From the Pope Urging the United States to take climate change seriously, to Paris ditching cars for a day, the climate had several moments this weekend.

On Sunday, the BBC reported that walkers and cyclists meet up on the Champs-Elysees in Paris to celebrate “car-free” day. And in the video below, you can see the Pope talk on the importance of climate action and endorse President Obama’s Clean Power Plan. A nod to Mother Jones for  posting this video first.

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More than 310,000 people flooded the streets of New York City at the People’s Climate March on Sunday, September 21st, 2014. Organizers had only predicted 100k, wildly underestimating the passion and wherewithal of hundreds of thousands of people from all over the planet. 

We marched. We chanted. We danced. We sang. And we demanded that world leaders take action on climate change as the United Nations Summit convenes this coming week. Ban-Ki Moon, the Secretary-General of the UN, marched in the People’s Climate March in a rare display of solidarity. Many other celebrities and leaders were there — but that’s not what matters most. What matters is what we do next.

The phrase I heard most often when I asked why people were marching was, “I’m marching for my children.” The science is settled, and the consensus among Americans is that change must happen now — or else the next generations will be forced to move away from the coasts, doomed to constant resource wars, droughts, ever worsening wildfires, superstorms, food shortages, and much worse. Yet our media continues to report on ISIS as if it’s the only existential threat we face — as if climate isn’t in acute crisis. My favorite sign today read: “Your grandchildren are more likely to die from climate change than terrorism.”

Before the march, there was talk that the most influential environmental organizations, some aligned with corporate agendas, had usurped the mission of the People’s Climate March — making it less about people power and more about political and corporate power. Yes, these organizations were there, but they didn’t take up all the air in the proverbial room. The people spoke, the people connected with one another — and if our leaders do not listen to us — the people will build change from the grassroots. Big Oil knows how to manipulate our leaders with lobbying money, but we can outsmart them.

I marched with the fracktivist contingent — we sprawled for blocks. Frackstivists hail from all over the country — fighting poisoned, flammable water and a host of other illnesses that have been unleashed into their communities thanks to the natural gas industry. Fracktivists are now fighting to stop Liberty National Gas from building deepwater terminals off our coasts. One of these export facilities is proposed right off the coast of Long Island, threatening the lives of people in communities already ravaged by Hurricane Sandy. The brilliant activists behind Sane Energy Project just launched a groundbreaking interactive map linking all the areas that the natural gas industry has ravaged in New York (or will ravage if they get their way).

The People’s Climate March was massive — and massively inspirational. Yet there is much more work to be done. On Monday, September 22nd activists will convene to #FloodWallStreet in a direct action that addresses the raw truth of climate change — that Wall Street bankers and corporations are the real reason our seas are rising.

No matter how perfectly we live our lives — recycling, using the right light bulbs, wearing eco-friendly makeup and eating organic food — we cannot save the planet for our children unless we halt carbon consumption. Capitalism runs on unchecked carbon consumption, and unless we stop feeding that monster, there will be no real change. The People’s Climate March started the conversation — and we don’t have much time left to spread this particular truth.

I’ll be at the action on Wall Street — follow my updates @ecosexuality.

Stefanie Iris Weiss is the author of “Eco-Sex: Go Green Between the Sheets” and “Make Your Love Life Sustainable”  (Ten Speed Press/Crown Publishing, 2010) and eight other books. Stefanie keeps her carbon footprint small in New York City, where she writes about sustainability, sexuality, reproductive rights, dating and relationships, politics, fashion, beauty, and more for many publications.

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images via Stefanie Iris Weiss

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ColumnIs your cup of coffee threatened?

Dukunde Kawa or Kilenso?

I was at Coava Coffee Roasters for an afternoon meeting and having to choose what beans I wanted my iced Americano to be made from. Here, roasting is taken seriously, and on any give day you have your pick between the two blends of the day, always sourced from specific cooperatives on the other side of the world. I went with the Rwandan one, liking the taste, but also, for a variety of reasons – including once having a roommate from Rwanda – because the cooperative was on my radar.

Coava is of course different from the majority of coffee shops. Most times we stand in line, decide whether or not we should go for the soy latte today because we’ve been feeling a little dairy intolerant lately, opt for the extra shot and go on our way. But our coffee choices aren’t insignificant. Far from it, in fact.

