Towards the end of his speech today Obama said

This is the moment when we must come together to save this planet. Let us resolve that we will not leave our children a world where the oceans rise and famine spreads and terrible storms devastate our lands. Let us resolve that all nations - including my own - will act with the same seriousness of purpose as has your nation, and reduce the carbon we send into our atmosphere. This is the moment to give our children back their future. This is the moment to stand as one.

I hope he really has that conviction because they are going to need all the help they can get.

Click here for a larger image

The above graphic shows the projected population growth of the US to 2030. Sometime before the turn of the century it will reach over 500 million. Notice that the midwest will shrink in population while the coastal regions will grow. According to the Analyses of the Effects of Global Change on Human Health and Welfare and Human Systems report from the U.S. Climate Change Science Program and the Subcommittee on Global Change Research, (not to mention the IPCC as well) the coastal areas are going to be among the hardest hit by climate change. The population drift is in all the wrong areas.

Our kids and grandkids and great grandkids are going to need a strong, committed leader today; one who can inspire, not just his own people, but other nations to come together to take action on climate change. John McCain is certainly not that person, indeed he is the antithesis of that person. I hope Barack Obama will be the one, I have my doubts, but he;s the best we have right now. I hope he stays true to his words.

Technorati Tags: come together, save this planet, oceans rise, famine, terrible storms, give our children back their future, Analyses of the Effects of Global Change on Human Health and Welfare and Human Systems, U.S. Climate Change Science Program and the Subcommittee on Global Change Research, population drift, John McCain, Barack Obama

Climate change, interacting with changes in land use and demographics, will affect important human dimensions in the United States, especially those related to human health, settlements and welfare. The challenges presented by population growth, an aging population, migration patterns, and urban and coastal development will be compounded by changes in temperature, precipitation, and extreme climate-related events. Climate change will affect where people choose to live, work, and play. Among likely climate changes are changes in the intensity and frequency of precipitation, more frequent heat waves, less frequent cold waves, more persistent and extreme drought conditions and associated water shortages, changes in minimum and maximum temperatures, potential increases in the intensity and frequency of extreme tropical storms, measurable sea-level rise and increases in the occurrence of coastal and riverine flooding. In response to these anticipated changes, the United States may develop and deploy strategies for mitigating greenhouse gases and for adapting to unavoidable individual and collective impacts of climate change

Just in case the Bush administration makes the EPA remove this report (4MB .pdf) from the web I grabbed a copy which you can download from here (to save my bandwidth please try the official site first)

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Technorati Tags: Climate change, heat waves, extreme drought conditions, water shortages, tropical storm, sea-level rise, flooding, greenhouse gases, climate change, EPA

Here’s just the sort of thing Gore was talking about in the last post. A team of researchers at MIT have developed a new solar technology

ScienceDaily (July 11, 2008) — Imagine windows that not only provide a clear view and illuminate rooms, but also use sunlight to efficiently help power the building they are part of. MIT engineers report a new approach to harnessing the sun’s energy that could allow just that.

The work, reported in the July 11 issue of Science, involves the creation of a novel “solar concentrator.” “Light is collected over a large area [like a window] and gathered, or concentrated, at the edges,” explains Marc A. Baldo, leader of the work and the Esther and Harold E. Edgerton Career Development Associate Professor of Electrical Engineering.

As a result, rather than covering a roof with expensive solar cells (the semiconductor devices that transform sunlight into electricity), the cells only need to be around the edges of a flat glass panel. In addition, the focused light increases the electrical power obtained from each solar cell “by a factor of over 40,” Baldo says.

Technorati Tags: MIT, solar technology, harnessing the sun’s energy, solar concentrator

Technorati Tags: Al Gore, The Future Of Human Civilization Is At Stake

An interesting study out of China indicates that children gestating in environments where power is being produced in coal fired plants have

significantly lower average developmental scores and reduced motor development at age two.

Given that over 50% of US power comes from coal burning plants, and that this percentage is increasing perhaps this explains why the GOP has been so successful

This too may be part of the explanation

Most kids’ foods provide poor nutritional quality, but packaging claims and healthy images could be misleading parents, according to a new study. Researchers used US guidelines to review 367 products. 70 percent of the products had higher than recommended sugar levels, 23 percent had high fat levels and 17 percent had high salt levels. But 62 percent of them still make health claims on the packaging.

as good nutrition is essential to a well developed intelligence.

