Signs From Earth

Journey to Aldo Leopold Shack, Baraboo, WI

Society of Environmental Journalists sunset journey to "The Shack," the farm close to the Wisconsin River near Baraboo, Wisconsin where conservationist Aldo Leopold was inspired to write his book "A Sand County Almanac." Saturday October 10, 2009. --Dennis Dimick

The Aldo Leopold shack at dusk.

Interior and kerosene lamps preserved as during the time Leopold lived there until his death in 1948.

Sandhill cranes at dusk over Aldo Leopold shack.

Wisconsin River Near Aldo Leopold shack, early evening.

Aldo Leopold Shack early evening.

The Aldo Leopold Shack, Baraboo, Wisconsin. Leopold's book "A Sand County Almanac" took form here.

Tallgrass prairie south of road from the Shack to Leopold Center. It was along this route that Leopold last traveled when he went to fight a fire on an adjacent farm. It was on this neighboring farm that Leopold died of a heart attack, and is where the Leopold Center now stands.

Posted via email from Signs From Earth Notes

Flash! Secret Ice Images Revealed (As Reported Here 10 Days Ago)

 

For what it is worth, the breathless July 26 headline in the London Observer, "Revealed: The Secret evidence of global warming Bush tried to hide," seems over the top, and late to the game. 

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One wonders where the major news outlets in the United States have been on this story, which was written about right here at Signs From Earth on July 16 after Jenny Lauren Lee at Science News in Washington posted an item there on July 15. 

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Details and pictures here: Secret Pictures of Arctic Ice Released. Now that the "major" news outlets are picking up this story, we can now believe that it really happened. Thank goodness.

Climate Fight Site: Carbon War Room

Sir Richard Branson is behind Carbon War Room, a new web effort designed to ramp up action on reducing carbon emissions and move the world "beyond the carbon economy." With a growing research database, resources, and widgets to post to your own website, the site's "About Us" page reveals:

"The Carbon War Room is a global philanthropic inititative, founded to harness the resource and skills of the Planet’s entrepreneurs and institutions to urgently deliver solutions that enable humanity to prosper beyond the carbon economy. Our Founders include some of the world’s leading entrepreneurs and institutions who are passionate about solving this problem..."

The website's creators envision the "battles" against carbon in seven "theatres," including: transportation, electricity, the built environment, industrial processes, agriculture and deforestation, development of transition economies, and in "adaptation mitigation." Thanks to Joel Makower for the tip...

National Security Equals Natural Security

 

The New Security Beat reports on a conference, new blog, and paper out this week from the Center for a New American Security, highlighting the intertwined relationship between national security and natural resources security.

Abstract of Paper, Natural Security: "In the 21st century, the security of nations will increasingly depend on the security of natural resources, or “natural security.”  This concept paper outlines a new program of study at the Center for a New American Security to look at emerging natural resources challenges in six key areas of consumption and consequences – energy, minerals, water, land, climate change, and biodiversity – as well as the ways in which these challenges are linked together. Any solution to the country’s energy insecurity is likely to involve water, non-fuel minerals, and land-use issues; climate change and biodiversity cut across all concerns, with broad effects on resource vulnerability. Without an integrated, national-level approach that links together natural security challenges, the United States runs the risk of trading one dependency for another and exacerbating the consequences."

PDF of CNAS Working Paper: Natural Security

Climate Change: The Problem for Others

The political reporting site fivethirtyeight has produced an inverted pyramid graphic that well explains why concern for climate change, global warming, global weirding, you name it, is a problem not for us to worry about. 

It's just too abstract, far off, something for others to furrow their brows for.

According to the results of a survey out this spring, climate change is something for plants and animals, future generations, people in developing countries, and others, but not me, to be concerned with. And this is why little or nothing gets done to reduce carbon emissions. If we have to choose between solving the problems in front of us or those facing others or the future which to choose?

This is a visualization of the results of a study, Climate Change in the American Mind, published recently by the Yale Project on Climate Change and the George Mason Center for Climate Change Communication.  

Yet the main problem we face with kicking the can down the road, allowing heat-trapping carbon to keep building in the atmosphere, is that unless we set ourselves on a pathway towards drastically reducing our emissions now, little we do in the future will matter, as has been written here and many places elsewhere previously:

Signs From Earth: A Thousand Years of Warming Ahead

Signs From Earth: Hot Planet - Our Path Ahead

 Sources:

Profile (and Seas) Rise for "Climate Refugees"

 

Tulun Atoll in the low-lying Carteret Islands in the Pacific Ocean. Photo: NASA via Wikipedia.