Coffee is the world’s second most valuable traded commodity, beat out only by oil. Our cars get fuel and so do we. Our consumption also fuels an entire global industry of farmers and producers. According to Global Exchange, there are approximately 25 million farmers and coffee workers in over 50 countries involved in producing coffee around the world.

For something that touches so many lives, both on the production and the consumption side, it often gets very little thought beyond whether or not we remembered to bring our travel mug. We know that we should skip the disposable cup and pesky little plastic lid, but for most of us, that’s where the environmental costs and coffee connection stops. Coffee however, is an industry highly subject to the negative effects of climate change, and if you don’t think that your everyday actions aren’t affecting what you’re drinking, think again.

As with other agricultural crops, coffee isn’t a newcomer to the effects of weather patterns. “The coffee industry has been very aware of the impact of weather on coffee for a very long time… if there’s an extreme weather event, the big commercial traders know how that is going to ripple out over the next 6 to 12 months,” says Ben Corey-Moran of Thanksgiving Coffee, an artisan coffee roaster based in Northern California. But with the heightened dramatic weather patterns influenced by climate change, those effects are changing, and in a big way. For decades adds Corey-Moran, “the wet season was consistently wet and the dry season consistently dry.” With these normal cycles there was a consistent rhythm, but with dramatic changes to climate “that rhythm has shifted so much that it’s totally chaotic.”

Simply put, as temperatures warm, coffee fruit ripens more quickly, producing a less complex flavor. As Corey-Moran compares it to Pinot Noirs of colder northern climates. “we’re losing the “terroir,” the dynamic balance in the ecosystem that produces these flavors that we love.”

This isn’t just a threat felt by a select few. “Organizations like GCQRI are researching this very threat to the industry and have put it at the top of their list as a critical problem to not only specialty coffee, but the entire industry of coffee. This threat could lead to areas, zones and regions becoming extinct from being able to grow coffee that suits our needs apropos quality, thus meaning a superior premium to growers who go the extra mile,” says Darrin Daniel of Stumptown Coffee, the Portland-based roasting company known for its close work with its coffee cooperatives and farmers.

But it’s not just a problem for specialty coffee. “Imagine in 10 years that sought after regions of cultivation of arabica might not be sustainable and also be suspect to outbreaks such as coffee leaf rust and increased issues with coffee borer (brocca). In ten years, we may have thousands of coffee producers who might have to cultivate an entirely new agricultural product or leave farming all together,” says Daniel.

That means not only you without a craft cup of joe, or a craft cup that could taste very differently than what you’re used to, but millions of people around the world without jobs.

“First and foremost this is livelihood for these farmers,” says Corey-Moran. “The farmers who we are working with are losing their crops because of the weather.” That’s why at Thanksgiving Coffee, Corey-Moran and his team started to think about what they could do, asking the farmers themselves what they would do to mitigate the effects. “More technology, more chemicals and better new breeds will help us [with] this mess that we’re in, [but] that’s not the direction we want to go. We want to go in the direction of investing in the farm’s ability to protect itself.”

“The cooperative developed a set of interventions that were designed to protect their farms against those changes,” says Corey-Moran. Those interventions came in the form of tree planting, and partnering with NGO Progresso, the company launched a comprehensive reforestation program at Dunde Kawa in Rwanda, planting trees to not only provide shade but also improve the topsoil, buffering the impact of rain and keeping the ground moist during dry periods. Inspired by the success of the project, Thanksgiving Coffee went on to launch the Resilience Fund, a non profit organization that will allow the company to invest in the same type of adaptive programs at other cooperatives. “The goal is that the Resilience Fund will be a vehicle that other coffee roasting companies can use to support their partners at origin,” says Corey-Moran

More programs like this will help cooperatives deal with the negative effects of climate change on their livelihoods, but ultimately, there is a need for larger change.

“The only action is to spur education around this issue and press governments to understand the importance of carbon emissions. This is a global issue that will not only impact coffee producers, but also large swaths of communities in areas of the world where rising temperatures will potentially devastate coastal communities,” says Daniel.

