Control Climate Change

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Levels of the main greenhouse gas in the atmosphere have risen to new highs in 2010 despite an economic slowdown in many nations that braked industrial output, data showed on Monday.

Carbon dioxide, measured at Norway’s Zeppelin station on the Arctic Svalbard archipelago, rose to a median 393.71 parts per million of the atmosphere in the first two weeks of March from 393.17 in the same period of 2009, extending years of gains.

The California Air Resources Board recently announced that they will begin monitoring and limiting the emissions of sulfur hexafluoride (SF6) in high-voltage electrical equipment starting in 2011. SF6 is the most potent of all greenhouse gases which contribute to climate change.
SF6 is approximately 23,900 times as potent as carbon dioxide, the world’s most prevalent greenhouse gas, at trapping heat in the atmosphere.

Aid to Artisans, a nonprofit group helping economically depressed artists generate sales from products created with local materials, also ensures the environment benefits from its endeavors.

The organization’s first project, started in Honduras more than a decade ago, involved recycling corn husks that even the pigs wouldn’t eat, said President Clare Smith. The husks were used to create wreaths and flowers that were then adorned with clay cherub figurines.

From these raw materials grew a thriving industry employing more than 600 villagers. Eventually, an export company owned by the local Hondurans was formed.

“The environment is a consideration in all our projects — it’s always a stipulation,” Smith said. “People are a part of the environment, so we try to integrate the two so everyone benefits.”

In Bangladesh, Aid to Artisans is developing a project to make paper products out the water hyacinth and another weed that clog many of the country’s rivers. However, the group must be careful not to create too large a demand for the paper.

“You have to be sensible,” Smith said. “While these plants now clog many rivers, if you had a big run on the paper, you could cause problems because a certain amount of the plants is needed to purify the water.”

Because of the delicate balance between creating economic opportunities and protecting the environment, Aid to Artisans develops relatively small-scale projects. Projects are currently under way in Jordan, Ghana, Mexico, Hungary, Bangladesh, Nepal, Tibet, Guatemala, Ecuador and Indonesia.

Aid to Artisans first sends designers to work with the local people in developing marketable products, then brings the products to the New York International Gift Fair, held twice a year, to take orders. The next step is to locate appropriate importers for the various product lines to create steady demand.

In 1990, the Mexican government created a reserve in a cloud forest along the Pacific coast, angering a local community which could no longer expand its coffee plantations by cutting down the forest. Ecologists who came to tell them about the law were threatened.

Aid to Artisans helped the community start painting T-shirts with images of birds and animals common to the cloud forests. A market for the shirts was created and now the community makes a living without continuing to destroy the cloud forest.

“We believe that what we do has to be suitable to both the people and their environment,” Smith said. “There’s an infinite number of things we can do to help save the planet — little by little.”

For more information about the group or to become a member, write to: Aid to Artisans, 80 Mountain Spring Rd., Farmington, CT 06032. Or call (203) 677-1649.

Earth Fact: Through the Aid to Artisans project in Honduras, more than 200 different products have been brought to the U.S. market.

Technorati Tags: environment benefits, save the planet, protecting the environment, cloud forest

The Carnegie Institution of Science released a new study this week finding that one-third of the carbon dioxide emissions developed countries release into the atmosphere result from goods and services produced outside their borders. The report’s details are troubling: Carnegie’s researchers estimate that 2.5 tons of CO2 per person are consumed in the United States but are produced elsewhere, and that figure spikes to 4 tons per European. Another point that will cause considerable disagreement among global climate negotiators is Carnegie’s analysis that one-quarter of the emissions in China are actually the result of its exports to its trading partners such as the United States.

Two billion people worldwide do their cooking on open fires, producing sooty pollution that shortens millions of lives and exacerbates global warming. If widely adopted, a new generation of inexpensive, durable cook stoves could go a long way toward alleviating this problem.

With a single, concerted initiative, says Lakshman Guruswami, the world could save millions of people in poor nations from respiratory ailments and early death, while dealing a big blow to global warming — and all at a surprisingly small cost.

