» 2007 » April

Take liquid hog manure and turn it into solid organic fertilizer — a relatively simple process — and you eliminate the most harmful greenhouse gas it would otherwise produce.

In the palm of his hand, John Paul holds one of Earth’s tiniest weapons in the fight against global warming. It is a thumb-sized clod of soil from the eight-hectare property of Abbotsford hog farmer John Doppenberg.

About 95 per cent of the clod is sand and rock. Pump enough synthetic fertilizer and water onto this material and you can use it to grow something to eat — but it will still be essentially devoid of independent life.

On this clod, however, it is the other five per cent that counts. There are about 50 billion microscopic organisms living here — Paul calls them “the treasures.”

“It’s the glue that holds it all together to form this clod. It’s a fascinating environment,” Doppenberg says.

It swarms with bacteria, fungi and actinomycetes — the latter of which, incidentally, are unsurpassed in their ability to support the production of pharmaceutical medicines.

Source: www.canada.com/vancouversun/…

LS » For the sake of our environment we are going to need our farmers to be scientists and technologists. There’s a lot more going on at those farms than just growing food. Our society should support our food producers to help them make all facets of their production process as technologically advanced a s possible. (From an environmental perspective that is, not a Monsanto perspective.)

What will climate change look like? It’s a harder question than you might think. The impacts may be massive, myriad, and happen long into the future, all depending on the path we choose. So how can we better visualize those impacts before they happen–when there is still time to act?

That’s what researchers at the University of British Columbia are attempting to do: help citizens and decision makers visualize how climate decisions made today will change the way things look 10, 50, and 100 years from now.

Stephen Sheppard is professor of landscape architecture and forestry at UBC and is the lead investigator of the Local Climate Change Visioning Project. He says he wanted to boil complex climate science down to something that people could more easily relate to.

Source: www.straight.com/…

LS » We can talk the talk about the looming impacts of our self-induced climate change but in order to get everyone to collectively walk the walk some good old-fashioned computer modeling is needed. Pictures are indeed worth a thousand words.

Earth Day Network’s Mission Statement

Earth Day Network seeks to grow and diversify the environmental movement worldwide, and to mobilize it as the most effective vehicle for promoting a healthy, sustainable planet. We pursue these goals through education, politics, cultural events, and consumer activism.

Source: www.earthday.net

LS » What are you going to do about it?

Last stage of denial: ethanol will save us!

Citizens in industrialized societies, including Canada, will cling to their extravagant lifestyles and massive over-consumption for a while yet, it seems. Global climate change is still seen by most people — even those who have no doubt of its human origins — as something that can be fixed by legislation, tougher rules and punitive penalties on big polluters — and that allegedly clean and green quick fix, ethanol.

Yes, we can all keep our individual chunks of steel, rubber and glass, those symbols of 20th century excess and irrationality, so long as we shift to burning alcohol.

Source: www.thetyee.ca/…

LS » The chain of events is fascinating. Apparently ethanol can be deleted from the list of alternative fuel sources for transportation because the mass consumption of it would cause developing countries to further deforest their land in an effort to grow more corn to meet the demand. And what’s the point anyway, the pollution decrease would be negligible at best.

We have an opportunity, now, says [Victor] Quintana, to make significant changes.

“A cycle of energy and food is drawing to a close — the cycle of low international prices for basic cereal grains and the predominance of hydrocarbons is coming to its close. In this cycle the key actors were the agribusiness corporations and the oil corporations. It depends on us that the next cycle of food and energy will not see just a change in control from the oil transnationals to the biofuel transnationals, but that it needs to be a cycle in which energy and food are dominated by small and medium producers in local communities.”

Source: www.salon.com/…

LS » The good news is that we are on the cusp of changing the status quo, the scary part is whether it is going to be for the good. The idea for our food production to be dominated by small and medium producers and for our food consumption to be dominated by our locality is not new, but the idea that all of our energy demands can produced locally by small and medium producers is a huge paradigm shift for most of us. Let’s make it happen.

Raffi’s newest song and video is a toe-tapping rockabilly tune on global warming—the most pressing issue of the day, and perhaps our lifetimes. COOL IT is guaranteed to grab you!

Recorded at Vancouver’s Blue Wave studios with top session players, COOL IT gets backing vocals from chanteuse Laurel Murphy and the staff of David Suzuki Foundation, including Dr. Suzuki himself. It is the theme song for David Suzuki’s cross-Canada bus tour to inspire action on global warming.

Watch it: www.raffinews.com/…

LS » Help Raffi tell the kids, then the kids can help tell the politicians.

North of Greenland, climate apocalypse glimpsed.

There are places one can stand and see, with the guidance of a thoughtful observer, the shape of the future.

… For the past 27 years, Henry has come to this long-abandoned RCMP post to utilize the six wood-framed houses here as the site for an ongoing study on climate change. He and his team of grad students are part of the 11-nation International Tundra Experiment that links every arctic country in a series of identical studies, and aims at putting precise figures on what’s happening climate-wise around the Arctic Ocean.

The news is not just bad. It indicates a worldwide catastrophe is at hand.

Source: www.thetyee.ca/…

LS » The article is of course interesting, but een more interesting is the comments it has received in the two days since it was posted. I’m quite sure the tipping point has recently been reached in that more people now ‘believe’ that global warming is happening than don’t. But apparently there are still quite a few people who will not only continue driving a V8 but will happily buy another one because this is warming trend is just part of natural cycle of global cooling and warming. I hope the naysayers are right but I think if I ever buy vacation property in will be inland and not on the coast.