As with many environmental issues, it also comes down to taking personal responsibility for your every day choices. Coffee companies that are making smart decisions and implementing programs that ensure their farmers are protected and making wages that allow them to care for their families and take part in their local communities need continued support. Without them, we’ll be looking at a very different industry.

“Know where your coffee comes from. Ask questions. Climate change is something that will impact growers and I believe an understanding of how overall yields and livelihood will impact. The biggest impact consumers can have is to seek ways in which they can influence issues that are connected with long term global change and carbon emission abatement,” says Daniel.

Next time you order your Americano, know what you’re drinking and know what drinking it means.

“Climate change is not going to affect someone else, it’s already affecting the food on your table,” says Corey-Moran.

Editor’s note: This is the latest installment of Anna Brones’s weekly column at EcoSalon, Foodie Underground, discovering what’s new and different in the underground food movement, from supper clubs to mini markets to the culinary avant garde.

Image: kennymatic, Thanksgiving Coffee

The post Foodie Underground: The Real Impact of Your Cup of Espresso appeared first on EcoSalon.

Climate Ride is a non-profit organization that organizes fully supported, charitable bike rides to support sustainable energy solutions, bike advocacy, and environmental causes. This is a special guest post from the Climate Ride NYC-DC 2012 participant Jenny Cooper of Environmental Defense Fund. 

Five days, four states, 300 miles of bicycle riding, and 200 hundred incredible people who are all working their tails off to address the greatest challenge of our time: climate change. With a perfect combination of mental and physical challenge, I couldn’t imagine a better adventure than Climate Ride, an epic bicycle ride from NYC to DC to raise awareness and funds for climate change solutions and sustainable transportation.

It’s the final day of my third Climate Ride. The ride yesterday took us through the hilly forests of southern Pennsylvania to the undulating landscape of rural northern Maryland dotted with horse farms. Today we’re pedaling 65 miles to the nation’s capital. Washington, DC here we come!

With nearly 200 riders this spring, Climate Ride is bigger than ever, drawing people from all over the country. We come from different geographic, professional, and cycling backgrounds, but two common threads tie us together: our dedication to finding effective solutions to climate change, and our love for bicycles (in some cases a newfound love!)

Growing up in Baltimore, Maryland and having family in New York, I’ve made the trek from DC to NYC upwards a hundred times in my life, whizzing up and down the I-95 corridor by train or by car. The architecture is largely homogenous and the sprawl rampant; I’m rarely inspired to stop along the way.

Riding my bike between the two cities with Climate Ride is the antithesis of that speedy and faceless experience. Back roads wind us through culturally rich and historically significant towns and across stunning river crossings once forded by Washington’s revolutionary army. We cycle past Amish farms, through state parks lush with trees and steeped in Civil War history, and end our five day adventure in our nation’s capital via a bike path along the Potomac river.

We’ve been biking 60+ miles each day, and each night we spend time as a group listening to speakers (nearly all of them riders) discuss their climate and sustainable transportation related work and explore creative ways to inspire and effect positive social change that will help avert catastrophic climate change.

From large scale sustainability initiatives at major universities, NOAA climate science updates, and climate change adaptation projects in developing countries, to bicycle infrastructure improvements across the globe, sustainable architecture, and climate literacy, the evening speaker series on Climate Ride offers an unparalleled opportunity to engage with people working on climate change issues from myriad angles. We push our physical abilities by day, and expand our brains by night.

Riding my bike connects me to the physical landscape, people, and culture in ways that cars simply can’t. As I pedal south from New York City, I feel the physical and cultural landscapes changing under my bike tires. The towering skyscrapers, potholes, and bustling streets of lower Manhattan shift to the rolling hills of New Jersey, which give way to the farmland and forests of Pennsylvania and the horse and buggies of Amish country.

As I ride through the urban jungle of New York City dotted with green spaces and chock full of high density housing, past the suburban McMansions of northern New Jersey, into Lancaster county where “car back!” becomes “buggy back!” and each house has its laundry hanging out to dry on a clothes line, I can’t help but think about how we design our public and private spaces and allocate resources to infrastructure improvements and construction.

Why do some people feel compelled to live in 10,000 square foot houses, while others are inclined to have 1,000 square foot abodes? Why are the small towns with mixed commercial and residential main streets so much more people-friendly than the strip malls of suburbia? Why are we converting farmland to housing developments scores of miles from supermarkets, schools, and other amenities? And why aren’t the vast majority of our roads built for people, rather than simply cars? Where are the sidewalks and bike lanes? How do these choices effect climate change, and how will our lives and the systems that sustain us be impacted by climate change?

We’ve built our houses, roads, factories, and bridges, based on predictable natural patterns—seasons, rain fall, wind, snow, heat, and cold. Climate change alters those natural patterns in unpredictable ways, threatening our natural and built environment, the very structures that sustain our lives. Climate Ride presents a rare opportunity, enabled by our bicycles, to confront these challenges and questions head on and brainstorm creative solutions. Hope to see you out on the road with us, pedaling our way to a sustainable future!

Learn more about Climate Ride and how you can participate and support the organization here. 

The post Climate Ride NYC-DC 2012: Pedaling for Sustainable Solutions appeared first on EcoSalon.

Fried food, two-stepping, honky tonk music, cowboy boots, and environmentalists? It might sound like an odd combo, but that’s South by Southwest Eco for you.

Last week, the EcoSalon team descended upon Austin, Texas to join in as a media partner in the first ever SXSW Eco, a three-day conference bringing together an “international audience of executive level decision makers from the public and private sectors, and thought leaders from academia.”

Just as SXSW has become a launching pad for new creative content and ideas fueled by a dynamic and diverse audience, the goal for SXSW Eco is to apply the same innovative approach to discussing the most pressing issues of our time. From food issues to the global population explosion to exploring what neuroscience can teach us about human behavior, the panelists and keynote speakers of the conference tackled these topics from a variety of perspectives, providing plenty of intellectual space to grow the conversation.

It’s one thing to gather a bunch of green-minded people into one space and get them to talk about pressing issues, and quite another to engage people outside of our circles on the same issues. “I am here to reach the people outside of the room, and I hope you do the same,” said Simran Sethi, journalist and Associate Professor University of Kansas. One of the main themes that stood out to us during the conference was how exactly we go about doing that. We all, at this point, acknowledge and understand that the green conversation has failed to become the green conversion. Going green has been a bust. But why? And where do we go from here? One popular sentiment floated into the Twitterverse from a panel on how green vocabulary has failed us was “We need a Rosetta Stone of green.”

So, is it changing how we talk about climate and the environment in our marketing efforts? Or are we so wired to consume more and deplete our natural resources, we must begin with psychology and science? Is dissonance and debate between greens – “skirmishes,” as the Nature Conservancy president Mark Tercek much prefers (bristling a bit under repeated criticism in the Q&A) – a healthy way to create space for forward progress, or a dangerously short-sighted distraction from the goals we share? Can we find ever find common ground that doesn’t politicize the issue of the environment and brings people from all points of the spectrum together to save ourselves?

The short answer is: yes. But it’s going to take work. And it’s going to take thinking creatively about how we talk about things like “green” and how we get people rallied around the issues. And it’s going to take words that don’t start with “g,” “s,” or “e.” (Green, sustainable, environmental.)

There’s hope, because when it comes to the environmental movement, we are talking about issues that affect everyone, which means that there’s plenty of room to improve and expand. We just have to rally around the right things, and become as sophisticated in our approach as Coca-Cola is at selling sugar water. As Roger-Mark De Souza, Vice President of Research Population Action International, said on a panel about pressing questions that won’t be on the Rio agenda in 2012, we have to make sure that we don’t have “missed opportunities.”

If we don’t want missed opportunities, we must start with communication. Facts and figures don’t work; relationships are everything. “We need to know our audience,” emphasized Brooke Buchanan, Director of Communications for Sustainability, Walmart. On the same panel, Jeff Nesbit, Executive Director of Climate Nexus, added “We have to learn other ways to communicate about these things so people actually care.” That means thinking creatively about how we frame environmental issues and how we communicate them to the larger public.

But it also means finding new ways to connect with people; focusing on the elements that transcend ideologies and political parties. One of those is food. In her presentation, Sethi presented a Wendell Berry quote:

Eaters, that is, must understand that eating takes place inescapably in the world, that it is inescapably an agricultural act, and how we eat determines, to a considerable extent, how the world is used.

