Any Questions?

Chomsky on Climate Change and Nixonian Environmentalism

Noam Chomsky interview, on Slate:

"Sticking with social and political change, what is going on with climate-change denial in the United States?"

"The Republican party now has its catechism of things you have to repeat in lockstep, kind of like the old Communist party. One of them is denying climate change."

"Why is it happening?"

"It happens that there's a huge propaganda offensive carried out by the major business lobbies, the energy associations, and so on. It's no secret, they're trying to convince people that the science is unreliable, that it's a liberal hoax. Those who want to be funded by business and energy associations and so on might be led into repeating this catechism. Or maybe they actually believe it.

"The Republican-dominated House of Representatives is now dismantling measures of control over environmental destruction that were instituted by Richard Nixon. That shows you how far to the right they have gone. Today Nixon would be a flaming radical and Dwight D. Eisenhower would be off the spectrum. Even Ronald Reagan would be on the left somewhere. These are interesting, important things happening in the richest and most powerful country in the world that we should be very much concerned about."

Climate change denial is simply greed writ large. Acknowledging that the climate is changing - and it is (that proof is incontrovertible) - means that business models will need to be changed and profits will almost certainly go down (at least in the short run). But these changes will need to be made anyway, if only because of the dwindling reserves of non-renewable energy sources, like oil, so it would be best to make the changes now. Companies would rather be reactionary, though, instead of obtaining the first mover advantages they could get for the future.

Read the full interview here: Everything Was a Problem and We Did Not Understand a Thing

NASA | Temperature Data: 1880-2011

Global temperatures have warmed significantly since 1880, the beginning of what scientists call the "modern record." At this time, the coverage provided by weather stations allowed for essentially global temperature data. As greenhouse gas emissions from energy production, industry and vehicles have increased, temperatures have climbed, most notably since the late 1970s. In this animation of temperature data from 1880-2011, reds indicate temperatures higher than the average during a baseline period of 1951-1980, while blues indicate lower temperatures than the baseline average.

Data source: NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies. Visualization credit: NASA Goddard Space Flight Center Scientific Visualization Studio

Note: For more information, see NASA Finds 2011 Ninth-Warmest Year on Record.

James Balog: Time-lapse Proof of Global Warming

Let the global warming deniers refute the evidence!

This first video is a TED talk by nature photographer James Balog, who has set up a project called the Extreme Ice Survey to record, through time-lapse photography, just how much (and fast) glaciers are retreating in various parts of the world.



This second video is a promotional video EIS created showing how the project is being done.

Hurricane Irene

NASA's Terra spacecraft passed over Hurricane Irene while it was just north of the Bahamas on August 25, 2011, at 11:45 a.m. EDT. At the time, Irene was a category three hurricane on the Saffir-Simpson scale, with maximum sustained winds of 115 mph (185 kph), and a minimum central pressure of 951 hPa, according to NOAA's National Hurricane Center. The storm made landfall in North Carolina on the morning of August 27 as a category one hurricane.

This set of images, acquired by the Multi-angle Imaging SpectroRadiometer (MISR) instrument on Terra on August 25, highlights geophysical parameters important to scientists studying these storms.

MISR uses nine cameras to capture images of the hurricane from different angles. The leftmost image is taken from an angle of 46 degrees. The storm is visible to the north of Cuba, which is located in the lower left of the image. Irene's eye is covered with clouds. Strong storms in the eyewall and the outer rain bands appear as bright, textured regions.

The multiple angles of MISR's cameras provide a stereographic view of Hurricane Irene. This information can be used to determine the height of the storm's cloud tops. As shown in the center image, these heights exceed 11 miles (18 kilometers) in the center of the storm, and in the outer rain bands, where the vertical motion is strongest. Lower clouds, at an altitude of about 5 miles (8 kilometers), are visible along the storm's northern edge.

The Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) instrument also flies on Terra and measures cloud top temperatures. Higher clouds are colder, and the highest clouds in Hurricane Irene on August 25 had temperatures less than minus 100 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 73 degrees Celsius).

While there is good correspondence between the MISR cloud top heights and the MODIS cloud top temperatures, these two observations provide different insights into the behavior of clouds near the core of the storm. Researchers are studying how the two measurements can be used in combination to estimate hurricane intensity.

These images cover more than 800 miles (1,300 kilometers) in the north-south direction, and are centered near 27 degrees North latitude, 75.5 degrees West longitude.

Photo credit: NASA/GSFC/LaRC/JPL, MISR Team

The Scourge of Peak Oil

The scourge of 'peak oil' - Features - Al Jazeera English

An interesting article from Al-Jazeera on peak oil.  The fact that we, humanity, are coming to the peak in oil production worldwide is not surprising to me.  What makes this article interesting, though, are the sections that describe how lifestyles, especially in Western countries are going to change.  Some excerpts:

Whipple is blunt about what life will look like in a post-peak oil world.

