I thought I would share some more pictures of California’s Channel Islands—Santa Catalina Island.
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Weekend postcards – Santa Catalina Island
The Week’s Environmental News roundup
New species of carnivorous mammal found in Madagascar
A mongoose-like creature has been discovered in Madagascar, BBC reports to http://news.bbc.co.uk/earth/hi/earth_news/newsid_9080000/9080783.stm
Leicester Geographers forensically tap pee ancient deposits to learn about desert area’s climatic changes
According to the media release, issued by the University of Leicester Press Office,
Scientists at the University of Leicester are using an unusual resource to investigate ancient climates– prehistoric animal urine.
The animal in question is the rock hyrax, a common species in countries such as Namibia and Botswana. They look like large guinea pigs but are actually related to the elephant. Hyraxes use specific locations as communal toilets, some of which have been used by generations of animals for thousands of years. The urine crystallises and builds up in stratified accumulations known as ‘middens’, providing a previously untapped resource for studying long-term climate change.
“Palaeoenvironmental records in this area were fragmentary,” says a researcher. “The middens are providing unique terrestrial records to compare against nearby deep ocean-core records, allowing us to think in much more detail about what drives African climate change.
“This is a very dynamic environment, and it appears that that the region’s climate changed in a complex manner during and after the last global Ice Age (around 20,000 years ago). The next step, which is part of Dr Chase’s new research project, will be to compare the midden data against simulations of past climates generated by GCMs [computer-based general circulation models that are used to simulate both past and future climates] to evaluate their performance and explore why climates have changed the way they have.”
Brazil’s Amazon forest to be auctioned off
According to Reuters, “Brazil will auction large swaths of the Amazon forest to be managed by private timber companies and cooperatives to help reduce demand for illegal logging…The government will grant private companies logging concessions for nearly 1 million hectares (2.47 million) by year-end and, within 4 to 5 years, nearly 11 million hectares (27 million acres), the size of the U.S. state of Virginia.“
The earth’s biodiversity probably still increasing
Hélène Morlon, Matthew D. Potts, and Joshua B. Plotkin from the University of Pennsylvania and UC Berkeley write in the excitingly titled paper, “Inferring the Dynamics of Diversification: A Coalescent Approach,”
We have developed a novel approach to infer diversification dynamics from the phylogenies of present-day species. Applying our approach to a diverse set of empirical phylogenies, we demonstrate that speciation rates have decayed over time, suggesting ecological constraints to diversification. Nonetheless, we find that diversity is still expanding at present, suggesting either that these ecological constraints do not impose an upper limit to diversity or that this upper limit has not yet been reached. [emphasis added]
200 new species found in Papua New Guinea
Last week we noted that 6,000 new species had been found in the earth’s oceans, this week it’s 200 new species in PNG. “Scientists Wednesday unveiled a spectacular array of more than
200 new species discovered in the Pacific islands of Papua New Guinea, including a white-tailed mouse and a tiny, long-snouted frog.” Said researcher Steve Richards, “To find a completely new genus of mammal in this day and age is pretty cool.”
US Interior Secretary lifts gulf drilling moratorium
According to a story in Marketwatch,
Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar on Tuesday said the deepwater drilling moratorium has been lifted ahead of the Nov. 30 expiration, saying progress has been made on making deepwater drilling safer. The moratorium was imposed after a BP well in the Gulf of Mexico exploded, leading to the worst oil spill in U.S. history. “There will always be risks associated with deepwater drilling, but we have now reached the point where we have, in my view, reduced those risks,” Salazar said.
ABC News notes that despite the Obama Administration’s lifting the moratorium six weeks ahead of schedule, “[A] combination of bureaucratic and technological hurdles means it will be months before most of the two dozen rigs idled by the moratorium resume drilling
“They [the oil industry and congressional allies] miss the point: The issue isn’t about a slowdown but a startup,” Los Angeles Times quotes Jason Grumet, president of the Bipartisan Policy Center, a Washington research group that has advocated lifting the moratorium. “Interior, with a lot of input from the oil industry, has set up new regulations. Standing up that new architecture is a first step for government and industry, and it will take some time.”
