Federal Court Interpreter of Spanish & Russian. Former college language & history instructor. Hiker, cyclist, sea kayaker. I'm especially interested in environmental questions, particularly those relating to climate change and water policy.
We the People Are No Longer Asking: Al Gore's Great New Video
David Roberts at Grist and Matt Stoller at Open Left have given Al Gore and We Can Solve It grief of late for not taking a hard enough stance against the wingnuts in their campaign to stop Climaticide. One of their complaints had to do with an early We Can Solve It ad that they thought gave green cred to right wing scumbag Newt Gingrich. Maybe Gore was listening. This new ad definitely hits a better tone.
"We DEMAND that we use them."
Yes! This is how WE we all need to be talking. We're not asking any more. Kudos to Al Gore and the We Campaign for getting it right this time.
You might be surprised to find out that despite being the number three wind producer in the world, Spain is dead last among developed countries in meeting its Kyoto targets. In this diary we'll take a look at how that happened and why Spain (and the rest of the United States) needs a dose of Californication.
According to the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, the European Union is to cut its emissions of greenhouse gases by 8% relative to 1990 levels by the period 2008-2012. Because at the time the agreement was signed, Spain was considered one of the less developed economies (it currently ranks 5th) among the then 15 European Union members (there are currently 27), its emissions target was set at a 15% rise over 1990 levels. (Greece, Ireland and Portugal were also allowed to grow their emissions.)
However, as of 2007, Spain is 52.3% above its Kyoto target and despite optimistic government promises that it can still meet the target it seems extremely unlikely that the Spanish will be able to reduce emissions by 35% relative to 1990 levels in only 4 years.
In EcoNoticiario #8: In Spain: protests against offshore wind power, and "streamlining" the review process for Environmental Impact Statements. Brazil to help Costa Rica with biofuels. A new study shows that Chile could produce 40% of its power with renewables by 2025. A Colombian editorial on air pollution and the Olympic Games in Beijing and oil-smeared penguins, sea lions and sea birds on the Uruguayan coast.
Today's Spanish words:
Declaración de impacto ambiental--Environmental Impact Statement
Through, No Man's Land, the family wheeled past fields that just been turned, the grass upside down. People in sputtering cars roared by honking, hooting at the cowboy family in the horse-drawn wagon, churning up dust in their faces. The children kept asking if they were getting any closer to Texas and if it would look different from this long strip of Oklahoma. They seldom saw a tree in Cimarron County. There wasn't even grass for the horse team; the sod that hadn't been turned was frozen and brown. Windmills broke the plain, next to dugouts and sod houses and still-forming villages. Resting for a long spell at midday, the children played around a buffalo wallow, the ground mashed. Cimarron is a Mexican hybrid word, descended from the Apache who spent many nights in these same buffalo wallows. It means "wanderer".[pp. 14-15]
Today's news that we may set a new Arctic sea-ice melt record in 2008 is, along with a number of other recent stories, further indication that Climaticide is proceeding full speed ahead the Arctic.
Warming temperatures resulting from our continued emissions of greenhouse gases are causing sea ice to melt (at both poles) at ever faster rates, ice shelves to collapse, 30 degrees-above-average temperatures in areas of the Arctic, the potential migration of sea creatures from the Pacific to the Arctic and the Atlantic after a 3.5 million year hiatus, and creating a new area for global conflict as the Northwest Passage opens and polar nations scramble to lay claims for both strategic and economic reasons.
If you need to pull an all-nighter tonight, forget the caffeine. Just join me below the fold.
Homeland Security, arguably the most incompetent agency in the astonishingly incompetent Bush Administration, has announced that it wants to spend tens of million dollars fighting hurricanes. That's right, HS, loser by a knockout against Hurricane Katrina, has staggered to it's feet and declared that it wants a rematch, not just against another hurricane but against all hurricanes.
The project has been given an estimated price tag of around $64m (£32m) over six years. Scientists will first conduct tests using models and small scale experiments before the most promising idea is developed for large scale testing.
Among the plans is a scheme to seed hurricanes with microscopic particles of salt that have been released into a storm from an aircraft. Research has shown that such seeding can cause hurricanes to dump large quantities of rain over the sea before it reaches land. The rainfall also carries away the heat that powers the hurricane, weakening it.
The experts over at the National Snow and Ice Data Center reported on August 1st that:
Sea ice extent continues to decline, but we have not yet seen last July’s period of accelerated decline. Part of the explanation is that temperatures were cooler in the last two weeks of July, especially north of Alaska.
Because we are past the summer solstice, the amount of potential solar energy reaching the surface is waning. The rate of decline should soon start to slow, reducing the likelihood of breaking last year's record sea ice minimum.
Lest the denialists get too excited (although generally Arctic ice melt is a topic that they avoid because what is going on is so clear) it is worth noting that the NSIDC analysis went on to say:
In a diary published last week that received 762 recs and 572 comments, there was a great deal of excitement about a supposed "breakthrough" by MIT chemistry professor, Daniel Nocera, that according to the MIT press release "could transform solar power from a marginal, boutique alternative into a mainstream energy source..."
The fact is that Nocera's discovery has been way overblown. While it does represent an improvement in the process of making hydrogen fuel, it is not a miracle cure.
