What do Lehman Brothers, the Economic Bailout Plan, climate change and natural disasters have in common?

Come and discover how these and other current events are setting the stage for an unprecedented global crisis that will impact the lives of us all.

You will come away from these amazing, interactive Keynote presentations clearly understanding how you can face these coming crises unafraid and with absolute confidence.

JAVA FLOW COFFEE HOUSE
Washington & Fourth Avenue
THURSDAY, November 13 at 6 p.m.

Contact: 360.402.1154 or libertyofconscience@gmail.com

Here are some photos from the Monday, October 6, 2008 No LNG Rally at the Washington State Capitol Campus Legislative Building.

No to LNG Washington State Capitol Campus Rally

LNG Means:
• More Global Warming
• More Big Oil Profiteering
• More Wars

We want renewable energy.
Power Vote

http://www.powervote.org/

When: Tomorrow, Monday October 6, 2008 from 11 to 1 (or 2)
Where: State Capitol Legislative Building Steps (North side of building)

The No LNG workshop at Traditions earlier tonight was informative. I learned that there are a number of good reasons to be opposed to a proposed LNG terminal on the banks of the Columbia River in Southern Washington State. The composition of the opposition is grass roots; it's a coalition of local stake-holders who would be affected by the Bradford Landing liquid natural gas terminal, as well as advocates for environmental justice.

Tomorrow's rally will call on Governor Gregoire to assist the peoples' opposition to this unnecessary and environmentally harmful project. The office of the Governor has made noises about even going so far as suing to stop the Houston based NorthernStar Energy Group's efforts to develop LNG terminals and pipelines - given the lack of appropriate state level input, environmental review, and oversight. The proposal has thus far been pushed and ferried through under authority of the 5 person Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC), although one member of the Bush Administration appointed commission, Jon Wellinghoff, who is also the only one to have met with concerned stake-holders, has written a powerful and substantive dissent of the FERC position (to permit) the NorthernStar LNG endeavors. Find out more about that at tomorrow's rally! (More detailed information is available on the FERC website, as well.)

Jay Manning from the Dep. of Ecology will be among the speakers. There will be important information about what exactly is going down with proposals for pipelines and shipping terminals, the natural gas market, and the dangers and environmental pitfalls of the LNG trade.

No to global warming! No to LNG! Yes to renewable/sustainable energy! Yes to a better tomorrow!

More information: No LNG [http://nolng.net/]

[correction: It's the "NorthernStar Natural Gas" Energy Group that has proposed the Bradwood Landing LNG Terminal and associated pipelines, not the "Northstar Energy Group", as previously stated above, article amended to reflect correction.

Also for more information please see: River Vision: Renewable Energy Sources, Columbia River Vision.]

The water was almost up to the boardwalk - about two feet or so shy of the mark.

The water was very high when I took this photo. According to www.saltwatertides.com, the high tide for Sunday August 3rd, 2008 was 15.5 feet at 8:35 pm (about 5 minutes prior to this photo being taken.)

This area is known to have tides of over 17 feet. A 17 foot tide this night easily might have been at or above street level, especially during inclement weather conditions.

If there were to be rain in a high tide situation like this, or in particular a storm with heavy rain and heavy river flow, it would push the water that much higher.

Many buildings with businesses in the area would likely suffer flooding in such a situation.

Is this a sign of impending sea level rise? I don't want to be a fear-monger. But this is a reality that the best science of the day suggests we will have to confront sooner or later. Could it be sooner rather than later? Discuss.

p.s. oh yeah, didn't a big piece of Antarctica break off recently?

As Olympia ponders the development of the waterfront and the downtown area I thought it might be helpful to review the weather report.

The City of Olympia is already attempting to develop plans for sea level rise of 1 foot, 2 feet, and 3 feet and the planners state that these plans will be useless if the Greenland glacial melt speeds up.  I think the quote from Steve Hall and Mike Mucha on Greenland was that all bets are off if Greenland melts.  We have no plan to respond to a sea level rise of that scale.  

Here is a roundup of some of the latest thinking:

from the scientific journal Nature as covered at Wired Science:

Could Methane Trigger a Climate Doomsday Within a Human Lifespan?

The potential problem here is the release of huge amounts of methane that are currently frozen away.  The arctic melt has potential to release the methane and methane is a potent greenhouse gas.  This is not a knife-edge type change where the impact could go either way, this is a tipping point, a feedback loop, that can reasonably be expected to accelerate and contribute to rising temperature.  

Olympia City Manager Steve Hall and Public Works Director Mike Mucha were interviewed by Christopher Swope for an article title "A Rising Tide" that was published in the US GSA magazine Governing.com. You can read the article here. This article is from December 2007 so it is pretty current.

Here are some things to consider from that interview:

Steve Hall says the Olympia community is "pretty engaged around the whole climate change issue" and Hall says that Olympia has met the Kyoto protocol standards.

It's an interesting read and focuses on the impact of rising sea level which makes sense because Olympia is a coastal community, even if the coast is the intercoastal Puget Sound. The City's planning is set around sea level rise of one foot, two feet and three feet.

