Signs From Earth

Trees Die for Your Wipes

 

johnarobb/flickr

Our transition from incandescent light bulbs to compact fluorescents appears well on its way. People using CFLs save money on electric bills, the bulbs last longer (mostly), and less energy is needed to light up the night. (Don't ask about the color of light.) 

So if we can change our light bulbs why not change our toilet paper? Fluffy toilet paper appears to be the next resource-wasting target for the environmentally attentive. 

Do we really need all those thick air-laden layers to cushion our derriere? Why not use recycled paper to get the job done? Those questions are unrolled by the New York Times: Mr. Whipple Left it Out: Soft is Rough on Forests

"...fluffiness comes at a price: millions of trees harvested in North America and in Latin American countries, including some percentage of trees from rare old-growth forests in Canada. Although toilet tissue can be made at similar cost from recycled material, it is the fiber taken from standing trees that help give it that plush feel, and most large manufacturers rely on them...."

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Perhaps we could recycle those old newspapers to make our TP?

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The Guardian: American taste for soft toilet roll 'worse than driving Hummers'

Australian Herald Sun: Bottom Reached - The Reusable Toilet Wipe

Drought Shrivels China's Wheat Region

The New York Times reports on a worsening drought in China's wheat growing region: 

Worst Drought in Half Century Shrivels the Wheat Belt of China

"Northern China is dry in the best of times. But a long rainless stretch has underscored the urgency of water problems in a region that grows three-fifths of China’s crops and houses more than two-fifths of its people — but gets only one-fifth as much rain as the rest of the country.

"The current drought, considered the worst in Northern China in at least half a century, is crippling not only the country’s best wheat farmland, but also the wells that provide clean water to industry and to millions of people..."

Long-term droughts already are underway in Australia and California, both major agricultural producers. Now with China potentially running short of cereal grains, this all bears watching.

Rising Odds for a Hotter World

 

MIT Greenhouse Gamble: No-Policy Case (left) where emissions are not limited, and Policy Case (right) where carbon emissions are limited, indicate likelihood of future temperature increases. The size of a pie slice indicates likelihood.

Scientists at the MIT Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Climate Change have updated their odds for future temperature increases. 

Called The Greenhouse Gamble, the project calculates the odds of temperature increases by 2100 based on what we do, or don't do, to limit carbon emissions. The project began in 2003, and updated projections released this year see significantly warmer temperatures for earth in the absence of stringent emissions reductions.

If we do nothing, odds are 1 in 11 (9 percent) that average temperatures will rise by 7 degrees C. by 2100. (That's 12.6 degrees F.) So far, we are doing less than nothing as global carbon emissions keep rising at record rates beyond any previous expectation. As we keep on this path the chance is less than 1 in 100 (1 percent) that temperatures will rise less than 3 degrees C. (5.4 degrees F.) Is it getting warm in here?

The longer we wait to cut back carbon emissions the higher future temperatures are likely to get. The 2002 gamble showed that 5 degrees C. was the previous ceiling if emissions continued unabated. 

So now the 2009 gamble tells us the future is going to be warmer than we thought it might be.

Climatologist Stephen Schneider of Stanford uses a fire insurance analogy to help people understand the risk from rising temperatures: Most people have fire insurance on their homes even though few have ever had fires. Reduced carbon emissions would be the equivalent of fire insurance for the earth.

We are looking at odds of 1 in 11 (nine percent) that earth (our house) is going to heat up more than 12 degrees F. by 2100. Essentially the earth we know is going to burn down, we're doing nothing to insure ourselves against this, and at the rate carbon emissions are rising we are in effect throwing gasoline on the fire.

Jordan's Glowing Waters

 

Scene from southern Jordan. Published research indicates that groundwater under the region is radioactive. Photo: guru9uru/flickr.

The groundwater under southern Jordan is radioactive. 

Geoff Dabelko at the Wilson Center's Environmental Change and Security Program reports on new research by Duke University's Avner Vengosh that indicates fossil groundwater in southern Jordan is up to 2000 percent more radioactive than allowed by international drinking water standards. 

In a region already short of surface water, the implications are potentially severe, prior studies in a New Jersey community with radioactive groundwater indicate a rise in bone cancer.