"You're going to see major changes in industrial civilisation," he said, adding that he expects oil to once again approach $150 per barrel in the next 18 months. "In the US, where we aren't used to paying $10 for a gallon of gas like they do in Germany, that [$150 per barrel of oil] will really slow things down."

He believes discretionary driving will basically stop, and added: "Anything with a parking lot out front is going to be in trouble."

...

"It [peak oil] is a crisis in the sense that someone is going to have to change their expectations about mobility, and the idea that anyone can go anywhere is unlikely to continue. Sooner or later, people are going to start wondering how they will get from place to place without their cars."

Due to rising fuel costs, Perl sees flying becoming less of an option for the global population.

"I tell people to go to their favourite travel website like Expedia, and pick your destination and dates, and hit the fare selector for first class, because that's the price it will be in the future for travelling. And ask yourself if you will make the trip. Flying cheap will no longer exist as an option."

...

Professor Michael Bomford, a research scientist at Kentucky State University, said that, in the US, far more energy is used when food leaves the farm than the amount of energy required to grow it.

"The long supply chain with food makes consumers particularly vulnerable to spikes in energy prices," Bomford told Al Jazeera.

Evidence of this is clear.

On June 23 French President Nicolas Sarkozy urged world leaders to take action against the "plague" of food price surges. World food prices have risen 37 per cent in a year, driving 44 million more people into poverty.

Wheat nearly doubled in cost during the past twelve months, as Russia and Ukraine cut exports after droughts decimated crops. The UN estimates nations will spend $1.29 trillion on food imports this year alone, making it the most money spent on imports in one year, and a 21 per cent increase over 2010.

Heinberg believes oil prices are now acting as a cap on global economic activity.

"Every time the economy starts to recover it pushes [the price of] oil up, and then the economy falters," he said, "We're damned if we do and damned if we don't. If oil price declines, it is because the economy is in the toilet. Global oil scarcity has triggered the limits to growth scenario and we've seen the last of economic growth as we know it, at least in the US."

The fact of the matter is that unconstrained capitalism as the primary worldwide business model based on continuing growth will ultimately need to be replaced by a lower-growth model that recognizes and works within the constraints provided by natural resources. This is not just an energy issue, but is also going to include issues such as food and clean water. "Business as usual" just isn't going to cut it anymore.

Mount Merapi, Java, Indonesia

On October 26, 2010, Merapi volcano in Indonesia erupted, killing at least 38 people and prompting authorities to evacuate tens of thousands of inhabitants from around the mountain. On the night of October 30, the Advanced Spaceborne Thermal Emission and Reflection Radiometer (ASTER) instrument on NASA's Terra spacecraft captured a thermal infrared image (center Figure 1) of the hot volcanic flow that resulted from collapse of the summit lava dome, and that led to the ensuing release of ash plumes (center Figure 1; hot areas are brightest). In the daytime image from 2003 (left Figure 1), vegetation is displayed in red, and older volcanic flows are in blue-gray. The composite image on the right superposes the hot flow and summit dome areas from 2010 in yellow on top of the 2003 image. Gaps in the hot areas are due to concealment by intervening clouds in the 2010 night infrared image. The ASTER image is located at 7.5 degrees south latitude, 110.5 degrees east longitude. The image covers an area of 17 by 19 kilometers (11 by 12 miles).

With its 14 spectral bands from the visible to the thermal infrared wavelength region and its high spatial resolution of 15 to 90 meters (about 50 to 300 feet), ASTER images Earth to map and monitor the changing surface of our planet. ASTER is one of five Earth-observing instruments launched December 18, 1999, on Terra. The instrument was built by Japan's Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry.

Photo credit: NASA/GSFC/METI/ERSDAC/JAROS, and U.S./Japan ASTER Science Team

Update: Another, less impressive image from ASTER can be found at PIA13607: Merapi Volcano Continues its Destructive Eruption.

Update #2: Another set of photos (visible light and infrared) from NASA: PIA13634: ASTER Images Merapi's Continuing Eruption, (released 18 November 2010).

Hungary's Toxic Sludge Spill

On October 4, 2010, a million cubic meters (35 million cubic feet) of red sludge spilled from a reservoir at an alumina plant in Ajka in western Hungary. Four people were killed and about 100 injured.* The sludge entered the Marcal River and has reached the Danube. Aquatic life in the Marcal was severely harmed; the mud also caused significant damage in nearby villages and towns, as well as adjacent farmland.

On October 11, when the Advanced Spaceborne Thermal Emission and Reflection Radiometer (ASTER) instrument on NASA's Terra spacecraft captured this image, the reservoir breach and downstream flow of the red sludge were still prominently visible. The ASTER image is located at 47.1 degrees north latitude, 17.5 degrees east longitude. The image covers an area of 14 by 34 kilometers (8.9 by 21 miles).

