Scientists recently reported that the level of carbon in the atmosphere has passed 400 parts per million. Carbon pollution causes climate change, and many experts believe we need to bring this level down to 350 ppm in order to hold off the worst impacts of climate disruption. And yet we continue to march into the danger zone.

Already the signs are appearing in our communities. Climate change intensifies drought, storms, tidal surges, and heat waves, and these events have exacted a staggering price in the past few years.

Last June, a freak storm called a “derecho” left 22 dead and 5 million people without power from Illinois to Virginia. Another potent storm dumped up to 10 inches of rain in Minnesota and Wisconsin, causing $80 million to Duluth’s public infrastructure. July 2012 became the hottest month on record for the contiguous United States, and 123 deaths were directly tied to the high temperatures. The heat dried out soil across the nation and contributed to the worst drought in 50 years. More than 2,000 counties were declared drought disaster areas and U.S. farmers received $12 billion in insurance payments for crop damage. And all this occurred before Superstorm Sandy struck.

This is not the climate we were born into. Instead we have entered the era of extreme weather.

We have profoundly altered the planet’s chemistry, and if we do not heed the alarm sounded by 400 ppm, we will lock ourselves into more intense droughts, wildfires, and Superstorm Sandys.

The good news is we know how to arrest this problem and reduce carbon pollution.

We just need President Obama to lead our nation in the right direction. We need him to make a public commitment to climate action and move American down a cleaner energy path.

Here’s how it starts. The president can use existing authority to curb carbon from power plants—the largest source of U.S. global warming pollution. Last year he proposed limits on new power plants, and now he needs to finalize them. He must also propose limits for existing power plants. NRDC has outlined a flexible, cost-effective approach to these standards that would cut carbon pollution by 26 percent by 2020 compared to 2005 levels and generate between $25 and $60 billion in public health and climate benefits by 2020.

President Obama must also reject the use of the dirtiest fuels—the ones that pump the most carbon pollution into our atmosphere. Producing tar sands oil, for instance, generates three times as much greenhouse gas emissions as producing conventional crude. That’s why the president must reject the Keystone XL pipeline that would carry tar sands from Alberta to the Gulf of Mexico for export.

As the New York Times editorial board wrote over the weekend, hitting the 400 ppm level increases the pressure on President Obama to demonstrate leadership. I urge you to raise your voices and call on President Obama to respond to what the planet is telling us. We need bold actions in order to end the era of extreme weather and usher in a cleaner, more sustainable future for our children. And we need them now.

Plug-In America has some fun facts related to this EV milestone:

• Over a quarter-million people are exposed daily to the benefits of electric transportation
• Nissan dealerships in some markets have reported that the Leaf has outsold all other Nissan models for particular sales periods this year
• Tesla’s Model S is outselling the Mercedes-Benz S-Class, the BMW 7 series and the Audi A8
• Chevy Volt drivers alone have logged over 187-million electric miles
• The plug-in vehicle market is approaching 48 percent annual growth with both Battery Electric (BEV) and Plug-in Hybrid (PHEV) vehicles finding growing interest
• Plug-in vehicle adoption exceeds the adoption of hybrid vehicles over the same timeframe in their market developments

• The domestic EV fleet now offers over 2,000 megawatts of battery storage, which may offer significant opportunities for the future management of our electrical grid and the increasing role of intermittent renewable energy sources
  • Manufacturers making EVs now include Nissan, Tesla, GM, Ford, Honda, Mitsubishi, Toyota, BMW, Mercedes, and Fiat. These plug-in cars have received a wealth of consumer and industry awards

While the numbers are great, EV technology is still being developed and advanced, meaning the numbers of units sold are expected to keep rising. While much work remains to be done, 100,000 vehicles means that we are ever closer to the tipping point for electric transportation.