Technorati Tags: lower average developmental scores, 50% of US power comes from coal burning plants, nutrition, intelligence

This is interesting and I hope it goes somewhere. My big question would be what is the cost to maintain the unit that separates water into Hydrogen and Oxygen and does it require more energy input than it outputs.

Technorati Tags: run your car on water, HHO

Today’s must read Living on the Ice Shelf - here’s a sample

Living on the Ice Shelf
Humanity’s Meltdown
By Mike Davis

1. Farewell to the Holocene

Our world, our old world that we have inhabited for the last 12,000 years, has ended, even if no newspaper in North America or Europe has yet printed its scientific obituary.

This February, while cranes were hoisting cladding to the 141st floor of the Burj Dubai tower (which will soon be twice the height of the Empire State Building), the Stratigraphy Commission of the Geological Society of London was adding the newest and highest story to the geological column.

The London Society is the world’s oldest association of Earth scientists, founded in 1807, and its Commission acts as a college of cardinals in the adjudication of the geological time-scale. Stratigraphers slice up Earth’s history as preserved in sedimentary strata into hierarchies of eons, eras, periods, and epochs marked by the “golden spikes” of mass extinctions, speciation events, and abrupt changes in atmospheric chemistry.

In geology, as in biology or history, periodization is a complex, controversial art and the most bitter feud in nineteenth-century British science — still known as the “Great Devonian Controversy” — was fought over competing interpretations of homely Welsh Graywackes and English Old Red Sandstone. More recently, geologists have feuded over how to stratigraphically demarcate ice age oscillations over the last 2.8 million years. Some have never accepted that the most recent inter-glacial warm interval — the Holocene — should be distinguished as an “epoch” in its own right just because it encompasses the history of civilization.

As a result, contemporary stratigraphers have set extraordinarily rigorous standards for the beatification of any new geological divisions. Although the idea of the “Anthropocene” — an Earth epoch defined by the emergence of urban-industrial society as a geological force — has been long debated, stratigraphers have refused to acknowledge compelling evidence for its advent.

At least for the London Society, that position has now been revised.

To the question “Are we now living in the Anthropocene?” the 21 members of the Commission unanimously answer “yes.” They adduce robust evidence that the Holocene epoch — the interglacial span of unusually stable climate that has allowed the rapid evolution of agriculture and urban civilization — has ended and that the Earth has entered “a stratigraphic interval without close parallel in the last several million years.” In addition to the buildup of greenhouse gases, the stratigraphers cite human landscape transformation which “now exceeds [annual] natural sediment production by an order of magnitude,” the ominous acidification of the oceans, and the relentless destruction of biota.

This new age, they explain, is defined both by the heating trend (whose closest analogue may be the catastrophe known as the Paleocene Eocene Thermal Maximum, 56 million years ago) and by the radical instability expected of future environments. In somber prose, they warn that “the combination of extinctions, global species migrations and the widespread replacement of natural vegetation with agricultural monocultures is producing a distinctive contemporary biostratigraphic signal. These effects are permanent, as future evolution will take place from surviving (and frequently anthropogenically relocated) stocks.” Evolution itself, in other words, has been forced into a new trajectory.

Technorati Tags: Living on the Ice Shelf, Humanity’s Meltdown, Mike Davis, Holocene, Stratigraphy Commission of the Geological Society of London, Anthropocene, greenhouse gases, stratigraphers, acidification of the oceans, Paleocene Eocene Thermal Maximum, monocultures, biostratigraphic signal, Evolution

DENVER — Faced with a surge in the number of proposed solar power plants, the federal government has placed a moratorium on new solar projects on public land until it studies their environmental impact, which is expected to take about two years.

The Bureau of Land Management says an extensive environmental study is needed to determine how large solar plants might affect millions of acres it oversees in six Western states — Arizona, California, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico and Utah.

