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A muddled message on solutions
This country's public discussion about global warming desperately needs to move beyond the tiresome back and forth about whether it's happening. We need to start discussing solutions -- in many ways a more complex and difficult topic.
CNN's Lou Dobbs offered just such an opportunity last night. He had on three climate scientists: Michael Mann, Gavin Schmidt, and Alan Robock.
Watch what happens. Here's the first opportunity:
DOBBS: Well, if you all as leading scientists, with your best science, your best minds working in the field, agree that there is global warming and that greenhouse gases emissions are responsible for all or part of it, what can we do, Gavin, to deal with the issue?
In other words: Enough about science. We believe you. What should we do?
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Varmint Cong
Organic farmers in Colorado ask state to blast rodents out of their holes They say life imitates art, but until now, life had stubbornly refused to imitate Caddyshack. Behold! Organic […]
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Talking point: Climate nonlinearity
Global warming will not necessarily mean a slow, steady rise in temperature, to which we can gradually adjust. Climate history contains sudden, lurching reconfigurations. Says the IPCC, as quoted by the U.S. EPA, "complex systems, such as the climate system, can respond in non-linear ways and produce surprises."
We might be able to adapt to an incremental warming trend, but such a surprise -- e.g., the shutdown of the thermohaline circulation -- would be likely be catastrophic.
What are the chances of a sudden shift? No one knows for sure. Low, we think, for now, probably. Such things are, almost by definition, difficult to predict with any certainty. What we do know is that we increase the probability of such a catastrophe with every ton of CO2 we put in the atmosphere.
We are rolling dice with humanity's future.
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Eddie Vedder to shame you with his environmental giving
Pop-superstars-turned-moody-hasbeens-turned-pop-superstars Pearl Jam recently pledged to donate $100,000 to groups that focus on climate change and other environmental concerns, as a way to offset their carbon emissions. Many of the recipients are, not surprisingly, in the Seattle rockers' home state. (Although there's at least one local nonprofit they seem to have missed ... what were they thinking?)
While the "carbon neutral" concept is trendy right now, Pearl Jam has followed this model for donations before.
Pearl Jam has aided other green causes in the past, including donating money to preserve a Madagascar rain forest to atone for environmental damage wrought by its last tour.
Vedder also recently gave an extremely large tip to his hair stylist to atone for the Mohawk hairdo he sported for their last album.
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Be very afraid
An unusually forthright commentary from Lee Dye on ABC:
But how much will it change? How will that affect us? And how soon?
Those are the tough questions, and some of the answers will remain elusive for years to come. After all, predicting climate, even day to day, is foggy at best. Given the variables, it may be the most difficult science of all.
But many experts confide privately what they aren't yet ready to announce publicly: Change is accelerating at a dramatic rate. -
Clean Automotive Technology funding
It's over a week old, but it's still worth reading Michael Stebbins' piece in Seed about the cool things coming out of the EPA's Clean Automotive Technology program -- including the nifty "hydraulic hybrid" UPS truck -- and Congress' short-sighted refusal to fund it adequately:
... between 2002 and 2006, the President's annual budget requests and Congress had tag-teamed the Clean Automotive Technology program, slashing its budget in half to $10 million per year for the 35 engineers working to reinvent the engine. In his budget request for 2007 -- released just after his State of the Union address, in which he announced his Advanced Energy Initiative to decrease our oil imports from the Middle East as much as 75% by 2025 -- the President asked Congress to cut the budget for the program to a paltry $3.6 million.
Jerks.
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Not to get all grassy knoll, but …
From the I-don't-want-to-get-all-grassy-knoll-on-y'all-I'm-just-sayin' department, I offer two items buried in the business page of today's New York Times:
* On page C3, we learn that Ken Lay isn't the only businessman involved in the Enron mess who came to an untimely end. Here is the NYT:
A British banker who provided evidence to the F.B.I. and the United States Department of Justice about Enron-related transactions has been found dead in an East London park, days ahead of the politically charged extradition of his former colleagues to Houston to stand trial.
Scotland Yard, the Times goes on, "said the death was being treated as 'unexplained' and that officers from its homicide and serious crime units were investigating."
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Brilliant
A friend who inexplicably still reads Wired religiously pointed me to this interview with Larry Brilliant, who was recently put in charge of Google.org, the philanthropic foundation set up by the Google guys.
Brilliant's quite a guy -- check out the whole thing -- but naturally this jumped out at me:
What's your mandate?
We'll have three big areas: climate crisis, global public heath, and global poverty, not necessarily in that order. I'm going to approach this the way a venture capitalist would -- map out the industry to see what the gaps are. You fund an initiative, learn what works, and ask, "Will it scale?"
