Yes we can! but it’s harder than we thought

I have just found what I think might be the most brilliant book on climate change on the market for people who care about the environment but might not be physicists, climatologists, or politicians.

The book is Sustainable Energy and is available in paperback or to download for free on-line.   There is also a downloadable ten-page synopsis which provides an introduction or summary for those without time to read more.

Why is it so fantastic?  Well, first of all, the author, David MacKay, is a physicist at Cambridge University in England, and he knows what he’s talking about.  But he talks in everyday English, English that non-professionals can understand.  He realizes that the huge numbers involved in so many discussions about alternative energy are so big as to be meaningless to many of us.

His second great contribution is that he is seriously trying to evaluate our options.  He didn’t make up his mind before learning the facts that a green or nuclear or change-of-lifestyle is the solution to our environmental challenge.  

He evaluates whether we can save the planet if we all do little things like turning off our tv stand bys, computer monitors and phone chargers when we’re not using them.  (No, it’s not enough.  It would be rather like trying to bail out the Titanic with a teaspoon.)

He evaluates whether Britain, which has a population of 60 million, or about 1/5th of that of the US, could meet its energy need through its renewable potential wind, wave, and solar resources.   (No, not unless we are willing to cover 5-10% of the country with solar panels, and fill the sea with ten million acres of offshore wind farms.)

He evaluates in a rational comparison whether hybrid or electric cars are more environmentally friendly.  (Electric cars win hands down.)

Overall, McKay’s conclusion is that if we want to ween ourselves from our excessive use of fossil-fuels, we will have to radically reduce our energy consumption as well as find significant alternative energy sources along with ways of reducing our carbon footprints. It is possible.  But it probably won’t be easy.

What is so refreshing about MacKay’s approach is the lack of hot air and unsubstantiated claims.  It calmly makes the nature and size of our choices clear.  It makes rational decisions by all of us and by our politicians possible.

Which, in its own way, is a little terrifying.

Do read the book.

Flushing the problem away

One of the ongoing arguments around the world today is if and how we can solve the problems of global warming and pollution we have created with our profligate energy use and tonnes of garbage.  

Being fundamentally optimistic, I tend to think that if we would only bring our minds and determination to bear on the problem, we would not have to resort to some of the more draconian solutions like nuclear power plants or severe cuts in populations or a return to life before the industrial revolution.

Two intriguing possibilities came to my attention this weekend.  The first is a sink/toilet arrangement where the grey water in the sink runs automatically into the toilet tank, thus saving water.  It also saves space in the bathroom.

I also saw that one of England’s water companies is setting up a project to convert sewage sludge into pellet fuel power plants.  Apparently sewage sludge is very high in methane gas, and they are already using sewage gas to run 53 of their power generation units.

We know it works because it’s been done before.  In the 1930’s, sewage gas powered the public transport systems in several German cities, including Munich.

 

The world’s floating garbage bins

Garbage is a big problem around the world.  Landfills are getting filled, and many are beginning to leak into household water supplies or infiltrate the air of the factories and houses which are built on them.

But the garbage is not just collecting in thousands of landfills.  Swirling in the Pacific Ocean are two giant expanses of perhaps a quarter of a trillion pieces of plastic trash and other debris from our affluent life styles, about 40 pieces of plastic for every living person on the planet.  These patches are mammoth, covering 1.4 million square kilometers of ocean surface.  One is twice as big as the state of Texas.

It’s a huge problem and getting bigger every year.

Is anybody doing anything about it?

Next month Project Kaisel begins with a flotilla of vessels setting out from San Francisco to investigate the potential of cleaning up these disastrous sea-faring garbage tips.  They hope to collect perhaps 40 tonnes of it to recycle as diesel fuel.

But this effort is a mere drop in the bucket.  Plastic bags, packaging, furniture, toys, various utensils and attachments float together.   Disbursing the garbage that’s already afloat could take centuries.

Clearly the flow of debris must also be stopped at source.  Almost 85 million plastic bottles alone are discarded every three minutes in the world. 

Do we as individuals and do our governments have the discipline and courage to prevent more plastic from being dumped into our oceans?

Earth Day 2009

Today is Earth day all over the world.

There are 6.7 billion people who live here.

I suspect a lot of us have to change the way we live our everyday lives if we are all going to have enough water and food and air to live.  We don’t have to change a lot.  

Just a little multiplied by 6.7 could make a big change.

For instance, most of us using the internet could choose to do one of the following from now on:

• turn off the TV stand by when it’s not in use
• turn off the computer or put it into Hibernation when it’s not in use
• turn off the light if you’re the last one to leave the room
• keep the tires inflated to the proper pressure on our cars
• turn down the thermostat by one degree
• fix the drip on the leaking faucet or tap
• take a shower instead of a bath twice a week
• wash clothes in 30 degrees water
• hang clothes out to dry instead of using the dryer on at least one load a week
• insulate the windows, wall cavities, and/or attic
• get a bicycle;  or walk once a week where you usually drive
• add at least two more things to this list

Then choose to do one.

Then do it.

Could the sun save us from global warming?

Although it’s not often mentioned in history class, a Little Ice Age descended on the northern hemisphere between 1350 and 1850, peaking between 1645 and 1715.  It is “little” not because it confined itself to a conveniently small corner of Earth, preferably near the north pole,but because for an ice age, it was short.  But it was serious.

