Memories of 21, 42, 63 ... the 84th meandering

Glad to hear something is going right, ehBeth....... We are still getting way too much rain down here. And, more on the way. I would like to ship some of the water to Kenya where they really need it.

It's drizzling, raining, drizzling, raining here these days. We're hoping for sunshine on Sunday.

Your rain is coming my way, ehBeth. Or Chicago's. Clicked.

spring weather here

what global warming???

http://rainforest.care2.com/i?p=583091674

AARRRGGHHH ALL YE MATIES ((((except for Stradee)))) AVAST AND ALL THAT OTHER PIRATIE STUFF!!!!!!!! BIG ASSED GRIN, STRADEE.....!

WE ALL SUFFER AND YOU ENJOY GREAT WEATHER!!

Don't worry ( I know you aren't) We are all green with envy. BUT, you know your weather isn't going to last very long and then - WE get the good stuff....!!

Or, at least till the BAD stuff comes our way.

That's the weather for ya......... When I was a pilot, I always called the WX Guys and asked for the forecast for the spot I was going to and the WX in between.........! They ALWAYS told me the truth about the WX. However, by the time I flew to the spot I was going to - THE TRUTH HAD CHANGED!!!

Ah, the good old days.

Flipped the click switch - (((That's pilot talk))) (((Not like the two guys who fell asleep in the cockpit yesterday and flew 150 miles past their landing site))) That's insane they are trying to say they were having a discussion. There would have been red lights and beepers going off !!! That's probably what finally woke them up.

LOL

Weathers been sooooooooo warm....then freezing rain....then warm again!

So just hang in there cause when we get winter, ya all will have summer, (Beth camping in January) and hopefully Kenya will have a good monsoon! Sue, we have no clue how your neck of the woods weather works. One day sunny, the next foggy, the next rain. Been a very mild Fall so far.

So what's with the pilots that nynited? Tell me they didn't have passengers and the plane was not an SST. jeeze

Hi everyone! Googled this thread after an email from Shirley. I did click today and hope you are all well.

Glad to see you here again, Teeny!

Look at the top of the page at:

Memories of 21, 42, 63 ... the 84th meandering
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See the "Get Email Updates" ? Just click on that... and you should receive notifications from a2k and the rainforest thread.


Then visit the thread each day and click on the team link:

http://rainforest.care2.com/i?p=583091674

I try and add the link each day to my postings. '

Thanks for clicking, Teeny! We missed seeing your happy face!

Thank Shirley for sending me the link. I'm a year older and on Medicare! I still have my Blue Cross, plus Tri-Care from the military. I'm happy as h**l, to be back. Missed all of you, so what's been going on since Pres. Obama's been in office? Going to the Statue of Liberty on Wednesday coming up. I've only been there twice in almost 40 years. Always something going on. Going with a group.

I'm glad yur back again too, Sharon!

Here's a photo my son in law Marvin took when he and Donna vacationed in NY.

They loved the visit. Hope you have a marvelous time too!

Gotta luv the Obama's.

Good morning, wildclickers. Couple of good articles coming your way.

October 24, 2009
Editorial
Breathing Room for the Bear

The Obama administration’s proposed designation of 200,000 square miles of Alaskan waters and sea ice as critical habitat for the polar bear is not just encouraging news for the bear. It signals a more sympathetic attitude toward endangered species, and is further evidence that the secretary of the interior, Ken Salazar, will take a more measured approach than the Bush administration to oil and gas drilling in the Arctic.

After much prodding by the courts and its own scientists, the Bush administration listed the polar bear as threatened under the Endangered Species Act in May 2008. But it deferred the required designation of protected habitat " the area deemed essential to the survival of a threatened or endangered species " partly because doing so could have torpedoed its grand plans to open millions of acres of prime polar bear territory in the Beaufort and Chukchi Seas to oil and gas exploration.