Photo credit: NASA/GSFC/METI/ERSDAC/JAROS, and U.S./Japan ASTER Science Team

* At the time of this posting, the death toll has risen to eight; 45 people are currently hospitalized, with two in very serious condition. (Source)

Update:  One of the towns affected by this disaster has made the best of their recovery efforts; see  Eco-Friendly Makeover for Hungarian Village.

The Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill by ASTER

On April 20, 2010, an explosion destroyed the Deepwater Horizon oil platform operating in the Gulf of Mexico 80 kilometers (50 miles) offshore, killing 11 crew members, and releasing 5,000 barrels of oil per day into the water. The huge oil slick was being carried towards the Mississippi River Delta, and was expected to reach the Louisiana, Alabama, and Mississippi shores as early as Monday, May 3. This image, from the Advanced Spaceborne Thermal Emission and Reflection Radiometer (ASTER) instrument on NASA's Terra spacecraft, was acquired May 1, 2010. It is located at 29.0 degrees north latitude, 88.3 degrees west longitude. The image covers an area of 79.1 by 103.9 kilometers (49 by 64.4 miles).

Photo credit: NASA/GSFC/METI/ERSDAC/JAROS, and U.S./Japan ASTER Science Team

But Will They? I Don't Think So.

Bill Maher on the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico:

Every asshole who ever chanted 'Drill baby drill' should have to report to the Gulf coast today for cleanup duty

Miscellaneous Links (18 June 2009)

Astronomy & Science:
SNR 0104: An Unusual Suspect (A supernova remnant (a star that blew up) with an unusual shape.)

Stars at the Galactic Center (The center of the Milky Way galaxy, as seen in infrared (heat) light.)

Streaming Dark Nebulas near B44

M13: A Great Globular Cluster of Stars (One of the better pictures I've seen of M13.)

NGC 6240: Merging Galaxies

Discovery Magazine: Holes of Silence (Sonic black holes. Cool!)

Science @ NASA: Mystery of the Missing Sunspots, Solved?

Climate change is already having an impact in the Midwest and across the US (The good news: a longer growing season (by one week) for crops. The bad news: temperature and humidity increases, more winter and spring rain, less rain in the summer (i.e., more droughts), more flooding, lower water levels in the Great Lakes, reduced air quality, more insect-borne diseases, pollen and fungi. But don't worry: global warming is just a hoax, doncha know?)


Comics:
Dilbert ("Too crazy too fast.")

One Big Happy ("Big deal! I know how to say, 'What's the matter with you? You're getting on my nerves," in Italian.")

One Big Happy (Grandma vs. Grandpa.)

One Big Happy (That's right, kids! All us daddies eat breakfast in our underwear. Don't puke while you watch! ;) )

Working Daze (I had a supervisor like this, a guy who kept calling me "Jim." (Not my name.) I could never get him to remember my real name, but when he asked for "Jim" I knew he was asking for me. :P )

Working Daze (Survivor's remorse.)


Science Fiction:
io9: The Composers That Make Space Adventures Epic (Can't disagree with a single one.)

ListVerse: Top 10 Survival Tips For People In Horror Flicks (#11: Teenagers should never have sex! ;) )

SciFi Scanner: Mary Robinette Kowal - Fantasy's Male Warriors Kick Butt (While Baring Butt)

SF Signal: It's Time For Indy To Hang Up His Hat, For Good

SF Signal: Do Literary Awards Affect Your Reading Choices?

The Architects' Journal: The architecture of Star Wars (pt I) (See also part II.)


The Truly Miscellaneous:
APOD: Pyrenees Paraselene (Every now and then, APOD publishes photos that have little to do with Astronomy. This beautiful picture looks down at the Pyrenees mountains, which separate Spain from France, from a local observatory.)

BWG: Asinine Assertion

Google Fusion Tables

IZ Reloaded: Laptop Uses AA Batteries

Kottke.org: 50 Films You Can Wait to See After You're Dead (I've seen three, "Son of the Mask" and "Catwoman," only because they were on TV, and "Rocky V," which was surprisingly good and shouldn't be on this list.)

The Mad Logophile: Foreign Words & Phrases (This diary over at Daily Kos examines the meanings of several hundred foreign words and phrases, including twenty-three from the Middle East, in Arabic, Persian and Turkish.)

WTF Is It Now?!?: Brett Favre, missing the spotlight, to torture country again

Yet Another Web Site: Are audiophiles really this stupid?

Yet Another Web Site: A really stupid article

Links for 18 May 2009

Another light day; people must still be sleeping off the weekend. ;)

Politics:
Michael Steele uses former Gov. Christie Todd Whitman as proof Republicans are a 'Big Tent' party. She quit the GOP in 2003.

The Chris Matthews Show: Has Cheney Influenced Obama's National Security Decisions? ("Centuries from now, when historians want to know how it all went so terribly wrong for the United States, all they need to do is look at this clip. They'll listen how these talking heads--people allegedly employed for the purpose of informing the public--these supposed erudite and informed members of the pundit class just yawned and shrugged at the notion of the torture of human beings, preferring to look at it from a political point of view." The problem goes deeper than that, of course, but it's a start.)

