- Since humans arrived on this planet, our weather has been relatively stable, allowing us to create systems that have defined our lives, our sustenance, our cultures, our habitats, all of which are dependent upon climate stability. If the foundational piece of all societies cracks, it will be, by far, the greatest human rights issue ever. When there is an emergency, it’s ALL HANDS ON DECK! - Editor

- While some are very depressed over the Senate’s failure, a minority longing for real action hope that this will open the door to a new approach that is free of the heavily biased giveaways in this bill. Let’s all unite on a simple carbon tax, an end to petroleum subsidies, and support for renewables and efficiency.  We are dreamers but we’re “not the only ones.”- Editor
We’re Gonna Be Sorry By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
Senate Democrats abandoned the effort to pass an energy/climate bill that would begin to cap greenhouse gases that cause global warming and promote renewable energy that could diminish our addiction to oil. I could blame Republicans for the fact that not one G.O.P. senator indicated a willingness to vote for a bill that would put the slightest price on carbon. I could blame the Democratic senators who were also waffling. I could blame President Obama for his disappearing act on energy and spending more time reading the polls than changing the polls. I could blame the Chamber of Commerce and the fossil-fuel lobby for spending bags of money to subvert this bill. But the truth is, the public, confused and stressed by the last two years, never got mobilized to press for this legislation. We will regret it.
We’ve basically decided to keep pumping greenhouse gases into Mother Nature’s operating system and take our chances that the results will be benign - even though a vast majority of scientists warn that this will not be so. Fasten your seat belts. As the environmentalist Rob Watson likes to say: “Mother Nature is just chemistry, biology and physics. That’s all she is.” You cannot sweet-talk her. You cannot spin her. You cannot tell her that the oil companies say climate change is a hoax. No, Mother Nature is going to do whatever chemistry, biology and physics dictate, and “Mother Nature always bats last, and she always bats 1.000,” says Watson. Do not mess with Mother Nature. But that is just what we’re doing.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/25/opinion/25friedman.html

- Protecting the brains of our future generation needs to be a primary goal of any sane society. When you study child development and IQ’s, it is astonishing what even a few IQ points mean. Our society values mere dollars- if it’s cheaper, it’s better. Again the equation needs to place a reasonable price on IQ points to show a truer picture. Lose of IQ points alone should end coal. And what about other health impacts, with these reproductive and developmental toxicants, mutagens, and carcinogens? - Editor

If you want smarter kids, shut coal plants
A major new study by the Columbia Center for Children’s Environmental Health finds:
“Closing coal-fired power plants can have a direct, positive impact on children’s cognitive development and health….prenatal exposure to coal-burning emissions was associated with significantly lower average developmental scores and reduced motor development at age two. In the second unexposed group, these adverse effects were no longer observed; and the frequency of delayed motor developmental was significantly reduced.
For the report- http://ehp03.niehs.nih.gov/article/fetchArticle.action?articleURI=info:doi/10.1289/ehp.11480
http://climateprogress.org/2008/07/15/study-if-you-want-smarter-kids-shut-coal-plants/
(The book cover is not real but should be!)

- We all have idols, and last week, I got to listen to one of mine. It was partly the ground-breaking Club of Rome work that influenced me away from my intended career and on to population, environment, and climate change. With such an important message, why weren’t all the City decision makers there at the talk? How do we get other cities to listen? Dr. Meadows had read our Sustainable Santa Fe Plan- great! - and while he congratulated us on its importance and value, he said that if population and consumption levels are not included in a climate plan, we can not become sustainable. It’s true. If we cut our emissions, for example 50%, but double the number of people, we have not become more sustainable.

For those of you who have been reading Climate Today for at least a year will not have had any surprises- his talk covered Peak Oil, population growth, the lag time of climate change, the need for local adaptation and relocalization, voluntary simplicity with reduced consumption, etc.

Here are a few gems from his talk that are worth remembering and sharing:
- 50% of all the oil consumed by humans has been consumed since 1984, creating a world we now view as normal, but this high energy usage can not continue.
- We are moving into the “Post Petroleum Age.”  In 2006, 9 billion barrels of oil were discovered, but we consumed 31 billion barrels that year. World consumption of oil is currently 5 to 6 times the amount that is being discovered, so we are using up our savings account, which can not continue.
- Prepare yourself for less available energy. It appears now that the government in the coming years will have to resort to some kind of rationing or quotas, similar to World War II. Just raising prices harms the poor.
- The “biocapacity” of the earth has been surpassed, and we are currently overshooting, which, if continues, is always followed by collapse. We are now consuming 140% of resources with demands accelerating against the world’s ecosystems. These trends include not only fossil fuels but also groundwater, greenhouse gases, the destruction of agricultural soils, the degradation of natural resources, the gap between the rich and the poor, the supply of fish, etc.
- Embodied energy is the energy used to create and ship the things that we import. We have to fully recognize the energy and resources used in other places like China if we are to reach sustainability.
- The world’s population will be going back down this century. It is only a matter of how.
- It is unlikely that waiting for the Federal government will work. Politicians want to get re-elected, and therefore fail to make the essential significant structural changes required to convert to sustainability.
Thank you Dr. Meadows for speaking so frankly. - Editor