As Sethi put it, “we cherish our connections to food… we do not cherish our connections to turning off our lightbulbs.”

Change, as it turns out, is about inspiring and moving people to do, not only better, but to connect, and the more we separate ourselves from others – be it through messages or actions or lexicons – the more we risk failure.

But there is hope. And in a post-Austin recharge, we’re donning our new cowboy boots and feeling inspired to do good, and we hope you do, too. Just how do we go about this? And what were points of consensus and criticism at the first ever SXSW Eco? Look for that and more in parts 2 and 3 this week from EIC Sara Ost and News Editor Andrea Newell.

We’ll have more on SXSW Eco throughout the week, so check back!

Images: Anna Brones

Main image: Chris Tackett, social media editor of Treehugger, Alex Steffen, environmental thought leader and keynote speaker, Sara Ost, EIC of EcoSalon, Andrea Newell, News Editor of EcoSalon, and others gather at the joint Treehugger/EcoSalon/Triple Pundit happy hour in Austin, Texas.

The post Lessons from SXSW Eco #1: Changing How We Communicate appeared first on EcoSalon.

The space-obsessed were treated to a Foursquare check-in from the wild black yonder last week from NASA astronaut and International Space Station Commander Doug Wheelock. For his efforts, he was told: “You are now 220 miles above Earth traveling at 17,500 mph and unlocked the NASA Explorer Badge! Show this badge and get a free scoop of astronaut ice cream.” Tons of press. Presumably, he’s the mayor of Space – for now, anyway. And for all you future-trippers, here’s something you might want to start worrying about right away. I mean, we do have our green priorities.

Bad news, says NewScientist: “Space tourism could have major consequences for Earth’s climate.” This based on brand spanking new computer simulations that say soot-spewing rockets (we recently told you about the climate evils of soot) could have an effect far nastier than airplanes, even though the model would have them “belch out” only about 600 tons of the stuff, which is less than airplanes currently bless us with.

This is because spacecraft are so far out – literally: “…plane soot occurs at low enough altitudes for rain to wash it out of the atmosphere in just days or weeks. Rockets expel the stuff at altitudes three times as high – in the stratosphere more than [about 25 miles] above sea level. There, well above the weather, it can remain for up to 10 years,” the article says.

Why should we worry about this? Well “in the next few years,” (ya think? really?) “space tourism companies hope to start routinely flying passengers on suborbital space flights.” Based on what some companies are saying, their business plans in the “by 2020” column, the simulations were based on an assumed rate of 1,000 suborbital trips per year.

The science is that the soot could warm air in the stratosphere and strengthen currents that carry air from the equator to the poles. This is “not a pretty picture for the Arctic or Antarctic,” says Charles Zender of the University of California, Irvine.

So a word of warning for you green folks who are looking to purchase advance tix for the Buck Rogers express: your eco-priorities might conflict with your moonage daydreams (or Foursquare badge aspirations). I don’t know, though. You might have some time to think about it. In the meantime, maybe stick to “unlocking” where you’re at.

Image: x-ray delta one

The post Spaced Out Green Worries for Future-Trippers appeared first on EcoSalon.

Growing up in the industrial Midwest, “California Dreaming” was more than just a song. It was an homage to someplace totally “other” – a shining state on the Pacific, full of light and beauty and forward-looking promise. When it came on the radio everyone immediately forgot what they were doing and sang of being “safe and warm.” It was mild all the time there, it seemed, and they had great pot, a governor called Moonbeam, and even solar power. If I just follow the sun, I thought, I’ll end up there.

While I took a crazily circuitous route, I did, in fact, follow the sun and about 15 years ago settled in just north of San Francisco. Though I’d been coming out here since I was a kid, and had experienced firsthand the progressive gestalt of the “mellow state,” it quickly became apparent to me as a new resident that all was not what I thought it would be. In many ways, massive California functions as a nation unto itself, as divided as any, as susceptible to reactionary thinking, bigotry and good old stupidity as anyplace else. In my time here, I’ve seen some horrendous political “leadership,” antisocial anti-tax measures and, most recently, Proposition 8, banning gay marriage. I often think to myself, where is progressive California? Was it ever even real?

When fits of Golden State cynicism arise, I can usually stop and meditate (yes, I learned to do that in California), and do a quick Cali gut check. Let’s do one now: Three reasons California is still cool.

Medical Marijuana and Marijuana Marijuana

NYT – October 1: A month before California voters decide the fate of a ballot initiative that would legalize marijuana, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has signed a bill that essentially puts those caught possessing small amounts of the drug on the same level as those caught speeding on the freeway.

I’ve always believed that the nation’s marijuana laws are cruel and unusual – and inane – from both the standpoint of its medical potential and its “hey, man, chill with this” benefits. I also have a bit of a libertarian streak in me that says: “Leave me the hell alone if I want to put something in my body that evidence shows is merely really not too good for me and for which basic precautions can be taken to make sure no one but me is going to get hurt.”

But in the end, it’s not about the party. It’s about sound transactional taxation policy (economic sense) and getting our arms around prosecution and incarceration abuses that are way out of hand (resource management and simple compassion). As an ex-user, I may not get there with you, but its time has come. Despite the fact the state-wide Proposition 19, which would legalize marijuana for recreational use, may go down to (perhaps narrow) defeat, it won’t be too long before the craziness around this issue will finally come to an end – and it will happen in California.

Keeping Cool on the Climate

NYT – October 5: A measure to suspend [California’s] vanguard climate change law is heading for failure, by a margin of 49 percent to 37 percent, because voters see the law doing more economic good than harm, a Reuters/Ipsos poll released on Tuesday showed.

Part of what makes this so cool is another headline: “Billionaire Koch brothers back suspension of California climate law” (LA Times, September 2). The law, AB 32 or the Global Warming Solutions Act, requires that one-third of California’s electricity come from renewable sources by 2020 (less than a quarter does today). The “hold off” measure, Proposition 23, was initially brought to us courtesy of funding from two Texas refiners, who have recently been joined by these maniac brothers, Charles and David, major tea-party enablers who operate oil refineries in states, you’ve guessed it, other than California. These two love to throw wads of cash at climate change deniers and renewable energy opponents. So welcome to California, guys. Boo-yah!

Like the marijuana issue, the progressive angle here is not about some Cali-hip movement. AB 32 limits greenhouse gas emissions and is creating a massive market for renewable energy, including solar, wind and other sources. According to polls, people are getting the money/jobs angle on all this and see California’s economic redemption as inexorably tied to being the global leader in the green economy. According to the NYT, the state “won 49 percent of the sector’s U.S. venture capital funding in the most recent quarter.” Of course, let’s check back in on this after Election Day, but it seems we’re seeing the forest for the trees on this one.

I Now Pronounce You…

SF Chronicle – September 3: The outlook for the legal defense of Proposition 8, California’s ban on same-sex marriage, grew cloudier Thursday as a state appellate court refused to order Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and Attorney General Jerry Brown to appeal a federal judge’s ruling overturning the measure.

The recent record on this one is not good. The passage of Proposition 8 (52.3 percent “yes,” 47.7 percent “no”) was nothing short of a disgrace for civil rights history. But while that speaks to pervasive homophobia in our society as whole (and perhaps also to ways in which the approach of legislation by initiative is so terribly flawed), it seems that our court system, our Republican governor and our Democratic attorney general know an assault – not to mention affront – to our nation’s Constitution when they see one.

Here’s the drill on this case: The Court of Appeal “dismissed without comment” a lawsuit, filed on behalf of a Los Angeles-area minister, seeking to require the state to defend the initiative after it was struck down as unconstitutional by a U.S. District Court in August. Both Brown and Schwarzenegger refused to defend it in federal court. Next up is a federal appeals court date in December when arguments will be heard on the sponsors’ legal standing and on the measure’s constitutionality.

California’s history, though stained by the passing of Proposition 8, remains at the forefront of civil rights for homosexuals. While the courts sort it out, I’m going to go ahead and remain hopeful that this measure will meet its doom.

This concludes our one-two-three listicle for your Cali consideration. Each one of these issues has key decisions coming up in the near future (two major ballot measures and one federal court case), so we’ll be keeping the pulse on California Cool as we go. In the meantime, I remain bullish on the Cal bear. And I still smile every time I cross the Golden Gate Bridge.

Image: tibchris

The post Gut Check West: 3 Reasons Why California Is Still Cool appeared first on EcoSalon.

I’m no chemist. In fact, I get a little jittery around (and refuse to make eye contact with) the Periodic Table on my son’s closet door. But, given the subject matter here, I must do my best to understand the basic causes surrounding greenhouse gas emissions and their impact on global warming. At times, the concepts seem simple to me (I “get” the greenhouse metaphor) and other times my eyes tragically glaze over when well-meaning scientists try to explain exactly what’s happening here that’s threatening the lives and future of my children. But mental gymnastics aside (sorry folks, some of it is hardcore science), I just read something that I can get my wee right brain around: the air is sooty and we should clean it up.

“A massive simulation of soot’s climate effects finds that basic pollution controls could put a brake on global warming, erasing in a decade most of the last century’s temperature change,” says a Wired Science post. What they’re getting at is that greenhouse gas emissions aside, which are a huge problem and require long-term solutions (“new energy technology and profound changes in lifestyle”), our habit of pumping good ol’ soot into the atmosphere (wood and dung burning, diesel exhaust, small boilers, residential coal use) is something that 1) is a huge part of the problem of global temperature change, and 2) we should be able to get a handle on for immediate impact using simple tools that already exist, like exhaust filters and clean-burning stoves.

The article is based in part on the work of Stanford University climate scientist Mark Jacobson, who conducted the simulation. He found that soot, or black carbon, plays a critical role in global warming, a fact apparently uncovered by prior studies, as well, including work done by NASA back in 2003. But Jacobson’s work takes the simulation a step further, looking into the immediate effects of decreasing the emissions of said soot. The good news, he reports, is that soot has a lifetime in the atmosphere of just a few weeks, while carbon dioxide, for example, has a lifetime of 30 to 50 years. So getting our black carbon problem under control could have a quick and significant effect on global temperatures.

“If you totally stop CO2 emissions today, the Arctic will still be totally melted,” says Jacobson. If we pull in the reins on soot, “the reductions start to occur pretty much right away. Within months, you’ll start seeing temperature differences.”

Explains the article’s author, Brandon Keim: “Soot comes from the incomplete combustion of fossil fuels, and also from the burning of wood or dung for fuel. Crop residue and forest-burning are another major source.”

The 2003 NASA simulation said soot was responsible for one quarter of all global warming in the 20th century. And soot has been identified a key contributor to crises ranging from to glacier melts to abnormal monsoon activity. The United Nations, says Keim, “puts the soot-related death toll at 1.5 million people annually.”

If stopped tomorrow, the disappearance of soot would could drop average world temps by about a degree Fahrenheit. “That’s about half the net warming – total global warming, minus cooling from sun-reflecting aerosols – experienced since the beginning of the industrial age,” says Keim. “The effect would be even larger in the Arctic, where sea ice and tundra could rapidly refreeze.”

The big picture impact of a wide-scale soot reduction effort could buy time and delay “tipping points” in climate change as greenhouse gases continue to take their toll. While the last year’s draft climate treaty generated in Copenhagen last year doesn’t say anything “soot-specific,” the United Nations Environmental Program (UNEP) will be discussing soot problems next year. Meanwhile, here in the States, the EPA will soon begin its own black carbon study. In the meantime, it’s nice to know that there may be some immediate answers out there if we just listen up and put a lid – or a filter – on it.

Image: stoixeia

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The weather this summer in the Bay Area has been nothing short of awful. And with me being what my friend calls a “High Priest of Ra,” it’s been posited that my missing a sacrifice or committing some other ungodly affront has resulted in this madness. We’re talking stretches of frigid weeks in July, a sunless, cold anti-summer, followed by sudden August temperature spikes reaching 104 degrees and literally melting the candles in my apartment. 104? I mean, this is San Francisco. Are you kidding me? Dear Lord, could it really be my fault? Do the weather gods care about us humans and what we do here on earth?

Evidently they do care. A lot. Human-induced global warming and our fossil fuel mission/vision of burn ’em if we got ’em has someone or something pissed off. Big.

We’ve all had the conversations that start with “How many hurricanes was it this year?” or “The summers have never been like this before!” or “When I was a kid we’d have snow days where we couldn’t even leave the house! What happened to those?”

