To You!

Happy New Years to all of you!!!!!!!!

Season’sGreetings

I am going off of the air for a week. Happy Holidays.

Matt

Nice Holiday

My son, a good cook (glad he is because I am not..but I brought all of the fixings for two of us), will share Thanksgiving with me down in Santa Cruz.

O bama is taking small steps on global warming by at least going to Coppenhagen…hopefully he will say the right kind of thing to start with on a complex topic.

I have seen more neat birds in the “green space” in Santa Cruz, including Oak Titmouse, hundreds of Red-throated Loons in the Ocean and Chestnut-backed Chickadee.

Happy T Day to all of you. Look for my next post on Saturday of this week.

Matt

 

Amid Worrisome Signs of Warming, ‘Climate Fatigue’ Sets In

By: Richard A. Kerr
We’re seeing things happen more rapidly” than IPCC 2007 anticipated, he says. “I think IPCC has done a very responsible job, but now we know more, and the trends are all in the wrong direction.”

 ”We have a delicate task of conveying the seriousness of the situation without overselling it as a done deal. We have a [climate] process that comes in fits and spurts,” he says, referring to the big loss of summer sea ice in 2007 as well as recent losses from Greenland. “We have to be careful not to extrapolate” a short spurt far into the future.

I Will Be Gone

I will be gone for the next 3 days so I will not write this blog until I come back. This brings up a question. Should I get a guest writer for this blog on the days that I am gone. I do not have a lot of readers so this blog is not that important although I would like to think my opinion on subjects that I care a lot about are important.

During the last year there has been an uptick in the readership of this blog and that is good and that encourages me to be serious about this blog when I have every reason to do other, more fun things. For readership I thank all readers of this blog.

Matt

Up For Air

Hello. All is now cooling down in the world of hawks in Minnesota but it sounds like the world of Global Warming  is heating up. Pun intended. Any news out there?

I am reading Tim Flannery’s “The Weather Makers”. What is interesting to me is that it was written in 2005 and Flannery, a Mammologist, and real thorough writer, is on target!!

the point is that Flannery wrote his book a year before this blog was even started, amongst many other things.

Matt

Erratic Again

I will be gone for a month during that time this blog will be erratic.

Matt

Waxmen Markey Benifits Far Outweigh the Costs

 

Commen sense…now there is something that seems novel in this debate!!!!!

Matt

by Keith Johnson

WSJ Environmental Capital

9.8.09

 So much of the wailing and gnashing of teeth around the climate bill in Congress revolves around the costs of curbing greenhouse-gas emissions. What about the benefits?

 That is, seemingly everybody—the Environmental Protection Agency, the Congressional Budget Office, the Energy Information Administration, not to mention private-sector lobbies—has tried to tally how much it will cost to nudge America toward cleaner energy and fewer greenhouse-gas emissions. None have sought to figure out what kind of benefits the bill could bring.

 That got some folks thinking. “Climate change is arguably one of the most complex issues to face Congress in recent memory, and yet Congress is essentially conducting its deliberations after having reviewed barely half the data,” says a new brief out from NYU Law School’s Institute for Policy Integrity, an outfit basically created to bring cost-benefit analysis back to the environmental arena.

 The upshot? As flawed as it may be, the Waxman-Markey climate bill makes economic sense, offering benefits worth at least twice as much as it costs, if not more.

 “From almost any perspective and under almost any assumption, H.R. 2454 is a good investment for the United States to make in our own economic future and in the future of the planet,” the paper concludes. But what’s the math look like?

 The authors set out to see how much a ton of carbon is worth—not what it trades for on carbon exchanges, but how much a ton of carbon not emitted to the atmosphere is worth society in terms of avoiding climate change.

 Turns out, even though the U.S. government does not have a hard and fast figure, it has a rough idea—around $19 a ton. (There is a huge array of estimates for the “social cost of carbon”; those so inclined will have fun on pages 21-30 here.)

 So, given that the Waxman-Markey bill would curb emissions over the next 40 years, it’s a pretty simple job to tally up the potential benefits: about $1.5 trillion on the middle-of-the-road estimate. The benefits could be as low as $382 billion or as high as $5.2 trillion, depending on how you fiddle with the numbers.

 Since Waxman-Markey is meant to cost about $660 billion, that means the bill provides $2.27 in benefits for every dollar spent, the brief concludes. That doesn’t include extra benefits—cleaner air from a cleaned-up power sector, for instance. And it suggests that even tougher greenhouse-gas targets in the Senate version of the bill would make an even more compelling economic argument.

