News from this month

August seems to be full of news on the global warming front. From today, three bits. A CNN article says Arctic sea ice expected to hit record low. This is not particularly news as it's been predicted widely, but it's one of the global warming affects we really don't want to see happen even faster than current models predict. This is one of the feedback loop problems - the more ice you have, the more sunlight reflects away from the earth, and the more ice you keep (or gain). The less ice you have...well, you get the idea. And there are a lot of feeding grounds up north for key animals in the food chain which depend on typical (cold) conditions.

There is, of course, Hurricane Dean. While we had hurricanes before global warming, they are expected to be be stronger and more frequent as they like warm water. Dean is approaching Jamaica at a category 4 as I write this, and may hit Cancun at a category 5.

And in today's PI, a more upbeat editorial called Global warming: The race is on in our state, by Joe Copeland. He lauds our leaders who have taken strong stances related to global warming and talks about Bracken Hendrick's and Jay Inslee's new book, Apollo's Fire, which according to Copeland suggests that tooling up for new, clean energy will bring up many good things - economically and for the planet. That's the attitude we need - that we can make this better.

Santa Barbara's Light Blue Line

You know how some issues get City Council halls overflowing? I've seen it happen over siting a jail in a city, over hosting a tent city, over almost anything residents are a little frightened or a little worried about. It is almost always a good thing when an idea galvanizes a community enough (pro or con) that a lively conversation ensures. Democracy at work and all that.
My dad sent me one of those from Santa Barbara, California. Now, if you've never been there, Santa Barbara is the kind of place you imagine when you think of an oceanfront utopia. It's got beautiful beaches, history, well-kept lawns, a University, an old California Mission, excellent restaurants and shopping, and growth has been managed so tightly housing costs keep most normal human beings out of town except to visit. Every time I've been there (visiting), there's been a wonderful art show on the water.
There is also now a proposal to paint a light blue line around town to show sea level after the Greenland ice-sheet melts. I think this is a brave and smart move. But like most other decisions about global warming, there are valid concerns. For example, do property values go down on the seaward side of the blue line? Will it become a tourist attraction and is that good or bad? Will it be more expensive to remove than to apply?
I'm sure it will be a conversation piece. It looks to me like a vivid reminder of what we might lose if we stay complacent. A lot of beach and a lot of a major coastal highway appear to be on the seaward side. There are pictures here.
The line is not painted yet, and I don't know if it's going to be or not - Santa Barbara is still having a conversation. I hope they do paint it, and if they do, I'll probably try to go visit. After all, Santa Barbara is one of my favorite towns anyway.
I think I can take the train.

Lake Shasta

We took a train trip from Seattle to San Louis Obispo last week. On the way, we passed by Lake Shasta. The bare reddish banks were so dry and so tall that boats looked tiny against them, and even though the lake still holds a lot of water, it looks lower than I've ever seen it. So I went out to see what other people thought once I got back to civilization and connectivity. According to this article, it's the lowest it's been in 13 years.
Now, I know it's not a given that's climate change is the main cause. But many of the commenters on the article seemed to think so. I also learned an interesting little side-note - dams emit a bunch of methane, which also a dangerous greenhouse gas.
Anyway - I really like the lake and hope it doesn't become a new normal.
Otherwise, things looked pretty healthy from a train window passing by at 50 miles an hour. That's a good thing. When you live in a busy suburb of a busy city, and spend a bunch of time flying and driving to other busy suburbs of busy cities, you forget how much open country there is. The Coast Starlight passed through a lot of very pretty land with few people. It all looked worth protecting.

Hawaii: Asking about Global Warming

I just got back from the island of Maui, in Hawaii. We enjoyed perfect weather – cool all morning because of the fabulous trade winds that blow fine mist and the scent of the sea and tropical flowers into obscure corners of the island. There were two fires in the week and a half we were there, which snarled traffic and blackened large sections of hills. Meanwhile, while we basked in cooling winds and 85 degree highs (still slightly brutal to Seattleites), the home front has had warmer and nastier days. We’ve heard on the news that major cities have been opening “cooling shelters.” This is new vocabulary for Seattleites, and I’m hopeful we won’t have to get used to it.
When I travel, I often like to ask local people about the signs of global warming. Not always scientists, but normal people, too. When my parents and I took a hiking day, we asked about the fires at the nature center on the way up to Iao point. We heard that Maui was having a drought which had already lasted over two years. Days later, I was out accompanying Katie, my partner’s ten-year-old, on a parasail ride. I asked the guys that drove the boat what signs of global warming they saw in Hawaii. They said the weather had been warm a few years, but who can tell if that’s global warming? They truly didn’t seem too concerned. Except one of them looked over just after he two people up into the clear blue sky strapped to a bright gold and green parasail. “But the one thing they say might happen to us is we could lose the trade winds.” He did look a bit afraid at that. Me too. The winds were what made Hawaii habitable, at least for us.