Source: Tree Hugger

According to the report, sequester cuts in energy and environment related programs generally have had the following impacts so far:

• Less ability to fight wildfires
• Greater exposure to climate related extreme weather
• Less protection from air pollution
• Reduced protection for national parks and other protected places

The sequester will expose Americans to additional risks from climate change. The House Appropriations Committee Democrats report that:

The sequester will result in a cut of at least $50 million from NOAA’s (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) geostationary weather satellite program, which provides continuous monitoring to track severe weather. The cut will cause a 3-6 month satellite launch delay, increasing the likelihood of having fewer than two operational geostationary weather satellites in the 2017 timeframe, increasing the risk of inaccurate forecasts for hurricanes, tornadoes, and severe thunderstorms, with further risks to public safety and costs from weather-related damage.

Likewise, the sequester will cut funding for NASA’s climate research satellites which helped detect the 25 most severe climate related floods, drought, storms, heat waves, and wildfires took 1,107 lives and caused $188 billion in damages that occurred in the last two years.

The House report also found that the Environmental Protection Agency will have less ability to protect people from air pollution.

EPA plans to delay the implementation of monitoring sites for dangerous air pollutants and cut grants to State regulators. The result will be reduced enforcement of air pollution rules, potentially overturning years of public health benefits from increasing air pollution.

The sequester will also curtail Americans ability to hunt, fish, hike, boat, and otherwise enjoy our millions of acres of wild places. The House report found that:

The public should be prepared for reduced hours and services this year at our nation’s 401 national parks, 155 national forests, 561 national wildlife refuges, and more than 258 public land units. For the National Park Service alone, the sequester means that 900 permanent positions are being left unfilled and 1000 fewer seasonal workers are being hired this year.

From wildfires, to increased air pollution, to less access to national parks, the sequester is truly terrible for our own health and well being as well as the planet’s.

Source: Think Progress

Public opinion on the topic of climate change is notoriously fickle, changing — quite literally sometimes — with the weather. The latest bit of evidence on this: Yale’s April 2013 climate change survey, which found, among other things, that Americans’ conviction that global warming is happening had dropped by seven points, to 63 percent, over the preceding six months. The decline, the authors surmised, was most likely due to “the cold winter of 2012-13 and an unusually cold March just before the survey was conducted.”

A far smaller percentage — 49 percent — understood that human activities are contributing to the problem.

People and surveys being what they are, these numbers tend to jump around a bit from year to year. At the same time, 49 percent is nearly half the country, so it wouldn’t be excessively cheerful (would it?) to note that half of the American public is more or less in harmony with basic science — at least as it relates to climate change and the role carbon dioxide emissions play in exacerbating things. Given that roughly the same number of Americans flatly reject evolution, the climate numbers represent a comparative bounty of enlightenment.

That’s not something you hear very often when it comes to surveys of Americans. Delving deeper into the textbooks, for instance, another recent study showed that less than half of population was clear on whether atoms are smaller than electrons, or whether lasers work by focusing sound waves. In this light (ahem), the larger consensus on global warming is notable. (Answers on atoms and lasers appear at the end of this column.)

But a far more troubling metric from Yale’s latest poll suggests that only 42 percent of Americans believe that scientists are in agreement on climate change. A full 33 percent of respondents are convinced that there remains “widespread disagreement” among scientists on the issue. This is a problem — both because it is so at odds with reality, and because it likely helps prevent more Americans from recognizing and accepting some pretty straightforward scientific realities.

It is this reason that prompted a team of researchers to painstakingly comb through the abstracts of more than 12,000 scientific articles published between 1991 and 2011 to determine just how much scientific agreement exists on the subject of climate change, and humanity’s role in driving it. The team was led by John Cook, a Climate Communication Fellow for the Global Change Institute at the University of Queensland and the founder of the climate change education web site SkepticalScience.com.

The results, published Thursday in the journal Environmental Research Letters, were clear: of the more than 4,000 abstracts that had anything to say about human-driven climate change, 97 percent endorsed the notion. A little less than 3 percent either rejected the idea or remained undecided.

“There is a gaping chasm between the actual consensus and the public perception,” Cook said in a statement accompanying the study’s release. “It’s staggering given the evidence for consensus that less than half of the general public think scientists agree that humans are causing global warming. This is significant because when people understand that scientists agree on global warming, they’re more likely to support policies that take action on it.”

