,Pages:378–381Date published:(17 February 2011)DOI:doi:10.1038/nature09763 Received15 March 2010 Accepted 17 December 2010 Published online 16 February 2011

Extremes of weather and climate can have devastating effects on human society and the environment^{1, 2}. Understanding past changes in the characteristics of such events, including recent increases in the intensity of heavy precipitation events over a large part of the Northern Hemisphere land area^{3, 4, 5}, is critical for reliable projections of future changes. Given that atmospheric water-holding capacity is expected to increase roughly exponentially with temperature—and that atmospheric water content is increasing in accord with this theoretical expectation^{6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11}—it has been suggested that human-influenced global warming may be partly responsible for increases in heavy precipitation^{3, 5, 7}. Because of the limited availability of daily observations, however, most previous studies have examined only the potential detectability of changes in extreme precipitation through model–model comparisons^{12, 13, 14, 15}. Here we show that human-induced increases in greenhouse gases have contributed to the observed intensification of heavy precipitation events found over approximately two-thirds of data-covered parts of Northern Hemisphere land areas. These results are based on a comparison of observed and multi-model simulated changes in extreme precipitation over the latter half of the twentieth century analysed with an optimal fingerprinting technique. Changes in extreme precipitation projected by models, and thus the impacts of future changes in extreme precipitation, may be underestimated because models seem to underestimate the observed increase in heavy precipitation with warming¹⁶.

Emphases added. It's gonna rain, folks. And the cloud-seeder is our tailpipes.

Yet more food gone

2011-02-13T08:38:00.000-08:00

"February's freezing fury has left a path of crumpled crops, pummeled harvests and dashed dreams in the countryside of northern Mexico. Hardest hit was the northwestern state of Sinaloa, known as the "Bread Basket of Mexico," where about 750,000 acres of corn crops were reported destroyed after unusually cold temperatures blanketed the north of the country in January and early February.

Sinaloa is among Mexico's major producers of white corn, the variety of maize used to make staple tortillas. Heriberto Felix Guerra, secretary of the federal Secretariat for Social Development (SEDESOL), called the weather-related losses "the worst disaster" in the history of Sinaloa.

Altogether, more than 1.5 million acres of corn, vegetable, citrus and other crops were either damaged or destroyed in Sinaloa, with a preliminary economic loss of approximately one billion dollars.

The source of about 30 percent of Mexico's grains and vegetables, Sinaloa also exports food products to the United States. Other northern states also experienced the widespread destruction of winter crops. In Sonora, more than 130,000 acres were reported lost, including 45 percent of the acreage planted in winter wheat. In Tamaulipas, nearly 800,000 acres in corn and sorghum were impacted, while crop losses in Chihuahua were calculated in the $100 million ballpark. Suddenly, corn is looking like gold. Early in the weekend, armed men reportedly robbed between 18 and 20 tons of corn seed from a truck on the highway between the Sinaloa cities of Culiacan and Navolato.

more at Salem News

Why did this happen? Arctic warming has displaced cold weather into North America and Northern Europe.

UN expert: help small farmers, not agribiz

2011-02-04T11:35:00.000-08:00

"One major problem, says Pandey Shivaji, is that many of the new technologies have been developed for rich, large farmers. Governments have generally ignored the 400-500 million of the world' farmers who cultivate less than 5 acres of land. "They have no strong political voice, but those small farmers produce more than half of the world's food."

It was small farmers tilling an average 2.7 acres of land in India's Punjab who were responsible for the Green Revolution in the '60s and '70s -- a revolution that took India from the brink of famine and to actually exporting food by 1985. Similarly, the agriculture revolution that occurred in China in the past twenty-five years occurred on the back of farmers with less than half an acre of land.

The "white revolution" that made India the world's number one milk producer was achieved by women and men farmers with only one or two cows.

Shivaji says:
In a country like Madagascar, where seventy percent of the population live on less than one dollar a day, where agriculture is the most important contributor to the GDP, if it is not agriculture that will get them out of their misery what do the so called experts propose? So many other countries are in that same situation in Africa... Certainly some consolidation of small land holdings would be better, but today we can make this world a better place only by making it easier for those who've been ignored for so long.

more at HuffPo

Drought + high prices = higher prices

2011-02-04T08:03:00.000-08:00

"Wide swathes of northern China are suffering through their worst drought in 60 years -- a dry spell that could have a serious economic impact worldwide if it continues much longer, experts say.

Some areas have gone 120 days without any significant rainfall, leaving more than five million hectares (12.4 million acres) of crops damaged -- an area half the size of South Korea -- China's drought control agency said Sunday.

There are fears that the problem could send global prices soaring at a time when food costs are already causing governments headaches. According to the UN last month world prices broke their peak levels of 2008 to hit a record high.

"If the dry spell continues into March or April, wheat production could be seriously affected, with losses of more than 10 million tonnes," Ma Wenfeng, an analyst at Beijing Orient Agribusiness Consultants, told AFP. "China would be forced to boost its imports."

more at RawStory

Time to dig up that lawn

2011-02-03T10:18:00.000-08:00

"We are entering an era of food volatility and disruptions in supplies. This is a very serious business for the world," Josette Sheeran, executive director of the World Food Programme, told Insider TV on the sidelines of a U.N. Conference in London. "If people don't have enough to eat they only have three options: they can revolt, they can migrate or they can die. We need a better action plan," she said.

"We think that we are in an era where we have to be very serious about food supply."

more at Reuters

Increased moisture in atmosphere =

2011-02-02T08:41:00.000-08:00

Snowstorms, among other things.

Global warming models predict larger storms

2011-02-01T16:43:00.000-08:00

If Yasi were headed for U.S. or Britain. It will make landfall in flood-soaked Queensland tonight. Yasi has passed over the hottest ocean waters in recorded Australian history and pumped itself up to Category Five.

About all that cold weather...

2011-01-20T13:21:00.000-08:00

In 2010, global average temperature was 0.53°C (0.95°F) above the 1961-90 mean. This value is 0.01°C (0.02°F) above the nominal temperature in 2005, and 0.02°C (0.05°F) above 1998. The difference between the three years is less than the margin of uncertainty (± 0.09°C or ± 0.16°F) in comparing the data….
Arctic sea-ice cover in December 2010 was the lowest on record.
The World Meteorological Organization announcement follows fast on the heels of the release of NOAA and NASA data showing 2010 tied with 2005 for hottest year on record.

more at Climate Progress

...but don't worry, Fox News, all the new congressmen are listening to you on this, not us...interesting times ahead.

BP, maybe you could tell us?

2011-01-19T18:45:00.000-08:00

BP, maybe you could tell us what this stuff is? No? How about you, Coast Guard? You neither? Huh.

What do you mean, it's not there?

Up up and away

2011-01-15T17:36:00.000-08:00

Argentina Star

Literally "away." Sheep stealing is sharply on the rise in the U.K. Advance echelons of the Golden Horde at work?

"The Food and Agriculture Organisation, a UN body based in Rome, announced a few days ago that food prices had risen 32 per cent in the second half of last year. Its composite index for the past five years is shown in the main graph, while last year's rise of specific types of food, notably sugar, cereals, and oils and fats, are shown in the small one on the right. As you can see, not everything is up: meat and dairy prices have so far been contained. But that must be a lag, for a rise in cereal prices pushes up the cost of feeding livestock, which in turn is bound to push up these prices too.

You can see the effect of this around the world. Rising food prices seems to be one of the immediate causes of the riots in Tunisia and Algeria. The governments of Libya, Jordan and Morocco have all taken steps in the past few days to control food prices in the wake of this unrest. The Indian government has taken a number of measures, including a ban on exporting onions, to try to hold down vegetable prices. China has cut road tolls for food lorries. In Indonesia, the price of chillies has risen five-fold and fears of unrest have been one of the reasons share prices have fallen sharply in recent trading.

Even relatively developed countries have been affected. The South Korean government has released emergency stocks of cabbages, pork, fish and so on.

This is worrying enough. More worrying is that there is, at the moment, no end in sight.

Many killed in Tunisian food riots

2011-01-12T08:26:00.000-08:00

2space.net
"We are entering a danger territory," said Abdolreza Abbassian, chief economist at the Food and Agriculture Organisation, on 5 January. The price of a basket of cereals, oils, dairy, meat and sugar that reflects global consumption patterns has risen steadily for six months, and has just broken through the previous record, set during the last food panic in June, 2008.

"There is still room for prices to go up much higher," Abbassian added, "if for example the dry conditions in Argentina become a drought, and if we start having problems with winter kill in the northern hemisphere for the wheat crops." After the loss of at least a third of the Russian and Ukrainian grain crop in last summer's heat wave and the devastating floods in Australia and Pakistan, there's no margin for error left.

It was Russia and India banning grain exports in order to keep domestic prices down that set the food prices on the international market soaring. Most countries cannot insulate themselves from this global price rise, because they depend on imports for a lot of domestic consumption. But that means that a lot of their population cannot buy enough food for their families, so they go hungry. Then they get angry, and the riots start.

About record floods

2011-01-11T19:29:00.000-08:00

What to know is that the record floods are tied in with record warming in the seas around Queensland. But you won't hear that from the U.S. Congress or Fox News. Hotter seas = more water in the atmosphere = higher levels of precipitation.

Giving away a country

2011-01-06T13:26:00.001-08:00

Costly myth about to gull Americans once again

2011-01-04T09:56:00.000-08:00

Sarah Goodyear at Grist:

"Highway users, self-sufficiently paying their own way as they motor down the nation’s roads. Transit users, always asking for a government handout so that they can ride their subways and buses.

It’s an old stereotype that’s been used to starve transit and fatten roads for generations. And it just isn’t true.

Now it’s time for a thorough debunking. Tanya Snyder reports on Streetsblog Capitol Hill:
The myth of the self-financed road meets its match today in the form of a new report from the U.S. Public Interest Research Group: “Do Roads Pay For Themselves?” The answer is a resounding “no.” All told, the authors calculate that road construction has sucked $600 billion out of America’s public purse since the dawn of the interstate system.
U.S. PIRG’s report takes down the “self-financed roads” canard point by point. It makes it clear that user fees do not pay for new roads (“user fees paid for only 51 percent of highway costs, down 10 percent over the course of a single decade”). And it takes a hard look at the external costs of driving, from environmental pollution and related health impacts to the myriad negative effects of the sprawl that all these roads enable.

As Snyder writes, the report comes out at a crucial time:
With a Republican majority in the House, the myth that roads pay for themselves will be again be enlisted to prioritize highways over transit, as the GOP begins shaping a transportation agenda around “getting back to basics” and cutting spending, especially for transit.

“We want to make sure that those falsehoods are not a part of this debate,” said [U.S. PIRG’s Dan] Smith. “People will think twice before saying roads pay for themselves when the numbers say they don’t.”

Food gets a bad wrap

2011-01-02T10:25:00.000-08:00

Treehugger

From the Huffington Post:

"A new study shows that toxicperfluoroalkyls, which are used in surface protection treatments and coatings to keep grease from leaking through fast food wrappers, are being ingested by people through their food and showing up as contaminants in blood.

Perfluoroalkyls are a hazardous class of stable, synthetic chemicals that repel oil, grease and water.

As reported by University of Toronto researchers, the chemicals studied in human blood, urine and feces were polyfluoroalkyl phosphate esters (PAPs), which are the breakdown products of the perfluorinated carboxylic acids (PFCAs) used in coating the food wrappers. Scientists said the exposure to humans through this means "should be considered as a significant indirect source of PFCA."

