A future of poisoned oceans, withered crops, and irate polar bears is nobody's idea of a good time. It's clear to anyone who is paying attention that our civilization is due for an upgrade. Bright Green covers the news, ideas, opinions, and trends littering the road to an environmentally sustainable future.
Although Earth's troposphere, shown here, and surface have been warming, the upper layers of the atmosphere have been cooling. (NEWSCOM)
Why is Earth's upper atmosphere cooling?
Temperatures at the earth's surface have increased by between 0.2 and 0.4 degrees C in the past 30 years. The vast majority of scientists attribute this warming trend to higher concentrations of greenhouse gases – CO2, methane, CFCs, and others – which warm both the earth's surface and lower atmosphere by holding heat in.
But one of the seeming paradoxes of more greenhouse gases is that while they seem to warm the earth's surface, they also seem to be cooling the higher layers of the atmosphere: Surface temperatures have gone up in recent decades, but they've declined to varying degrees in the stratosphere (above 20 km), the mesosphere (above 50 km), and the thermosphere (above 90 km).
In the lower and middle mesosphere, for example, temperatures have fallen by between 5 and 10 degrees C during the past three decades. And the outermost part of the atmosphere, around 350 km high — the so-called thermosphere — has, as would be expected by cooling, contracted.
(Here's a review of these observed changes in Science, the journal of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.)
The science behind the observed stratospheric cooling is complex, but important to understand.
Some people cite this cooling as evidence that greenhouse gases aren't warming and that human-induced climate change isn't happening. But the conclusion, it seems, should be the opposite.
In 1989, scientists predicted that more greenhouse gases would cool the stratosphere.
Indeed, Venus, which many say has a "runaway" greenhouse effect — its atmosphere is 97 percent carbon dioxide and temperatures at its surface can reach 900 F. — has a stratosphere that's four to five times cooler than ours.
It's also worth remembering that Earth supports life as we know it only because of a greenhouse effect. Without some heat-trapping ability, Earth's surface temperature should be, on average, around -0.4 F. Instead, it's a nice 57 F.
So why is our stratosphere cooling?
As Dr. Elmar Uherek of the Max Planck Institute explains, human activity affects the stratosphere in two ways:
1. By ozone depletion.
2. By increasing carbon dioxide.
Cooling by ozone depletion is the simpler of the two mechanisms. Stratospheric ozone absorbs ultraviolet radiation emitted by the sun as it enters Earth's atmosphere. Once absorbed, the radiation has, in effect, transferred its energy to the ozone molecule and warmed it.
By inadvertently depleting this ozone layer with CFCs, we've lessened its ability to absorb that energy. It now passes on to lower layers of the atmosphere, or the surface of the Earth itself, and is absorbed there instead. (Here's a nice graphic of what wavelength is absorbed where in Earth's atmosphere )
The second mechanism is slightly more complicated, and underlines how trace gases act differently at different pressures and densities in the atmosphere.
Earth's atmosphere is made almost entirely oxygen (21 percent) and nitrogen (78 percent). Both gases are largely invisible to infrared radiation emitted by Earth, or by other greenhouse gases, such water vapor, methane, or carbon dioxide.
In the troposphere, greenhouse gases slow the dissipation, eventually to space, of energy emitted by Earth as infrared radiation. They do so by intercepting the outgoing heat radiation, and re-emitting it back down to the earth's surface.
But in higher, thinner layers of the atmosphere, the increased carbon dioxide has a cooling effect by improving these layers' ability to emit heat radiation into the void of space.
In the stratosphere, heat is transferred between molecules mostly by radiation or conduction. Conduction means molecules exchanging energy by slamming into each other, and radiation means they exchange energy by emitting and absorbing radiation.
Just as in lower atmospheric layers, carbon dioxide molecules here can release energy they absorb from jostling as radiation.
But at these heights, photons released like this — traveling at infrared wavelengths — have a good chance of escaping directly back into space. There's not much around to absorb them. Thus, the cooling ability of these higher layers is enhanced by increased carbon dioxide.
One important facet, say some, of the observed stratospheric cooling is the following: It seems to debunk the notion that the sun is behind the warming of the earth's surface during the past 30 years. That's a point made by Real Climate's Gavin Schmidt.
If increased solar activity were warming Earth, we'd expect it to warm not just the troposphere, but Earth's stratosphere as well.
