January 1, 2009 by mike.

Wonderful site hosting pictures that show the glacial ice retreat. Next time you hear somebody say they have doubt about global warming suggest they go review the pictures.

clipped from www.doublexposure.net

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December 27, 2008 by mike.

This article in the NY Times covers growing interest in home use of coal stoves, but conveniently fails to review the complete cost of coal mining, the subsidies that the coal and other petro fuel industries get from our tax dollars, the long term cleanup costs of accidents like the coal slurry spill this past week, the environmental devastation of mountain top removal mining.

I think it is important that the complete context be considered when thinking about energy and comfort and how we live here. Simply looking at the cost of $165 per ton and the question about dealing with the coal ash is not the whole picture.

“Cheap” coal is not an elegant solution.

clipped from www.nytimes.com Burning Coal at Home Is Making a Comeback By TOM ZELLER Jr. and STEFAN MILKOWSKI SUGARLOAF, Pa. — Kyle Buck heaved open the door of a makeshift bin abutting his suburban ranch house. Staring at a two-ton pile of coal that was delivered by truck a few weeks ago, Mr. Buck worried aloud that it would not be enough to last the winter. Problematic in some ways and difficult to handle, coal is nonetheless a cheap, plentiful, mined-in-America source of heat. And with the cost of heating oil and natural gas increasingly prone to spikes, some homeowners in the Northeast, pockets of the Midwest and even Alaska are deciding coal is worth the trouble.

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December 27, 2008 by mike.

clipped from www.nytimes.com The Energy Challenge No Furnaces but Heat Aplenty in ‘Passive Houses’ By ELISABETH ROSENTHAL Published: December 26, 2008 DARMSTADT, Germany — From the outside, there is nothing unusual about the stylish new gray and orange row houses in the Kranichstein District, with wreaths on the doors and Christmas lights twinkling through a freezing drizzle. But these houses are part of a revolution in building design: There are no drafts, no cold tile floors, no snuggling under blankets until the furnace kicks in. There is, in fact, no furnace. In Berthold Kaufmann’s home, there is, to be fair, one radiator for emergency backup in the living room — but it is not in use. Even on the coldest nights in central Germany, Mr. Kaufmann’s new “passive house” and others of this design get all the heat and hot water they need from the amount of energy that would be needed to run a hair dryer.

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December 25, 2008 by mike.

We have played with lots of small steps that we can take in our day to day life to create a sustainable and satisfying life.  Our old house is a great place that catches a lot of sunlight in the winter months.   It’s got a massive basement and foundation that seems to be a good heatsink to keep the place relatively cool in the summer.  We have been paring our energy consumption and converting the lawn around the building into an edible forest, but we have to wander away from the place from time to time and when we do, we are often grabbing the car keys and going for a ride.  

This has been troubling us more and more as it becomes clear how inherently destructive the internal combustion engine is.   There don’t seem to be many options to internal combustion.  We can grab the bus, it’s burning diesel.  We can ride the bike or walk, but our regular daily lives take us beyond bike and foot range on most days, so we have been reluctantly staying with automobiles as primary transportation.

It may be that the car of the future will be electric and maybe we can convert to clean and sustainable electric generation  over time, but for now we are driving cars with internal combustion engines.

Given that reality, we decided to try converting our cars to run on propane instead of gasoline.   The greenhouse gas tailpipe emissions of a propane vehicle are way under the greenhouse gas tailpipe emissions of a gasoline or diesel vehicle.  That sounds pretty good.  It seems like a good transitional step that we can use while we wait for sustainable transport to show up at our doorstep.

I will tell you a little more about our propane vehicle conversions in the posts to come.

Meanwhile, here are some good links about propane cars if you are interested:

• Tom Jennings is a pioneer of diy propane conversion
• Chrysler Imperial conversion - good tips on doing it right
• 1987 BMW conversion - nice pictures, no details or text

More to come about propane conversion.

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December 25, 2008 by mike.

The easy answer is that no one knows how many people can live in a sustainable way on this amazing world.  We can make some guesses about the number and we can review what the limiting factors will be.  Let’s do that.

There a lot of factors that could pose an eventual limit on population.

Global food supply is one of the potential limiting factors.  This one seems like it might come into play because so much of the planet’s food supply is now produced through petro-chemical industrial agriculture and this form of agriculture is doomed by peak oil.  This industrial food supply is also subject to the issues that plague mono-crop agriculture.

This is an important problem and we should think hard about how we create a sustainable planet agriculture, but I don’t think this is likely to be the primary limiting factor on human population.

What about air supply?   As we burn everything in sight we definitely create changes in the thin wisp of atmosphere that is the essential home to all the living things we know and love.

The atmosphere is primarily nitrogen with a healthy splash of oxygen and a sprinkle of carbon dioxide and then a whole bunch of trace gases.  Lots of the green beings on the planet really dig the nitrogen, these green beings grow, other beings eat them.  The green beings breathe in the nitrogen and carbon dioxide and breathe out oxygen.  The beings that are grazing the green beings breathe in the oxygen and breathe out carbon dioxide.  It’s a pretty good arrangement.   As we foul the atmosphere we end up with all sorts of population constraints - like lung cancer, asthma, heart disease, etc.   But I don’t think air supply is going to be the primary constraint on human population.

Here’s the one that I think is going to hit the hardest and soonest:  water.  Even with the bottled water industry working overtime it seems likely that a day is coming when water is going to be scarce.  

The water factor is likely to be exacerbated by global warming.   We can anticipate increased water shortages in areas that rely on glacial melt, like India and Pakistan, for a good portion of their fresh water.  But the simple fact is that nothing we can do is going to change the fresh water supply on this small blue planet.  The fresh water supply is the same now as it was 2000 years ago when the world population was 3% of what it is today.

Can we calculate how many people this small blue planet can support?  I don’t think we can.  I think we are probably already exploring and living in the realm of unsustainable human population at 6 billion plus.  My guess is that the planet can sustain a population of 2 or 3 billion humans.   It’s an educated guess, but still a guess.  The troubling aspect of our situation is that no one is coming up with a good way to reduce the human population.  Famine and conflict are ugly population controls.  We can do better.  I hope we do.  And sooner rather than later.

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December 25, 2008 by mike.

I have repeated this warning like a mantra for several years. There are several factors with the predictions and modeling for climate change that will lead to the change being more rapid than projected. The factors are complex and varied, I can spell some of them out, but the bottom line is that we have less time than we think to fix the problem. The cost of the fix increases every day we delay. The impact is being felt. People around the world already know it is happening. The 5 to 7 degree range by 2100 is a slow moving disaster and it is probably the best we can hope for. Read this article in full if you have a couple of minutes.

clipped from www.washingtonpost.com Faster Climate Change Feared New Report Points to Accelerated Melting, Longer Drought By Juliet Eilperin Washington Post Staff Writer Thursday, December 25, 2008; Page A02 The United States faces the possibility of much more rapid climate change by the end of the century than previous studies have suggested, according to a new report led by the U.S. Geological Survey. The survey — which was commissioned by the U.S. Climate Change Science Program and issued this month — expands on the 2007 findings of the United Nations Intergovernment Panel on Climate Change. Looking at factors such as rapid sea ice loss in the Arctic and prolonged drought in the Southwest, the new assessment suggests that earlier projections may have underestimated the climatic shifts that could take place by 2100.

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December 25, 2008 by mike.

So, how many human beings can this small blue planet actually support in a sustainable manner?

Before we think hard about that question we have to review the population pattern of homo industrialus.   Here is a graph from the Temperate Forest Foundation.  As you can see there were about 1 billion of us around 1860 and now there are over 6 billion of us and the trend continues up.

A short review of the population work of Thomas Robert Malthus may be in order.  Malthus thought that conflict, war, pestilence, famine were natural consequences and controls on population.  I don’t think Malthus could foresee huge leaps in human productivity, health, longevity that developed with the petro-industrial age and the advances in the sciences, but I think it is an open question whether these advances enable us to avoid the devastating controls on population that Malthus saw as natural processes.  I hope that an advance, a new paradigm, the birth of post-petro human culture may produce new ways of being that defy imagination and that such an advance might seek a  way to establish a sustainable and relatively peaceful human presence on the planet.  I think the transition is likely to be tough.  I don’t know how we get from the current dominant paradigm of capitalistic individualism to a more natural, sustainable, indigenous way of being a component of the diversity of life on this small blue planet.  I write here in the hope that by posing questions, by sharing advances, knowledge, wisdom, data that we may somehow collectively bring something new into the world.  Perhaps a view of the place of our species as a component of a diverse biosphere instead of a view of human as pinnacle of creation?   I suspect that the pride that comes with seeing oneself as the pinnacle of creation precedes a fall.

Enough back ground, in 150 years we went from 1 billion people to over 6 billion people and we may be headed for 9 billion by 2100.  How many people can the planet support in a sustainable manner?  And let’s define sustainable as a life of relative comfort and safety, but not an affluent life.  Let me do some research and we will then review that question.

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November 30, 2008 by mike.

