Deteriorating carbon sinks

Ocean acidification is reducing the effectiveness of the oceanic carbon sink. We knew this, but now we have a new, better data set and a better explanatory model.



http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/19/science/earth/19oceans.html?hpw


and

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v462/n7271/full/nature08526.html

New EV program touted

I would like an EV, and had I the time, I might have made one like my buddy and colleague Tom Gocze of Hot and Cold TV fame.

But the next best thing would be to trade in our 1999 Nissan on a 2010 Nissan Plug-in Hybrid and get a serious tax break for early adoption.

Read about it here.

Key oil figures deliberately inflated

This article for Environmental Sustainability, for our discussion of oil depletion.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/nov/09/peak-oil-international-energy-agency

Religious environmentalism and how ideas change

Photo: We attended an Amish wind turbine raising in Unity Maine, on Wednesday. These home-built turbines, which make compressed air, not electricity, may soon be made illegal by several local towns. Do the Amish have a different mental model of energy and sustainability than the rest of American society? Does their religion affect the way they think about energy?



Three news items sent me to the bookshelf to pull down my PhD dissertation (on the potential effects of American religious environmentalism) and re-read the conclusion.

This was, I admit, a moment of pure academic self-gratification.

The Queen has been hosting world religious leaders at Windsor to discuss climate change responses. Al Gore, albeit expectedly, has released his new book on climate change, setting forth the religious and moral imperative for action. And Tim Nicholson, a young fellow in Britain, won the right to have his discrimination case heard in court against the firm that allegedly fired him for his religious environmental beliefs.

I told my thesis advisors and the small crowd that attended my dissertation defense in 2002 that religious environmentalism would be important one day.

"I told you so," gets you nowhere in life, particularly with your spouse.

Lately I've been interested in the number of people around me, and in the public arena, to whom I might have said this, were I less than diplomatic, and if I could.

Which has led me to more useful and productive thoughts about ideas and leadership and how people's ideas of how important systems in the world work change over time, also a topic of my thesis. It helps that I currently have a class, my Environmental Citizen "Build a Barn" class, to whom I am supposed to teach about such things.

One of my dissertation advisors, Willett Kempton of the College of Earth, Ocean, and Environment at the University of Delaware, wrote a rather decent book about Environmental Values in American Culture, still in print, which I used a good deal in my thesis.

Kempton, et al, hypothesized a relationship between people's actions on the environment and the mental models they held of environmental processes. "Mental models" are the explanations for phenomena that ordinary people use to understand complex systems and make decisions. The weather is a good example. Few folk are weather forecasters, but we must all make decisions about what to do based on what the weather will do. Anticipating good or bad weather can make or break a picnic or a wedding, or even, especially in Maine, make a mundane daily commute a huge challenge.

So most of us have a mental model of what the weather does in our region and walk around daily applying this model, making decisions about what to do. We get a lot of help from experts, of course, the forecasters on the TV or radio or these day the Internet.

But they can't make decisions for us. We have to do that.

So in Maine, the accuracy of your mental model of the difference between driving in the dark on the freeway in light powder snow versus heavy fluffy snow, when all the forecast said was "one to two inches of snow," may make a big difference. Knowing whether the snow that was forecast was likely to be light and powdery or wet and fluffy, based on your model and based on other factors like the air temperature, the direction of the storm, the wind, the itch in your big toe, is important to your life. However rational or irrational, if your mental model works for you or at least seems to work, you will cleave to it.

Many folks, possibly an increasing number, are still walking around thinking climate change will not affect them. And they are cleaving to this model. This disinterest, plus the recession, interference with the health care debate and the debate over the war in Afghanistan, have scuttled American progress on a climate bill for a while, and thus the Copenhagen conference.

Others, particularly our local anti-wind activists, are deciding that green energy is not for them, based on mental models, often somewhat mistaken, about how much climate change will affect the countryside they seek to protect, how much they will be affected by energy shortages, the amount of noise wind turbines make, their efficacy in actually reducing climate emissions, their cost-effectiveness, and mostly, how ugly they are.