Resource Wars: Here Already?

I read a very scary article in the Seattle times on Friday, June 22nd, titled Experts warn Darfur is "an early warning" of climate change's effects, by ALFRED de MONTESQUIOU. I actually had to let it sink in before I was ready to post about it.

There are a lot of potential bad feedback mechanisms related to global warming. Hopefully at least some of them are overblown products of the doomsday-mad. But others seem likely. For example, sunlight melts ice in the ocean. The more ice melts, the more sun hits the water (instead of being reflected away by ice) and the warmer the water, the more the ice melts. Pretty simple, huh?

This article talks about Darfur. It suggests a few things, but some of the basic logic goes something like: The conflict started at least partly as a result of drought, which made water and wood and other necessities hard to get (this is a resource war). The conflict itself requires more resources than peaceful living, thus stripping the area even more. The more the scarce resources are used up, the less resilient the ecosystem. As the area gets hotter and drier (assuming that is the affect of climate change there), then the conflict gets worse.

And I'm using nice words like "conflict" instead of more appropriate ones like "genocide."

So we have a resource war in Iraq. We also have a resource war in Darfur. What's next? And is this same logic eventually going to apply to, say, downtown Phoenix? Let's hope that thought is one for the doomsday-mad.

But while we wait to find out, maybe we should closely at the affects of climate change on resources and make part of our mitigation plans to shift water and food and shelter where its needed.

A nice travel and carbon entry at Futurist.com

I want to point out a blog entry over at Futurist.com, where a new member of our team there, Kanna Hudson, did a nice job discussing summer travel choices and global warming.

And speaking of summer travel and global warming, I just did a day-trip to Canada on the train. Generally, it worked well. It was more expensive than driving ($80 for tickets and $20 to park; the drive would have been about $60) unless you start counting all the wear and tear on the car and the like. Maybe by then the train was about the same. The whole trip took more overall travel time, but I got some of it back: I read and napped and answered email.

Both trains left on time. The only downside was they arrived a their respective stations on time, but then it was almost an hour to actually get off the train and through customs in Vancouver, B.C., and a half hour to get off the train in Seattle for no apparent reason. Customs coming south was pretty quick.

An Interview with Kim Stanley Robinson

I've recommended Kim Stanley Robinson's trilogy about climate change (which begins with Forty Signs of Rain) for some time now. He graciously agreed to do an interview for me, which is posted at Futurist.com. He's got some thoughtful answers, and I highly recommend a visit to read them.

Through the Eyes of a Child

We pulled a tree out of the front yard last Sunday. It was a little tree - a cypress that we'd moved from one place to another when we bought the house, and which was getting too big in the new place, too. A kind of normal gardening chore during spring clean-up. We were already researching what kind of bush we might replace it with.

Well, just as I was pulling the tree out of the ground, our other car drove up, including the ten-year-old, who caught me in the act. She wailed. I immediately became a murderer. Silly me, I suggested that it was like weeding, which we all do all the time. Little did I know that a tree is, on no case, a weed (I recall weeding my farm of alders to keep pasture and to leave room for young cedars when I lived a more rural life).

Anyway, I was in trouble for the rest of the evening. Not only did I pull the tree out but I also lopped it into pieces small enough to put into the recycle bin and I didn't do any kind of ceremony to lament its passing.

But it made me remember one night in California, where I grew up, when I sat up by a favorite stand of eucalyptus trees and watched the cars go by on the interstate below. This was when the orange groves were being yielded to housing tracts at the rate of a few acres a day and drives down familiar roads lined with unfamiliar sights happened regularly. I was sitting under the eucalyptus, breathing in their sandy scent, crying for the orange groves.

Maybe we should all feel the Earth the way kids do. I know I haven't cried for trees in a long time. Maybe it's time I tried that again. After all, when I print a ream of pretty, glossy, unrecycled paper, I'm using the life of a tree.

