The Real Cost of Climate change

By Alex Shimo - Tuesday, February 3, 2009 at 7:14 PM - 11 Comments

No one argues that the cost of tackling climate change is going to come cheap, but a number of recent reports have put an exact price tag on it. And this global problem is about as expensive as they come. If you want to keep the planet cool, and stabilize the amount of carbon dioxide at 450 parts per million (ppm), which was the target set by the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, that will cost $542 billion US per year, every year till 2030, according to the World Energy Outlook (WEO). The EU estimates that it about half that cost, or about $224 billion US per year. A research group called New Energy Finance sides with the WEO, putting the price tag at $515 billion US dollars a year.

The discrepancies between these two estimates depend on how quickly you think renewable energies are going to improve and the cost will decrease. (The cost of renewable energy will certainly fall: solar power has fallen greatly in price as the technology has improved.) But can it come down quickly enough? Suppose you’re an optimist and low ball the cost, like the bureaucrats at the EU, then the cost of reducing emissions to tackle climate change is mere $224 billion US per year, or $276 billion CAD. That’s $276 billion each year for the next 20 years. Which makes one wonder, where is all this money going to come from?

Delivery services are good for the Environment

By Alex Shimo - Tuesday, February 3, 2009 at 10:07 AM - 1 Comment

A new study says it may be more environmentally friendly to get your food delivered rather than driving to the local farmer’s market. Published in the journal Food Policy, it compares the carbon emissions from a delivery service versus driving to the market yourself. Researchers from the University of Exeter say a delivery service cuts down on emissions because they deliver to multiple addresses all in one trip.

Global Warming is Irreversible, study suggests

By Alex Shimo - Thursday, January 29, 2009 at 6:28 PM - 41 Comments

Climate change is essentially irreversible, according to a sobering study from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). Once the ocean has heated up, it will warm the planet for thousands of years, according to lead author Susan Solomon. If carbon dioxide is allowed to peak at 450-600 parts per million, it will take millenia for the excess CO2 to dissipate, according to Solomon, with NOAA. The current level of carbon dioxide is 385 parts per million. Currently the oceans are absorbing the excess heat and carbon dioxide, but they will reach a saturation point, according to the study.

Ms. Soloman says the permanence of the predicted changes is not a reason to do very little, but a reason to take immediate action right now.

“If it’s irreversible, it seems all the more reason to do something about it,” she told NPR.

Global Warming could multiply Ocean Dead Zones

By Alex Shimo - Monday, January 26, 2009 at 10:36 AM - 4 Comments

The number of low-oxygen areas in the world’s oceans where little life can survive is set to greatly multiply with global warming, according to a study by two Danish researchers.  In a study published online by the journal Nature Geoscience, scientists built a computer model to simulate climate change over the next 100,000 years. In the worst case scenario, CO2 concentrations would rise to 1,168 parts per million (ppm) by 2100, or about triple today’s level, and the ocean dead zones would increase by a factor of 10 or more. In the best case scenario, the CO2 would reach 549 ppm by 2100, or roughly 50 percent more than today. Dead zones – where complex organisms like fish, crustaceans and mammals cannot survive because of the lack of oxygen – would increase, but the damage would not be as great.

However, even if global warming is reversed by 2100, its effects will continue for hundreds of years, says Jens Olaf Pepke Pedersen, a physicist at the Technical University of Denmark, one of the scientists on the study. Once the ocean has warmed up, it then needs hundreds of years to cool down again, Pedersen says. According to the model, “these low-oxygen areas would continue to expand and they would peak around 2,000 years from now. The ocean would then slowly recover as it cools.”

Marine oxygen depletion is believed to have played a role in the major mass extinctions in the past, such as The Great Dying, that occurred at the end of the Permian, 250 million years ago, which wiped out 95 per cent of all marine life. Areas of low oxygen exist in today in shallow areas next to the coast, where runoff from agricultural fertilizer causes a multiplication of oxygen-gobbling algae producing the dead zones.

