Puck

Climate is not weather and the group that seizes the story first is bound to control it best and longest. A sad but true rule of PR.

A panel of eminent U.S. and European scientists has confirmed the widespread scientific consensus that the Earth's climate is warming due to human activities, but said they and their colleagues should have responded more quickly and effectively to news of an error in a major climate report and hacked researcher e-mails.

In a symposium Friday at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement Science, AAAS, the scientific leaders acknowledged errors in a 2007 report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and possibly impolitic email exchanges by East Anglian University climate researchers.

But they expressed shock at the political effects of the disclosures and said the impact was far out of proportion to the overwhelming evidence that human activity is changing the Earth’s climate.

via Top Scientists Affirm Consensus on Global Warming.

They expressed shock? Shock!? Sheeze…. Scientists and children….

A new bike wheel from the folks at MIT turns a regular bike into a hydrib e-bike. Called the Copenhagen Wheel, it was unveiled at COP15 on Dec. 15.

Smart, responsive and elegant, the Copenhagen Wheel is a new emblem for urban mobility. It transforms ordinary bicycles quickly into hybrid e-bikes that also function as mobile sensing units. The Copenhagen Wheel allows you to capture the energy dissipated while cycling and braking and save it for when you need a bit of a boost. It also maps pollution levels, traffic congestion, and road conditions in real-time.

Controlled through your smart phone, the Copenhagen Wheel becomes a natural extension of your everyday life. You can use your phone to unlock and lock your bike, change gears and select how much the motor assists you. As you cycle, the wheel’s sensing unit is also capturing your effort level and information about your surroundings, including road conditions, carbon monoxide, NOx, noise, ambient temperature and relative humidity. Access this data through your phone or the web and use it to plan healthier bike routes, to achieve your exercise goals or to meet up with friends on the go. You can also share your data with friends, or with your city – anonymously if you wish – thereby contributing to a fine-grained database of environmental information from which we can all benefit.

How freekin cool is that? Want me one!

review by Brian Charles Clark

Climate change is inevitable, says Wallace Broecker, and it’s already happening, so he teamed up with journalist Robert Kunzig to tell us what we can do about it.

Fixing Climate comes in three parts. There’s a highly skimmable prelude by way of memoir explaining how Broecker came to be a scientist. The bulk of the book is a fast-moving glacier of evidence arguing for the possibility of sudden change in global climate patterns. Extreme desertification, rising sea levels, and shifting agricultural regions are in our future; we need to accept the facts and learn to deal with them, Broecker argues. The last part of the book is a survey of technological fixes or, rather, of extreme engineering ideas that might stabilize the planetary carbon load.

The evidence is largely familiar, as Broecker is a climate-change godfather, and much of his research and speculation have entered the collective mythos as a set of inconvenient truths. Decades ago, Broecker was one of the first scientists to point out that dumping billions of extra tons of carbon into the environment was bound to turn on a climatic burner. He was able to come to that conclusion in the early ’80s because he’d been studying millions of years of carbon deposition since the 1950s. Broecker ran one of the first carbon-14-dating labs; some people follow the money, others follow the carbon. Read the rest of this entry »

USA Hemp Museum presents great pictures of live cannabis plants over Willie and Amy Nelson’s song, “A Peaceful Solution,” performed by Amy Nelson and Rattlesnake Annie. The bill was introduced by Cong. Barney Frank. H.R. 5842 is the 2008 version of the medical marijuana bill. Support the congresspeople who support cannabis.

Related: The Lotus Eco Elise uses a host of sustainable materials to make up the body and trim, including hemp, “eco wool,” sisal and a new high-tech, water-based paint that can be applied by hand. It’s fitted with a set of flexible solar panels on the hard top to help power the electrical systems, reducing the drain on the engine and improving efficiency. There is a new green shift light on the instrument panel that assists drivers in maximizing fuel efficiency.