But the decision to freeze new solar proposals temporarily, reached late last month, has caused widespread concern in the alternative-energy industry, as fledgling solar companies must wait to see if they can realize their hopes of harnessing power from swaths of sun-baked public land, just as the demand for viable alternative energy is accelerating

But hey you know, according to Bush and Bush Jr. (McCain) we can start drilling for oil right away in all those previously protected areas because, you know, the need for energy is so great. The Arctic National Wildlife Refuge contains about 12B barrels of recoverable oil at today’s prices. The US consumes about 20M barrels a day. That means that all the oil there would supply about 600 days worth of oil consumption, but it would take a decade or more before it came on stream. In the meantime the White House would not even open an email from the EPA (regarding CO2 emissions) but is now stifling solar power development. I must confess I’m surprised that Bush et al did not step in and stop California from launching its Million Solar Roof project, which, after all, is depriving his oil buddies of revenue. I guess that would have been just a little too obvious.

Technorati Tags: moratorium on new solar projects, Bureau of Land Management, environmental study, solar plants, Bush, Bush Jr., McCain, drilling for oil, Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, California

My inner skeptic cries “fraud” but the rest of me says, now that’s cool I hope it works as it would certainly solve the biggest part of the CO2 equation in global warming.

Genepax Co Ltd explained the technologies used in its new fuel cell system “Water Energy System (WES),” which uses water as a fuel and does not emit CO2.

The system can generate power just by supplying water and air to the fuel and air electrodes, respectively, the company said at the press conference, which took place June 12, 2008, at the Osaka Assembly Hall.

The basic power generation mechanism of the new system is similar to that of a normal fuel cell, which uses hydrogen as a fuel. According to Genepax, the main feature of the new system is that it uses the company’s membrane electrode assembly (MEA), which contains a material capable of breaking down water into hydrogen and oxygen through a chemical reaction.

Though the company did not reveal the details, it “succeeded in adopting a well-known process to produce hydrogen from water to the MEA,” said Hirasawa Kiyoshi, the company’s president. This process is allegedly similar to the mechanism that produces hydrogen by a reaction of metal hydride and water. But compared with the existing method, the new process is expected to produce hydrogen from water for longer time, the company said.

That’s not the only potentially good thing on the environment from. There’s also The Day Cycle, a new method for converting municipal waste into usable products. Using massive plasma furnaces this process uses less energy than it creates (excess electrical energy that can be sold) and it produces Hydrogen and Oxygen as by products, not CO2.

The purpose of the system is to simultaneously produce hydrogen, electricity, oxygen, biofuels/biomass, syngas, and other useful products from waste.

Now, with one of the heroic oversimplifications I am known for, I’ll explain that the rest of the Day Cycle involves injecting steam into the syngas to create even more hydrogen along with lots of carbon dioxide. The carbon dioxide can be used to grow algae, yielding both biomass and oxygen in copious amounts. The final outputs of the plant are whatever can be made from the algae (biodiesel, ethanol, or — what the heck — SwiftFuel). All heat is recycled, no carbon dioxide is released (that’s the theory) and all that gets pumped out of the plant is some excess electricity (not sure how much of that), hydrogen, all those algae products, and of course oxygen.

Their claimed net production from each ton of municipal solid waste:

112 pounds of hydrogen
55 gallons of biodiesel
a little electricity
926 pounds of oxygen

According to Cringley’s calculation about 7,000 of these furnaces would be needed to deal with the entire waste production of the US. Bonus - assume those 7000 furnaces were spread out somewhat evenly across the US then you have solved the problem of producing and selling hydrogen to replace petroleum for the transportation network.

It “appears” like the Day family have their act together better that Changing World Technologies did, which used a similar but different process.

Technorati Tags: Water Energy System, CO2, Genepax, Day Cycle, plasma furnaces, entire waste production of the US, Changing World Technologies

I’m not a big supporter of carbon trading, the opportunities for fraud and other mischiefs are too great. However, it is likely that carbon trading schemes are going to abound, and if they must then this is a great idea.

CORONADO, Calif.–Reducing greenhouse gases isn’t enough for EcoVerdance and Accelegrow Technologies; why not tackle world hunger, too?

