Archive for October, 2009
« Older Entries | Newer Entries »Another wheel falls off the climate skeptic bus
Monday, October 26th, 2009
Most of you have probably heard climate skeptics suggest that there is no climate warming because temperatures in the last decade have seemed to cool (examples at BBC and Drudge).
In the news today, the Associated Press asked a group of independent statisticians to evaluate the temperature records to see what they thought.
The answer?
The skeptics are wrong—warming is real, and it’s statistically hotter than at any point since records began.
Some excerpts:
In a blind test, the AP gave temperature data to four independent statisticians and asked them to look for trends, without telling them what the numbers represented. The experts found no true temperature declines over time.
“If you look at the data and sort of cherry-pick a microtrend within a bigger trend, that technique is particularly suspect,” said John Grego, a professor of statistics at the University of South Carolina.
Yet the idea that things are cooling has been repeated in opinion columns, a BBC news story posted on the Drudge Report and in a new book by the authors of the best-seller “Freakonomics.” Last week, a poll by the Pew Research Center found that only 57 percent of Americans now believe there is strong scientific evidence for global warming, down from 77 percent in 2006.
Real Climate had a post recently about the cottage industry that built climate change denial.
Here’s the new Pew poll that everyone is talking about.
This is a short review of a book describing the climate denial industry.
And here is a website dedicated to confronting climate change denial.
Tags: Pew, skeptic
Posted in climate change science | No Comments »
Does environmental literature beget environmental literacy and behavior?
Monday, October 26th, 2009
In the fast-paced world of science and policy, the contributions of the humanities are often overlooked in the transition to a more sustainable world.
In this week’s Online First edition1,2 of Environment and Behavior, Catherine Mobley and colleagues argue that reading environmental literature might be an important factor promoting environmentally responsible behavior (ERB), such as cutting back on driving, recycling, buying organic foods, using public transportation, using renewable energy, reducing home water and energy use, etc.
The study of ERBs is complex, owing to a number of sociodemographic factors like education level, income, and political orientation that can influence behavior:
Sociodemographic factors –> values, attitudes, and worldviews –> ERB
This team asked whether reading three texts, considered by many to be part of environmental literature’s canon,
- Aldo Leopold’s A Sand County Almanac
- Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring
- H.D. Thoreau’s Walden
might be an additive factor in explaining ERBs above and beyond socioeconomic factors. They used a survey of >7,000 people to assess the degree to which people exhibit ERBs.
Their results suggest that this may be the case. Controlling for the confounding sociodemographic factors, they found a small but significant increase in ERB for people who read environmental literature compared to those that didn’t.
The results spur more questions than they answer:
- Why does reading environmental literature affect ERBs? For example, as the authors state, does environmental literature increase ecological foundations, conceptual awareness, or action skills? Does it allow one to vicariously experience these issues or reinforce the reader’s prior experiences with environmental issues?
- How do these results factor into environmental literacy outreach? The authors suggest community book clubs or combining book discussions with specific community actions or analyses of contemporary environmental issues and solutions.
- What might be the value of other environmental texts and readings that appeal to a wider constituency (e.g., environmental justice)?
- What should be included in an environmental literary canon?
1Mobley, C. et al (2009) Exploring Additional Determinants of Environmentally Responsible Behavior: The Influence of Environmental Literature and Environmental Attitudes. Environment and Behavior (Online first).
2Bowdoin people can access the article here.
Tags: literature
Posted in behavior, environmental literacy, environmentalism | No Comments »
This week’s good ideas in campus sustainability: 10/26/09
Monday, October 26th, 2009
This is the first post of a new feature at globalchangeblog.com. The Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education (AASHE) publishes a weekly bulletin listing many of the things that campuses across the country (and Canada) are doing to become more sustainable.
Each week, I will pull a few of the best examples of interesting projects and weave them into a broader discussion about sustainability.
This week’s featured projects:
(1) Aspen Institute Beyond Gray Pinstripes Green MBA Ranking
- As I mentioned in an earlier post, it’s time for higher education to start thinking about what it means to train people to be successful in a world that is ecologically unsustainable and socially unjust. If we expect the world to change, part of what we need to do is to start producing leaders who can help drive that change. This project ranks business schools according to how well they are achieving these goals.