Editor’s note: For more articles about the environment, see the Monitor’s main environment page, which offers information on many environment topics. Also, check out our Bright Green blog archive and our RSS feed.
At the American Museum of Natural History in New York, an exhibition on Climate Change: The Threat to Life and A New Energy Future. Will it change the mind of any skeptic of global warming? (NEWSCOM)
Will talking change anyone's mind about climate change?
On Wednesday, Columbia University's Center for Research on Environmental Decisions released a guide titled "The Psychology of Climate Change Communication."
Freely available online [pdf], the manual endeavors to describe the various biases and barriers that lurk in the minds of the general public, and that, as the authors see it, confound an accurate comprehension of climate science and its ramifications.
In concept, at least, the manual's arrival is timely.
In case you missed it, a poll conducted by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press last month found that the number of people who think there's solid evidence of human-induced climate change has declined dramatically in the past few years.
Fifty-seven percent of respondents now believe it's happening, down from 77 percent in 2006.
The guide has eight chapters:
1. Know Your Audience.
2. Get your Audience's Reaction.
3. Translate Scientific Data Into Concrete Experience.
4. Beware the Overuse of Emotional Appeals.
5. Address Scientific and Climate Uncertainties.
6. Tap Into Social Identities and Affiliations.
7. Encourage Group Participation.
8. Make Behavior Changes Easier.
Following are a few tidbits that caught this reporter's eye.
Chapter 1
The authors explain "mental models" — "a person's thought process for how something works." Understanding the audience's mental model and its inherent biases is key to successfully imparting information.
There's an interesting example from Anthony Leiserowitz, director of Yale's Project on Climate Change. He has observed that mental models of the ozone layer hole and climate change are often conflated, and that this conflation leads to inaccuracies.
Paradoxically, this conflation is due in part to scientists' and the media's success in communicating the gravity of the ozone problem in past decades. Legislation followed and CFCs are (almost) phased out. But now, as the public grapples with a different issue — climate change from "greenhouse gases" — some wonder why we can't just bring back CFCs to reopen the ozone hole and release the trapped heat.
The problem is with the "greenhouse" metaphor. The two descriptors — "ozone hole" and "greenhouse gases" — have together fostered a misconception of how the science behind human-induced climate change works.
Presumably, if a communicator knows about this faulty mental model in advance, he can account for it in his explanations and, it's to be hoped, even correct it.
Chapter 4
People don't have an infinite capacity to worry, note the authors. Researchers call that limited fretting capacity "a finite pool of worry." And there's competition for space in this pool. If a person begins worrying about one risk, he or she will likely begin worrying less about another. In this constant competition, short-term threats beat out long-term ones.
That partly explains the apparent decline in belief about global warming, as measured by the Pew poll: Since the economic implosion of 2008, the economy has taken center stage, leaving little room for other concerns.
So how to get climate back into the spotlight? The manual doesn't say exactly, advising, only that would-be communicators should be aware of what else is floating around the worry pool.
But it does mention another risk – piling on too much anxiety-inducing information at once: "emotional numbing." That's when an exposure to a multitude of problems overwhelms, and makes one less likely to care about much about any of them.
Chapter 5
People don't like uncertainties. Unfortunately, climate science — and science in general — tries to be upfront about uncertainties. That's why scientists use language riddled with caveats, and why they often seem to speak in the conditional tense.
The authors argue that, although people prefer certainty, it's important to communicate uncertainties when they exist.
Indeed, that was the thinking behind sentences like "Most of the observed increase in global average temperatures since the mid-20th century is very likely due to the observed increase in anthropogenic GHG [greenhouse gas] concentrations," which appears in the Summary for Policymakers from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
The problem, say the authors, is that an honest attempt to express real uncertainties may come across as vagueness to laypeople, who then conclude that the scientists aren't really certain about much, so it's best to ignore them entirely.
To avoid this, the authors recommend nipping far-out interpretations in the bud by including absolute numbers next to probabilistic verbiage. "Very likely" in the sentence above, for example, could have a "90 percent or greater likelihood" parenthetical next to it, which is what the IPCC scientists mean.
Of course, the authors offer no advice on how to better explain the statistical analyses that produced the 90 percent figure, which surely lies at the root of much doubt.
Chapter 8
This chapter details "default effects" — "the human tendency to stick with the option that is selected automatically instead of choosing an alternate option" — and suggests that people seeking to make human behavior more enviro-friendly take advantage of it.
