The human ability to hope stands as perhaps our most defining trait. That hope leads to denial could lead to our downfall. Time will continue to tell, but as we move forward into the era of predicted climate change, the more we get to experience the veracity of the predictions. Our hope has given us the comfort level that we will handle whatever cards the environment deals us. I hope that we are not too late.
Panel says global warming carries risk of deep changes
"The document the panel released Tuesday is the latest in a string of reports to consider whether some changes could occur so suddenly as to produce profound social or environmental stress, even collapse. Like previous reports, the new one considers many potential possibilities and dismisses most of them as unlikely — at least in the near term.
But some of the risks are real, the panel found, and in several cases have happened already."
Most of us only know about feedback from the obnoxiously loud speaker sounds we hear at concerts or high school events. Some of us know it through the generous number and size of opinions people express to us when they "politely" evaluate our performance. In nature, feedback can lead to tremendously good or tremendously horrible consequences. Once nature begins a feedback loop, stopping it takes significantly more effort than preventing it in the first place. Unfortunately, one has already started in the Arctic.
Another reason to worry about methane: It’s leaking out of the Arctic Ocean hella fast
"Methane is stored on the Arctic Ocean floor, and is kept there by a layer of permafrost. As the permafrost thaws due to global warming, the methane escapes. Extra methane has also been escaping in recent years due to stronger and more frequent storms that shake up the ocean and bring gases to the top more quickly. As the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner notes, there are also carbon stores being similarly affected.
And the methane release creates a feedback loop: More methane causes more warming, which causes more rapid methane release."
I have thought for years that in a city like Chicago, we should be able to eliminate driving, at least in the city center - and ideally on Lake Shore Drive. If you look at the changes in major European cities since the 1970s, we see far fewer cars and greater emphasis on bikes, walking, and urbanism (the layout of cities to create communities that do not require a car for survival). The latest to reach this conclusion offers some great insights on what the future can hold when we stop thinking of cars as essential to our quality of life.
Madrid's big plan to swear off cars
"Trees, bikes, and walking are in. Cars, historical protection, and new apartments are out. This is the gist of a new plan Madrid has hatched to help it catch up with its European neighbors. The General Urban Plan is a massive, doorstep-sized blueprint created by the city government about every 15 years. This latest iteration arrived just as crisis-hit Madrid badly needs an about-turn to put it back on track."
Lest one think that Europe has a monopoly on the ability to create economically thriving communities without cars, we have seen that more and more Americans have learned to live without them. This trend will continue.
The US cities leading the decline in driving
"Over the last decade, however, a new report from the U.S. PIRG Education Fund and the Frontier Group finds that the share of workers who get to work by private car declined in 99 of America's 100 largest urbanized areas (by the Census Bureau's definition, this is a densely populated geography often larger than a single city but smaller than a metropolitan area)."
Finally, a real reason for hope. Coal and nuclear plants close with regularity. Building new natural gas plants takes time to ensure that environmental impacts will remain low. Even new wind projects require necessary environmental scrutiny and significant planning. We can deploy solar quickly, effectively, and more and more as of late, economically. Predictions of how quickly we can create a renewably-powered way of life have always underestimated the speed of deployment of distributed energy like solar. We can do some much more than we previously thought. The transformation can happen, and will happen when we prioritize our economy and our health.
Solar energy was America's sole new power source in October
"That only solar power plants came online in October speaks to some inherent advantages solar holds over fossil fuels – beyond not roasting the planet. One is that photovoltaic power stations can be built relatively quickly given that they essentially involve deploying thousands of solar panels over hundreds or thousands of acres of land. Photovoltaic power plants are modular, meaning that you can build them small near cities to avoid the huge costs of new transmission lines, or build them big to take advantage of economies of scale. More than half of the new solar power plants that came online in October were photovoltaic."
Happy Friday!
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