Category: Environment

Cross-posted from THE ENVIRONMENTALIST

Three years ago today, in what scientists refer to as the Great Sumatra-Andaman earthquake, the resultant tsunami caused more than 225,000 deaths in eleven countries along the shores of the Indian Ocean.

The 2004 tsunami has since been estimated as the ninth worst natural disaster in modern history, which deserves (at least) 225,000 moments of silence and reflection.  

For the people of Java, Indonesia, however, which has again been hit by rising waters, the monsoon rains that have impacted their region on the tsunami’s third anniversary don’t leave time for reflection as they run from landslides that are forcing thousands from their homes:

At least 80 people have been killed or are reported missing after floods triggered landslides in the central Java region of Indonesia.  Local officials say they fear the death toll could rise. Thousands have been forced to seek shelter after their homes were buried or washed away.  Landslides and floods are regular in Indonesia and many blame deforestation.

More below the jump…

Cross-posted from THE ENVIRONMENTALIST

(I’m having trouble figuring out if this latest Bush Administration move is cynical or arrogant or both…)

Just after the Bush Administration signed an auto fuel efficiency bill, they denied a request for a waiver by California to tighten their own emission standards.

The Bush administration said Wednesday night that it would deny California’s bid to set stricter vehicle emissions standards than federal law required as part of the state’s efforts to fight climate change.

The E.P.A’s decision was a victory for the American auto companies, and came just hours after President Bush signed legislation that will raise fuel economy standards by 40 percent to 35 miles a gallon in 2020.

More below the jump…

(Short) crosspost from THE ENVIRONMENTALIST

Following a speech by the representative of Papua New Guinea, where he called upon the United States to: “lead, follow or get out of the way:”

The United States made a dramatic reversal Saturday, first rejecting and then accepting a compromise to set the stage for intense negotiations in the next two years aimed at reducing carbon dioxide emissions worldwide. The final result was a global warming pact that provides for negotiating rounds to conclude in 2009.

Here’s a link to the whole post.

Crossposted from THE ENVIRONMENTALIST

A report from Bali by the editor of THE ENVIRONMENTALIST:

The same day that the University of East Anglia reports that 2007, despite the cooling effects of La Nina, has been the seventh warmest year on record, word came from the U.N. Climate Conference in Bali that the talks were in danger of breaking down:

European leaders and environmental campaigners reacted angrily yesterday after the United States rejected guidelines for reducing greenhouse gas emissions intended to check global warming.  The proposal, supported by the members of the European Union as well as Brazil, would have set out in writing an ambition to cut greenhouse gases produced by industrialised countries by up to two fifths in the next 13 years.

-snip-

The row has undermined the hopes of environmentalists for a strong and detailed statement of agreement among the 190 governments attending the United Nations climate change conference on the Indonesian island of Bali. Link.

This has lead to a proposal for a compromise deal. If they cannot come to agreement, participants have threatened to to bypass next month’s Bush Administration’s climate meetings set for Hawaii.

More below the jump…

Salon:

Desperate times, desperate scientists

How dire is the climate situation? Consider what Rajendra Pachauri, the head of the United Nations’ prestigious Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), said last month: “If there’s no action before 2012, that’s too late. What we do in the next two to three years will determine our future. This is the defining moment.” Pachauri has the distinction, or misfortune, of being both an engineer and an economist, two professions not known for overheated rhetoric.

In fact, far from being an alarmist, Pachauri was specifically chosen as IPCC chair in 2002 after the Bush administration waged a successful campaign to have him replace the outspoken Dr. Robert Watson, who was opposed by fossil fuel companies like ExxonMobil. So why is a normally low-key scientist getting more desperate in his efforts to spur the planet to action?

Part of the answer is the most recent IPCC assessment report. For the first time in six years, more than 2,000 of the world’s top scientists reviewed and synthesized all of the scientific knowledge about global warming. The Fourth Assessment Report makes clear that the accelerating emissions of human-generated heat-trapping gases has brought the planet close to crossing a threshold that will lead to irreversible catastrophe. Yet like Cassandra’s warning about the Trojan horse, the IPCC report has fallen on deaf ears, especially those of conservative politicians, even as its findings are the most grave to date.

