Screw global climate change, conservative Republicans sign this!

Screw global climate change, conservative Republicans sign this!

As a scientist it drives me crazy that science seems to have taken a back seat to misrepresentation in the media. Essentially today if someone has media access and can say enough times this is false, then people will believe it, after all, it’s on television. This is particularly true of both evolution and climate change. Both concepts are overwhelmingly accepted by science yet if you were to listen to conservative talk radio, Fox News or even the main stream media you’d think both of these concepts were radical new ideas that only a small percentage of scientists supported. Ironically in Europe, you know all of those countries we seem to feel so superior too, these concepts are broadly accepted. This is another nod to the fact that America is one of the more religious and uptight countries on earth.

No place is the idea of repetitive bullshit being treated as fact more apparent than on the presidential campaign trail. If you say your opponent is soft on crime, fiscally irresponsible, unsupportive of the military, in a cult, etc… and you say it enough times, it becomes the truth. On the subject of global climate change the current crop of Republican presidential candidates keep hammering on how climate change is bullshit, how they believe the concept is only fear mongering on the part of liberals who want to ruin the economy.

I would ask those people to go and talk to the people on the Carteret Islands of Papua New Guinea who are having to leave their island home due to global sea rise as a result of global climate, there is a really fascinating documentary about this called, Sun Come Up check it out. But hey, they’re not Americans so who cares, no one in Boca Raton has had to move, and so everything must be fine.

While thinking about this the other day I’ve come up with an idea. The Republicans are very fond of signing pledges that they won’t raise taxes, inconvenience rich people or allow homosexuals to be treated like humans, so I have another one for them. If they think global climate change is such crap then sign the following pledge:

I {insert the change of your favorite conservative climate change denier} do pledge that I am so unbelievable sure that global climate change is a crock, that if it turns out to not be, I hereby pledge that my descendants will accept financial liability for any and all global climate change related financial impacts, including housing any and all climate change refugees with said descendants.

So screw global climate change, Republicans sign this!

 

 

Sustainable Sunday Blogroll

I write for several places on the issues of sustainability and alternative energy so today I decided to post some of the links from other places including pieces on powering garbage trucks with garbage, utilizing sewage for power, and establishing a solar power highway, and nuclear power plant safety, enjoy.

http://www.examiner.com/alternative-energy-in-sacramento/are-california-s-nuclear-plants-safer-than-japan-s

http://www.examiner.com/alternative-energy-in-sacramento/smud-solar-highway-project-is-currently-the-comment-phase-for-its-environment

http://www.examiner.com/alternative-energy-in-sacramento/everyday-solar-energy

http://www.examiner.com/alternative-energy-in-sacramento/let-s-power-our-garbage-trucks-with-garbage

http://www.examiner.com/alternative-energy-in-sacramento/flush-the-toilet-and-power-your-neighborhood-1

http://www.examiner.com/alternative-energy-in-sacramento/what-really-drives-sustainability

Sustainable Sundays: Sustainability for Kids

The reality of the situation is this, if we are to see a greener more sustainable future, then we are going to have to not only change our behavior, but teach our kids better than we were taught.  Now, I’m not talking about full on hippy indoctrination, not even sure if I could handle that myself.  However, I think it’s important that kids have an understanding of what sustainability is and how their actions impact the environment.  The state of Oregon has done a great job of putting together a straightforward easy to understand page for schools with some basics and a quiz, it’s a great start and would be a great resource for kids and elementary school teachers anywhere.  You can find it at the link below:

http://www.sustainableschools.org/documents/Sustainability%20for%20kids%20070302.pdf

Sustainable Sunday: Blog Roll of Sustainability Articles

Sustainable Sunday:  Blog Roll of Sustainability Articles

 Energy Star is a government program that helps you find out the energy efficiency of products, and also evaluates home improvements in your own area:

Green Seal is a site that refers you to environmentally friendly products and services:

Local Harvest is a site that shows you where you can find local organic farms and farmers markets:

 

Some interesting reading:

 What really drives sustainability.

 Flush the toilet power your neighborhood.

 Sustainable building in the form of Earthships.

Sustainable Sunday: Sustainability in Higher Education

Nobody made a greater mistake than he who did nothing because he could only do a little – Edmund Burke

Today friends I want to talk about sustainability in higher education, we’ll look in the weeks to come at sustainability education at the elementary levels but today I want to focus on higher education.  Sustainability, particularly on the west coast has become a very hot issue for colleges.  There is even an association, for a fee of course, that links sustainability initiatives across the country providing resources and guidance on these issues.  Across the country many college presidents have become signatories to the American Colleges and Universities Presidents’ Climate Commitment (ACUPCC).  These signatories are taking a step toward ensuring that colleges and universities are leaders in the discussion of sustainability, not followers.  A link to the text is below:

http://www.presidentsclimatecommitment.org/about/commitment

Among the leaders at the college level on sustainability is a community college in Oroville, California, Butte-Glenn Sustainability Community College.  I love this place, the effort is a college-wide effort that is led in many ways by a very wise facilities director by the name of Mike Miller.  Mike’s philosophy is, “fiscal stability through sustainable initiatives” a philosophy I have personally adopted.  Butte has done a significant amount of green building on campus, building a number of LEED certified buildings and of course has developed education programming to match.  However the most amazing thing to me, and their greatest claim to fame, will be by this spring the first grid positive campus in America.  What does that mean?  Very simply the college will produce more energy than it consumes.  They are accomplishing this through a combination of energy efficiency in action and building as well as a three phases of solar fields that have been installed.  A really remarkable accomplishment and one that they should be commended for and which other colleges should aspire to, and very much what the ACUPCC is all about.  You can read more about Butte at the following link:

http://www.butte.edu/sustainability/

Sustainable Sundays: Earthships

There has been a lot of focus in the news recently concerning green building particularly in light of the new green building codes that have recently gone into effect in California, you can read more about that here:

http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/2010/0115/California-adopts-first-statewide-green-building-code

I definitely applaud this move and it is part of a larger move in California on most fronts to increase the sustainable initiatives in the state as California becomes the national leader in green technology and sustainability.  Steps have included the million solar roofs initiatives, the largest commercial solar fields in the nation and groundbreaking greenhouse gas emission legislation.

However today the sustainable building I would like to discuss is some very cool work being done in the high desert areas of New Mexico which were originally designed and constructed by architect Mike Reynolds.

The Earthships as they are called, use rammed earth tires to create the foundations and load bearing walls of the structure, they also make use of passive solar heating methods and typically also are solar-powered.  Many of the early Earthships used composting toilets with recent innovations allowing for typical water toilets to be used.  Along with these features homes typically recycle grey water, do rain catchment and include gardens.  All in all the system is very cool, low-cost and uses nothing but natural and easily available materials that the rest of society considers trash.  Additionally, internal non-load bearing walls are often honeycombed using cans or bottles.  You can read more about them at the following link:

http://earthship.com/

One of the really amazing things about the Earthships are how individually beautiful they can be.  The builders are often very creative in their use of materials, particularly in how they use bottles.  In the honeycombed walls you can use the bottles to allow for light penetration and they are often spectacular, check out the one below:

Earthship Bottle Wall

 

The image comes from another site about Earthships and can be found at:

http://www.rodale.com/earthship-homes?page=0%2C1

So at the end of the day what the Earthship concept really shows is that sustainability doesn’t have to be some wacky hippie concept, but that sustainable ideals can be both functional and economically efficient, a great example for us in any activity.

Mystery Bird Death, the sky is falling in Arkansas and Louisiana, and fish too!

So unless you’ve been in a bunker over the last few days you have probably heard about the over 1000 (some estimate 5000) birds who died suddenly in Arkansas and then the sudden death of around a 1000 birds yesterday in Louisiana.  In case you are just coming out of that bunker, here’s a link to the story:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2011/jan/04/apocalypse-mystery-bird-deaths-louisiana

The story, sans the title, is actually a pretty balanced examination of the two events without some of the hyperbole I’ve been seeing on cable news coverage.  Yeah, I know, cable news blowing something out of proportion, couldn’t happen, yes that was sarcasm.

On a parallel note there have been several major fish kills as well in the last few days but the answer that came out about these is very accurate.  The Maryland kill is highly likely to be caused by temperature fluctuations and because the Arkansas kill was limited to a single species it is very likely to be disease related.  During the winter as fish school up in deep pools a disease can spread very quickly and produce mass, single-species kills.

The birds are a much bigger mystery however, the necropsies of the birds seem to indicate blunt force trauma causing massive internal injuries.  This is highly suggestive of birds being disoriented and crashing into solid structures, however if you see how far the birds were stretched it seems odd that somehow they hit solid objects and then flew a quarter-mile.  I believe it is much more likely that the Arkansas birds were killed when they encountered a hail storm, this seems the most likely cause.  Hail at high altitude could have hit a large flock and killed thousands of birds, this would not be completely unusual.

In fact in January of 2007 there were near simultaneous large bird die offs in both Australia and the United States.  There were also large storm systems within a couple of days of the deaths, indicating that perhaps the birds were pummeled by the incoming front prior to it dumping precipitation to the ground.   You can read more about the die offs three years ago at the following link:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-427997/Dead-birds-rain-towns-half-world-apart.html

Finally, hell we’d be remiss if we didn’t scream, “the sky is falling, the sky is falling.”  That was fun!  And I think we have to leave the door open for more sinister possibilities from these kills.  Could this be a test of a new biological or aerosol dispersed chemical weapon, very possibly so, in fact in Arkansas they immediately did air sampling to check for this very thing and found nothing, stay tuned as information comes in on this we’ll keep you posted.

Sustainable Sundays: Here we go

 Opinions are formed in a process of open discussion and public debate, and where no opportunity for the forming of opinions exists, there may be moods…but no opinion.   Hannah Arendt

Welcome to the first post of the Sustainable Sundays series.  To start this series off I think it’s important to define sustainability so here we go, according to the Brundtland Commission from 1987.