When you bring up drastic measures to address global warming you often get blasted for playing with fire. The problem is that we have been playing with fire since we discovered fire and the build-up of carbon dioxide is the result. One unintended impact of so many human activities is carbon dioxide buildup. It’s too bad that we can get so exorcised with ideas that intend to reduce atmospheric CO2 buildup when we are in such denial about all the activities that create buildup.

Nonetheless, I do understand the warnings inherent in so many “scientific” endeavors that have become famous for their unintended consequences.  You do not want to be the scientist remembered for introducing  Killer bees  to the Americas.

And you probably would not want to remembered for suggesting bringing Cane toads to Australia was the solution to a bug infestation.

So, when scientific thinkers start suggesting large scale geo-engineering projects to keep the small blue planet a congenial place for the kind of life that has evolved here, the discussion that follows has to include some concern that we may be fooling with some systems that operate in ways that we don’t understand and that the long term consequences could be disastrous.  If the cure is worse than the disease you might want to try living with the disease, right?

Despite those reservations and concerns, some folks are starting to suggest that when large scale extinctions are underway,  it may be time to start thinking more about geo-engineering.

I am not keen on this idea of liming the oceans to fix both the increasing acidity of the oceans  and to give the oceans a boost in their capacity as carbon sinks for a number of reasons.  One is that the creating of the lime takes a significant amount of energy, so this approach does not appear to be an elegant solution where some component or facet of the problem itself becomes a solution, this one is simply a means of hitting two problems with one energy-consumptive solution.  It’s a twofer.  I will give it credit for that.  It works on ocean acidification and carbon sequestration at the same time.

Maybe we can figure out how to unring the killer bee and cane toad bell once we come up with the geo-engineering solution to global warming?

clipped from www.cquestrate.com The Idea First, you heat limestone to a very high temperature, until it breaks down into lime and carbon dioxide. Then you put the lime into the sea, where it reacts with carbon dioxide dissolved in the seawater. The important point is that when you put lime into seawater it absorbs almost twice as much carbon dioxide as is produced by the breaking down of the limestone in the first place. This is a brief description of the idea. If you prefer we also have a detailed description and a slideshow presentation on the process for you to see. The idea works like this:

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November 30, 2008 by mike.

There is a lot of discussion back and forth between environmentally-aware folks who disagree on how we should proceed.  James Hansen has been a consistent scientific voice warning us that change is required and he has been muzzled at times.

Dr. Hansen has signed on to the idea that we have to get atmospheric carbon dioxide down to 350 ppm.  Climate Progress has an open letter to Dr. Hansen about this idea.   Climate Progress appears to think that 450 ppm ought to be the target.

This is a hard discussion to follow for those of who do not have a phd in some related field.  I think we have to keep in mind that it is likely there is a cost benefit analysis that comes into play.  The cost on responding to droughts, famines, floods, hurricanes has to be weighed against the cost of aggressive climate action that will reduce the impact and cost of the natural disasters that attend global warming.

The human cost of death and suffering that goes along with climate change can’t even be quantified in this discussion.

I think that we might be wise to err on the side of caution and go after the problem of global warming with the kind of zeal that some folks have for going after the potential danger of “terrorists.”

Change is coming.  President Obama is in the wings.  It is encouraging to be engaged in an active discussion about what level of carbon dioxide should be the target instead of listening to policy makers equivocate about the problem of global warming.

I think we have to walk some kind of tightrope to keep up pressure and enthusiasm for change without resorting to the kind of conflict that will reduce our effectiveness.  I think it will become clear in time if the magic number (if one exists, because global climate is an amazingly complex system) is 350 or 380 or 410.  If we find out the magic number is 300 and we have organized around lower cost number like 450, our cost-containment strategy just went out the window.

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November 30, 2008 by mike.

It’s difficult to find a silver lining for this impact of global warming. The outlook for the glaciers of the Himalays is grim. They are in retreat. The increase melt is creating runoff disasters and the long term outlook is for the fresh water source for a billion people to wane. There is nothing to do here except stabilize global climate through radical change in the way we live. I think Bill McKibben is correct in setting the target at 350 ppm for CO2. I don’t know how we get there, but I think we are looking at global disaster if we don’t. As Bucky Fuller said, we can afford to do anything that we have to do.

clipped from abcnews.go.com In the Indian Himalayas, You Can Hear Climate Change Before You Can See It CHHOTA SHIGRI GLACIER, INDIAN HIMALAYAS, August 08, 2008 By NICK SCHIFRIN In the Indian Himalayas, you can literally hear the glaciers melting. The river that rushes through the Lahaul-Spiti Valley is fed almost entirely by melt from the surrounding glaciers. The sound of the river’s rapids has never been this loud. The level of the water has never been this high. In other words, the glaciers have never receded this quickly.

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