Obama-Netanyahu must not be Kennedy-Khrushchev ("If Obama can cow Netanyahu, his Middle East policy may have a chance. If Netanyahu comes away thinking he can thumb his nose at Washington, the whole Middle East could be in flames by the end of Obama's first term.")


Miscellaneous:
"The Paradox of Declining Female Happiness" ("By many objective measures the lives of women in the United States have improved over the past 35 years, yet we show that measures of subjective well-being indicate that women’s happiness has declined both absolutely and relative to men." Perhaps because more women must work today compared with women in the early- to mid-70s?)

How Sand Dunes Grow Huge

Foreign Policy: Thomas Friedman’s Plan for a Hot, Flat, and Crowded World

One other article I found of interest today, a short interview by Foreign Policy magazine with Tom Friedman, the NY Times columnist and author. Tom is coming out with a new book, and I thought three sections of the interview were worth bringing some more exposure: on American oil "independence" and offshore drilling, on Tom's vision of a "green revolution," and a brief discussion about the possibility of China going green before the U.S. The entire article can be read here.

BTW, that "drill, drill, drill" quotation is a classic: When I hear McCain pounding the table for “drill, drill, drill,” it reminds me of someone pounding the table for IBM Selectric typewriters on the eve of the IT revolution.

Foreign Policy: In his speech to the Democratic National Convention last Thursday, U.S. Presidential candidate Sen. Barack Obama promised, “In 10 years, we will finally end our dependence on oil from the Middle East.” Is that even feasible? Does anyone you talk to believe that’s doable?

Thomas Friedman: Well, if you just talked about oil imports from the Middle East, I think it is feasible. I don’t know exactly how he would want to get there, but I think that it is a feasible goal if you’re just talking about the percentage of our oil that comes from the Middle East.

FP: And what about drilling? Republican presidential candidate Sen. John McCain, his running mate Gov. Sarah Palin, and President George W. Bush are implying that lifting environmental restrictions on drilling is the way to promote energy independence.

TF: Well, I think it’s patent nonsense. No one believes that somehow offshore, there’s enough oil in any near term and even the long term to provide us oil independence. It’s the wrong approach because in a world that’s hot, flat, and crowded, fossil fuels—and particularly crude oil—are going to be expensive and exhausting. Therefore the focus should be on the next great global industry: clean energy technology. When I hear McCain pounding the table for “drill, drill, drill,” it reminds me of someone pounding the table for IBM Selectric typewriters on the eve of the IT revolution.

I’m not against offshore drilling, by the way, because I believe the technology and the safety has improved far beyond where it was back in the 70s, 80s, and 90s, even. What I’m against is making it the centerpiece of our energy policy. If all McCain said was, “Let’s drill, but let’s also throw everything into innovating the next generation of clean-energy technologies,” I’d say, “You’ve got it exactly right, pal.”

FP: Your new book is called Hot, Flat, and Crowded: Why We Need a Green Revolution — and How It Can Renew America. What do you mean by a “green revolution” and how do we get there from here?

TF: The green revolution is about how we produce abundant, cheap, clean, reliable electrons, which are the answer to the big problems we face in the world today. I would point to five problems, and they’re all related: Energy and resource supply and demand, petrodictatorship, climate change, biodiversity loss, and energy poverty. They all have one solution: abundant, cheap, clean, reliable electrons. The search for and the discovery of a source of those electrons is going to be the next great global industry. And I think the country that mounts a revolution to be the leader of that industry is going to be a country whose standard of living is going to improve, whose respect in the world is going to improve, whose air is going to improve, whose innovation is going to improve, and whose national security is going to improve. That’s what this book is about.
Click Here!

I want a green-energy bubble. I want so many people throwing crazy dollars at every idea, in every garage, that we have 100,000 people trying 100,000 things, five of which might work, and two might be the next green Google. But I don’t want a Manhattan Project of 12 people in Los Alamos. I want it to be like the IT revolution: everyone becoming a programmer. Only in this case, it’s everyone becoming a green innovator. What IT was to the 80s and 90s, ET, energy technology, will be to the early 21st century.

FP: What conditions don’t exist right now that could create this bubble?

TF: Three things. One is a price on carbon, a fixed, durable price signal that says, “Carbon is always going to be this price.” Let’s just use a simple example: We put a floor under the price of crude oil that says, “Oil simply will not fall below $110 a barrel. If it does, we’ll tax it up.”

Second, we need to change the bargain we have with our electric and natural gas power utilities. Your dad was right when he came into your room and you’d left the lights on and he said, “What, do you own stock in the utility company?” He was right, because the more you left your lights on, the more money the utility made. And we need to change that bargain—this is already going on in California—so that utilities are paid by how much energy they help you save, not by how much energy they help you consume.