A case study: Rutgers University saved many trees simply by changing the default setting on printers in school computer labs from "single-sided" to "double-sided." After the switch, students had to manually select "single-sided" if they wanted it. Most didn't care and, ultimately, this small alteration saves nearly 7.4 million sheets of paper, or 1,280 trees, during the academic year.
The manual concludes on a hopeful note:
"Social science research provides compelling evidence for an optimist’s view that climate change communicators can reach both policymakers and the public, informing and inspiring them to address climate change."
Editor’s note: For more articles about the environment, see the Monitor’s main environment page, which offers information on many environment topics. Also, check out our Bright Green blog archive and our RSS feed.
Hoses are installed that will eventually be attached to the geothermal heating system for the renovation of Sheep Dog Hollow, a 1902 farmhouse in Connecticut. (Joanne Ciccarello/Staff/The Christian Science Monitor)
Drawbacks of geothermal heating systems
I’m sold on geothermal heating. Just check out my previous blog post. But being trained as a journalist, I can’t help but strive for at least some kind of balance. And so, I’ve felt it necessary to outline some of the various problems associated with geothermal residential heating.
First, let’s start with the very basics – the word geothermal itself. Several helpful readers have noted that there’s a bit of confusion about just what it means. So let’s get that cleared up.
Geothermal, as the word is traditionally used, refers to harnessing “energy from ‘hot spots’ in the earth's crust, and can only be employed in locations where these exist,” according to the website Lighthouse. ( Continue… )
Does Porter, a 70-plus-pound chocolate lab, have a larger carbon footprint than this gas-gulping SUV that gets about 17 mpg? Some New Zealanders say so. A new study argues that resources required to feed a dog give it about twice the eco-footprint of an SUV. (NEWSCOM)
Four good green reads, from edible fashion to your pet's eco-pawprint
Who says that environmental news always has to be about cap and trade or disappearing glaciers? Some of our green reading today tends toward the offbeat: edible clothing (think pasta blouses and a cabbage-leaf bikini) and calculating the eco-pawprint of your dog or cat.
Then take a peek at Southwest's new green airplane and consider an environmental side effect of the world's yearly 1.2 billion lightning flashes.
Edible fashion
You get the feeling that Joe Laur had fun compiling From the Fig Leaf to Fig Newton’s….Edible Clothing can grow on you! at Greenopolis. He documents Chocolate Fashion in Greece and clothes made using flowers and seeds.
So far, we haven't seen any studies about the environmental impact of a Nike hamburger.
How green is your pet?
According to Robert and Brenda Vale, architects specializing in sustainable living at Victoria University of Wellington in New Zealand, a medium-size dog has more of an adverse impact on the environment than driving a Toyota Highlander.
And a cat isn't much better. It's slightly less than a Volkswagen Golf.
In their book, "Time to Eat the Dog," the Vales measure the environmental paw-print of pets by analyzing what they eat. You know where this is going, of course: Eating meat is terrible for the environment.
The Vales suggest that animal lovers get more eco-friendly pets – such as hamsters and goldfish (which have "the eco-finprint of two cellphones," reports Marty Durlin) – or "edible pets" like hens (which come with a bonus of organic eggs) and rabbits.
But not everyone's sold on that idea. While agreeing that owning a dog is an extravagance, observers such as Judy Gruen aren't so sure that it's the carbon footprint of Bowser that does it. And she points to the emotional benefits of dogs.
Added later: And Clark Williams-Derry crunched the numbers – and says it isn't so.
A look at a new green airplane
Air travel has adverse environmental impacts because of noise, emissions, and fuel. And while there are things that travelers can do to ease their impact, greener planes are definitely the wave of the future.
Many of the ideas are still experimental – although getting closer – but here's a look at a "green plane" that's in commercial use today. It hasn't solved the big environmental problems but decided to go for the interior issues – including carpet that's 100 percent recylable and is returned to the manufacturer at the end of its service to be remanufactured into new carpet and seat covers made from recycled materials that are more durable and lighter in weight than leather.
Lightning's environmental impact
Not only is lightning noisy and destructive, each flash "produces a puff of nitrogen oxide gas (NOx) that reacts with sunlight and other gases in the atmosphere to produce ozone," says NASA.
Recent research at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., has determined that "lightning may have a considerably stronger impact on the climate in the mid-latitudes and subtropics — and less on surface air quality — than previously thought."
Editor’s note: For more articles about the environment, see the Monitor’s main environment page, which offers information on many environment topics. Also, check out our Bright Green blog archive and our RSS feed. Or become a Twitter follower.
