Cities and Climate Change, Enter the C40

From the NY Times title link: "It was six years ago when Mr. Clinton, working with Ken Livingstone, the leftist and then-mayor of London, drew together officials from 40 of the world’s largest cities, from Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, to Yokohama, Japan, to share ideas for reducing carbon emissions and dealing with the inevitable impacts of a changing climate........

Cities now house more than half of the world’s population, and while they occupy 2 percent of the globe’s land mass, cities consume 70 percent of global energy and produce 70 percent of greenhouse gas emissions. If anything meaningful is going to happen on climate in the short term, Mr. Clinton, Mr. Bloomberg and their advisers say, it has to start in the cities."

Those impressive figures come from the C40 Cities organization, strongly supported  by a joint effort of Clinton and  Bloomberg to tackle climate change by focusing on the large cities of the world.

“We are putting a stake in the ground around the idea that national and international governments have failed, possibly quite permanently, or at least in a way that they will not make any serious progress before it’s too late,” said Kevin Sheekey, a former deputy mayor of New York and principal political adviser to Mr. Bloomberg. “If you address the problems of the cities, there will be no need for China and India to sign onto some international accord. And thank God, because that’s not going to get done. It’s time to say it.”

The C40 has its next meeting in Sao Paulo Brazil, May 31 to June 2.

Access to Family Planning and Saving the Earth

On Marc Guenther's Blog, he presented the following quote from Ted Turner, of CNN fame:

Food, population and women: “What really concerns me is if we go to 8 or 9 billion. The natural world is collapsing all around us. There are two things we can do that won’t cost a lot of money… Millions of women don’t have access to family planning. If you provide people with  family planning, they won’t have unwanted pregnancies and they won’t have to  have abortions. The second thing we could do and we should have done it a long time ago is half the women in the world don’t have equal rights with men. In the Arab world, people are treated like dogs. They can’t vote in Saudia Arabia. They can’t drive a car. They don’t get an education. Women need to have equal rights with men, and equal education and equal rights to a job, and when women have that, they will choose to have smaller families.”

I have been a supporter of Population Connection (formerly Zero Population Growth) for a long time, and that is certainly what they advocate. A couple more quotes by Ted Turner, that will hopefully inspire you to read the title link:

The defeat of climate bill: “It’s going to go down in history as one of the great tragedies that we’ve ever had.”

Energy poverty: Rich countries should get together to help the two billion people in the world who don’t have access to electricity. “Why not give everyone in the world who doesn’t have electricity a solar panel and a light bulb so their kids can do their homework?”

The Skeptics Side

For the sake of objective presentation...and a few laughs, I wanted point out James Taylor's blog post in Forbes (title link) concerning the recent report from the National Acadeny of Scienes titled America's Climate Choices. If you read the post, also be sure to read the comments by David, as they provide an excellent counter perspective. Or you can make your own assessment of the credentials of the report's authors.

Also see NOAA's comments and the Reuters article by Elizabeth McGowan, Climate Study Congress Requested Falls on Deaf Ears in the Capitol. From this article:

"WASHINGTON—Ho hum.
The average air temperature in the United States has leapt two degrees in the last five decades. Yawn. Coastal regions in the country are disappearing because of rising sea levels. Hit the snooze button. The already-arid Southwest is becoming drier. Snore.......
"If members of Congress challenge the assertions in the report, they should hold hearings," Bledsoe (climate change specialist with the Bipartisan Policy Center) said. "If they believe and accept what's in it, they should hold hearings. One way or another they should deal with it," he concluded. "I don't see how they can ignore it." "

Shrimp Farming and the Environment

My daughter never eats shrimp because of the negative impact so many shrimp operations have on the environment. These negative impacts range from cutting down mangrove forests, to the effluent pollution from poorly operated shrimp farms. In the title link you can learn that these negative impacts  are not inevitable, and that shrimp can be farmed in an environmentally sound manner. The link includes a 16 minute video about Linda Thornton, a major pioneer in these efforts. This video also covers some details about the shrimp farming techniques developed and employed on three shrimp farms in Belize.

There is still a lot of work ahead to get these techniques learned and practiced around the world, but organizations such as the World Wildlife Fund are helping make this happen, and are also developing certification techniques for shrimp raised on environmentally sustainable shrimp farms.

Will we resort to geoengineering in 2031?

"After decades of global warming, the summer sea ice in the Arctic has vanished entirely, opening up new trade routes and vast oil and gas reserves in the Far North. China and the Pacific Rim nations, meanwhile, are enduring ever-worsening repercussions of climate change: volatile storms, food riots, and rising sea levels that displace millions of people. Suddenly.......some countries say, ‘Screw it. We have to cool this down.’  How? A bloc of Asian nations underwrites an aggressive geoengineering effort that uses specially designed aircraft to disperse thousands of tonnes of sulfate aerosols into the upper atmosphere."

This is a hypothetical scenario by Jason Blackstock, a senior fellow at the Centre for International Governance Innovation in Waterloo, Ontario. It is contained in the title link article by John Lorinc in The Walrus. This article presents a fascinating overview of geoengineering (aka Plan B), and makes a compelling case for  at very least for discussing it in international forums:

"At this stage, [David] Keith says, a formal policy debate is certainly more important than coming up with rules. He feels there needs to be 'a lot of talk, because for so many people this is so new. [We] need a venue to allow a lot of people to express a lot of opinions, including those that say geoengineering is stupid and should be banned.'

Perhaps, Keith notes, the prospect of governments or private entities deploying these fantastically potent technologies will stir people to focus more energy on finding ways to make Plan A work."

Anatomy of a Disastrous Tornado Weather System

NASA Photo

First off, I am not saying the recent tornado outbreak is climate change related. It could be, but for now I will just focus on the amazing satellite video footage of this recent major storm system that devastated much of the southeastern US. On the title link, at very least I recommend you view the "small animation" to see what looks like a wildfire sweeping the southern states. But it is not a fire, it is simply cold air interacting with warm-moist air. Both are feeding into the front....as logic would require to sustain this storm system for more than a day. From NASA:

"The animation starts on April 26 and runs through the morning of April 28. The ingredients for severe weather are evident in the cloud patterns. A relatively stable mass of cold air—visible as a swirl of more-or-less continuous clouds—rotates in the north along the top of the image. Meanwhile, moist air pushes north and west from the Atlantic Ocean and Gulf of Mexico. The warm air contains small low clouds.

The collision between two such air masses is enough to generate severe weather, but the weather also was amplified by the jet stream on April 27. Though not directly visible in the image, the narrow band of fast-moving wind blew north and east between the two air masses. With surface winds blowing from the south and east, and the jet stream blowing from the west, powerful smaller-scale circulation patterns generated lines of intense thunderstorms."

The GOES satellite that took these videos is a joint NASA-NOAA geostationary satellite that stays over one point of the earth.

Penguins, Humpbacks and Antarctic Changes

Adelie Penguin, Antarctica, photo by Bill Fintel

Adelie Penguins feed primarily on krill. Krill depend on sea ice to assist in growing their phytoplankton food. Hence, as sea ice coverage shrinks, Adelies are having less success raising their young. From the title link:

"Krill form the basis of the marine food web, supporting organisms ranging from fish and penguins to whales. Krill feed on phytoplankton -- basically, ice algae -- that grow lushly on the undersides of ice floes.

These tiny crustaceans are specially adapted to graze for the tiny plants among the ice crystals. But in the last few decades, winter ice has formed later in the season and has covered less area and spring melt comes earlier. Without ice, krill's feeding is disrupted and populations fall."

This change in seasonal sea ice coverage has also affected Humpback Whales, temporarily for the better, but probably not for their long term good. See: Whale of a find: Krill feast in Antarctica

Keeping track of our Earth in detail via satellites, is truly amazing. For Arctic and Antarctic ice mass monitoring, thank GRACE.