The Environmental Protection Agency chief fought back on Monday against Senate attempts to challenge the agency’s authority to regulate greenhouse gas emissions, saying delaying action would be bad for the economy.

President Barack Obama has long said the EPA would take steps to regulate greenhouse gases if Congress failed to pass climate legislation. The bill faces an uncertain future in the Senate amid opposition from fossil fuel-rich states.

The European Union’s development chief may be forced to name and shame France, Germany and Italy for not living up to their aid commitments, contributing to a roughly $17 billion funding gap this year.

Andris Piebalgs warned in January he would clearly identify EU countries that failed to meet their aid commitments.

“In 2010, the EU aid disbursements are likely to further grow to approximately 54-55 billion euros ($74-75 billion),” a leaked EU document seen by Reuters shows. “Many member states will most probably not reach their… aid targets. A gap of 12-13 billion euros remains.”

The Obama administration will give small businesses a break on coming carbon dioxide emissions rules but big emitters like coal-fired power plants will face a crack-down, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lisa Jackson said on Wednesday.

President Barack Obama has pushed the EPA to begin regulating gases blamed for warming the planet, in part to force polluters to support the climate change bill. The legislation is his preferred method of climate control, but it is stalled in the Senate.

The Pliocene epoch is the period in the geologic timescale that extends from 5 million to 2 million years before present. Although scientists know that the early Pliocene had carbon dioxide concentrations similar to those of today, it has remained a mystery what caused the high levels of greenhouse gas and how the Pliocene’s warm conditions, including an extensive warm pool in the Pacific Ocean and temperatures that were roughly 4 degrees C higher than today’s, were maintained.

In a paper published February 25 in Nature, Kerry Emanuel and two colleagues from Yale University’s Department of Geology and Geophysics suggest that a positive feedback between tropical cyclones — commonly called hurricanes and typhoons — and the circulation in the Pacific could have been the mechanism that enabled the Pliocene’s warm climate.

The British Antarctic Survey (BAS) presents the results of its ongoing census of marine life in the Antarctic at a meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. The BAS census has been documenting the diversity of marine life in Antarctic waters and the way it is changing in response to climate change.

To many children, pizza ranks as their favorite food on Earth. Now an environmentally correct pizza aimed at helping them save the Earth is available at natural food stores across the country.

Tree of Life, the nation’s largest distributor of organic foods to the natural food industry, introduced its new Pizza Power Pack in March. Pizza is the second product marketed under the company’s Small World brand, following the success of its Animal Grahams organic cookies.

Small World pizzas are made entirely with organic ingredients, said John Rowland, product development manager. Packaging used for the product is a recycled paperboard made from old newspapers and printed with soy-based inks. Also, the St. Augustine, Fla.-based firm donates 2 percent of all wholesale dollars to the Rainforest Action Network.

To help educate their young customers, as well as parents buying the product, the company includes an ecosystem card in each package of pizzas. Each fact-filled card features a color photo of an ecosystem and map of the world showing where it exists. Each card also explains what ecosystems are, how they work, why they’re in trouble and how kids can help.

“The idea is to educate children about Earth’s ecosystems. And the wonderful thing is the kids eat it up,” Rowland said. “They are very much in tune with the environment — much more so than adults. It has amazed us how ecologically minded they are.”

Small World Animal Graham cookies, introduced in 1990, set the tone for the pizza packaging. Each box of cookies contains an endangered-animal card instead of an ecosystem version. Each animal featured on a card matches one of the 10 cookie shapes. The cards also tell children and their parents how to learn more about organizations working to protect endangered animals.

Two percent of the wholesale dollars raised through the cookie sales is donated to environmental groups like the the African Wildlife Federation. And like the pizzas, Small World cookies also are made entirely with organic ingredients.

“By using organic supplies, we’re helping support sustainable agriculture and eliminating the use of artificial fertilizers, pesticides and herbicides in the ingredients we use,” Rowland said.

Pizza was chosen to follow up the Small World Animal Grahams because the company already distributed the main ingredients — organic bread, cheese and tomatoes, he added.

