Talks Thurs and Fri eve - Steingraber on "Living Downstream" , Mach on climate & Calif's vulnerability

We've got two upcoming talks this Thurs and Fri eve - Sandra Steingraber ("Living Downstream") on Thurs, then Katharine Mach on the IPCC, climate change & California's vulnerability (snowpack, water...) on Friday.
 Steingraber had this piece in Orion last fall.

Which U.S. congressional candidates support ending the $12b/yr taxpayer subsidies to fossil fuel industry?

Positions of our district's House and Senate candidates and incumbents (and their opponents), in response to queries by email and web form:  (last edited 2012-05-25 pm)

Contact info for Aanestad, Arrowsmith or Dacquisto?

Update: Never mind, this post is moot.  (Three cheers for the League of Women Voters, for their smartvoter.org website.)

I've emailed or otherwise contacted all the other U.S. congressional candidates on our Nevada County ballots, asking whether they'd support the Sanders/Ellison "End Polluter Welfare Act" bill to stop the roughly $12 billion/year in taxpayer-funded subsidies to fossil fuel companies.

But I am not finding the email or other contact info for Aanestad, Arrowsmith and Dacquisto.

Great voter guide in yesterday's Sac Bee

For the June 5 elections, California has implemented redistricting and a top-two primary, where - except for presidential candidates - you can vote for anyone who's running, regardless of party, and the two candidates with the most votes, also regardless of party, advance to the general election.  There's a great article by Torey Van Oot in the  dead-tree Bee explaining all this, but it doesn't appear to be online among the race and candidate profiles - and  what is there is said to be optimized for mobile, i.e. not for readers who want to see the whole thing at a glance.

I wonder if you can pick up a used Sunday Bee for a reasonable price on EBay; this one would be worth it.

(h/t Steve Baker and/or Shawn Garvey)

"If this sounds apocalyptic, it is." - problem and solutions from James Hansen in NY Times, and solution from senators

Yesterday's New York Times has an op-ed from climatologist James Hansen on the problem and solutions, Game Over for the Climate; and Senators Bernie Sanders and Keith Ellison have introduced a bill, the End Polluter Welfare Act, that's part of the solution.

Connecting the dots, tending your acre, and revisiting the proposed "fee and dividend" carbon policy.

It was a good rally we had here on Saturday; and it was great to see that others in our community thought protecting a livable climate was worth turning out for. 

I need to get better at stressing that this is about saving the humans, since that doesn't seem to be the general perception.  Folks, you've got about an acre, which must sustain you and your descendants forever.   Good stewardship is a must.

One correction to something I said on Saturday: while it's true that acting to effectively cut greenhouse gas emissions will cost only about 10 cents per gallon of gas, that's the initial cost, which will ramp up over time - though it's moot since it's revenue-neutral (so the money collected gets returned to us anyway), plus the increase over time will be countered by cost savings, as people switch to lower-carbon or more efficient energy usage.
(updated 3pm, since the reference provided didn't back up the original example) A hypothetical example of this "switch effect"  would be state revenue from tobacco taxes declining, as people respond to the price signal and cut back on smoking.

So your "$1500" could turn out to be less (edited).   "Ask me how to make $1500 and get clean air."

Two upcoming climate events, and Reclaiming The SIerra conference with visionary keynote speech and Saturday workshops

Sat May 5's Connect the Dots, Fri May 18's climate talk, Reclaiming the Sierra conference.

From Howard Zinn

“TO BE HOPEFUL in bad times is not just foolishly romantic. It is based on the fact that human history is a history not only of cruelty, but also of compassion, sacrifice, courage, kindness. What we choose to emphasize in this complex history will determine our lives. If we see only the worst, it destroys our capacity to do something. If we remember those times and places—and there are so many—where people have behaved magnificently, this gives us the energy to act, and at least the possibility of sending this spinning top of a world in a different direction. And if we do act, in however small a way, we don’t have to wait for some grand utopian future. The future is an infinite succession of presents, and to live now as we think human beings should live, in defiance of all that is bad around us, is itself a marvelous victory.”
(link)

How grassroots and personal-carbon-footprint sustainability efforts do move us forward

I'm sure this subject has been addressed before; if you've seen a particularly good post about it, please speak up.

Earlier today I'd argued that a focus on local and personal-sized sustainability actions was something to be careful of, since it could lead people to think they had done enough, whereas policy action is the most important part of the solution.  But upon rumination, I'd like to backtrack, partly.  These local-and-personal actions do move us forward in a number of ways, IF they're consistently, repeatedly paired with communication to drum in the point that policy action is the most essential part of the solution; i.e., "just don't make the mistake of only working on these local-greening things."