Public Works Director Mike Mucha notes that planning for sea level rise in Puget Sound is not simply looking at global sea level rise, the planning has to take into account tides that can cause regular 20 foot sea level fluctuations with the tides. Mucha also notes that the rising sea level is magnified in Olympia because we are at the end of Puget Sound.

The problem is that as sea level rises, it's not going to be felt as a gently lapping body of water that creeps slowly higher, it's going to be increased flooding that occurs during specific events when high winds, heavy rains and high tides coincide and that when these three coincide we will experience increased flooding.

Science Magazine printed an article about anthropogenic CO2 impact on the oceans in July 2004.  You can read the article here:  The Oceanic Sink for Anthropogenic CO₂

Some folks, spokepersons for industries who stood to turn a quick profit through environmental destruction, have created lots of smoke to make it less than clear that anthropogenic global climate change is happening and needs to be addresses. The ethics of folks who would choose to draw their paycheck from being part of the smoke machine are in question. 

Other folks, politically motivated, but unsophisticated thinkers, have done their part to prevent needed changes in public policy.  These unsophisticated thinkers are easily manipulated by wedge issues like abortion, gun rights, same-sex marriage etc. and then they can be counted on to mindlessly parrot the industry storyline and make it more difficult for the electorate to understand the situation we face.  We see an endless run of red herrings:  the ice caps on Mars are melting, environmentalists and their catalytic converters caused global warming, on and on.  Some of these smokescreens are more laughable than others, but the impact is not laughable. 

On May 22 2008, the NOAA published an updated article on the acidification problem.  You can read that article here: International Scientists Find ‘Acidified’ Water on the Continental Shelf from Canada to Mexico

from that article:

“Acidification of the Earth’s ocean water could have far-reaching impacts on the health of our near-shore environment, and on the sustainability of ecosystems that support human populations through nourishment and jobs,” said Richard W. Spinrad

Here is a potential teaching moment from this article: 

Findings suggests that politicians aren't aiming nearly high enough to prevent our certain doom. Apparently it is more important to save their jobs then the planet. It appears to be a value judgment wether we want to survive or make money for a few rich white men. Washington Post article

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The task of cutting greenhouse gas emissions enough to avert a dangerous rise in global temperatures may be far more difficult than previous research suggested, say scientists who have just published studies indicating that it would require the world to cease carbon emissions altogether within a matter of decades.

Their findings, published in separate journals over the past few weeks, suggest that both industrialized and developing nations must wean themselves off fossil fuels by as early as mid-century in order to prevent warming that could change precipitation patterns and dry up sources of water worldwide.

Lots of folks have decided to drive cars powered by biofuels, feeling good about the switch from fossil fuels and hoping the biofuel decision is an ethical and effective response to global warming, but the science is starting to accumulate indicating that biofuels are not an effective answer.

I know this may not be what a lot of people want to hear. And it's no doubt true that if you simply measure the gases at the tailpipe, it would appear that biofuels are cleaner than fossil fuels, but once you start measuring the complete environmental picture of biofuels, it turns out that biofuels are simply not green. I don't believe that ethanol, biodiesel and the other internal combustion options for loco-motion have any real merit.

The NYT carries a story today here that covers two papers recently published in the journal Science that includes the following:

Together the two studies offer sweeping conclusions: It does not matter if it is rain forest or scrubland that is cleared, the greenhouse gas contribution is significant. More important, they discovered that, taken globally, the production of almost all biofuels resulted, directly or indirectly, intentionally or not, in new lands being cleared, either for food or fuel.

“When you take this into account, most of the biofuel that people are using or planning to use would probably increase greenhouse gasses substantially,” said Timothy Searchinger, lead author of one of the studies and a researcher in environment and economics at Princeton University. “Previously there’s been an accounting error: land use change has been left out of prior analysis.”

If you want to read the articles themselves, not dumbed down through the NYT, you can go to the journal Science online here.

•What: A Community Forum on Climate Change in the Pacific Northwest

•Who: A panel of South Sound and state lawmakers, business leaders and scientific experts on global warming will talk with residents about environmental issues.

•Where: The Washington Center for the Performing Arts, 512 Washington St. S.E., Olympia

•When: 7 to 10:30 p.m. today

•Admission: Free

Other events

•Today: The films "The Story of Stuff" and "Climate Change: Olympia's Call to Action" will be shown at noon and 4 p.m. in Building 26, Room 105, at South Puget Sound Community College, 2011 Mottman Road S.W., Olympia.

•Today: Climate-change workshops will be from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. at The Evergreen State College, 2700 Evergreen Parkway N.W.

•Thursday: Information booths, demonstrations and food, noon to 2 p.m. at SPSCC's Student Union Building, 2011 Mottman Road S.W., Olympia. Speaker Paul Horton of Climate Solutions will discuss possible climate-change solutions.

•Thursday: Tamra Gilbertson and Kevin Smith, researchers with Carbon Trade Watch, will give a presentation about the effects of carbon trading and offsets in third-world countries and more prosperous nations from 3 to 5 p.m. in Lecture Hall 4 at Evergreen. For more information, call 360-867-6137 or e-mail chriset@evergreen.edu.

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