That means you now have a new reason to avoid fast foods.

"Huh? Why should I care?"

You like cancer?

Hot year? More snow!

2010-12-29T08:12:00.001-08:00

And rising

2010-12-25T13:44:00.000-08:00

New York Times:

"With the exception of European countries, few nations have been willing to raise the cost of fossil fuels or set emissions caps as a way to speed the transformation. In the United States, a particular fear has been that a carbon policy will hurt the country’s industries as they compete with companies abroad whose governments have adopted no such policy.
As he watches these difficulties, Ralph Keeling contemplates the unbending math of carbon dioxide emissions first documented by his father more than a half-century ago and wonders about the future effects of that increase.
“When I go see things with my children, I let them know they might not be around when they’re older,” he said. “ ‘Go enjoy these beautiful forests before they disappear. Go enjoy the glaciers in these parks because they won’t be around.’ It’s basically taking note of what we have, and appreciating it, and saying goodbye to it.”
On Dec. 11, another round of international climate negotiations, sponsored by the United Nations, concluded in Cancún. As they have for 18 years running, the gathered nations pledged renewed efforts. But they failed to agree on any binding emission targets.
Late at night, as the delegates were wrapping up in Mexico, the machines atop the volcano in the middle of the Pacific Ocean issued their own silent verdict on the world’s efforts.
At midnight Mauna Loa time, the carbon dioxide level hit 390 — and rising.

Everyone puts coal in everyone else's stocking

2010-12-09T18:05:00.000-08:00

From Grist

A new study is out showing that EPA has been substantially undercounting the externalities imposed by ozone pollution—and thus understating the net benefits of its new ozone rules.
The reason for EPA’s conservatism is that it focuses almost exclusively on health costs, i.e., mortality and morbidity. (Defending public health is, after all, EPA’s mandate.) But direct health costs do not capture the full impact on downwind states. After all, if employees are getting sick or dying, or if they’re unable to work outdoors because of poor air quality, there are also, the the report’s words, “higher labor and health insurance costs, lost jobs, lost state and local tax revenue, and higher gasoline prices.” In other words, polluters aren’t just harming individuals, they are harming other businesses and state budgets.
The report is called “Expensive Neighbors: The Hidden Cost of Harmful Pollution to Downwind Employers and Businesses” [PDF]. In it, author, former professor, and electricity industry expert Dr. Charles J. Cicchetti finds that power plants without SO2 and NOx scrubbers are imposing some $6 billion in annual costs on downwind businesses. Specifically, the report finds that thanks to unscrubbed coal plants, between 2005 and 2012:
Businesses will suffer over $47 billion in costs; Over 360,000 jobs will be lost; State and local governments will lose almost $9.3 billion in tax revenue; Families and businesses in polluted areas will pay $26.0 billion more for reformulated gasoline as a result of ongoing pollution.

What do you do when the river runs dry?

2010-11-26T08:44:00.000-08:00

Second 100-year drought in the Amazon in five years. Sound familiar? Seen at Climate Progress (as usual).

The clouds of unknowing

2010-11-23T14:51:00.000-08:00

Wikipedia

New Science (AAS) study: Clouds are not a climate negative feedback as posited by deniers, but a positive feedback, i.e., current models are inaccurate as there will be more global warming than currently predicted. Seen at http://climateprogress.org

Observational and Model Evidence for Positive Low-Level Cloud Feedback
Amy C. Clement¹,*,
Robert Burgman¹ and
Joel R. Norris²
+ Author Affiliations
¹Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Sciences, University of Miami, Division of Meteorology and Physical Oceanography, MSC 362, 4600 Rickenbacker Causeway, Miami, FL 33149, USA.
²Scripps Institution of Oceanography, University of California-San Diego, La Jolla, CA 92093–0224, USA.
*To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail: aclement@rsmas.miami.edu

Abstract
Feedbacks involving low-level clouds remain a primary cause of uncertainty in global climate model projections. This issue was addressed by examining changes in low-level clouds over the Northeast Pacific in observations and climate models. Decadal fluctuations were identified in multiple, independent cloud data sets, and changes in cloud cover appeared to be linked to changes in both local temperature structure and large-scale circulation. This observational analysis further indicated that clouds act as a positive feedback in this region on decadal time scales. The observed relationships between cloud cover and regional meteorological conditions provide a more complete way of testing the realism of the cloud simulation in current-generation climate models. The only model that passed this test simulated a reduction in cloud cover over much of the Pacific when greenhouse gases were increased, providing modeling evidence for a positive low-level cloud feedback.

When anything but a dollar speaks

2010-11-18T10:44:00.000-08:00

300 YEARS OF FOSSIL-FUEL ADDICTION IN 5 MINUTES

2010-11-13T11:17:00.000-08:00

Heinberg is more upbeat than I think makes common sense concerning human nature, but it's a nice quick summary of the number one issue facing us.

NASA sees record heat global heat through end of October for 2010

2010-11-11T10:14:00.000-08:00

Via Climate Progress

___________________________
Action to take: Save open pollinated seeds. These will adapt somewhat; those from Monsanto, which owns, like, 90% of the market, are deliberately prevented from being adaptable or second-generation viable.

Geological Society suffers mass hallucination, say freshman Republicans?

2010-11-04T15:53:00.000-07:00

BBC

"Professor Jim Zachos, of the University of California, said that 55 million years ago volcanic activity caused around 4,500 gigatons of greenhouse gases to be released into the atmosphere over thousands of years. This caused the planet to warm by 6C (10.8F), forcing whole ecosystems, including early mammals, to adapt, migrate or die out in certain areas. Prof Zachos said that if the world continues to pump out greenhouse gases at the current rate, around 5,000 gigatons of greenhouse gases will be released into the atmosphere over a few hundred years. He said this will cause a more rapid temperature rise that at any other time in history and could cause “mass extinction of species”. “The impacts will be pretty severe compared to 55 million years ago in terms of evolution of this planet,” he said.
The Geological Society warned that it could take the Earth 100,000 years to recover.

more at The Telegraph (UK)
_______________________________
Action to take: paint roof white

Drill, baby ... woops?

2010-10-29T10:11:00.000-07:00

WTNH

"The U.S. Geological Survey says a revised estimate for the amount of conventional, undiscovered oil in the National Petroleum Reserve in Alaska is a fraction of a previous estimate. The group estimates about 896 million barrels of such oil are in the reserve, about 90 percent less than a 2002 estimate of 10.6 billion barrels. The new estimate is mainly due to the incorporation of new data from recent exploration drilling revealing gas occurrence rather than oil in much of the area, the geological survey said.

"These new findings underscore the challenge of predicting whether oil or gas will be found in frontier areas," USGS Director Dr. Marcia McNutt said in a statement. "It is important to re-evaluate the petroleum potential of an area as new data becomes available." The organization also estimates 8 trillion cubic feet less gas than a 2002 estimate of 61 trillion cubic feet of undiscovered, conventional, non-associated gas -- meaning gas found in discrete accumulations with little to no crude oil in the reservoir.

more at CNN

_______________________
Action to take: Move closer to your job. If you still have one. Or take the train.

On even less than thin ice

2010-10-26T09:07:00.000-07:00

Janet Raloff at Science News:

"The nation’s tenth national park — once home to some 150 named glaciers — is running out of ice fields. Century-old Glacier National Park has but 25 glaciers left. And computer models by federal scientists working at the park indicate that within another decade — at most two — the only place to see the region’s glaciers will be in historic photos.

The problem: The region’s climate has been warming, notes Erich Peitzsch of the U.S. Geological Survey, who studies snow and ice at the park

more at Science News
_____________________________
Action to take: don't fly -- take the train

Deep purple

2010-10-25T09:20:00.000-07:00

The colors on this map/chart represent precipitation above or below normal for a decade within 30 years from now. I'm 61; if I make 80 I get to see the beginning of this. But this U.S. Government chart says I don't make 80. Here's why:

Red is pretty dry. Most of the U.S. charts red at the height of the Dust Bowl, when millions fled Middle America, where agriculture collapsed, looking for food and jobs. By the 2030s, according to an amalgamation of the 22 most likely computer projections, much of the world has shifted to purple. You don't grow much of anything in red zones. In purple zones, you're down to Toyotas covered with kids with AKs.

_______________
Action to take:
Stuart Staniford is a solid statistician not given to pooping bricks over projections, and I urge you to read his entire post about this map. Then: buy this book.

Beet-seed succubus stymied

2010-10-20T08:18:00.000-07:00

whatgives365.wordpress.com

Tom Philpott at Grist:

"In August, Monsanto suffered yet another of a continuing line of setbacks, when a federal judge effectively nixed the USDA’s approval of GM sugar beets. The agency had failed to adequately assess the environmental impact of planting the high-tech seeds, the judge ruled.

On Monday, a USDA economist released a report (via Bloomberg) estimating that the ban on GM sugar beet seeds would cut U.S. total sugar production by 20 percent in 2011, due to the the “limited availability of conventional seed.”

Let’s ponder that for a moment. As recently as 2008, sugar beet farmers relied exclusively on conventional seeds; the GM ones weren’t commercially available. Two years later, GM seeds dominate the market, and the conventional market has been essentially wiped out.

more at Grist

__________________________
Action to take:

Join Seed Savers now if you haven't already.

In the popcorn popper

2010-10-18T08:29:00.000-07:00

http://www.wunderground.com/hurricane/2010/heatrecords2010.jpg

Seen at Climate Progress.

Be aware that 2011 may be cooler than 2010, which will lead to a lot of climate denial chest-thumping. Then comes 2012 ...

_______________________________
Action to take:

Put exterior blinds on south-facing windows to reduce air-condition use in hot weather

Farm for the Future

2010-10-14T21:53:00.000-07:00

Part Two:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W0X25hMLXiE

Part Three:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NJQhRIKo5rA

Part Four:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YxsPfeSRIFo

Part Five:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=09Ez5ViYKYA

British Broadcasting Corporation via YouTube
__________________________________________
Action to take:

Get to know, and support, your local farmers

Bake until well done

2010-10-14T14:00:00.000-07:00

NASA. (See discussion at Climate Progress).

_________________
Action to take:

"Around the world, there were about 806 million cars and light trucks on the road in 2007; they burn over 1 billion m³ (260 billion US gallons) of petrol/gasoline and diesel fuel yearly. The numbers are increasing rapidly." [Wikipedia]

Switch to a bicycle or your feet if you possibly can. Moving closer to work (if you have work any more) would be a smart economic decision now, let alone altrusitic.

Studying what's happening, instead of pretending it isn't

2010-10-13T09:17:00.000-07:00

philebrity.com

"The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have announced their first-ever direct grants to states and cities to study the potential effects of climate change in the United States.

Some $5.25 million will be split among eight states and two cities seeking to evaluate and mitigate health impacts from everything from hotter summers to an anticipated increase in waterborne illness resulting from flooding as glaciers melt and raise sea levels, the centers said.

Many of the grants will be used simply to assess what dangers may lie ahead, said Dagny E.P. Olivares, a health communications specialist with the centers. Arizona, Massachusetts, New York, North Carolina and San Francisco, for example, will each will receive up to $360,000 over the next three years to help local governments evaluate potential risks to the most vulnerable groups.

Other departments that have already identified important risks will get money to develop plans to protect communities. Maine, Michigan, Minnesota, Oregon and New York City will each receive up to $750,000 over the next three years in this category.