Tony Silverio, center, explains the economics of geothermal heating and cooling to Alexandra Marks and Martin Sheridan. (Joanne Ciccarello/Staff/The Christian Science Monitor)
Why choose a geothermal heating system?
As an indication of how completely antediluvian I was in terms of my Green IQ (a term I thought I’d just made up, but is actually all over the place, I had not even known that geothermal heating and cooling was a viable option in the Northeast until after we’d already bought Sheep Dog Hollow.
Martin and I were standing outside the house with Dale King, the previous owner who is also our lead builder and who lives down the road. (More on Dale later.) I was talking about how we’d like to renovate as “greenly” as possible but also maintain the historic nature of the house.
I didn’t like the idea of having huge, high tech solar panels glinting on top of the elegant old white clapboard frame. ( Continue… )
One of a growing number of isolated remnants of Kilimanjaro ice spires, once full glaciers. (Photo courtesy of Lonnie Thompson, Ohio State University)
Is global warming melting the ice on Mt. Kilimanjaro?
Global warming appears to be melting the ice on Tanzania's Mt. Kilimanjaro. The summit's glaciers are likely to be gone within a few decades
That's the word from a study appearing this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
But global warming may not be the whole story behind Mt. Kilimanjaro and its environs. And therein lies a tale of how human activities may affect local and regional climate in ways that can mask or reinforce a long-term warming trend.
Understanding those effects is critical to devising strategies for adapting to global warming at regional or local levels.
The new results showing how quickly ice is melting on Mt. Kilimanjaro's iconic summit comes from the lab of Lonnie Thompson, an Ohio State University glaciologist who has spent his career studying the climate records trapped in mountain glaciers in the tropics. (For a good read on his work, snag a copy of the book "Thin Ice" by Mark Bowen.)
Among the findings:
-- The summit lost 80 percent of its ice between 1912 and 2007. Some 26 percent of the ice present in 2000, Dr. Thompson's last trip to the summit, vanished by the end of the period. The Furtwangler Ice Field in particular has lost 50 percent of its thickness since 2000. At that pace, it will vanish into a damp patch of summit soil by 2018. Glaciers on Mt. Kilimajaro's flanks have lost some 40 percent of their area between 2000 and 2007.
-- One ice core Thompson's team pulled hosts oblong air bubbles at the top. Those bubbles signal repeated melting and refreezing, something that fails to appear at any other point along the core, which spans 11,700 years.
-- Even during a 300-year-long drought the region experienced 4,200 years ago, the cores show no evidence of melting and refreezing during that drought.
The ice loss is bad news for Tanzania, Thompson explains in an e-mail exchange. Tanzania's main source of foreign currency is tourism. When the glacier's vanish, will the mountain still draw 30,000 to 40,000 tourists a year, as it does now? (About 10,000 a year try to climb it.) And farmers at the mountain's base rely on glacial melt water for irrigation.
Mountain glaciers in tropical South America and the Himalayas are undergoing similar changes, Thompson's work shows.
"It is the balance of evidence and global nature of glacier-ice loss throughout the tropics that points to global climate change as the driver," he writes.
But what about the actions of folks at the base of the mountain? Might deforestation -- clearing trees for farmland -- have led to changes in temperatures and precipitation patterns that have at least contributed to, if not driven, changes at the summit?
After all, researchers have found that since 1971, temperatures at the base of Mt. Kilimanjaro have been rising faster than global warming alone would account for.
"We have no way of knowing how much of that, if any, is transmitted to the summit ice fields" some 15,000 feet above the base, Thompson acknowledges. You can download a full copy of the study, as a pdf, here.
So if the impact on the summit remains unclear, that same can't be said for the base. If Kilimanjaro becomes iconic, perhaps it deserves that status as much for the impact of human land-use changes on local and regional climate, as for the broader trend of long-term global warming.
Indeed, an increasing number of studies are suggesting that the intensity of long-term effects from global warming locally can be affected by land-use practices in the area.
Among these studies:
-- Early last month, a team led by Richard Seager at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory in Palisades, N.Y., showed how drought in the US Southeast from 2005 through 2007 was run-of-the-mill by historical climate measures. Yet its effects were severe, prompting widespread water restrictions and courtroom water wars between states dipping their conduits into the same river system. The reason for so much hardship? Development and population growth in the region, which caused demand for water to explode. Even though climate models project an increase in precipitation in the region, that isn't going to bail the region out of its water problems, the team writes. Models project a slight increase in evaporation over precipitation during the course of this century. You can download a pdf of the study here.