In the words of the Aspen Institute, “While many MBA rankings exist, only one looks beyond reputation and test scores to measure something much more important: how well schools are preparing their students for the environmental, social and ethical complexities of modern-day business.”
(2) University of Missouri, Columbia begins peer-to-peer sustainability outreach program.
- It’s one thing for colleges to get committed to sustainability, but these kinds of commitments reach a whole new level once students buy in and take some ownership in the process, turning what is often a top-down process into a bottom-up community driven effort.
(3) Antioch New England reduces energy by 19% since 2007
- 657 schools have signed the President’s Climate Commitment, an effort to move campuses towards carbon neutrality. As most of us who are working on these projects knows, it’s hard to turn the corner and get our institutions on an emission reduction path. It’s impressive when schools are already making significant, meaningful reductions.
(4) U Illinois to Offer Grad Option in Energy & Sustainability Engineering
and College of the Desert to Train Students for Solar Farms
- Environmental Studies students are excited about green jobs. Efforts by universities to develop innovative ways of training students for the future are exciting.
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For more information:
Posted in behavior, campus sustainability, higher education, sustainability | 1 Comment »
Climate adaptation: We have no choice, and it’s not enough
Saturday, October 24th, 2009
Our global environment is changing in ways that we are beginning to observe in our lifetimes:
- Climate is warming by as much as a degree centigrade per decade in parts of the Polar North.
- Permafrost is thawing.
- Species ranges are shifting northwards in latitude and upwards in altitude.
- Sea level is rising.
- Sea ice is shrinking.
- Polar ice is thinning.
- Pervasive droughts are beginning to grip parts of the world.
- 50 and 100 year rain storms are happening multiple times in a decade.
- Warming is wreaking havoc on cultures around the world. Inuit communities are losing their villages and traditional hunting grounds. Bangladeshi farmers are losing their coastal fields to saltwater incursion. Pacific islanders are poised to lose their atolls. This week, Nature published a story about how the thawing of the Thorthormi Glacier in the Himalayas threatens the nation of Bhutan.
Tim Killeen, head of Geosciences at NSF, once said that if you look at model projections of climate, they all say the same thing up to the year 2030: Based on the gases we have already emitted, and the inertia in the ocean-atmosphere system, we are committed to climate change at least to this point, and there’s little we can do about it. This means we have no choice but to start adapting to things like changing seasonality in temperatures and precipitation, food production, sea level rise, and species distributions. The most recent IPCC synthesis report echoes this.
After 2030, however, models diverge depending on which socioeconomic path we choose. How fast we de-carbonize the economy will determine the extent to which we mitigate warming and how much further adaptation we will need.
There is vigorous debate about the role of adaptation in a world where mitigation is clearly needed. Adaptation has long been assailed by the environmental community as giving up. And now that we need it, old thinking is hard to break.
In a recent article in Yale 360 (Learning to Live With Climate Change Will Not Be Enough), David Orr argues strongly for mitigation over adaptation, although he recognizes that adaptation strategies in the near term are prudent to meet the changes to which we are already committed.
Today, Bowdoin College’s Environmental Studies program, in partnership with the The Nature Conservancy and the McKeen Center for the Common Good, hosted a symposium, “Changing Environments, Changing Societies: Community Responses to Environmental Uncertainty.” It included a mix of international and regional scholars and practitioners, social and natural scientists, and issues like biodiversity, water, food, public health, and infrastructure/urban planning.
What were some of the main outcomes this group synthesized about adaptation?
Posted in behavior, climate adaptation, climate change science, environmentalism, food and agriculture, nature and culture, policy | 2 Comments »
1.7 kilograms of CO2 per serving?
Friday, October 23rd, 2009
That’s how much some Swedes are finding out a hamburger contributes to their carbon footprint.
Yesterday, the NY Times ran a story highlighting new Swedish dietary guidelines—in this case, labels on food products showing consumers how much carbon is emitted in the production of these items.
It’s an interesting idea on many levels:
- It deals with the chronic problem of environmental illiteracy.
- It makes the idea of carbon emissions real and personal rather than some ethereal, abstract idea.
- It makes information readily available in a useful form that can influence consumer choice (e.g., folks can compare two items side-by-side to see which has a lower footprint).
