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Time to step up fight against global warming

   Climate change/global warming are making almost daily headlines. Just last week we read about Bangkok disappearing bit by bit under ocean water; carbon dioxide in the atmosphere increasing faster than expected; polar ice caps melting faster than expected; and the censorship by the administration of testimony on health impacts of global warming.
   It’s time for everyone to become involved in doing their part to help with this impending climate crisis. How can we read about it almost daily and do nothing? What can we do? It may not sound like much, but lots of little things, like changing your light bulbs to the compact fluorescents, really make a big difference when everyone does it. Also, combining your errands will reduce the number of miles you drive, and using the bus or walking whenever possible helps. When you clean up the leaves in your yard, get out the rakes instead of the leaf blower — it’s good exercise and cuts lots of carbon emissions. And all of these measures not only help the planet but save money.
   All of us can also become involved in influencing our public officials and other decision makers. Let them know that you’re concerned about what happens to our planet before your grandchildren suffer the consequences. An opportunity to do this is coming on Nov. 3 — our second Step It Up event, part of a nationwide action to cut carbon emissions.
   At 10 a.m. you are invited to join us in the McChesney Room of the Schenectady Library for a press conference on local measures to conserve energy. After that we will rally on the steps of City Hall. Paul Tonko, head of the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority, will speak on state measures to conserve energy. There will be music, posters and information on what each of us can do to help.
   NANCY PETERSON
   Schenectady  

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All of us can also become involved in influencing our public officials and other decision makers. Let them know that you’re concerned about what happens to our planet before your grandchildren suffer the consequences. An opportunity to do this is coming on Nov. 3 — our second Step It Up event, part of a nationwide action to cut carbon emissions.

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Let them know that you’re concerned about what happens to our planet before your grandchildren suffer the consequences

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EEUUW! - Laurie David Award Finalists: Julia Roberts' & Other Dumb Environmentalist Antics of the Week


By Debbie Schlussel

In the spirit of Laurie David's (and Sheryl Crow's) insistence that we limit our toilet paper usage to one-square per visit, I bring you dumb environmental activist recommendations and experiments of the week:

* Julia Roberts stirring toilet-soup made of used diapers:

In order to promote her soon-to-be-released likely flop, "Charlie Wilson's War" (which denounces our involvement with the Afghanistan Mujahideen against the Soviets), Julia Roberts got USA Today to do a gushing piece, today--"Julia Roberts: The Greening of a Superstar." In it, Ms. Roberts tells us how she contributes less to the world's garbage:



"We make a lot of garbage. How can we make less garbage? This is our plight. I use Seventh Generation (chlorine-free, non-toxic) diapers for Finn and Hazel, and then I was turned on to the (plastic-free, flushable) gDiapers" for Henry. "It is flushable, but you've got to stir that thing! If you don't really break it all the way up, it doesn't go all the way down," advises the multimillion-dollar leading lady.
Um, who really believes this prima donna is running to her bathroom every time one of her three young kiddies makes a doody and is stirring diarpers in her toilet until they break up into pieces? If anyone is actually doing this--and I highly doubt it--it's a personal assistant or her servant-husband.

Stirring diapers in a toilet bowl? You keep doing that, Julia. But no thanks.

Question: Since there's lots of garbage created, each time they eat--much less make a move--on movie sets, did Julia Roberts stir the set garbage in her toilet . . . "to break it up" and make less garbage?

You keep lecturing us little people, "Pretty Woman."

Oh, and don't forget: This is the same woman who in 2000 said:

Republican falls between Reptile and Repugnant in the dictionary.
FYI, Roberts falls between Roach and Rodent in the dictionary.

* "Don't flush if it's yellow":

Fans at Saturday's University of Georgia homecoming game were asked not to flush the toilet . . . if it was #1 they were releasing. More info than I needed, but the slogan, "Don't flush if it's yellow," was posted on signs in bathrooms all over the stadium, in an effort to conserve water.

Not really a new concept, since passengers were forced to do the same on the planes that the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine hijacked in 1970. You don't exactly want to have to behave like hostage of Islamic terrorists when you're at a football game.

Gee, I'll bet the smell in there was just lovely. Gee, I have an idea for a new perfume: "Eau d'Hillary."

