Check out this compelling roundtable discussion of four expert climate change scientists: The State of the Climate — and of Climate Science.

It originally appeared in the June 2009 issue of DISCOVER Magazine. (I just "discovered" it ...) The introduction does a great job of describing the crossroads we're at today as science and public opinion meet:

"In the list of world challenges, global warming might be at once the most alarming and the most controversial. According to some predictions, climate change caused by human activity could cause mass extinction in the oceans, redraw the planet’s coastlines, and ravage world food supplies. At the same time, a significant portion of the American public questions whether global warming will really cause any major harm; many still doubt that human-driven warming is happening at all."

Here are a few highlights of the discussion:

"I spend a lot of time studying the ice sheets at the bottom of the planet—how they form and how they collapse. The poles are like the planet’s air conditioner. When things are working well, the poles keep the planet nice and cool and we don’t think about it. When things stop working, the poles can start to melt and there’s a puddle on the floor. Today both poles are getting warmer; in Greenland and Antarctica you can see the surface of the ice dropping, and you can see there’s less mass when you measure the ice from space. The process has been ongoing, but it looks like it’s happening faster than it was. We know the ice sheets have come and gone in the past. Why is this any different? One of the most compelling reasons is that in the past the ice sheets from the two poles didn’t move together—one would lead and the other would follow. This time, both the north and south are spewing ice into the global ocean, accelerating at the same time." 

— Robin E. Bell, a senior research scientist at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory

[... the Earth got warm in the past, too] "but it got warm over millions of years, and ecosystems had a chance to adapt. What we’re seeing are rates of increase in greenhouse gases and warming that exceed natural rates by a factor of 100. So what we’re doing is really unusual when seen from a geologic perspective.

[Humans are doing in centuries what natural processes do over millions of years?] "Yes, and the other timescale mismatch is that what we do over the next decades will affect life on this planet for hundreds of thousands of years, if not millions of years. We are at a critical juncture in earth history. If we don’t do the right thing and there are geologists around 50 million years from now, they’ll be able to look at cores and see the remnants of a civilization that developed advanced technology but didn’t develop the wisdom to use it wisely."

"To me the most compelling evidence [that human behavior is actually warming the planet] is the fact that the stratosphere — the upper atmosphere — is cooling while the lower atmosphere and the land surface are warming. That’s a sign that greenhouse gases are trapping energy and keeping that energy close to the surface of the earth. I mentioned that in ocean acidification, you actually see animals that should make shells unable to make shells anymore. You could demonstrate the same kind of effect in a bell jar in the lab. There is a level of certainty about it."

— Ken Caldeira, a professor at Stanford and staff member in the department of global ecology at the Carnegie Institution of Washington

"One of the most remarkable achievements of the 20th century was the way we were able to increase the global food supply in pace with unprecedented population growth. We will have to raise the food supply another two times to feed all of the people that we think will be alive by the latter third of the 21st century. We have reason to be somewhat sanguine about doing it if climate stays more or less the same, but how will we do it with the climate change? Based on our simulations and on 25 years of research, what bothers us most is that in the tropics, where the majority of poor people live today, crops are currently raised at temperatures pretty close to their photosynthetic optimums."

— Bill Easterling, Dean of the College of Earth and Mineral Sciences at Pennsylvania State University

You can read the full discussion and learn more about the credentials of the panelists at The State of the Climate — and of Climate Science.

White roofs, aka cool roofs, have caught attention lately as an offbeat but relatively simple and effective strategy for reducing air conditioning costs and greenhouse gas emissions.

The idea is simple: white reflects heat instead of absorbing it. It's also a favorite idea of Energy Secretary Steven Chu, who said "when you're thinking of putting on a new roof, make it white" in his appearance last month on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart (you can watch the video below).  Chu added that white roofs costs about the same as traditional black roofs and for those in a warm climate, a white roof can reduce air conditioning costs up to about 20 percent.

When Chu talks white roofs, he cites research from Art Rosenfeld, the commissioner of the California Energy Commission. Rosenfeld calculated that pervasive white roofs and white streets throughout the United States would create a significant reduction in carbon dioxide emissions — the equivalent to getting rid of all cars for 11 years. You can learn more about Rosenfeld and his passion for energy efficiency by watching the second video below.