-- The strains of crops grown, as well as approaches used to grow them that put little premium on soil conservation, likely turned a moderate drought centered in the US Southwest into a disaster embracing the Great Plains, according to a recent study by a team led by Benjamin Cook, with the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory in Palisades, N.Y. You can download a pdf copy here.
-- Data and modeling studies of the effects of farm irrigation in Nebraska and California's Great Central Valley suggest that widespread irrigation reduced the hottest summer temperatures in the irrigated regions by an average of nearly 7 degrees C (nearly 13 degrees F.); irrigation shaved an average of 2.7 degrees C off the heat index as well. A team led by Stanford University's David Lobell published the results in the journal Geophysical Research Letters last year. You can find a summary here.
Expect to see more of these kinds of studies as adaptation to global warming looms larger on the horizon.
Editor’s note: For more articles about the environment, see the Monitor’s main environment page, which offers information on many environment topics. Also, check out our Bright Green blog archive and our RSS feed.
Research is being conducted on whether it's possible to produce a flow of gasoline directly from sunlight and CO2 using a symbiotic system of two organisms. (NEWSCOM)
ARPA-E - are its energy projects crazy or revolutionary?
Last week, the US Department of Energy announced a series of new energy-efficiency projects that could, according to the press release, "fundamentally change the way we use and produce energy."
The projects are, in the words of one observer, so crazy they may actually work.
If just one is successful, it could transform society, says another.
They're talking about the recently formed Advanced Research Projects Agency — ARPA-E for short – which awarded $151 million in grants to 37 projects in 17 states. Of the major recipients, small businesses make up 43 percent, educational institutions 35 percent, and large corporations 19 percent.
In its own words, "ARPA-E's mission is to develop nimble, creative and inventive approaches to transform the global energy landscape while advancing America's technology leadership."
ARPA-E is modeled on the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency (DARPA), the agency that helped develop technologies like the stealth fighter, the M16 assault rifle, and the Internet, among other transformative ideas.
Reactions to ARPA-E's announcement have been largely positive, but a few have voiced concerns. Business Week's Elise Craig writes about the program's broad focus:
"Former House Science & Technology Committee Staff Director David Goldston worries that its mission is too unfocused — and that congressional pressure to get fast results may steer it away from the most daring research. The key will be structuring the program to buck the typical government research culture by rewarding risk-taking."
Sally Adee at ieee Spectrum observes: "Some of the technologies that received funding are true to the pie-in-the-sky, mad science aspirations of a real ARPA: For example, a University of Minnesota project uses two symbiotic organisms to create gasoline directly from sunlight and CO2. That is outright bananas. And, as the saying goes, it’s so crazy that it might just work."
Kevin Bullis of MIT's Technology Review comments on the importance of having expert reviewers with a very specific skill set looking at project proposals, which may not have occurred. "Ideally you'd have people who are both the very best scientists in their fields and who have had extensive experience in industry," he writes. "The problem is that the ARPA-E process, by necessity, disqualified some of the very best potential reviewers."
Bullis goes on to explain that many of the most brilliant academics found their own companies — companies that may compete with proposed projects. As a result — and rightly so, he says — people connected with competing companies were prohibited from participating in the ARPA-E review process.
Unfortunately, that may mean that many meritorious projects "slipped through the cracks," he says, "while some companies that have almost no chance of success may have received money. "
Nevertheless, Bullis is "excited" about the program.
This past April, President Barack Obama allotted ARPA-E $400 million in initial funding under the American Recovery and Investment Act. Of the major recipients so far, small businesses make up 43 percent, educational institutions 35 percent, and large corporations 19 percent.
ARPA-E's website lists all 37 projects, which include everything from photovoltaics and biomass energy to renewable energy storage and harvesting waste heat from vehicles. These four projects are showcased:
1. "Liquid Metal Grid-Scale Batteries: Created by Professor Don Sadoway, a leading MIT battery scientist, the all-liquid metal battery is based on low cost, domestically available liquid metals with potential to break through the cost barrier required for mass adoption of large scale energy storage as part of the nation's energy grid. If successful, this battery technology could revolutionize the way electricity is used and produced on the grid, enabling round-the-clock power from America's wind and solar power resources, increasing the stability of the grid, and making blackouts a thing of the past. And if deployed at homes, it could allow individual consumers the ability to be part of a future 'smart energy Internet,' where they would have much greater control over their energy usage and delivery."
