Sustainablog

Today’s post is by Lisa Moore, a climate scientist at EDF.

NOAA recently released a terrific scientific report that explains, in plain English, the current and projected effects of climate change on the U.S. The nonpartisan report, prepared by the 13-agency U.S. Global Change Research Program, tells a grim but important story, clearly and with lots of powerful maps and charts. I encourage you to check it out to see how climate change will affect your area of the country.

Here are some of the “business-as-usual” projections that my colleagues and I find most striking and disturbing:

You think August is hot now?

By the end of this century, we could be in for much more severe summers all across the country (see maps that follow).

• If you live in New Hampshire, summer could feel like it does today in North Carolina (p.107).
• If you live in Michigan, brace yourself for summers that feel like today’s summers in Oklahoma (p 117).
• And if you live in Texas, you now experience 10 to 20 days a year over 100 °F. By the last two decades of this century, look for 100 such days - that’s more than three months (p. 90).

Read the rest of this entry »

Yesterday’s Post-Dispatch had a story on the front page of the Business section that immediately caught my eye: St. Louis-based agribiz giant Monsanto has started blogging (and Twittering and YouTube-ing).

That’s right: Monsanto, the company many of us in the sustainability sphere love to hate, has entered the conversation.

That, on the surface, is a good thing.

Of course, the devil’s in the details.  As occasional contributor Max Gladwell pointed out in “10 Ways that Social Media and Sustainability Line Up,” social media can provide a high return on investment for a business… provided its efforts are grounded in transparency. I’d add that such efforts must also be based in a genuine desire to interact: social media is conversation, and all parties have to both talk and listen. Without these elements, a corporate blog will strike its intended audience as just another effort at message control.

Monsanto’s blog also seems to validate another of Max’s points: much of the content so far has consisted of responses to grassroots criticisms of the company ventures into biotechnology, particularly genetic engineering of crop seeds. As blogger and public affairs manager John Combest told the P-D, “”There was this big conversation going on (on the Internet), and we weren’t a part of it.”

So, how’s the company doing in its initial forray into the blogosphere?

At this point, I’d argue they still have a lot to learn.

Read the rest of this entry »

Editor’s note: This post was written by Max Ajl, and originally published on Wednesday, March 25, at SolveClimate.

A couple of weeks ago, we discussed the possibilities of biochar - burning organic waste, such as wood chips, left-over crop residue or even manure at extremely low oxygen levels and high temperatures in order to produce charcoal and biogas. The charcoal would go into the ground, increasing soil fertility, while the gas would be an effective energy source, making good use of detritus that would otherwise decompose, returning its carbon to the atmosphere.

I suggested that although the technology was still distant from full-scale implementation, it had considerable promise as a way to draw-down carbon from the atmosphere.

Well, environmental writer George Monbiot has demurred. He wrote in the Guardian yesterday that biochar advocates have been “suckered.” They promote “an even crazier use of woodchips.” They wish to “turn the planet’s surface into charcoal.” They are a wild band of “magical thinkers” who wish to “destroy the biosphere in order to save it.”

Remember, this is Monbiot, a serious analyst of anthropogenic global warming, not Bjorn Lomborg or a mercenary from the Heartland Institute. This man isn’t “supposedly” in the coalition to avert disastrous warming - he’s part of it, through and through.

So what’s he in a tizzy about? A lot of nothing, it turns out, since he’s battling with a straw-man that most biochar researchers don’t take even remotely seriously.

Read the rest of this entry »

Discover what really happens with your recyclables. It’s time for another round of That’s Just Weird.

Read the rest of this entry »

Courtesy of  Scientific American and Environmental Health News, another reason to despise plastic. According to an article by Matthew Cimitile, researchers believe that airborne pollution from plastics manufacturing may change the DNA of cattle.

It all started when ranchers living 4 miles downwind from the Formosa Plastics facilities in Point Comfort, Texas noticed that their steers were losing weight, their cows were miscarrying and having stillborn calves and some of the calves were being born with abnormalities like missing limbs:

Tests have revealed that herds as far as six miles downwind of the factories have more DNA disturbances than other herds not downwind, according to scientists at Texas A & M University. The changes in chromosome structure and other genetic damage can increase the animal’s risk of cancer and reproductive damage

Read the rest of this entry »

If you don’t eat for a day, you know it. If you stay inside all day, you feel it and it makes a strong impression on the character of the day. These are two critical parts of our day — what we eat and where we go.

If we want to be Green, if we want to make a decision to help the environment, these daily issues are about as big as it gets. If we buy a green product — an organic cotton t-shirt, a hemp bag or wallet, a recycled chair — we are, basically, doing one environmental action. If we decide to make our eating and transportation habits environmentally friendly, however, we are make several environmental actions everyday.

We see many figures showing us that transportation and food are the largest contributors to the global warming crisis and to many other environmental issues (water quality, air quality, etc.), but do we take this home and say, “this is what I need to change”?

Here are three or four ways to make that change we have been waiting for.
Read the rest of this entry »

A recent study shows that Alaska’s coast is melting faster than ever, and that along with the melting ice, more and more of the land is eroding into the ocean as well. The causes of the erosion also seem to be changing — in the past it was largely due to storms but that is no longer the case.

From 2002 to 2007, Alaska’s coast eroded at a rate that was more than twice that of the years 1955-1979. It is not just land that the sea is taking in these days either. It has swallowed a historic ghost town (Esook) and a historic whaling boat as well as an oil well (and probably more soon).
Read the rest of this entry »

Did you know that by mixing tap water and table salt you can create a substance that degreases, kills bacteria, cleans and costs less than a penny a gallon? Too good to be true, right? But for decades, this method has been used in Russia and Japan, and it’s slowly gaining acceptance in the U.S.

The thing is, you can’t just pour some salt in a container of water and shake it up. You have to scramble the ions in the salted water with an electric current and create electrolyzed water. Most of us don’t have electrolysis machines in our home, but some U.S. businesses are buying them and finding the results favorable.

The Los Angeles Times reported that Sheraton Delfina in Santa Montica is using the electrolyzed water for cleaning rooms and disenfecting produce in the kitchen and the staff, the workers who actually use the stuff, are calling it “el liquido milagroso - the miracle liquid.” Read the rest of this entry »

Hey, you know that old conflict between religion and science? Remember the Scopes monkey trial in 1925 or the 1960 film about the case? How about the legislative battles of the last few years in Georgia, Pennsylvania, and Kansas over the mandatory inclusion of intelligent design alongside evolution in public schools?

Waiting for worldviews to change to accommodate new science is like watching the emergence of multicellularity. Keep in mind that Darwin’s On the Origin of Species is only 150 years old. Copernicus’s On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres was published in 1543. That book wasn’t completely dropped from the Vatican’s list of banned books for another 300 years. (I wonder if foundation-shattering books would fly under heresy radars if the titles didn’t start with “On the…”)

Chuck, on the other hand, just got fast-tracked! On Darwin’s 200th birthday, the Vatican is officially on board with evolution! Also, more than 800 pastors and rabbis are celebrating “Evolution Weekend” following Darwin’s 200th birthday February 12.

Read the rest of this entry »

Obihiro University of Agriculture and Veterinary Medicine Professor Junichi Takahashi and the Sumitomo Corporation research group (both in Japan) have jointly developed technology to produce hydrogen from cattle dung and urine for use in fuel cells. They say the same can be done with human waste.

The researchers say the process allows for the production of hydrogen without producing unwanted carbon dioxide. Given its potential utility with human waste, the idea also may open pathways to household toilet technology: “toilet generators.” Read the rest of this entry »