Don’t Call Me Grandma

By Alex Shimo - Friday, January 23, 2009 at 10:50 AM - 8 Comments

Baby boomers have always liked to do things a little differently. It might not come as a surprise then that for people like 58-year-old Jan Reisen of New Jersey, Grandma is not a name to be embraced. It’s stodgy, even “desexualized,” she says, adding that it evokes an image of someone who stays home, bakes strudel and rolls her stockings. Reisen, who runs www.AgingHipsters.com, doesn’t have grandchildren but she has already planned her future non-grandma name. When one of her adult sons— they are 20 and 24—finally becomes a dad, she has decided that she will be called “Queen Mum.” “When I told my boys about the name, they just rolled their eyes,” says Reisen.

Queen Mum may sound outlandish, but it’s pretty tame compared to some alternatives—like Geezer Girl, one of the names writer Lin Wellford has encountered. Wellford’s own grandchildren call her Mimi. She is the co-author of The New Grandparents Name Book, which lists hundreds of substitutes. Some, like Ugogo, mean grandmother in a different language (in this case, Zulu). Other names come about as a result of the mangled mispronunciation that emerges from the grandchild’s lips as he or she tries to grapple with the word grandma. When Kate Bandos’s grandson tried to say the word, what came out was Bacca. It stuck because Bandos, a 62-year-old book publicist, thought it was fun. When the child finally learned how to say grandma, he was told not to bother. “Anyone can be Grandma. I wanted to be Bacca—it made me special.”

Continue…

The Global Extinction crisis may have been Overstated

By Alex Shimo - Thursday, January 22, 2009 at 6:19 PM - 3 Comments

Two researchers say the damage to the world’s tropical forests may not be as bad as first feared. Because population growth is slowing in many countries and people are moving to cities, the pressure to cut down primary rainforest and use marginal land for agriculture is falling, according to Joseph Wright of the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama and Helene Muller-Landau of the University of Minnesota.

If current trends continue, the area of tropical of forest will still be at one third of its natural range by by 2030, say the scientists. The area of tropical forest in Latin America and Asia could actually increase. Those predictions mean that in Africa 16-35% of tropical-forest species will become extinct by 2030, in Asia, 21-24% and in Latin America, fewer still, according to the Economist, which first reported the story. Continue…

Are the new light bulbs a health risk?

By Alex Shimo - Thursday, January 22, 2009 at 5:20 PM - 45 Comments

Health Canada is reviewing the safety of energy-saving light bulbs to determine whether the amount of UV light and electromagnetic radiation they emit is safe. The federal government launched its study on compact fluorescent lights in December, following several public health warnings by British medical professionals.

British health officials have warned that the new bulbs could worsen existing skin conditions, like eczema and dermatitis. Skin disorders that are photosensitive could react to the more intense light of fluorescent bulbs, which emit UV rays similar to outdoor exposure levels on a sunny day. Britain’s Health Protection Agency now recommends that people should not be closer than 30 centimetres from the energy-saving variety for more than one hour per day.

Continue…

Obama's cabinet – the greenies to watch for

By Alex Shimo - Wednesday, January 21, 2009 at 4:56 PM - 2 Comments

Obama’s cabinet is said to be full of intellectual heavyweights. On climate issues, there are several key people to watch out for. (Luiza Savage’s article on this is very good on this and other cabinet issues, if you haven’t already read it.)

1) Henry Waxman – the new chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee. The tenacious democrat blasted the Bush administration on everything from tobacco to loosening standards on toxins like arsenic in drinking water. He is said to be one of leaders of the campaign against “dirty oil”, i.e. oil from Alberta’s oil sands.

2) Steve Chu – the Nobel Prize winner is the new energy secretary and climate czar. Chu has devoted much of his career figuring out a way to wean people off fuels.

3) Tom Vilsack – the Agriculture secretary is the former governor of corn-growing Iowa, where ethanol subsidies are considered a golden goose, bringing jobs and revenues to the state. However, his support isn’t unwaivering – he has suggested lowering the tariff on greener, more efficient Brazilian sugar-based ethanol, which might bring more competition to the industry.