The New Security Beat: Hot Water: High Levels of Radioactivity Found in Jordan's Groundwater

Environmental Science and Technology: High Naturally Occurring Radioactivity in Fossil Groundwater From the Middle East

Rare African Cheetah Photographed

The BBC reports on camera-trap sightings in Algeria of the rare Northwest African, or Saharan cheetah. Estimates have populations of the cat, which is thought to range over six north African countries, at 250 or fewer mature adults. The research is being conducted by the Zoological Society of London and Office du Parc National de l'Ahaggar.

BBC: Rare Cheetah Captured on Camera

ZSL : New Evidence of Critically Endangered Cat

More Fuel Efficient: Prius or Airplane?

Good Magazine looks at what forms of transportation get the most bang per gallon on a 350 mile trip. Produced by Robert A. Di Leso Jr., the chart's bars are made up of fuel cans. Bicycling the distance takes 16 cheeseburgers, walking will need 48 cheeseburgers. Buses are competitive, too bad there aren't more of them around.

Good Magazine: Is a Plane More Fuel Efficient than a Prius?

Extreme Climate Change Journalism

Editorial page editors at the Washington Post might read recent articles on climate change in their own news pages. After publishing an ill-informed and poorly researched op-ed column by George Will a week ago called "Dark Green Doomsayers," the newspaper now fronts an article on human migration driven by climate change.

"Climate Fears Are Driving 'Ecomigration' Across Globe" discusses migration trends unfolding as individuals and nations move or prepare to move to avoid climate change impacts.  A family from Montgomery County, MD moves to New Zealand to avoid America's systemic fragility, the nation of Kiritbati seeks new ground to move its whole population to avoid sea level rise, Floridians who can no longer get insurance on their homes (because of rising risk from hurricane damage) ponder a return to colder climes. It's insightful reporting on a trend little highlighted by mainstream media.

This story follows another published the same day as the lamentable Will bloviation called "Scientists: Pace of Climate Change Exceeds Estimates." This article by Kari Lyderson details accumulating effects of changing climate discussed at the AAAS science meeting by Christopher Field of the Carnegie Institution of Washington, and a lead author for the upcoming 5th global climate assessment from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. 

Field explained the increasing urgency of "climate feedbacks" and why scientists underestimate future impacts from planetary heating. This because we emit more heat-trapping carbon dioxide now than ever imagined, that the southern ocean and forests counted on to absorb it are failing, and that permafrost is beginning to melt, producing more heat-trapping methane. In its 2007 report, the IPCC did not even ponder effects of permafrost melting because too little data existed.

So as the planet ramps up its extreme behavior, we get extreme journalism, both good and bad.  The planet will respond as it must to our excesses, and we need smart journalism like the Post offers in its news pages to explain those changes. But the least my local newspaper can do can do is not further confuse the issue by publishing clueless commentary. We deserve better from those who decide what to print, and Will should stick with what he knows: baseball.

Scenes from a Drying California

Feb. 3, 2009 view of Lake Oroville northeast of Sacramento, California, in the Sierra Nevada foothills. Photo from CA Dept. of Water Resources.

Time runs out for California to receive its annual quota of winter snow and rain. The state is now in the third year of a drought.

Recent snowpack and reservoir measurements indicate that parts of the state now face the most severe water shortage since a major drought in 1991. More than 9 million people have since moved to the state.

State authorities Friday called for statewide 20 percent water use reductions. Federal and state water authorities notified irrigators and other users of federal water in the Central Valley that deliveries would be from zero to 10 percent of normal. 

This means if you are a farmer counting on irrigation water to grow your crops, you will be have enough water to grow crops on 10 percent of your acres, or to put 10 percent of needed water on all your acres. Neither choice appeals.

Graphic published in Sacramento Bee, Sat. Feb 22, 2009

Lake Oroville, above, a reservoir on the Feather River that produces hydropower and water for irrigation, is among lowest in the state. Projections are that Oroville will fill only about one-third this year. 

California's Central Valley farms, dependent on irrigation water from reservoirs like Oroville and Lake Shasta, produce major portions of the nation's lettuce and vegetable supply.

Western states must confront the reality of declining snowpacks due to long-term increases in temperatures from human-induced climate change. This while regional population increases stress what water supplies remain.