Mr. Salazar is now reviewing those plans. Though a pre-existing Shell Oil lease in the Beaufort will be allowed to go forward, it seems highly unlikely that Mr. Salazar would authorize major oil and gas development in territory that his own Fish and Wildlife Service has identified as crucial to the bears’ future.

The designation of critical habitat does not automatically bar commercial activities like oil and gas drilling. It does mean that such activities, if they occur on federal land or require a federal permit, cannot go forward without intensive review by agencies like the Fish and Wildlife Service, which can limit them or prohibit them.

The biggest threat to the bears is, of course, the gradual disappearance of the sea ice where it lives and hunts, which in turn is linked to global warming. The Endangered Species Act is not designed to solve the problem of climate change, a global problem. It can relieve an already-burdened animal of the added stresses that widespread drilling would surely bring.

October 23, 2009
By Degrees
To Cut Global Warming, Swedes Study Their Plates
By ELISABETH ROSENTHAL

STOCKHOLM " Shopping for oatmeal, Helena Bergstrom, 37, admitted that she was flummoxed by the label on the blue box reading, “Climate declared: .87 kg CO2 per kg of product.”

“Right now, I don’t know what this means,” said Ms. Bergstrom, a pharmaceutical company employee.

But if a new experiment here succeeds, she and millions of other Swedes will soon find out. New labels listing the carbon dioxide emissions associated with the production of foods, from whole wheat pasta to fast food burgers, are appearing on some grocery items and restaurant menus around the country.

People who live to eat might dismiss this as silly. But changing one’s diet can be as effective in reducing emissions of climate-changing gases as changing the car one drives or doing away with the clothes dryer, scientific experts say.

“We’re the first to do it, and it’s a new way of thinking for us,” said Ulf Bohman, head of the Nutrition Department at the Swedish National Food Administration, which was given the task last year of creating new food guidelines giving equal weight to climate and health. “We’re used to thinking about safety and nutrition as one thing and environmental as another.”

Some of the proposed new dietary guidelines, released over the summer, may seem startling to the uninitiated. They recommend that Swedes favor carrots over cucumbers and tomatoes, for example. (Unlike carrots, the latter two must be grown in heated greenhouses here, consuming energy.)

They are not counseled to eat more fish, despite the health benefits, because Europe’s stocks are depleted.

And somewhat less surprisingly, they are advised to substitute beans or chicken for red meat, in view of the heavy greenhouse gas emissions associated with raising cattle.

“For consumers, it’s hard,” Mr. Bohman acknowledged. “You are getting environmental advice that you have to coordinate with, ‘How can I eat healthier?’ ”

Many Swedish diners say it is just too much to ask. “I wish I could say that the information has made me change what I eat, but it hasn’t,” said Richard Lalander, 27, who was eating a Max hamburger (1.7 kilograms of carbon dioxide emissions) in the shadow of a menu board revealing that a chicken sandwich (0.4 kilograms) would have been better for the planet.

Yet if the new food guidelines were religiously heeded, some experts say, Sweden could cut its emissions from food production by 20 to 50 percent. An estimated 25 percent of the emissions produced by people in industrialized nations can be traced to the food they eat, according to recent research here. And foods vary enormously in the emissions released in their production.

While today’s American or European shoppers may be well versed in checking for nutrients, calories or fat content, they often have little idea of whether eating tomatoes, chicken or rice is good or bad for the climate.

Complicating matters, the emissions impact of, say, a carrot, can vary by a factor of 10, depending how and where it is grown.

Earlier studies of food emissions focused on the high environmental costs of transporting food and raising cattle. But more nuanced research shows that the emissions depend on many factors, including the type of soil used to grow the food and whether a dairy farmer uses local rapeseed or imported soy for cattle feed.

Business groups, farming cooperatives and organic labeling programs as well as the government have gamely come up with coordinated ways to identify food choices.

Max, Sweden’s largest homegrown chain of burger restaurants, now puts emissions calculations next to each item on its menu boards. Lantmannen, Sweden’s largest farming group, has begun placing precise labels on some categories of foods in grocery stores, including chicken, oatmeal, barley and pasta.

