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Good as usual

Elizabeth Kolbert’s latest piece in the New Yorker discusses the IPCC report and the political shift underway as the science debate dies down and the policy debate heats up. She says more or less the same things I said in my latest Tom Paine piece, only more elegantly and, you know, to about five bazillion […]

The question is, what kind of geoengineering?

Gwynne Dyer writes of James Lovelock:

If we overwhelm the natural systems that keep the climate stable, Lovelock predicted, then we would "wake up one morning to find that [we] had the permanent lifelong job of planetary maintenance engineer ... The ceaseless intricate task of keeping all the global cycles in balance would be ours. Then at last we should be riding that strange contraption, the 'spaceship Earth', and whatever tamed and domesticated biosphere remained would indeed be our 'life support system'."

I have a nasty feeling that we are almost there.

So do I.

A visual history of the industry

Avast, me hearties! Seems the landlubbers ’round here have it in for me column. But I refuse to Arrr. I. P. I’ve returned, peg-leg and all, with a quick post about the atlas resources on the fisheries pages of the U.N.’s Food and Agriculture Organization. These maps illustrate tuna and billfish catches over time and […]

Vermont congressman walks the talk

Vermont Rep. Peter Welch (D) has announced that both of his offices — one on Capitol Hill and one back in his home state — will be going carbon neutral. Welch will offset 56 tons of carbon each year — the amount generated by fuel and electricity use in his two offices and travel for […]

Links

There was some hot-and-heavy debate about carbon offsets on Gristmill last week. I assume that debate will only get more intense as offsets and "carbon neutrality" move into the mainstream. Here are a few semi-related links relevant to the debate: Sun Microsystems’ enviro blog has a detailed, thoughtful series going on carbon offsets: part one, […]

Mine Your Own Business

Check out this video from "Mine Your Own Business" and let me know if you think it's a joke or not. And then, whether you think there is even a grain of truth in it. That's what I am interested in. Video below the fold.

And green is the new rock

Check out these 45 iPod Cases made from recycled 45 rpm records. You can choose your favorite piece of vinyl and have the case custom-made. So what’ll it cost ya to use old media to protect your new media? $45, of course. In other music news, green is the new rock. Seriously. When D.C. classic […]

Cheney’s investment guy attacks Cheney’s energy policy

Here’s an amusing story about an attack on the Bush administration’s energy policies from … Dick Cheney’s investment manager: "What were we thinking?’ [Jeremy] Grantham demands in a four-page assault on U.S. energy policy mailed last week to all his clients, including the vice president. Titled "While America Slept, 1982-2006: A Rant on Oil Dependency, […]

A road runs through this issue

The Feb. 8 Jackson Hole News & Guide reports that a judge has again chastised the Bush administration for violating federal law when it overturned the Clinton-era Roadless Rule. And she has issued an order protecting 52 million acres of federal roadless forest lands nationwide from roads or surface disturbance related to energy development.

Though it's likely that feds and states will continue to litigate this good idea to death (why?), I'm going to celebrate by tucking into this great new volume of essays on the topic from intrepid roadless defenders Wildlands CPR just received at my office: A Road Runs Through It. "Road-ripping," writes Annie Proulx in her foreword, "is a meaningful ritual that seeks to reestablish the correct order of the world." Amen.

And what should that tell us?

The IPCC's official total temperature increase since 1850 has gone from .6° Celsius to .76° C (or about 1.4° Fahrenheit).

The Fourth Assessment also explains that, "For the next two decades a warming of about 0.2° C per decade is projected for a range of [emission scenarios]. Even if the concentrations of all greenhouse gases and aerosols had been kept constant at year 2000 levels, a further warming of about .1° C per decade would be expected."

Their best estimate for a low emissions scenario is still a temperature increase of 1.8° C by 2100. Their best estimate for a worst case emissions scenario projects 4.0° C -- and recent research suggests that would give us sea level rise of 6 inches a decade in 2100.

Whaddya say we try to stick with the low emissions scenario?