This year’s Future in Review conference has chosen to spotlight a company called EcoVerdance, which is using a product developed by Accelegrow to promote carbon trading by using the proceeds from selling carbon offsets to purchase a chemical called Accele-Gro-M that dramatically improves the yields of existing farms and makes it possible to grow plants in places previously thought impossible

Accelegrow is not a fertilizer or pesticide

Accele-Gro products are fertilizer supplements that are eco-friendly, naturally-based, and are revolutionary plant growth enhancers that provide greater yields, higher crop quality, and increased profitability for farmers. Accelegrow Technologies’, patent pending, breakthrough technology allows a plant to unlock its genetic potential, stimulating the plants cells to produce at opportune times to create a more productive and healthier plant. The difference is found in our unique preservative, stabilizer, activator and carrier system that maintain efficacy and balance reducing the need for as many applications as similar products require. In fact, Accele-Gro products usually require a seed coating and two to three foliar applications per crop for best performance which can be applied with fertilizer, pesticide or herbicides resulting in no additional application costs.

[snip]

Accele-Gro-M is an all-natural chemical fertilizer that consists of hormones, proteins, nitrogen, urea and two proprietary ingredients for which Accelegrow is seeking patents. It overrides a plant’s natural response to a stressful environment, which is to shrivel up in order to protect itself. Instead, Accele-Gro-M encourages the plant to open up and accept moisture from whatever sources are available, such as dew. And despite the stressful situation, it somehow encourages the plant to keep growing, Knight said.

The company has been studying the use of the fertilizer in drought areas, and has seen yields grow from 40 bushels an acre to 180 bushels to 190 bushels per acre, Knight said. Only 8 ounces of the product are required per acre of farmland, and the cost to the farmer is around $8 to $11 per acre, depending on the crop and the area of the world in which it will be used.

The results are quite dramatic

Vegetable testing took place in Malvern, Alabama, USA on drip irrigated farm land. Ten acres were planted with 5,000 Roma tomato plants. Accele-Gro fertilizer supplement was applied twice at the rate of 5 ounces per acre through the drip irrigation system (5+5) and 15lbs of 20-20-20 fertilizer were applied per acre. Total yield on Accele-Gro supplement treated Roma tomatoes (graded number 1) was 1,976 boxes versus the five year average of 972 boxes.

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Technorati Tags: carbon trading, EcoVerdance, Accelegrow Technologies, world hunger

I’ve mentioned the North Pacific Gyre before. It’s a vast floating sea of man made garbage, mostly plastics, about the size of Texas. Here’s a map of it

The following documentary from VBSTV follows a crew as the sail out to the gyre and spend a week there collecting samples of the debris. It is in 13 parts and I’ll publish one part per day. I’d say enjoy but you’ll more likely be disgusted.

Technorati Tags: North Pacific Gyre, human garbage, ocean pollution, plastic waste, environment

Click on the above picture for a large image. Earth as seen from space by NOAA

Technorati Tags: Earth, NOAA, Earth Day

Via Tomgram

It’s strange that the business and geopolitics of energy takes up so little space on American front pages — or that we could conduct an oil war in Iraq with hardly a mention of the words “oil” and “war” in the same paragraph in those same papers over the years. Strange indeed. And yet, oil rules our world and energy lies behind so many of the headlines that might seem to be about other matters entirely.

Take the food riots now spreading across the planet because the prices of staples are soaring, while stocks of basics are falling. In the last year, wheat (think flour) has risen by 130%, rice by 74%, soya by 87%, and corn by 31%, while there are now only eight to 12 weeks of cereal stocks left globally. Governments across the planetary map are shuddering. This is a fast growing horror story and, though the cry in the streets of Cairo and Port au Prince might be for bread, this, too, turns out to be a tale largely ruled by energy: Too many acres turned over to corn (and sugar cane) for the creation of biofuels; a historic drought in Australia and other climate-change-induced extremes of weather — a result of the burning of fossil fuels — that have affected crop yields; and many new middle-class consumers, in China and elsewhere, coming on line, with a growing desire for meat, the production of which is heavily petroleum based.