Here is how the C.D.C. described the need for one project: “More frequent extreme heat events are of particular concern for the Michigan Department of Community Health. In the last 20 years the number of days Detroit residents swelter in temperatures exceeding 90 degrees has doubled.

more at New York Times

______________________
Action to take:

Paint your roof, or talk to the landlord about painting the roof, white, using a full-spectrum-reflecting membrane roofing compound. This will lower the summertime highs in the building, make the roof last longer and resist leaks longer, and reflects solar heat back into space, countering the greenhouse effect.

Climate change felt

2010-10-08T13:43:00.000-07:00

Gregory Meyer and Javier Blas at Financial Times give the lie to cheery reporting in U.S. on crop yields and food prices:

Indiana State
"Agricultural commodities prices exploded on Friday, threatening higher global food prices, after the US government forecasters slashed grains production estimates after adverse weather damaged crops worldwide.
The price movements of up to 12.5 per cent were among the worst since the 2007-08 food crisis as traders scrambled for supplies amid warnings of dwindling inventories. They followed a warning from the US Department of Agriculture that stocks of corn and barley, the feedstocks of the meat industry, would “fall dramatically” with US corn stocks forecast to hit a 14-year low....

“This revision highlights that we are in a fragile supply and demand situation,” said Abdolreza Abbassian, senior economist at the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation in Rome....

The US is the world’s largest corn grower and its exports make up the majority of global trade in the grain. The USDA had earlier forecast a record corn crop this year, but a combination of unfavourable heat and heavy rains forced a re-evaluation of yields.

more at FT

___________________
Action to take:

Redesigned your yard yet?

How to feed billions and steepen a die-off

2010-10-08T10:11:00.000-07:00

OMAFRA-Ont.
The Evolution and Future of Earth’s Nitrogen Cycle
Donald E. Canfield,¹^,* Alexander N. Glazer,² Paul G. Falkowski³
Atmospheric reactions and slow geological processes controlled Earth’s earliest nitrogen cycle, and by ~2.7 billion years ago, a linked suite of microbial processes evolved to form the modern nitrogen cycle with robust natural feedbacks and controls. Over the past century, however, the development of new agricultural practices to satisfy a growing global demand for food has drastically disrupted the nitrogen cycle. This has led to extensive eutrophication of fresh waters and coastal zones as well as increased inventories of the potent greenhouse gas nitrous oxide (N2O). Microbial processes will ultimately restore balance to the nitrogen cycle, but the damage done by humans to the nitrogen economy of the planet will persist for decades, possibly centuries, if active intervention and careful management strategies are not initiated.

¹ Institute of Biology and Nordic Center for Earth Evolution, University of Southern Denmark, Campusvej 55, Odense M, Denmark.
² Department of Molecular and Cell Biology, University of California, Berkeley, CA 94720, USA.
³ Institute of Marine and Coastal Studies and Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ 08901, USA.

abstract from Science

______________________
Action to take:

Build a bioswale to capture and control your runoff

Industrial fail

2010-10-07T11:49:00.000-07:00

CBS

"On Monday, October 4th, a large reservoir filled with toxic red sludge in western Hungary ruptured, releasing approximately 700,000 cubic meters (185 million gallons) of stinking caustic mud, which killed many animals, at least four people, and injured over 120 – many with chemical burns. The 12-foot-high flood of sludge inundated several towns, sweeping cars off the road as it flowed into the nearby Marcal River. Emergency workers rushed to pour 1,000 tons of plaster into the Marcal River in an attempt to bind the sludge and keep it from flowing on to the Danube some 45 miles away. The red sludge in the reservoir is a byproduct of refining bauxite into alumina, which took place at an alumina plant run by the Hungarian Alumina Production and Trading Company. A criminal probe has just been opened by Hungarian authorities.

More from Boston Globe with 30 stunning photographs

I'm sure some very well-to-do people somewhere, are performing duck-and-cover. Some nice work ahead for their lawyers. For some reason I place more faith in that last sentence (in bold) than I would if this happened here. Am I growing too cynical about my country?
______________________
Action to take:

Reduce consumption

"Things will change very rapidly"

2010-10-04T17:47:00.000-07:00

OCAL

From Chris Martenson:

"Peak Oil is now a matter of open inquiry and debate at the highest levels of industry and government. Recent reports by Lloyd's of London, the US Department of Defense, the UK industry taskforce on Peak Oil, Honda (HMC), and the German military are evidence of this. But when I say “debate,” I am not referring to disagreement over whether or not Peak Oil is real, only when it will finally arrive. The emerging consensus is that oil demand will outstrip supplies “soon,” within the next five years and maybe as soon as two. So the correct questions are no longer, "Is Peak Oil real?" and "Are governments aware?” but instead, "When will demand outstrip supply?" and “What implications does this have for me?”

It doesn't really matter when the actual peak arrives; we can leave that to the ivory-tower types and those with a bent for analytical precision. What matters is when we hit “peak exports.” My expectation is that once it becomes fashionable among nation-states to finally admit that Peak Oil is real and here to stay, one or more exporters will withhold some or all of their product "for future generations" or some other rationale (such as, "get a higher price"), which will rather suddenly create a price spiral the likes of which we have not yet seen.

What matters is an equal mixture of actual oil availability and market perception. As soon as the scarcity meme gets going, things will change very rapidly.

In short, it is time to accept that Peak Oil is real - and plan accordingly.

more from Seeking Alpha

___________________
Action to take:

Take the bus. Did you know Google has transit routes and times for most major cities?

Turning up the heat

2010-10-01T13:52:00.000-07:00

Washington Post

"Given the dominant effect of El Nino-La Nina on short-term temperature change and the usual lag of a few months between the Nino index and its effect on global temperature, it is unlikely that 2011 will reach a new global record temperature.

In contrast, it is likely that 2012 will reach a record high global temperature. The principal caveat is that the duration of the current La Nina could stretch an extra year, as some prior La Ninas have (see Nino 3.4 index at the bottom of Figure 3). Given the association of extreme weather and climate events with rising global temperature, the expectation of new record high temperatures in 2012 also suggests that the frequency and magnitude of extreme events could reach a high level in 2012. Extreme events include not only high temperatures, but also indirect effects of a warming atmosphere including the impact of higher temperature on extreme rainfall and droughts. The greater water vapor content of a warmer atmosphere allows larger rainfall anomalies and provides the fuel for stronger storms driven by latent heat.

More from James Hansen, NASA scientist. Seen at Climate Progress.

______________________________
An action to take:

Plant shade and shelterbelt trees. If you are in a temperate zone where conifers thrive: in northern hemisphere, put deciduous (leaf-dropping) trees near the south side of your house (if you have one), extra points for choosing fruit or nut trees; and conifers or other evergreens on the north side. Reverse positioning for southern hemisphere. This gives you solar shade in the summer and solar heat gain in winter, plus protection from cold winter winds, lowering the heat bill.

Genetically modified drinking water?

2010-09-29T15:09:00.000-07:00

From Tom Laskaway at Grist

Greenpeace
"One of the main arguments offered in support of the wide use of genetically engineered crops is that they reduce overall pesticide use. This is particularly the case with Monsanto’s “Bt” line of corn, soy, and cotton seeds, which are able to produce their own pesticide, a “natural” toxin from genes of the bacteria Bacillus thuringiensis. Ironically, commercial pesticide derived from Bt also happens to be one of the only chemical pesticides approved for use in organic agriculture, because it’s produced through a biological process.

Biotechnology companies thus consider Bt seeds some of their most “eco-friendly” products. In theory, farmers don’t have to spray pesticide as much or as often on these crops, and therefore pesticide runoff into waterways is much less of a concern. Well, after years of denial, Monsanto finally admitted recently that superbugs, or pests that have evolved to be able to eat the Bt crops, are a real and growing concern. And now, researchers at the University from Notre Dame have shown that the Bt from genetically engineered maize is polluting waterways in Indiana (the study area). They found Bt toxin in almost 25% of streams they tested, and all the streams that tested positive were within 1,500 feet from a cornfield.

Flesh-eating flesh sold

2010-09-28T22:37:00.000-07:00

USGS

From WalletPop via Cryptogon

"Meat contaminated by a potentially lethal infection is being sold to consumers -- creating a public health threat that has largely flown under the the radar due to powerful industry interests and lax accountability at the federal agency in charge of ensuring food safety, according to recent studies and a prominent investigative journalist.

"It makes salmonella look like a picnic," is how David Kirby, an investigative journalist who has written about MRSA, a life-threatening pathogen, described it in an interview with Consumer Ally. MRSA (Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus) is an antibiotic-resistant staph infection that kills about 20,000 Americans -- more than the number of people who die from AIDS -- each year.

MRSA affects livestock and ultimately supermarket meat. Previously associated mostly with infections acquired in hospitals, nursing homes or by people with compromised immune systems, for the past 15 years MRSA is increasingly being traced to industrial animal feeding operations, so-called factory farms, where much of the nation's protein comes from.

A number of clinical and academic studies bear this out: a recent Canadian study showed nearly 14% of pork chops (about one in seven) and 6.3% of ground pork sold in supermarkets carried the contamination -- taken together, 9.6% of all pork samples. Additionally, 5.6% of the beef and 1.2% of the poultry carried the bug. The bacterium was also found in veal, lamb and other meats.

What will future generations condemn us for?

2010-09-26T11:20:00.000-07:00

sustainable.org

From a thoughtful opinion piece in the Washington Post.

"Of the more than 90 million cattle in our country, at least 10 million at any time are packed into feedlots, saved from the inevitable diseases of overcrowding only by regular doses of antibiotics, surrounded by piles of their own feces, their nostrils filled with the smell of their own urine. Picture it -- and then imagine your grandchildren seeing that picture. In the European Union, many of the most inhumane conditions we allow are already illegal or -- like the sow stalls into which pregnant pigs are often crammed in the United States -- will be illegal soon....

It's not as though we're unaware of what we're doing to the planet: We know the harm done by deforestation, wetland destruction, pollution, overfishing, greenhouse gas emissions -- the whole litany. Our descendants, who will inherit this devastated Earth, are unlikely to have the luxury of such recklessness. Chances are, they won't be able to avert their eyes, even if they want to.

more

Put the dog down and back away slowly

2010-09-25T16:47:00.000-07:00

Total Health Breakthroughs

"The World Cancer Research Fund (WCRF) has just completed a detailed review of more than 7,000 clinical studies covering links between diet and cancer. Its conclusion is rocking the health world with startling bluntness: Processed meats are too dangerous for human consumption. Consumers should stop buying and eating all processed meat products for the rest of their lives.

Processed meats include bacon, sausage, hot dogs, sandwich meat, packaged ham, pepperoni, salami and virtually all red meat used in frozen prepared meals. They are usually manufactured with a carcinogenic ingredient known as sodium nitrite. This is used as a color fixer by meat companies to turn packaged meats a bright red color so they look fresh. Unfortunately, sodium nitrite also results in the formation of cancer-causing nitrosamines in the human body. And this leads to a sharp increase in cancer risk for those who eat them.

How the handbasket gets us there amidst plenty

2010-09-22T07:20:00.000-07:00

Solamavigator

1. There is a theoretical limit to how long a networked resource system can continue to function.

2. This limit is reached with little warning.

3. Even after the limit is approached and the squeeze on networked resources starts, the nature of the problem is not apparent to the resource producers, who are likely to say "there is still plenty of our resource available - we just need more inputs and better price signals"

All three conclusions are surprising. Why should there be a theoretical limit? Why would the warning signs be hidden? Why would the problem be difficult to diagnose even after the first impacts are felt?