In a follow-up email exchange, Cook said that the evidence for consensus on the topic among individual scientists was even stronger, given that more researchers were listed as co-authors on papers endorsing the idea of human-driven climate change — technically called “anthropogenic global warming,” or AGW for short — than on papers that rejected it.

“Consequently,” Cook said, “among the 10,000 scientists who had expressed a position on AGW in the peer-reviewed literature, 98.4 percent endorsed the consensus.”

The study, which is also outlined in detail (and with colorful slides) at The Consensus Project, is the latest in a long line of meta-analyses seeking to debunk the relentless and apparently potent talking points of naysayers who argue that scientists continue to disagree on the matter. Last year, the free-market and right-leaning Heartland Institute financed a series of billboards in Chicago comparing those who understand and accept the basic science on global warming to unsavory characters like convicted murderer Charles Manson, Cuban dictator Fidel Castro and the Unabomber, Ted Kaczynski.

“The point is that believing in global warming is not ‘mainstream,’ smart, or sophisticated,” the organization wrote at the time. “In fact, it is just the opposite of those things.”

Studies like Cook’s, which revisits a well known and similarly conducted 2004 review of the scientific literature by Naomi Oreskes at the University of California, San Diego, provide clear evidence that messages like Heartland’s — besides being rather boorish and odd — are bunkum. Scientists are no more divided on the basic mechanics of the greenhouse effect than they are on questions of evolution (sorry folks) or other elementary concepts.

Sure, there’s ample room for debate on the particulars: How hot will the planet get? How quickly? How will our various ecosystems, from forests and oceans to vast tracts of tundra and polar ice, respond to rising temperatures, and how will these responses feed, in turn, into the incredibly dynamic and interactive machinery of our climate? And then based on all this, what the hell should we do about it? These are all questions without precise answers, and they are providing rich and important territory for scientific investigation as well as social, political and economic soul searching.

What’s not a matter of debate, however, is that human beings are saturating the atmosphere with volumes of carbon dioxide — mostly arising from the burning of fossil fuels — at an unprecedented rate. That’s trapping heat and driving up average surface temperatures across the planet, which in turn is spurring regional changes that we are only now beginning to understand. On these points, virtually all climate scientists agree.

A famous 2009 study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences came at the question of scientific consensus from an entirely different angle, but arrived at nearly identical results. That study reviewed public statements made by scientists of any kind about anthropogenic global warming, and then identified which of those scientists had published peer-reviewed climate research — this as a way of weeding out those who publicly reject human-driven global warming but have no formal expertise or training in climate science, like these folks.

Among the nearly 1,000 most actively published climate scientists, that analysis found that between 97 and 98 percent supported the basic tenets of human-driven climate change — a very similar result to the one published Thursday by Cook and his colleagues.

“We want our scientists to answer questions for us, and there are lots of exciting questions in climate science,” said one of Cook’s co-authors, Mark Richardson of Britain’s University of Reading, in a statement accompanying the release of the study. “We found over 4,000 studies written by 10,000 scientists that discussed whether recent warming is mostly man-made,” Richardson said, “and 97 percent answered ‘yes.’

We can’t possibly expect to agree on everything. Should there be subsidies for cleaner forms of energy, or a stiff tax on carbon pollution, or both? Or do we simply wait it out in the hopes that necessity — in the form of rising seas, more destructive storms, choking droughts and other climate-related freakishness — will drive invention and save the day? For my money, an ounce of early prevention would seem worth a ton of cure further down the line, but I understand the differing opinions.

What’s far more clear — and indeed, what is a virtual certainty among scientists — is that we’ve got a problem on our hands, and we’re going to have to deal with it sooner or later.

So if you count yourself among the 49 percent of Americans who believe that climate change is happening, and that we’re playing a key role in it, give yourself a gold star. The planet’s best and brightest scientific minds agree with you.

And if you weren’t sure whether electrons were smaller than atoms (they are), or that lasers work by focusing light, not sound, well, take heart: Scientists have got your back. See the science and technology survey published last month by the Pew Research Center and Smithsonian magazine for more.

“America is doing an amazing thing. We’ve made a promise to keep species from going extinct. And we’ve been incredibly successful. Endangered Species Day is an ideal opportunity to celebrate our nation’s success stories,” said Leda Huta, Executive Director of the Endangered Species Coalition, primary sponsor of Endangered Species Day.

Schools, libraries, museums, zoos, aquariums, botanical gardens, wildlife refuges, parks, community groups and conservation organizations will hold tours, exhibits, restoration projects, children’s programs, field trips and other activities on Endangered Species Day and throughout the month.

Last year, more than 130 events were held across the country, including an event to release endangered sea turtles back into the ocean. This year, there will be 200 or more events with thousands of participants. They range from the annual Endangered Species Day Festival at the United States Botanic Garden in Washington, D.C., to the Kansas City Zoo’s “Learning Fest,” to habitat restoration projects in San Diego, to an endangered species “scavenger hunt” at the Georgia Aquarium in Atlanta, and a variety of other activities.

The purpose of Endangered Species Day is to educate the public about the importance of protecting the nation’s rare, threatened, and endangered animal and plant species; highlight success stories of species recovery; and demonstrate everyday actions that people can take to help protect our disappearing wildlife and last remaining open spaces. Endangered Species Day began with a unanimous Senate Resolution in 2006.
In addition to the Endangered Species Coalition, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, National Park Service, U.S. Forest Service and National Oceanic and  Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), numerous conservation and education organizations support Endangered Species Day, including the Association of Zoos and Aquariums, the North American Association for Environmental Education, the Garden Clubs of America, Sierra Club, American Library Association, the National Association of Biology Teachers, the National Science Teachers Association,  San Diego Zoo, Earth Day Network, National Wildlife Federation, National Audubon Society and Defenders of Wildlife.

For more information on Endangered Species Day, including a list of events occurring throughout the country, visit www.endangeredspeciesday.org

In a sprawling Compton distribution center that Ralphs shares with its fellow Kroger Co. subsidiary Food 4 Less, organic matter otherwise destined for a landfill is rerouted instead into the facility’s energy grid.

So how does it work?

Once the moldy bread, rotten meat, and discarded fruit and veggies from 359 stores make their way to the center, the anaerobic digester goes to work. The food that is unable to be donated or sold is then dumped into a massive grinder — cardboard and plastic packaging included.

After being ground up, the mass is sent to a pulping machine, which filters out inorganic materials such as glass and metal and mixes in hot wastewater from a nearby dairy creamery to create a sludgy substance. From there, the sludge is transported into a storage tank, and then eventually a 2 million gallon silo.

Once inside the silo, devoid of oxygen, bacteria munch away on the liquid refuse, naturally converting it into methane gas. The gas, which floats to the top of the tank, is siphoned out to power three on-site turbine engines. The 13 million kilowatt-hours of electricity they produce per year could power more than 2,000 California homes over the period, according to Kroger.

Excess water is purified and then piped into an industrial sewer and leftover sludge is used as nutrient-rich organic fertilizer, enough to nourish 8,000 acres of soil.

The system helps Kroger reduce its waste by 150 tons a day, not to mention the energy it is saving by reducing the need for it to travel to landfills and other sites. The food otherwise would have been sent to Bakersfield to be composted, hauled away six times a day by diesel trucks traveling 500,000 miles a year.

The technology of the digester has been proposed as a fuel source for data centers, farms, government buildings and other sites.Nick Whitman, president of Feed Resource Recovery, said Kroger’s new anaerobic digester in Compton may help encourage future installations in more urban areas.

“We’ve had to solve some really critical problems — sanitation, efficiency and reliability issues — that have plagued anaerobic digestion and prevented its wider adoption in the U.S.,” he said.

“We’ve been able to bring digestion out of the farms and off the composters and into cities and industrial centers.”

Source and Photo credit: LA Times

Scott and Julie Brusaw created the first prototype for Solar Roadways in 2010, funded by a grant from the Federal Highway Administration, and this year they’re testing a fully-functional solar parking lot.

So what exactly is a solar road? In theory, a solar road would work the same way as a solar panel in that it would collect the energy from sunlight and generate it as electricity.

There are several components of the solar road that make it even more functional than a regular solar panel. The solar highway will be able to keep roads lit up at night, heat them to melt ice and snow, and power homes and business along the way.