* NBC Sports goes dark for a few minutes, expects you to go dark for a lifetime:

Last night, during the last minute of the kickoff show for NBC's "Sunday Night Football" broadcast and during its Half-time and Post-game shows, the studio went dark to do its part for the Green movement. Yup, I love watching my sporting events with 25% of normal visibility, too. Thrilling. NBC Sports says this is an attempt to get us to turn out our lights, too. Hey, NBC, I'll happily do that, so long as you do it the entire season, for the entire show, on all of your television shows, instead of as a few-minute BS publicity stunt. What's good for the goose, is good for NBC, right?:

NBC's studio show will deliberately go dark for the last minute of the show — before fully lit coverage of Dallas-Philadelphia kicks off at about 8:15 p.m. ET — and stay dark during the halftime and postgame studio shows.
"We're thinking of having Cris Collinsworth wear a miner's helmet with a light," says show producer Michael Weisman, seemingly serious. "And have candles. Or maybe Glow Sticks."

Weisman knows how this all sounds. "We're opening ourselves up for ridicule and sarcasm," he says. "It might be perceived as a stunt. But with 20 million people watching, some might say, 'Let's go turn out the lights in rooms we're not using.' "

Which is not something you'd expect NBC parent General Electric— founded by light bulb creator Thomas Edison - to be advocating.

But starting at 8 p.m. ET Sunday, NBC and its various cable channels begin a week of "green-themed" programming, weaving in environmental angles to all its shows.

To address that NBC "edict," Weisman says, FNA will show satellite shots of U.S. cities "to show all that electricity being used," turn its onscreen logos green and include Bob Costas talking to Matt Lauer, who'll be near the north pole to report for NBC's Today show next week. Says FNA analyst Jerome "The Bus" Bettis: "This week, I'm the hybrid bus."


Gee, how much energy does Jerome Bettis' gazillion-square-foot mansion use? Bob Costas? Matt Lauer? When they downsize, then I'll consider doing something.

Posted by Debbie at 09:50 AM | Comments (4) | Printer Friendly

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Support effort to fight global warming

   On Nov. 3, a national event was held in all but three states. It was the day for climate action, organized by Bill McKibben’s Step It Up team in conjunction with One Sky [One Sky’s mission is to promote sustainable living globally]. Most states had multiple events. In New York, events were held from New York City to Buffalo. One was held here in Schenectady.
   The message for this day of climate action was clear: Cut carbon emissions 80 percent by the year 2050, create green jobs and place a moratorium on new coal-burning power plants.
   That the national event was planned just before Election Day was in keeping with its theme: Who’s a leader? As a grass-roots citizens’ alliance, Step It Up is demanding accountability from all our elected officials. We are demanding political leadership to curb global warming. The future of the planet is at stake.
   The Schenectady events were held by a coalition of nonpartisan groups concerned with the tragic consequences of global warming. We do not endorse candidates. We represent a broad base of citizen concern about the looming consequences of inaction, particularly at the federal level.
   The Schenectady Coalition Against Global Warming counts as its participating members the following organizations: the Environmental Clearinghouse, the county League of Women Voters, the Sierra Club, the Green Sanctuary of the Unitarian Society, ARISE [A Regional Initiative Supporting Empowerment] and the SCCC Science Club.
   Our coalition is planning programs and events for the coming year to keep our message in front of the community, and in front of our elected officials.
   PATRICIA RUSH
   Schenectady  

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Climate experts sound alarm
U.N. chief calls for ‘urgent, global action’
BY ARTHUR MAX The Associated Press