The New York Times also covered cool roofs in White Roofs Catch On as Energy Cost Cutters.

"We come home on days when it’s over 100 degrees outside, and the house is at 80 degrees,” white roof owner Jon Waldrep of Sacremento, Calif., told The New York Times.  

According to research by the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, nearly every state could see significant reductions in carbon dioxide emissions if 80 percent of commerical buildings were converted to have white roofs, even if white roofs meant increased heating demands in winter. You can see how much each state would save in Imagining a Cool-Roof Nation.

So what do you think? Should commercial buildings switch to white roofs? What about for your home? If it meant significant savings in your air conditioning bills, would you choose a white (or lightly colored) roof the next time you need new shingles? Or would that be too much of a color clash? Share your thoughts by posting a comment below.

Hold onto your hats, Congress is debating climate change. Right now the U.S. House is considering the Waxman-Markey climate bill.

To get in on the fun, check out the extensive coverage over on Grist. You can find their latest articles on the climate bill here. (One especially fun article: Grist’s description of Gore v. Hansen on the climate bill, complete with an illustration showing those two environmental heavyweights boxing.)

Also today, I was reading an e-mail update from the American Solar Energy Society. They had a short and helpful summary of why they believe that the climate bill isn’t strong enough and what could be done to improve it. Here’s a link to their recommendations.

Biologists from the University of California, Berkeley, have reported that salamander populations in parts of Central America have declined sharply in the past 40 years — and global warming could be the cause.

UC Berkeley researchers compared data of current salamander populations in western Guatemala and southern Mexico to data collected from the locations between 1969 and 1978. The team found that two of the most common species of salamanders in the areas 40 years ago are extinct, and several others have experienced large drops in number.

Amphibian populations have been declining worldwide, and experts have attributed the drops in other amphibian species — such as the well-documented plummeting of frog populations — to factors such as pesticides, predators and habitat destruction.

But according to David Wake, professor of integrative biology at UC Berkeley and the new study’s lead researcher, the salamanders in Guatemala lived on a controlled nature preserve, so neither outside predators nor human disturbance could have been responsible for their startling disappearance.

The nature preserve couldn’t guard the salamanders from the effects of global warming, however, and the climate conditions of salamanders’ habitat did change over the past 40 years. Salamanders are highly sensitive to climate and humidity, so even a slight increase in temperature could have caused them to seek higher elevations. Having thrived at their former altitudes for thousands of years, the salamanders were unable to adjust to these new habitats, researchers suspect.

Unlike other amphibians, salamanders are famously secretive creatures and often go unseen by all but keen, deliberate observers. Wake says salamanders’ effects in ecosystems do not go unnoticed, however: In forests, salamanders account for a large amount of biomass. Certain species even depend on salamanders for their own survival, such as the salamander-eating snake, which, according to Wake, is also showing signs of population decline.

See Science Daily's article for more information on Wake and his colleagues’ study, and check out A Wealth of Salamanders for more on these fascinating creatures and their unique presence in North America.

Photo by iStockphoto/Armin Hinterwirth

PHOTO BY ISTOCK/JAN WILL

While Congress continues to consider climate legislation (see Gore Says this is the Year for Action on Climate), some scientists and scholars — believe it or not — still debate about whether or not the global warming issue is real. There is even a government website (the U.S. Senate Committee on Environment & Public Works) that debates the topic, as if it’s something that still needs to be debated over. Climate Debate Daily also lists arguments for and against the idea of global warming. My personal favorite response to the debate comes from the Canada Free Press: “They’ve given carbon dioxide (CO2) a bad name and it is now being hanged by draconian and completely unnecessary legislation.”

It’s hard to believe that there are still people out there that won’t grasp the fact that humans can and do have an affect on our environment. Yes, the Inhofe EPW Press Blog has been able to find 650 international scientists to speak out against global warming. But many of these scientists aren’t credible on the climate topic, like this blog on Grist magazine quite logically shows, by comparing the credibility of these skeptical scientists to the credibility of just any doctor on the treatment of cancer. It’s always best to find the answers to problems from actual experts. Environmental scientists prove again and again that global warming is manmade, like the evidence in this Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report that says “There is very high confidence that the net effect of human activities since 1750 has been one of warming.” Or like the evidence in this RealClimate article.

