November 16, 2008 by mike.

At least it is interesting in so far as it is complicated story of rampant pollution with complex impact on the living things here on the small blue planet.

The AP has carried a story this past week about the Asian brown cloud and UN concerns that this toxic cloud of pollutants could cause more problems with our food production on this little world.

This is really an old story.  The smog of Los Angeles a generation ago was probably not very different from the Asian brown cloud.  Brown clouds are also reported with regard to Phoenix and Denver. The Denver link goes into how the brown cloud was reduced and that’s a good story.

The real lesson of the Asian Brown Cloud is that there really is no such thing as my backyard and any attempt to control growth and industry that does not see the world in it’s reality as one ecosystem, an amazing environment that has the capacity to support an amazing diversity of living things, really a Gaia organism of unimaginable complexity, is doomed to failure.

You can’t live in a pristine environment and consume products made in China and not be intimately connected to the Asian Brown Cloud.  There is no free lunch.

The brown cloud is a complex story.  Clouds of soot can offset global warming by letting less sunlight reach the ground and then less heat builds up in our troposphere.  That’s a good thing, right?  Well, maybe.

If the clouds of soot are composed of particles that cause many people to die due to pulmonary and cardiac disease, then maybe this is not the solution to the buildup of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.  It’s just a different paradigm of death and toxicity related to unsustainable human activities.

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November 16, 2008 by mike.

It’s really hard for me to feel positive about nukes because we have no viable plans for dealing with the waste that, for all practical purposes, lasts forever.  Add in the fact that the waste is deadly and can be the basis for terrorism, mayhem and extortion and my interest really wanes.  But maybe I am wrong about all that?   Maybe there is a way to produce electricity/power with nukes that we will have to use?

If so, then this article from the Guardian is talking about a possibility for a grid of the future that does not rely on combustion of fuels that produce more greenhouse gases.

I think it is worth the read and some consideration:

clipped from www.guardian.co.uk Mini nuclear plants to power 20,000 homes �13m shed-size reactors will be delivered by lorry The Observer, Sunday November 9 2008 guardian.co.uk, Sunday November 9 2008 00.01 GMT Article history Nuclear power plants smaller than a garden shed and able to power 20,000 homes will be on sale within five years, say scientists at Los Alamos, the US government laboratory which developed the first atomic bomb. John Vidal and Nick Rosen The miniature reactors will be factory-sealed, contain no weapons-grade material, have no moving parts and will be nearly impossible to steal because they will be encased in concrete and buried underground.

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November 9, 2008 by mike.

The United States elected a smart guy and progressive thinker to be President for the next four years.  This has to be a good thing.  The less than smart guy we have been suffering with the past eight years has destroyed his political party for the time being.  Now we see how much of the damage can be undone.  Two wars and a world-wide financial crisis.  George W. Bush has always figured out a way to go Arbusto and he brought his unique talents to bear and turned this country into the United States of Arbusto.

But he is leaving and his sidekick/mentor Dick Cheney is required to leave with him, so here we go, a new day.

Barack Obama has chosen Rahm Emanuel as chief of staff.  Rahm is a guy who makes things happen.  We will have to see if he is pragmatist and can help Barack with a progressive agenda.

If he is a committed free-marketeer, as some think, and can keep our economic train on that set of tracks then Barack is going to be the first African-American Herbert Hoover.

If there was ever a time for Keynesian economics, this is it.  We need to seize the opportunity of the economic downturn to gear up a major public works project with a focus on energy independence,  sustainability, a re-tooling of our transportation system to reduce the power and profits of the oiligarch.   The economic swing that would follow would allow the market economy to retool to a sustainable model, a human model.  This will only work if there is regulation and/or tax policy that makes it happen.  The glory days of the idea that free markets are self-regulating should be over.  Anyone who spouts that sad story should be immediately forced to convert all of their economic assets into Enron stock.

Oh, on the wish list - Barack should ask Nobel Prize Economist Paul Krugman to sign on for a one-year stint as Economy Czar.

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November 9, 2008 by mike.

clipped from news.yahoo.com Scientists say a rock can soak up carbon dioxide NEW YORK (Reuters) – A rock found mostly in Oman can be harnessed to soak up the main greenhouse gas carbon dioxide at a rate that could help slow global warming, scientists say.

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November 1, 2008 by mike.

Our solutions to our population and environmental demand problems can be elegant instead of catastrophic.  We don’t have to go to war to control petrol reserves, we could re-tool our fuel economy to run on fuels we can develop, capture, and benefit from without bombing anyone, intelligent or otherwise, on the small blue planet.

Methane Gas Capture

The way that we bring the planet into balance is through elegant thinking, elegant being.  We currently have a problem with the buildup of certain gases in the atmosphere that are causing the planet to heat up with disastrous consequence for many living things.  An elegant approach to this problem is to look at the capture of one of these gases, methane, and it’s use as a relatively clean fuel.  It burns much more cleanly than gasoline or coal in terms of other greenhouse gases, so the capture of methane is a twofer.  We reduce the atmospheric buildup of a powerful greenhouse gas and we burn it in place of less clean fuels, thereby producing less other greenhouse gases as combustion byproduct when we burn methane instead of gas, diesel, or coal.

This is happening.  At various places around the small blue planet methane is being captured as a fuel instead of being emitted as a potent greenhouse gas.  Here are some examples:

•  Environomics - Waste2Profits.com - feedlot waste digesters
•  Great Lakes Biomass Partnership 
• Harvard University study on methane capture from landfills
• San Antonio Waste Water Methane Recapture Contract

The solution to our environmental problems is to find the solution within the problem somehow.    Here is a thought from a great thinker and problem-solver:

When I’m working on a problem, I never think about beauty. I think only how to solve the problem. But when I have finished, if the solution is not beautiful, I know it is wrong.

R. Buckminster Fuller

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November 1, 2008 by mike.

Courtesy of Reuters:

Climate-warming methane levels rose fast in 2007 | Environment | Reuters

Methane is a serious green-house gas.  It has 25 times more impact in terms of global warming than carbon dioxide.  If we were burning fuels that sent clouds of methane out the tailpipe instead of clouds of carbon dioxide we would be cooked already, but methane is not a by-product of combustion generally.

Methane is the primary component of natural gas.  It is essentially a vaporous fuel.  Methane levels in the atmosphere have risen since pre-industrial times.  The level has more than doubled, but the methane levels had been essentially stable until 2007.

In 2007, methane levels in the atmosphere, measures around the small blue planet, took a significant jump.  The mechanism of the jump is currently unknown and the increase does not pose an immediate risk, but if the increase is indicative of a trend for increasing atmospheric methane levels, it is worrisome.

There are at least two ideas currently under study with regard to the methane increase.  The first, that I have posted about before, is that as global warming advances, tundra and permafrost thawing release methane.  This methane release is also occuring from the floor of the Arctic Ocean as the polar ice cap diminishes.   The second potential cause of atmospheric methane increase is the possibility of a change in the atmosphere’s capacity to scrub methane through the hydroxy free radical (like Williams Ayers, I guess,  free radical, get it?  stay with me) known as OH.

Too soon to tell how the methane story will play out, but I am following it here and I will post again as more information develops.

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October 9, 2008 by mike.

A number of states are violating the Help America Vote Act of 2002 and are taking people off the election rolls within 90 days of the election and engaging in other actions that will limit the right to vote and have your vote counted.  The story is in the NY times, you can read it here:

States’ Actions to Block Voters Appear Illegal - NYTimes.com

In addition to the problems posed by dropping voters off the rolls, there is the problem of having your vote counted if you are allowed to vote.

That’s a Pretty Big Glitch

This editorial piece in the times discusses a problem with the Diebold electronic voting machines.  It has become well-known and well-documented that the electronic voting machines can be easily hacked.  If you have questions about that, go to Bev Harris’ website, Black Box Voting for  more information.

The Ohio Secretary of State is suing Diebold over the problems that Ohio has experienced with the vote-counting machines.  Diebold started by denying that their machines were the problem, but they have now come around to agreeing that the electronic cards can hold votes and not upload the held votes.

The bottom line on this whole mess is that we need to work for a paper trail that can be counted and recounted to verify the totals that voting machines create.  It’s too late for the November 2008 election.  Maybe we will get election protection from the next Congress.  We need it.

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October 6, 2008 by mike.

Earth Aboil - washingtonpost.com

Carbon emissions in 2007 were much higher than expected.  The article from the Washington Post extrapolates that emissions and increase of emissions in this range would lead to an 11 degree increase in the planet’s temperature by the end of this century.  We have every reason to expect that carbon emissions will not continue to increase at the rate of 2007, but the question is when are we are going to make the necessary changes?  Every day, every week, every month and year we wait increases the impact and cost of dealing with the problem.

Scientists:  1 in 4 mammals faces extinction

This article from AP goes into the impact that homo industrialus is having on the planet. 1 in 4 mammals faces extinction and 1 in 2 is in decline.  Folks, this is not good news for human beings.  We are mammals, we are a thread in the weave of life.  When we tear the fabric of life, many threads are destroyed.

I don’t know what we can do that is sufficient to fix this problem, but the solution begins when we acknowledge the problem and its gravity.

Time for change folks.

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October 5, 2008 by mike.

AP Investigation: Ike environmental toll apparent - Yahoo! News

34 people known to have died withHurrican Ike.  This article reports 9 million gallons of crude oil known to have spilled so far.

Conservative commentators have spread the story that Katrina caused no oil spill.  This article says Katrina spilled 12 million gallons.

Don’t let them kid you, global warming has made much of the Gulf Coast a death zone.  The insurance companies will spot this and raise their rates or refuse to insure in this death zone.  

There is a certain irony in the fact that global warming is creating monster hurricanes that are destroying oil industry infrastructure, but the important question is when are we going to understand the totality of the situation and work hard to create an energy system that does not cause great destruction.  Any day now will work for me.

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September 28, 2008 by mike.

Greenhouse gas emissions shock scientists - Los Angeles Times

This is not good news.  Despite the economic slowdown, greenhouse gas emissions have grown at a higher rate than anticipated.  Carbon dioxide output actually grew by 3% when it was expected to fall.

Our natural carbon sinks on the planet - the oceans and the forests - appear to be slowing in their capacity to capture carbon dioxide.

There are a lot of potential tipping points and potential feedback loops we are facing that could accelerate global warming.  One of these is pretty well understood, it is the release of methane, a much more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide, as the planet warms.  The methane release would be expected from tundra and from the Arctic ocean beds.  These are not knife-edge changes where the impact could go one way or another, they are tipping points where change is expected to go in a certain direction.

Are there unforeseen controls on global warming?  Changes in the environment that will counterbalance the changes brought on by the burning of fossil fuels?  We should certainly hope so because the anticipated and predicted changes are not good for many species of life, including industrial bipeds.

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