Consumers who pay attention may learn that emissions generated by growing the nation’s most popular grain, rice, are two to three times those of little-used barley, for example.

Some producers argue that the new programs are overly complex and threaten profits. The dietary recommendations, which are being circulated for comment not just in Sweden but across the European Union, have been attacked by the Continent’s meat industry, Norwegian salmon farmers and Malaysian palm oil growers, to name a few.

“This is trial and error; we’re still trying to see what works,” Mr. Bohman said.

Next year, KRAV, Scandinavia’s main organic certification program, will start requiring farmers to convert to low-emissions techniques if they want to display its coveted seal on products, meaning that most greenhouse tomatoes can no longer be called organic.

Those standards have stirred some protests. “There are farmers who are happy and farmers who say they are being ruined,” said Johan Cejie, manager of climate issues for KRAV.

For example, he said, farmers with high concentrations of peat soil on their property may no longer be able to grow carrots, since plowing peat releases huge amounts of carbon dioxide; to get the organic label, they may have to switch to feed crops that require no plowing.

Next year KRAV will require hothouses to use biofuels for heating. Dairy farms will have to obtain at least 70 percent of the food for their herds locally; many previously imported cheap soy from Brazil, generating transport emissions and damaging the rain forest as trees were cleared to make way for farmland.

The Swedish effort grew out of a 2005 study by Sweden’s national environmental agency on how personal consumption generates emissions. Researchers found that 25 percent of national per capita emissions " two metric tons per year " was attributable to eating.

The government realized that encouraging a diet that tilted more toward chicken or vegetables and educating farmers on lowering emissions generally could have an enormous impact.

Sweden has been a world leader in finding new ways to reduce emissions. It has vowed to eliminate the use of fossil fuel for electricity by 2020 and cars that run on gasoline by 2030.

To arrive at numbers for their company’s first carbon dioxide labels, scientists at Lantmannen analyzed life cycles of 20 products. These take into account emissions generated by fertilizer, fuel for harvesting machinery, packaging and transport.

They decided to examine one representative product in each category " say, pasta " rather than performing analyses for fusilli versus penne, or one brand versus another. “Every climate declaration is hugely time-intensive,” said Claes Johansson, Lantmannen’s director of sustainability.

A new generation of Swedish business leaders is stepping up to the climate challenge. Richard Bergfors, president of Max, his family’s burger chain, voluntarily hired a consultant to calculate its carbon footprint; 75 percent was created by its meat.

“We decided to be honest and put it all out there and say we’ll do everything we can to reduce,” said Mr. Bergfors, 40. In addition to putting emissions data on the menu, Max eliminated boxes from its children’s meals, installed low-energy LED lights and pays for wind-generated electricity.

Since the emissions counts started appearing on the menu, sales of climate-friendly items have risen 20 percent. Still, plenty of people head to a burger restaurant lusting only for a burger.

Kristian Eriksson, 26, an information technology specialist, looked embarrassed when asked about the burger he was eating at an outdoor table.

“You feel guilty picking red meat,” he said.

Largest solar panel plant in US rises in Fla.
By CHRISTINE ARMARIO, Associated Press Writer Christine Armario, Associated Press Writer Fri Oct 23, 4:55 pm ET

ARCADIA, Fla. " Greg Bove steps into his pickup truck and drives down a sandy path to where the future of Florida's renewable energy plans begin: Acres of open land filled with solar panels that will soon power thousands of homes and business.

For nearly a year, construction workers and engineers in this sleepy Florida town of citrus trees and cattle farms have been building the nation's largest solar panel energy plant. Testing will soon be complete, and the facility will begin directly converting sunlight into energy, giving Florida a momentary spot in the solar energy limelight.

The Desoto Next Generation Solar Energy Center will power a small fraction of Florida Power & Light's 4-million plus customer base; nevertheless, at 25 megawatts, it will generate nearly twice as much energy as the second-largest photovoltaic facility in the U.S.

The White House said President Barack Obama is scheduled to visit the facility Tuesday, when it officially goes online and begins producing power for the electric grid.

As demand grows and more states create mandates requiring a certain percentage of their energy come from renewable sources, the size of the plants is increasing. The southwest Florida facility will soon be eclipsed by larger projects announced in Nevada and California.

"We took a chance at it and it worked out," said Bove, construction manager at the project, set on about 180 acres of land 80 miles southeast of Tampa. "There's a lot of backyard projects, there's a lot of rooftop projects, post offices and stores. Really this is one of the first times where we've taken a technology and upsized it."

Despite its nickname, the Sunshine State hasn't been at the forefront of solar power. Less than 4 percent of Florida's energy has come from renewable sources in recent years. And unlike California and many other states, Florida lawmakers haven't agreed to setting clean energy quotas for electric companies to reach in the years ahead.

California, New Jersey and Colorado have led the country in installing photovoltaic systems; now Florida is set to jump closer to the top with the nation's largest plant yet.

The Desoto facility and two other solar projects Florida Power & Light is spearheading will generate 110 megawatts of power, cutting greenhouse gas emissions by more than 3.5 million tons. Combined, that's the equivalent of taking 25,000 cars off the road each year, according to figures cited by the company.

The investment isn't cheap: The Desoto project cost $150 million to build and the power it supplies to some 3,000 homes and businesses will represent just a sliver of the 4 million-plus accounts served by the state's largest electric utility.

But there are some economic benefits: It created 400 jobs for draftsmen, carpenters and others whose work dried up as the southwest Florida housing boom came to a closure and the recession set in. Once running, it will require few full-time employees.

Mike Taylor, director of research and education at the nonprofit Solar Electric Power Association in Washington, said the project puts Florida "on the map."

"It's currently the largest," Taylor said of the Desoto photovoltaic plant. "But it certainly won't be the last."

There are two means of producing electricity from the sun: photovoltaic cells that directly convert sunlight; and thermal power, which uses mirrors to heat fluid and produce steam to run a turbine power generator.

Taylor said a one- or two-megawatt project was considered large not long ago. The size has slowly increased each year.

Overall, the United States still trails other nations in building photovoltaic plants.

Spain and Germany have made larger per capita commitments to solar power because of aggressive government policies, said Stephen Smith, executive director of the Southern Alliance for Clean Energy. And China has announced plans to pay up to 50 percent of the price of solar power systems of more than 500 megawatts.

"If we don't get our market right and send the right market signals and really support growing this technology, we will be buying solar panels from other countries," Smith said.

In April, Arizona-based manufacturer First Solar Inc. announced plans to build a 48-megawatt plant in Nevada, producing power for about 30,000 homes. Even that pales compared to recently announced plans for a 2 gigawatt facility in China. First Solar has initial approval to build it.

From NPR:

On Friday, the Environmental Protection Agency is expected to give a price tag for the Senate's global warming bill. That will frame next week's scheduled debate on the legislation.


A farmer harvests corn on a farm near Spring Mills, Pa. According to current biofuel laws, if you burn ethanol from corn in your car, the government doesn't count the carbon dioxide that comes out of the tailpipe as an actual carbon emission.

One key part of the climate bill has to do with fuels made from green plants. These can reduce the use of fossil fuels, and they also are a big draw for farm-state votes.

But scientists writing in the current issue of Science magazine point out a huge error in existing biofuel laws that could actually make climate change worse. They say these rules inadvertently encourage deforestation, which in turn contributes to global warming.

Something Doesn't Add Up

If you burn ethanol from corn in your car, the government doesn't count the carbon dioxide that comes out of the tailpipe as an actual carbon emission. That's because they figure the corn plant originally took that carbon dioxide out of the air, so you're just putting it back.

But 13 prominent scientists writing in Science says that's bad logic when it comes to many types of biofuels. Author Tim Searchinger of Princeton University offers an extreme example to make the point.