But whether you do or don’t “believe” in global warming, it’s a good idea to research both sides of the debate, especially if you’ve found yourself lost when trying to gather up a not-too-condescending response to co-workers, friends or even — in my case — to family at Christmas dinner. That way, the next time the issue comes up, the evidence can prevail and the debate will be finished in time for you to enjoy your post-break-room or post-dinner cup of coffee.

PHOTO BY ALEX SLOBODKIN/ISTOCKPHOTO

Now that Obama has been elected, the question everyone's asking is — what’s next? There’s a lot of curiosity about what he’ll do as president to address the related issues of clean energy and climate change.

The good news is that Obama has already pledged serious action on reducing greenhouse gas emissions and promoting the use of renewable energy. But there are a lot of questions still to be answered. Just as a starting point, here are three articles I ran across this week that are asking interesting questions about climate, energy and politics.

• First, I saw this article in Time which asks: Is Obama’s Energy Plan Enough? This is eye-opening. The question is — even though Obama is prepared to take big steps on energy and climate, is his agenda ambitious enough to address the scale of the problems?

• Here’s a related question from a recent article on Gristmill, What’s the Magic Number? Ouch, this one is scary. It concerns the ultimate safe level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Many leading scientists argue that its 350 parts per million (ppm). Unfortunately, we’re already at 380 ppm. According to the author, Joseph Romm, it’s going to take a World War II level of effort to stabilize the climate. (More on that here. No surprise: it would involve a lot of renewable energy.) The big question here is — is the general public willing to make that kind of an effort?

• And there’s a good description of that problem on the Dot Earth blog, which wonders Is the World in Obama’s ‘Shock and Trance’ Mode? Apparently, in the recent 60 Minutes interview Obama suggested that with falling energy prices, the world was moving from “shock” mode to “trance,” or complacency. He said that while energy remains high on his agenda, already there’s not as much political support for the kind of changes that are necessary. (Here’s more from the interview.) The author of this article wonders if it’s going to take a Katrina-level climate event to wake us up from our energy trance. Eek.

But back to the good news. Not only is Obama pledging to act on climate change, he’s also leaving the door open to better solutions to our biggest problems. Obama’s new Web site asks Americans to submit their best ideas on different policy issues. So if you have something to say about climate or energy, check out the energy and environment page and let your voice be heard.

Friday is the last day to participate in Repower America’s campaign to encourage the Environmental Protection Agency to regulate carbon dioxide pollution, a major contributor to global warming. Repower America advocates 100 percent clean energy use in 10 years.

Cathy Zoi, Repower America CEO, sent an action alert e-mail urging supporters to post comments, which will appear on the EPA Web site.

The EPA will rule on whether it considers carbon dioxide and other pollutants a danger to public health and welfare under the Clean Air Act.

The U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the EPA has the authority to regulate carbon dioxide if it harms public health and welfare in April 2007.

The court ruled five to four that the EPA violated the Clean Air Act by not regulating new-vehicle emissions standards to control pollutants contributing to global warming.

"EPA has offered no reasoned explanation for its refusal to decide whether greenhouse gases cause or contribute to climate change," Justice John Paul Stevens wrote for the majority.

Repower America has been critical of the Bush administration for taking the side of oil and coal lobbyists on the issue of global climate change, but thinks the new Obama administration will be more receptive to the public comments.

If you have an opinion on the EPA’s decision, comment by Friday, Nov. 28.

Welcome to a new chapter in climate change! On Tuesday, Nov. 18, more than 600 climate change leaders from around the world gathered at the Global Climate Summit in Los Angeles to discuss climate issues and prepare for next month’s United Nations Climate Change Conference in Poznan, Poland.

While President-elect Barack Obama did not attend — “the United States has only one president at a time” — he addressed those in attendance through a short video, still promising to establish a federal cap-and-trade system, reduce emissions to 80 percent below 1990 levels by 2050, and invest $15 billion a year for clean energy.

Of course it won’t be easy, but finally there’s going to be someone in office that refuses to ignore climate change: “Now is the time to confront this challenge once and for all. Delay is no longer an option. Denial is no longer an acceptable response.” And that’s reassuring enough — for now at least.