Agriculture was drastically affected and millions of people died as a result.  Glaciers in the Swiss Alps buried entire villages, and plummeting temperatures froze the River Thames in London and the Hudson in New York.  People walked on ice from Manhattan to Staten Island.

There are two theories about what caused this Little Ice Age.  One is that, after the plague, agriculture was drastically reduced and so was the emission of greenhouse gases.  The stronger theory, though, is that the sun itself dimmed, emitting less heat and so sending out a lot less warmth. 

Scientists today have noted that the sun is dimming once again.  Why, we don’t know.  Nor have we any idea how long it might last.  It could last for as little as a few more months.

So scientists are cautioning that it would be very risky to count on the sun to turn the heat down and so solve our global warming problems for us.

Who owns the rain?

Scientists have been warning for at least a decade that eventually humans were going to start fighting over water.  Not fighting over water for golf courses, swimming pools, and lawns, but fighting to get enough water to drink, wash, and stay healthy.

Despite the long-term water shortages in western United States, especially in California, but I was  astounded to discover that there are states in America where the rain that falls onto a person’s private property is not theirs.  It is illegal to catch it in rain barrels and use it to grow vegetables or flush the toilet.  That’s because some states have passed laws saying that the rain belongs to farmers and water companies who have bought rights to it, and so homeowners have no right to collect it.

Harvesting rainwater is illegal in some parts of Africa.  I had no idea it was illegal in some parts of the United States of America.

Currently the law is being challenged in the Colorado courts.  Whatever the outcome, as global warming increases desertification and the sources of drinkable water decline, there is going to be a shortage of water to meet our basic needs.  This catastrophe won’t happen in a single overnight explosion, eruption, wave, or crash.  

But it would be a catastrophe of no mean proportions nonetheless.

http://www.truthout.org/031909EA

A laser ray of hope

Anyone who has been following the problems of global warming for very long at all is acquainted with a variety of schemes that we humans have thought up to give us energy without giving us pollution.  So far, the magic elixir hasn’t been found:  

bio-fuels are competing with our global food and water supplies;  oil-producing algae aren’t yet producing; wind and wave energy only work when where there are wind or waves; solar energy has been too expensive or unreliable;  cold fusion uses energy to produce than it produces itself, but scientists can’t make it work in in practical terms;  conservation and using less energy seems a better idea for other people than it does for ourselves.

But we humans are a creative, innovative species and we haven’t given up.  Scientists in California are beginning a series of experiments using laser beams with the power 1,000 times greater than the US national grid.  

They think they just might be able to replicate the process that takes place within the sun in which atoms of hydrogen fuse together, producing a greater burst of energy than it was required to produce the fusion.

If they can do it, this ignition could be the basis of the ultimate clean energy – a no carbon, no radio-active waste, limitless, safe and secure energy source.

Even if they succeed, however, it will probably be 25 years before power stations using the process are commercially viable.  So we best keep our options open for a while.  

Oh, and turn out the lights when you aren’t using them.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/science/article5908490.ece

When we lose our workers

Apple production is down by 50% in Wales this year because so many bee colonies have collapsed.  The supply of English honey is also seriously depleted.

The cause of the colony collapse can’t be genetically modified plants, as some people have hypothesized, because genetically modified plants have been grown here only in seriously proscribed test fields, and that was some years ago.

Almost all bee farmers and scientists studying the cause of the problem think that it is the Varroa mite – which most think has also infected up to 90% of the hives in America.  A particularly wet, cold climate this year in Britain also has not helped the bees thrive.

Figuring out how to solve this problem is really really important.

As Albert Einstein – among others – said:  if we lose our bees, the world will run out of food in ten years.

The good news/ bad news department

Once we discovered how useful it was, it took us 125 years to use the first trillion barrels of oil.

Analysts are predicting that we will use the second trillion in 30 years.

But we might not have enough oil to use the third trillion.  According to a recent article in the National Geographic magazine, mainstream oil experts are now agreeing with the mavericks who said five years ago that oil production will peak worldwide by 2015.  That’s not because people won’t want to buy it, but because it’s getting harder to find, and harder and more expensive to produce. 

That means that green technologies – some of which we already know like wind and wave and solar energy – and some that still await invention by the ingenious and creative – will be more and more sought after.

Maybe knowing we’re running out of oil is good news after all.

Too hot for comfort

Another government report (the intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) thinks there is a serious possibility that the climate could heat up more than 5 degrees Celsius (about 10 degrees Farhenheit) by the end of this century if our greenhouse emissions are not reduced.

The last time the world was that warm was between 35 and 55 million years ago, about ten million years after the dinosaurs became extinct.  It was warm enough for alligators to live close to the North Pole.

What is worrisome is not that humans could not survive in a climate like this, but how many of us would not survive the transition from today’s climate.  With only a 4 degree change, billions of people would be flooded out of the lands where we live now and where our food is grown.  Deserts would expand and water shortages would multiply. 

And so we would inevitably start fighting to the death not over oil but over things as basic as land to live on, water to drink, and food to eat.

Hard as it is, it looks like it would be a lot easier to cut down on our greenhouse emissions and at least slow down climate change, giving us time to adapt to having alligators prowling around northern Canada.