CA Dept. of Water Resources: Executive Update 

CA Dept. of Water Resources: Photos of Lake Oroville 2009 and 1991

New York Times: Severe Drought Adds to Hardships in California

Sacramento Bee: California urges all to cut water use by 20 percent 

Signs From Earth: California Keeps Drying Out

Signs From Earth: Western Water Worries Intensify

Washington Post: Decline in Snowpack is Blamed on Warming

Incredible Shrinking Trophy Fish

Trophy fish caught on Key West charter boats in (a) 1957, (b) early 1980s and (c) 2007. From Monroe County Library

If you are not convinced that our overfishing of the seas is having an effect, look at the shrinking "trophy fish" of the Florida Keys.

Scripps Institution graduate student Loren McClenachan rounded up more than five decades worth of archival photographs of Florida Keys fish catches, and what she found showed a drastic decline in the size of "trophy fish" caught in the seas around Key West, Florida. 

Her analysis of photographs from the 1950s through 2007 showed that fish caught today are nearly 90 percent smaller in estimated weight than those caught in the 1950s. Her research, part of the emerging field of historical marine ecology, is being published by Conservation Biology.

McClenachan discovered a cache of historical images of nearly 1,300 fish in the Monroe County Library in Key West which gave her visual baseline fish size data for her analysis. 

These images showed fish on a hanging board next to the sport fishing passengers of the day who caught the fish.

Scripps Institution of Oceanography: Historical Photographs Expose Decline in Florida's Reef Fish

Abstract of Paper: Historical Photos Document Changing Reef Fish Communities 

Interview with Smithsonian Magazine editor who discusses McClenachan's work.

Rebuilding America From City to Farm

 

Map from The Atlantic showing "Top 30" city population across the United States in 2007. A related article contemplates which cities and regions will benefit or wither once, if, the country pulls out of this current economic tailspin.

What will America's inhabited landscape look like, where and how will people live and move about, which cities and surrounding regions will thrive or wither after the clouds clear from our housing and economic collapse? (If they clear?)

Some ponder this post-crisis reshaped landscape, while others like small farmers already invent an emerging future that differs from the recent past.

In an Atlantic article How the Crash Will Reshape America, Richard Florida assesses regions and cities that will likely "win or lose." He thinks that some "mega-regions" with educated and creative classes will prosper, but old-line manufacturing and sunbelt regions that built false prosperity on debt-laden housing "booms" will implode. Suburbia and its housing bubble spawn, exurbia, likely will shrink.

An accompanying interactive map The Shaping of America examines trends in patent, income, and population across America to give a geographical sense of our stocks of past and current intellectual and human capital. In a related Q&A Florida ponders whether the recent "stimulus" package will just throw money after places doomed to collapse instead of focusing on building forward-looking infrastructure like intracity passenger railways that can create regional strength. 

Earlier this month the U.S. Department of Agriculture released the 2007 census of agriculture, and within the data are harbingers that the "get big or get out" conventional wisdom espoused by Agriculture Secretary Earl Butz in the 1970s is being challenged by new farmers on the ground.

The number of farms is up, and the face of farming grows diverse as the number of women running farms has risen about 30 percent. For sure very big farms dominate in terms of overall production, and mid-size farms are being sucked up by the very big. But within we see a boom in very small farms, where people also hold down a day job. 

Map from NYT, Farm Living 

People are moving back to the land and reclaiming a connection to the food in their lives. Perhaps what goes around comes around, and as the bloom is off suburbia we will see a reshaping of the suburban landscape and continued growth in "subfarmia," more small-scale farms near cities that grow the food city people eat. 

In the interim perhaps it is time to grow your own garden, if you have not already started.

Al Gore Plea to Scientists: "We Need You"

 

Al Gore speaks to a packed AAAS session at Chicago's Fairmont Hotel. by Dennis Dimick

Self-described "recovering politician" Al Gore brought his campaign against human-induced climate change into the belly of the scientific beast February 13. 

Speaking in Chicago to thousands of scientists at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), the former vice-president showed an updated slide show with pictures and charts of recent floods, fires, and disappearing ice at both poles. 

He also showed clips of several advertisements from his Alliance for Climate Protection which campaigns for alternative energy and against coal. 

What was striking was Gore's call to action. This to a group with more accumulated knowledge about the cause and effects of global warming than any other, but also with more reticence than any other group to speak forcefully and clearly about what they know. 

As Stanford climate scientist Stephen Schneider said earlier in the day to a session on media coverage of climate change, "We lead with our caveats."