According to GOOD, the panels for the solar road are topped with a super-strong, translucent layer that provides traction, but lets sunlight through. The middle of the panel has solar electronics to gather energy, and can also light the road with LEDs at night, similar to the Smart Highway being tested this year in the Netherlands. It will also be able to warm the roads to melt ice and snow. At the bottom, the panels have a layer to distribute power to homes and businesses connected to the Solar Roadway.

If the panels replaced all paved surfaces in the United States, from roads to sidewalks to playgrounds, the developers have estimated that they could produce more than three times the amount of electricity currently used in the whole country—and almost enough to supply the entire world.

The technology to make solar roads a reality is still being developed but every step closer is good news for the planet.

Source: GOOD

Architect Stefano Boeri designed Bosco Verticale, a vertical forest which will plant 900 trees on the balconies of two towers. The vegetation from the towers will produce the same ecological footprint as 10,000 square meters of forest.

The lush forest will add so much more than natural beauty to the building’s design. The plants and trees will produce humidity and oxygen while protecting from radiation and pollution through absorbing carbon dioxide. It will also attract birds and insects, creating a miniature ecosystem.

Milan’s will be the first vertical forest to go up in a major metropolitan area with the hope that green-thinking architects will want to emulate its creation in cities all over the world.

Source: Huffington Post

Say goodnight, Earthlings.

That message — plus the slimmest of shots at an eleventh-hour reprieve — was announced to the people of the world last week.

When this happens in science fiction — 1951′s The Day the Earth Stood Still is the classic — the planet pays attention. The flying saucer lands; an alien, in this case played by Michael Rennie, emerges; a final warning is issued: Stop it. If you don’t, you’re doomed.

Back then, the “it” was violence — the Cold War, and the threat of nuclear midnight. Last week, it was climate change — greenhouse gases, and the promise of ecological extinction.

“Heat-Trapping Gas Passes Milestone, Raising Fears,” ran the headline on the front page lead story in Saturday’s New York Times, with this sub-head: “CO2 at Level Not Seen in Millions of Years, Portending Major Climate Changes.”

A headline like that — millions of years? really? — normally turns up in comic books and superhero movies, not in the paper of record. In fiction, what usually comes next is a montage. At breakfast tables and on street corners, in souks and igloos, in the Oval Office and at the U.N., the shocking news galvanizes humanity into action.

In the real world, it was pretty much a one-day story.

What does it take to grab us by the eyeballs? Chris Christie’s waistline is guaranteed wall-to-wall coverage. The next Jodi Arias is waiting in CNN’s wings. The Benghazi circus will be in town at least through 2016. Sure, disaster porn is always good for ratings, but though a Superstorm Sandy may momentarily raise the specter of climate change, daily bulletins on the parts per million of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere apparently aren’t Nielsen enough.

It’s not that people who know our planet’s hair is on fire aren’t trying to get our attention. The animated graph from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Earth Science Research Lab showing how atmospheric carbon dioxide has changed over the last 800,000 years should be as horrifying as any computer-generated imagery Hollywood has to offer. Along with the news that we had hit the 400 ppm mark on the CO2 curve for the first time since the Pliocene epoch came scary quotes from scientist after scientist calling this our last chance before the point of no return. Unless we act, children born today will see temperatures rise irreversibly and sea levels rise catastrophically. Weather patterns will be disrupted, deserts and drought will spread and — in the words of Lord Stern, head of the U.K.’s Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment — “hundreds of millions of people will be forced to leave their homelands because their crops and animals will have died…. [W]hen they try to migrate into new lands… [they will be brought] into armed conflict with people already living there. Nor will it be an occasional occurrence. It could become a permanent feature of life on Earth.”