Read Obama’s Changing Climate Change for more information. Or watch Obama’s video below.

In a recent press release, the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) announced that it is ready for President-elect Barack Obama — especially after the Bush administration ignoring international progress on climate change for the past eight years. Not only does Obama argue for progress, he says he wants to find a common solution to our energy, environmental and economic problems. To do that, he says he wants to build a clean energy economy which will create millions of new jobs, expand capital investment, stop the nation’s dependence on oil, and prevent global warming.

To start, Obama’s cap-and-trade policy would require all permits for emitting carbon dioxide to be auctioned off, with proceeds going towards clean energy, habitat protections, and other transition relief for families. Last month, six of the 10 Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative states in the Northeast raised $39 million doing just that, and if that price holds, the auctions could yield more than $500 million a year.

The soon-to-be President also has outlined plans to reduce global warming emissions by 80 percent by 2050. He’s pledged to make 10 percent of the nation’s electricity come from renewable energy sources by 2012 and 25 percent by 2025. According to UCS analysis, if just 20 percent of the nation’s electricity comes from renewable sources by 2020, it could generate 185,000 new jobs; gain $66.7 billion in private capital investment; give $25.6 billion to rural landowners for leasing their land for biomass and wind energy production; and create $2 billion in new local tax revenues. On top of that, consumer electric and natural gas bills would reduce by $10.5 billion in 2020 and $31.8 billion in 2030.

And when all of this happens, it would reduce global warming emissions in 2020 by 223 million metric tons a year — the same as taking 36 million cars off the road. Now, that’s a change I think everyone could handle.

In February 2007, the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change said that Antarctica was the only continent that did not show signs of climate change. However, recent studies published by Nature Geoscience prove that global warming has in fact made Antarctica warmer.

After comparing 100 years of Arctic temperature data and 50 years of weather records from 17 Antarctic weather stations, scientists concluded that arctic temperatures have warmed about 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit, and Antarctic temperatures warmed about 1.8 degrees. But Antarctica could be even warmer than that. Researchers may have underestimated the temperature change due to readings from the cold continental interior — where there have been observations of cooling in the spring and summer months as a result of the ozone hole.

According to an article in Scientific American, one quarter to one half of the Antarctic coastline has shown substantial warming. The Larsen B and Wilkins ice shelves on the Antarctic Peninsula have already collapsed. If the eastern and western shelves melted completely, sea levels would increase by as much as 230 feet. Unfortunately, while the consequences of global warming are starting to be addressed, things will still get worse before they get better.

This year, join the fight to help alleviate world hunger. Currently, 923 million people around the world are starving. World Food Day, held every year on October 16, is an international event put on to acknowledge the founding of the UN Food and Agriculture Organization and promote ways to diminish hunger around the world. All planned events bring people together to raise awareness and funds.

Many events will be held in the United States and around the world. Check the World Food Day Web site to see if there is an event in your area. Anyone can host their own gathering, so if you’re interested, get tips here. It can be as simple as meeting with a small group and brainstorming ways to get involved in your own community.

To learn more, watch the video promo below and see how global warming contributes to this ongoing crisis.

This blog has been written, in part, in response to Blog Action Day 2008. This year thousands of bloggers will unite to discuss poverty and raise awareness.

Climate change getting you down? If you've ever wondered if humanity can really do anything about greenhouse gas emissions, watching David Letterman's recent rant about climate change may help you get it all out of your system. (You can find it here on The Huffington Post. The quick summary: We are dead meat.)

But this week I’ve been feeling more optimistic, and for good reason. On Tuesday and Wednesday I attended the Kansas State Energy Conference to learn more about what’s happening locally and nationally on different energy issues. As part of that, I was lucky enough to get to hear the keynote address from one of the leading experts on climate science, Dr. James Hansen.

Don’t get me wrong, no one is likely to walk away from a lecture on climate change with a rosy view of the Earth’s future. It certainly wasn’t all good news. But at the same time, Hansen wasn’t saying that we’re dead meat or that it’s already too late. Instead, his message was that we still have time to act.