Gore pleaded with the scientists to get involved in public education on the issues, to no longer separate the work they do from the civilization they live in.

"This is no time to sit back. This is a historic struggle. We as a species must make a decision," Gore said. "We've now reached a stage where continuing on our present course would threaten the entirety of human civilization.

"We have to go far quickly. And the only way that's going to happen is if those of you who are in a position to exercise influence and communicate your understanding of what this is all about make a decision to get involved. We need you to be actively involved.

"Scientists can no longer in good conscience accept this division between the work you do and the civilization in which you live. I'm asking you for help.

"I believe in my heart that we do have the capacity to make this generation one of those generations that changes the course of humankind. The stakes have never been higher."

The scientists could also take some cues from the presentation style of Gore's slide show, designed by Duarte Design. Bad powerpoint-style presentations dominate at meetings like this, the slides larded with poor-quality pictures, inscrutable graphs, charts, and hundreds of data points. 

In that sense scientists are their own worst enemies when communicating clearly and effectively. 

Better presentations are a good start to more effective communication about scientific work and findings. Scientists, and anyone, wanting to communicate more powerfully could start by reading Garr Reynold's book Presentation Zen, Nancy Duarte's book slide:ology, or Edward Tufte's essay, The Cognitive Style of Powerpoint.

California Keeps Drying Out

Australia isn't the only place suffering from drought. Areas of the Western United States continue to dry out as normal winter rains and mountain snowpacks fail to arrive. The Wall Street Journal reports on the multi-year drought in California threatening farm crops: Shrinking Water Supplies Imperil Farmers

California gets most of its moisture in the winter, and the California Department of Water Resources reports that rainfall is less than 70 percent of normal. Snowpacks that keep reservoirs and streams filled throughout the year are anywhere from 50 to 70 percent of normal.

Reduced water availability for irrigation is causing a reduction in acres planted. This decline in farm production compounds financial stress in Califonia's Central Valley, which already has been suffering from the fallout caused by the banking system collapse.

Los Angeles Times: California farms, vineyards in peril from warming, U.S. energy secretary warns

Signs From Earth: Western Water Worries Intensify

Murky World of Carbon Offsets

Environmental Health Perspectives in its February edition discusses the emerging trade in carbon offsets, a market that "trades in the absence of something no one wants: greenhouse gases in the atmosphere." 

Carbon Offsets: Growing Pains in a Growing Market

According to the article, despite marketing claims that offsets can absolve you or your firm of your carbon sins, evidence mounts that offsets do not deliver a measurable, genuine reduction in net emissions.

In same issue, (with picture by Jim Richardson): Biochar: Carbon Mitigation from the Ground Up explores the ancient Amazonian practice of "terra preta," mixing charcoal into the soil which improves soil ability to soak up and store carbon. 

Charles Mann and Richardson reported on this practice last September for National Geographic in the article Our Good Earth.

Merrill Lynch: Oil Output Set to Fall

Given that the world uses about 85 millon barrels of oil a day and production is barely able to keep up with demand, we are heading for an oil supply squeeze. This at least according to a new report from Merrill Lynch that says we will see a 30 million barrels per day decline in output in six years.

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(And Merrill is not alone, the International Energy Agency has previously forecast these shortages.) 

Arabian Business.com: Oil output could fall by 30m bpd by 2015

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"Steep falls in oil production means the world now needed to replace an amount of oil output equivalent to Saudi Arabia’s production every two years, Merrill Lynch said in a research report..."

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Signs From Earth: Mapping Energy Shortages

Australian Fires Are No Surprise

TIME Magazine: How Global Warming May Be Fueling Australia's Fires

Bryan Walsh: "Although the wildfires caught so many victims by surprise last weekend, there have been no shortage of distant early warning signs. The 11th chapter of the second working group of the 2007 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), for example, warned that fires in Australia were "virtually certain to increase in intensity and frequency," thanks to steadily warming temperatures over the next several decades..." 

Signs From Earth: Mapping the Heat Behind Australia's Fires

NASA Earth Observatory released this image Feb. 9 taken on Feb. 7 showing the smoke from fires just northwest of Melbourne in Victoria state in the southeast part of the country.  These fires have resulted after record heat, a decade-long drought and winds. Temperatures one day last week in Melbourne had been reported at 117 degrees F.

Also see: Twice Daily Images from MODIS satellite of this region.