2. "Bacteria for Producing Direct Solar Hydrocarbon Biofuels: Researchers at the University of Minnesota have developed a bioreactor that has the potential to produce a flow of gasoline directly from sunlight and CO2 using a symbiotic system of two organisms. First, a photosynthetic organism directly captures solar radiation and uses it to convert carbon dioxide to sugars. In the same area, another organism converts the sugars to gasoline and diesel transportation fuels. This development has the potential to greatly increase domestic production of clean fuel for our vehicles and end our reliance on foreign oil."
3. "CO2 Capture using Artificial Enzymes: Today's funding will support an effort by the United Technologies Research Center to develop new synthetic enzymes that could make it easier and more affordable to capture carbon dioxide emissions from power plants and factories. If successful, the effort would mean a much lower energy requirement for industrial carbon capture and significantly lower capital costs to get carbon capture systems up and running. Success of this project could substantially lower the cost of carbon capture relative to current, state-of-the-art amine and ammonia based processes. This would represent a major breakthrough that could make it affordable to capture the carbon dioxide emissions from coal and natural gas power plants around the world."
4. "Low Cost Crystals for LED Lighting: Developed by Momentive Performance Materials, this proposal for novel crystal growth technology could dramatically lower the cost of developing light emitting diodes (LEDs), which are 30 times more efficient than incandescent bulbs and four times more efficient than compact fluorescents. This higher quality, low-cost material would offer significant breakthroughs in lowering costs of finished LED lighting, accelerating mass market use, and dramatically decreasing U.S. lighting energy usage. Lighting accounts for 14 percent of U.S. electricity use."
As Bullis says, "Maybe they'll all fail. But if even one succeeds, it could transform society."
Editor’s note: For more articles about the environment, see the Monitor’s main environment page, which offers information on many environment topics. Also, check out our Bright Green blog archive and our RSS feed.
You probably don't have any king vultures in your backyard, but the birds that do come will enjoy eating your leftover Halloween pumpkin – and that will keep it out of a landfill. (NEWSCOM)
How to have a green Halloween
If you'd like Halloween's dominant color to be green instead of orange, here are some tips for how you and your family can celebrate the holiday with the environment in mind:
Costumes
Reuse materials from thrift stores or yard sale to make costumes, instead of buying them, suggests Larry West, who covers environmental issues at About.com.
Blythe Copeland at Planet Green shares creative costume hints with "Top Homemade Halloween Costumes for the DIY-Impaired." How about turning a black pillowcase into Pac Mac with just a red marker?
Elizabeth Seward also presents some excellent budget-friendly costume ideas in "Make Your Own Cheaper, Better Halloween Costume."
Or, host a costume exchange with other families and recycle previous years' garb, recommends Green Halloween.
Pumpkins
Save the seeds when you carve the jack- o'-lantern and roast them for a treat, says Mr. West. Then add the pumpkin to the compost pile to break down and improve the garden soil in which to grow next year's jack-o'-lanterns.
Protecting our Environment notes that if you don't have a compost pile – or don't like pumpkin seeds – you can put the jack-o'-lantern outside for the squirrels and birds and add the seeds to the bird feeder (after you've cleaned and dried them).
Sometimes you read about turning a jack-o'-lantern into a pie, but the best pie pumpkins are small ones, not the giants that are best for decorations. Also, a jack-o'-lantern isn't going to be edible if it's been cut days ahead or had a lighted candle inside.
Trick-or-treating
It makes sense to look for organic treats, Fair Trade chocolate bars, and candy that doesn't have excess packaging, but you probably won't win any popularity contests if you hand out recyclable toothbrushes, as Umbra mentions.
She also advocates giving away "things that you own and are ready to get rid of, like CDs, books, jewelry, trophies, trinkets, and the like. Put them in a treasure chest of your own devising and let the children choose one item each."
Change the emphasis from getting to giving, suggests Grist. Have your kids feel good about themselves and help others by trick-or-treating for UNICEF.
Or have your youngsters ask people for their old cellphones, says Grist. Recycling cellphones helps get women and families get out of poverty through the Women's Funding Network.
Protecting our Environment recommends sending the kids out with reusable or recyclable treat bags -- pillow cases, for instance, or cloth shopping bags.
