writeaboutwarming

April 8, 2015 - As petro-profit continues its downward spiral, investors are seeking out The Next Big Thing.  More and more of them say the future belongs to solar energy.  Companies like Tesla, Google, and Apple are investing in solar.  In fact, Tesla will soon announce the release of a "home battery" that will help store power generated by rooftop solar panels.  While there's a part of me that questions how well solar will work in a warming world, where warm air that holds more moisture will create more thunderstorms, I'm pleased that Americans are finally looking beyond fossil fuel. Oddly enough, the word "Americans" now includes American conservatives.  Though they may not always feel free to spell out their support, they come pretty close in places like Florida, where Floridians for Solar Choice welcomes members from both the tea party and the Christian Coalition, as well as liberals, environmentalists and retailers.  More and more of us seem to be a...

March 25, 2015 - I recall, back in the early 1970's, the constant stream of news stories telling Americans that virtually every new product recently developed contained something that caused cancer.  Honestly, it was hard to know what to do with the information.  I think because there were so many stories - several a week, it seemed like - there was also a lot of skepticism.  All these years later, I will confess we should have demanded that the products be pulled from the shelves.  We didn't, and now we pay the price with our own lives, and the lives of our children and grandchildren. I volunteer at the elementary school's library.  The librarian, incredibly competent and caring, is also the mother of two daughters.  Her younger child has had to be treated twice for leukemia.  The second go-round was caused by the first; yes, that's what I'm saying - the chemotherapy caused her to contract leukemia for a second time.  In all likelihood, chemica...

CORRECTION:   I failed to mention in my last article that Australia sells and sends a great deal of coal to China every year.   My oversight – sorry! February 24, 2015 – It’s been 43 years since the Club of Rome commissioned scientists at MIT to conduct research into the likelihood of civilization collapse.   Their results were published in a book titled The Limits to Growth .   Its primary focus was the finiteness of our planet, and its inability to support never-ending population growth and resource depletion. Researchers at the University of Melbourne recently decided to examine the accuracy of Limit ’s predictions.   Dr. Graham Turner used data provided by both the United Nations and the United States, specifically the UN’s department of economic and social affairs, Unesco, the UN’s food and agriculture organization, the UN statistical yearbook, and the United States’ National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. What he and his research te...

February 15, 2015 -NASA released a report on Friday the 13 th , detailing the effects of megadroughts they foresee occurring in the United States throughout the rest of this century.  I don’t think I need to tell you that the only way to mitigate these effects is by sharply reducing greenhouse gas emissions (GHGE).  What might very well need saying is that our future and the future of humankind rests in the hands of the Chinese, and the people of India.             Don’t misunderstand: we must all do much better, and very, very soon.  However, the population of the United States is paltry when compared with the populations of either of these two countries.  Combine that fact with the increasing demands of rising middle classes in both, and you get bad news.  Combine that bad news with the fact that China burns staggering amounts of coal, and you get, according to NASA, megadroughts i...

January 7, 2015 – I want to tell you about a book I just read, by Naomi Klein, called This Changes Everything .   Klein’s book is about climate change, and how very close we have now come to exchanging our world for a place that’s nearly unlivable. She begins with dogged conjecture regarding why we appear to want to change our world in such a manner.   We don’t, of course, so we engage in various degrees of climate change denial.   I’ll interject here that looking away and pretending everything will be just fine is essentially mandatory, at least from time to time, if we’re to continue living in this world without going mad.   Draconian measures are required, as all non-Republicans are now aware.   In the words of Angelica Navarro Llanos, “We need a Marshall Plan for the Earth.”   All good Republicans know what that means: the United States will get stuck with the bill.   And that terrifies them. Except that now, China has admitted that it mus...

I like Ban Ki-Moon, UN Secretary General.   He doesn’t just talk about doing things; he makes things happen.   I refer specifically to a new collaboration between the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) and the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN).   These two organizations intend to restore at least 150 million hectares of forest by 2020 (a hectare is slightly more than 2 acres).   Their joint effort will be announced at the Secretary-General’s Climate Summit on September 23, 2014. Restoring 150 million hectares of forest, an area about the size of Alaska, would sequester roughly 1 gigaton of carbon dioxide and/or the equivalent thereof every year, reducing the current emissions gap by 11 – 17 percent.   The target date of 2020 is ambitious, but would generate US$85 billion per year in ecosystem services that would benefit the rural poor all  over the world. The rate of global deforestation has slowe...

July 16, 2014 - Stephen Leahy has just written a landmark article, which can be found at http://motherboard.vice.com/read/the-new-ddt-is-starving-out-insect-eating-songbirds.  I kind of wish he wouldn't use that phrase, "the new ddt," though I understand why he does.  He's actually talking about neonicotinoids, which I've written about here previously.  His article is based on a science article published in the journal Nature on July 9.  The name of the article begins "Declines in insectivorous birds ... ." Neonicotinoids were introduced 20 years ago.  Their usage has increased every year since then.  When did their manufacturers realize that these toxins were 5,000 - 10,000 times more poisonous than DDT? As the now-adage goes, what did they know, and when did they know it?  The contagion makers have unleashed on an unsuspecting world amounts to a lethal pandemic.  You see, neonicotinoids don't stay put.  They are absorbed not just by cr...