“We knew kids liked pizza and we had all the ingredients,” he said. “It was a natural fit.”

More Small World foods are in the planning stages. Anyone interested in the products should visit their local natural food store. If they don’t carry the Small World brands, ask them to call Tree of Life.

Earth Fact: There are approximately 9,000 natural food stores in the United States.

Technorati Tags: ecosystems, organic foods, environmentally correct pizza, packaging, sustainability

Investors want oil giants to answer questions on their involvement in the environmentally damaging extraction of oil from tar sands

Shareholders at BP and Shell will get the chance to vote at upcoming AGMs on whether to force oil giants to come clean on their Canadian tar sands involvement.

Institutional investors including The Co-operative Asset Management and Rathbone Greenbank have co-signed a ’special resolution,’ which would force the two companies to fully disclose and justify their involvement in Canadian tar sands.

Two senior Democrats in the U.S. House filed a resolution to block the Obama administration from regulating greenhouse gases on its own if a climate change bill fails to pass Congress soon.

The resolution of disapproval, filed on Thursday, is identical to a controversial resolution by Alaska Senator Lisa Murkowski.

Both resolutions offer a fairly quick way to overturn Environmental Protection Agency proposals to regulate emissions of carbon dioxide and other gases blamed for global warming.

An iceberg the size of Luxembourg has broken off from a glacier in Antarctica after being rammed by another giant iceberg, scientists said on Friday, in an event that could affect ocean circulation patterns.

The 2,500 sq km (965 sq mile) iceberg broke off earlier this month from the Mertz Glacier’s 160 km (100 miles) floating tongue of ice that sticks out into the Southern Ocean.

The collision has since halved the size of the tongue that drains ice from the vast East Antarctic ice sheet.

Over the past few months, polls show that fewer Americans say they believe humans are making the planet dangerously warmer, despite a raft of scientific reports that say otherwise.

This puzzles many climate scientists — but not some social scientists, whose research suggests that facts may not be as important as one’s beliefs.

Take, for example, a recent debate about climate change on West Virginia public radio.
“It’s a hoax,” said coal company CEO Don Blankenship, “because clearly anyone that says that they know what the temperature of the Earth is going to be in 2020 or 2030 needs to be put in an asylum because they don’t.”

On the other side of the debate was environmentalist Robert Kennedy, Jr.

As Mongolia cowers under the brutal thrall of its worst winter in decades, questions are being asked as to whether the country should end its reliance on nomadic herders and dig deeper into its mineral reserves instead.

Some 800 years ago, Mongolia’s nomadic herdsmen were surging across the steppe under the leadership of Genghis Khan and conquering China, Tibet and much of central Asia.

Today, most of their descendents are at the mercy of the hostile Mongolian weather or crammed in the capital, Ulan Bator, where they struggle to make a living even though the country sits on some of the world’s richest mineral reserves.

Fallout from a loss of public confidence in climate science is affecting other fields of research, a top US academic claimed.

American opinion polls point to a general deterioration in people’s faith in science, according to Dr Ralph Cicerone, president of the National Academy of Sciences.

It came after two major public relations setbacks for the global warming gurus.

Yvo de Boer, the head of the United Nations Climate Change Secretariat, has formally announced he’ll be leaving the post this July. The decision is widely thought to come from de Boer’s deep disappointment with the results of the Copenhagen climate talks, and the nonbinding Accord forged there. An energetic and often “sharp-tongued” man, many fear that whomever is selected as his replacement will lack his audacity and enthusiasm. Here’s his statement on why he’s leaving:

A study by scientists from the U.S.’s National Climatic Data Center refutes claims from climate change skeptics that data from U.S. weather stations was seriously flawed and exaggerated the rate of temperature increases. The study, published in the Journal of Geophysical Research, says that U.S. weather stations may have actually slightly underestimated temperature increases. Anthony Watts, a former meteorologist who publishes the WattsUpWithThat blog, compiled photo evidence of what he considered poorly located weather stations across the U.S., including locations that could be influenced by artificial heat, such as those near parking lots and air conditioning systems.