And third, we need a national renewable portfolio standard that says to every utility, “By 2025, you need to produce 30 percent of your electricity by renewable power: wind, solar, biomass, hydro, you name it.”

...

FP: You went to China for the Olympic Games, and I know you’ve been there many times in the past. Do you think China is serious about going green? Is China going to have a green revolution before the United States does?

TF: Every time I go to China, as I say in the book, it always strikes me that people speak with greater ease and breathe with greater difficulty. As the country grows, it gets more integrated with the world, standards of living rise, and people are able to move more and have more personal freedom. I don’t want to exaggerate it, but clearly it’s a more open place.

So, they speak with greater ease but they breathe with greater difficulty. And that’s a real tension. Right now, if you said, “Tom, snapshot today: Where’s China at? OK, choice: More growth or less pollution?” They’re going to go for more growth. Look what happened after the Olympics. They cleaned up Beijing for two weeks by shutting down factories and limiting driving. But as soon as the Olympics were over, they went back to the old system.

But you’re also getting a transition. You’re getting the birth of wind power and solar companies in China, so they’re seeing the market potential. And you’re seeing the rise of an environmental consciousness. The inertia and the momentum of the old, pure GDP system is much stronger than the green GDP system, but there is now a competition between the two.

China is hiding behind the United States, saying, “If the Americans aren’t going to do it, why should we?” When we move they will move, because we define modernity for them. They’ve copied us: our highways, our cars—the whole thing. And when we change, they will change.

Robert Reich: "No" to Further Offshore Drilling

The other day, in my update about how much oil the U.S. imports, I wrote:

...[S]hame on you ... if you believe either McCain or Cheney that drilling for oil offshore or up in Alaska will make a significant difference. Two reasons: "drop in the bucket" and "long-term projects," neither of which will lower your gas prices.

On the same day that I wrote the above, Robert Reich, former Secretary of Labor during the Clinton administration and currently a professor at the University of California (and a blogger), had a similar post on why the U.S. should not do further offshore drilling for oil. His first and second reasons are identical to what I wrote above, just further developed:

First, the crude oil market is global. Oil companies sell all over the world. The price of crude is established by global supply and demand. So even if 3 million additional barrels a day could be extruded from lands and seabeds of the United States (that sum is the most optimistic figure, after all exploration is done), that sum is tiny compared to 86 million barrels now produced around the world. In other words, even under the best circumstances, the price to American consumers would hardly budge.

Second, whatever impact such drilling might have would occur far in the future anyway. Oil isn't just waiting there to be pumped out of the earth. Exploration takes time. Erecting drilling equipment takes time. Getting the oil out takes time. Turning crude into various oil products takes time. According the the federal energy agency, if we opening drilling where drilling is now banned, there'd be no significant impact on domestic crude and natural gas production until 2030.

Third, oil companies already hold a significant number of leases on federal lands and offshore seabeds where they are now allowed to drill, and which they have not yet fully explored. Why then would they seek more drilling rights? Because they want more leases now, when the Bushies are still in office. Ownership of these parcels would serve to to pump up their balance sheets even if no oil is pumped.

Last but by no means least, environmental risks are still significant.

HT: Economist's View

350

Bill McKibben writes in the LA Times that we here on Earth are very much in danger of losing our civilizations if world governments don't get their act together very quickly (by the year 2012). The adjustments that need to be made will be very painful, politically and economically, but the choice will be either to make the adjustments now or see humanity slide into an environmental disaster. Some excerpts:

All of a sudden it isn't morning in America, it's dusk on planet Earth.

There's a number -- a new number -- that makes this point most powerfully. It may now be the most important number on Earth: 350. As in parts per million of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

A few weeks ago, NASA's chief climatologist, James Hansen, submitted a paper to Science magazine with several coauthors. The abstract attached to it argued -- and I have never read stronger language in a scientific paper -- that "if humanity wishes to preserve a planet similar to that on which civilization developed and to which life on Earth is adapted, paleoclimate evidence and ongoing climate change suggest that CO2 will need to be reduced from its current 385 ppm to at most 350 ppm."

Hansen cites six irreversible tipping points -- massive sea level rise and huge changes in rainfall patterns, among them -- that we'll pass if we don't get back down to 350 soon; and the first of them, judging by last summer's insane melt of Arctic ice, may already be behind us.

So it's a tough diagnosis. It's like the doctor telling you that your cholesterol is way too high and, if you don't bring it down right away, you're going to have a stroke. So you take the pill, you swear off the cheese, and, if you're lucky, you get back into the safety zone before the coronary. It's like watching the tachometer edge into the red zone and knowing that you need to take your foot off the gas before you hear that clunk up front.

In this case, though, it's worse than that because we're not taking the pill and we are stomping on the gas -- hard. Instead of slowing down, we're pouring on the coal, quite literally. Two weeks ago came the news that atmospheric carbon dioxide had jumped 2.4 parts per million last year -- two decades ago, it was going up barely half that fast.