Coming soon on NCTV: an episode on upcoming Connect The Dots event and its climate context

Lew, Richard and I were guests for an Occupy Nevada County TV episode publicizing our upcoming local 350.org-coordinated Connect the Dots May 5 event and climate change; we filmed it this morning.

This a.m, planning for May 5 Climate Impacts Day, on climate change & extreme weather - connect the dots

We were hugely fortunate to have Bill McKibben come here last week (Tue 17th) and speak to a packed house about global warming, and about the "global weirding" of weather that we've seen over the last several years. (If you haven't seen the talk, an edited-down version will air on NCTV, on the Occupy Nevada County program.) His most trenchant statement was essentially this:

Working to green your local community is important; just don't make the mistake of ONLY working on those things - because this won't be nearly enough to tackle the scale of the problem.

He also spoke a lot about "global weirding", the spate of wild weather that's hit our world over the last few years - record U.S. heat in March, "the French heat wave, the Chicago heat wave, the Australia heat wave, the Russian heat wave, the Texas drought"; the Pakistan and Phillipine floods...

A quick summary of 2011 [New England] weather highlights would read approximately like this:  Devastating snowstorm, devastating snowstorm, blizzard, heat wave, heat wave, torrential rains, hurricane (more torrential rains), floods, hurricane remnants (even more torrential rains), worse floods, even more devastating snowstorm—and that only takes you through October.  (link)

 The climate group that McKibben and seven Middlebury College students started, 350.org, is holding a worldwide action May 5 to stand in solidarity with communities and workers (including Vermont small farmers) impacted by this wild weather - and we in Nevada County will participate.  Our planning meeting is at 8:30 a.m. this (Sat.) morning at Sierra Mountain Coffee Roasters; and the event itself will be next Saturday afternoon, 3pm.  Stay tuned...

Why it matters

We can tangle on details of the science, but it's more important to step back and consider the risks.

See this excerpt from Elisabeth Kolbert's interview with Bill McKibben. Is it worth an extra 2 or 3% of income, to make a high-risk gamble with the only home we've got, when it's irreplaceable?

Keep in mind that uncertainty actually makes the risk picture worse.

McKibben will speak here in Nevada City next Tuesday eve (tickets at Briarpatch), and a climate speaker from the Carnegie Institution at Stanford will speak at the May 18 Sierra Club meeting.


p.s. for newbies: SkepticalScience.com is the best resource I know of for checking out the science bearing on contrarian climate claims.

Lakes and oceans, from xkcd

Source: http://xkcd.com/1040/

Hottest March, hottest 12 months on record for contiguous U.S.; with inaction, expect much more.

March temperatures were "as much as 15 degrees F hotter than average" (link);  35 times more heat records were set than cold records.  For the contiguous U.S., aka the "lower 48", this was the warmest March and the hottest January-March on record, according to the NOAA's National Climate Data Center State of the Climate Report; and the hottest 12 months on record, according to Weather Underground meteorologist Jeff Masters. (link)

"This is weird. This is not good." (link)

And it's with just 1.5 degrees F average warming over the past century; this century, if we don't change course, we expect five times more. (link)

(But this doesn't give us license to throw up our hands and walk away; "Pick any guideline you want, from 1C to 2C to who knows what, and in whatever “important” time frame you prefer, but the inescapable bottom line is that there is always a very high human cost to doing too little. And the further we are from doing enough, ... we’re undeniably making the situation, and thereby the price humanity will pay, much worse by our inaction..." (link) )

Uncertainty; (4/1) Climate science fixed, "wrong sign paradox" finally resolved. And other news.

RealClimate has the good news; though you might want to check the publication date.  (Also, is April Fools Day a worldwide observance, or is it just for Euro&North American culture?)

Also, from the NY Times on March 28, see Justin Gillis's Weather Runs Hot and Cold, So Scientists Look to the Ice - meaning the decline of Arctic sea ice, a disruption that'll likely disrupt weather patterns.

Climate models, which didn't predict this much weather weirdness, "have always had a kind of stodginess to them" (link); so when someone says that "climate models are uncertain," remember (since they typically don't mention this fact) that uncertainty cuts both ways, and increases the threat considerably:

"As uncertainty increases, the probability of a truly catastrophic outcome [goes up disproportionately: an increase in]...the standard deviation of our distribution...from .5 to 2.5 increases the likelihood of catastrophe by a factor of 200."

Edited (wording, add link) 2012-04-10,11.