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The green films on show this year at Sundance

It's a reel good time in Park City, Utah: The 10-day Sundance Film Festival kicked off there on Jan. 14, and five of the 32 documentaries have environmental themes. An additional 50 eco-related films were submitted but didn't make the cut -- more greenish submissions than in the past two years combined, said a Sundance programmer. It's no wonder that budding eco-filmmakers clamor to get in, as An Inconvenient Truth and Who Killed the Electric Car? got their starts at Sundance.

Here's a rundown of this year's greenish offerings:

 

The Cove: This eco-thriller exposes the slimy underbelly of the cultural infatuation with dolphins. Activists -- led by Flipper's trainer -- sneak cameras into the cove of a major Japanese dolphin supplier and document the sketchy treatment of the animals. Which probably includes making them pose for neon Lisa Frank merch.

 

 

 

No Impact Man: You may've heard of Colin Beavan, aka No Impact Man, the New Yorker who attempted to go carless, eat organic and local, and not create any waste (including toilet paper) for a year -- and who made his wife and kidlet go along with him. If his wife is really as "espresso-guzzling [and] Prada-worshipping" as she's made out to be, this could be a tasty greenish slice of Simple Life-esque schadenfreude.

 

 

The ocean is absorbing less carbon dioxide

Premier among their many unscientific beliefs, deniers cling to the notion that some magical negative feedback will avert serious climate impacts. Sadly, we will need magic to save humanity if we foolishly decide to listen to the deniers and to keep ignoring the one negative feedback that science says can certainly save humanity -- simply reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

The scientific reality based on actual observations (not to mention the paleoclimate record) is that the climate models are not underestimating negative feedbacks -- the models are wildly underestimating the positive or amplifying feedbacks. Among the greatest concerns is the growing evidence that the major carbon sinks are saturating, that a greater and greater fraction of human emissions will end up in the atmosphere.

A new study in Geophysical Research Letters ($ub. req'd), "Sudden, considerable reduction in recent uptake of anthropogenic CO₂ by the East/Japan Sea," finds,

The results presented in this paper indicate that the rate of CO₂ accumulation in the deepest basin of the East/Japan Sea has considerably decreased over the transition period between 1992-1999 and 1999-2007.

The authors explain to the U.K.'s Guardian why this is an amplifying feedback, why warming is diminishing the ability of the ocean sink to absorb CO2:

The world's oceans soak up about 11bn tonnes of human carbon dioxide pollution each year, about a quarter of all produced, and even a slight weakening of this natural process would leave significantly more CO2 in the atmosphere. That would require countries to adopt much stricter emissions targets to prevent dangerous rises in temperature.

Kitack Lee, an associate professor at Pohang University of Science and Technology, who led the research, says the discovery is the "very first observation that directly relates ocean CO2 uptake change to ocean warming".

He says the warmer conditions disrupt a process known as "ventilation" -- the way seawater flows and mixes and drags absorbed CO2 from surface waters to the depths. He warns that the effect is probably not confined to the Sea of Japan. It could also affect CO2 uptake in the Atlantic and Southern oceans.

"Our result ... unequivocally demonstrated that oceanic uptake of CO2 has been directly affected by warming-induced weakening of vertical ventilation," he says ...

Lee adds: "In other words, the increase in atmospheric temperature due to global warming can profoundly influence the ocean ventilation, thereby decreasing the uptake rate of CO2."

This study matches other recent research on ocean sink saturation. In 2007, the BBC reported, "The amount of carbon dioxide being absorbed by the world's oceans has reduced" based on more than 90,000 ship-based measurements of CO2 absorption over ten years. The Global Carbon Project analysis of the "natural land and ocean CO₂ sinks" finds:

Better isn't enough

"President-elect Obama's goal of reducing emissions to 1990 levels by 2020 falls short of the response needed by world leaders to meet the challenge of reducing emissions to levels that will actually spare us the worst effects of climate change."

-- Dr. Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change

DDT, other contaminants persist in Columbia River

As the Columbia River runs its 1,200-mile course from a Canadian glacier out to the Pacific Ocean, it passes by one nuclear production complex, 13 pulp and paper mills, and countless agricultural areas, mines, and sewer outflows from major cities.

So perhaps it should be no surprise that the U.S. EPA recently found that the river -- which drains a 259,000-square-mile basin covering seven U.S. states and part of Canada -- is carrying "unacceptable" levels of contaminants like mercury, DDT, PCBs, and PBDEs.

Although other river systems like the Mississippi and the Colorado contain comparable levels of DDT, PCBs, and mercury, an EPA official said that reducing pollution in the Columbia basin would be a high priority. This is good news for many Northwest tribes who rely heavily on Columbia River fish for their diet. It's also important news for the region's salmon populations, which use the Columbia and its tributaries as spawning ground.

So how did these contaminants end up in the river? Here's a rundown, courtesy The Oregonian:

Richard Tol says wildly optimistic MIT/NBER study is 'way too pessimistic'

An amazing comment (here) from climate economist luminary Richard Tol epitomizes the narrow, linear, non-scientific thinking of the economics profession in the climate arena.