"Even if you were to cut down the world's forests and turn them into a parking lot, and take the wood and put it in a boiler " which obviously releases enormous amounts of carbon from the trees " that is treated as a pure way of reducing greenhouse gas emissions," Searchinger says. "And that's obviously an error."

And that error isn't trivial. It's now enshrined in European law as well as the Kyoto climate treaty.

"The problem is that when the world agreed to a treaty that limited the amount of carbon that goes up the smokestack, they didn't agree to limit the amount of carbon released by cutting down trees," he says.

Forests Worth More Dead Than Alive

Searchinger explains that in an effort to avoid double-counting carbon emissions, the treaty negotiators ended up with a system that never counts them at all.

And he says the climate bill that passed the U.S. House of Representatives earlier this year makes basically the same error, though at the moment, the Senate bill does have forest safeguards in place.

As a result of this accounting error, countries trying to reduce their carbon emissions actually have an incentive to cut down forests and burn them up or replant the area with biofuel crops. In fact, Searchinger says power plants in Northern Europe are starting to chip up wood and burn it for energy in the name of reducing emissions.

"The fundamental effect of this flaw is to make forests worth more dead than alive," he says.

This spring, another report in Science pondered what would happen in the coming decades if biofuel carbon was never counted as an emission. Jae Edmonds of the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory says they calculated that almost all the world's forests would be chopped down by the middle of this century.

"You can't actually imagine this going on like this with no one noticing and nobody stepping in to intervene," Edmonds says. "But the numerical experiment is instructive in that it takes the phenomenon into sharp relief."

An Easy Fix

Searchinger says the good news is that it's easy to fix the problem. Nations simply need to count all carbon dioxide coming out of tailpipes and smokestacks, regardless of the source. Then, if the source of the biofuel is a destructive source, like deforestation, there would be no carbon emissions credit. But if it is from a good source, like plants grown on previously barren land, that would earn a carbon credit.

"There are substantial amounts of bio-energy we can make, that do give us greenhouse gas benefits," Searchinger says. "What we don't want to do is create a false and perverse incentive simply to clear the world's forests."

Whether this new accounting scheme would affect the domestic biofuels industry is debatable. Bob Dinneen, president of the Renewable Fuels Association, says it shouldn't matter.

"Some of the points that have been made in the [research] paper today, we agree with," Dinneen says. "You should never, under any circumstance, tear down a forest for the growing of a biofuel."

But some scientists argue that the domestic biofuels industry does, indirectly, lead to deforestation in the tropics, by raising the global price of corn and encouraging farmers in South America to clear land to plant grain.

Edmonds, of the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, says that if we could place a cash value on preserving forests, that ends up being good for the atmosphere.

"You don't end up not producing quite as much biofuels," he says, "but you don't need as much because you don't have to make up for the deforestation."

The real challenge now, Edmonds says, is figuring out how to put a new carbon accounting scheme into practice.

Good to see you Sharon. Enjoy your trip.

There is just something so special about the Statue of Liberty. I love to see her - even if it's just from the Staten Island Ferry - each time I go to New York.

Clicked!

Have a lovely weekend everyone.

Sumac, I'm not sure whose rain you're getting.

We apparently decided to keep ours for a few more days

Just a weak cold front blowing through. Nothing substantial like Danon's rain.

October 25, 2009
Campaign to Reduce Carbon Dioxide Picks a Number
By ANDREW C. REVKIN

Campaigners against global warming have drawn on an arsenal of visually startling tactics over the years, from posing nude on a Swiss glacier to scaling smokestacks at coal-fired power plants.

As Saturday dawned, they tried something new with the goal of prodding countries to get serious about reaching an international climate accord: a synchronized burst of more than 4,300 demonstrations, from the Himalayas to the Great Barrier Reef, all centered on the number 350.

For some prominent climate scientists, that is the upper limit for heat-trapping carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, measured in parts per million. If the gas concentration exceeds that for long, they warn, the world can expect decades of disruptive climate patterns, rising sea levels, drought and famine.