Forest Service estimates US forests locking up 190+ million tons of carbon annually
The USDA Forest Service released new estimates of the total carbon storage of U.S. forests, highlighting the important role America’s forests play in the fight against climate change. According to the new data, 41.4 billion metric tons of carbon is currently stored in the nation’s forests, and due to both increases in the total area of forest land and increases in the carbon stored per acre, an additional 192 million metric tons of carbon are sequestered each year. The additional carbon sequestered annually offsets roughly 11 percent of the country’s industrial greenhouse gas emissions, the equivalent of removing almost 135 million passenger vehicles from the nation’s highways. (Read more)
Hal Lewis Resigns From The American Physical Society
This letter of resignation from the American Physical Society by Dr. Harold Lewis is being placed on science and environmental blogs. Highlights and emphasis have been added by me.
From: Hal Lewis, University of California, Santa Barbara
To: Curtis G. Callan, Jr., Princeton University, President of the American Physical Society
6 October 2010
Dear Curt:
When I first joined the American Physical Society sixty-seven years ago it was much smaller, much gentler, and as yet uncorrupted by the money flood (a threat against which Dwight Eisenhower warned a half-century ago). Indeed, the choice of physics as a profession was then a guarantor of a life of poverty and abstinence—it was World War II that changed all that. The prospect of worldly gain drove few physicists. As recently as thirty-five years ago, when I chaired the first APS study of a contentious social/scientific issue, The Reactor Safety Study, though there were zealots aplenty on the outside there was no hint of inordinate pressure on us as physicists. We were therefore able to produce what I believe was and is an honest appraisal of the situation at that time. We were further enabled by the presence of an oversight committee consisting of Pief Panofsky, Vicki Weisskopf, and Hans Bethe, all towering physicists beyond reproach. I was proud of what we did in a charged atmosphere. In the end the oversight committee, in its report to the APS President, noted the complete independence in which we did the job, and predicted that the report would be attacked from both sides. What greater tribute could there be?
How different it is now. The giants no longer walk the earth, and the money flood has become the raison d’être of much physics research, the vital sustenance of much more, and it provides the support for untold numbers of professional jobs. For reasons that will soon become clear my former pride at being an APS Fellow all these years has been turned into shame, and I am forced, with no pleasure at all, to offer you my resignation from the Society.
It is of course, the global warming scam, with the (literally) trillions of dollars driving it, that has corrupted so many scientists, and has carried APS before it like a rogue wave. It is the greatest and most successful pseudoscientific fraud I have seen in my long life as a physicist. Anyone who has the faintest doubt that this is so should force himself to read the ClimateGate documents, which lay it bare. (Montford’s book organizes the facts very well.) I don’t believe that any real physicist, nay scientist, can read that stuff without revulsion. I would almost make that revulsion a definition of the word scientist.
So what has the APS, as an organization, done in the face of this challenge? It has accepted the corruption as the norm, and gone along with it. For example:
1. About a year ago a few of us sent an e-mail on the subject to a fraction of the membership. APS ignored the issues, but the then President immediately launched a hostile investigation of where we got the e-mail addresses. In its better days, APS used to encourage discussion of important issues, and indeed the Constitution cites that as its principal purpose. No more. Everything that has been done in the last year has been designed to silence debate
2. The appallingly tendentious APS statement on Climate Change was apparently written in a hurry by a few people over lunch, and is certainly not representative of the talents of APS members as I have long known them. So a few of us petitioned the Council to reconsider it. One of the outstanding marks of (in)distinction in the Statement was the poison word incontrovertible, which describes few items in physics, certainly not this one. In response APS appointed a secret committee that never met, never troubled to speak to any skeptics, yet endorsed the Statement in its entirety. (They did admit that the tone was a bit strong, but amazingly kept the poison word incontrovertible to describe the evidence, a position supported by no one.) In the end, the Council kept the original statement, word for word, but approved a far longer “explanatory” screed, admitting that there were uncertainties, but brushing them aside to give blanket approval to the original. The original Statement, which still stands as the APS position, also contains what I consider pompous and asinine advice to all world governments, as if the APS were master of the universe. It is not, and I am embarrassed that our leaders seem to think it is. This is not fun and games, these are serious matters involving vast fractions of our national substance, and the reputation of the Society as a scientific society is at stake.
3. In the interim the ClimateGate scandal broke into the news, and the machinations of the principal alarmists were revealed to the world. It was a fraud on a scale I have never seen, and I lack the words to describe its enormity. Effect on the APS position: none. None at all. This is not science; other forces are at work.
4. So a few of us tried to bring science into the act (that is, after all, the alleged and historic purpose of APS), and collected the necessary 200+ signatures to bring to the Council a proposal for a Topical Group on Climate Science, thinking that open discussion of the scientific issues, in the best tradition of physics, would be beneficial to all, and also a contribution to the nation. I might note that it was not easy to collect the signatures, since you denied us the use of the APS membership list. We conformed in every way with the requirements of the APS Constitution, and described in great detail what we had in mind—simply to bring the subject into the open.