With these ideas, your holiday can be both fun and environmentally friendly.
Editor’s note: For more articles about the environment, see the Monitor’s main environment page, which offers information on many environment topics. Also, check out our Bright Green blog archive and our RSS feed. Or become a Twitter follower.
There are many decisions to take when renovating an old house. Alexandra Marks and Martin Sheridan check out the possibilities for environmentally friendly heating systems at Silverio Mechanical in Old Saybrook, Conn. (Joanne Ciccarello/Staff/The Christian Science Monitor)
Reasons to hire a green renovation expert
I ended my last post with the conclusion that hiring a “green expert” would be too expensive and so I would not hire one, but would do the research about various green building techniques myself (which I will then share with you).
In that way, I concluded, Martin and I could make informed decisions about which technologies to use based on our limited budget and save the money we’d use on an expert.
Even as I was writing that last sentence, I knew that I had not done due diligence. ( Continue… )
Baffin Island in the Canadian Arctic. (NEWSCOM/File)
Global warming takes a toll on Arctic ecosystem
Sediment cores taken from a remote Arctic lake indicate that the ecosystem has changed dramatically in recent decades, according to a new study.
These shifts, which are unprecedented for the past 200,000 years, most likely result from human-induced climate change.
Writing in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the authors explain that ecosystem changes as observed in sediment cores are tightly linked to changes in climate.
Until quite recently, natural influences, such as periodic shifts in Earth's orbit, effected the changes. But the ecosystem shifts they observe since 1950 indicate that something other than Earth's wobbly orbit is changing the Arctic's climate.
As another recent study pointed out, going strictly by orbital shifts, the Arctic should be cooling at present. Earth is now 0.6 million miles farther from the sun during the northern hemisphere's summer solstice than 2,000 years ago, and receives less of its energy.
And, in fact, the Arctic was gradually cooling for the past 2,000 years — until about 50 years ago when, despite the diminished solar energy reaching the northern hemisphere during summer, it abruptly began warming. (Here's a nice graphic of that trend and its abrupt reversal.)
And the Arctic lake ecosystem appears to have adjusted accordingly.
The authors of the PNAS study examined the relative abundances of midges and algae in the sediments of a lake on Baffin Island, which lies a few hundred miles west of Greenland. For the past several thousand years, cold-adapted midge larvae have abounded in the lake.
Then came 1950. Since then, midge numbers have undergone a steep decline. Two species have disappeared entirely.
In that same period, a lake alga species, which was relatively scarce before the 20th century, has increased in abundance. The authors attribute this to less lake ice. Without it, the photosynthetic alga has more access to sunlight.
This study comes on the heels of a several others documenting other ecosystem shifts in the Arctic. A review last month in Science summed them up. In the past 150 years, Earth's average temperature has increased by about 0.4 C (0.72 F.).
But the Arctic has warmed two to three time as much. As a result, spring arrives earlier and winter is less severe. Some plants begin flowering 20 days earlier than previously. Insects show up earlier. Herbivorous insects, like the winter moth, have moved north, defoliating birch forests in parts of Scandinavia. Red foxes have moved north into Arctic fox territory.
Some migrating caribou herds, meanwhile, find that their calving season is out of sync with the most nutritious forage, which now sprouts earlier. These herds have declined.
Conversely, in some places, snow that now melts more often during winter permits caribou herds to access more food during cold months. These herds have responded by growing in number.
Another recent study in the journal Ecological Monographs looked at the positive feedback potential of a warming Arctic. Arctic land and sea together absorb and sequester up to one-quarter of the world's carbon.
Much of that carbon is held in permafrost. If the Arctic warms too much, it may not only stop absorbing carbon, it may begin emitting greenhouse gases, warming climate further.
Another recent bit of climate news has little to do with climate science directly or observations of shifting ecosystems. Rather, it purports to measure Americans' perception of climate change.
A poll by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press released last week found that, compared to three years ago, fewer Americans believe there's strong evidence that global warming is real.In 2006, 77 percent believed that global warming was real. Now 57 percent do.
Andrew Kohut, director of the research center, attributed the decline to the economic downturn. "The priority that people give to pollution and environmental concerns and a whole host of other issues is down because of the economy and because of the focus on other things," he told The Associated Press.
Editor’s note: For more articles about the environment, see the Monitor’s main environment page, which offers information on many environment topics. Also, check out our Bright Green blog archive and our RSS feed.
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