Dennis Meadows probably doesn’t mean to be a downer at a cocktail party. But the researcher, who has spent decades studying Earth’s capacity to endure human population growth and extractive economies, says we’ve run out of time to turn around our global version of the Titanic.
Call him a realist. “We’re not talking about problems our grandchildren will have to deal with. We’re talking problems we’ll deal with in the next three to five years,” said Meadows, professor emeritus at the University of New Hampshire and winner of the 2009 prize for original and outstanding achievements from the Science and Technology Foundation of Japan. Meadows thinks humans can adapt to what is around the corner, such as higher fuel costs and warmer weather. Rebuilding local food supplies, living within an area’s existing water resources and producing energy locally from renewable sources are all ways communities can prepare for what’s ahead, he said.
Meadows and colleagues from the Club of Rome, a think tank focused on global challenges, produced a report in 1972 called “The Limits of Growth.” Their research concluded humans and their economies would outstrip the earth’s resources if growth wasn’t limited.
They updated the report in 2004 and found that on a planet-wide scale, humans hadn’t made much progress on saving the Earth’s resources. “We’ve seen so much population growth and industrial growth that we’re worse off then we were 20 years ago,” Meadows said. Now, it is too late to stop climate change, he believes. “Even if you lower CO2 emission to zero, we’re still going to see climate change from existing emissions for hundreds of years.” For people in general, it means learning to live well on less, he said - less energy, less water, less stuff.
http://www.santafe.edu/news/item/researcher-talks-climate-change/
For an 8 minute video that is not as clear as his 1 ½ hour talk but gives a flavor- http://www.theoildrum.com/node/6209

- I went to the cohousing conference Sustainability through Community (www.cohousing.org/2010/overview) in Boulder this past weekend since my work and heart are in sustainability, and I live in cohousing. It was gratifying to hear the plenary speakers have a clear view of just how much and how fast we need to change to save our planet. The new element was how to relate this urgency to cohousing. When people visit our Commons cohousing, they ohh and ahh over its lovely landscaping and how adorable it is that the kids are constantly having a blast. Yet, the potential is far deeper. We who live here know the value of sharing resources such as tools and Common House, but now we must probe deeper into “Waking Up from the American Dream.”

Kids thriving in cohousing

 
The first speaker was David Wann (http://www.davewann.com/), who gave an articulate explanation of voluntary simplicity, begging us not to “Drop the Egg that Belongs to the Future.” He’s coming out with a book in January- The New Normal: Agenda for a Healthy Planet, but his other books are excellent, too. For cohousing, his vision is to have cohousing become political- as examples of a more sustainable lifestyle, we need members on City Councils, we need to be activists, “converting shame to pride.” The psychological and social aspects of shared living can replace the emptiness of the mainstream American lifestyle that relies on consumption rather than social connectedness. Get him to come speak at your conferences- you won’t regret it.

Conference Chart- the US has 2% of the world’s oil resources, yet we use 25% of the oil.
Do we want to continue this? Think of the dolphins and turtles that are dying. 

Two and a half days of speakers and sessions revealed so much. How to reduce energy- new cohousing is creating net zero energy buildings- no need to wait for 2030! Older ones can use DER- Deep Energy Retrofits. One cohousing estimates that their energy savings have saved $720,000 in energy bills! One family used only 1 tank of gas in an entire year in part because the resources they needed were right there!  How to reduce waste- composting, fun clothing swaps, shared resources, permanent give-away bins, etc. How to eat locally- community gardens, a CSA on your own land, strong ties with coops and nearby CSA’s, a formal commitment to eat organically, and more. You have never wanted to plant potatoes? Well, when your community is having a “Cinco de Mayo” potato planting party, with chips, salsa, beer and music- you won’t want to miss the fun party!  And get the job done amidst laughter and camaraderie!

There is no doubt that cohousing has the potential to become powerful incubators of “The New Normal” where less is more, used is great, sharing is better than possessing, growing food, seeing solar panels and clothes lines are the norm, eating with your friends regularly means walking a few yards, having no more babysitting worries- and more! Even outside of cohousing, we all need to replace our unprecedented material expectations with healthy psychological bonds.  - Editor

- Just in case you aren’t mad enough at Big Oil. The statistics are frightening- we are losing ground on the percentage of people who believe climate change is real and caused by human actions. - Editor

Oil company behind effort to teach climate skepticism in Colorado
A group called Balanced Education for Everyone is backing an effort to force the Mesa County, Colorado, school board to mandate school instruction of the “other side” of the so-called debate about global warming, in what may be a national test case on how global warming is taught. A failed candidate for the school board, 32-year old attorney and Tea Party activist, Rose Pugliese - working with the support of Balanced Education for Everyone - presented the board with one petition demanding that global warming not be taught and, ironically, another demanding that political views be kept out of the classroom. The Balanced Education for Everyone website features an ad for the vendetta documentary, Not Evil Just Wrong, and advocates use of the film to teach the “truth” about global warming. So much for balance.