5. To our amazement, Constitution be damned, you declined to accept our petition, but instead used your own control of the mailing list to run a poll on the members’ interest in a TG on Climate and the Environment. You did ask the members if they would sign a petition to form a TG on your yet-to-be-defined subject, but provided no petition, and got lots of affirmative responses. (If you had asked about sex you would have gotten more expressions of interest.) There was of course no such petition or proposal, and you have now dropped the Environment part, so the whole matter is moot. (Any lawyer will tell you that you cannot collect signatures on a vague petition, and then fill in whatever you like.) The entire purpose of this exercise was to avoid your constitutional responsibility to take our petition to the Council.
6. As of now you have formed still another secret and stacked committee to organize your own TG, simply ignoring our lawful petition.
APS management has gamed the problem from the beginning, to suppress serious conversation about the merits of the climate change claims. Do you wonder that I have lost confidence in the organization?
I do feel the need to add one note, and this is conjecture, since it is always risky to discuss other people’s motives. This scheming at APS HQ is so bizarre that there cannot be a simple explanation for it. Some have held that the physicists of today are not as smart as they used to be, but I don’t think that is an issue. I think it is the money, exactly what Eisenhower warned about a half-century ago. There are indeed trillions of dollars involved, to say nothing of the fame and glory (and frequent trips to exotic islands) that go with being a member of the club. Your own Physics Department (of which you are chairman) would lose millions a year if the global warming bubble burst. When Penn State absolved Mike Mann of wrongdoing, and the University of East Anglia did the same for Phil Jones, they cannot have been unaware of the financial penalty for doing otherwise. As the old saying goes, you don’t have to be a weatherman to know which way the wind is blowing. Since I am no philosopher, I’m not going to explore at just which point enlightened self-interest crosses the line into corruption, but a careful reading of the ClimateGate releases makes it clear that this is not an academic question.
I want no part of it, so please accept my resignation. APS no longer represents me, but I hope we are still friends.
Hal
———————————————
Harold Lewis is Emeritus Professor of Physics, University of California, Santa Barbara, former Chairman; Former member Defense Science Board, chmn of Technology panel; Chairman DSB study on Nuclear Winter; Former member Advisory Committee on Reactor Safeguards; Former member, President’s Nuclear Safety Oversight Committee; Chairman APS study on Nuclear Reactor Safety Chairman Risk Assessment Review Group; Co-founder and former Chairman of JASON; Former member USAF Scientific Advisory Board; Served in US Navy in WW II; books: Technological Risk (about, surprise, technological risk) and Why Flip a Coin (about decision making)
The Week’s Environmental News
The White House will go solar…again
It’s déjà vu all over again. Department of Energy Secretary Steven Chu, announced plans to install solar panels and a solar hot water heater on the roof of the White House Residence, “a project that demonstrates American solar technologies are available, reliable, and ready for installation in homes throughout the country.” This is not the first time the White House has tried to use “renewable energy.” The Huffington Post noted, “[President] Carter in the late 1970s spent $30,000 on a solar water-heating system for West Wing offices.” No word if they had been left on the roof if the 32 solar panel would yet have paid for the investment; in 1986, President Reagan had them removed them for a resurfacing of the roof.
10:10 UK lays video turd in environmental punchbowl
The folks at 10:10UK.org unveiled a video titled, “No Pressure” which, frankly, stunk. As James Delingpole wrote on October 1 in the Telegraph, “[The No Pressure script by Richard Curtis] makes the Vicar of Dibley look like a collaboration between Oscar Wilde and Shakespeare.”
Marc Morano former communications director for Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.) was more charitable, “I think the idea of a comedy is fine, and even the gore and blood is part of our pop culture,” he told Greenwire. “What is not fine, and what is actually very revealing, is that their impulse — the intellectual strain that runs through the alarmist movement — is to try to silence their critics.”
10:10 UK’s director has issued an apology saying, “I am very sorry for our mistake and want to reassure you that we will do everything in our power to ensure it does not happen again…This media coverage for this film was not the kind of publicity we wanted for the cause of saving the climate, nor for 10:10, and we certainly didn’t mean to do anything to distract from all the efforts of those in other organisations who are working so hard to secure effective action on climate change.”
