Wednesday, December 20, 2006

The plan to protect New Orleans and the Gulf Coast


How's this for a quote:




Reducing emissions at an airport near you





Tuesday, December 19, 2006

Supporting renewable energy in Mexico









Friday, December 15, 2006

The ongoing recovery in New Orleans

Almost 16 months after Hurricane Katrina struck the Gulf Coast, many parts of New Orleans are still putting the pieces together. I spent part of Thursday cleaning up yards in the Lakeview neighbourhood with the Beacon of Hope Resource Center.

Lakeview is adjacent to the 17th Street Canal levee, one of three levees that breached during Katrina. This NASA image from after the storm shows the Canal stretching into the city from Lake Ponchotrain (middle-left), and the flooding of the neighbourhoods (to the right).

For a sense of the scale of the flooding, you only have to see the yellowish line along the outer walls of many of the remaining homes that marks the maximum height of the floodwaters.
Few of the residents of this area returned to New Orleans after the storm. The old neighbourhood was now a patchwork of empty streets full of abandoned and badly damaged homes. The eerie quiet was interrupted only by the sound of sound of houses being razed and debris being removed.

Denise Thornton and the founders of the Beacon of Hope wanted their old neighbourhood back, but found little help from the government. So they started on their own, raised money for equipment to clean up yards, remove dead tress, replace storm drains and gut old houses, one by one. Thanks to outside donations and support from the United Way, the grassroots clean-up organization is now expanding to other parts of the city.

From a distance, it is hard to truly appreciate not just the physical, but the social devastation caused by Hurricane Katrina and the levee failures. The clean-up effort not only makes life more palatable for those that are there now, but it may encourage others to return. This is not just about the comfort of seeing people walk by your house or some lights on down the street; with so few people in these neighbourhoods, the property tax base has collapsed, making it even harder for the city to provide any services to the community.

If you’re in New Orleans, give the volunteer coordinator, Liz Widener, a call. They appreciate when out-of-towners spend even half a day (like me) removing weeds, debris and mowing lawns. If you want to plan a special trip to volunteer, they can even get you a discount at a local B&B.


Wednesday, December 13, 2006

The hurricane season

I’m in New Orleans for a meeting. Naturally, it has me thinking about hurricanes, climate change, and just how toxic the subject has become.

The 2006 Atlantic cyclone season came and went with far fewer storms than originally forecast. Why? El Nino conditions caused greater upper-level wind shear, slowing hurricane development and helped divert the storms that did develop safely into the middle of the Atlantic. This was relief for many coastal dwellers in the Caribbean, the Gulf Coast and the Atlantic seaboard.

It should also be a cautionary tale for everyone out there talking about the threat posed by climate change.

Hurricane Katrina and the devastating 2005 hurricane season provided a legitimate opportunity to raise concerns about the possible future effects of climate change. Not because those events were caused by climate change, or that the overpopulation of vulnerable coastal areas is a huge, separate problem, but because some research suggested it was the type of event that could occur more frequently in a warmer climate.

Hurricanes have become a rallying cry for the greenhouse gas reduction movement – just look at the posters for An Inconvenient Truth. The 2006 hurricane season was promoted like the upcoming fall television season. As I remarked back in June, the press covered “opening day” of the hurricane season, a loose date not exactly etched in the climate’s schedule, as if we were all awaiting the opening pitch of the baseball season, and all the balls had been juiced.

It was crazy. Not because there is serious uncertainty in the science relating hurricane intensity and climate change (see the recent statement from a WMO meeting on tropical storms). But because even if future warming in the tropical Atlantic does increase the likelihood of more intense storms, there will still be weak hurricane seasons. Just like even if the planet warms by several degrees, there will still be cold days.

Everyone forgot the basic rule, the difference between weather and climate. You just can’t lean on an individual event, or an individual season, for proof of climate change. It is a house of cards. Your argument is doomed to collapse.

That doesn’t mean people should stop talking about hurricanes. It is important to continue to study and discuss the effect of climate change on hurricane intensity. Climate models can be used to investigate how warming could alter the probability of individual events like more powerful storms or storm seasons. Depending on those results, individual storms or storm seasons can continue to be legitimately seen as examples of events that some research suggests may be more common in the future.

But those working to promote concerns about climate change must not fall into trap of looking at individual storms or storm seasons as the smoking gun for climate change. It has emotional appeal - but it is fundamentally bad science. Hurricane Katrina and the 2005 Atlantic cyclone season did not end the “debate” about climate change, nor did the weak 2006 Atlantic cyclone season reignite the “debate”. Let’s not reduce it to that.


Tuesday, December 12, 2006

Warming and ocean biology










Sunday, December 10, 2006

Last word on James Inhofe






Here, here.


Friday, December 08, 2006


I wanted to put a plug in for the terrific website Worldchanging. The site is all about solutions, the ideas and the technologies that will help build towards a more sustainable world.

I'll be contributing some cross-border thinking and examples to the new Worldchanging Canada "local" edition, launched a few weeks back. Take a look when you have the chance.

You may also be interested in the site's very well-received book Worldchanging: A Users Guide for the 21st Century.


Thursday, December 07, 2006

A modest proposal

A few months ago, Nobel Prize winner Paul Crutzen published an essay in the journal Climatic Change proposing that the world could eject sulphate aerosols into the stratosphere, sort of a gaseous solar shield, could combat global warming.

Sulphate particles, emitted by burning of coal and many other activities, reflect incoming solar radiation. They are though to have offset some of the expected warming over the past century.
The eruption of Mt. Pinatubo in 1992 emitted 10 Tg of sulphate (10 million metric tons) into the stratosphere, and helped cool the planet by 0.5 degrees C the following year. Crutzen's proposal would effectively be creating a small Pinatubo every year.

So, a scientific meeting was held, a talk was given at the UN meeting in Nairobi and now the 'geoengineering' proposal has developed some life in the scientific community and in the media.

I think we should come down out of the stratosphere. This should be seen as a modest proposal, in the tradition of Jonathan Swift, that's all. It demonstrates the type of drastic action that could be necessary if serious action is not taken to slow greenhouse gas emissions. It is a reasonable alternative only in the worst case scenario.

Let’s not forget all those anthropology, paleoclimate or paleoecology classes. Large injections of aerosols or particles into the atmosphere in the past (from volcanic eruptions) had devastating impacts on life, from massive famines to species extinctions. The year after the eruption of Krakatoa – and after Mt Pinatubo – was popularly referred to as the year without a summer.

We'd have to be supremely confident in model results to embark on this scale of planetary experiment. We're not just talking about turning the thermostat down a notch. We're talking about altering stratospheric chemistry, solar radiation, ozone concentrations, and cloudiness, which would together radically alter ecosystem function across the planet.

This is the solution to climate change? Maybe there is a danger in is using the same type of thinking that got you into a problem to get you out the problem.

Most of all, I'm concerned about the effect that discussing these geoengineering proposals on policy. It sends the erroneous message that there is one magical solution to climate change, that if we wait long enough, the scientists will invent some pill the planet should put under its tongue.


Monday, December 04, 2006

A win for the environment?