BBC:

Arctic summers ice-free ‘by 2013’

Scientists in the US have presented one of the most dramatic forecasts yet for the disappearance of Arctic sea ice.

Their latest modelling studies indicate northern polar waters could be ice-free in summers within just 5-6 years.

Professor Wieslaw Maslowski told an American Geophysical Union meeting that previous projections had underestimated the processes now driving ice loss.

Summer melting this year reduced the ice cover to 4.13 million sq km, the smallest ever extent in modern times.

^{Credit: Rising Tide North America}

“If you want to go quickly, go alone. If you want to go far, go together. We need to go far – quickly.”

– Al Gore

“Dante once said that the hottest places in hell are reserved for those who in a period of moral crisis maintain their neutrality.”

– JFK (taking liberties with Dante – h/t to Marcus Graly)

Twelve thousand climate delegates descended on one of my favorite places in the world last week, the Indonesian island of Bali, a place that actually measures up to a good portion of its reputation as Paradise. In my opinion, anyway. Some of the delegates didn’t apparently see things that way, and grudgingly shed their business attire for batik shirts when they discovered their complaints about the lack of enough air conditioning in the pricey tourist and conference region known as Nusa Dua were not going to change the situation. How can anybody properly discuss climate change with sweat pouring down his back like the gushing moulins of Greenland’s melting ice?

If air conditioning is part of the must-have for any place you call Paradise, then you understand the predicament of those delegates. Because Bali doesn’t have electrical capacity to handle the load of “enough air conditioning” for tourists, much less the population at large. Indeed, all of Indonesia – population 235 million – has 35,000 megawatts of installed electrical power. The United States, with 300 million people – has nearly 1,100,000 installed megawatts.

Bravo to the Judiciary branch for doing what the other two can’t or won’t do!

Since the U.S. government announced new fuel efficiency standards in March of 2006, environmentalists and 11 states have argued that the standards do not go far enough to combat the harmful emissions that lead to global warming.

Today, the Ninth Court of Appeals gave a victory to environmentalists and a “rebuke” to the Bush administration in ruling that regulators “failed to properly assess the risk of global warming” in part at least for exempting larger SUVs and trucks.

The court decision is a rebuke to the Bush administration and its refusal to make meaningful steps to reduce global warming pollution from our automobiles,” said Pat Gallagher, director of environmental law at Sierra Club. “The decision tells the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration that it can’t monkey the numbers when it sets fuel economy standards by ignoring the cost of carbon emissions.”

The court’s action invalidates the March 2006 fuel standards for minivans, light trucks and smaller SUV’s.

Setting the Stage

In 1995-96, I spent a year taking care of my 84 year old father after he had a series of debilitating strokes.   He was paralyzed at first on the left side and lost his speech, but never his mind.  Over the course of the year, he learned to walk and talk anew, with my help 3-4 days a week. It was an amazing year for me – I think the best of my life.  

My father and I had been somewhat estranged for most of my adult life.  He had never understood (or approved of) my decison in my twenties to divorce or go to law school.  As late as 1988, when I was 42 and joined my husband in California where he had taken a very good job, Daddy had said “I don’t understand why she has to go out to California.”

But as I helped him regain his speech and walking, fixed his meals, watched baseball with him (he was a big Braves fan), helped him with crossword puzzles, and listened with him to his favorite music and books on tape, we became very close.  Then of course over the last few months when he started to go down again, managing the three other caretakers we needed for him, I felt like I was somewhat living his dying process with him.  I was with him at the end and as his body withered, I could feel myself going with him, into his pillow, into death.  

I don’t know how many others have experienced something similar at the loss of a close one, but I feel like I lived my father’s death with him – and then I came back, but was forever changed by the experience.  (I still feel that ability to be in more than one place at a time, to get outside my body and let my mind take me wherever I want to go, not bound by space and time, to go completely through something, and be on the other side.  The first time I described it to a friend in the first weeks after my father’s death was as the ability to feel that I was on the other side of a wall, that I had gone through the wall, at the same time that I was there on the other side talking with her.)