4) Jane Lubchenco – a marine biologist at Oregon State University, is the head of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. This is the government agency responsible for marine life and studying the climate. Dr. Lubchenco has been critical of the Bush’s inaction on greenhouse-gas emissions and marine pollution, including the species die off in ocean dead zones.

5) John Holden – an expert in the fields of energy, the environment and nuclear proliferation is Obama’s top scientific adviser. When he was president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in 2007, he argued publicly for swift action on climate change, arguing that otherwise we were headed for disastrous changes that would affect all life on earth. Continue…

Obama's speech and the environment

By Alex Shimo - Tuesday, January 20, 2009 at 1:03 PM - 10 Comments

A number of references to tackling climate change in Barack Obama’s historic inauguration speech. Obama has long made climate change a key part of his program, with his stimulus package, creating green jobs, and the incoming cap and trade program. In his words:

- He talked about “restoring science to its rightful place;” likely partly a veiled reference to his appointment of Nobel prize winner Steven Chu as Energy Secretary, who is regarded as a key player in the administration’s climate change program.

- “We will harness the sun and the winds and the soil to fuel our cars and run our factories.” Obama’s $875 billion stimulus package is hoped to create 3-4 million jobs, many of them in clean tech.

- “Nor can we consume the world’s resources without regard to effect.”

-”Each day brings further evidence that the ways we use energy strengthen our adversaries and threaten our planet.”

Whiting Out Climate Change (one easy solution)

By Alex Shimo - Tuesday, January 20, 2009 at 10:56 AM - 6 Comments

It sounds almost too good to be true doesn’t it? Reducing climate change through a lick of white paint? Actually scientists have long known that white roofs leads to lower cooling costs because they reflect, instead of absorb, heat. According to a study released at the annual Conference on Climate Change by the California Energy Commission, painting a single 1,000 square-foot dark roof white would reduce carbon emissions by 10 metric tons. Changing the color of roofs and pavement in 100 of the world’s largest cities could reduce global emissions by 44 billion metric tons, says Hashem Akbari, a scientist at theLawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California, who has a campaign to whiten the world’s roofs. Just to compare, the world produced 49 billion metric tons of emissions in 2004, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

A number of cities have already started implementing this solution: California has mandated all commercial properties with flat roofs be white, and New York is whiting roofs as part of the greening of its transit system. White roofs could cut energy use by buildings by 20 percent, the researchers said. The equivalent energy reduction would save the U.S. $1 billion a year in energy costs.

One concern with this solution is glare. Shiny surfaces are fine for flat roofs, which most people never see, but for other buildings or roads, it might start looking like the Arctic in the summer time, with harsh white light bouncing off bright surfaces. Leading the way, Japanese researchers has tried painting roads with different paints: one’s that reflects infrared light which helps keeps surfaces cool, yet reflects a small proportion – just 23 per cent – of visible light, according to The Guardian. They’ve even done tests with pedestrians, having them stand on the different types of painted roads, and the research subjects seemed to prefer the reflective streets because they were cooler.

Of course, this isn’t a complete solution – emissions are still rising. But a lick of paint for the roofs of 100 of world’s biggest cities would wipe out the expected rise in emissions over the next decade, says Akbari.

News from the Climate Change Skeptic

By Alex Shimo - Thursday, January 15, 2009 at 12:52 PM - 35 Comments

Bjorn Lomborg has written a challenging article on why Barack Obama should not do anything about climate change. Lomborg is probably the most respected of climate change skeptics, and author of two books, The Skeptical Environmentalist and Cool It. He doesn’t dispute that global warming is happening, but argues our money is better spent on other policy goals. He makes the following points.

1) Global food production is expected to decrease with climate change, but only by a small amount: 1.4 per cent. Even under the most pessimistic predictions, advances in technology mean food production can more than keep pace with this slight decrease to feed the world’s hungry.

2) Implementing the Kyoto Protocol will cost $180 billion annually. If we spent $10 billion annually on direct food aid, the United Nations estimates we could help 299 million hungry people now.

