Don't be fooled by deniers

Not one, but two opinion pieces in the Santa Fe New Mexican last Sunday are full of falsehoods and misleading statements about climate change. I will address these fully in response to the New Mexican, which I'll either excerpt or provide a link to on this blog, but in the meantime you can find facts and links to more information to counter most of the spurious claims in the New Mexican pieces in this piece by Scientific American. Remember, 97% of US climate scientists, the scientists who actually study this subject, agree that global warming is real and that it's caused by humans. Our National Academy of Sciences under George W. Bush, along with the academies of science of 10 other nations, agreed that the evidence for climate change and humans' role in it was strong enough to warrant fast action by governments. Update: The US National Academy of Sciences, along with the Academies of Science of 12 other industrialized and emerging nations, signed a statement in June 2009 including the following quotes: "Climate change is happening even faster than previously estimated,""The need for urgent action to address climate change is now indisputable," and "Limiting global warming to 2°C would require a very rapid worldwide implementation of all currently available low carbon technologies. The G8+5 should lead the transition to an energy efficient and low carbon world economy." When we are faced with such great consequences and quite substantial evidence, do you think we should wait until the consequences are so dire that they can't be denied? The people who live on various islands and in the polar reaches, not to mention many species of plants and animals, are already facing dire consequences. By the time the consequences are in the faces of the rest of us, because the ocean and the natural world absorbs CO2 and heat and delays these consequences, scientists tell us it will probably be too late to avoid a world far different from the one that civilization evolved in. Do we really want to let a minority of vocal deniers, some of whom have been paid by oil companies to delay government action, confuse us into losing our chance to save ourselves and thousands of other species? Would you rather prepare for a catastrophe that might not happen, or not prepare for a catastrophe that is actually already happening, but not yet to most of us?

Should You Buy Carbon Offsets?

After encouraging you to offset your Thanksgiving travel by using one of the offset programs at the bottom of the homepage, I did more research. Carbon offsets, which are shares of projects you can buy that cancel out your greenhouse gas emissions for various activities, are controversial. Responsible Travel, one of the first travel companies to give travelers the option of buying offsets, canceled their program in October because they believe that offsets do more to soothe consciences than reduce CO2 output. We do need to ask ourselves whether we're buying offsets to assuage a guilty conscience, or whether we're using them when we've reduced our carbon footprint as much as we can. If you just have to take a flight, buying an offset will reduce overall greenhouse gas emissions if the offset is real. Here's where things get dicey. Michael Wara, a professor at Stanford Law School and former climate scientist, says "we don't know" how many offset projects really reduce CO2 emissions. The hardest part is knowing whether a project would have been done without offsets helping to pay for it. My take is that it's very unlikely that all offset programs would have been done without offset money, so you are paying for some greenhouse gas reduction. Since it's an imperfect mechanism, it's not a great conscience-soother, so don't use it for that. With these cautions in mind, I've changed the links at the bottom of this page to only include carbon offset programs that serve individuals and are retailers for the Climate Action Reserve, which has strict requirements that projects are real, permanent, and additional, and includes independent verification. I encourage you to reduce your carbon footprint as much as you can (see the list of "10 Things" below), look at these sites, and then offset your holiday travel and other activities as much as you see fit. Going through the process will also make each of us more aware of how much greenhouse gas our different activities produce. Please share any thoughts, facts, or questions you have about offsets, and
Stay cool,
Bonney

Tell Senate to Pass a Strong Climate Bill

As you may know, the US House of Representatives passed a climate bill in June, the American Clean Energy and Security Act (ACES). We've been nagging our Senators meanwhile to do likewise, and it's time to nag them again. Click here to find your Senator and call, write, or email urging them to pass the strongest climate legislation possible. Until both houses pass a bill and the President signs it, there can be little progress on an international treaty, which is why world leaders delayed expectations this week for a strong new treaty to reduce global warming to come out of the Copenhagen talks. Senators John Kerry and Barbara Boxer introduced a climate bill on Sept. 30 that we should support. It needs strengthening, as lucidly outlined by Margie Alt of the Huffington Post blog site. Alt points out that we could achieve a 26% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions by 2020 just by investing in energy efficiency, which costs less than we're spending on energy now! We need to do more than this, and there are lots of options other than turning to nuclear energy, which is very expensive and creates waste that's radioactive for tens of thousands of years. Nuclear energy and offshore oil drilling are both being discussed in the Senate. Drilling for oil and burning coal cause global warming, they don't solve it, although sequestering CO2 from fossil fuels is an interim solution. Call or write your Senators now to urge them to pass the strongest climate legislation possible without relying on nuclear or coal. If you're traveling for Thanksgiving, have safe travels and offset your travel with the programs at the very bottom of this page! I'll post again in 2 weeks.
Stay cool,
Bonney

This Isn't About Climate, But It's Unbelievable

I have to take a moment to post this unbelievable bit of info that I found buried in a UNICEF report. They sent me a nice email about buying stuff for the holidays to support their programs (which is a fine idea, along with giving them money) and about tracking progress on child nutrition. I was intrigued by the statement that "80 percent of all chronically undernourished children are found in just 24 countries." After following a link, I came to this report on Tracking Progress on Child and Maternal Nutrition. On page 15, there's a world map that has a red circle on each country. The size of the red circle is proportional to the number of children in that country who are moderately to severely stunted because of hunger (they call it undernutrition now). But look--there's a pretty good-sized red circle on the U.S.! Now go to page 104. There's the top 24 countries in terms of numbers of stunted children. And look! The US is number 42 with not 714 children as I thought at first, but 714,000 children WHO ARE STUNTED BECAUSE THEY DON'T HAVE ENOUGH TO EAT. This is 3% of all children under 5 in one of the richest countries in the world who are "below two standard deviations from median height for age of the WHO Child Growth Standards." We are doing only 2 percentage points better than Iran, the same as Ukraine, and worse than Chile and Croatia! TELL EVERYONE YOU KNOW THAT THIS IS UNACCEPTABLE!

Hopenhagen

Here's two cool ideas! Go to the appealing little site called Hopenhagen.org and sign their petition for a climate treaty that is "definitive, equitable, and effective," and will set binding targets to cut greenhouse gases by 2020. The petition will be presented to world leaders at the UN Climate Change Conference Dec. 7-18. When you sign, you can write what gives you hope. If you put down your city, your comment will be put on a map. You can click anyplace on the map to see what gives someone from that place hope. Pretty cool!

Now that it's finally getting cooler, make sure your water heater is well insulated. That can save you money and save 1,000 pounds of CO2 a year! If your water heater is warm to the touch, it could use more insulation. You can get a pre-cut insulating jacket for your heater for $10-$20 and put it on yourself. If your heater is gas-fired, you need to pay a professional or follow directions carefully. Here's a site with more information.

Good luck, and write us!
Stay cool,
Bonney

We can't be the problem, right? Wrong.

One final myth to discuss in this series (I'm always happy to address others at your request): Human CO2 emissions are tiny compared with natural sources, so they can't be important.

Fact: While it's true that natural sources give off much more CO2 than humans, plants and the oceans are currently absorbing even more CO2 than they give off. Click here for more on this. It's humans' use of fossil fuels that have thrown CO2 levels off balance, since fossil fuels have been buried for hundreds of millions of years and their carbon has been out of circulation. Right now, nature is saving us from more extreme climate change than we're currently experiencing, because the oceans and plants are absorbing excess CO2. However, we're still emitting CO2 faster than natural sources can absorb it, increasing the greenhouse effect and causing climate change.

I know there are people reading this blog! (Don't worry, I don't know who you are unless you've told me, and I certainly won't share your personal info.) But all of us reading would love to hear from you--your questions, your thoughts, your ideas about climate change and what we can do about it. Thanks so much for all your support!
Stay cool,
Bonney

A Great Day, and More Work To Do

Thanks to all those who participated in the planet's most widespread day of political action ever- with over 5,200 events in 181 countries! There was scant to no mainstream media coverage of Santa Fe's action involving 350 people, but there was a huge amount of coverage worldwide, including front-page stories in the New York Times and International Herald Tribune and top stories on Google News and CNN World online. Thanks to Barbara Wold for coverage on her blog Democracy for New Mexico. Organizers posted photos to 350.org from Papua New Guinea to New Jersey, Botswana to Brooklyn, Antarctica to China. Go see them--they're amazing and inspiring! And if you haven't contacted your Senators to demand the strongest climate legislation they can deliver, click here to do that. See my Aug. 28 post for more info.

Now, back to refuting myths, which I started in my Oct. 16 post. Myth #2: CO2 is not a major cause of climate change. Ads on TV and sites on the Internet proclaim this myth. But that's just what it is, a myth.

Fact: According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (an international group of climate scientists established by the UN Environment Program and the World Meteorological Organization), "Most of the observed increase in global average temperatures since the mid-20th century is very likely due to the observed increase in anthropogenic greenhouse gas concentrations." CO2 is the most important greenhouse gas, according to the IPCC and many other sources. If you're worried about the phrase "very likely," realize that the IPCC has a reputation for being conservative, because it can only report what all its many scientist from all over the world agree on.

Fact: The US National Academy of Sciences along with 10 other national science academies proclaimed in 2005 that the evidence for human-caused global warming is strong enough for governments to take rapid action.

Fact: 97% of US climate scientists surveyed agree that human activity has been a significant factor in rising average global temperatures.
Send us your thoughts and
Stay cool,
Bonney