B.C.’s insurance industry and homeowner protection office, gun-shy after the province’s leaky-condo debacle, has temporarily put the brakes on the burgeoning green-roof industry.

The plans of dozens of developers poised to put green roofs on their condo buildings — the Olympic village being the most prominent among them — are now in limbo after the province’s Homeowner Protection Office sent out a letter to all municipalities warning that local insurance companies are mostly unwilling to insure green roofs on multi-unit residential buildings that will be sold as condos.

Source: www.canada.com/vancouversun/…

LS » Great, we finally get the greedy property developers and the snail-paced and uninspired bureaucrats to endorse sustainable building issues and the nasty insurance industry puts the brakes on an important step in building development. This sustainability stuff is a long slow process folks. I know we have only recently gotten over the leaky condo debacle but presumably we have learned some things from it other than just to be scared of water.

All continents face drought, starvation, rising seas, panel says

As global temperatures continue to climb, every continent in the world is vulnerable to severe shifts in weather patterns and rising sea levels that could lead to drought, food shortages, heat waves and disease, according to a report adopted Friday by an international body of scientists.

“No one of us will escape the impacts of climate change,” said Patricia Romero Lankao, a scientist with the National Center for Atmospheric Research, speaking from Brussels, where the U.N.-sponsored Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is meeting.

Source: www.sfgate.com/…

More Info: www.ipcc.ch

LS »» Things are going to get interesting folks! It’s time to stop the partisan politicking, it is now our moral obligation to do something about the the consequences of our industrialized ways and attitudes.

In an article in the Vancouver Sun (by Scott Simpson, but not published in the online version) about the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, this was reported in the last two paragraphs:

At the insistence of the United States, a paragraph warning of potentially catastrophic impacts in North America was deleted from the final published version of the summary report, Agence France-Presse reported.

Greenpeace Canada said global warming was now a “moral issue” for Prime Minister Stephen Harper and challenged him to deal with it outside the political arena, stressing he “has an obligation to future generations to act now.”

The rich may be moaning about wind turbines ruining their coastal views on Cape Cod, but in Delaware, citizens are ardently battling politicians — and the coal industry — to build the nation’s largest offshore wind park.

Peter Mandelstam says he can power 130,000 Delaware homes without adding to the greenhouse gas emissions dangerously heating our planet. His proposed 600-megawatt offshore wind park — the biggest such project yet unveiled in the United States — could supply that power over 20 years cheaper than coal or gas, he vows.

The tireless founder of Bluewater Wind, a wind energy developer, Mandelstam has been right before, having built a wind farm in Montana that provides power to more than 45,000 homes. And Delaware is no Cape Cod, where an offshore wind plan has stalled amid bitter controversy for the past six years. Polls show that offshore wind is overwhelmingly popular in this state, graded F for air pollution by the American Lung Association, whose coastal residents aren’t griping about their ocean views being ruined.

Yet Mandelstam still faces a gale force in persuading Delaware officials, lashed to coal and gas industries, to go along with his plan. “The chief obstacle is the newness of offshore wind,” he says enthusiastically. “It’s not new in the world, but it’s new in this country. So my challenge is simply to educate people.”

Source: www.salon.com/…

LS »» If only our government representatives would stop huffing gas and take some leadership initiative and put into action some serious plans to implement renewable and non-polluting energy sources like wind energy instead of dithering about legislating miniscule greenhouse gas reductions from the oil and gas industry. Let’s bypass those gassholes and create a meaningful alternative. Now.

Proposed regulatory changes, obtained by Salon, would destroy the “safety net for animals and plants on the brink of extinction,” say environmentalists.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is maneuvering to fundamentally weaken the Endangered Species Act, its strategy laid out in an internal 117-page draft proposal obtained by Salon. The proposed changes limit the number of species that can be protected and curtail the acres of wildlife habitat to be preserved. It shifts authority to enforce the act from the federal government to the states, and it dilutes legal barriers that protect habitat from sprawl, logging or mining.

“The proposed changes fundamentally gut the intent of the Endangered Species Act,” says Jan Hasselman, a Seattle attorney with Earthjustice, an environmental law firm, who helped Salon interpret the proposal. “This is a no-holds-barred end run around one of America’s most popular environmental protections. If these regulations stand up, the act will no longer provide a safety net for animals and plants on the brink of extinction.”

Source: www.salon.com/…

LS »» We all know how corrupt and pro-corporate deregulation Bush and his imbecilic cronies are so it is no surprise that they will try and dismantle things like the Endangered Species Act that get in their destructive, err pro-development, ways once they officially lose power in 2008. But how’s this for an interesting statistic:

Under his reign, the administration has granted 57 species endangered status, the action in each case being prompted by a lawsuit. That’s fewer than in any other administration in history — and far fewer than were listed during the administrations of Reagan (253), Clinton (521) or Bush I (234).

Higher taxes, droughts, floods and extreme weather predicted for B.C

The looming “destabilization” of Earth’s atmosphere means British Columbia faces higher municipal taxes and a reordering of basic government priorities to cope with an accelerating regime of droughts, floods and other weather-related civil emergencies.

One of Canada’s most eminent climate researchers said the enormous challenges caused by rapidly changing weather systems confronting B.C. and other jurisdictions will be as significant, difficult and costly as reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

Source: www.canada.com/vancouversun/…

LS »» There’s going to be some interesting times ahead folks. Unfortunately interesting isn’t necessarily a good thing especially when it involves the financial cost and geographic destruction that rising sea levels are going to cause.