However, it’s a narrow window. We need to take serious action immediately, and it sounds like we’re talking about some pretty major steps — such as figuring out how to get off of coal completely unless we can figure out how to capture and store the carbon. There’s a great article from Hansen here on the Worldwatch Institute Web site with much more information on his views on climate.

Another bright spot: It was exciting to be at the conference and see how much is already happening in the world of wind power. There are a lot of new wind turbines being installed here on the Great Plains and in other windy spots around the world. Let’s keep them coming.

Photo by RUSTY DODSON/ISTOCKPHOTO

Have something to say about global warming? How does it affect you? Your life? The world around you and its inhabitants? 

Put your thoughts into a 200- to 500-word essay (or take a photograph that says it all) and submit it to the Union of Concerned Scientists for a chance to be published in their new online book, Thoreau’s Legacy: American Stories about Global Warming. 

To read the contest guidelines and/or view examples of submissions, click here.

Photo by Clint Spencer/iStockphoto

I think it’s time for us to start visualizing the future we desire. I’m not pretending it will be easy to get there.

I believe we have three tall mountains to climb.

Conservation is, indeed, the first - if smallest - mountain. We need to forestall the effects of global warming as much as possible while we get our act together. We’re on the lower slopes of the first mountain.

The next climb is longer and steeper. Population control is perfectly unavoidable. Eventually, we must control human population or we’ll make a mess of the habitat and then nature will exert the control we abdicated. I’m not advocating anything draconian, but if the international moral consensus were that each human being should reproduce himself or herself once – two children per couple – populations would begin slowly shrinking. It’s a simplistic solution, but the ultimate solutions are often the simplest.

After conservation, population is the second mountain we have to climb and we’ll have to negotiate some very difficult routes through social and political conflict to reach the top.

I’m optimistic that we’ll reach both these goals. We already have the tools we need to reduce per-capital consumption, and to control our population. That leaves the third, and tallest, mountain.

As our economies are now structured, we depend on population growth to support economic growth. If demand for all goods and services were shrinking, values of all goods and services would also be declining in our current models. Imagine a world in which demand for all the fundamental human necessities – food, shelter, etc. – were shrinking every year. Imagine a world in which, let’s say, 5 percent of all houses on the market had no buyers because fewer people lived in your city. We’ve never seen this and we probably don’t have the means of creating prosperity in a shrinking population. To sustain our population at lower, healthier levels, we’ll have to invent a human economy that creates prosperity without growth. We will need brand new economic tools.

If we are to form the global consensus we will need to support these sea-changes in human attitudes and culture, then we’ll have to visualize – as individuals and as a species – successful outcomes for all concerned. Otherwise, a lot of people just won’t share in the consensus and we won’t be successful. We need new systems in which no one is placed at an unfair disadvantage. I’m not talking about socialism, communism or any other obsolete social system. I think we’re looking for something new that rewards human innovation without requiring human expansion. Simply put, our new economic systems will require unprecedented cooperation across cultural, class and political barriers.

I think we have the tools to halt climate change and reduce the human population. But the economic tools we’ll need to secure our societies during a population reduction have yet to be invented.

Can we create economic tools that distribute the benefits of a healthy planet to all the planet’s human residents? Maybe not, but we’ll need to come pretty close to that if we’re to convince our global neighbors to join us in our effort to create a sustainable, healthy habitat for ourselves.

If we are to cooperate, as a species, in forming a positive vision for our future then the disenfranchised must be enfranchised. It’s a global problem whose solution must be a global consensus, or something very close to it.

Yesterday, Al Gore gave a speech challenging the United States to set a surprising new goal: To produce 100-percent of our electricity from renewable and carbon-free sources within 10 years.

Here’s the text of the speech, and you can check out video highlights below. It’s already gotten a lot of attention, and there’s a nice roundup of reactions to the speech from the blog Gristmill.

Tell us what you think. Is this goal far too ambitious, or is it achievable? Is setting this kind of challenge just the thing we need to start thinking seriously about renewable energy, or should we be aiming for more realistic goals?

More on this Topic:

An Inconvenient Truth

What You Can Do To Help Solve the Climate Crisis

Lewis Ziska, a weed ecologist with the Agriculture Research Service of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, may have found a way to fight global warming with weeds. According to an article in the New York Times, Ziska conducted several experiments that tested the effects of changing CO2 concentrations on different crop and weed species. He found out that weeds respond a lot better than the crops do. In one experiment, he tested a weed called Chenopodium album, which grew six to eight feet on an organic farm in western Maryland and 10 to 12 feet in the inner harbor of Baltimore (where the CO2 in its local atmosphere is above the current global average). While this can be troublesome for crops that can’t grow at the same rate, especially under the same conditions, Ziska suggests that the excessive amounts of weeds could be a possible source for biofuels. Read the full article here.

 
In July of 2007 I nearly killed myself. I didn’t do it intentionally, but I almost died from a terminal case of poor visualization.

That’s right, poor visualization almost ended my life.

The motorcycle is a beautiful machine. In motion it is graceful, yet it defies the physical senses. When a motorcycle carves through a corner it solves a ridiculously complex equation involving speed, the rider, the road, the tires and a thousand other elements that allow the motorcyclist and motorcycle to lean into the corner at an angle that appears — in video or photographs — perfectly impossible. Until the rider gets used to it, it doesn’t feel any more plausible than it looks.

The decreasing-circumference curve is the bane of the inexperienced rider. In the mountains, curves are not always symmetrical. If you enter a turn with a gentle arc and that arc gradually becomes smaller, then you are in a decreasing-circumference curve. This presents a serious problem when you enter the corner too fast and then discover it closing down on you. It’s your classic rookie error, and I made it.

There’s only one way out and slowing down is not an option. To brake a motorcycle in a high-speed corner is disastrous. You’ll lose traction and lay the machine down on its side. So the experienced rider leans deeper into the irrational angle and holds his intent. He visualizes a successful outcome. He experiences the exhilaration of successfully testing his own courage and skill against the laws of nature.

I, on the other hand, lost my nerve. Rather than visualizing myself – and the motorcycle – carving our way out of our predicament I became trapped in a tentative state of mind in the middle of the turn. I let fear take over. Even though I was following two other riders who had successfully negotiated the corner, even though logic dictated that I could follow those other riders, I lost my confidence. I just couldn’t see myself completing that turn at that speed. I couldn’t visualize it and, for lack of a clear mental picture, I became trapped in the curve. Instinctively, I tried to slow the motorcycle down. In an automobile that would have been precisely the right answer. On the motorcycle it was a bad decision and could have been disastrous. The motorcycle and I went sideways, bounced off a fortuitous guardrail and I went down in the middle of the road at about 45 miles per hour.

I walked away after ruining a good helmet and about $1,000 worth of excellent protective clothing. Well, “walked” might be inaccurate. I hobbled away. It was about a year before I healed up completely.

Naturally I did a lot of reflecting about how the accident could have been avoided.

The most obvious answer to that question is, of course, “Don’t ride motorcycles.” My wife and a number of friends have brought this simple solution to my attention repeatedly. Duly noted.

But as I considered the lessons I took from the experience – while massaging the deep bruises on my legs, arms and torso – it dawned on me that our species is, in a manner of speaking, right in the middle of a decreasing-circumference curve. Global climate change has created a worldwide sense that if we don’t do something soon we may have messed up our environment for the long term. We’re moving fast toward some form of environmental reckoning.  The path we are on necessitates a change in attitude.

At the moment we have our attention trained on conservation, effectively the middle of the curve. Instinctively, we want to slow down our personal consumption.

A wreck is imminent if we just follow our instincts.  Voices around the globe are calling for us to, “Slow down!” But we’re in the middle of a bunch of phenomena we don’t know how to interrupt. We are focusing our attentions in the wrong place. Motorcyclists, mountain-bikers, skiers and steeplechasers all learn the same lesson: When you have a lot of forward momentum you have to train your attention beyond the short-term challenges. You need to be thinking ahead. You need to form a picture of yourself successfully negotiating the coming obstacles. You have to visualize the successful outcome. Your reflexes and, hopefully, some previous visualization are taking care of the ruts under the tires of your bicycle. Your attention should be trained on the area where you will arrive in the next few seconds. Your mind visualizes the best route and your body begins making adjustments in your approach.

If you focus on the intermediate obstacle, you’re likely to hit that obstacle.