If graphs and quotes aren’t sexy enough to warrant a permanent place in the news, there are other ways to hang on to the spotlight. The Climate Reality Project‘s website features 18 disturbing but entertaining videos about the price of carbon and our addiction to fossil fuels. “Do the Math,” the film that journalist Bill McKibben is using to spark his 350.org movement, has a dramatic narrative that’s compelling but not preachy. The Years of Living Dangerously, Showtime’s climate change documentary series now being shot, has producers who know a little something about how to capture audiences: James Cameron, Jerry Weintraub and Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Those efforts use media to engage an informed, activist public. Could such a citizenry make change? There’s plenty we can do in our personal lives to reduce our carbon footprint. Local and state policies in conservation, transportation, building design and urban planning can also curb greenhouse gas emissions. But without federal leadership like killing the Keystone XL pipeline and putting a tax on carbon, and without global commitments with teeth to enforce them, it’s hard to imagine a path back from the brink.

In the U.S., the same dysfunctions preventing anything else useful from happening — the Senate filibuster, the gerrymandered House, the corrupt campaign finance system — also hold climate change mitigation hostage. So does denial. And though some denial can be attributed to hoax propaganda funded by the fossil fuel industry, some comes from an infantile strain in the American psyche that should not be mistaken for religious freedom.

Last week, Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D — R.I.) gave a floor speech urging his colleagues to

“awaken to what carbon pollution is doing to our planet, to our oceans, to our seasons, to our storms. And I wonder, ‘Why is it that we are so comfortable asleep, when the warnings are so many and so real?’ What could beguile us away from wakefulness and duty? I was recently at a Senate meeting where I heard a member of our Senate community say, ‘God won’t allow us to ruin our planet.’… [That] statement… is less an expression of religious thinking than it is of magical thinking.”

I admit that my fantasy that last week’s CO2 headlines might rally our planet like an alien invasion may make me as guilty of magical thinking as Senator God-Won’t-Allow-Us. On the other hand, Ronald Reagan was a big fan of The Day the Earth Stood Still, and as president he often referred to it. When he first met Mikhail Gorbachev in 1985, he speculated that the threat of an alien invasion might get the Americans and the Soviets to cooperate. If Michael Rennie’s “Klaatu barada nikto” line is the father of “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall,” maybe blowing past the 400 ppm barrier can be the progenitor of “Mr. Obama, cancel that pipeline.”

This is my column from The Jewish Journal of Greater Los Angeles. You can read more of my columns here, and email me there if you’d like.

Follow Marty Kaplan on Twitter: www.twitter.com/martykaplan

Per the New York Times: The best available evidence suggests the amount of the gas in the air has not been this high for at least three million years, before humans evolved, and scientists believe the rise portends large changes in the climate and the level of the sea.

“It symbolizes that so far we have failed miserably in tackling this problem,” said Pieter P. Tans, who runs the monitoring program at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration that reported the new reading.

Ralph Keeling, who runs another monitoring program at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in San Diego, said a continuing rise could be catastrophic. “It means we are quickly losing the possibility of keeping the climate below what people thought were possibly tolerable thresholds,” he said.

What exactly causes carbon dioxide levels to rise?

Carbon dioxide is released every time you drive in a car, get on a plane ride and, in most places, flip on a light switch.

China currently releases more carbon dioxide than any other country but the United States has been consuming fossil fuels for a longer period of time and are therefore equally responsible for the high levels emitted.

The new measurement came from analyzers atop Mauna Loa, the volcano on the big island of Hawaii that has long been ground zero for monitoring the worldwide trend on carbon dioxide, or CO2. Devices there sample clean, crisp air that has blown thousands of miles across the Pacific Ocean, producing a record of rising carbon dioxide levels that has been closely tracked for half a century. Carbon dioxide above 400 parts per million was first seen in the Arctic last year, and had also spiked above that level in hourly readings at Mauna Loa.

The level of carbon dioxide rises and falls with the seasons, and the level will dip below 400 some time this summer, but scientists are anticipating a day in the near future when no measurement of the ambient air anywhere on earth, in any season, will produce a reading below 400.

Indirect measurements suggest that the last time the carbon dioxide level was this high was at least three million years ago, during an epoch called the Pliocene. Geological research shows that the climate then was far warmer than today, the world’s ice caps were smaller, and the sea level might have been as much as 60 or 80 feet higher.

Experts fear that humanity may be precipitating a return to such conditions — except this time, billions of people are in harm’s way.

Source and image: NY Times