In Voodoo economists, part 3, I explained why a recent study, "Climate Shocks and Economic Growth [PDF], was a new favorite of global warming deniers. In projecting the economic consequences of global warming this century, the authors:

• knowingly ignored many of the key impacts (like sea-level rise, extreme weather, species loss)
• (unknowingly?) ignored all the other key impacts (like desertification and loss of the inland glaciers and ocean acidification)
• assumed the the tiny global warming impacts we have experienced in the last few decades could be be extrapolated in a linear fashion to determine the huge global warming impacts projected for this century on the business-as-usual emissions path
• absurdly did not assign China and India "significant negative consequences of climate change" because those countries would soon be rich.

That's the only way they could come up with conclusions like "we find very little impact of long-run climate change on world GDP" or "Changes in precipitation had no substantial effects on growth in either poor or rich countries" -- conclusions the right wing deniers at the Heritage Foundation and elsewhere were quick to embrace. But Richard Tol posted a comment here:

Observations and reflections from a House hearing on stimulus, efficiency, and green jobs

On Thursday I attended a hearing of the House global warming select committee on stimulus, efficiency, and green jobs. You can find a list of attendees, their full written testimony, and some pictures on the committee website.

Just a few observations.

First, and this will shock no one, Van Jones is a marvel. (It is not normal for Congressional testimony to solicit applause.) To take one example from today: I have labored through thousands of words on Grist to try to explain why the most common economic models fail to fully account for the benefits of efficiency investments. In doing so I have bored even myself and built great, airy rhetorical castles that only masochists would want to explore.

Here's what Jones said at the hearing: "Get the math right: don't just count what you spend, count what you save."

Um ... dammit. Why didn't I think of putting it that way? I could have trimmed 14,000 words down to 14.

Here's his opening statement, if you're interested:

How often do natural and unnatural flights collide?

A plane crashes into the Hudson River. By great good luck, all 155 people aboard survive. The cause of the accident? “A double bird strike.” So how often do birds, going about their wild-thing business, bring down our massive metal machines? More often than you might think — and yet, way less often than you’d […]

Must-read: Van Jones and the English language

I'm a big fan of people who are persuasive advocates for clean energy -- and an even bigger fan of those who keep trying to improve their language skills.

And that brings me to Van Jones, founder of Green for All, an organization promoting green-collar jobs and opportunities for the disadvantaged (and a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress). He is the subject of a must-read New Yorker profile by Elizabeth Kolbert, "Greening the Ghetto: Can a remedy serve for both global warming and poverty?"

This is the part that got my attention:

He spends a lot of time listening to speeches -- the way most people download Coltrane or Mozart, he's got Churchill and Martin Luther King on his iPod.

"Ronald Reagan I admire greatly," he once told me. "You look at what he gets away with in a speech -- unbelievable. He's able to take fairly complex prose and convey it in such a natural and conversational way that the beauty of the language and the power of the language are there, but you stay comfortable. That's very hard to do."

Precisely. We are constantly being told people have the "gift of gab" as if it is something you were born with. Facility with persuasive language is a skill that is developed and improved through practice and study.

Lincoln didn't become our most eloquent president through happenstance. He consciously decided to educate himself in rhetoric. Indeed, much as Van Jones listens to Churchill and Martin Luther King Jr., Lincoln studied, listen to, memorized, and recited the works of the greatest master of rhetoric in the English language -- William Shakespeare.

Churchill himself studied the art of rhetoric and the figures of speech all his life and at the age of 23 wrote a brilliant, unpublished essay, "The Scaffolding of Rhetoric," that explains:

Time for new thinking — and new blood? — in the White House economics team

In 2005, Henry Paulson stepped down as chief of Goldman Sachs to become President George W. Bush's Treasury secretary. The Wall Street-to-Treasury story is a bit dog-bites-man; Robert Rubin had taken the exact same path a decade before under Clinton.

Yet Paulson's appointment generated excitement in green circles, of all places. The new secretary had sat on the board of the Nature Conservancy and collaborated on projects with Conservation International. An article by Grist's own Amanda Griscom Little summed up the mood. She quoted Conservation International Chair and CEO Peter Seligmann:

My hope is that Paulson will raise the level of understanding around these issues [i.e., climate] within this inner circle, and rally a critical mass that will push the administration to make substantive moves in the right direction.

Since then, of course, Bush has done approximately nothing on climate. And Paulson has evidently been a less-than-constructive presence, as David Roberts recently pointed out.

So the Wall Street-friendly finance minister, despite his Big Green cred, ended up caving on climate. What does this tell us, as the Obama administration prepares to install its own Wall Street-friendly economics team?

Kids stay off lawns, debunk ethanol fantasies

Those of us of a certain vintage recall a showman named Art Linkletter, an avuncular old guy who seemed to have a knack for connecting with kids and getting the kids to talk to him like they talk to each other, leading to shows and books on the theme of "Kids say the darnedest things."

Well, some slightly older kids have shown that kid wisdom is still around: