Is Anyone Even Listening?

Over the last few months, the majority of major news outlets have been running stories on climate change and it's impacts on the environment, people, and the economy. ABC recently ran a two-hour program entitled Earth 2100 on the combined effects of climate change, a collapsing economy, and other factors we currently see going on in the world.

I had to wonder though, is anyone even listening?

Climate change is a natural occurring phenomena on this planet. We know the planet goes through periods of ice ages and thaws. One of the best-documented ice ages occurred from 850 to 630 million years ago and may have led to a permanent ice cover over the entire globe. What is thought to have ended it? The accumulation of greenhouse gases produced by volcanoes. That is all well and good for the Earth. We know she will be fine and will be here until our Sun ceases to be. It's the humans, being at the top of the food chain, we have to worry about.

Big industry cares what the government decides what will be the future of greenhouse gas emissions in this country. They paint a doomsday scenario of our economy collapsing further if such legislation is passed, a second great depression. Well what is the economic impact if we do nothing? What if we continue on our full-throttle consumption and polluting without any regard?

Other than big industry, the second group that is listening is those who do not think humans can have an impact on the earth. My question is how could we not? A good friend of mine suggested an experiment for these skeptics: turn your car on, shut the garage door, and see what the effects are to your environment. A bit drastic, but it gets the point across. Actions have consequences.

The most interesting human-impact story, thanks to Bill Bryon's A Short History of Nearly Everything, is about Mr. Clair Patterson. In the 50s, he was trying to determine the age of the Earth by determining the age of lead in meteorites. However he encountered all sorts of atmospheric lead that threw off his results. He eventually created a "clean" environment and was able to successfully determine our planet's age. He then turned his attention to all this lead in the atmosphere. Mr. Patterson collected samples of ice cores, the first person to do this, to determine the concentrations of lead over the centuries. His result? Lead concentrations had increased 1000 times from the introduction of leaded fuel in 1923. Lead, as you know, being a heavy metal has serious impacts on health and development as well as sticks around for a while. After many negative encounters with pro-leaded fuel companies, Mr. Patterson, in 1986, was able to get leaded fuel banned in this country and helped establish the Clean Air Act of 1970 Quickly lead levels in the blood of Americans dropped by 80%. Even so, today we have 625 times more lead in our blood than did people before leaded gasoline (read more here).

Did this pollution affect the Earth? Yes. But, the consequences of our actions affected and are continuing to affect the health of humans.

On ABC's Earth 2100, they use a frog in a pot of water analogy: A frog placed in a cold pot of water cannot detect the small changes in water temperature as it is being heated and never realizes that he is being cooked until it is too late.

What is it going to take for people to wake-up and realize this is going on? Will it be too late? All I can cling to is the hope that people will indeed start listening and act before it's too late.

So Glad This is Getting So Much Media Attention

From Reuters:

Menaces to oceans: CO2, plastic bags, overfishing

The world's seas are filled with too much garbage and too few fish with flimsy plastic bags and government subsidies bearing much of the blame, activists and trade officials said Monday on the first U.N. World Oceans Day.

The World Trade Organization's director-general, Pascal Lamy, used the occasion to note that some species are at risk of extinction from overfishing, and government subsidies bear some of the blame.

"Governments have contributed to this problem by providing nearly $16 billion annually in subsidies to the fisheries sector," Lamy said. "This support keeps more boats on the water and fewer fish in the sea.

He said WTO members are now negotiating to reform subsidies programs to make fishing a sustainable industry.

U.S. Trade Representative Ron Kirk echoed those sentiments, saying the United States is pushing for stronger rules against "harmful fisheries subsidies that contribute to overcapacity and overfishing."

Eighty percent of the world's fisheries are under pressure, according to the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO): overexploited, fully exploited, significantly depleted or recovering from overexploitation.

Global fisheries subsidies are estimated at $20 billion or more annually, an amount equivalent to 25 percent of the value of the world catch. Economic losses from overfishing in marine areas are $50 billion a year, according to a 2008 World Bank/FAO report.

"International trade can play a key role in protecting the world's oceans," Courtney Sakai of the group Oceana said in a statement reacting to Lamy's and Kirk's comments. "The WTO is in the unlikely position of producing one of the most significant actions to stop global overfishing."

CO2 THREAT

In addition to overfishing, the carbon dioxide emissions that contribute to climate change also combine with sea water to form carbonic acid, a corrosive substance that eats away at the shells of mollusks and corals.

Last week, as international climate negotiators gathered in Bonn, Germany, 70 of the world's major science academies reported that ocean acidification was so dangerous that it could be irreversible for thousands of years.

The academies urged those bargaining for a world agreement to stem global warming into take account the risks to the oceans in working on a new U.N. treaty to be agreed in Copenhagen in December.

The U.N. Environment Program and the Ocean Conservancy marked the day with a report on marine litter, from discarded fishing gear to cigarette butts to plastic bags, which the environment program's director called signs of systemic waste.