Other green groups reacted as though they had picked up something on the bottom of their collective shoes. Bill McKibben, the founder of 350.org (a group advocating lowering CO2 to 350 parts per billion in the atmosphere, and is organizing work parties for 10/10/10) wrote of the 10:10 video, “It’s the kind of stupidity that hurts our side, reinforcing in people’s minds a series of preconceived notions, not the least of which is that we’re out-of-control and out of touch…” Gee, given that the Guardian called it “edgy,” screeners of it found it “extremely funny,” a lad says it’s okay to explode other kids for the cause, a NASA scientist says oil and coal company “CEOs should be tried for high crimes against humanity and nature,” and commenters to pro-global warming posts call for the lynching of corporate executives, (I could go on), where could skeptics have picked up the idea that warmers are out of touch?
Read more here.
Coral Oasis Found In Mediterranean Desert
The Terra Daily reports that an oasis of coral has been found in a part of the Mediterranean thought to be mostly devoid of life. “The exploration vessel Nautilus, with a team of experts of the University of Haifa’s Leon H. Charney School of Marine Sciences , headed by Prof. Zvi Ben Avraham, discovered for the first time an area of reefs with deep-sea corals in the Mediterranean, offshore of Israel.”
6,000 New Species found in First Ever Ocean Life Census
The UPI reports, “A decade-long Census of Marine Life by 2,700 scientists from 80 countries has been completed and revealed thousands of new species…The initiative launched 570 expeditions that produced more than 2,600 academic papers and collected 30 million observations of 120,000 species. Researchers found a possible 6,000 new species, 1,200 of which have been formally described…”
Despite the good news that the world has more biodiversity than previously thought, the folks at Climate Central want you to know that every silver lining has a cloud. Michael Lemonick says the “mammoth marine census lays out what we’ve got to lose… Humans are altering the oceans through pollution and overfishing. We’re also changing the Earth’s climate by pumping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere — and that warms the oceans; sends glacial meltwater into the seas to change salinity and alter currents, removes the coating of ice that has been a feature of Arctic waters for hundreds of thousands of years and gradually turns seawater more acidic.”
U.S. Military Goes “Green”
Despite petroleum products having the most scalable and transportable energy available, the Pentagon thinks it might be a good idea to explore alternative energies. The New York Times Green blog reports, “The military’s renewable initiatives extend from the battlefield to the hundreds of bases and hundreds of thousands of vehicles it operates around the world.” Green reports the military has even appointed something of an “energy czar” to oversee the initiatives: Sharon E. Burke.
Don’t expect to see the military have much more success than the private sector with its massive subsidies. After all, electric cars need to be lightweight because the power density of rechargeable batteries is not as high as gasoline or diesel, and an “MRAP (mine-resistant ambush-protected) armored vehicle weighs 50,000 pounds and gets four miles per gallon.”
GM corn provides benefit to neighbors
In much the same way that a population does not need to be 100% vaccinated for non-vaccinated individuals to be protected from pathogens, researchers have found that corn genetically modified to produce Bacillus thuringiensis (Bt) can protect neighboring fields from insects. With $2.4 billion in benefit to non-Bt fields. This benefit gets passed along to consumers. Matt Ridley, over at the Rational Optimist blog says, “Higher profits for farmers means lower costs for consumers (think about it: competition can drive prices lower and effectively pass on the extra profits as savings). So GM crops are leading to higher yields which means ploughing less land, cheaper food and more insect life, which means more bird life.” And Ronald Bailey at Reason.com says, “This beneficial pest reduction effect has also been reported in cotton crops in the U.S. and China. Maybe some day organic growers will stop worrying about a little bit of harmless pollen drift from biotech crops and welcome the pest protection spillover benefits provided by their biotech farmer neighbors.”
Those are the best environmental stories I found last week. Did you notice others? Did you have a different take on these? Leave a comment and let me know what you think.
Rotting Swill: The “No Pressure” video from 10:10UK.org stinks
Recently a four-minute video titled No Pressure, written by the writer of Notting Hill, bombed worse than Ishtar because it bombed innocents. No Pressure promotes the 10:10 movement’s goal to lower carbon emissions by ten percent. The video went viral in an ebola sort of way.
Because banners and billboards are so déclassé, the 10:10 UK organizers decided that they needed to raise awareness for the prevention of the imagined catastrophic consequences of global warming with a YouTube video. The video certainly raised awareness—or, at least, eyebrows. In it, schoolteachers and bosses “lightheartedly” explode—complete with bucketsful of fake blood—anyone who chose not to do their part to lower their carbon dioxide emissions by ten percent starting October 10 (hence,10:10).
About fifty actors volunteered to work in the British video. Said one smiling child actor, and nascent eco-crusader, drenched in fake blood, “I think it is vital that children should be exploded in a good cause.” (video here) Call me old fashioned but this chills me to the bone. I don’t think it’s okay to blow anyone up for merely holding a different opinion from your own.
Before the release of No Pressure, Britain’s Guardian newspaper (a sponsor of the video) called it “edgy.” Since its release, and its nearly instantaneous removal, the 10:10 UK folks have issued an apology. And, by way of explanation they wrote, “We were therefore delighted when Britain’s leading comedy writer, Richard Curtis – writer of Blackadder, Four Weddings, Notting Hill and many others – agreed to write a short film for the 10:10 campaign. Many people found the resulting film extremely funny…”
You should judge for yourself.
The video starts in a classroom. A teacher asks if their families will be lowering their carbon emissions. All students except two raise their hands. She says that it is fine if they do not wish to participate. “No pressure,” she says, and then announces the weekend’s homework and “one more thing.” She presses a large red button and the two non-compliant students explode. She smiles, wipes the blood from her glasses, and repeats the homework for everyone, “except Phillip and Tracy, of course.” Since they now resemble mashed tomatoes, they will not have to do, hee-hee, the assignment.
The next scene is in a business. The boss asks his twenty or so employees, after the preliminaries and “no pressure,” if they will be participating. All but four raise their hands and out comes the box with the large red button. Four more explosions. Four fewer dissenters.
The last scene is of Gillian Anderson doing the voice-over saying she thought that her doing the voice-over was contribution enough. The producer pushes the big red button. Blood thumps against the sound room’s glass and as a bloody mess dribbles down the window, a message comes on screen: “1010global.org. Cut your carbon by 10%. No pressure.”
Now I could call 10:10’s video a number of things. “Edgy” is not among them: sick, ghastly, horrid, appalling, disgusting, revolting, and other adjectives come to mind. “Extremely funny”? On what planet? You are scaring us by taking on the trappings of a crusade, a holy war for the earth where only the “just” deserve to live; infidels must die. Apocalyptic fear mongering quivers throughout much of the rhetoric of global warming crusaders. Like the amplifier for the ersatz band, Spinal Tap, the rhetoric has been pushed to eleven.
Bill McKibben, the founder of 350.org (a group advocating lowering CO2 to 350 parts per billion in the atmosphere, and is organizing work parties for 10/10/10) wrote of the 10:10 video, “It’s the kind of stupidity that hurts our side, reinforcing in people’s minds a series of preconceived notions, not the least of which is that we’re out-of-control and out of touch…” Gee, Bill, given that the Guardian called it “edgy,” screeners of it found it “extremely funny,” a lad says it’s okay to explode other kids for the cause, a NASA scientist says oil and coal company “CEOs should be tried for high crimes against humanity and nature,” and commenters to your posts call for the lynching of corporate executives, (I could go on), where could we have picked up that idea?
So, what are you doing this weekend? No pressure.
Envirasceticism
I think Brendan O’Neil’s essay on the new enviro-asceticism is brilliant. I especially liked:
Eating, drinking, playing, procreating – everything is carbon-calculated, everything is carbonised. These carbon-calculations really represent a moral judgement on our lives. They [today’s environmentalists] make everything into a potential sin, a crime against the planet. They send the very powerful message that to live, to travel, to breed, to immerse yourself in every human experience is bad – whereas to stay still, to stay put, to be meek, to be quiet, to grow your own is good. Experimentation and experience are potentially polluting; restraint is pure.
What do you think? Was learning to cook with fire where humans went wrong?
The Week’s Environmental News Roundup
Brazil’s Petrobas raises $70b
Brazil’s oil company, Petrobas, raised $70 billion in a sale of it’s stock.
According to a report on the Economist website, “The share issue is an important element in Brazil’s plan to exploit the sizeable oilfields it discovered off its coasts in 2007. These ‘pre-salt’ fields (so called because they are under a thick layer of salt, deep below the seabed) are thought to contain enough oil to make
Brazil a significant energy exporter, albeit not quite on the scale of
Saudi Arabia.”
According to the South Atlantic News Agency, MercoPress, “Petrobras forecasts that by 2014 it will produce the energy equivalent of 3.9 billion barrels of oil per day when natural gas output is included. That’s equal to what Exxon Mobil Corp., the world’s largest publicly traded oil and gas company produces today.”
