Hhaing The Yu, 29, in rain falling on the ruins of his home, in a township outside Yangon, Myanmar.

This is not about politics; it is about saving people’s lives. There is absolutely no more time to lose.

— United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, pressing the military junta in Myanmar to accept international assistance as hundreds of thousands of its citizens reel from the effects of a devastating cyclone earlier this month; May 14.
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Energy efficiency is tricky. You might think that increasing energy efficiency would be a no-brainer, since it usually pays for itself, improves the reliability of electrical transmission systems, reduces the number of power plants that need to be built, and reduces greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. You’d be wrong. And last week, The Economist had a great overview as to why improving energy efficiency is so difficult. And according to the article, the reasons that energy efficiency gains aren’t metaphorically exploding all over the place come down to the intersections of these three areas: prices, markets, and governments. Full Story »

Spiegel Online published a story last week about how a group of Europeans have formed the Trans-Mediterranean Renewable Energy Corporation (TREC) to develop enough solar-thermal power in the Sahara to power all of Europe. The idea is to build enough solar thermal power plants, plants that use concentrated solar energy to heat salts or boil water which then turn turbines to generate electricity, and then to transmit that energy across the Mediterranean to be used in Europe. Europe gets all the electricity it needs and North Africa gets a massive influx of development money and energy for desalinization plants, among other things. Full Story »

I think blogs are dedicated to cruelty, they’re dedicated to dishonesty, they’re dedicated to speed.

— Buzz Bissinger, author of “Friday Night Lights” and other bestsellers, castigating blogs on HBO’s “Costas Now”; May 1.

It’s one of the bigger Cadillacs. I’ve got a desk in it. It’s like an airplane. … I want them to feel that they are somebody and their congressman is somebody. And when they say, ‘This is nice,’ it feels good.

— Rep. Charles Rangell, chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, describing the 17-foot-long, 300-horsepower, 2004 Cadillac DeVille he leases for for $777.54 a month; House rules permit members to lease any vehicle at taxpayer expense; May 1.
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Dirt. It’s all around you. You wash it off your car. You run and hike on it. You buy it to plant your new roses in. And yet, according to an amazing Boston Herald story titled The Future of Dirt, soil scientists are only now beginning to understand how it really works. And given that the global population is expected to rise by about 50% in the next 50 years, we’re going to need to figure out ways to keep what soil we have from degrading and even improve the fertility of our dirt if possible. Full Story »

It’s often difficult to get the attention of my students. But when I told them that it’s possible that a few of them would see the year 2100, and that most of their children surely would, they stopped furtively texting under their desks and began paying attention.

When I was born just after World War II, I told them, the population of the United States was about 141 million; of the world, about 2.7 billion. Now, 62 years later, Americans tip the scale at about 303 million; the world’s population has grown to about 6.6 billion.

A little extrapolation of U.S. Census data, I told them, shows the American population hitting 518 million at mid-century and 758 million in 2100. The world’s population is likely to grow to 14 billion at century’s end. Imagine what that world — their world — would be like, I challenged them.

But I was too optimistic. In a report to be released today, a Virginia Tech professor estimates that between 2100 and 2120 the population of the United States will reach one billion people.
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The jet stream has been described by many as a river of air in the atmosphere. It’s similar in that respect to the Gulf Stream in the ocean, and both serve similar climate functions - the distribution of hot air (or water) from the tropics toward the poles. In the case of the jet stream, however, it also moves around high and low pressure systems and is thus one of the more significant controls over global weather. So when something happens to the jet stream, it matters. And according to MSNBC, a paper from the Carnegie Institution shows that the jet streams in both the northern and southern hemispheres have been migrating toward their respective poles. Full Story »

President Bush announced yesterday that his administration would address global heating. This basic fact has been covered, and re-covered, in media around the country and around the world. The general response appears to have been negative, with a widespread view internationally and from domestic environmental and progressive organizations that Bush’s proposals are a serious case of “too little, too late.” And U.S. conservative and libertarian groups consider Bush’s announcement to be little more than political appeasement.

Today I’d like to dive a little deeper into Bush’s claims about his global heating record and his new proposal. But first, a small sampling of responses from around the world. Full Story »

In our first Carboholic, I pointed people at a great new tool to monitor global carbon emissions, the Carma (Carbon Monitoring for Action) website. Today I’d like to point people to a fantastic new scientific tool for monitoring the carbon emissions of the continental United States: Project Vulcan. But first, a YouTube video on the project.

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The Washington Post reports that Al Gore and his Alliance for Climate Protection are launching one of the most expensive advocacy programs ever. The We campaign will run over the next three years and cost $300 million, of which about half has already been raised. The goal of the campaign is to change ingrained habits and behaviors directly if possible, but primarily through legislation.

“This climate crisis is so interwoven with habits and patterns that are so entrenched, the elected officials in both parties are going to be timid about enacting the bold changes that are needed until there is a change in the public’s sense of urgency in addressing this crisis,” Gore said. “I’ve tried everything else I know to try. The way to solve this crisis is to change the way the public thinks about it.” Full Story »

If it was the Marlins, you wouldn’t see people in Florida getting up at 5 a.m. And if it was the Yankees — well, their fans aren’t real. They just buy the hat.

— Helio Rocha, a restaurant manager who stayed up all night in anticipation of watching the Red Sox’ Major League Baseball opener (played in Toyko) at 5:30 a.m. in famed Boston watering hole Cask ’n’ Flagon; March 26.

Adam Smith’s invisible hand has a puppeteer: the Federal Reserve. In case there is any confusion about who was pulling the strings behind the scenes of JPMorgan Chase’s acquisition of Bear Stearns, the curtain was lifted Monday. By raising its bid — with the grudging approval of the Fed — to $10 a share, from $2, JPMorgan exposed what had long been whispered about but no one dared to say aloud: the Fed is officially in the deal-making business.

— from Andrew Ross Sorkin’s “Dealbook” column in The New York Times; March 25; emphasis added.
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According to the New York Times, the U.S. has begun exporting coal to countries like Japan, Germany, India, and China. In the process, our domestic coal prices have risen more, percentage rise, than oil prices have risen over the last year. And the reason we’re voluntarily increasing the prices of our electricity and steel? Foreign demand and expected federal curbs on carbon dioxide (CO₂) emissions have made the domestic markets risky, and foreign markets represent a growth opportunity. Put simply - higher profits. Full Story »

According to this story from National Public Radio, data from autonomous ocean probes have detected no aggregate ocean warming since the probes came online in 2003. The Argo system comprises 3,000 probes in all of the world’s oceans that dive as deep as 1-2000 meters every ten days and then ascend, taking continuous temperature and salinity measurements in the process. There is no sign of overall oceanic heating in the data since 2003, leading researchers from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the National Center for Atmospheric Research to wonder where all the energy supposedly being dumped into the ocean via global heating is actually going. Full Story »

On January 16, 2008, Dr. James Hansen of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Sciences (GISS) released the summation of temperature data for 2007 with apparently very little fanfare. Given the data collected by Dr. Hansen, the lack of fanfare itself might well be notable. But regardless, the data itself bears more public attention that it’s had.

2007 is now tied with 1998 as the second hottest year for global temperature in a century. Full Story »

The March 10 issue of BusinessWeek has a set of charts that discuss a McKinsey & Company report that discusses how best to approach reducing carbon emissions. Essentially, the approach is to start with the actions that save more money than they cost and provide the most carbon reductions for the money - things like improving the efficiency of commercial and residential electronics, changing over all lighting to high-efficiency bulbs, and improving vehicle fuel economy. Then we go and start building more nuclear plants, engaging in reforestation projects, and other high cost/negative economic return activities. The image below is one of the charts from that issue - click on it for a larger, more readable version.

Source: BusinessWeek.com, 3-10-2008 magazine issue

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Daniel Kester of Williamsville, N.Y., believes some actions of his representative in Congress are hypocritical. So, fed up and using information available online, he sat down and penned a letter to the editor of The Buffalo News:

Last year, Exxon-Mobil made a profit of more than $40 billion. This is the highest profit any American company has ever made. While I congratulate Exxon on this achievement, it does make me wonder why my congressman, Tom Reynolds, found it necessary to vote to continue to give tax breaks to Exxon and other oil companies (House Bill 5351). At the same time, Reynolds voted against tax credits for wind, solar and other alternative energy sources that could actually help reduce global warming.

I can see the sense in giving tax breaks to struggling Western New York companies. But tax breaks for Exxon? What was he thinking? This wouldn’t have anything to do with the fact that he has received more than $165,000 in contributions from the oil and gas industry, would it?

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According to an article in New Scientist, scientists from the University of Colorado - Boulder have calculated that a) there isn’t much volcanic dust in the Earth’s atmosphere and b) that may be contributing to global heating.

Generally speaking, volcanoes emit lots of stuff, including carbon dioxide, sulfur dioxide, and lots and lots of ash. However, it’s been shown scientifically that the dominant climate factor in nearly all volcanic eruptions is the sulfur dioxide, a gas that combined with water vapor in the atmosphere to create sulfuric acid droplets. Those droplets are very reflective, and when combined with high-altitude ash and dust, they create very white clouds that cool the Earth down far more than any carbon dioxide emissions would heat it up. Full Story »

In 1990, Congress revised the Clean Air Act to enable utilities to use market efficiencies to lower sulfur dioxide (SO₂)pollution from power plants. In response to this cap-and-trade system, utilities have reduced SO₂ pollution by 30% more than the federal government required. A similar mechanism has been suggested for reducing carbon dioxide (CO₂) emissions. Earlier this month the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) released their analysis of three alternatives to reducing CO₂ emissions, and their conclusion was that a carbon tax was the most efficient method, not the oft-touted cap and trade system. However, as is so often the case, the devil is in the details, rather than in the executive summary. Full Story »

A new study by the Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology and reported in the Asahi Shimbum (English edition) says that Russian permafrost has been melting deeper and faster than previous studies indicated. Specifically, the average temperature of the permafrost has risen almost to melting, the depth of melt has doubled since 2000, and the size of melt lakes have increased by 3.5x. All of these things are bad, given that permafrost traps a huge amount of methane, a very potent greenhouse gas.

However, we can’t accept these results on face value for a very important reason - they directly contradict several Russian studies. These results need to be verified and reconciled with studies like this one, published by the global heating denier organization the Heartland Institute. Ultimately, unless someone is lying here (which is always a possibility when talking about global heating), the data for both studies have to be explainable via a single hypothesis - data cannot be thrown out without corrupting the scientific method. I look forward to hearing how these disparate results are reconciled. Full Story »

Germany has made a decision to abandon nuclear energy. No nation has to use nuclear energy for their electricity needs - there are abundant alternatives, and Germany has a plethora of alternatives. Unfortunately, according to the Washington Post, Germany is finding that their anti-nuclear, green impulse has had an unintended consequence - they’re transitioning away from nearly carbon-free nuclear energy and back to the dirtiest energy source there is - coal. Full Story »