The Seattle Times Challenge Continues: Our Report

The Seattle Times Climate Challenge continues...an encouragement for all of Puget Sound to do better. Popular columnist Nicole Brodeur reported out today. She's starting where we started - way too much carbon usage.
We're still there. I'd have to say we're energy pigs. We own two cars and drive them both most days. We travel. We have more computers than people and tons of devices.
We're changing, but slowly.
Things we've done across the last year include taking the bus to work at least once a week every week we can (we often have to go to more than one place across a work day), switching to an environmentally friendly dry-cleaner, installing fluorescent bulbs in some lights, buying terrapasses to offset airline travel, and trying to plan trips to reduce driving. We bought new energy efficient windows (we needed windows anyway). We did do a few things for Earth Day, too. We signed up for the green power program at PSE which lets us pay more for power and supports PSE as they buy green power or invest in building green power plants (kind of like a more focused terrapass). We bought a new washer and dryer and they coincidentally got delivered on Earth Day. We chose the Whirlpool Duet, and then had to paint the laundry room since an empty room demands paint. We picked an eco friendly paint from Benjamin Moore. $56 a gallon.
We've been doing good. But not good enough.
The paint is symbolic for our choices (a gallon of bad-for-the-world paint would be half that price or less). We've been throwing money at the problem. That's good , and something we can do to a limited extent, although we've got to finish paying for the windows before we do anything else big. It sort of feels like middle-class reaction.
We might have to actually do something harder soon to keep getting better.

Happy Earth Day

Hey mom! It’s spring, and really pretty outside. Thanks for the flowering cherry trees I can see outside my window, and the tender little vine maples with the slenderest of new leaves just now uncurling from wherever they slept the winter away. Thanks for my dogs barking in the backyard, running and playing and wagging their tails. Thanks for the bright and unlikely-to-actually-rain-today clouds of a Northwest spring.
Thanks for my friends and my family and the art on my wall. It’s all of a piece, and if I can just stay in the moment I can see that.
Oh...and thanks for the bring purple tulips and the fifteen colors of green in a single tree outside.
P.S. Thanks for the beam of sunshine.

Seared Ground

I'm in Lake Chelan, Washington, at a business meeting. Through a variety of odd linkages, that resulted in my visiting with two cowboy poets in the bar last night. They're real cowboys, the kind of men that lead strings of horses and mules up into the roadless North Cascades.

I asked them about global warming and climate change. First, they didn't question it at all. These are men that know the land and the trees and the snow pack and the migration of animals like I know stop signs and walking trails and urban dog parks.

So I asked them, "All right, what's the biggest danger for you? What do you see up there in the wild?"

They worried most about fire. There are a bark-beetle killed trees (bark-beetle habitat is changing - I think spruce worms is the other term I've heard) which they say will burn like torches. Combine that with the way the forest has been managed for people instead of for the sake of the forest itself; we have too much underbrush, too many years fire hasn't neatly scored out the deadfall. They said the fires are so hot now they sterilize the ground. They told me a tale of a government-sponsored program to truck in straw - bales and bales and bales of pale-yellow straw - and use helicopters to spread it across the seared earth in hopes that it will slow erosion and decompose enough to allow grass to grow again in a few years. They said that without the straw, all of the places touched by the too-hot fire wouldn't grow anything for a decade or more.

Seattle Times Challenges us to Reduce Carbon Footprint

With Earth Day coming, the Seattle Times spent a lot of expensive Sunday paper ink talking about how to reduce the average family's carbon footprint. Kudos to them. Read the online article, or better yet, buy a copy of the paper which has a great colored pull-out on the topic.

Paving Paradise

I didn't make it out to any of the Step it Up protests today, but I did get out for an after-dinner walk with the dog. We did some cloud-watching as the evening burnished the bottoms of the clouds with gold and yet still lit the very tops brilliant white.

During dinner, we had been talking with a friend of ours who wants to be a Red Cross worker after she retires, and is already looking into how to get the right training. It seems like a good idea: climate change almost certainly means climate chaos (after all, why should the climate take to change any better than we do?). I mean, really. Hailstones as big as fists landed in Dallas and late spring snow fell all across the southern plains this week, followed by violent thunderstorms.

But back to cloud watching. I grew up in the 60's and 70's, and I like a lot of that music. I have what I call a "green mix" on my ipod that I put together for an event about ecologically sound choices. So by pure coincidence, I ended up walking across a wide swath of wetland/open space that Nintendo has posted permits to build on while listening to Joni Mitchell's "Big Yellow Taxi" - you know, the one about paving paradise with parking lots. I was singing it, too, really loudly, and Nixie, our golden retriever, was walking in front of me with her tail wagging to the beat. A few songs later, back on the main street, John Denver crooned through "Rocky Mountain High."

These songs were seeds of change.

We've been working on these same issues for forty years. We've made a little progress.

The last song in my Mix is "Imagine" by John Lennon. If you know those lyrics, that's what we need to do now.