- These labels could possibly drive producers and supermarkets to respond more to consumer demand.
- And when big retailers get on board, large ripple effects can happen. Walmart is about to roll these labels out as well. As Walmart goes, so goes the world’s biggest supply chain. That’s good news.
However, it’s also interesting to see the range of responses among consumers–and not all of it’s positive. An analysis of these labels is an environmental psychology PhD dissertation waiting to happen.
photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/su-lin/ / CC BY-NC-ND 2.0
Tags: carbon labels, Wal Mart
Posted in behavior, environmentalism, food and agriculture, nature and culture, sustainability | 1 Comment »
How our foods and fuels drive poor air quality in the tropics
Friday, October 23rd, 2009
Palm oil has garnered a lot of news recently. It’s an ingredient in many processed foods and, increasingly, is being used to make biodiesel fuel.
One initial concern was the destruction of tropical rainforests and peatlands to create palm oil plantations. To the extent that these plantations are leading to habitat destruction in places like Indonesia, this threatens species like the orangutan.
In this week’s early edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (open access), a team addressed a second potential problem: air pollution, specifically ground-level ozone production.
The news about ozone is potentially confusing, so let me start with a quick primer:
- Ozone’s chemical formula is O3, which is similar to oxygen we breathe in the air (O2).
- Ozone is a highly oxidizing molecule, which means that it is harmful to living organisms when it comes in contact with them (such as when we inhale it). If you have ever been around electrical motors and you smell a pungent odor, that’s ozone.
- Ozone in the stratosphere (upper atmosphere) is good for life on Earth. It absorbs ultraviolet light and prevents us from getting skin cancer. This is the ozone that gets damaged by CFCs and other gases, creating the ozone hole over Antarctica. Because we do not come into contact with this ozone, we benefit from it’s sunscreen properties without suffering any ill health effects.
- Ozone in the troposphere (the part of the atmosphere near the ground, so it’s also called “ground-level” ozone), however, is not a good thing to have around because this is the part of the atmosphere that comes in contact with living organisms.
- Ground-level ozone is often a byproduct of urban sprawl. It forms when volatile organic carbon (VOC) from vehicles (think gasoline vapor) and vegetation (think the smell of Christmas trees) react with nitric oxides from car exhaust under warm, sunny conditions.
- It’s a part of the chemical soup we call smog. This is why we often see code orange or code red days in metro suburban areas like Washington DC, suburban NY, Atlanta, and Raleigh-Durham, NC warning people with respiratory illnesses, children, and the elderly to stay inside.
- Although there is reason to believe that increasing ozone is connected with the rising incidence of asthma, that link has not been well established.
- The World Health Organization has recommended exposure limits of no more than 50 parts per billion in any 8 hour period.
The PNAS article indicates that ozone production is a growing threat in palm plantations, which show higher temperatures and levels of VOCs and nitric oxides than adjacent rainforests.
Although the level of ozone in palm plantations is not yet at a level that threatens health, the team used a model of ozone production to suggest that if nitric oxide emissions were to reach levels seen in the developed Western world (which may be expected with further development and auto use), this could lead to ozone concentrations exceeding 100 ppb, which is considered an emergency air quality event.
Bottom line: In tropical regions, we need to think of how to balance economic development, biofuel production, habitat protection, and–now– human health. To the extent that processed foods and biofuel production are driven largely by consumption in industrialized countries, we share in the responsibility of dealing with this issue.
Already, some companies like Whole Foods have banned unsustainably produced palm oil to combat habitat destruction, but this doesn’t solve the new issue of air pollution. The article suggests that new varieties of palm plants that emit much lower amounts of VOCs could solve this problem. That’s good news.
Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/ahvega/ / CC BY 2.0
Tags: Indonesia, orangutan, ozone, palm oil
Posted in biofuels, pollutants | 1 Comment »
Good intentions, bad legacies: A history of why natural resource management sometimes fails
Friday, October 23rd, 2009
In the latest issue of Ecology and Society (open access), Colin Beier and colleagues provide an interesting case study of the Tongass National Forest (Alaska), examining the social-ecological dynamics of resource systems and why they often fail–in the long term–to deliver either improvements in public welfare or ecological sustainability. It’s important to note that they’re talking about a paradigm typical of 19-20th Century USA (i.e., post-colonial people of European descent in North America).