3) Sea levels are rising, but they have been rising since the early 1800s. (The last mini Ice age was from 1550-1850, which is why sea levels have been rising for that long. Since 1993, the rate of rise has in fact increased).

4) Coastlines are determined as much by the natural climate as by human intervention. The massive humanitarian disaster caused by Hurricane Katrina was mainly because of the lack of intervention to protect the coast and disorganized and poorly-managed clean up efforts. New Orleans needs to focus on how to protect itself against the next hurricane, as there will be another hurricane of equal ferocity regardless of how the planet is affected by global warming.

Anyway, you can read the full article here. I have some objections to his points, but I’d like to hear from readers first.

Caffeine driving you crazy?

By Alex Shimo - Wednesday, January 14, 2009 at 12:10 PM - 4 Comments

Drinking copious cups of coffee isn’t just bad for your health, it’s also more likely to drive you crazy, or at least crazy enough to hear voices. According to a study published in the academic journal “Personal and Individual Differences,” people who consumed the equivalent of more than seven cups of coffee per day (330 mg) were more likely to have hallucinations than those who consumed less than one cup (10 mg).

The study monitored 200 students from the University of Durham. It asked them about their caffeine intake from coffee, tea, energy drinks, chocolate and caffeine tablets. Of the top 10 per cent, who consumed more than 330 mg of caffeine per day, 41 per cent had experienced a hallucination at some point in their lives. Those who consumed less than 10 mg were much less likely to hallucinate—only 14 per cent had had such an experience. Continue…

Google responds to yesterday's study

By Alex Shimo - Tuesday, January 13, 2009 at 6:52 PM - 7 Comments

A number of prominent media outlets, including Macleans, published yesterday’s study on the environmental impact of Google. According to a Harvard physicist, Google is a major contributor to our carbon footprint because each Google search takes about as much carbon dioxide as boiling a kettle, or about 7g of CO2.

Google rebuffed these figures today, saying they are out by a factor of 35. They say it takes about 0.2 g of CO2 for each search. Which is not very much at all. To put this figure in perspective, you’d need to do about 1,000 Google searches to generate the equivalent of driving your car about 1 km.

Wired magazine has also weighed in, coming down on Google’s side. They argue that even if the Harvard professor was right, Google’s total contribution still amounted to very little in the big scheme of things. The United States generates 6.9 billion kilograms of CO2-equivalent per day, according to the US Environmental Protection Agency. So assuming that Google does 5 billion daily searches and the higher figure of 7g CO2 is right, says Wired, then the search engine is still only responsible for 0.2 per cent of the nation’s carbon footprint.

So, keep Googling.

Do you suffer from green fatigue? (The symptoms)

By Alex Shimo - Monday, January 12, 2009 at 6:02 PM - 15 Comments

Are you tired of reading doomsday articles about how the world is going to hell in a handbasket? Are you annoyed by the “greener than thou” attitudes of people who eat granola, wear hemp trousers and lecture you on Who Killed The Electric Car? Are you infuriated when your compost bag bursting on the way to the green bin spilling rotten garbage all over your lawn? Do you long to set fire to the mountains of plastic garbage bags you have collected under your sink in a massive explosion of noxious fumes? Do you secretly long for climate change to hurry up so we can enjoy lengthy, hot summers where there is nothing but drought?

If you answer yes to one more more of the above, you may suffer from green fatigue. Continue…

President Bush Turns A Little Green

By Alex Shimo - Friday, January 9, 2009 at 2:21 PM - 4 Comments

Well, sort of. President Bush is to create the world’s largest marine protection area in the Pacific Ocean. Mining and commercial fishing will be banned across 505,000 square kilometers, in an area larger than California. These preserves include the the northern Marianas Islands and the Mariana Trench, Pacific Remote Islands, and Rose Atoll Marine National Monuments and are home to hundreds of species of bird and fish that are found nowhere else, including, the Micronesian megapode, which is the only known living bird that uses volcanic heat to incubate its eggs. The Mariana Trench is also home to the deepest spot on the sea floor.