But before I get to this, I should answer the question "What is a network of produced resources?" ....

All over the world Mining companies are reporting declining ore quality.
This is fine; we can go on forever - as long as we have endless energy. But to produce that energy we need more resources. And to extract the resources we need more energy – which requires more resources, which requires more..... And now we begin to see the problem.

Spy vs. the people

2010-09-15T18:06:00.000-07:00

From Concrete Junkyard
"[Monsanto in 2008 hired a] Blackwater shell company called “Total Intelligence Solutions” for overseas services.

In an email obtained by Scahill, a Blackwater operative who had talked to Monsato officials ahead of the hiring claimed that the security firm would “develop into acting as intel arm of Monsanto”—including infiltrating activist groups working to oppose it. The operative wrote hopefully of Monsato’s “generous protection budget.”

A Monsanto official told Scahill that the relationship ended in early in 2010 and denied that there were ever plans to infiltrate activist groups. Instead, he said, Blackwater served Monsanto “by monitoring local media reports and other publicly available information.” Scahill adds: “The subject matter ranged from information regarding terrorist incidents in Asia or kidnappings in Central America to scanning the content of activist blogs and websites.”

more at Grist

Sold

2010-09-14T23:14:00.000-07:00

Global Dashboard
The neo-colonial rush for global farmland has gone exponential since the food scare of 2007-2008. Last week's long-delayed report by the World Bank suggests that purchases in developing countries rose to 45m hectares in 2009, a ten-fold jump from levels of the last decade. Two thirds have been in Africa, where institutions offer weak defence.

As is by now well-known, sovereign wealth funds from the Mid-East, as well as state-entities from China, the Pacific Rim, and even India are trying to lock up chunks of the world's future food supply. Western agribusiness is trying to beat them to it. Western funds - many listed on London's AIM exchange - are in turn trying to beat them. The NGO GRAIN, and farmlandgrab.com, have both documented the stampede in detail...

The great leap forward in crop yields is fading. The Bank said rises in wheat and soya yields have declined from 2pc a year to zero since the 1970s in the West. Yield growth for rice and soya in emerging economies has fallen from 3pc to 1pc. "With few break-through technologies on the horizon, the scope for yield gains seems lower than in the past. Irrigation has contributed to past growth in crop yields, but water scarcity in many regions is now a major constraint," it said. The Green Revolution is "exhausted"...

Rich countries do not face a Malthusian crisis. They face a shift in the terms of trade between country and city, a reversal of urban dominance since the industrial revolution. We are on a thinner margin of food security, just as we are on a thinner margin of oil security. But those who live in poor countries that rely on food imports most certainly did have a Malthusian moment in 2008 when bread riots swept Egypt, Indonesia, and a string of states in Africa.

more by Ambrose Evans-Pritchard @ The Telegraph

Crop failure in Nepal traced to illegal activity by multinationals

2010-09-14T09:36:00.000-07:00

Greenpeace

ERLICH: Nirval Gadal, a Nepali agronomist working an international agricultural NGO, says smuggling of seeds is a huge problem.

GADAL: According to the Seed Act, these seeds must be registered with the National Seed Board and before the farmers do planting, it should be tested by the laboratory. And the public organisations should keep that seed lot as a sample so that if there are problems, we can test it later.
This is one of the major problems these days in Nepal. They come directly to the farmers, the staff of the multinational companies. They do demonstrations for them. They give training to them. They sell the seed without giving information to government offices.

ERLICH: Foreign companies know that enforcement of agricultural laws is problematic in Nepal these days because of political instability. Four years ago Nepalis overthrew a dictatorial government, but forming a new administration has been difficult.

GADAL: Our regulatory mechanism is very weak. The border with India is open. Anyone can enter very easily. By taking advantage of this weak regulatory system, they can come directly to the farmers to sell the seeds.

more at Radio Australia

Deutsche Bank AG to invest to fight global warming

2010-09-10T09:03:00.000-07:00

A new paper published by the asset management arm of Deutsche Bank AG challenges the claims of climate change skeptics and argues that global warming “is already happening and is a serious long term threat.”

“There is a very high probability that we are already heading towards a future where warming will persist for thousands of years,” the paper warns. “Failing to insure against that high probability does not seem a gamble worth taking.”

The paper was published by DB Climate Change Advisors, an investment division of Deutsche Asset Management which pursues investment opportunities stemming from climate change. Deutsche Asset Management says the division is now “one of the leading climate change investors in the world,” with about $4 billion under management as of March 2009.

Mark Fulton, Global Head of Climate Change Investment Research, said the bank asked scientists at the Columbia Climate Center at the Earth Institute, at Columbia University in New York, to examine major skeptic claims in the light of the latest peer reviewed scientific literature and to weigh the arguments of each side in the balance.

“Although the scientific community has already addressed the skeptic arguments in some detail, there is still a public perception that scientists have been dismissive of the skeptic viewpoint, so the intention in this report is to correct the balance,” Mr. Fulton said. “The paper's clear conclusion is that the primary claims of the skeptics do not undermine the assertion that human-made climate change is already happening and is a serious long term threat.”

Among a number of citations, the paper notes the recent publication on the State of the Climate by the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), which analyzed over thirty indicators, or climate variables. That report concluded that “the Earth is warming and that the past decade was the warmest on record,” Mr. Fulton said.

Sea Ice volume dropping off the chart

2010-09-07T18:00:00.000-07:00

Click to expand. From New Scientist. Seen at Climate Progress

Global warming local: hotter, colder, wetter, drier = famine, not beach days

2010-08-30T10:54:00.000-07:00

"The greater threat from rising sea levels is not actual flooding, but infiltration of ground water by sea water. Once the ground water becomes saline the salt migrates up through the soil and turns productive land into a salt desert.

A two meter rise in sea level can affect agricultural land quite some distance from the ocean. A majority of the world’s food production is within 5 m of sea level.

Warmer weather means different weather, and that means changes in rainfall. There are a great many variables involved in creating weather, but some broad patterns are known.

Warmer air can hold more moisture, which will mean more rainfall in some regions when the air masses bring in more moisture. In other regions it will mean greater drought as the warmer air sucks up more moisture. It depends on how saturated with moisture the air is, and on whether the system is warming or cooling. Systems that are cooling will tend to drop rain. Systems that are warming will tend to suck up moisture.

Weather systems coming off of the ocean will tend to be wet. Systems coming from mountains will tend to be drying as the air descends and warms. The same will tend to be true for systems moving from north to south (ie they will be warming).

In crude terms we expect dry areas to get drier, and wet areas to get wetter. Neither is good news.

Mike Kaulbar
more from News Junkie Post

Are greenhouse gases and temperature rises even correlated?

2010-08-25T15:01:00.000-07:00

Chart from Climate Progress, linked from ThinkProgress.
Source: Skeptical Science, from data from NASA and others.

Yes. They are.

About industrial food -- again

2010-08-25T12:13:00.000-07:00

Not subject to recall!

A good summation by The Agriculture Society:

For a long time I believed that with every food recall story in the media, we’d see more and more people start taking notice of what’s going on in the food system – that food produced in factory environments is harming our health because everything is completely backward and geared toward the reign of big food and corporate agriculture – and that sustainable agriculture would start to become the order of the day.
Food recalls are not doing the job they should – they are not waking people up fast enough. The more we continue to support big agriculture’s products by ignoring these problems, the more control will be given to entities (the government) and corporations (Big Pharma and Big Agriculture – companies like Tyson, Smithfield, Swift, and Cargill who control over 80 percent of the food sold in our country) to dictate the future of food growth, production, sales, and health (or lack thereof).
The reality is, nothing will change until major modifications occur in the way we produce food. Stepping up regulations and laws will not change the recall situation or food-borne illnesses problem.
Every time food recalls happen, irrational and uneducated parties and spokespeople start rousing the masses to stop buying certain foods – tomatoes (2008), beef (2008), pork (2008), eggs (2010), and a breaking report today from Walmart – 380,000 pounds of deli meat (2010).
Recalls are becoming more numerous and people aren’t understanding the reason why – they believe it’s due to lax standards on “food safety” measures and laws. This is only a very small component of what is going on. The real culprit is not eggs or meat or anything else in and of itself – the cause is the farming methods and manufacturing processes used in the growth and production of these foods.

more by Raine Saunders at The Agriculture Society -- with some solutions ...

Thanks to Elizabeth R. for sending this.

Corporatism, fascism and tea party populism

2010-08-24T08:16:00.000-07:00

Wonder where all the money is coming from to set up and stir up the Tea Parties? Wonder no more. It's Koch Industries, who fund, much more than anyone else, the extreme right in general and lobbying to protect corporate polluters and climate damagers in particular. The Koch brothers' father was one of the founders of the John Birch Society. Here's a minor excerpt, describing just one of many facets of Koch's activities, from one of the most important articles to appear in the New Yorker ever:

Koch’s corporate and political roles, however, may pose conflicts of interest. For example, at the same time that David Koch has been casting himself as a champion in the fight against cancer, Koch Industries has been lobbying to prevent the E.P.A. from classifying formaldehyde, which the company produces in great quantities, as a “known carcinogen” in humans.

Scientists have long known that formaldehyde causes cancer in rats, and several major scientific studies have concluded that formaldehyde causes cancer in human beings—including one published last year by the National Cancer Institute, on whose advisory board Koch sits. The study tracked twenty-five thousand patients for an average of forty years; subjects exposed to higher amounts of formaldehyde had significantly higher rates of leukemia. These results helped lead an expert panel within the National Institutes of Health to conclude that formaldehyde should be categorized as a known carcinogen, and be strictly controlled by the government. Corporations have resisted regulations on formaldehyde for decades, however, and Koch Industries has been a large funder of members of Congress who have stymied the E.P.A., requiring it to defer new regulations until more studies are completed.