VALENCIA, Spain — Global warming is “unequivocal” and carbon dioxide already in the atmosphere commits the world to sea levels rising an average of up to 4.6 feet, the world’s top climate experts warned Saturday in their most authoritative report to date.
   “Only urgent, global action will do,” said U.N. Secretary-General Ban Kimoon, calling on the United States and China — the world’s two biggest polluters — to do more to slow global climate change.
   “I look forward to seeing the U.S. and China playing a more constructive role,” Ban told reporters. “Both countries can lead in their own way.”
   Ban, however, advised against assigning blame.
   Climate change imperils “the most precious treasures of our planet,” he said, and the effects are “so severe and so sweeping that only urgent global action will do. We are all in this together. We must work together.”
   According to the U.N. panel of scientists, whose latest report is a synthesis of three previous ones, enough carbon dioxide already has built up that it imperils islands, coastlines and a fi fth to two-thirds of the world’s species.
GLOBAL THREAT coastal flooding, according to the report.
   Europeans can expect extensive species loss, and North Americans will experience longer and hotter heat waves and greater competition for water, says the report from the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which shared the Nobel Prize with Al Gore this year.
   The panel portrays the Earth hurtling toward a warmer climate at a quickening pace and warns of inevitable human suffering. It says emissions of carbon, mainly from fossil fuels, must stabilize by 2015 and go down after that.
   In the best-case scenario, temperatures will keep rising from carbon already in the atmosphere, the report said. Even if factories were shut down today and cars taken off the roads, the average sea level will reach as high as 4.6 feet above that in the preindustrial period, or about 1850.
   “We have already committed the world to sea level rise,” the panel’s chairman, Rajendra Pachauri, said. But if the Greenland ice sheet melts, the scientists said, they could not predict by how many feet the seas will rise, drowning coastal cities.
   Climate change is here, they said, as witnessed by melting snow and glaciers, higher average temperatures and rising sea levels. If unchecked, global warming will spread hunger and disease, put further stress on water resources, cause fiercer storms and more frequent droughts, and could drive up to 70 percent of plant and animal species to extinction, according to the panel’s report.
BLUEPRINTS LAID OUT
   The report was adopted after five days of sometimes tense negotiations among 140 national delegations. It lays out blueprints for avoiding the worst catastrophes — and various possible outcomes, depending on how quickly and decisively action is taken.
   “The world’s scientists have spoken clearly and with one voice,” Ban said, looking ahead to an important climate conference in Bali, Indonesia, next month. “I expect the world’s policy makers to do the same.”
   The report is intended to both set the stage and serve as a guide for the conference, at which world leaders will begin discussing a global climate change treaty to replace the 1997 Kyoto Protocol.
   That treaty, which expires in 2012, required industrial nations to reduce greenhouse gases and a smooth transition to a new treaty is needed to avoid upsetting the fledgling carbon markets.
   “This report will have an incredible political impact,” Yvo de Boer, the United Nations’ top climate change official, told The Associated Press. “It’s a signal that politicians cannot afford to ignore.”
   The United States opted out of Kyoto in 2001, arguing that the science was unproven and that the burden of mandatory emission cuts was unfair since it excluded fast-growing China and India.
   Chief U.S. delegate Sharon Hays said doubts have been dispelled. “What’s changed since 2001 is the scientific certainty that this is happening,” she said in a conference call late Friday. She did not indicate that Washington would abandon its policy of voluntary emission cuts.
STEPS RECOMMENDED
   China and India have said any measures impinging on their development and efforts to lift their people from poverty were unacceptable — a point likely to be heeded at the Bali talks.
   The report offered dozens of measures for avoiding the worst catastrophes if taken together — at a cost of less than 0.12 percent of the global economy annually until 2050. They ranged from switching to nuclear and gas-fired power stations to developing hybrid cars, using more efficient electrical appliances and managing cropland to store more carbon.
   Ban said a new agreement should provide funding to help poor countries develop clean energy resources, adapt to climate conditions and give them the technology to help themselves.
   He said he witnessed the devastation of climate change in disappearing glaciers of Antarctica, the deforested Amazon and under the ozone hole in Chile.
   “These scenes are as frightening as a science fiction movie,” said Ban. “But they are even more terrifying because they are real.”  

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Don't swallow meat theory on global warming  

First published: Monday, November 19, 2007

Robert Lawrence of the "Meatless Mondays" program ought to do his homework before linking U.S. meat production to climate change. ("Want to help save Earth? Lose some weight," Nov. 12)
  
While the United Nations claims meat producers are responsible for 18 percent of global greenhouse gases, data from the Environmental Protection Agency show that U.S. livestock production only contributes 2.4 percent. If anything, Lawrence should be encouraging us to eat home-grown beef, since our domestic ranchers appear far more efficient and eco-friendly than their counterparts overseas.

And it's not true that Americans are eating far more red meat than the government recommends. Data from the U.S. Department of Agriculture show that the average American eats 2.3 ounces of red meat per day. This is far below the 5 to 7 ounces that the federal government's current Dietary Guidelines recommend for foods in the "meat" group.

Animal rights activists and other advocates of strict vegetarianism are working overtime trying to hitch their cause to the global-warming bandwagon. But the facts just aren't on their side.

DAVID MARTOSKO
Director of Research
Center for Consumer Freedom
Washington, D.C.

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Richard Monda STAR TALK Possible solutions to cool Earth are out of this world
Richard Monda is an astronomer living in the Capital Region.