Step it Up Seattle

There is a large linked global warming event coming on April 14th (This Saturday). Called Step it Up, the idea is to gather and promote actions to mitigate global warming. Sort of green protests if you will. Find one near you at www.stepitup2007.org. I'm quite heartened to see there are a LOT of events planned for the Pacific Northwest. In fact, the map looks a lot like the red/blue voting map, only for this saturday, the coasts are bright green and the interirior is dotted with green, mostly in the major cities.

I may have to miss, but I hope that these are well attended.

More Web Resources

I came across a great web resource the other day -- idealbite.com. You can sign up to have tips emailed to you daily. The idea behind it seems to be that for many of us, if we just knew what to do, we'd do it. I did sign up, and the emails I've gotten for three days so far now have been useful reminders, and I learned a few new things. Worth the time. Hasn't resulted in any excess spam so far. I like it!

And for a more complex site you can get to a lot of research documents from, try climate solutions.

I also got an email from a fellow that's just starting to do a wiki about sustainable goals. It's pretty empty right now - think of it as a clean slate you can go help him write on! The url is www.sgoals.net.

Little Mirrors

There is an article running around the web and in the papers with a bunch of far-out scientific ideas for global warming mitigation...adding iron to the sea, making artificial trees, having a man-made volcano. One of these ideas, out of the University of Arizona, is called a space-launched solar umbrella and is made up of a bunch of mirrors that reflect some of the sunlight away from the earth.
The first science fiction story I published was a collaboration with the very brilliant Larry Niven called "Ice and Mirrors." In that story, published in Asimov's Science Fiction in February 2001, Larry and I have evil aliens use the same exact device to freeze a planet. The idea for the mirrors was Larry's (all this was shortly after Kim Stanley Robinson wrote his Red/Green/Blue Mars series that had a single big mirror called a "soletta" warming Mars and so the idea may have kind of come from that - I really don't remember).
It feels kind of like Star Trek communicators and cell phones....maybe we'll get weather control from space using little mirrors. A great example of the way science and science fiction play well with each other.

A Night Walk with Frogs

I walked up to the local 7-11 last night. It was, sort of, raining. We have a particular kind of soft rain in the northwest that seems like tiny drops just hanging like a thin curtain in the air. Not falling, just making sure everything is properly wet. This walk is along 148th street, four lanes with turn-outs and traffic lights, past the entrance to Microsoft's Red-West campus, past a municipal golf course, and a large wetland Nintendo keeps claiming they'll build on. In simpler terms, it's a big, busy concrete street with a lot of wet stuff on either side, and wet stuff hanging in the air.
There was a chorus playing almost the whole way. An uncountable number of frogs reveling in the warming wet air and singing in the dark. Living with the concrete and the cars and singing. I realize this is anthropomorphizing, but they sounded quite happy.
This is what we risk. The happiness of frogs. They are a bit of a bellwether species, and while I can't see the poor thin polar bears, I can hear the frogs.
I keep seeing the words mass extinction associated with global warming, and I suspect it's because the change is too fast. Evolution likes change, just not change moving at the speed of a big SUV barrelling down 148th, threatening the frogs.
I think I'll try to listed to the frogs as often as possible this year.

Kim Stanley Robinson

I'm reading the next book in Kim Stanley Robinson's series on climate change, SIXTY DAYS AND COUNTING. He's really very, very good. This is a series of fiction books that outlines a possible scenario for climate change. The scary part is that the books talks about many of the things brought up today in a CNN article about the affects of climate change. I know KSR does his homework - I read his series about terraforming Mars and then did a bunch of actual research on terraforming to prepare for writing BUILDING HARLEQUIN'S MOON with Larry Niven. KSR had clearly used the same base research we found (a book by Martin Fogg and a bunch of articles by various people). So it didn't surprise me to find that his science fiction is mimicking the real world rather well.
I highly recommend the series. In fact, I highly recommend that you either read KSR's whole trilogy or you read the CNN article and think about it hard, or you do both. :)

Earthweek: Australia Thinking like Terraformers

This week's Earthweek has a little blurb mentioning that Australia is trying to create an "escape corridor," or a place where animals can migrate to different habitats freely without having to pass through major cities.
The science fiction writer in me kinda likes that idea. When we write about terraforming (changing a planet to make it more habitable) we often consider that humans will have a major role in gardening new species/helping earth species adapt.
Perhaps we will need to also take a hand in helping species survive the current warming period.

I had to quote this

From an article by Robert Lee Holtz, for the Los Angeles Times and also printed in today's Seattle Times:
"Based on two years of study, the scientists called for dramatic actions ranging from carbon taxes and a ban on conventional coal-fired plants to an end to all beachfront construction worldwide."

It's the last few words that king of emphasize yesterday's post.