"Marine litter is symptomatic of a wider malaise: namely the wasteful use and persistent poor management of natural resources," said Achim Steiner, U.N. under-secretary-general and UNEP Executive Director.

The ubiquitous flimsy plastic shopping bag is a particularly nettlesome problem, said the environment program's spokesman, Nick Nuttall.

In a telephone interview from Nairobi, Nuttall said that "these rather pointless flimsy plastic bags, which serve little or no purpose except to choke the oceans and the environment" should be banned or taxed to kick-start recycling efforts.

Last December, the United Nations designated June 8 as World Oceans Day, more than 16 years after it was first proposed at an Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro.

Corporate Scientists Lie?

I found this too interesting and wanted to reprint in its entirety:

Industries Buried Internal Findings
Climate Wording Cut From Public Report
By Juliet Eilperin
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, April 25, 2009

A group funded by fossil-fuel-dependent companies that argued for years that human-generated greenhouse gases were not driving global warming was advised by its own scientists that this was the case, according to documents submitted as part of an ongoing lawsuit between auto manufacturers and states seeking to regulate vehicles' greenhouse gas emissions.

The Global Climate Coalition, a group of representatives of the oil, auto and coal industries, spent years telling the public that the link between human activity and climate change was too uncertain to justify U.S. participation in the Kyoto Protocol, a 1997 treaty aimed at curbing greenhouse gas emissions. In 1995, however, a "primer" on the issue produced by the organization's own scientific experts concluded that "the scientific basis for the Greenhouse Effect and the potential impact of human emissions of greenhouse gases such as CO2 on climate is well established and cannot be denied."

This language was deleted from the primer when the group released it to the public.

Existence of the deleted material was first reported yesterday by the New York Times, which received it from a lawyer involved in a suit between the state of California and automakers; The Washington Post obtained a copy from the Sierra Club, which is also involved in the case.

William O'Keefe, who chaired the group before it folded in 2002, denied that the organization made an effort to suppress science suggesting a link between carbon-based emissions and climate change. He said the Times article "creates the impression the companies within the GCC intentionally tried to mislead the public on the human impact on the climate. That is absolute fiction. What we said then is there was enough uncertainty about the extent of human influence that it would not justify the Kyoto Protocol."

David Bookbinder, the Sierra Club's chief climate counsel, said it was notable that three of the parties in the case -- the Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers, General Motors and Chrysler -- had earlier dropped one of their legal claims that would have compelled them to hand over documents related to climate change science. Another party, the Association of International Automobile Manufacturers, turned over the primer.

"The only conceivable reason they would drop their claim is they were afraid to share their documents on climate change with the public or the courts," Bookbinder said.

Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.), one of the Senate's most vocal proponents of climate legislation, said the revelation of the deleted material "underscores the need to be wary of some of the industry studies and analyses that will come out" in the coming months as Congress debates whether to impose a mandatory limit on greenhouse gas emissions.

Former vice president Al Gore also attacked the Global Climate Coalition yesterday in a hearing before the House Energy and Commerce Committee, comparing it to disgraced financier Bernard Madoff. "They have committed a fraud larger than Madoff's fraud," Gore said. "They lied to people who trusted them, in order to make money."

In a sign of how much has changed over the past dozen years, former members of the defunct industry group now endorse a cap-and-trade bill to curb emissions.

"The utility industry doesn't dispute the science or the need for federal legislation," said Dan Riedinger of the Edison Electric Institute. "Our focus is on urging lawmakers to enact a climate bill that cuts emissions but also protects our customers from sharply higher costs."

Climate Change in the Media; A Bit of Realism Please!

With Friday's EPA ruling that CO2 should be regulated under the Clean Air Act, every media outlet in the country has been talking about the impacts this will have from legislation/regulation to economics. Most of the articles I've read including The Wall Street Journal have been quoting dire consequences from both coal and electric producers. They claim that passing such legislation will be an "atomic bomb... to the U.S. economy".

From the WSJ article, "American Electric Power, a utility giant with 5.2 million customers in states from Texas to Michigan to Virginia, is already considering what coal plants would have to be shuttered and how high rates would have to go to comply with either a regulatory or legislative mandates to curb carbon dioxide. AEP spokesman Pat Hemlepp said rate increases stretch from 25% to 50% and beyond, depending on the climate change strategy that finally emerges from Washington." Talk about scare tactics!

No one believes that whatever legislation or regulation that gets passed is going to be enacted overnight. Coal-fired plants are not going to be running one day and shut down the next. As much as these spokepeople will try to have you believe, it's just not going to happen.

It's going to be an ongoing process - limits are going to achieved over time. What will happen is that jobs will be created here in this country not lost. We need further research on how we can still use existing plants and reduce emissions. There is already a great site, U.S. Climate Change Technology Program, that outlines ongoing research and technologies being considered led by The Department of Energy.

This administration also has already pledged further funding for research on renewable energy. We already have commercial operations for wind, solar, and fuel cell technologies. With the recent collaboration of FERC and MMS, we should be seeing more research and testing in offshore wind and wave energy. The result - more jobs created and less CO2 released in the atmosphere.