California’s Prop 23 AGW initiative in dead heat
The Los Angeles Times’ Greenspace blog says, opinion polls on Proposition 23 “shows a dead heat among California voters.”
Ugandan national parks see surge in animal populations
(H/T GNN)
The number of animals in Uganda’s national parks and game reserves has soared over the past decade, the Uganda Wildlife Authority (UWA) says.
The latest figures show that the population of some species has doubled since 1999, spokeswoman Lillian Nsubuga said.
Wildlife had benefited from improved monitoring and the expulsion of rebels from the country, she added.
The animals on the rise include buffalos, giraffes and elephants.
New statistics show that the population with the biggest increase is that of the Impala, a grazing antelope.
The number of Impala in Uganda has surged to more than 35,000, from around 1,600 at the time of the last census in 1999.
Hippopotamuses, waterbucks, and zebras are also on the increase.
James Hansen arrested at White House over mountain top mining
According to treehugger.com (a Discovery Company) among the number of mountaintop removal protesters arrested was Dr. James Hansen.He believes the practice of strip-mining is destroying a historic mountain range and poison water systems.
“The science is clear,” said the handcuffed Dr Hansen, “mountaintop removal destroys historic mountain ranges, poisons water supplies and pollutes the air with coal and rock dust. Mountaintop removal, providing only a small fraction of our energy, can and should be abolished. The time for half measures and caving in to polluting industries must end.”
Dr. Hansen (whose degrees include a BA in Physics and mathematics, an MS in Astronomy, and a PD in Physics) is known to be an outspoken critic of the country’s use of fossil fuels, contends there is a conspiracy of special interests preventing the transition to renewable energy.
Special interests have blocked transition to our renewable energy future. Instead of moving heavily into renewable energies, fossil companies choose to spread doubt about global warming, as tobacco companies discredited the smoking-cancer link. Methods are sophisticated, including disguised funding to shape school textbook discussions.
CEOs of fossil energy companies know what they are doing and are aware of long-term consequences of continued business as usual. In my opinion, these CEOs should be tried for high crimes against humanity and nature. [emphasis mine]
Deforestation diminishing the Snows of Kilimanjaro
Last year a Huffington Post post conjectured that the loss of snow on Mount Kilimanjaro was another sign of global warming. A team observed that Kilimanjaro’s glaciers were receding and “The increase of Earth’s near surface temperatures, coupled with even greater increases in the mid- to upper-tropical troposphere, as documented in recent decades, would at least partially explain” the observations.
I and others pointed out that the more likely reason for the receding glaciers could be explained by deforestation. Now, nearly a year later, New Scientist has a post that more data point to deforestation. “Nicholas Pepin from the University of Portsmouth, UK, and colleagues say deforestation could be an important part of the puzzle,” because transpiration from trees plays a role in humidity and temperature. “Pepin suggests that extensive local deforestation in recent decades has likely reduced this flow of moisture, depleting the mountain’s icy hood.” Professor Pepin is no denier of climate change and has been studying global warming for two decades. According to his biography on the University’s site, his “main research interest is in assessing evidence for climate change in the mountainous areas of the globe, specifically how the high elevation signal of global warming may be different to that at sea-level.”
Deforestation’s causes are many but in Africa cooking and heating with wood is much of the problem.
Would better stoves help slow the loss of snow from Kilimanjaro?
Green quote of the day
“When scientists align themselves with anti-science political movements, like Rifkin’s anti-biotechnology crowd, what are we to think? When scientists lend their names and credibility to unscientific propositions, what are we to think? Is it any wonder that science is losing its constituency?” – Dr. Norman Borlaug, Feeding a World of 10 Billion People: The Miracle Ahead, May 6, 1997
Locally produced organically grown. Better for the environment?
Last week we looked at the locavore movement (called Not livin’ la vida locavore). My conclusion was that while local is tasty, food-miles are less than half the energy of storage and prep. Transport accounts for only 14 percent of the energy of a product in the food system. 
The locavore movement also touts organically grown food, saying it’s better for our, and the earth’s, health.
It is neither healthier than conventionally produced food, nor with its larger carbon footprint and requiring more land to produce, is it better for the earth (despite what the good folks at the Rodale Institute say). I haven’t found anything convincing me differently. I have found lot showing that conventional farming and specifically Norman Borlaug’s Green Revolution, saved 1 billion from starving and 3.7 billion acres of forest.
Nullius in Verba 