And boy are they ever cleaving. Just ask our local selectors.

Once people have a model and become stuck to it, it is hard to change, however much evidence may pile up to the contrary.

As a degree-trained scientist and social scientist, I'm supposed to be good at changing my mind. We PhDs are beaten fairly soundly with the sticks of assumption-questioning and premise-challenging as we come through the gauntlet of highest academia.

This may not be good: we become like the proverbial two rabbis with three opinions on an issue between them. But at least we can change our minds.

Sometimes.

The religious ideas mentioned in the three articles are interesting to me as a scientist and a social scientist because they demonstrate the way that certain more reflective fields of discourse in society have a rare ability to change mental models and thus the minds of the people that hold them. It's hard to think of religion as one such field.

We tend to think of the mainstream world religions as things with timeless creeds, but the best religious organizations act more like philosophical think tanks for ordinary people, asking questions about moral behavior and trying to answer them while staying within the confines of the tradition, whether Talmudic, Biblical or Koranic.

This is definitely a better guide to right action than utilitarianism, whether of the capitalist libertarian sort, or the socialist welfare-maximizing sort.

Both, in the their time, have reduced people to slavery and could happily do so again. So for that matter have the three Abrahamic religions, and at least some followers of one of these seek to do it again.

But I think the mainstream religions do make a solid contribution to societal discourse, and I think Gore is right to suggest that climate change is a biq question for God.

The new scientific information about the planet's climate is a huge challenge to the various mental models we have of the good human society. If we live on a planet that can switch into an ice age or into a superheated phase more or less at will (or at least driven by Milankovitch cycles), where is God in that, and how does he want humans to live?

As a scientist and as a Quaker I don't generally expect God to tell me this. I expect to have to figure it out for myself, using rational thought, my own conscience, and above all, moments of quiet refection in which the most brutal self-honesty can move to the surface of consciousness. This particular praxis, to my mind, of careful reflection, marks the best, and hardest to implement, idea of my adopted tradition.

But I know most other religions feel a deep need to know what God wants them to do.

I do hope they figure it out soon.

NYT graphical analysis of unemployment

We'll have to discuss employment and related issues like unions soon in Introduction to Economics and Economic Criticism. When we do, this graphic will be interesting to study.

Reduce, Reuse, Recycle, Repurpose; In Our Backyard

Via Stef 06 at the DEP.

With this greatest of recessions not showing any signs of letting up - at least for those of us not riding golden parachutes out of the collapsing financial industry - many people are turning away from the consumerist free-for-all and are instead making do with what they have and taking stuff that’s already out there in the world and giving it new life.

Unlike recycling, which breaks an item down to its component parts and makes it into something new (e.g. shredding newspapers and mixing them in the pulp to make new paper), or reusing, which doesn’t generally involve a modification of the reused object, repurposing takes something that’s out there already and changes it into something new and useful, without shredding or melting it back into raw material.

Repurposing has found a cozy niche among those who sew.  The internet abounds with instructions for wearable art made by dismantling old T-shirts and reassembling them into skirts, headbands or grocery bags, quilts, toddler pants, baby hats and more.  Vintage bed sheets offer up another treasure trove of colorful, ecological and cheap fabric for a myriad of projects from pajama bottoms and clothespin bags to picnic blankets and bath mats.  A trip to the nearest thrift shop (or your own closet) could easily yield enough material for all of your holiday crafting projects.
Not handy with a needle and thread?  A quick internet search reveals a number of ways of repurposing obsolete computer accessories - CDs decoupaged and made into coasters, CD cases turned into picture frames, and even a CD spindle turned into a bagel-carrier (technically this last is reusing but too clever to leave out). 