I want to tell you about my wife. Today is our 12th wedding anniversary (although B. and I have known each other for 28 years, and been together for 16).
All those years neatly divide into two sections of very unequal proportions. On the far side are the good years, the ones we remember nostalgically, the ones that sustain us when we're trying to fight off depression. On this side are the last two years, the ones that have transpired since the doctor told me that I had Mantle Cell Lymphoma.
When I last diaried on the breakup of the Wilkins ice shelf there were a great many questions about glacier movement and sea-level rise so I thought that while we are waiting for the Wilkins ice shelf to collapse completely, it would be worthwhile to take the time to take a look at what causes ice shelves to break up and what the consequences of such a breakup are.
We can do this by examining the collapse of the Larsen B ice sheet, which took place in 2002.
The Associated Press has just announced that a 7 square mile piece of the Ward Hunt ice sheet, the largest ice sheet in the Arctic has collapsed. The ice sheet was first noticed to be fracturing in 2002. It was observed in April of this year that the ice shelf has broken into 3 pieces and fears were expressed that it would not survive the year. Ward Hunt is the remnant of a much larger ice sheet that surround Ellesmere Island until the beginning of the 20th century when it broke up into 6 pieces, the largest of which is the Ward Hunt, at 170 square miles and 130 feet thick.
In EcoNoticiario #7 we have (Spain) feuding between irrigators and "hippies" over water, (Mexico) a report of a possible new eruption of the Chaitén volcano in Chilean Patagonia, (Costa Rica) conflict between bicyclists and drivers in San José, (Guatemala) heavy rainfall leads to landslides and loss of life, (Colombia) the Colombian authorities launch a campaign to pick up plastic-bag litter, and (Chile) the Chilean government decides to extend it's restrictions on electricity use for a couple more months.
Probably nobody. Probably, it was just an accident...
My 18-year old son had an unusually serious look on his face when he got home from work last night. "What's wrong?" I asked. "I just got a text message from Mike" he said. "Do you remember, Bobby Chandler, the big guy who played Syria in the United Nations simulation we did this year?" Indeed, I did. The Seattle Cancer Care Alliance, where I am receiving treatment, had not yet given my wife and I permission to go home when the High School held the simulation, so I had watched the two-day performance via choppy, streaming video in a tiny window on my laptop. My son had played Israel in the simulation and he and Bobby had had some rousing exchanges.
"Yeah, I remember him", I said.
"Well, Mike says, he was killed today fighting a fire in California."
The Washington Post has reported that the Environmental Protection Agency has made an announcement that should surprise no one who has lived through the last seven and a half years of the Bush Administration: a human life in the United States is now worth less than it used to be.
Last week, it was revealed that an Environmental Protection Agency office had lowered its official estimate of life's value, from about $8.04 million to about $7.22 million. That decision has put a spotlight on the concept of the "Value of a Statistical Life," in which the Washington bureaucracy takes on a question usually left to preachers and poets.
This value is routinely calculated by several agencies, each putting its own dollar figure on the worth of life --not any particular person's life, just that of a generic American. The figure is then used to judge whether potentially lifesaving policy measures are really worth the cost. [My emphasis]
...Gore seems clearly to be trying to deceive, and the consequence of the success of his deception is likely to give him immense power over other people's lives. Syndicated Columnist Tibor Machan
...two things about this proposal merit attention. It points a country that uses too much energy down the right path. And Gore is showing that being environmentally responsible is economically sensible. WaPo columnist E.J. Dionne
The polar-opposite quotes above are examples of what was actually a very meager editorial response in American newspapers to Al Gore's recent "Challenge to America" speech. As I listened to the speech, (full video and text here) I wondered how much attention Gore's message would get in the press and what newspapers around the country would say about it, so I decided to do some research. This diary is about what I learned.
UPDATE: Once again I am asking for signatures on a petition to get the Traditional Media to tell the truth about the relationship between Global Warming, or as I prefer to call it, Climaticide, and extreme weather events. Given Al Gore's Challenge to Americans speech yesterday, it seems appropriate to once again call for signatures from the Daily Kos community. People can not make informed decisions if they aren't told the truth.
If you have already signed, thanks a ton. If you haven't please do.
The current edition of Econoticiario brings you stories from Spain (the end of the Catalan drought?), Mexico (a slideshow of a glacier crumbling in Patagonia), Costa Rica (results of a new study on the migratory habits of leatherback turtles), Colombia (Costa Rica announces carbon offset program for air travelers), and Chile (tightening of rules in Santiago on who can drive on "pre-emergency" days)
In the introduction to The Ethics of Climate Change: Right and Wrong in a Warming World, James Garvey, Secretary of the Royal Institute of Philosophy (given that title you might expect him to be a white-haired old duffer, but in his photo he appears quite young, perhaps around 30] explains his motivation for writing it:
Science can give us a grip on the facts, but we need more than that if we want to act on the basis of those facts. The something more which is needed involves values. Climatologists can tell us what is happening to the planet and why it is happening, they can even say with some confidence what will happen in the years to come. What we do about all of this, though, depends on what we think is right, what we value, what matters to us. You can not find that sort of stuff in an ice core. You have to think your way through it.
