Environment

How California Tracks the Air That They Breathe

- Adam Clare

California has a law that dictates the quality of air, but that needs to be tracked so it can be enforced. Here’s a video about how Berkeley Lab keeps track of the air.

Last March, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory scientist Marc Fischer boarded a small airplane loaded with air monitoring equipment and crisscrossed the skies above Sacramento and the Bay Area.

Instruments aboard the aircraft measured a cocktail of greenhouse gases: carbon dioxide from fossil fuels, methane from livestock and landfills, nitrous oxide from agriculture, and industrially produced gases such as refrigerants.

The flight was part of the Airborne Greenhouse Gas Emissions Survey, a collaboration between Berkeley Lab, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and the University of California, Davis to pinpoint the sources of greenhouse gases in Central California.

The airborne survey is intended to improve inventories of the state’s greenhouse gas emissions, which in turn will help scientists verify the emission reductions mandated by AB-32, the ambitious legislation passed by California in 2006 to slash the state’s greenhouse gas emissions 25 percent by 2020.

“In order to comply with AB-32, we need to know where the gases are coming from and how much,” says Fischer, a scientist in Berkeley Lab’s Environmental Energy Technologies Division.

Keep reading.

Wind Turbines are not a Health Risk

- Adam Clare 2 Comments

A small group of people have complained and argued that wind turbines can cause health problems. A new study confirms that those people are wrong and in fact wind turbines are not a health risk at all.

The study acknowledges that a minority of people find the intermittent swooshing noise emitted by the turbines’ giant blades to be annoying, but it also concluded: “Annoyance is not a pathological entity.”

The study says there’s “nothing unique” about the noise or vibrations emitted by wind turbines and no evidence that the audible or sub-audible sounds have any direct adverse effect on health.

It suggests that those who are bothered by turbines simply have a lower tolerance for annoying sounds of all sorts.

“A major cause of concern about wind turbine sound is its fluctuating nature. Some may find this sound annoying, a reaction that depends primarily on personal characteristics as opposed to the intensity of the sound level.”

Keep reading at the CBC.

What You Can do to Stop Climate Change

- Adam Clare

Here’s an example of what a German family are doing to lower their environmental impact and make the world a little better for their children:

Georg Fürtges’s pride and joy is a green monstrosity standing in the basement of his house in the western German city of Essen, hissing quietly and consuming dark little pellets that look like worms. The pellets, stored in bins reaching up to the ceiling in another room, are made of compressed sawdust. And the monstrosity is a furnace that is at least three times as big as a modern condensing gas boiler. Fürtges, 55, and his wife Karla, 49, have 6.4 tons of the pellets stored in their basement, enough to meet their heating needs for a year and a half. The couple has decided to live in an environmentally friendly way.
They have been doing so for more than 20 years, partly because they have three children and are thinking ahead, beyond their own life spans. They have made mistakes, but they have also learned a lot. They remain convinced that their approach is the right one, but they also know that a life devoted to living green can only be had at a high price. Georg Fürtges spent an entire year researching heating systems before he recently replaced his old gas furnace with a pellet furnace combined with a solar thermal heating system. Some of the pipes in the house had to be replaced. All told, it cost Fürtges €27,000 ($40,200) to retrofit his home. He would have paid about €10,000 for a modern gas furnace.

“We believe that it will pay off in the long term,” says Karla Fürtges. The couple bought their small 1930s house in Stadtwald, an Essen neighborhood, 16 years ago. The heating system was old, the windows weren’t insulated and the house lacked effective heat insulation.

The couple began by insulating the outside walls. Then they purchased the costly new gas furnace and had vinyl thermopane windows installed. The insulation alone brought down their annual natural gas consumption from 22,000 to 12,000 kilowatt hours. An average household currently consumes almost twice as much gas.

Keep reading at Der Spiegel

56 Newspapers in 45 Countries and 20 Languages

- Fono

Just one last post about Copenhagen (probably.) Yesterday, 56 newspapers in 45 countries and 20 languages published a shared editorial, urging the citizens and policymakers of the world to take Copenhagen as a serious call-to-action. If they can work together, maybe the rest of us can?

Given that newspapers are inherently rivalrous, proud and disputatious, viewing the world through very different national and political prisms, the prospect of getting a sizeable cross-section of them to sign up to a single text on such a momentous and divisive issue seemed like a long shot. But an early, enthusiastic, conversation with the editor of one of India’s biggest dailies offered encouragement. Then in Beijing in September, I met a senior editor from an influential business weekly, the Economic Observer.

Notwithstanding the shifting boundaries of press freedom in China, he was sure his paper would participate (and another major Chinese daily would subsequently, too). If we could reach a common position with papers from the two developing world giants most commonly identified as obstacles to a global deal, then surely we could crack the rest.

Read the editorial here (The Guardian)

Read the behind-the-scenes story here (The Guardian)

Ban Ki-moon Optimistic About Copenhagen Agreement

- Adam Clare

The Voice of America is reporting that UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon is optimistic about the world’s nations coming to an agreement about how to tackle climate change.

U.N. chief Ban Ki-moon told reporters he would go to the Danish capital next week to open the high-level segment that he expects will draw more than 100 heads of state and government.

“I am encouraged and I am optimistic. I expect a robust agreement at Copenhagen summit meeting that will be effective immediately and include specific recommendations on mitigation, adaptation, finance and technology. This agreement will have an immediate operational effect,” he said.

His remarks come as scientists released new data showing the first decade of this century will likely turn out to be the warmest ever. The findings from the World Meteorological Association also predict 2009 will be the 5th warmest year since global record-keeping began in 1850.

Keep reading at Voice of America

Meanwhile in Canada, Greenpeace unfurled banners on Parliament Hill pointing out that Ignatieff and Harper are total failures. Good for Greenpeace for a little direct action.

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