“These places are so pristine that they are like time machines that take us hundreds of years in the past,” says Enric Sala, a marine ecologist at the National Geographic Society, speaking to National Public Radio.

George W. Bush used the authority of the Antiquities Act of 1906, which allows the president to protect areas of historic or scientific significance on land owned or controlled by the United States.

A legacy, of sorts.

As arctic ice melts, South Pole ice grows

By Alex Shimo - Monday, January 5, 2009 at 12:38 PM - 36 Comments

We haven’t heard a lot about the other ice sheet, the one at the South Pole. This is probably because no one lives on in the Antarctic, other than a few very cold scientists, and not that much is known about it, compared to the arctic, where data was amassed by Canadian, United States, and the Soviet military in their struggle for power during the cold war. What we do know is that the Arctic is in a very bad state: September Arctic sea ice has decreased between 1973 and 2007 at a rate of about -10% +/- 0.3% per decade. By contrast, ice in the Antarctic has shown very little trend over the same period, or even a slight increase since 1979. Continue…

If climate change is happening, why is the earth getting colder?

By Alex Shimo - Friday, January 2, 2009 at 5:14 PM - 201 Comments

No you weren’t imagining it. The snow storms and freezing temperatures across the country aren’t just a one off, but the winters of the past few years have actually been getting colder. The world’s average global temperature has fallen for the past four years, and 2008 was the coldest since 2000. The British Met Office has released figures that the show the earth’s average for 2008 was 14.3 C , which is 0.14 C below the average temperature for 2001 – 2007. Nasa’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies has also released figures with similar results. Continue…

How to fix the leaking Alberta oil sands

By Alex Shimo - Tuesday, December 30, 2008 at 5:23 PM - 6 Comments

Earlier this month, a report came out on how much contaminated water was leaking from the Alberta tar sands. The Green Room reported on the study, as did pretty much every other Canadian media outlet. This was likely because the volumes of the leaks were so big – 11 million litres every day – and the contaminated water was filled with lots of substances that one really shouldn’t drink, such as known carcinogens and toxins like polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons and copper, zinc and iron.

Anyway, the Green Room was curious about what could be done about this, so we contacted one of Canada’s leading researchers on water pollution, Leslie Warren at McMaster University. Warren has been studying a specific solution – using bacteria to neutralize the tailings ponds. Here are my questions and her answers:-  Continue…

Squelch. Squelch. Squeak. Squeak.

By Alex Shimo - Friday, December 26, 2008 at 9:00 AM - 7 Comments

Liquid leggings, sported by Posh Spice, Rihanna, Lindsay Lohan and Ashley Olsen, among many other celebrities, have replaced the skinny jean as the newest buzz item. Fashion imitators, however, should beware: wearing this item of clothing can be deeply embarrassing, as Jacinte Faria, a Toronto interactive Web producer, knows only too well. She has three pairs. When she wears the leggings, her friends tease her, saying she looks like she’s wearing Superman’s tights. “They say I’m crazy. They call me ‘No-pant Faria.’ ”

When Mosha Lundström Halbert, 22, a fourth-year University of Toronto student and freelance fashion journalist, wears her skin-tight pleather leggings, she too gets attention. People have stopped and asked, “Are your pants leather?” To which she replies, “No, they are even tackier than leather, they are latex.”

Continue…

The call-911 Christmas turkey

By Alex Shimo - Monday, December 22, 2008 at 5:00 PM - 4 Comments

Deep-fried turkey is a dish for people who want to live on the edge. Steve Pendergrass, a firefighter in Kern County, Calif., found this out on Christmas Day 2003. He’d invited about 20 people over for Christmas dinner and was preparing two medium-sized birds. After deep-frying the first one, he immersed the second into the large pot of oil. “A ball of fire” came up from the propane-fuelled cooker, he says. Panicking, he tried to pull the turkey out of the fryer, but the bird and the pot tipped over. Boiling oil spilled over him and the patio floor where he had been cooking. Suddenly, his clothes were on fire and his skin was burning—chunks of flesh were “falling off,” he says. As his wife and two young daughters watched horrified through the window, he stripped off his clothes and rolled around in the snow to put out the flames.

