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Pediatrician identifies five foods for parents to buy organic

Like the sound of organic food but don’t have the wherewithal to overhaul your entire pantry? Parents should focus their funds on organic milk, potatoes, peanut butter, ketchup, and apples, says pediatrician Dr. Alan Greene. But that doesn’t mean you’re allowed to mash those five foods together and call it a healthy dinner.

Fox pundit blames wildfires on federal government

60 Minutes ran a spectacularly well-timed feature this past Sunday on wildfires in the Western states, entitled "Expert: Warming Climate Fuels Mega-Fires." Predictably, climate change denier Steven Milloy, who runs a website and serves as a pundit for Fox News, was quick to criticize the news report.

His press agent at Advocacy Ink issued a release for him, in which Milloy claimed that, "There's no evidence that man-made climate change is playing any role whatsoever in the current Western forest fire season."

I called the press agent, Audrey Mullen, to check on the quote, and to ask to interview the Fox pundit. She promised he would return the call within the hour; predictably, he did not. But Milloy's outrageously false claims still demand a challenge -- especially for those of us threatened by wildfires.

In truth, the 60 Minutes report itself did a superb job of laying out the evidence for the role that global warming plays in wildfire in the West, beginning by saying -- as virtually all fire experts agree -- that the past national policy of total fire suppression was a mistake. As far as Milloy is concerned, that's all that need be said: Smoky the Bear was wrong, end of story.

But this is now conventional wisdom among fire experts, and has been for many years. In fact, where I live in Ventura County, "fire planners" work year round preparing "prescribed burns" designed to reduce the risk of fuel build-up and let wildfires not threatening homes burn freely, as they are right now in the backcountry.

"Current drought conditions and poor timber management practices are the primary causes," Milloy goes on to claim from his offices in Maryland. Milloy ignores the fact that, as the 60 Minutes report showed, the fire season today in the west is far longer than in past years.

Reporter Scott Pelley talked to researcher Tom Swetnam, who has the largest collection of tree ring data in the world and has shown authoritatively that the fire season in the high mountains is far longer today than in the past. Swetnam said:

Is geoengineering worth a second look?

Until recently, I was under the impression that scaling back carbon emissions 80% by 2050 might forestall the worst of effects of global warming. But with news like yesterday's,  with California up in flames, and with the Arctic ice cap shrunken to an all-time low, I'm beginning to wonder if we've already done so much damage that a technological fix might be necessary.

In today's Times, Ken Caldeira, of the Global Ecology Department at Stanford makes his case:

If we could pour a five-gallon bucket's worth of sulfate particles per second into the stratosphere, it might be enough to keep the earth from warming for 50 years. Tossing twice as much up there could protect us into the next century.

Geoengineering has never received much love from environmentalists, and understandably so. Too often it just diverts attention from the core problem: that our fossil-fuel fed lifestyles are unsustainable. Surely, if we're going to consider these types of projects at all, they must be one weapon among many in our arsenal. And Caldeira agrees:

This is not to say that we should give up trying to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Ninety-nine percent of the $3 billion federal Climate Change Technology Program should still go toward developing climate-friendly energy systems. But 1 percent of that money could be put toward working out geoengineered climate fixes like sulfate particles in the atmosphere, and developing the understanding we need to ensure that they wouldn't just make matters worse.

What do you think?

NYT revs up special package on cars

The New York Times published a gazillion-story special section on autos today, with many articles covering the green angle. Read up about General Motors’ electric dreams, the difficulty facing Hummer marketers, waterless car washes, and more.

Danish picturebook, Portland video show how to respect bicyclists

What bicycle-respecting streets, intersections, and neighborhoods look like is largely a mystery to most people, even those who cycle regularly. I’ve offered descriptions twice before. Since then, two wonderful new tools have been completed. StreetFilms.org, the awesome, New York-based outfit that makes movies about cycling, has posted a 30-minute ode to Portland’s bikability (linked above). […]

Sprawling homes susceptible to flames in California

The impact of the still-raging California fires on humans and their homes is tragic and lamentable — but far from unexpected, thanks to homeowners’ tendency to sprawl out and nestle right up to the fire line. Some two-thirds of new building in southern California in the past decade was on tinder-dry, fire-susceptible land, says historian […]

Chertoff lies, wildlife dies

Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff announced yesterday that he's going to just waive the Endangered Species Act, the Toxic Waste Disposal Act, the National Environmental Policy Act, and the Migratory Bird Treaty Act (among many others) in order to plough ahead with building a wall along the Arizona-Mexico border in the San Pedro Riparian National Conservation Area.

He repeated his rationale that the wall could be good for the environment because migrants leave behind trash:

But there are also environmental reasons to stop illegal crossings in the SPRNCA. Illegal entrants leave trash and high concentrations of human waste, which impact wildlife, vegetation and water quality in the habitat. Wildfires caused by campfires have significantly damaged the soil, vegetation, and cultural sites, not to mention threatened human safety.

As anyone who's spent any time along the border (or, really, anywhere on the planet) can attest, this statement is a complete lie. A little pile of trash in the wilderness might be unsightly, but it has nowhere near the effect of a giant, honking, double layered concrete wall. (Which, um, is a little more unsightly, if that's the standard we're going by.)

Since when is a wall a solution to trash anyway? I think usually, Mr. Chertoff, the way people clean up trash is by picking it up. What jaguars and bobcats and Sonoran pronghorn antelope and ocelots need is not a trash-free wilderness, but a wilderness that doesn't cut them off from the breeding populations on the other side of the border. Increased Bush administration border activity and the climate crisis have already reduced populations of the endangered Sonoran Pronghorn Antelope from 500 to below 25.

Umbra on dishwashing and droughts

Dear Umbra, I am trying to be so much more green than I used to be, so your column has helped me with the nagging questions. Now I wonder about living in a drought-stricken state with water restrictions and bulging landfills. Saturday I had a wedding shower for a dear niece and invited many women […]

Global warming and the California wildfires

Global warming makes wildfires more likely and more destructive -- as many scientific studies have concluded. Why? Global warming leads to more intense droughts, hotter weather, earlier snowmelt (hence less humid late summers and early autumns), and more tree infestations (like the pine beetle). That means wildfires are a dangerous amplifying feedback, whereby global warming causes more wildfires, which release carbon dioxide, thereby accelerating global warming.

The climate-wildfire link should be a special concern in a country where wildfires have burned an area larger than the state of Idaho since 2000.

I write this as my San Diego relatives wait anxiously in their hotel room to find out if their Rancho Santa Fe home has been destroyed. This is a beautiful home that I lived in for a month when I moved to the area in the mid-1980s to study at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography.

Can we say that the brutal San Diego wildfires were directly caused by global warming? Princeton's Michael Oppenheimer put it this way on NBC Nightly News Tuesday:

China has not officially endorsed a carbon price

As I mentioned yesterday, a new report from the InterAcademy Council advocates for a price on carbon (among many other things). I started reading it last night, and it’s fantastic — more on it later. The report was commissioned by China and Brazil. The foreword is by Lu Yongxiang, president of the Chinese Academy of […]