Category: Education

Sustainable Edgewater Seminar on Climate Change

We had great discussions about climate change last Tuesday at the Edgewater Library. Thanks to all the new faces and those of you who are there every week. Check out the Climate Change Seminar slides here.

If you’ve never seen the carbon dioxide emission visual from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, watch this at their site.

At the seminar, we first talked about the green house effect and the green house gas, carbon dioxide, its natural and human generation, and the isotopic properties of fossil fuels, which have a clear affect on the atmosphere’s C-12 to C-13 ratio. We discussed how over twenty-four thousand peer reviewed scientific articles discussing climate change measured up against the five which reject man-made climate change, as discussed on jamespowell.org.  This gives scientific consensus on the topic. Exactly what is going to happen is still under debate.

Really important, was the timescale for our climate, for which we have been in a perfect scenario for about 8,000 years since the end of the last ice age. Of course the climate has changed before, but not since we’ve settle the major river deltas, that have been stabilized by consistent sea levels. This led naturally into the rising sea levels, which rate has doubled since last century. We’re on track for about 3 feet of rise by century’s end. Next we looked at how the poles are warming faster than the rest of the planet, and one hypothesis how that may be changing our jet stream pattern. Alaska again, has seen records warmth in 2016 across the state.

Some of the heavier topics were upcoming climate refugees, who have no legal status yet. (see links below) And how some nations are already negotiating acceptance for their people to foreign nations as escape. A serious group preparing for climate changes is the defense department and has indeed written a living document called the DOD Climate Change Adaptation Roadmap. Megadroughts, droughts lasting 35 years or more have occurred historically, and based on models of soil and weather moisture indicate significant increases in probability in the southwest and central plains of the US. One of the more troubling indicators for me is the coupled trend between rising CO2 levels and ocean acidification, where the ocean has become 30% more acidic in the last 25 years, resulting from a drop in pH by just over 0.1. Recall that pH is logarithmic with base 10. We also looked at the Mediterranean drought maps from 2011 which support the idea that Syrian conflict is not being helped by their drought.

Then the polls: Who believes climate change is real? China was #1, while US was last and closely followed by Britain. We learned about some useful resources like skepticalscience.com and the climate myths. There’s also two good reads to recommend on obscuring the truth: A book, “Merchants of Doubt” by Naomi Oreskes, and National Geographic’s “War on Science” March 2015.

But there’s been some good news too. British Petroleum and other oil companies are beginning to warn of CO2 effects and global warming. And there’s things we can do to. On my street this week, new solar panels were going up on my neighbor’s roof. Renewable energy and variations of carbon free energy systems are becoming more popular. Energy efficiency is also on the rise, with LED lighting saving energy for every bulb replaced. Of course there’s a conundrum, when we have higher efficiency will we save energy and emissions or will we just have more and more things to run? I’m not sure on this one.

I have to thank Chuck Kutscher from the National Renewable Energy Lab for posting his presentation and talk video on the web.  I highly recommend this for anyone who wanted to attend but couldn’t. I based my talk on his and also showed many of those slides.

Finally, if you are looking for some more links to interesting articles, check these out: