Forests
"Alternative Nobel" For Environmental Activists
Published October 14, 2009 @ 12:00PM PT
The Right Livelihood Award Foundation, which aims to promote global ecological balance, eliminate material and spiritual poverty and contribute to lasting peace and justice in the world, has announced its 2009 Right Livelihood Award, often described as the "alternative Nobel Prize."
This year the Foundation has honored, among other people, Canadian environmentalist and television personality David Suzuki "for his lifetime advocacy of the socially responsible use of science, and for his massive contribution to raising awareness about the perils of climate change and building public support for policies to address it," and René Ngongo of Greenpeace "for his courage in confronting the forces that are destroying the Congo's rainforests and building political support for their conservation and sustainable use."
Suzuki received an honorary award, which does not include a cash prize. The other three winners -- Ngongo, Australian doctor Catherine Hamlin who works in her adopted country of Ethiopia benefits Africa's poorest women, and nuclear-disarmament activist Alyn Ware of New Zealand -- will receive 50,000 euros ($74,000). The awards ceremony will occur in December in the Swedish parliament.
In a video interview with Greg Bourne of WWF-Australia, Suzuki reflected on the devastating changes in the natural world that have occurred since he was a boy. "The change has been absolutely dramatic in my lifetime. The fish I took for granted as a child are simply not there," he said. (See a collection of videos on the award winners here.)
People often say that's the price of progress, he reflected, but "I don't think it's progress to use up the rightful legacy of future generations."
Photo courtesy of environmentnorth on flickr
Cattle Industry Giants Agree to Protect the Amazon and the Climate
Published October 10, 2009 @ 10:15AM PT
A Greenpeace activist urges the President of Brazil to attend The UN climate meeting in Copenhagen. The presence of the Heads of States of the most influential countries are needed in order to secure an ambitious and legally binding agreement in Copenhagen in December, and measures to stop deforestation must absolutely be part of that agreement. ©Greenpeace/Johanna Hanno
Four giants of the cattle industry have agreed to stop supporting deforestation of the Amazon — and that’s huge news for the climate in addition to forests. Now we just need Brazil’s President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva to get on board with the zero deforestation initiative as well, and take that pledge to Copenhagen.
I haven’t been writing my weekly guest blogs lately because I’m currently in the middle of the Pacific Ocean on the Greenpeace ship Esperanza as part of a campaign to stop overfishing and establish a global network of marine reserves, but I had to take a break to write about this tremendous victory.
I’ve reported here on this blog about the role tropical deforestation plays in contributing to climate change. To briefly summarize, deforestation is responsible for nearly 20% of global carbon emissions every year — more than the entire transportation sector. In other words, tackling global climate change means stopping deforestation.
I also wrote about Greenpeace’s campaign to urge major shoe manufacturers to put their foot down and tell their Brazilian suppliers that they would no longer purchase their leather until they could guarantee it wasn’t coming from destruction of the Amazon rainforest. Cattle ranchers are responsible for 80% of deforestation in the Amazon.
Videos to Watch: Climate week highlights, what's next in int'l talks
Published September 27, 2009 @ 02:43PM PT
Above: Climate advocates are striving to contain growing worries that the December climate talks in Copenhagen will be a bust. In this video made just as the G20 summit wrapped up, Kumi Naidoo, chair of the Tck Tck Tck climate mobilization campaign (and incumbent director of Greenpeace), encourages people to get active in their communities, churches, mosques, temples, and clubs. Naidoo and others believe it's crucial that citizens to contact their leaders and demand that they reach a "fair, ambitious and binding" climate treaty agreement in December.
It has been an inconclusive "Climate Week." The world's major economic powers made few significant moves on curbing global warming, and produced no major public breakthroughs in deadlocked climate treaty negotations.
On the activist side, things were a good deal more inspiring:
The Global Wake-up Call saw thousands of people worldwide performing creative, cheerful street actions and calling their political leaders to support a strong climate treaty. This "Human Countdown" in New York City last Sunday kicked off the week's activist events:
The film "The Age of Stupid" had a star-studded evening opening in New York City. The film takes a black-humored backwards look at our era, when no one acted fast enough to stave off global warming. Gillian Anderson! Moby! Heather Graham! Stephen Baldwin!
[[There, my SEO for the week is accomplished.]]
The Yes Men pranked New York City and the media with their mock "climate change edition" of the Rupert "Fox News" Murdoch-owned tabloid, The New York Post:
"SPECIAL EDITION" NEW YORK POST from The Yes Men on Vimeo.
More activist moments, and the anti-climatic policy roundup, after the jump.
Climate Activist to Stephen Colbert: "We're past the point where you can make the math work one bulb
Published August 18, 2009 @ 12:54PM PT
| The Colbert Report | Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c | |||
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Related post: Bill McKibben: 'There finally is climate change activism' and anyone can join
350.org founder and co-director Bill McKibben wisely opted to play it straight last night on The Colbert Report.
Colbert's quips and numbnuts neo-con questions were gentler than usual -- but no matter what, it's a rare guest that can out-funny Stephen.
Under Colbert's purposefully obtuse barrage of questions, McKibben described how during the summer of 2007, the Arctic ice cap shrank so dramatically (to a new known low), that to many researchers, it signaled a dramatic shift in the climate.
The situation moved some scientists from abstractions to alarm. In early 2008, NASA senior climatologist James Hansen and colleagues released a draft paper stating that given the climactic instability already being observed, the world needs to get back to 350 ppm of CO2 in the atmosphere. (We're now at around 390 ppm, and at the anemic levels of current action, we'll be lucky to level out at 490 ppm.)
[[The final version of this paper is available at arXiv.org, an open access repository of scientific research sponsored by Cornell University and the National Science Foundation.]]
350 ppm is a concentration at which the oceans and forests of the globe could probably continue to pull and store enough carbon out of the atmosphere, explained McKibben, to avert the worst impacts of global warming.
Colbert: Can I steal your thunder and start 349.org? Mine's one better.
McKibben: Science isn't like politics, you know. Chemistry and physics don't bargain that way. We know know now what the bottom line for the planet is.
Colbert: Chemistry and physics doesn't bargain?
McKibben: They don't haggle.
Colbert: Well then I refuse to talk to them, until they reconsider their position!
McKibben: And they to you! They're just gonna do what they're gonna do.
And that's why, around the world now, there are people coming together in this 350.org movement, to try to get our leaders to take the steps that we need.
Colbert: Now you're calling for action on October 24. On October 24 you want people to what, screw in florescent bulbs? What do you want people to do?
McKibben: That would be nice. But we're past the point where you can make the math work one bulb at a time.
Colbert: Good, 'cause I hate those things.
Climate Solutions from Solar Forests and Artificial Leaves
Published July 28, 2009 @ 10:45AM PT
Biomimicry is a rich source of inspiration for designers, engineers and scientists. They look at how evolutionary biology has solved problems, and then use artificial materials to recreate these solutions found in nature.
Many clean energy and climate solutions are turning to trees and other plants for design cues:
The Solar Forest concept, reported at Inhabitat, is racing around the blogs this week. It's designer Neville Mars' idea for an electric vehicle (EV) charging port powered by gracefully branching trees covered in solar panel "leaves." The leaves track the sun to generate power with maximum efficiency. Certainly the concept has a lot more aesthetic and pragmatic appeal than leaving acres of parking lots to bake in the sun.
Google, meanwhile, installed a "grove" of pole-mounted solar panels in the parking lot of its Mountain View, Calif. headquarters in 2006. It's the solar forest concept taken live, although lacking the sylvan look and feel.
And then there's "solar ivy" -- a concept product by a Brooklyn design group called SMIT (Sustainably Minded Interactive Technology) that seems to be on its way to market. Composed of netting covered in "leaves" made of flexible solar cells, the "Grow" system can be draped down the side of a building. In addition to converting light to energy, each solar leaf has piezoelectric generators on the underside as well -- so that as they flutter in the wind, that movement is harvested as energy as well.
"Artificial forests at nano scale" are another compelling avenue of research and development. The idea here is to create materials that mimic the leaf's ability to convert sunlight into energy, and then capture that energy for human uses. Another grail of this research is to find a synthetic way to emulate a leaf's ability to capture carbon out of the atmosphere and store it -- technology that could help us in re-stabilizing the climate.
The big news so far this year in artificial forests at nano scale is that a team of European researchers recently announced that they've succeeded in modifying chlorophyll from an alga so that it resembled the light antennae of bacteria, nature's most efficient photosynthesizers.
They then figured out the structure of these light antennae -- opening the way to creating an artificial leaf.
This isn't the first time there's been a wave of excitement on the synthetic photosynthesis front. In March of this year, researchers at the Energy Department's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory announced that nano-sized crystals of cobalt oxide can split water molecules into hydrogen and oxygen, the central part of the photosynthesis process.
In 2002, at the height of the "nanotech bubble," a team of scientists published research on using cadmium-laden nanocrystals to fix carbon dioxide (that is, transform it into other organic molecules, which is how plants store carbon absorbed from the atmosphere).
(And these are just two examples of what I'm sure are tens or dozens more.)
Why at the nano scale? In part because of the promise nano materials hold: when substances are created at these incredibly small scales, they often have properties that they don't exhibit at larger scales. For instance, they can have much more net surface area (to soak up sun) than the same materials at conventional macro scales.
Another reason is that nano-scale materials could potentially be incorporated into many relatively cheap substances we already use to cover big areas outdoors, like asphalt, concrete, rubber, paint, and vinyl. Imagine millions of homes sheathed in siding that incorporates nano-scale solar collectors, sitting in the sun all day and converting light into electricity.
So while nano materials research and development are often slow and expensive, the return on the time and money invested could be enormous in three ways: energy generated, carbon sequestered out of the atmosphere, and dollars earned.
Suggest a story to Stop Global Warming
Published July 10, 2009 @ 08:01AM PT
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Fatalistic Friday: Warmer Winters Shrinking Scottish Sheep
Published July 03, 2009 @ 01:00PM PT
Are We Not Sheep? We Are Devo(lving) Scientists solve mystery of Scotland's shrinking sheep: Shorter, milder winters caused by global warming to blame for steady decrease in size of St Kilda sheep. (The Guardian)
Rainy Days and Thursdays Always Get Me Down: Millions of euro worth of damage was caused yesterday after Dublin was swamped by a record two weeks' worth of rain in one hour. "This is the second time within the space of 12 months that Dublin experienced this type of flooding and it is clear that this is as a direct consequence of climate change," Lord Mayor Councillor Emer Costello said. (The Irish Independent)
Never Can Say Goodbye: ExxonMobil continues to sink hundreds of thousands of dollars into climate change sceptic groups National Center for Policy Analysis, the Heritage Foundation, and the American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research. This is despite promising more than once to stop its efforts to cultivate fear, uncertainty and doubt about global warming; Between 1998 to 2005, ExxonMobil gave almost $16 million to 43 lobby groups that worked to confuse Americans about the reality of global warming. (Wonk Room)
I Want You Back: New research reconstructing the extent of ice in the sea between Greenland and Svalbard from the 13th century to the present indicates that there has never been so little sea ice as there is now. Even though the 13th century was a notably warm time, there has never been so little sea ice as in the 20th century. (ScienceCentric)
Sludge, Drain O'er Me: EPA has posted a list of 44 “High Hazard Potential” coal ash waste dumps. They're near 26 communities in 10 different states, and similar to the impoundment that buried over 300 acres in Tennessee in toxic mud late last year. (Associated Press)
And highlights of the rest of the week's bad news about global warming:
Global warming may halve Bangladesh rice yields (SciDev.net)
NZ scientist warns of Antarctic ice melt, sea rise (China Central Television)
Permafrost melting a growing climate threat (Reuters)
Ocean acidification may push many fish to the brink (Christian Science Monitor)
Oyster Die-off in Pacific May Be Due to Ocean Acidification (e360 - Yale)
Global Sunscreen Won’t Save Corals (Carnegie Institution for Science)
India Will Reject Curbs On Its CO2 Emissions (CleanTechies)
Consumer culture keeps carbon emissions high(American Chemical Society)
World failing to halt biodiversity decline (Associated Press)
Amazon squatter law fuels deforestation worries (ScienceCentric)
Mangrove-dependent animals globally threatened (ScienceCentric)
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Image: Soay sheep on St. Kilda, Scotland. Via CommonorGarden/flickr