What I like about this case study is its generality to several kinds of natural resources and the lessons it offers when considering development in the modern world.
You’ll see at the end that they describe a solution similar to the growing Indigenous and Community Conserved Areas (ICCA) movement promoted by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN). And you’ll see an example of the changing focus of The Nature Conservancy as they work to promote sustainable development alongside conservation.
An excerpt:
Government efforts to stimulate the development of natural resources for public benefit often seek to implement a vision at grand scales that, over time, creates a cycle of dependency that undermines the original social purpose as well as the resource base that was intended to be sustained. In the United States, this has occurred with respect to agriculture, forestry, fisheries, water, and many other types of resource systems. Similar cycles of dependency have emerged through international aid programs to developing nations that were intended to create self-sufficiency through resource development. Although the goals of these programs are often socially admirable and provide an economic stimulus to initiate changes that would otherwise lack the resources to emerge —i.e., to escape from poverty traps —they often result in challenging social traps that can constrain options for future generations. Why have these governance efforts failed so consistently, and what lessons can be learned that would enlighten efforts to address new frontiers of resource governance and public welfare in a rapidly changing world?
What did they find?
Tags: industry, logging, Tongass
Posted in community conserved areas, environmental history, sustainable development | No Comments »
In this week’s Science: Fixing a major flaw with biofuels
Thursday, October 22nd, 2009
There’s an interesting article in Friday’s issue of Science by a team of ecologists and environmental scientists arguing that the way we think about biofuels is flawed and can potentially lead to bad outcomes in mitigating climate change.
Here’ s the issue: When we think of using, say, wood from forests or grasses from grasslands for energy, we normally think of this process as being carbon neutral–i.e., the carbon released when we burn the wood/grass will be taken back up by the regenerating forest/grassland. No net change in atmospheric CO2. At face value, this sounds like a great strategy for dealing with atmospheric CO2.
However, the authors indicate that the carbon accounting system in the Kyoto protocol, EU carbon trading system, and developing U.S. cap and trade plans makes a mistake in how biofuels are handled. Specifically, because of the carbon neutrality of biofuels, the carbon accounting system simply ignores (1) the release of carbon to the atmosphere from biofuel burning and (2) the movement of carbon from the atmosphere back into regenerating forests and grasslands (or other biofuel crop). At first glance, this appears to make sense: If burning biofuels is carbon neutral, just ignore the release and uptake of carbon since they cancel one another out.
There are two major problems with this–one ecological and another economic:
Tags: biofuel, carbon neutral
Posted in biofuels, climate change science | 2 Comments »
In this week’s issue of Nature: “Earth’s biggest climate switch”
Thursday, October 22nd, 2009
A lot of us have been following the paleoclimatology literature examining changes in global temperatures and atmospheric CO2 over the past 60 million years, which can be deduced using different chemical signatures in ocean sediment cores.
One time period, in particular, is especially relevant to the discussion of rising CO2–a change between 33.5-34 million years ago (MYA) called the Eocene-Oligocene (E-O) transition.
What happened back then? Around this time was the first appearance of consistent polar ice on Antarctica. Before then, atmospheric CO2 levels were high enough that Earth’s climate was a hothouse, perhaps as much as 8-10 degrees C warmer than today. Antarctica was lush and green with forests.
The worry is that if we start approaching atmospheric levels of CO2 similar to those before the E-O transition, we may warm the climate to a condition where polar ice us unstable. That would be bad news because the loss of the Antarctic ice sheet would raise sea level by more than 60 meters.
This week, Paul Pearson and colleagues (who have done a lot of this great work) published a new article1 examining the E-O transition in more detail to see if it has any clues for our modern environmental challenges.
What did they find?
Tags: Antarctica, climate history, ice
Posted in climate change science, polar ice | No Comments »
In this week’s issue of Nature: Copenhagen
Thursday, October 22nd, 2009
The focus this week is on the Copenhagen climate talks coming up in December. Here are some excerpts from a few articles:
Tags: China, Copenhagen, India
Posted in policy | No Comments »
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