Invariably, these openers are followed by, “Yeah, right, and there’s no global warming.” Indeed, for general weather phenomena like these, science has been emerging that shows connections between human activity and broad brush climatic change.

But take the conversation a step further to speak about a certain climatic event – the Russian heat wave, say, or Pakistan flooding – and it becomes more challenging to point to a particular culprit. While we all seem to instinctively know there’s a connection between specific weather events and what we’re up to on the ground, the science hasn’t been there to make absolute links, as in “that flood came from that weather pattern which came from those countries burning this much fossil fuel back in these years.” Capiche?

Scientists are beginning to capiche.

Earlier this month, white coats from all over the world gathered in Broomfield, Colorado, at a National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and International Group on Attribution of Climate-Related Events (ACE) workshop series on the “science, application, and communication of climate attribution information.” As defined by the NOAA, climate attribution is “a scientific process for establishing the principal causes or physical explanation for observed climate conditions and phenomena.” This includes attribution for variations “for which great public interest exists because they produce profound societal impacts.”

In other words, what’s behind the mega-weather headlines.

Not too long ago, our ability to address such questions would have been dismissed, says an article in New Scientist. “Many scientists at the time [a decade ago] said that you can never blame an individual weather event on climate change,” says Myles Allen of the University of Oxford.

But attempts to assign blame for such events goes back to 2004, when Allen and others “showed to a high level of confidence that human greenhouse gas emissions had at least doubled the risk of the European heatwave of 2003.” Their research approach required them to “run thousands of simulations of the climate as it is and as it would have been without human influences, then compare the number of times a given event occurs in each scenario.” Today, technological adavances will enable to such analyses to be much more accurate.

One of the worlshop’s attendees, Dr. Claudia Tebaldi, of Stanford’s Carnegie Institution, says that research already has been able to attribute causes of  trends in continental scale temperatures, large area-averaged precipitation trends, ocean temperature trends, long-term changes in atmospheric humidity and more to, well, us.

“Using sophisticated computer modeling and high quality observations,” she writes, “we are able to say with great confidence that in these changing aspects of our climate system, the fingerprint of human causes is already evident.”

Now the the goal is use new methods to get even more specific regarding particular events and their causes. And while forecasting is of primary importance, right now there’s a lot of buzz around the legal implications of pointing accurate fingers. For example, can one country sue another for activity that can be proven to be responsible for something as devastating as a flood, heat wave or famine?

In 2005, Katrina victims filed a lawsuit against some oil companies, saying their activity in the Gulf contributed to the power of the hurricane. The case was recently dismissed due to a legal glitch, but you get the idea. Big implications here.

Connecting weather events with their causes is going to be a huge undertaking in upcoming years. As climate changes have increasingly profound effects on the lives of millions, people are going to want to know the whys and whos and hows and, hopefully, how to predict and prevent catastrophes going forward. And leaving it up to the gods just ain’t going to cut it. (Sorry, oh dear and powerful Ra. Can I have some more summer please? Just a little? What do you want? A dead goat?)

Image: crowt59

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Northern Europe’s air traffic is at a near-total standstill after windblown ash from Iceland’s Eyjafjallajökull volcano spread across Scandinavia and the north of the U.K. While posing little environmental threat in the long term, this silica-rich ash could melt into liquid glass inside aircraft engines, clogging and even stopping them in mid-air.

Pity the U.K’s commercial airline services, set to lose tens of millions a day while disruptions last and if Eyjafjallajökull repeats its performance of 1821, that could be a very long time indeed.

“We are volcanoes. When we women offer our experience as our truth, as human truth, all the maps change. There are new mountains.” – Ursula K. Le Guin

“Don’t dance on a volcano” – French Proverb

Further reading:

“How do volcanoes affect world climate?” – Karen Harpp, Scientific American

” ‘Volcanoes emit more CO2 than humans’ – not even close…” – Grist

“Harness volcano power, energy experts say” – Daily Telegraph

“Erupting Volcanoes From Earth As Seen From Space” – Betsy Mason, Wired

Editor’s note: Join us every Friday for our environmental photo essay with Mike Sowden.

Images: rachel thecat and NASA

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