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Speaking of guides to the candidates’ positions on global warming, here’s another guide to the candidates’ positions on global warming — this one is from LCV, and it looks to be a little more specific and concrete than the other one.

Law & Order … in the ocean

Playing hard-nosed Executive Assistant District Attorney Jack McCoy, actor Sam Waterston has thrown the book at the bad guys for years on TV's Law & Order.

Bad guys on boats and beaches better watch out now, too, because Waterston recently joined Oceana's Ocean Council, a panel of academic, business, and philanthropic leaders who represent and support Oceana's efforts on the global stage. Also on the Ocean Council are actors Pierce Brosnan and Kelsey Grammar.

Recent report published projecting values of sea-level rise

As anyone who reads my posts knows, I am a big fan of the IPCC reports. They are the best summary of what the scientific community knows about climate change and how confidently we know it.

A recent article (subscription required, sorry) in Science suggests that some scientists view the IPCC as overly cautious:

In the latest report, its fourth since 1990, the IPCC spoke for scientists in a calm, predictably conservative tone (Science, 9 February, p. 754). It is, after all, an exhaustive, many-tiered assessment of the state of climate science based exclusively on the published literature. In IPCC's Working Group I report on the physical science of climate, 600 authors contributed to an 11-chapter report that drew 30,000 comments from reviewers. The report was in turn boiled down to a 21-page "Summary for Policymakers" (SPM). Its central projection of sea-level rise by the century's end -- 0.34 meter -- came within 10% of the 2001 number. And by getting a better handle on some uncertainties, it even brought down the upper limit of its projected range, from 0.89 to 0.59 meter.

The SPM did add that "larger values [of sea-level rise] cannot be excluded." Whatever has accelerated ice-sheet flow to the sea, the report said, might really take off with further warming -- or not. "Understanding of these effects is too limited" to put a number on what might happen at the high end of sea-level rise, it concluded. Lacking such a number, the media tended to go with the comforting 0.34-meter projection or ignore sea level altogether.

I have two conflicting views of this.

A short, powerful video

Greenpeace UK passes along this short, powerful video drawing attention to the dangers of biofuels:

Anyone got those cans of instant water? (Just add water)

"A drought for the ages."

Declining production and what comes next

This week the Durango Herald discussed the steadily declining production of methane gas from wells in southern Colorado's La Plata County and what impacts there will be when the wells go dry.

Unfortunately, the article focuses only on the economic implications and goes nowhere on the topic of what the landscape will look like when those companies pull up stakes for new pastures. Even if all the well pads are reclaimed, which would be a miracle, what kind of rangeland and habitat will these parts of the West be left with when the boom is over?

Dam it all

Tucuruí, Brazil's second largest dam has many times the GHG emissions of a natural gas plant of the same capacity -- though there is fierce argument over whether that output substantially exceeds what a natural watercourse would produce. (The emissions are due to methane from trapped organic matter in the dam.)

There is now a proposal to tap that methane to run gas turbines and produce electricity, reducing the emissions many times, since CO2 from burning the methane has a much lower impact than the methane itself. It would also close to double the electrical output from the dam. This seems very close to an acknowledgment that critics of methane from dams are correct. Outside of estuaries, I don't know many natural water courses that might be tapped in such a way. I have to admit that it is an ingenious solution to the problems of dams as methane sources.

From Splits to Stamps

Enthusiasm officially curbed We knew global warming was a partisan issue. But tearing a marriage apart? Now that’s an inconvenient truth. Photo: Alex Berliner Kilimanjaro softly Mount Kilimanjaro, the Everglades, the Great Barrier Reef, and other treasured vacay spots are being threatened by over-tourism. Quick, go forth and spew massive amounts of CO2 to see […]

Sign the petition!

I opened my inbox the other day and thought I must be dreaming: the venerable progressive organization MoveOn is taking on coal-to-liquids (CTL). This is from an email they sent to their over three million members on Wednesday: In the next few weeks, Congress could vote to DOUBLE the amount of greenhouse gases America produces […]

Oregon Gov. signs tough new renewable standard

Kudos to Oregon Gov. Ted Kulongoski, who this week signed one of the nation’s toughest renewable portfolio standards: the state’s biggest utilities must deliver 25% of their power from renewable sources by 2025.