The drowning Carteret Islands northeast of Papua New Guinea get the attention of The New York Times in an article "Refugees Join List of Climate-Change Issues," which also discusses the emerging awareness that hundreds of millions could lose their homes due to rising seas and other effects of climate change. 

..."There could be 200 million of these climate refugees by 2050, according to a new policy paper by the International Organization for Migration, depending on the degree of climate disturbances. Aside from the South Pacific, low-lying areas likely to be battered first include Bangladesh and nations in the Indian Ocean, where the leader of the Maldives has begun seeking a safe haven for his 300,000 people. Landlocked areas may also be affected; some experts call the Darfur region of Sudan, where nomads battle villagers in a war over shrinking natural resources, the first significant conflict linked to climate change...."

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The phrase "climate refugee" comes into increasing use, yet has no legal definition. Geoff Dabelko wrote in 2007 at The New Security Beat in the postiing, "A Word of Caution on Climate Change and “Refugees” that the word "refugee" is problematic when applied to being driven from one's place because of environmental conditions.

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"In order to achieve refugee status, people must be fleeing persecution or violence and must cross a national border," he said.  Dabelko continues that discussion here in the introduction to a new report from the Woodrow Wilson Center's Environmental Change and Security Program, where he is director. 

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A beacon, ECSP and its blog The New Security Beat continually explores the confluence of issues like population, water, ecosystems, resources and migration -- and their impact on security, economy, and society.

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As people increasingly are displaced from the accumulating catalog of climate impacts, perhaps we need to consider expanding the legal definition of refugee, or find new words to describe environment- and climate-driven flight from home. Right now no internationally accepted term exists for people moving because of environmental reasons, and according to the International Organization for Migration, the terms "environmental refugee" and "climate change refugee" have no basis in international refugee law. 

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So if not refugee, what now to call those driven elsewhere by the effects of human-induced climate change?

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Report: Ecological Impacts of Climate Change

The U.S National Academy of Sciences has released a new 28-page illustrated booklet "Ecological Impacts of Climate Change." Available free as a downloadable PDF, the booklet shows in a visual way the accumulating impacts of climate change across the United States. 

As temperatures keep rising we see a variety of changes: growing seasons and ocean currents shift, animals modify their migratory and breeding behavior, plants such as grape varieties grow in new areas and abandon old, and habitats such as the Arctic ice shrink and change the ecology of the north. All regions of the country are being affected.

The booklet is based on a 2008 report by the National Academies with the same title, "Ecological Impacts of Climate Change." (Lest we get confused.)  This extended assessment is also available free as a PDF download from the National Academies Press website once you have registered.

 

The new Ecological Change booklet is a companion to "Understanding and Responding to Climate Change," which was updated in 2008 to include new information from the 2007 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) 4th Assessment Report.

Powerpoint slides for the new Ecological Change booklet are also available to download and use if you are so inclined. This to help educate or inform a local civic group, museum visitors, the kids at your neighborhood school, or even your peers at work. Climate impacts for each area of the U.S. are different and presentations are tailored for your region: Pacific Coast, Alaska and the Arctic, Western Mountains, Southwestern Deserts, Central U.S., Southeast, and Northeast.

Both booklets are part of an ongoing National Academy of Sciences study of climate choices ahead for the United States. A two-day summit was held the end of March, and webcasts of the sessions are available. The summit agenda is available here.

The changes we are seeing all around are going to be with us for a very long time, so we might as well understand and help others understand what is in store for our animal and plant neighbors, and ourselves. These materials from the National Academy of Sciences are a good place to start learning.

Related: Island Press this spring released a book Heatstroke: Nature in an Age of Global Warming, by Anthony Barnosky. A professor of biology at the University of California-Berkeley, Barnosky focuses on the changes we see in the natural world as temperatures rise rapidly, and he connects this with the end of the last ice age when mass extinctions occurred. 

Washington Post review by Barbara King: "A Hot Topic: In "Heatstroke," an ecologist argues that we need to rethink conservation in an age of global warming."

.."Barnosky likes ecosystems just as much as the next scientist, but in "Heatstroke: Nature in an Age of Global Warming," he argues brilliantly that conservation biology can no longer focus on saving them. The reason is simple: Thanks to global warming, the ecosystem we work to save today will have a different climate tomorrow. This means that many species will face extinction (or at least serious loss of genetic diversity), even if the land around them is protected from the logger's chainsaw and the developer's backhoe..."

Tips to Avoid "Black Swan" Events

A few days ago Nassim Nicholas Taleb, author of the book "The Blacks Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable," penned a piece for The Financial Times on avoiding "black swan" events. 

Black swans in this context are very infrequent extreme events that have wide implication. (9/11, financial collapse, power grid failure, the internet, rapid climate change.) 

Taleb has posted the article on his website and it can be downloaded here as a PDF:  Ten Principles for a Black Swan-proof World. 

A few of the ten principles: don't let anything get "too big to fail," stop the socialization of losses and the privatization of gain, and do not give children sticks of dynamite, even if it comes with a warning. (In this context the "dynamite" is complex financial derivatives that no one understands.)

The term "black swan" comes from the mistaken assumption that all swans are white. In this context a "black swan" is a metaphor for something that cannot exist. Black swans were discovered in Australia in the 18th century, thereby proving false the assumption that all swans are white. In Taleb's context "black swans" are rare events beyond the realm of normal exprectation. Photo: Big Gray Mare/flickr

Signs From Earth: Turbulence in Our Midst

Towards Aspen Environment Forum

 

Postings will be even slower in the next few days than they have been over the past few days. Am heading to Colorado for the Aspen Environment Forum, co-sponsored with the Aspen Institute. 

I was involved in developing the agenda for this year's (and last year's) sessions, and opened the 2008 forum with a slide show "Changing Planet: Where Energy and Climate Collide." This year we explore energy, probing whether we can power the future on something other than coal, oil and gas.

Will be moderating several sessions on solar energy, Canadian tar sands, and the emerging role of bloggers in defining coverage of science and environmental issues...

New Climate Change Film: The Age of Stupid

Opening in the UK this week is the new climate change film The Age of Stupid. The film is based on the life of a man (Pete Postlethwaite) living alone in 2055 who looks looks back at films from 2008 and wonders why we didn't do anything to stop global warming when we had the chance. 

It was bankrolled by what is called "crowd-funding," with shares sold to individuals and groups. U.S. screenings begin with the San Francisco Film Festival in April, with theatric release said to be September.

Review in The Guardian; CBS News: The Age of Stupid Cometh

Earthman's Jammin' Climate Song

If the relentless media drumbeat of climate doom has you feeling low, check out this rockin', sockin', "Climate Crisis Jam" presentation from the Earthman Project. 

Uplifting, engaging, empowering, fun, great for the kids, and to the point. Thanks to Joe Romm at Climate Progress for the heads up. 

The Earthman Project is part of the Captain Planet Foundation.

Recycling the Suburbs

10 Ideas Changing the World Right Now: Emerging trends highlighted this week in TIME as the world economy evolves to something new. Besides suburban recycling, others include rent-a-country and ecological intelligence.

Friedman Channels Jim Kunstler, Wendell Berry

Apparently Thomas Friedman has come to the realization that the rapacious, energy-intensive living arrangements we created the past half century aren't working so well. It's about time.

Friedman's column in Sunday's New York Times makes me wonder if he has secretly been reading James Howard Kunstler and Wendell Berry. If he has, he doesn't admit it.

Kunstler for years has said we have been living way beyond our means (and will pay for this excess) via his book The Long Emergency and his weekly column:

(March 2, 2009: What Next?)..."The collapse of complex systems is actually predicated on the idea that the systems would mutually reinforce each other's failures. This is now plain to see as the collapse of banking (that is, of both lending and debt service), has led to the collapse of commerce and manufacturing. The next systems to go will probably be farming, transportation, and the oil markets themselves (which constitute the system for allocating and distributing world energy resources). As these things seize up, the final system to go will be governance, at least at the highest levels.

"If we're really lucky, human affairs will eventually reorganize at a lower scale of activity, governance, civility, and economy. Every week, the failure to recognize the nature of our predicament thrusts us further into the uncharted territory of hardship. The task of government right now is not to prop up doomed systems at their current scales of failure, but to prepare the public to rebuild our systems at smaller scales..."

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Wendell Berry laid this all out last May in Harpers' Magazine: Faustian Economics--Hell Hath No Limits:

"The general reaction to the apparent end of the era of cheap fossil fuel, as to other readily foreseeable curtailments, has been to delay any sort of reckoning. The strategies of delay, so far, have been a sort of willed oblivion, or visions of large profits to the manufacturers of such “biofuels” as ethanol from corn or switchgrass, or the familiar unscientific faith that “science will find an answer.” The dominant response, in short, is a dogged belief that what we call the American Way of Life will prove somehow indestructible. We will keep on consuming, spending, wasting, and driving, as before, at any cost to anything and everybody but ourselves...."

Friedman's March 8 New York Times piece, "The Inflection is Near?:

"...What if the crisis of 2008 represents something much more fundamental than a deep recession? What if it’s telling us that the whole growth model we created over the last 50 years is simply unsustainable economically and ecologically and that 2008 was when we hit the wall — when Mother Nature and the market both said: “No more.”

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.

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?