And suddenly the news arrives that the amount of methane, another potent greenhouse gas accumulating in the atmosphere, has unexpectedly begun to soar as well. It appears that we've managed to warm the far north enough to start melting huge patches of permafrost, and massive quantities of methane trapped beneath it have begun to bubble forth.

And don't forget: China is building more power plants; India is pioneering the $2,500 car; and Americans are buying TVs the size of windshields, which suck juice ever faster.

...

We're the ones who kicked the warming off; now the planet is starting to take over the job. Melt all that Arctic ice, for instance, and suddenly the nice white shield that reflected 80% of incoming solar radiation back into space has turned to blue water that absorbs 80% of the sun's heat.

...

If we did everything right, Hansen says, we could see carbon emissions start to fall fairly rapidly and the oceans begin to pull some of that CO2 out of the atmosphere. Before the century was out, we might even be on track back to 350. We might stop just short of some of those tipping points, like the Road Runner screeching to a halt at the very edge of the cliff.

More likely, though, we're the coyote -- because "doing everything right" means that political systems around the world would have to take enormous and painful steps right away. It means no more new coal-fired power plants anywhere, and plans to quickly close the ones already in operation. (Coal-fired power plants operating the way they're supposed to are, in global warming terms, as dangerous as nuclear plants melting down.) It means making car factories turn out efficient hybrids next year, just the way U.S. automakers made them turn out tanks in six months at the start of World War II. It means making trains an absolute priority and planes a taboo.

It means making every decision wisely because we have so little time and so little money, at least relative to the task at hand. And hardest of all, it means the rich countries of the world sharing resources and technology freely with the poorest ones so that they can develop dignified lives without burning their cheap coal.

It's possible. The United States launched a Marshall Plan once, and could do it again, this time in relation to carbon. But at a time when the president has, once more, urged drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, it seems unlikely. At a time when the alluring phrase "gas tax holiday" -- which would actually encourage more driving and more energy consumption -- has danced into our vocabulary, it's hard to see. And if it's hard to imagine sacrifice here, imagine China, where people produce a quarter as much carbon apiece as Americans do.

Still, as long as it's not impossible, we've got a duty to try to push those post-Kyoto negotiations in the direction of reality. In fact, it's about the most obvious duty humans have ever faced.

Bill McKibben, a scholar in residence at Middlebury College and the author, most recently, of "The Bill McKibben Reader," is the co-founder of Project 350 (www.350.org), devoted to reducing carbon dioxide in the atmosphere to 350 parts per million. A longer version of this article appears at Tomdispatch.com.

HT: Economist's View

Burning Salt Water

John Kanzius, a retiree, has found a way to burn salt water using radio waves. This is one of those wonderful, serendipitous accidents where Kanzius was trying to find a way to kill cancer cells using radio waves but, instead, discovered an alternative source of energy. The water burns because the radio waves shake the water molecules hard enough to break the chemical bonds that hold the hydrogen atoms to the oxygen atom. The hydrogen atoms then burn with the oxygen atom, causing an intense flame (as you can see in the below video).

Presently, there are two significant hurdles to using Kanzius' method for energy generation. First, more energy is consumed by the radio wave generator than is released by the burning hydrogen. Second, the vibration of the salt molecules (sodium chloride) releases chlorine gas which, of course, is toxic. Should both of these problems be overcome, the world may have a new source of energy that should last us for thousands of years.



(HT: Mohamad Latiff)

Blue Marble: The Next Generation

Credit: Reto Stockli, NASA

Above are two new "Blue Marble" images of Earth's Eastern and Western Hemispheres, including cloud cover, oceans, phytoplankton activity, topography, and city lights in the nightime part of the hemisphere.

The original project, Blue Marble 2000, was completed for the 30th anniversary of Earth Day and aimed to recreate the view of Earth that Apollo astronauts had from space. The final image, released in April 2000, displayed cloud cover from a single day, the oceans, exaggerated topographic features and vegetation for the Western Hemisphere.

The new images have combined even more of Earth's features into more complete, higher-resolution images of both the Eastern and Western hemisphere. The data used to create the new images span a longer period of time than the original and have a resolution of 500 meters (1,600 feet), versus the 1,000 meters (3, 273 feet) resolution of the older image.

Measurements of reflected sunlight taken by the NASA instrument Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) (aboard both the Terra and Aqua satellites) in July 2004 were used to recreate the land surfaces. MODIS observations of daytime sea ice between late August and early September 2001 were used to recreate polar sea ice in the image.

The ocean was generated by combining Terra MODIS observations of the reflectance of sea water with Aqua MODIS observations of chlorophyll content data over the open ocean to represent the activity of phytoplankton.

Cloud cover is taken from a single-day snapshot by MODIS on July 29, 2001.

City lights as they would appear on Earth at night were taken from data collected by the Defense Meteorological Satellite Program mission between 1994 and 1995.

Topography is based on radar data collected by the Space Shuttle Endeavor during an 11-day mission in February 2000.