It’s recently occurred to me that I don’t hear anyone describing the world in which we want to live 20 years from now. Almost no one, it seems, is visualizing the successful outcome. We’re too busy arguing about where to drill for oil.

As far as we know, there is only one species in the universe capable of conceptualizing its own impact on its habitat. That’s us.

If we are defined by our capacity for objective thought, then we are now living in one of the definitive moments in human history. Our ability to conceptualize our own role in nature defines us as human beings. Our capacity for creating solutions to complex problems is the primary factor in our success as a species. In the Judeo-Christian Bible we defined ourselves as human beings when we ate the fruit of the “Tree of Knowledge” and spontaneously realized we were naked. In a phrase, we became self-aware.

Today we have to face the challenge of solving the definitive human riddle. We are aware that we have an impact on the environment. We are aware that our population has been growing exponentially. We are aware that no species can expand infinitely on this finite planet. With this awareness comes responsibility. We are capable of moderating our impact on the planet. We are capable of conceptualizing a sustainable human habitat and executing a plan to create that habitat. Yes, we face complex problems. But we’ve solved complex problems before. Perhaps the more vexing puzzle is how to defeat our biological programming — the programming that, in the words of the Judeo-Christian Bible, tells us to “go forth and multiply.”

It’s a good thing we enjoy solving puzzles.

If you're concerned about climate change, and want to reduce carbon emissions, you might be surprised how easy it is to figure out how much carbon dioxide is produced by, say, driving to work. Sure, there are a lot of carbon calculators out there where you can plug in all the numbers on how much you drive, and how much electricity you use. But it's also surprisingly easy to estimate yourself.

Here’s how you can do it. If you go to the EPA carbon calculator it gives you recognizable units, like gallons and pounds. (And slightly more confusing units like carbon dioxide equivalent.  Essentially, they’re adding the other greenhouse gases into the number for carbon dioxide. But there’s more about that on the calculator page.)

It’s very simple to use, so here are results I got from spending a few minutes with the EPA calculator and playing with the numbers.

* Every gallon of gas burned produces about 22 pounds of carbon dioxide equivalent. (So for simplicity, let's round down to 20.)
* Every therm of natural gas burned produces about 11 pounds. (I think it’s fair to round down to 10.)
* Every kilowatt hour (kWh) of electricity produces about 1.7 pounds.
(If rounding up to 2 seems too painful, consider where your electricity comes from. If it comes from coal, yep, round up to 2. For natural gas, you can figure 1 pound. There are some statistics that help justify those numbers here.)

So when you fill up your gas tank, you have a number in gallons. Take it times 20 and you're awfully close to knowing how much carbon dioxide burning that tank of gas will produce. Same thing goes for your electric bill. Take a look at the number of kilowatt hours. Double it (in most cases) and you’re looking at pounds of greenhouse gas emissions.

Want to think more about pounds of carbon emissions and how to lose them? Here are a few related articles:

Eight Projects for Instant Energy Savings, Mother Earth News 

On Carbon Calculators, Grist 

What Makes a Pound of Carbon Dioxide, The Green Guide

It's time to think about New Year's resolutions again. This year, why not resolve to go on an energy diet? The idea is to set a few measurable goals to make your home more energy efficient in 2008 and then keep track of your progress. Not only will you save money by reducing your energy bills, you'll be protecting the environment by reducing carbon emissions and other pollutants that come from burning fossil fuels.

How can you get started? Here are two books and two Web sites that will help you measure and then reduce your home energy use.

Web Resources. One good place to start is the Climate Crisis Web site, where you can calculate your carbon footprint, and then find lots of suggestions for how to start reducing it.

Another resource I find very useful is The Half Plan section of BuilditSolar.com. The great thing about this site is that it shows you the exact steps one household followed to cut its energy use in half, and tells you exactly how much money and energy they saved by doing each project. 

Helpful Books. Both of the books below are on my own bookshelf, and both are packed with good ideas for saving energy. You may be able to find them at your local library, or click on the links below for sources where you can purchase them.

Low Carbon Diet: A 30 Day Program to lose 5,000 Pounds, by David Gershon The Home Energy Diet: How to Save Money by Making Your House Energy Smart, by Paul Scheckel

Are you finding new ways to save energy at home? You can share your experiences in the comments section below.