Koch Industries became a major producer of the chemical in 2005, after it bought Georgia-Pacific, the paper and wood-products company, for twenty-one billion dollars. Georgia-Pacific manufactures formaldehyde in its chemical division, and uses it to produce various wood products, such as plywood and laminates. Its annual production capacity for formaldehyde is 2.2 billion pounds.

more at the New Yorker

Patents poison a nation's agriculture

2010-08-15T19:46:00.000-07:00

A tangible consequence of India's shift to a neo-liberal economic model has been the flood of suicides among farmers. The vast majority of the world's second most populated country still farms for a living, but are caught between deep debt and the erratic nature of seasonal change. Lured by the promise of greater production, farmers are pressured into mortgaging their farms to purchase genetically modified seeds, pesticides, and fertilizer from American companies like Monsanto. Since GM seeds are patented by Monsanto, their repeated use each year requires constant licensing fees that keep farmers impoverished. One bad yield due to drought or other reasons, plunges farmers so deep into debt that they resort to suicide. One study estimates that 150,000 farmers have killed themselves in the past ten years.

more at Alternet

Our steep ascent

2010-08-13T15:37:00.000-07:00

NASA via Climate Progress

Humans playing with fire

2010-08-10T21:01:00.000-07:00

This just in (with links to the peer-reviewed literature)

Humans are currently emitting around 30 billion tonnes of CO2 into the atmosphere (CDIAC). Of course, it could be coincidence that CO2 levels are rising so sharply at the same time so let’s look at more evidence that we’re responsible for the rise in CO2 levels.
When we measure the type of carbon accumulating in the atmosphere, we observe more of the type of carbon that comes from fossil fuels (Manning 2006).
This is corroborated by measurements of oxygen in the atmosphere. Oxygen levels are falling in line with the amount of carbon dioxide rising, just as you’d expect from fossil fuel burning which takes oxygen out of the air to create carbon dioxide (Manning 2006).
Further independent evidence that humans are raising CO2 levels comes from measurements of carbon found in coral records going back several centuries. These find a recent sharp rise in the type of carbon that comes from fossil fuels (Pelejero 2005).
So we know humans are raising CO2 levels. What’s the effect? Satellites measure less heat escaping out to space, at the particular wavelengths that CO2 absorbs heat, thus finding “direct experimental evidence for a significant increase in the Earth’s greenhouse effect”. (Harries 2001, Griggs 2004, Chen 2007).
If less heat is escaping to space, where is it going? Back to the Earth’s surface. Surface measurements confirm this, observing more downward infrared radiation (Philipona 2004, Wang 2009). A closer look at the downward radiation finds more heat returning at CO2 wavelengths, leading to the conclusion that “this experimental data should effectively end the argument by skeptics that no experimental evidence exists for the connection between greenhouse gas increases in the atmosphere and global warming.” (Evans 2006).
If an increased greenhouse effect is causing global warming, we should see certain patterns in the warming. For example, the planet should warm faster at night than during the day. This is indeed being observed (Braganza 2004, Alexander 2006).
Another distinctive pattern of greenhouse warming is cooling in the upper atmosphere, otherwise known as the stratosphere. This is exactly what’s happening (Jones 2003).
With the lower atmosphere (the troposphere) warming and the upper atmosphere (the stratophere) cooling, another consequence is the boundary between the troposphere and stratophere, otherwise known as the tropopause, should rise as a consequence of greenhouse warming. This has been observed (Santer 2003).
An even higher layer of the atmosphere, the ionosphere, is expected to cool and contract in response to greenhouse warming. This has been observed by satellites (Laštovi?ka 2006).
Science isn’t a house of cards, ready to topple if you remove one line of evidence. Instead, it’s like a jigsaw puzzle. As the body of evidence builds, we get a clearer picture of what’s driving our climate. We now have many lines of evidence all pointing to a single, consistent answer – the main driver of global warming is rising carbon dioxide levels from our fossil fuel burning.
– John Cook, Skeptical Science.

Seen at Climate Progress

Up in smoke

2010-08-03T22:51:00.000-07:00

Drought and raging wildfires have destroyed one-fifth of the wheat crop in Russia and sent wheat prices soaring around the world....
Any price increases will hit consumers hardest in wheat-deficient areas such as the Middle East, Africa and parts of Asia.
The severe drought in Russia is thought to be the country’s worst in 130 years. Most of the damage to the wheat crop has been caused by the drought, but now wildfires are sweeping farmlands in western Russia.

Kansas City Star via Cryptogon

Ruh-Roh!

2010-07-29T21:45:00.000-07:00

The microscopic plants that support all life in the oceans are dying off at a dramatic rate, according to a study that has documented for the first time a disturbing and unprecedented change at the base of the marine food web.

Scientists have discovered that the phytoplankton of the oceans has declined by about 40 per cent over the past century, with much of the loss occurring since the 1950s. They believe the change is linked with rising sea temperatures and global warming.

If the findings are confirmed by further studies it will represent the single biggest change to the global biosphere in modern times, even bigger than the destruction of the tropical rainforests and coral reefs, the scientists said yesterday.

More at The Independent (UK)

Cap-and-Trade would have bipartisan support in a sane universe

2010-07-28T11:23:00.000-07:00

Snipped from Google Reader; a conservative argument for sanity:

The Power of Cap-and-Trade
by Richard Schmalensee and Robert Stavins
The Boston Globe, July 27, 2010
LAST WEEK, the Senate abandoned its latest attempt to pass climate legislation that would limit carbon dioxide emissions, putting off any action until the fall at the soonest. In the process, conservative Republicans dubbed the cap-and-trade system “cap-and-tax.’’ Regardless of what they think about climate change, however, they should resist demonizing market-based approaches to environmental protection and reverting to pre-1980s thinking that saddled business and consumers with needless costs.
In fact, market-based policies should be embraced, not condemned by Republicans (as well as Democrats). After all, these policies were innovations developed by conservatives in the Reagan, George H. W. Bush, and George W. Bush administrations (and once strongly condemned by liberals).
In the 1980s, President Ronald Reagan’s Environmental Protection Agency successfully put in place a cap-and-trade system to phase out leaded gasoline. The result was a more rapid elimination of leaded gasoline from the marketplace than anyone had anticipated, and at a savings of some $250 million per year, compared with a conventional no-trade, command-and-control approach.
In June 1989, President George H. W. Bush proposed the use of a cap-and-trade system to cut by half sulfur dioxide emissions from coal-fired power plants and consequent acid rain. An initially resistant Democratic Congress overwhelmingly endorsed the proposal. The landmark Clean Air Act amendments of 1990 passed the Senate 89 to 10 and the House 401 to 25. That cap-and-trade system has cut sulfur dioxide emissions by 50 percent, and has saved electricity companies — and hence shareholders and ratepayers — some $1 billion per year compared with a conventional, non-market approach.
In 2005, George W. Bush’s EPA issued the Clean Air Interstate Rule, aimed at achieving the largest reduction in air pollution in more than a decade, including reducing sulfur dioxide emissions by a further 70 percent from their 2003 levels. Cap-and-trade was again the policy instrument of choice in order to keep costs down and achieve the rapid reductions at minimum economic pain. (The rule was later invalidated by the courts, and is now being reformulated.)
To reject this legacy and embrace the failed 1970s policies of one-size-fits-all regulatory mandates would signify unilateral surrender of principled support for markets. If some conservatives oppose energy or climate policies because of disagreement about the threat of climate change or the costs of those policies, so be it. But in the process of debating risks and costs, there should be no tarnishing of market-based policy instruments. Such a scorched-earth approach will come back to haunt when future environmental policies will not be able to use the power of the marketplace to reduce business costs.
Virtually all economists agree on a market-based approach to reduce carbon dioxide emissions. Some favor carbon taxes combined with revenue-neutral cuts in distortionary taxes, whereas others support cap-and-trade mechanisms — or “cap-and-dividend,’’ with revenues from auctioned allowances refunded directly to citizens.
Conventional approaches advanced as “painless alternatives’’ — a plethora of standards, special-interest technology subsidies, and tax breaks — won’t do the job, and will be unnecessarily expensive. While we are struggling to revitalize the economy, we simply cannot afford to turn our backs on markets and impose unnecessary costs on businesses and consumers.
A price on carbon is the least costly way to provide meaningful incentives for technology innovation and diffusion, reduce emissions from fossil fuels, and drive energy efficiency. In the long run, it can reduce our use of oil and drive our transportation system toward alternative energy sources.
Market-based approaches to environmental protection – including cap-and-trade – should be lauded, not condemned, by political leaders, no matter what their party affiliation. Demonizing cap-and-trade in the short term will turn out to be a mistake with serious long-term consequences for the economy, for business, and for consumers.
– Schmalensee and Stavins

The big thirst

2010-07-27T18:05:00.000-07:00

By mid-century climate change will mean a high or extreme risk of water shortages in 14 states, according to a new study commissioned by the Natural Resources Defense Council.

Seen at Climate Progress

The greed machine runs day and night

2010-07-15T11:10:00.000-07:00

Grain-importing countries are buying up land and water rights in grain-exporting countries, cutting off local people from their own food security.

Lester Brown, Earth Policy Institute:

In 2009 the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) compiled a list of nearly 50 agreements, based largely on a worldwide review of press reports. No one knows for sure how many such agreements there are or how many there will eventually be. This massive acquisition of land to grow food in other countries is one of the largest geopolitical experiments ever conducted.
The role of government in land acquisition varies. In some cases, government-owned corporations are acquiring the land. In others, private entities are the buyers, with the government of the investing country using its diplomatic resources to achieve an agreement favorable to the investors. The land-buying countries are mostly those whose populations have outrun their own land and water resources. Among them are Saudi Arabia, South Korea, China, Kuwait, Libya, India, Egypt, Jordan, the United Arab Emirates, and Qatar. Saudi Arabia is looking to buy or lease land in at least 11 countries, including Ethiopia, Turkey, Ukraine, Sudan, Kazakhstan, the Philippines, Viet Nam, and Brazil.

In contrast, countries selling or leasing their land are often low-income countries and, more often than not, those where chronic hunger and malnutrition are commonplace. Some depend on the World Food Programme (WFP) for part of their food supply. In March 2009 the Saudis celebrated the arrival of the first shipment of rice produced on land they had acquired in Ethiopia, a country where the WFP is working to feed some 5 million people. Another major acquisition site for the Saudis and several other grain importing countries is the Sudan—ironically the site of the WFP’s largest famine relief effort.

For sheer size of investment, China stands out. The Chinese firm ZTE International has secured rights to 2.8 million hectares (6.9 million acres) in the Democratic Republic of the Congo on which to produce palm oil, which can be used either for cooking or to produce biodiesel fuel—indicating that the competition between food and fuel is also showing up in land acquisitions. This compares with the 1.9 million hectares used by the Congo’s 66 million people to produce corn, their food staple. Like Ethiopia and Sudan, the Congo also depends on a WFP lifeline. Among the other countries in which China has acquired land or has plans to do so are Australia, Russia, Brazil, Kazakhstan, and Myanmar.

South Korea, a leading world corn importer, is a major investor in several countries. With deals signed for some 690,000 hectares (1.7 million acres) in the Sudan for growing wheat, South Korea is one of the leaders in this food security push. For perspective, this land acquisition is nearly three fourths the size of the area South Korea now uses at home to produce rice, its staple food. The Koreans are also looking at the Russian Far East, where they plan to grow corn and soybeans.

One little noticed characteristic of these land acquisitions is that they are also water acquisitions. Whether the land is rain-fed or irrigated, it represents a claim on the water resources in the host country. Land acquisitions in the Sudan that tap water from the Nile, which is already fully utilized, may mean that Egypt will get less water from the river—making it even more dependent on imported grain.

These bilateral land acquisitions raise many questions. To begin with, these negotiations and the agreements they lead to lack transparency. Typically only a few high-ranking officials are involved and the terms are confidential. Not only are many stakeholders such as farmers not at the table when the agreements are negotiated, they often do not even learn about the deals until after they have been signed. And since there is rarely idle productive land in these countries, many local farmers may simply be displaced. This helps explain the public hostility that often arises within host countries.

China, for example, signed an agreement with the Philippine government to lease over a million hectares of land on which to produce crops that would be shipped home. Once word leaked out, the public outcry—much of it from Filipino farmers—forced the government to suspend the agreement. A similar situation developed in Madagascar, where South Korea’s Daewoo Logistics had pursued rights to more than 1 million hectares of land, an area half the size of Belgium. This helped stoke the political furor that led to a change in government and cancellation of the agreement. China is also running into on-the-ground opposition over its quest for 2 million hectares in Zambia.

This new approach to achieving food security also raises questions about the effects on employment. At least two countries, China and South Korea, are planning in some cases to bring in their own farm workers. Is the introduction of large-scale commercial, heavily mechanized farming operations what is needed by the recipient countries, where unemployment is widespread?

Feedbacks!