But, wait, there’s more! BEE is a project of the Independent Women’s Forum, which, in turn, is an arm of the Americans For Prosperity Foundation; Americans for Prosperity is an industry front group that reportedly gets most of its funding from oil companies.
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/blogs/green/detail?entry_id=64501

- Having spent years with UNESCO struggling over ways to influence rural villages in remote locations in different countries, I know it is not easy. Dealing with climate adaptation isn’t easy, either. Here’s a project where movies showing people’s solutions even from across the world to similar climate problems can increase awareness and motivation to face adaptation. - Editor
 

Movies that save lives
More intense and more frequent floods, droughts and storms generated by the unfolding impact of climate change are hitting millions of people, especially in rural areas in developing countries, yet many are unaware of the growing danger because climate change is hard to understand, and even fewer are prepared to deal with it. On the other hand, humanitarian organizations and governments have piloted several successful projects to help vulnerable rural farmers adapt to a future characterised by bad-tempered weather. Pablo Suarez, associate director of the International Red Cross and Red Crescent Climate Centre, commented that it was not “feasible to dispatch technical experts to every location with poor people threatened by climate risks”.

During a workshop in Mozambique some years ago the Red Cross discovered that small-scale farmers were highly receptive to audiovisual presentations showing other small-scale farmers applying solutions and adapting to similar conditions. In 2000 the Mozambican farmers were affected by devastating floods that killed 700 people, followed by two dry spells that ravaged their crops. The Red Cross told the farmers about climate change, but they were not entirely convinced. “Like everybody else, I thought it was God punishing us, and we can’t do much about it,” said one of the women farmers at the workshop. The Red Cross then played a video of a similar workshop in a flood-prone shantytown in Argentina. “But now in the film I see that white women at the other end of the world have the same problem we have! So maybe it is true that the global rainfall is changing, and … I can do something about it.” She is now considering growing crops more suited to changing weather patterns.
http://www.reliefweb.int/rw/rwb.nsf/db900SID/EGUA-84FSJX?OpenDocument
From Kenya and the reactions to pastoralists to climate change-  http://www.irinnews.org/Report.aspx?ReportId=88815

- People ask us to get specific all the time- what temperatures, what changes, and when. The when and where is impossible except in broad terms, making detailed planning a challenging nightmare. Now the U.S. government has a plan to use the world’s most powerful computer to get specific, and grants to researchers are being offered. It’s important that the Dept. of Ag is involved, too. Some of our readers will want to check Earth System Models (“EASM”) out! - Editor
Can Climate Models Predict Global Warming’s Direct Effects in Your City?
Nobody lives in the global average climate. Now the National Science Foundation (NSF), along with the U.S. Energy and Agriculture departments are teaming up to financially support the development of new computer models aimed at revealing the anticipated effects of climate change at the regional level. “The impacts of climate change are becoming more immediate and profound than anticipated,” NSF Director Arden Bement said. “We must be able to predict how climate change will impact regions in the next 10 to 20 years.” A big part of the effort will rely on advances in computer power; the Department of Energy (DoE) now hosts the world’s most powerful supercomputer at its Oak Ridge National Laboratory. Such computers will help scientists to improve both the time and spatial scales of their models. “We love to be able to go exoscale -another 1,000 times faster and bigger.” “Producers of food will need to know what to expect in the future to be ready for the kinds of changes that are anticipated,” said Department of Agriculture chief scientist, Roger Beachy. “We are concerned about the impact on our ability to grow food.” We need to have the data before we embark on big policy changes.
For a rather dull video explaining the project and its grant opportunities- http://www.nsf.gov/news/news_images.jsp?cntn_id=116602&org=NSF ;
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=climate-models-predict-global-warming-effects-in-cities

- We will not solve nor adapt to the climate problem without major changes in our massive out-of-balance food systems. When Michelle heard from the family doctor her children might be at risk, she took successful action away from the poor food norms of today and realized she needed to focus on the bigger picture. Good news!! - Editor
 

First lady meets with lawmakers on child obesity
First lady Michelle Obama invited a bipartisan group of lawmakers and Cabinet members to the White House Tuesday to help firm up plans for her national campaign against childhood obesity. The meeting signaled the first lady’s intent to be involved not just in talking about the problem, but in crafting specific solutions. The first lady plans to release specifics of her “ground-up” plan to fight child obesity next week, including steps to encourage schools to promote healthy eating, increase physical activity for kids, improve families’ access to healthy foods and give parents better information about healthy choices. Almost one-third of U.S. children are at least overweight, and about 17 percent are obese.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/02/02/AR2010020202334.html
and for her personal experience in needing to improve her own children’s diet and exercise-
http://www.ajc.com/news/nation-world/michelle-obama-makes-obesity-285946.html?cxntlid=daylf_artr