An offering that came from a comment on this blog - a fun little newsfeed on global warming. Be patient - it takes a few moments to load.

I posted a blog entry at futurist.com entitled "Why Businesses Need to Plan for Global Warming Now."

Part of why I started this blog is to have a place to talk more about global warming, since Futurist.com, the futurist site that I work on in support of Glen Hiemstra, is really a generalist site. But as I was wearing my futurist hat and thinking about predictions for 2007, one that I'm sure of is that global warming will be the single most defining political issue except for the Iraq war. So we have a responsibility to talk about it there, even though we also get to play in technology and science and business and other topics.

First, a little contrast. I bought two tickets to the Seattle Arts and Lectures series this year - Steven King and Elizabeth Kolbert. The Steven King reading was packed, the patron section (the expensive seats) was at least twenty rows deep from the stage, and people had flown from all over the country to see him.
Seattle is the originating point for the US Mayor's Climate Protection Agreement. Many people consider us one of the most activist cities in the US on global warming. Yet the auditorium was not full, and some of the people there were sleeping. It appeared to have been assigned as homework. The patron section was about seven rows deep.

It's too bad that the talk didn't sell out.

One of the most interesting parts of Elizabeth's talk was not new, but was very well-framed. Climate change had many positive feedback loops built into it. That means that global warming begets more global warming. Take, for example, the melting of arctic ice. Ice reflects sunlight and water absorbs it. More ice means cooler temperatures and more water means warmer temperatures. As the ice melts, and there is less ice and more water, the temperatures rises. She gave a number of other examples.

One of her quotes that I like a lot was "People think global warming is just beginning because we are just beginning to see it." The point is that global warming is, in fact, beginning to have consequences that we can see all around us. But those consequences are the result of Co2 level increases that began years ago.

When she went back to update her book, Field Notes from a Catastrophe, in the one year that had passed from hardback to paperback publication, not one change was happening more slowly than predicted in the hardback, and many were happening faster.

I bought a copy of her book and I'll review it when I get it read. Since I'm in the middle of a research intensive novel, it make take a little while.

I'll do something a little more substantive on this tomorrow night, but I had a powerful image come up early in the talk that seems worth relating.

Elizabeth was talking about the Greenland Ice Sheet. It's too warm, now, for the ice sheet to form. It has sustained itself because it is cold enough that it doesn't melt away, and enough new snow falls onto it to actually build some parts of it each year (although we are suffering net loss of ice there). But in today's climate, and the climate of the last ten thousand years,it would not get built.

Last week, it snowed on us in Washington, and we experienced very low temperatures for a few days after that. Well, snow is rare for us, and so we played in it and with it, and made snow sculptures and snowballs. Some of that snow we'd sculptured -- and turned into ice balls -- stayed with us for literally days after the untouched surface snow was melted and rained off.

But it's not there now.

The ice sheet holds so much water that if it all melts away, we could see a twenty-foot rise in sea level.

Global warming actually hasn't been a topic in my life much for a few days, unless you want to count getting the house ready for new energy-efficient windows, or seeing copies of "An Inconvenient Truth" for sale at Costco. But tomorrow night, I'll be going to a talk on climate change at Benaroya Hall in Seattle. It's part of the Seattle Arts and Lectures tour and features Elizabeth Kolbert. I'm quite looking forward to it, and I noticed that it isn't sold out yet. So maybe I'll see some of you there.

In this week's Earthweek, Western Europe has had such a warm autumn that birds are not flying south, and frogs are not sleeping. I wonder if you could do a GlobalWarmingWeek? At least one of the items they pick for this seems to be related every week now.

This morning's Seattle Times has an editorial, Greenhouse innovation: bury the carbons in rock in support of carbon sequestration in rocks. A paragraph part way through the editorial says, "While many environmental groups support this technology, some worry its use will dampen the sense of urgency to reduce greenhouse gases."

This is the same argument I hear from people about carbon credits (investment in clean energy to offset personal or corporate creation of greenhouse gases). There is no single change to help with global warming. Its going to take personal changes on all of our parts, which are coming gradually. We are also going to have to apply scientific and technical tools that will help us transition from our carbon dependency. The best way to transition is going to be to both help the old industries that we still need for a robust economy --through solutions like this and through a strong mix of incentives and regulations -- and to actively foster investment in clean energy.

If there is a way to succeed in at least mitigating global warming, we need the resources to do it. And all of the tools available to us now, plus more that are in development. The Seattle Times editorial is a good one.

At a wrapping party at work today (wrapping boxes for people to put donations in for charity), someone mentioned global warming in context with the severe weather we've had up here this November (the wettest month, ever, on record in Washington State). One of the women helping said something like, "Global warming. It's too overwhelming. I can hardly even think about it."

The Supreme Court is considering a case that is very tightly linked to global warming. This will be an interesting look at how the new Court acts on a critical environmental issue, and it is expected that the vote will be close. The basic story is that this is an attempt to force the federal government to regulate carbon dioxide as a pollutant. I'm hoping that the Court finds that this is a good thing. Effective regulation might go a long way to helping reduce some of our major sources of global warming gas emissions.