For some time after Daddy’s death, I felt very close to the spirit world.  I had a  vivid visit from my father the night he died.  Over the next several years, I took a further hiatus from practicing law and delved into a more mystical world.  I joined with some women friends, most of whom are artists, in weekly dream sharings and interpretation.  

For that period of time I felt that I was thinking in spirals, not in the logical, square boxes of a lawyer.  I had more vivid dreams and messages that began to appear to me in the weekly Friends’ meeting we had been attending for years.

On this Halloween, who needs ghosts and goblins? The real spooky stuff is in the science.

First, from Science Daily:

The greatest mass extinction in Earth’s history also may have been one of the slowest, according to a study that casts further doubt on the extinction-by-meteor theory.

Creeping environmental stress fueled by volcanic eruptions and global warming was the likely cause of the Great Dying 250 million years ago, said USC doctoral student Catherine Powers.

Writing in the November issue of the journal Geology, Powers and her adviser David Bottjer, professor of earth sciences at USC, describe a slow decline in the diversity of some common marine organisms.

Obviously, this wasn’t a human-caused event, but it demonstrates just how catastrophic such a catastrophe can be. As this NASA article explains, in the Great Dying, up to 90% of marine species and up to 70% of land species were wiped out. All life on Earth almost ended, even as it was still beginning, and global warming seems to have been one of the reasons why.

There is such a steady stream of stories on the current era of global warming, but here are just two new examples…

‘ya hang around some of the less savory places I do on occasion and you’re bound to bump into this sweet-smelling bad actor named, Trichloroethylene, or TCE. You might recall that this bad actor had a lead in the book and movie “A Civil Action”, about contaminated wells in Woburn, MA. Well, if you do bump into this character in a dark  alley, grab your kidneys and liver and get outa town. Or maybe not…

TCE lingers like a bad houseguest, especially if handled carelessly. It accumulates in soil and can persist for years in groundwater. In a report last year, the National Research Council found that TCE was a potential cause of kidney cancer; it’s also associated with liver problems, autoimmune disease and impaired neurological function.

Enter King Midas–usually known as Michael Wong–with his miracle gold nanoparticles dusted with palladium.  According to The Smithsonian Magazine in a piece by William Booth of the Washington Post, Mr. Wong has discovered somewhat of a cure that even he doesn’t fully understand.

And just what is it? “We don’t know!” says Wong. “We don’t understand the chemistry. But we don’t understand it in a good way,” meaning he believes that his team will figure it out soon. “Our catalyst is doing something really goofy.”

No expensive endless inefficient pump and treat? That’s just positively goofy.

It’s more than global warming and climate change.

From the Guardian:

The future of humanity has been put at risk by a failure to address environmental problems including climate change, species extinction and a growing human population, according to a new UN report.

In a sweeping audit of the world’s environmental wellbeing, the study by the UN Environment Programme (UNEP) warns that governments are still failing to recognise the seriousness of major environmental issues.

It doesn’t get much more blunt, although don’t expect to hear much about it from the corporate media.

The study, involving more than 1,400 scientists, found that human consumption had far outstripped available resources. Each person on Earth now requires a third more land to supply his or her needs than the planet can supply, it finds.

Meanwhile, biodiversity is seriously threatened by the impact of human activities: 30% of amphibians, 23% of mammals and 12% of birds are under threat of extinction, while one in 10 of the world’s large rivers runs dry every year before it reaches the sea.

This is a follow-up to a similar study, made in 1987. It’s a progress report.

As the UNEP press release explains:

GEO-4, the latest in UNEP’s series of flagship reports, assesses the current state of the global atmosphere, land, water and biodiversity, describes the changes since 1987, and identifies priorities for action. GEO-4 is the most comprehensive UN report on the environment, prepared by about 390 experts and reviewed by more than 1 000 others across the world.

It salutes the world’s progress in tackling some relatively straightforward problems, with the environment now much closer to mainstream politics everywhere. But despite these advances, there remain the harder-to-manage issues, the “persistent” problems. Here, GEO-4 says: “There are no major issues raised in Our Common Future for which the foreseeable trends are favourable.”