In recent years, a growing number of fires caused by deep-fried turkeys have been reported, according to the Underwriters Laboratories website, North America’s largest independent product-safety organization. It’s difficult to estimate exactly how many fires deep-fried turkeys cause in the U.S. or in Canada, since all types of cooking fires are usually lumped together. Nevertheless, in the U.S., where the cooking method originated, fire departments have issued safety demonstration videos and warnings, says Lorraine Carli, spokesperson for the U.S. National Fire Protection Association. Just a few weeks ago, a group of Canadians from Toronto witnessed local emergency services extinguishing a deep-fried turkey fire at a Buffalo Bills football game. Luckily, the fire was put out before anyone was hurt. Carli expects more incidents like these as the cooking method becomes more common. It’s a “recipe for disaster,” she says.

Continue…

Could Canada gain from Climate Change?

By Alex Shimo - Friday, December 19, 2008 at 3:44 PM - 57 Comments

Perhaps this is a thought that dare not speak its name, yet it has haunted me ever since Canada came under such strong criticism at the UN climate talks in Poznan talks. Could Canada gain geopolitically from climate change, and if so, was that the reason why we were doing so little about it? This is a cold, callous idea, and one that would horrify most Canadians. Yet it is the viewpoint of Atlantic Monthly columnist Gregg Easterbrook, who wrote:

“In recent years, Canada has increased its greenhouse-gas output more rapidly than most other rich countries. Maybe this is a result of prosperity and oil-field development – or maybe those wily Canadians have a master plan for their huge expanse of currently inhabitable land.”

In this article, Easterbrook, author of the Progress Paradox, examines which countries stand to gain and which countries will lose from climate change. Shanghai, Hong Kong, the Netherlands, Bangladesh and Venice will obviously will be in big trouble with the sea level rises expected by 2100. But a few countries – like Sweden, Greenland and Denmark, stand to gain greatly. And Canada, as a a cold, rich, sparely populated country, he writes, will likely make a killing.

Machiavellian, isn’t it?

Is the recession good for the environment? (and why Margaret Wente is wrong)

By Alex Shimo - Thursday, December 18, 2008 at 5:30 PM - 32 Comments

Could an economic recession actually be good for climate change? Such a thought strikes fear into every moderate green’s heart, because if environmentalism is actually antithetical to the capitalist project, if it is incompatible with economic growth and our post-industrial, urbanized society, we might as well fry now and pay later. Reversing centuries of development, infrastructure, jobs, careers, education, the NHL and all the other twenty-first century essentials and luxuries is not going to happen any time soon.

Yet, the incompatibility of these two movements – environmentalism and growth – is often written about like it just one of sad little truths you have to live with. On Thursday of this week, Margaret Wente, wrote in The Globe and Mail:

“Even global warming has moved down the anxiety scale, but that’s okay, because the recession will slow down global warming more than all the carbon-trading schemes put together.”

Wente makes one of those breezy, glib comments that has a modicum of truth, but doesn’t get to the real heart of the issue. Continue…

A Green Christmas

By Alex Shimo - Tuesday, December 16, 2008 at 7:27 PM - 1 Comment

The NY Times just come out with their green gift guide. You can see it here:

What always annoys me about these gifts is that some are utterly ridiculous – clunky, ugly and a little pointless. If you really want to go green, your best bet is to buy gifts that people actually want. If you feel particularly worthy, why not give to charity? Or you could even try making something, like the Brangelinas, who just announced that they make gifts for each of their six kids, pushing them deeper into the realm of annoyingly perfect. Continue…

Carbon self flagellation (complete with thorns)

By Alex Shimo - Monday, December 15, 2008 at 10:43 AM - 2 Comments

If you’ve ever felt guilty about harming the planet, Swiss artist-inventor Annina Rüst has invented just the right Christmas gift for you. According to the New York Times, this translucent leg band monitors how much electricity you use, and once you’ve gone over your threshold, the wireless device inflicts physical punishment and slowly drives six stainless-steel thorns into the flesh of your leg. Continue…