The new project, dubbed Blue Marble: Next Generation, also includes other images that are monthly composites of the Earth that show the seasonal variations in vegetation and ice cover over an entire year.

The Economist: Faith Upon the Earth

In this week's (September 22nd) issue of The Economist, there's a one-page article about the hot-and-cold alliance between religious groups and environmental scientists. Personally, I favor such alliances.

In Islam, we believe that mankind, through the acceptance of the Khalifa by Adam (pbuh) on mankind's behalf (2:30), has a responsibility toward our natural environment. The word Khalifa has multiple meanings, including: successor, steward, trustee, viceroy, and guardian. While we have the use of all the natural resources on the earth, in the seas, and in the heavens (14:32-3, 31:20, 45:12-3), we must still use these resources wisely. They were created to facilitate humanity in fulfilling our own purpose for which we were created: to worship and serve Allah (swt).

As a result of this, there has been a trend among Muslims toward ecological stewardship. One of the bright lights in this field is the work of Seyyed Hossein Nasr, who is currently a Professor of Islamic Studies at George Washington University. (For an article that includes a brief interview with Dr. Seyyed, please click here.)

Some excerpts from The Economist:

In many other parts of the world, secular greens and religious people find themselves on the same side of public debates: sometimes hesitantly, sometimes tactically, and sometimes fired by a sense that they have deep things in common.

One more case from India: ornithologists who want to save three species of vulture (endangered because cattle carcasses are tainted by chemicals) see their best ally as the Parsees, who on religious grounds use vultures to dispose of human corpses.

In China, organized religion is much weaker and conservationists also feel more lonely. But Pan Yue, the best-known advocate of green concerns within the Chinese government, says ancient creeds, like Taoism, offer the best hope of making people treat the earth more kindly.

Other tie-ups between faith and ecology are less obvious. In Sweden, the national Lutheran Church, working with Japanese Shintos, recently held a multi-faith meeting on forestry. They agreed to set a new standard for the care of forests owned or managed by religious bodies—in other words, they said, 5% of the world's woods.

...

The terms of the transaction between faith and ecology vary a lot. In places like Scandinavia, where religion is weakish, a cleric who "goes green" may reach a wider audience; in countries like India, where faith is powerful, spiritual messages touch more hearts than secular ones do. That doesn't stop some environmental scientists from saying they are being hijacked by clerics in search of relevance. But Mary Evelyn Tucker, of America's Yale University, says secular greens badly need their spiritual allies: "Religions provide a cultural integrity, a spiritual depth and moral force which secular approaches lack."

Martin Palmer, of the British-based Alliance of Religions and Conservation, says faiths often have the clearest view of the social and economic aspects of an environmental problem. In Newfoundland, he notes, conservationists put curbs on cod fishing—and left the churches to care for families whose living was ruined.

Still, one selling point often used by the religious in their dialogue with science—the fact that faith encourages people to think long-term—may be a mixed blessing. The most pessimistic scientists say mankind has a decade at most to curb greenhouse gases and fend off disastrous global warming; that doesn't leave much time to settle the finer points of metaphysics.

American Theocracy

The past two weeks or so, I've been reading Kevin Phillips' American Theocracy, subtitled, "The peril and politics of radical religion, oil, and borrowed money in the 21st century." (When he refers to "radical religion," he's not talking about Islam but protestant Christianity in the mold of the Southern Baptist Convention, and other fundamentalist and evangelical Christian churches.) The book is a very sobering indictment of American politics and culture, suggesting that a convergence of three problems that face the U.S. (and that the Republican party have embraced) may very well lead to America's "fall from grace," a fall which is largely avoidable but that Americans have set themselves up for.

The following passages came from the last chapter of the book.

One can only imagine the private conversations - the blunt economic language - in the conference rooms of Asian financiers and exporters, each group as confident of its contingent's coming hour as executives in Manhattan and Chicago circa 1919 were of America's: "Why don't the Americans take care of their industry and invest in it? Why do they dither over primitive and antiscientific religion? Why are their children so far behind our own students? Why can't they cut back on their foolish and unaffordable overconsumption of oil? How far can we - should we - support them?"
p. 360


To policy makers elsewhere in the world, Washington's espousals of these priorities in the American South is one thing; pushing them globally is something else. These gender and sex-related postures have gone hand in hand with opposing the Kyoto Protocol, embracing a concept of unilateral preemptive war, declining to accept the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court, and appointing as the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations a man such as John Bolton, whose previous attacks on the world body - some admittedly justified - bore a more polished resemblance to the name calling in the Left Behind series.