All of these elements reduce the Eco Elise’s footprint throughout its lifecycle, limit the amount of energy used during production. Lotus looked to reduce the car’s environmental impact by focusing on how it is made as well as how it performs. Link.

My friend B. wrote me this:

So I was reading the Bay Area Guardian, something I do exactly as regularly as I vote, and I ran across something that I thought might interest you. It seems San Francisco has a Peak Oil Preparedness Task Force to explore life after fossil fuels. Of course few take them seriously.

And I replied:

Do you mean that people locally don’t take the task force in SF seriously? Or don’t take post-oil seriously?

The peak oilers are sometimes hard to listen to because they’re so apocalyptically pessimistic. They see the energy packed into a hydrocarbon molecule and moan, What can possibly replace this? They don’t see anything on the shelf that can replace oil, so assume we’re all doomed. I do admire their historical analysis, tho, and I think Hubbert was right; well, he was right, US production peaked right when he said it would. A year or so ago the Saudi Minister of Energy said the planet was running out of oil and had to get ready. And now the King of Saudi Arabia has created a $10-billion endowment for a new university, sci and tech research, that will be a mini-kingdom unto itself in order to free it (and thus attract students and faculty) of Sharia, the heinous religious law of fundamentalist Islam. The king’s reasoning was explicit: Saudi Arabia won’t be an energy economy for much longer and needs to transform itself into a knowledge economy. Amen, brother. At last we agree on something. Read the rest of this entry »

review by Brian Charles Clark

With Speed and Violence: Why Scientists Fear Tipping Points in Climate Change
Fred Pearce
Beacon Press, 2007
Cloth, $16.47

Buying a Prius and locally grown foods may convince you that you’re reducing your carbon footprint, but for Fred Pearce in With Speed and Violence, the damage may already be done. The planet’s carbon load is high enough that we may already be careening towards a tipping point, a moment when the climate changes suddenly, “with speed and violence.” Any way it goes is bad for humans (biology is fragile, and culture especially so), but hot looks especially pernicious.

Pearce is a self-described climate-change skeptic. He’s not a naysayer. To the contrary and while remaining skeptical, Pearce thinks the mainstream of climate science may not go far enough. So he’s kindly assembled a menagerie of horrors which, perversely, make for fascinating reading. Read the rest of this entry »

Jeanette Winterson, the British novelist, wonders in the Times of London (and which I found via BroneteBlog):

As the floodwaters rose around me and we sank in a summer of rain, I tried a kind of homeopathic charm; what books could I find on my shelves where floods and rain played a part?

Winterson rattles off the usual list of suspects, including the biblical flood story and (weirdly) the movie version of Frankenstein (which movie? and why not the novel?). What’s odd to me is that almost none of the academic eco-criticism types have picked up on climate as at least a viable leit motif for analysis. In my reading of gothic lit, climate and weather are veritable characters. Wouldn’t it be useful (something that is normally very difficult to say about contemporary literary studies) to analyze climate and weather in literature with an eye toward shedding some light on our current crisis, a crisis which, in our inability to do anything concrete about, is surely as much moral and psychological as scientific and economic?

I took a stab at it a couple years ago by presenting a paper at a low-level, regional MLA lit-studies conference. I was met with blank stares, for the most part, perhaps because I eschewed the jargon of the trade as much as possible. Because they could understand all the words I used, the audience may have felt talked down to. Or maybe it’s just a crappy paper. It certainly doesn’t delve deep enough into the implied thesis: that climate is a character or anyway a means of characterizing roles.

In any case, here’s the paper as presented at the conference in 2005. Perhaps it’ll be of some use to an eco-conscious scholar attempting to open the field of climatocriticism. Read the rest of this entry »

Get the straight dope on climate change from Real Climate, a blog by scientists who aren’t afraid of the so-called “liberal” media (right-wing monkey boys, all of ‘em) and the American oligarchy called democratic politics. Get a great intro to the Real Climate blog and the state of climate change science and politics by reading this interview over at Daily Kos.