2010-07-08T10:46:00.000-07:00

A roundup from Joe Romm at Climate Progress, after noting that predictions of positive feedback effects of greenhouse gases have been improperly disparaged once again in the media (scientists were misquoted and have asked for retractions, an ongoing and very damaging process):

Here’s some of the recent research and observation on the dangerous positive carbon-cycle feedbacks that threaten to amplify the impacts of human-caused GHGs.

Science: “Clouds Appear to Be Big, Bad Player in Global Warming” — an amplifying feedback (sorry Lindzen and fellow deniers)
Science: Vast East Siberian Arctic Shelf methane stores destabilizing and venting, NSF issues world a wake-up call: “Release of even a fraction of the methane stored in the shelf could trigger abrupt climate warming.”
Science: Global warming is killing U.S. trees, a dangerous carbon-cycle feedback
Study: Water-vapor feedback is “strong and positive,” so we face “warming of several degrees Celsius”

Indeed, the best evidence is that the climate is now starting to be driven by amplifying feedbacks, most notably:

The defrosting of the permafrost [see figure below]
The drying of the Northern peatlands (bogs, moors, and mires).
The destruction of the tropical wetlands
Decelerating growth in tropical forest trees — thanks to accelerating carbon dioxide
Scientists: “There are multiple, consistent lines of evidence from ground-based studies published in the peer-reviewed literature that Amazon forests are, indeed, very susceptible to drought stress.”
Wildfires and Climate-Driven forest destruction by pests
The desertification-global warming feedback

Using the first “fully interactive climate system model” applied to study permafrost, the researchers found that if we tried to stabilize CO2 concentrations in the air at 550 ppm, permafrost would plummet from over 4 million square miles today to 1.5 million. If concentrations hit 690 ppm, permafrost would shrink to just 800,000 square miles:

Civil and informed.

2010-07-06T06:50:00.000-07:00

On the one hand, we have this in today's Guardian:

Climate scientists in the US say police inaction has left them defenceless in the face of a torrent of death threats and hate mail, leaving them fearing for their lives and one to contemplate arming himself with a handgun.
The scientists say the threats have increased since the furore over leaked emails from the University of East Anglia began last November, and a sample of the hate mail sent in recent months and seen by the Guardian reveals the scale and vitriolic tone of the abuse.
The scientists revealed they have been told to "go gargle razor blades" and have been described as "Nazi climate murderers".

I would note they were not leaked, but criminally hacked, in preparation for undermining the Copenhagen talks. There was in fact nothing in these emails to support a "Climategate" furore, as noted recently.

So, when it dawns on those of us who remember when science was taken seriously, that it is no longer possible to conduct civil and informed dialogue in the political and media arenas, we'll have to begin gardening the sod round our homes and laying in candles and bags of oats and digging wells. The survivalists turn out to have had a point.

Just remember, when it goes to 108F out for a week or so, not to blame the lib'rals. Liberal really only means "civil and informed." Noting the high-school-science demonstrable principle of heat-trapping properties of gases is not equivalent to "communism."

Actic sea ice extent/volume so far

2010-06-27T14:33:00.001-07:00

PIOMAS via Climate Progress. Click to enlarge.

Harm upon harm

2010-06-24T12:59:00.000-07:00

BP may shut down the oil gusher in the Gulf by the end of the summer, yet the harms from human-induced climate change will likely plague the world for centuries. While the threat from the BP gusher to the wild life in the Gulf is huge, the threat to people, animals, and ecological systems from climate change is much larger.

While it is proving difficult to shut down the oil flow from the Deepwater Horizon site, the magnitude of greenhouse gas emissions reductions needed to prevent dangerous climate change is truly civilization challenging. This is so because the world will need to reduce global greenhouse gas emissions from current levels by 80% or greater by the middle of this century to prevent catastrophic climate change as greenhouse gas emissions increase world wide increase at 2% per year under current trends.

Yet, some of the members of the U.S. Congress that are outraged at BP have been resisting meaningful action on climate change. In fact the U.S. Congress has been a barrier to responsible U.S. climate change action since the early 1990s.

There are a few things in common about the Gulf spill and climate change. One lesson of the Gulf oil spill that is an ominous warning about climate change is that the Deepwater Horizon disaster demonstrates that what are often initially believed to be low probability, catastrophic impacts do happen.

Although even more optimistic predictions of climate change impacts are disastrous for some of the world’s most vulnerable people, the upper end of possible human-induced temperature increases in this Century of 9 to 16 F will be catastrophic and perhaps unimaginable for the world.

Also, some of the U.S. Congressmen who have consistently fought stronger government climate change action have also promoted rapid expansion of deep sea oil drilling. It is also no mere coincidence that most of these Congressmen are also from oil states and are the greatest recipients of fossil-fuel industry political contributions.

Although the BP oil spill seriously threatens those who live along the Gulf of Mexico, U.S. intransigence on climate change threatens the entire world; a fact that is causing rising anger around the world. Yet the U.S. Congress continues to resist action on climate change on the basis that it will harm some U.S. economic interests, while ignoring our duties, responsibilities, and obligations to others to reduce U.S. greenhouse gas emissions to the U.S. fair share of safe global releases. For this reason, while the BP oil spill can be rightfully be understood as a disaster, U.S. Congressional inaction on climate change must be understood as a huge moral failure leading to an even greater disaster.

– Donald A. Brown at Climate Progress

Two of the tags used in the blog are: "venality in corporatism," "venality in government." They're chosen frequently, because the link between these two, through lobbying, campaign contributions, and the revolving door, worldwide, but most especially and emphatically in the United States, will be the principal cause of of the downfall of civilization and the principal threat to life on earth.

Tea Partiers -- face it, teabaggers may well be the better name -- go on about "keeping government out of the free market." But the trouble isn't nearly government so much as corporate culture. That's not a free market now; never was, and never will be. It's a market that's free to rape as it pleases.

Five thousand Gulf oil spills

2010-06-20T16:22:00.000-07:00

That’s the rate that people are releasing carbon to the atmosphere from fossil fuel combustion and deforestation today. I know, it’s apples and oranges; carbon in the form of oil is more immediately toxic to the environment than it is as CO₂ (although CO₂ may be more damaging on geologic time scales). But think of it — five thousand spills like in the Gulf of Mexico, all going at once, each releasing 40,000 barrels a day, every day for decades and centuries on end. We are burning a lot of carbon!

From David @ Realclimate

Dig deeper for those potatoes

2010-06-18T17:22:00.000-07:00

The new Agricultural Outlook 2010-2019 report from the UN Food and Agriculture Organization has been released, warning that the price for many staple food products is projected to rise between 15-45%, adjusted for inflation. Balancing that is the projection that global food production over the next decade will be able to expand to keep pace with growing human population.

The FAO projects average wheat and coarse grain prices to increase 15-40% over the next ten years, as compared to the average levels between 1997-2006. Vegetable oil prices are expected to increase more than 40%, with dairy prices increasing 16-45%. Prices for livestock are expected to increase, but to a lesser degree than other farm commodities.

Food Distribution & Pricing, Not Production, Cause of Continued Hunger
Distribution and price spikes, rather than food production itself, remain the factor in rises in hunger and lack of food security. The FAO says that though agricultural output with grow more slowly over the next decade than it has in the past, growth will still be sufficient to meet future increases in global human population. By 2050 the FAO says a 70% increase in food production will be required to keep pace with projected population growth.

Read the full report: OECD-FAO Agricultural Outlook 2010-2019

Mongabay via Treehugger

Ice down

2010-06-18T07:42:00.000-07:00

Arctic sea ice melted 50% faster than the average rate during May 2010, with combined global land and ocean surface temperature being the warmest on record for the period from January-May, studies have suggested.

Research at the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has shown that the combined global land and ocean surface temperature was the warmest on record for the period from January-May.

Economic Times (India -- where highs of 126F have not been uncommon this spring).

Move along; nothing to see here

2010-06-16T11:47:00.000-07:00

We are shivering here in the Pacific Northwest, where it's been a record long time that we have not seen an 80F high. People bundle up in sweaters and laughingly remark in coffee shops, "ha ha, so much for global warming."

Once again it's time to remark that local weather is not climate; climate is an aggregation of weather readings over time. Statistics, verifiable statistics, tend to excite only scientists and some of their educated readers; most of the rest of us are left with the har-hars of media and politacians gorged on largess derived from the profits from egregious corporate polluters. "Har-har" is much more easily understood than scientific fact, and therefore much more easily believed.

But we're one of the few cold spots just now. Do have a look at the Federal-agency-produced charts below.

and:
Though the variances shown appear higher for land than ocean, nearly all the volume of heating is going into the oceans. At some point, however, the ocean heat sink will lose its ability to shield us from all this. And most of the fish are already gone.

Currently, the EROEI problems we're experiencing with oil and private and public debt are much more on everyone's mind than this potentially-fatal-to-billions heat problem. But all the problems are one problem.

And Congress and the corporations are not only not minding the store; they're looting it at a record pace. Dunno where they plan to retire to with all that loot. But never mind them; go back to watching "Last Comic Standing." Forget we said anything here, huh?

Charts seen at Stuart Staniford's excellent Early Warning blog.

Cheap food? No, very, very expensive food

2010-06-09T08:14:00.000-07:00

Industrial agriculture pays out one dollar's worth of food for ten dollars' worth of tractor diesel, herbicide, insecticide, artificial fertilizer, legalized theft of seed-saving rights, transportation diesel, and storage/retail electricity. It's profitable because of huge subsidies to the rich ...

Energy Return on Energy Invested (EROEI) or Net Energy Productivity, is the ratio of energy that comes out of a system, divided by the energy put into it. I was fascinated with comparing pre-industrial with the industrial agriculture and food systems.
Pre-industrial systems showed an EROEI of five to fifty. That is to say that for every unit of energy put into the system, between five and fifty units came out. In pre-industrial agriculture, that energy was human labour, draft animals, tools, and seeds saved from previous crops.
The high end of the scale was an intensively managed and layered system, like paddy rice. The low end was simple subsistence agriculture. To me, the interesting thing was that agriculture systems did not go lower than five units out per unit in. My guess is that an agricultural system that produced less than five units literally "starved out"; it didn't yield enough surplus energy to have a reserve for bad harvests or to raise the next generation.
By contrast, industrial agriculture — with its fertilizers, pesticides, diesel fuel, big machines, transport, processing and distribution networks — has an EROEI of zero point one. In other words, ten units of energy are used in the system to get one unit of energy to the table. Industrial agriculture is a system for converting petroleum into food in an extremely wasteful fashion.

more from Straight Goods (CA) ... seen at The Oil Drum

How will you behave when the gas runs low?

2010-06-05T07:01:00.000-07:00

In a new article, an Oxford researcher has examined what will happen when peak oil hits. According to Jörg Friedrichs, the outlook is not good. In his article Friedrichs doesn’t attempt to answer the question when peak oil will happen (or if it already has). Instead he imagines that it has happened and the world has to deal with it.

His conclusions: the world will have a “slow and painful” adjustment to peak oil lasting a century or more with the inevitable collapse of industrial society and the disintegration of free trade. How cheerful.

In his research, Friedrichs used three historical examples to guide his thought process of how the world’s different governments will deal with being energy constrained: North Korea, Cuba and Japan....

According to Friedrichs, all countries of the world that are wholly dependent on an oil economy will react to peak oil in one of the above 3 methods. “Countries prone to military solutions may follow a Japanese-style strategy of predatory militarism,” he said. “Countries with a strong authoritarian tradition may follow a North Korean path of totalitarian retrenchment. Countries with a strong community ethos may embark on a Cuban-style mobilization of local resilience, relying on their people to mitigate the effects of peak oil.”