“Sustainable development is development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs. It contains within it two key concepts:

• the concept of ‘needs’, in particular the essential needs of the world’s poor, to which overriding priority should be given; and
• the idea of limitations imposed by the state of technology and social organization on the environment’s ability to meet present and future needs.”

To some it may seem odd that development is being discussed in a definition of sustainability; however that is only because sustainability is shorthand for ecologically sustainable economic development.  Over the years as the term sustainability has been co-opted by environmentalists we’ve lost the necessary economic portion of the definition.  To read more about how I feel about environmentalists you can read the link below:

http://zdeaconblue.wordpress.com/2010/04/19/dont-call-me-an-environmentalist/

Another concept that needs to be discussed as background on the idea of sustainability is the concept of the triple bottom line.  This concept asks us to keep in mind three aspects of life the ecological, economic and social aspects.  We need to protect our environment, to finance our society and treat people with fundamental human respect.  This idea is not just something to think about because it is right, but because it provides us with the best chance at long-term sustainability.  You can read more about this concept at the link below:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triple_bottom_line

Finally, I don’t want this series to be a philosophical or political discussion of sustainability, sure there will be some of that, but what is most important is that each week I provide you with some practical advice on how to improve your own personal triple bottom line.  To start I want to link you with an article/blog from the LA Times on an experiment a reporter did on what she called living a sustainable year.  I really like the piece because of its practicality and because she openly talks not just about what worked in her little experiment, but what didn’t work as well.

http://zdeaconblue.wordpress.com/2010/10/21/an-actual-year-of-sustainable-living-what-worked-what-didnt/

Even Scientists Don’t Believe in Global Warming

“Even scientists don’t believe in global warming,” said this older woman to me today.  Well, that can’t be true I said because I’m a scientist and I know the world is warming.  She told me I was wrong she saw it on the news.  People, don’t get your science in 30 second sound bytes from CNN or Fox News, science is complicated and in fact it actually takes more than 30 seconds to explain a complex idea like global climate change.

Shallow thinking will kill us all.  Honestly folks I need some help on this, how do we get people to think deeper than a sound byte?  I think the reason newspapers are dying out is because they can get the written equivalent of sound bytes off of the web and not have to read any deeper, plus there’s a lot more celebrity gossip on the web.  I’ve even had some interesting comments about my blog, comments that were obviously made about nothing but the title of the post.  How do we get people to stop and consider the complexities of the world we live in?  I’m not sure we can, I’m a cynical bastard and honestly I don’t think people want to know, they just want to bitch.

The woman after she realized I vehemently disagreed with her and knew a bit about the topic decided to end the discussion by saying, “I guess it all comes down to which side of the (political) fence you’re on.”  I reminded her that science is not about political position but about data.  Every time I have a conversation like this I feel closer and closer to folks at NASA who have to put up with the whole, we didn’t go to the moon bullshit.

For those of you who want to argue the global warming idea you’re stupid.  The world is warming, that is a fact, look at mean global temperatures over the last 200 years they are increasing, no scientist who can read a graph can argue with that fact.  The argument is about how much of the increase is as a result of man’s actions.

Of course some people will still argue it’s not warming, I mean hell it snowed in Vegas the other day.  So my question would be if it isn’t warming why is the Antarctic Ice Sheet melting, why aren’t the seas in the arctic freezing the way they used to, why are mountain glaciers disappearing – have they gone on vacation?

Below is a link to some comparative photography using old photos with new photos taken from the same vantage point:

http://sites.asiasociety.org/riversofice/comparative-photography

Recently in the news you see things like oh the IPCC said the glaciers would melt by 2035 and they’ve had to retract that statement.  People jump on this to say, see global warming is bullshit.  In fact, the number 2035 was wrong, maybe it will be 2050, but having the year wrong doesn’t change the simple fact that they are melting.  Sometimes I think the human population deserves to die some horrible environmental death for being so damn thick-headed.  Happy New Year.

Welcome to Sustainable Sundays

Welcome to Sustainable Sundays

If you read this blog regularly you know I have a standing Fun Friday post where I try to post something to raise a smile for anyone reading the blog.  Starting with the first Sunday in the New Year I’ll be posting a Sustainability post each Sunday.  Sustainability is not only a vital and currently popular issue in America but it is the field that I was educated, trained and worked in as well as an area I’m currently very involved in.  The point of these blogs is not to convert anyone to a new environmental ethic, or make anyone feel bad about the way they live.  Instead my focus will be to educate folks about some of the issues related to sustainability, provide some ways in which you can live more sustainability and hopefully show how the triple bottom line concept of sustainability provides good things on the social, environmental and economic fronts.

One of the things I think it will be important to remember and so I will add to each sustainability post, is the definition of sustainability that I operate under.  The original definition of sustainability is ecological sustainable economic development, the concept from its inception links economics and the environment.   I’m posting a link to a few early posts from this blog to give you some idea where I’m coming from on these types of issues:

http://zdeaconblue.wordpress.com/2010/04/19/dont-call-me-an-environmentalist/

http://zdeaconblue.wordpress.com/2010/04/27/carbon-dioxide-is-not-pollution/

http://zdeaconblue.wordpress.com/2010/05/10/save-the-earth-no-save-your-ass/