What makes an animal large or small? Part of it may be due to climate change.

It may be that these are reactions to rapidly rising temperatures due to global climate change according to Professor Yoram Yom-Tov of Tel Aviv University, who has been measuring the evolving body sizes of birds and animals in areas where climate change is most extreme.

Electric cars have many merits: They are quieter and require less maintenance than cars with internal combustion engines. A network of smartly located charging stations covering the entire Harz region in Germany is bound to make electric cars a regional feature.
The Harz region is banking on electric cars. Electric cars will soon be rolling through Quedlinburg, Werningerode and other cities in the region. Seventeen partners from research, academia and industry have committed themselves to this with their project Harz.ErneuerbareEnergien-mobility or Harz.EE-mobility for short.

The President remains committed to advancing his stalled legislative agenda. Addressing the Democratic National Committee in Washington last Saturday, Obama insisted he is not going to let go of his aspirations for America. “I’m not going to walk away from the American people,” he said. “I’m not going to walk away on any challenge.”

However, Senators from Red States, Coal States, and Rust Belt States are concerned about job losses and increased costs associated with a climate bill. Many lawmakers are also concerned about controlling the emissions of rapidly developing nations like India and China.

The U.N. panel of climate experts overstated how much of the Netherlands is below sea level, according to a preliminary report on Saturday, admitting yet another flaw after a row last month over Himalayan glacier melt.

A background note by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) said a 2007 report wrongly stated that 55 percent of the country was below sea level since the figure included areas above sea level, prone to flooding along rivers.

A simple soil test could improve the growth of your vegetables and possibly the health of your children. The Chaney-Mielke soil test will help parents determine if the soil in their yard contains enough lead to threaten the health of their children.

After using leaded gasolines and paints in our society for years, lead particles have settled out of the air and chipped off buildings, contaminating portions of the soil, said Rufus Chaney, a research agronomist for the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

“Automobile exhaust alone has caused the inner-city areas to have high lead content in their soils,” he said. “We’re talking about tens of millions of homes potentially being at risk. And children are the people who need to be protected from high lead contents in the environment because this situation can cause lower IQ’s and behavioral problems.”

Children five years and younger are especially at risk to lead poisoning due to the rapid neurological development at this phase in their lives. It’s also the age when children tend to put dirt and unsanitary items in their mouth.

One of the biggest lead threats to children may be found in vegetable and flower gardens, Chaney said. The soil in these areas can potentially expose children to dangerous levels of lead.

While lead paint used inside homes is still a greater risk to children, he said lead content in soils also should be considered. Soils near the edges of homes and buildings are often the most hazardous because rain will rinse dust particles containing lead off the walls. Lead-based paint also can chip from older buildings, collecting near exterior walls, he added.

The soil test developed by Chaney and his partner, Howard Mielke, is available for a $10 lab fee from local county extension agents or soil-testing labs at universities. (If these sources are unfamiliar with the test, have them call Chaney at (301) 504-8324.)

All soils will test positive for some amount of lead, Chaney said, but if lead levels prove hazardous, there are corrective steps that can be taken. In some cases, the soil can be made safer by just tilling the top layer under under. In other cases, a sludge compound can be added to the soil to absorb the lead, which also will make the soil more fertile.

Earth Fact: Under the latest standards established by the Centers for Disease Control, millions of children in America have dangerous levels of lead in their blood.

Technorati Tags: lead poisoning, soil test, environment

Mars is too cold. Venus too hot. Earth is just right in terms of temperature for us to live. How does this all affect climate change?

The notion that scientists understand how changes in Earth’s orbit affect climate well enough for estimating long term natural climate trends is challenged in a recent study.

Are warming conditions in the Arctic unprecedented in Earth’s history? It turns out that they are not. The Earth’s climate has gone through warming and cooling times in the past as can be seen in the fossil record that shows tropical species in regions now too cool to support them.

These past variations were obviously not caused by the effects of man’s activities. This does not mean that the current warming trend is not caused, or affected by anthropogenic air pollution.

There is now increased evidence that the Arctic could face seasonally ice-free conditions and much warmer temperatures in the future.

A fresh coat of paint can change a room from dreary to divine. Stains, sealants, caulks, and adhesives help you build everything from a new bathroom to a bookcase. But all these useful products can also introduce unhealthy chemicals into your home and your body.
Low-VOC paint

The biggest culprit is VOCs, or “volatile organic compounds,” a large class of chemicals that readily evaporate at room temperature. If you walk into a room and notice that new-paint smell, you’re breathing VOCs. Paints, stains, sealants, caulks, and adhesives release the highest levels of VOCs when wet. But even when they feel dry to the touch, they may keep releasing these gases for days, weeks, months, even years. Meanwhile your upholstery, carpets, and drapes act like sponges, absorbing VOCs and releasing them over time. While not everyone may be bothered by exposure to these gases, they can be a serious health risk for people with chemical sensitivities, asthma, or other respiratory conditions.

The sea level in Israel has been rising and falling over the past 2,500 years, with a one-meter difference between the highest and lowest levels, most of the time below the present-day level. This has been shown in a new study supervised by Dr. Dorit Sivan, Head of the Department of Maritime Civilizations at the University of Haifa. “Rises and falls in sea level over relatively short periods do not testify to a long-term trend. It is early yet to conclude from the short-term increases in sea level that this is a set course that will not take a change in direction,” explains Dr. Sivan.

Scant ice over the Arctic Sea this winter could mean a “double whammy” of powerful ice-melt next summer, a top U.S. climate scientist said on Thursday.

“It’s not that the ice keeps melting, it’s just not growing very fast,” said Mark Serreze, director of the U.S. National Snow and Ice Data Center.

In January, Arctic sea ice grew by about 13,000 square miles (34,000 sq km) a day, which is a bit more than one-third the pace of ice growth during the 1980s, and less than the average for the first decade of the 21st century.

A New Mexico radio station is using sunshine to increase its listening audience tenfold… and in doing so has become the nation’s only radio station transmitting solely on solar power.

Thanks to its solar boost, KTAO-FM, located in the resort community of Taos, can now tap an additional audience in New Mexico’s capital of Sante Fe, said Brad Hockmeyer, the station’s owner and general manager.

The system uses 135 photovoltaic panels to collect the sun’s energy, then stores the power in a bank of batteries weighing 44,000 pounds. The batteries can hold more than five days’ worth of power to transmit the station’s signal. And a six-day stretch of sun-less weather is unheard of in Taos, Hockmeyer said.

The solar system was built on top of 10,800-foot Picuris Peak overlooking Taos, a town of about 4,000 in the mountains of northern New Mexico. By transmitting KTAO’s signal from such a high elevation, the station’s potential listening audience grew from 15,000 people to 150,000.

Getting electricity to the top of the mountain would have cost at least $300,000, Hockmeyer said, and would have required an eight-mile trench through an archaeologically rich area. So solar power became a cost-effective alternative.

“I didn’t consider alternative energy until I had to,” he said. “Conventional power ended up being too expensive, so this became the best way we could get it done.”

Hockmeyer said he estimates the station will save $4,000 a year in electricity costs, making pay back on the $60,000 project very reasonable — especially considering the alternatives.

Since hooking up the system, Hockmeyer said he has been contacted by a number of radio station owners trying to find out if solar might be an option for their stations.

“I’d love to get people thinking solar,” he said. “The benefit that comes from just thinking of an alternative method — even if they can’t do it — is better than not even considering it.

“If this project gets them looking into the possibilities, maybe they’ll say, ‘Well, I can’t do it for my radio station, but I can do it for my hot water heater at my house or maybe I can do it to power part of my radio station.”

Earth Fact — The housing unit for KTAO’s new transmitter was built out of recycled tires and aluminum cans, then covered with adobe plaster to blend into the natural landscape.

Technorati Tags: radio stations, solar powered, solar energy