It continues with a great chapter from Michael Klare’s new book Rising Powers, Shrinking Planet: The New Geopolitics of Energy

The End of the World as You Know It
…and the Rise of the New Energy World Order
By Michael T. Klare

Oil at $110 a barrel. Gasoline at $3.35 (or more) per gallon. Diesel fuel at $4 per gallon. Independent truckers forced off the road. Home heating oil rising to unconscionable price levels. Jet fuel so expensive that three low-cost airlines stopped flying in the past few weeks. This is just a taste of the latest energy news, signaling a profound change in how all of us, in this country and around the world, are going to live — trends that, so far as anyone can predict, will only become more pronounced as energy supplies dwindle and the global struggle over their allocation intensifies.

do read the whole article then let me know what you think.

Technorati Tags: Tomgram, geopolitics, energy, oil, food riots, Geopolitics of Energy, $110 a barrel, unconscionable price levels, energy supplies

I’d say the results listed on this spreadsheet are unbelievable, but sadly they are all too believable. In one day 187,454 people, around the world, collected of 6,075,600.4 pounds of trash off of ocean and lake shorelines, sorted it into classifications and relayed that data to Ocean Conservancy.

Ocean Conservancy’s International Coastal Cleanup is the world’s largest volunteer event of its kind. Thousands of volunteers participate from all over the globe, clearing tons of trash from oceans and waterways, and recording every piece of trash collected. Last year, 378,000 volunteers participated from 76 countries and 45 states. Worldwide, volunteers removed an average of 16 pounds of trash, per person.

Thank you again for all of your dedication and care for the ocean. Ocean Conservancy is looking forward to our next International Coastal Cleanup on September 20, 2008

The health of the planet would be so much better off without humans. Consider the North Pacific Subtropical Gyre a.k.a. the Great Pacific Garbage Patch where there are ~3,340,000 pieces/km² of flotsam (mostly plastics) with a mean mass of 5.1kg/km² . Over the size of the gyre that amounts to ~100 million tons of flotsam. We really are the scum of the earth.

Technorati Tags: 6, 075, 600.4 pounds of trash, Ocean Conservancy, International Coastal Cleanup, North Pacific Subtropical Gyre, Great Pacific Garbage Patch, scum of the earth

Global climate change denialists and so called Intelligent Design proponents share at least two things in common, aside from their general lack of reasoning capabilities, and that is their willful dismissal of sound science and their intellectual dishonesty. Here’s a couple of articles to piss them both off.

Scientists at the Carnegie Institution determined that over a 23-year span from 1979 to 2001 the jet streams in both hemispheres have risen in altitude and shifted toward the poles. The jet stream in the northern hemisphere has also weakened. These changes fit the predictions of global warming models and have implications for the frequency and intensity of future storms, including hurricanes. (Science Daily)

and for the idiotic IDers - you’re Expelled

In 1971, biologists moved five adult pairs of Italian wall lizards from their home island of Pod Kopiste, in the South Adriatic Sea, to the neighboring island of Pod Mrcaru. Now, an international team of researchers has shown that introducing these small, green-backed lizards, Podarcis sicula, to a new environment caused them to undergo rapid and large-scale evolutionary changes.

“Striking differences in head size and shape, increased bite strength and the development of new structures in the lizard’s digestive tracts were noted after only 36 years, which is an extremely short time scale,” says Duncan Irschick, a professor of biology at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. “These physical changes have occurred side-by-side with dramatic changes in population density and social structure.”

Researchers returned to the islands twice a year for three years, in the spring and summer of 2004, 2005 and 2006. Captured lizards were transported to a field laboratory and measured for snout-vent length, head dimensions and body mass. Tail clips taken for DNA analysis confirmed that the Pod Mrcaru lizards were genetically identical to the source population on Pod Kopiste. (Science Daily

Read the article it’s fascinating. It’s pretty much as close to proof of evolution as it is possible to get.

Technorati Tags: Global climate change, denialists, Intelligent Design, sound science, intellectual dishonesty, Carnegie Institution, jet stream, These changes fit the predictions of global warming models, storms, hurricanes, Expelled, pod kopiste, green-backed lizards, Podarcis sicula, rapid and large-scale evolutionary changes, only 36 years, Duncan Irschick, evolution