The current concentration of carbon dioxide is 387 parts per million.

Organizers said their goal, in the prelude to global climate talks in Copenhagen in December, was to illustrate the urgent need to cut emissions by pointing out that the world passed the 350 mark two decades ago.

Yet while agreeing that unabated emissions pose serious risks, some prominent scientists and economists focusing on climate policy said the 350 target was so unrealistic that the campaign risked not being taken seriously " or could even convey the wrong message.

“Three-fifty is so impossible to achieve that to make it the goal risks the reaction that if we are already over the cliff, then let’s just enjoy the ride until it’s over,” said John M. Reilly, an economist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

“The message needs to be that there are risks at the current level, and those risks increase the further we push the system,” he said.

In a prominent recent study, scientists concluded that carbon dioxide levels were almost certainly headed beyond any levels experienced on the planet in the last 15 million years.

Michael Oppenheimer, a former chief scientist for the Environmental Defense Fund who now teaches at Princeton, said it would be a herculean accomplishment to hold concentrations below 450 parts per million in decades.

But Bill McKibben, the author and activist who founded 350.org, the group coordinating the protests, defended its approach, saying that settling on a concrete goal articulated as a number was the only way to build a “global community” around climate action.

“We need to be thinking about reducing, not going up more slowly,” he said. “Three-fifty is the number that says wartime footing, let’s see how fast we can possibly move, and let’s hope against hope that it’s fast enough.”

Mr. McKibben spent Saturday morning hunkered in an office in downtown Manhattan with 20 young volunteers coordinating an accelerating flow of videos and photographs from other time zones that captured demonstrations planned in 170 countries.

Events focusing on the number were held on every continent and from pole to pole, with climbers unfurling a banner on a mountain peak in Antarctica and artists forming a 350 out of hunks of ice on a gravel beach in Disko Bay, Greenland, in the Arctic.

The Cairo Cyclist Club posed with a banner and activists in front of one of Egypt’s great pyramids, while more than 350 roller skaters swept through Tel Aviv.

Some participants had gotten a head start. On Friday,

thousands of students assembled in a plaza in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, waving “350” placards. Grinning American soldiers in eastern Afghanistan e-mailed photographs of a 350 fashioned from sandbags.

Robert J. Brulle, a sociologist at Drexel University who analyzes environmental campaigns, expressed a mixed view of the 350 campaign. It represents “a new wave of civic environmentalism” that has proved vital to solving problems, he said, although that approach was abandoned long ago by many big environmental groups that now focus mainly on legislation and litigation.

But Dr. Brulle questioned the core symbol and message of 350.org. He suggested that it might be too technical and that it focused on deeply cutting emissions without providing a clear path for accomplishing the task. Nonetheless, the effort has been endorsed by dozens of prominent figures, including James E. Hansen, a NASA scientist who has been most closely associated with defining the climate threshold as 350 parts per million.

Mr. McKibben of 350.org said it was up to national leaders to assume a moral obligation to match their actions to the science.

On Saturday, as the pictures flowed in via e-mail and the Web, he noted that there were hardly any showing celebrities or officials. “Ordinary people are just haunted by this,” he said. “Now they’re saying one thing very loudly, and very beautifully.”

Yet Gavin A. Schmidt, a climate scientist who works with Dr. Hansen and manages a popular blog on climate science, realclimate.org, said those promoting 350 or debating the number might be missing the point.

“The situation is analogous to people trying to embark on a cross-country road trip to California, but they’ve started off heading to Maine instead,” Dr. Schmidt said. “But instead of working out ways to turn around, they have decided to argue about where they are going to park when they get to L.A.

“If you ask a scientist how much more CO2 do you think we should add to the atmosphere, the answer is going to be none.”

Warm temps today

Painting and cleaning for the next few weeks

Weather should hold till then although we never know anymore.


http://rainforest.care2.com/i?p=583091674