 Now, there are some important caveats. That “cost of carbon” is a global cost; the U.S. doesn’t face quite the same risk from climate change as, say, Bangladesh. Which means all the “benefits” cited in the paper are similarly global, even if the costs are not: “A large portion of benefits might not be felt directly or immediately within U.S. borders,” the paper notes, suggesting that U.S. voters think of it as a “highly effective, highly leveraged form of foreign aid.”

 Of course, the Senate still faces attacks from the right and the left when it comes to the climate bill. Will a move to tally not just the costs but the potential benefits of the bill make the Senate’s job any easier?

On Earth/NRDC: From “Nancy’s Blog”

 

Nancy Stoner

Co-Director, Water Program, Washington, DC

Blog | About

Posted September 1, 2009 in Health and the Environment , Solving Global Warming

For the more than two decades I have been working to clean up our nation’s beaches and waterways, the Clean Water Act has been the primary tool of my trade. But this year, I have a new solution to turn to: the clean energy and climate bill working its way through Congress.

What does an energy bill have to do with beachwater? An awful lot, it turns out, because global warming poses an immediate risk to nearly every town and city beach across the country.

I saw for myself how this works just a few weeks ago. Like millions of Americans, I fled the August heat by heading to the beach. My family chose Block Island, just off the coast of Rhode Island, for our swimming holiday. But our trip was cut short when Hurricane Bill loomed on the horizon and prompted many vacationers to evacuate.

It turns out Hurricane Bill wasn’t as powerful as expected. Still, I don’t regret leaving early. I have learned from my years as a water advocate that you don’t want to swim at the beach after a powerful rainstorm, whether it’s a hurricane or a sudden downpour.

Why? Because when it rains on town and city streets, water rushes into storm drains pulling oil, toxins, and fertilizers along with it. In many communities, stormwater gets passed through the same pipes as sewage, and when the system gets swamped by rain, the sewage gets dumped raw–with all its cargo of infectious bacteria, viruses, and parasites– right next to nearby beaches.

In NRDC’s Testing the Waters: A Guide to Water Quality at Vacation Beaches, we discovered that there were more than 20,000 days of closings and advisories in 2008. Stormwater runoff was the number one identified cause.

Global warming could send these beach closing numbers through the roof.

Global warming will cause more extreme storm events, including downpours. And the more powerful storms we have, the more pathogens will end up in our beaches–specifically more microbes that cause stomach flu, diarrhea, skin rashes, and neurological and blood infections.

Luckily, those of us who care about keeping our beaches safe and clean and open have this new tool at our disposal: the climate legislation that passed through the House in June and is now headed to the Senate.

The bill could help protect our beaches in three critical ways.

1. It will set firm limits on global warming pollution, which will help minimize the impacts of climate change, including storm events.
2. It calls for protecting the wetlands, coastal dunes, and other natural systems that buffer us from storms and help filter out pollutants in stormwater.
3. It offers funding for water utilities and sewage treatment plants to update their storm drains and make their infrastructure more resilient to climate change.

Since the Senate has not yet released its own version of the bill, we don’t yet know exactly which programs will be included in the final version. But I remain optimistic.

Senator Ben Cardin from Maryland, for instance is not only a member of the Environment and Public Works Committee charged with drafting the Senate climate bill, but he is also the chair of the Water and Wildlife Subcommittee. He is well information about and able to communicate the interplay between fighting global warming and keeping our water clean.

I encourage you to add your voice to this effort. Click here to tell your senator that you support combating climate change and preserving our beaches at the same time. You can also click here to find out how well your favorite beaches are handling stormwater, and then contact your local officials to encourage them to support the climate bill–the newest thing in clean water protection.

 

Completely Off Topic

I post regularly about global climate change and some about birds and bears. All are interesting, and as in birds and bears favorites of mine, but I am at Myrtle Beach, South Carolina and some of the names here have really reached my funny bone and I have to share them.The name of this county is Waccoma (sounded Wa as in lesser case). The Pee Dee River flows through here. There is a restaurant here called El Patios, a corny name, though the food is quite good. There is a Maggymoos ice cream shop and a Whores ice cream shop in Myrtle Beach also.

Need I write more!!! I forgot how weird we, as a species, can be.

Matt