Humpback Whale, Antarctica, photo by Bill Fintel

Can the Barramundi help feed 7+ Billion People?

As has been proven time and time again, hungry people are not peaceful subjects of any country. Hungry people create unrest anywhere in the world. So averting hunger is certainly a number one priority of mankind.........if we are to live together in any sort of harmony, and care about our neighbors.

Swim forward the Baramundi, aka Asian sea bass. A fish selected as preferred for fish farming out of over 40 candidate species. Why did it come out on top? Because it is healthy with high levels of Omega-3 fatty acids, it reportedly tastes good, it does not need a lot of other seafood as its food, and its waste waters are unlikely to cause environmental problems.

Read the title link for details. I will report on it again after I have eaten some. For more about its life cycle, food preferences, a recipe...and why it makes sense to aquaculture, click Eating Jellyfish.

BP/Horizon Closed Waters Re-opened to Fishing 4/19/11

From NOAA: "Effective April 19, 2011 at 6 p.m. eastern time (5 p.m. central time), NOAA will reopen the last 1,041 square miles (2,697 sq km) of area previously closed to commercial and recreational fishing in the Gulf of Mexico in response to the BP/Deepwater Horizon oil spill. All areas of federal waters previously closed to fishing because of the oil spill are now open. Other federal closed areas, such as marine protected areas, remain in effect.....

NOAA analyzed 85 finfish samples for sensory analysis and 112 finfish samples in 25 composites for chemical analysis, including commercially and recreationally important species, such as swordfish tuna, and escolar. Sensory testing showed no detectable oil or dispersant odors or flavors in the samples, and the results of chemical analysis were well below levels of concern for oil. Additionally, the composite samples used for the chemical analysis were subjected to a dispersant test developed by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and NOAA as an added precaution. The test detects a major component of the dispersants used during the spill response known as DOSS. No DOSS was detected in the samples or DOSS was found at levels well below the level of concern to protect public health."

This certainly seems like a positive event considering the magnitude of the spill. Full details are available on the title link. Relationship to climate? Minimal, other than fossil fuels get a very small reprieve from their horrible press concerning this event. Why was this event not as bad as the Exxon Valdez Alaska oil spill? Because Gulf of Mexico microbes were already attuned to eat oil seepage from the Gulf floor.

Aneutronic Fusion

Aneutronic fusion is fusion that takes place without generating any neutrons. This is desirable because high energy neutrons make material they interact with radioactive. One of the most studied aneutronic fusion reactions is one proton (hydrogen nucleus) reacting with one Boron-11 nucleus to create 3 Helium nuclei and a great deal of energy. The title link takes you to a page on the the Focus Fusion web site with an excellent animation of this reaction.

If you like what you see, you then can spend many more days studying Focus Fusion's approach, technology, and tests results to date. One of the more intriguing aspects of this approach is that high energy Helium nuclei generated by a proton-B11 fusion reaction are positively charged, and can thus be directly converted to electricity, bypassing the heat-to-steam cycle of coal and conventional nuclear power plants.

Why have I presented this topic in a Climate Blog? Because this technology does not generate any CO2 or other greenhouse gases, and it has the potential to become a major source of power generation, although that is seemingly quite far away at present.

US Gov Key Climate Indicators

This is an update of US Gov links to global climate data. There is NO title link, because all links are in the below table:

NASA
NOAA
NOAA - Lewes sea level

Note the Greenland and Antarctic land ice mass data on the NASA site, and the sun's energy output and ocean heat content on the NOAA site. This is good supporting information, which often is not quoted.

In a nutshell, if land ice disappears, it went into the ocean and will contribute to sea level rise. If the sun's energy output changes, it will have an effect on global temperature. If the oceans warm, they will expand causing sea level rise, plus this is one more indicator the world is warming.

Lewes (DE) sea level is presented because many followers of this blog live in or near Lewes.

My apologies for letting this blog get behind in updating, but I have been away.