Friedrichs thinks the U.S. will resort to predatory militarism because that is our one biggest strength....

A good show

2010-05-28T14:04:00.000-07:00

[Reposted from Stony Run Farm]

As a civilization, we of the West have begun to lose the capacity to make and repair and do, for ourselves, or locally. And with the strains on the complex system now in place, and its tendency to serve mainly the top ten percent of its income brackets, the need for reversing the centralizing trend becomes more and more urgent.

When I see so many of my friends and neighbors thrown out of work, I'm reminded of that moment in Kurt Vonnegut's Player Piano when the protagonist's car breaks down, and a crowd of the great mass of unemployed gathers, which he views with suspicion until one of them wistfully says, as nearly as I can remember it from a distant read: "Maybe I could look at it for you. I used to be pretty good with my hands."

The generation now in charge has mostly not read E. F. Schumacher, which is a sad fact. My copy of Small is Beautiful (Perennial Library, 1973) is thirty years old; it's a crumbling paperback, yellow and a bit musty, that has traveled with me, long un-reread but treasured, crisscrossing the Northwest with me when I worked in the woods, and the nation when I worked in Pennsylvania.

If we thought Schumacher's views were important then, we should read him now. Everything he found urgent has become more so.

Samples:

...one of the most fateful errors of our age is the belief that the problem of production has been solved. This illusion ... is mainly due to our inability to recognize that the modern industrial system, with all its intellectual sophistication, consumes the very basis on which it has been erected .... it lives on irreplaceable capital which it cheerfully treats as income. (20)

And:

An attitude to life which seeks fulfillment in the single-minded pursuit of wealth -- in short, materialism -- does not fit into [the] world, because it contains within itself no limiting principle, while the environment within which it is placed is strictly limited. (29-30)

By "limits" he means three things; fossil fuels, natural systems with their feedback loops, and human limitations (that they can tolerate only so much of a life that is functionally no more than slavery, or consumerism, or both). He believes if he can prove his point with any one of the three, he has made his case.

Economics, as practiced by industrial society, is in Schumacher's view fatally fragmentary: the society's judgments

are based on a definition of costs which excludes all "free goods," that is to say, the entire God-given environment, except for those parts of it that have been privately appropriated. This means that an activity can be economic although it plays hell with the environment, and that a competing activity, if at some cost it protects and conserves the environment, will be uneconomic. (43)

Thus you have the strange condition in which extraction of oil from the ground, poisoning the land, water, air, and ourselves, is an activity which can be rationally charted as economic, and leaving it there so that we can breathe, avoid being roasted by climate change, and survive as a species, cannot.

One effect of the fragmentary view of the world encouraged by industrial economics is that agricultural work is regarded as of little value; since agriculture is seen in this view to be simply another kind of factory, and no "profit" can be extracted from it unless it is practiced on an industrial scale, more farming must be done by fewer and fewer people and the rural population is displaced into the cities to look for work there, adding to the enormous problems of social disintegration and grinding poverty that appear in urban settings.

The subtitle of the book is "Economics as if People Mattered." Schumacher was Catholic, and regarded St. Thomas Aquinas as the underpinning of his understanding of science. He knew that much of his audience would be unwilling to hear him if he made much of this at the time, so he devised a clever and famous chapter, "Buddhist Economics." A discussion framed in Buddhist terms served his immediate aims just as well as one framed in Christian terms, for his point was that economics ought to serve humanity and not the other way round; and economics cannot serve humanity on its terms, for that which makes us human is unquantifiable in dollar amounts.

What is desirable to the materialist economist is undesirable to the Buddhist economist and vice versa, so that their aims in the short term are diametrically opposed. This is because the Buddhist economist has an interest in the long term, which is an interest that is unquantifiable in the industrial economist's system.

Buddhism is concerned with the alleviation of suffering so that one can focus on understanding one's self and the universe better, with the aim of right living, of choosing a path that promotes one's own well-being and that of all others: what are called "sentient beings" in Buddhist lingo. So the way of Buddhism trends toward peace and the way of a materialist system trends toward the opposite:

As the world's resources of non-renewable fuels -- coal, oil and natural gas -- are exceedingly unevenly distributed over the globe and undoubtedly limited in quantity, it is clear that their exploitation at an ever-increasing rate is an act of violence against nature which must inevitably lead to violence between men .... Before [materialists in Buddhist countries] dismiss Buddhist economics as nothing better than a nostalgic dream, they might wish to consider whether the path of economic development outlined by modern economics is likely to lead them to places where they really want to be. (61)

All well and good; but as with almost all liberals, one might expect that at this point Schumacher will rest on his laurels, having simply noted that what we are all doing is a Bad Show. But, unlike others, he has a specific set of proposals toward what might be a Better Show.

Schumacher notes that when local people produce local goods for other local people, the relationship, the bond, between them, that sense of well-being for which industrial economy can find no place in its equations, is strengthened.

Hence what are called "economies of scale" -- nation-states, multinational corporations, mass production, and export -- are false economies because they encourage bankruptcy in those three things, the state of the planet, of its non-renewables, and of the well-being of its beings.

Whereas local economies, inefficient as they are in those equations, tend to conserve the Three Things.

It's true, notes Schumacher, that in what are called Third World countries, there are what might be called one-pound (or we Americans could say one-dollar) workplaces, and life is marginal and sometimes prey to drought, disease, etc. But the cure proposed by the industrial economy is to bring in one-thousand-dollar workplaces, which cannot be justified economically except through extractive export strategies that ultimately only benefit the industrial chieftains in the developed countries.

Local people, on seeing the implementation of these impressive workplaces, often give up (and forget how to return to) their own one-dollar strategies, expecting full employment, except that the one-thousand-dollar solution, due to its capital cost, cannot be emplaced quickly enough to provide this. So from marginal existence a great many of them go straight to a starvation existence. Also, full employment was never a goal of the industrial economy in the first place. Fear tends to be regarded by the captains of industry as a great motivator, and pools of underutilized labor can be tapped for new projects at "reasonably" low wages.

Schumacher proposes an "intermediate" solution.

Devise the one-hundred-dollar workplace, using technologies that can be built and managed locally, to produce a higher standard of living by marketing the product locally.

To the objection that local people from a one-dollar background have no buying power, he answers that with the ten-times-cheaper-than-industrial-scale one-hundred-dollar workplace, you can do ten startups simultaneously, with the goods from one workplace affordable to the workers in one of the other nine.

There is thus no need to export, eliminating the need to carry on in the extractive and eventually bankrupting manner to which the West is addicted. Also, rural populations, by recovering a measure of independence and self-worth locally, are then not so easily driven to the urban ghettos, which reduces the strain on the megalopolitan cities which our industrial economy has created.

This sounds Utopian, but in fact his approach has been extensively tested. To show what would be examples of intermediate technology, applied to local economies by the local people themselves and not by well-intentioned but locally ignorant strangers, he formed, with other scientists and interested parties, a barely capitalized organization called the Intermediate Technology Development Group (ITDG).

They still exist, as the nonprofit Practical Action, thirty years later!

ITDG, with little real cooperation and much disdain from the developed nation-states and megacorporations, has for four decades doggedly kept up its mission of demonstrating the economic and scientific principles of E. F. Schumacher, and carried out numerous local initiatives, always sharing the lessons learned with anyone who seeks them out.

In the field of local energy development, they began with the obvious: people in developing countries depend on biomass for energy, and open fires waste energy. So ITDG designed low cost cooking stoves to reduce impact on the forests and other vegetative cover, as well as the tremendous labor expended, usually by women and children, in going farther and farther to strip the landscape of available fuel.

When a locality is ready for more, Practical Action is ready with more: micro-hydro plants, small scale wind generators, solar lanterns, biogas.

A serious bottleneck for local production, which cannot easily reach even local markets in rural areas of undeveloped countries, is transportation. Practical Action offers expertise in locally controlled construction of cycle trailers, improved ox and donkey carts, and efficient low-technology road building.

I refer those interested to Practical Action's website to grasp the scope of their activities. None of the ideas described are vaporware; they have applied them all in the real world and have the stories of local communities where the projects are being carried out.

See their links on agroprocessing, food production, information and communications technologies, small-scale mining, water and sanitation, disaster amelioration, advocacy, and education.

One might think that Practical Action would have an extensive Peace-Corps-style volunteer program. That's not the case. They seem to be a low-overhead operation, focused on getting information into the hands of the rural populations that need it, rather than bringing in mysterious expertise as if from some "higher" realm, deus ex machina, to carry out projects little understood by those they "help."

What Practical Action brings is accessible knowledge, created not for but in cooperation with rural populations in Third World, countries, the kind of knowledge that takes root in the heart of the woman or man who says, "yes, I can do this."

Practical Action has respect for the communities it works with. It advocates, and carries out, programs which restore subsistence and distributed capability. And it costs little to emulate it; a little heart, some labor, some clear communication, and an ethic. It's one of the few Good Shows going.

St. Benedict correctly models energy descent

2010-05-27T00:06:00.000-07:00

John Michael Greer:

Within not too many years, it’s safe to predict, only the relatively rich will have the dubious privilege of spending the last months of their lives hooked up to complicated life support equipment. The rest of us will end our lives the way our great-grandparents did: at home, more often than not, with family members or maybe a nurse to provide palliative care while our bodies do what they were born to do and shut down. Within not too many years, more broadly, only a very few people anywhere in the world will have the option of trying to escape the core uncertainties and challenges of human existence by chasing round after round of consumer goodies; the rest of us will count ourselves lucky to have our basic material needs securely provided for, and will have to deal with fundamental questions of meaning and value in some less blatantly meretricious way.

Some of us, in the process, may catch on to the subtle lesson woven into this hard necessity. It’s worth noting that while there’s been plenty of talk about the monasteries of the Dark Ages among people who are aware of the impending decline and fall of our civilization, next to none of it has discussed, much less dealt with, the secret behind the success of monasticism: the deliberate acceptance of extreme material poverty. Quite the contrary; all the plans for lifeboat ecovillages I’ve encountered so far, at least, aim at preserving some semblance of a middle class lifestyle into the indefinite future. That choice puts these projects in the same category as the lavish villas in which the wealthy inhabitants of Roman Britain hoped to ride out their own trajectory of decline and fall: a category mostly notable for its long history of total failure.

The European Christian monasteries that preserved Roman culture through the Dark Ages did not offer anyone a middle class lifestyle by the standards of their own time, much less those of ours. Neither did the Buddhist monasteries that preserved Heian culture through the Sengoku Jidai, Japan’s bitter age of wars, or the Buddhist and Taoist monasteries that preserved classical Chinese culture through a good half dozen cycles of collapse. Monasteries in all these cases were places people went to be very, very poor. That was the secret of their achievements, because when you reduce your material needs to the absolute minimum, the energy you don’t need to spend maintaining your standard of living can be put to work doing something more useful.

more at The Archdruid Report

An elephant is harder to push than you may think

2010-05-23T07:39:00.000-07:00

Here in United States we like to outsource the extraction of our oil supply to anyone but ourselves. We don’t particularly want to see the results of our own demand for liquid fuels, the pull from our 300 million vehicles and our four million miles of highways. We’d prefer that someone else–preferably far away–despoil their own landscape. And we’ve done quite a good job over the past several decades to make sure that’s happened, as the amount of oil we’ve had to import from the Mideast, from Africa, from Mexico and Canada has skyrocketed. This background is helpful in framing the BP well blowout in 5000 feet of Gulf deepwater. The reality of our oil demand has now touched home. In fact, it’s washing up on our coastline.