Realistically, these events and circumstances hardly encourage foreign central bankers, diplomats, or political leaders to buy and hold U.S. Treasury bonds, support American energy profligacy, join U.S. ventures in the Middle East, or believe that young people unskilled in mathematics, addled by credit cards, and weaned on so-called intelligent design instead of evolution will somehow retool American science for another generation of world industrial leadership. Dismissing global opinion is easy in Idaho or suburban Houston, but in the world beyond the GOP core constituencies, such attitude keep exacting a price.
pp. 370-1


First, put in one column the earlier estimates as to when China might or might not start to catch up with and even pass the United States in gross domestic product [various estimates mentioned in the book place China passing the U.S. by the years 2034-2040]. Next to that sequence put a middle-range forecast for several decades - the 2010s, probably - when global oil production outside OPEC might peak. In the next imaginary column, visualize two related trend lines - the cost of oil per barrel and the annual expense of the growing amount of oil and gas the United States will have to import. The adjacent column should list the prospects over the next fifteen years for the U.S. current account deficit - and one column beyond that, the reader can mentally jot down the unfolding prospects for the U.S. dollar during the same stressful and high-powered time frame.

Beyond these, of course, it will also matter what happens to Social Security, Medicare, the federal budget deficit, and the various tabulations of U.S. public, private, and total credit-market debt. The 2010s could easily be a very troubled decade, and the 2020s after them. Many cautionary time frames are converging just at a time when the political leadership of the United States - much like that of past leading economic world powers in their later days - is not in the most competent hands.
p. 382

Juan Cole on Global Warming, Oil and American Politics/Militarism

Juan Cole, who's at his best when he writes analysis, has done a very good piece on the intersection of global warming, oil, and American politics and militarism. The second sentence of the second paragraph is incorrect, IMO, but otherwise an excellent discussion on these various, interrelated topics.

Only by a Manhattan Project-scale government effort to develop green energy can we hope to avert the worst consequences of global warming, which is likely to raise sea levels at least a foot, and possibly 7 feet over the next century or century and a half. (That would put a lot of cities on both coasts under water). The arctic and antarctic ice shelfs are already falling into the ocean at rates that have astonished climate scientists. The arctic alone lost perennial ice cover the size of Texas in 2004-2005! Warm water takes up more space than cold water and the loss of white ice cover is bad because it radiates a lot of sunlight back out to space. So it is a double whammy.

But the other problem with petroleum and gas as sources of energy is that they are getting scarcer. No big new fields have been found for some time. And in one recent year China generated 40% of new demand for petroleum. If a billion Chinese and a billion Indians adopt the American lifestyle and all want 1.5 automobiles and superhighways to crawl along on, the existing stocks of oil will become objects of fierce competition. This process has already begun, and there is a sea change from the mid-1990s, when oil was still cheap and competition for it limited.

Iraq is an Oil War in the mind of politicians like Dick Cheney. It was necessary to deny it to China and other rivals thirty to fifty years in the future. It was necessary to open its vast petroleum fields up for exploration and cast aside anti-American Baath socialism.

Likewise, the religious rigidity of the Pushtun peoples of Helmand province is not the real reason for the US insistence on occupying Afghanistan. It is the vast Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan gas fields that Cheney has his eye on. It was the US hope to use a pipeline from Turkmenistan to supply Pakistan and India, and so forestall a deal by those two countries with Iran. The inability of the Bush administration to calm things down in Afghanistan sufficiently for anyone to dream of putting in such a pipeline and having it avoid routine sabotage has made it likely that Iran will break out of the Bush boycott toward the East.

Hunger for future rights to petroleum and positioning the US to remain a superpower in a world of hydrocarbon scarcity is also driving the campaign to get up a war against Iran. Why can Pakistan have a nuclear weapon, and that is all right, but Iran cannot? Pakistan has very little petroleum. Iran has a lot, and maybe 750 trillion cubic feet of gas in the southwest. If it gets a bomb, regime change becomes impossible, and if Iran wants to tie its supplies up in proprietary contracts with China and India, locking out the United States, it will be able to do so.

Continued heavy dependence on gas and oil therefore not only turns the world into a hothouse, with rising seas, ever more destructive hurricanes, and possibly disastrous shifts in the ocean currents, but it also drives the United States to more and more wars.

And, note that the wars are not even successful in allowing a practical oil grab of the sort Cheney and Lee Raymond dreamed of.

Indeed, you could now, in retrospect, turn their whole argument around on them. US militarism cannot secure petroleum and gas supplies from places such as Iraq, because the pipelines are so easily sabotaged and local nationalisms and religious activism make it impossible for people to accept that kind of US hegemony.

Since the Pentagon cannot practically speaking hope to safeguard US petroleum supplies from the Gulf, national security requires a massive and rapid research and development program of green energy. A lot of green technology, especially solar, would come down in price rapidly if enough government money were thrown at it. We need to press Congress on this, and maybe Californians can craft some of their famous referendum items. That would be one way to promote a new generation of electric cars.

Green energy -- wind, thermal, solar, maybe ultimately fusion, etc. -- is what would allow the US to retain its autonomy and independence into the next century, and what would allow it to avoid losing more cities the way Bush and Cheney lost New Orleans. Oil and War will, in contrast, ruin us all.