Have extra building materials lying around (along with a few tools and some carpentry know-how)?  You can turn a block of wood into a toothbrush holder, two pallets into a deck chair, five gallon buckets into a fence.  If your returnable bin is overflowing with bottles from a beverage of the grape variety, they can be combined with scrap wood and turned into modular shelving units that will attract attention.
If you got an A-plus in cut-and-paste, there are dozens of ways for you to repurpose paper projects.  Crafters have dismantled vintage children’s books, too damaged to be read, and made them into greeting cards or glued the illustrated pages onto vintage suitcases and metal buckets.  Magazine pages can be turned into light fixtures, bowls and picture frames. 

No matter what your skill set, there is a repurposing project out there to suit your needs.  Just hop on your favorite search engine and enter the words “repurpose” (or “recycle” or “upcycle”) and either the materials you are hoping to use up, or the final product you hope to create.  For those of you who haven’t felt the economic pinch, but want to show off your green credentials, hundreds of artists and craftspeople ply their repurposed wares online, ready for you to contribute to the greening of the earth and to their own personal economic recovery.

This column was submitted by Andrea Lani, an Environmental Specialist with the Maine DEP Bureau of Air Quality.  In Our Back Yard is a weekly column of the Maine Department of Environmental Protection.

Indoor air quality

Via Stef '06 at the DEP:

In Our Back Yard; Cleaning Up Indoor Air
 
Will an air purifier help me?
 
Many people these days are worried about the quality of air in their homes or offices.  Many of these people try to make their air better with air purifiers or air cleaners.  Unfortunately, this may not help.  Here’s why.
 
Many air purifiers or air cleaners are really ozone generators.  These usually claim they “make your air smell as fresh as after a spring rain.”  Some advertise they “clean your air with ions,” or that “charged plates pull the particles from your air.”  The idea of these devices is that they either cause the pollutants in the air to become oxidized (and theoretically less harmful); or they make the contaminants become electrically charged so they will stick to ‘charged plates,’ filters, or anything else that can have a static electrical charge- like a TV screen, walls, carpet, or hair.
 
As the name says, ozone generators make ozone, which everyone knows is harmful when made by pollution outdoors.  The ozone from air cleaners/purifiers is the same ozone, but is made by an electrical charge instead of a chemical reaction.  It takes a lot of ozone to “clean” the pollutants out of indoor air, but it does not take too much ozone to hurt people.  This means that an air cleaner/purifier that ‘cleans’ the air is making enough ozone to be harmful, and one that doesn’t harm people doesn’t really ‘clean’ the air.  A side effect of using ozone to clean the air is that the by-products made when ozone reacts with things in air are often more dangerous than the original pollutant.
 
So what should you do?  The best thing to do is reduce or remove the source of your air quality problem.  For many people, it means cleaning your house differently or with different products.  For example, use better vacuum cleaner bags, which don’t let as much dirt and dust escape when vacuuming.  This means buying the packages of 3 bags for $10, instead of the packages of 10 bags for $3.  Damp mop the floor instead of sweeping, to keep dust down.  Use cleaning products that advertise low fumes, or no fragrance, because the fumes and smells can bother people.  Mold problem?  Find and fix the water problem that let the mold grow, then remove the mold or mold-contaminated materials.  Stop mold from starting by drying up water leaks, spills, etc. in less than 48 hours.  Not sure what the problem is?  Play detective.  The source of many problems is not too hard to find.  It is usually easier to stop the problem than it is to deal with it once it happens.
 
If you feel you really need an air cleaner, consider one that only filters air.  And make sure you change the filters!  For more information on air purifiers, or how to find what your air quality problem might be, go to this federal Environmental Protection Agency website at http://www.epa.gov/iaq/, or the Maine Indoor Air Quality Council at www.miaqc.org .
 
This column was originally submitted in 2003 by Bob Stilwell, the Radon Section Leader at Maine CDC.  In Our Back Yard is a weekly column of the Maine Department of Environmental Protection.