In the previous world of Ricardian Comparative Advantage, the decline of North American oil supply didn’t matter so much. But now that oil is no longer a cheap widget that can be efficiently sourced globally, regional and domestic supplies have started to matter. Whether or not you agree with solutions like the Pickens Plan (opens to video page at the recent Milken conference), you at least have to give Mr Pickens credit for identifying the problem: a very nasty mechanism, if you will, of increased capital outflows for increasingly expensive global oil is now at work like a buzz saw on the US economy. And it’s only going to get worse from here.

If the solution to a problem is unsufficiently scaled to the size of the problem, then at best we can say it’s a token solution. And token solutions are what the US has been trying out for 40 years, on the matter of energy. 8 billion for High Speed Rail? Sorry, but the restoration of rail in this country is an 800 billion dollar project and that would be just for the first wave. Adoption of electric vehicles, as part of some cultural need to maintain US car culture? Sure, at realistic adoption rates you might be running mostly on EVs in 150-200 years. Switch the powergrid to 100% renewable resources like Wind and Solar in ten years? Not likely. But maybe if you are willing to withdraw the entirety of US armed services from overseas, devote the entire military budget for 10 years, and match that workforce with highly skilled workers from the private sector, then maybe you can make a dent by 2020.
When a politician tells you they want to solve for climate change while investing heavily in automobiles and highways, rest assured that is decidedly unserious....

more at Seeking Alpha

Coming up empty

2010-05-17T16:44:00.000-07:00

The world faces the nightmare possibility of fishless oceans by 2050 without fundamental restructuring of the fishing industry, UN experts said Monday.

"If the various estimates we have received... come true, then we are in the situation where 40 years down the line we, effectively, are out of fish," Pavan Sukhdev, head of the UN Environment Program's green economy initiative, told journalists in New York.

A Green Economy report due later this year by UNEP and outside experts argues this disaster can be avoided if subsidies to fishing fleets are slashed and fish are given protected zones -- ultimately resulting in a thriving industry.
The report, which was opened to preview Monday, also assesses how surging global demand in other key areas including energy and fresh water can be met while preventing ecological destruction around the planet.
UNEP director Achim Steiner said the world was "drawing down to the very capital" on which it relies.

more at Raw Story

Bombs away!

2010-05-17T15:46:00.000-07:00

Writing in The Omnivore’s Dilemma, Michael Pollan detailed how, following World War II, nerve-gas factories were converted en masse into synthetic pesticide factories. These weapons reborn as pesticides are organophosphates, as are both Sarin and VX gases. For farmers, they work by, as Wikipedia tastefully puts it, “irreversibly inactivating” an essential neurotransmitter within insects—just as they worked for military generals by irreversibly inactivating the same equally essential neurotransmitter within soldiers.
The dangers of organophosphates are thus nothing new, though industrial agriculture continues to drop tens of millions of pounds of them on fields across the country every year. The argument in favor of their use has always been that, whatever their devastating effects at high doses, general exposure through the environment was far too low to do any harm.

The BPA fiasco has, of course, taught us that low-level exposure to supposedly “nontoxic” doses can indeed be a problem. And now researchers from Harvard and the University of Montreal report in the Journal of Pediatrics that low-level exposure to organophosphates may significantly increase the risk of attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) in children.

more by Tom Laskawy at Grist

Monsanto, BP, Chevron, ADM, Goldman-Sachs, DuPont ... in this case, Dow ... Notice how the same names keep turning up over and over? And if something happens to your kid, and you hire a lawyer, how many lawyers do you think they're going to bring?

Yep. This is why, during peasant revolts in the fourteenth century, the first thing the peasants did on arriving in a city was kill the nobles' lawyers.

How's your new ice age coming along?

2010-05-16T10:33:00.000-07:00

April 2010 hottest in 131 years; Jan-April period 2010 hottest in 131 years.

I know; in my area people have been complaining of a cold April and nothing will grow. The unseasonably cold weather hit us gardeners hard; and I heard the usual complaint: "So much for global warming." As the old lady in New Jersey said during the record winter precipitation (which happened to be snow; well, it was winter): "Al Gore should be ashamed of himself!"

Well, he's not. And with good reason.

Weather, in any one place at any one time, is not climate, which we can really only track statistically. While my friends and I were shivering by the fires in sweaters, this spring, some places were suffering unimaginably record highs, one after another after another.

Do this, please. Remembering that it is only spring, go to Google News and enter the search terms: India, "heat wave". [with "heat wave" in double quotes]

See that? 47C is becoming common there this spring. Which is over 116F. Which means people are dying. Climate happens everywhere, even if your weather (for now) seems to contradict it.

H.T. Climate Progress and NASA

Reduce your exposure!

2010-05-11T14:11:00.000-07:00

A few years ago, scientists released one of the first studies to examine how diet can affect your exposure to toxic substances. In that case, researchers had a group of Seattle schoolchildren eat an organic diet for five days a week. Almost immediately, pesticide levels in the children’s bodies dropped to almost undetectable levels—and returned to “normal” after they resumed eating a conventional diet.
Now, a group of Korean scientists have looked at what kind of toxins disappear when research subjects stopped eating conventional meat:
People who adopted a vegetarian diet for just five days show reduced levels of toxic chemicals in their bodies. In particular, levels of hormone disrupting chemicals and antibiotics used in livestock were lower after the five-day vegetarian program. The pilot study suggests that people may be able reduce their exposure to potentially dangerous chemicals through dietary choices, such as limiting consumption of animal products like meats and dairy.

more by Tom Laskawy at Grist

"Limiting consumption of animal products like meats and dairy" here really means limiting consumption of industrial farming products, particularly from CAFOs (Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations). In other words, such places aren't especially good for you (let alone the animals) even if they weren't ruining groundwater and rivers and breeding new superbugs.

Support your local, organic, conscientious, and humane farmer. Better yet, become one.

What's cooking?

2010-05-07T14:32:00.000-07:00

Odds of Cooking the Grandkids

There is a horrible paper in this week's Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (hat-tip Desdemona Despair), which looks at how the limits of human physiology interact with upper-range global warming scenarios. The bottom line conclusion is that there is a small - of order 5% - risk of global warming creating a situation in which a large fraction of the planet was uninhabitable (in the sense that if you were outside for an extended period during the hottest days of the year, even in the shade with wet clothing, you would die). To give you a feeling for the likely uninhabitable regions, it's the portions of the map above that are in the white or pink/purple color (above 35^oC wet bulb temperature on the scale). As you can see, it includes most of the eastern US, much of inland Brazil and Latin America, tropical Africa, pretty much all of India, portions of northern China, and most of Australia. Plenty to qualify as a "Risk to Global Civilization", I think.

more by Stuart Staniford at Early Warning

seen at Casaubon's Book

Weeds of the world, unite

2010-05-06T10:41:00.000-07:00

U.S. farmers are dealing with a superweed epidemic, and it's not as groovy as it sounds on first read. Ubiquitous use of the weed killer Roundup over time has spawned herbicide-resistant superweeds , much as heavy use of antibiotics over past decades has bred drug-resistant germs and bacteria.

Roundup -- which was created by Monsanto but is now sold generically under the common name glyphosate -- has been a boon for agriculture over the last 20 years. Genetically modified crops are immune to its poison, meaning farmers can spray down their entire fields with the stuff, killing off invasive weeds while leaving their harvests in perfect order. It degrades quickly, and cuts down on erosion, agricultural fuel cost, and carbon emissions because farmers don't have to plow their fields under each season.

At least, they didn't have to until now. The first glyphosate-resistant species was identified a decade ago, but that resistance is now shared by at least 10 species in 22 states, affecting between 7 million and 10 million acres of land predominantly hosting soybeans, cotton and corn. Farmers battling with resistant strains of horseweed, pigweed and ragweed are having to turn to stronger herbicides, plowing and pulling weeds by hand, methods that could lead to increased environmental harm, lower yields, and rising prices. Andrew Wargo III, president of the Arkansas Association of Conservation Districts, told the Times, "It is the single largest threat to production agriculture that we have ever seen."

More at Popular Science

Decolonization and crop disaster

2010-05-03T10:19:00.000-07:00

Disturbing evidence that honeybees are in terminal decline has emerged from the United States where, for the fourth year in a row, more than a third of colonies have failed to survive the winter.
The decline of the country's estimated 2.4 million beehives began in 2006, when a phenomenon dubbed colony collapse disorder (CCD) led to the disappearance of hundreds of thousands of colonies. Since then more than three million colonies in the US and billions of honeybees worldwide have died and scientists are no nearer to knowing what is causing the catastrophic fall in numbers.
The number of managed honeybee colonies in the US fell by 33.8% last winter, according to the annual survey by the Apiary Inspectors of America and the US government's Agricultural Research Service (ARS).
The collapse in the global honeybee population is a major threat to crops. It is estimated that a third of everything we eat depends upon honeybee pollination, which means that bees contribute some £26bn to the global economy.
Potential causes range from parasites, such as the bloodsucking varroa mite, to viral and bacterial infections, pesticides and poor nutrition stemming from intensive farming methods. The disappearance of so many colonies has also been dubbed "Mary Celeste syndrome" due to the absence of dead bees in many of the empty hives.
US scientists have found 121 different pesticides in samples of bees, wax and pollen, lending credence to the notion that pesticides are a key problem. "We believe that some subtle interactions between nutrition, pesticide exposure and other stressors are converging to kill colonies," said Jeffery Pettis, of the ARS's bee research laboratory.

more at The Guardian (UK)

"We've got it covered..." ...with oil.

2010-05-01T13:06:00.000-07:00

Ian MacDonald, professor of oceanography at Florida State University who specializes in tracking ocean oil seeps from satellite imagery, said there may already be more than 9 million gallons of oil floating in the Gulf now, based on his estimate of a 25,000 barrel-a-day leak rate. That’s compared to 12 million gallons spilled in the Valdez accident.

Interior Department officials said it may take 90 days to cap the leaking well. If the 25,000 barrels a day is accurate and it leaks for 90 days, that’s 2.25 million barrels or 94.5 million gallons.

Mr. MacDonald and his colleagues at the Earth, Ocean and Atmospheric Science Department have worked jointly with National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in the past on oil spill tracking, and have shared their estimates with NOAA scientists. He said the NOAA scientists didn’t dispute the calculations.

A NOAA spokeswoman said the government estimate of 5,000 barrels a day leaking from the BP PLC deep sea well was based on collaborative assessments produced by BP, NOAA and the U.S. Coast Guard….

John Amos, a geologist who has worked as a consultant with companies such as BP, ExxonMobil Corp. and Royal Dutch Shell PLC on tracking and measuring oil spills from satellite data, said NOAA raised its estimates to 5,000 barrels a day after he and his colleagues published calculations that showed the original figures were far too low based on the NOAA data. Amos has also previously participated in a joint industry-NASA study using satellite imagines to detect and track oil slicks.

Mr. Amos said the 5,000 barrels a day is the “extremely low end” of their estimates. He said, based on NOAA maps, a more realistic figure is 20,000 barrels a day.

more at Wall Street Journal

Pro-dirty-and-poisonous-earth activists will just have to wink and grin louder.