   Polar ice core samples show that the average temperature of Earth has been increasing. Whether this increase will continue in the long term and cause a permanent climate change has yet to gather a scientific consensus. In the meantime, various engineering solutions have been proposed that are literally out of this world.
   Engineering practices that address Earth’s environment on a planet-wide scale are called geoengineering. One of the goals of geoengineering is to correct for any effects of global warming by decreasing the heating of Earth’s atmosphere.
   One such solution has been proposed by University of Arizona astronomer Roger Angel. Wellknown for his innovative technique of “spin-casting” exceptionally large telescope mirrors for the world’s major observatories, Angel’s idea is to cool the entire planet slightly. His method involves decreasing the amount of incident energy that Earth receives from the sun.
   To accomplish this, he proposes placing a sunshade in space to uniformly reduce the amount of sunlight reaching Earth. This reduction would only amount to a few percent and would be enough to balance the additional heating of Earth if the amount of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere were to double from its present value.
   The solar sunshade scheme, unquestionably, would be a tour de force of technology. Angel’s team envisions launching trillions of ultralight spacecraft, catapulted into space by magnetic launchers a million mechanisms at a time, parked in orbits spread out a million miles above the earth. Nonetheless, if a stack of fliers were launched every five minutes, it would still take a decade to complete the solar canopy.
   Dimensionally, each of these space vehicles would be about 2 feet across by one five-thousandth of an inch thick and weigh about as much as a large butterfly. Every one of these orbiting fliers would be made of a transparent film pierced with small holes so that tilting the little gadgets would control how much the sunlight is reduced.
   Angel estimates that the total weight of this constellation of spacecraft would be about 20 million tons but with magnetic launchers, the cost could be as little as $20 per pound for liftoff. (The current working figure for sending objects into space is $10,000 per pound.) Estimates place the lifetime of the sunshade at approximately 50 years.
MICROWAVE MAGIC
   In San Diego, Eastlund Scientific Enterprises has been looking at weather modification schemes for several years. In 2000, Eastlund joined with a NASA veteran to study how the “twist” could be taken out of a twister. They envisioned a satellite beaming microwave energy into a tornado to dissipate the energy of such a tempest.
   These kinds of surgical strikes on weather systems could moderate air temperatures, altering a storm’s wind currents and ultimately tame a tornado.
   The beamed microwave energy could also be directed to the edge of the jet stream, heating that region and influencing its temperature and pressure. This process could steer the jet stream without changing its chemistry. Global climate is influenced by the path of the jet stream, such as the way the El Niño temperature changes in the Pacific Ocean alter the course of the jet stream.
   Similarly, the jet stream could be steered to bring rain to a droughtstricken region or steered away from a rain-soaked area to prevent flooding.
SILVER BULLETS
   Power rays from space to manipulate weather cause meteorologists to raise a skeptical eyebrow. These weathermen prefer to introduce small changes to Earth’s atmosphere to fine-tune its climate.
   They favor making Earth’s surface more reflective or seeding the stratosphere with tiny silvered particles to make this part of Earth’s upper atmosphere more reflective to solar energy. Clearly, managing the ground’s reflectivity would not only allow for regional climate control but would be a more cost-effective solution than a planetary parasol.
   Lightheartedly mocking the astronomers, one meteorologist suggested that the first test of an atmospheric modification scheme should be to control the global dust storms on Mars.
   At present, all planetary engineering solutions are in the idea stage and would need serious research to determine if they are viable without the risk of any adverse consequences, and real cost estimates are yet to be determined for feasibility.
   Further, scientists agree that atmospheric adjustment plans are not a substitute for developing renewable and alternative energy sources. Technological innovation could help ensure that as well. However, if an abrupt climate crisis does occur, it is clearly advantageous that alternative remedies have been studied.
DECEMBER SKY
   Mars is a marvelous view in the evening sky. It outshines all of the night stars, outdoing the night’s brightest star, Sirius, by almost twice as much. Along with its brightness, this planet’s carroty-colored light makes it easy to identify. As a further aid, look for the waning gibbous moon next to Mars on Monday night and then the full moon next to Mars during the night of Dec. 23-24.
   The third quarter moon will appear next to Saturn throughout the night on Dec. 1. Then a lunar crescent will be near Venus during the hours before sunrise on Dec. 5. In addition, the Geminid meteor shower will take place on Dec 13-14.