Kit Stolz

Climate karma: Texas to catch hell

According to the EPA, Texas emits a far higher volume of greenhouse gases than any other state — more than 676 million tons a year.

For the sake of context, that's more than many entire regions put together; more than twice as much as Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado, Nevada and Utah combined, for instance.

California comes in second among states for total emissions, at 402 million tons, but to provide electric power to its people, the most populated state in the union emits 50 million tons of CO2.

To generate its power, Texas coal plants belch out more that 229 million tons of greenhouse gases.

It's shameful.

Now, news comes that Texas is going to pay the price for its emissions in hellish temperatures.

That's according to the latest in a long-line of studies by Texas A&M professor (and IPCC co-author) John Neilsen-Gammon.

To put it in English, as he did in a recent post:

The climate model projections are that the summer temperatures of 2009 will be the temperatures of a typical summer by about 2050. An unusually cool summer in 2050 would be similar to what we presently consider a normal summer, and an unusually hot summer in 2050 would be, well, way off the chart.

The funny thing is, as Neilsen-Gammon points out in a post in the Houston-Chronicle, this projection of has been out for some time, but somehow, the facts still seem to make people spitting mad.

One emailer called Neilsen-Gammon lots of names; about 20% of those who heard about it from a Texas TV station were angered.

Regardless, since 2007 it's been out, to be exact, in a front-page story in the Houston Chronicle by the paper's science writer Eric Berger:

Welcome to Texas, circa 2100, when severe drought and triple-dight temperatures — presently considered a heat wave — will become standard summer fare.

Wait, there's more. Rising seas will increase the inland reach of hurricane storm surges and threaten low-lying coastal areas. Rainfall may remain the same, but will come in shorter bursts, leading to more flooding. Warmer temperatures will cause rivers traversing Central and South Texas to run dry before reaching the coast.

Now the news seems to be sinking in. According to a poll on a Dallas-Fort Worth TV station, 40% of those reading about the future summers in the area were left sad.

And, according to NOAA, some may be thinking of leaving, perhaps with electoral consequences, as Jim Tankersley speculated for Slate:

Both major political parties could see their power bases erode as Americans, responding to warming temperatures and rising seas, flee the Republican-dominated South and Democratic-friendly coasts.

I guess it's wrong to blame Texans for the 115-degree broiling they will suffer. Blaming the victim.

h/t: Creative Greenius

China attacks U.S. in climate negotiations

From Tiajin, an inside look at climate talks being hosted by Chinese. Reporting is from Angel Hsu, of Yale University, in the Atlantic:

[Chinese negotiator] Su's comments in the corridors of the Tianjin Meijiang Convention Center reflect his obvious frustration with what he feels is hypocrisy on the part of the U.S. in the climate negotiations. During a press conference, Su criticized the United States for failing to meet its UNFCCC commitments, particularly in terms of pledges to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and to provide financial assistance to developing countries. He said it was unfair for the United States to criticize China and make them the scapegoat in the climate debates when the United States itself "isn't doing anything,"

The differences…culminated with the Chinese lead negotiator Su Wei calling the US a "pig preening itself in a mirror." In the classical Chinese idiom where Su derived the comparison, Zhubajie zhao jinzi, li wai bu shi ren – meaning "pig in mirror, not human inside or outside" – the half-man, half-pig character Zhubajie is portrayed as lazy, gluttonous, and idiotic. Needless to say, in Chinese culture, this less-than-desirable comparison is considered an undiplomatic slight.

The Chinese called the United States "a half-man, half-pig" in a press conference? Jeez.

What next — will the lead negotiator throw down a gauntlet, demand a duel at dawn? Holy cow.

No coverage in the papers in the U.S. of course…

Did Jerry Brown endorse a peripheral canal yesterday?

Or did the AP botch the story?

A University of the Pacific professor who blogs at Valley Economy wants to know.

It's a great question. Here's the sentence from the Brown website that the AP read as an endorsement of the "alternative conveyance," also known in the past as the peripheral canal.

Support conveyance and storage investments, such as a peripheral canal or tunnel, that provide a net benefit in ecosystem and water quality conditions and where the beneficiaries pay for the benefits they receive

Further, Brown's website makes amply clear that any such conveyance should be paid for by those who will most benefit, and any such conveyance must benefit the state and environment as a whole:

The beneficiaries – or users – of water infrastructure projects should pay their share of the costs of those projects. The state should invest in infrastructure improvements providing benefits to the general public or the environment.

In the minds of water experts such as Peter Gleick, the peripheral canal would fail both tests. And, as a spokesperson for Meg Whitman pointed out, Brown did not back the water bond that was pulled off the ballot last summer by supporters such as Gov. Schwarzenegger, who saw it was facing defeat this year.

So why is the AP so certain Brown wants to build the canal?

Well, although it's not stated clearly in the story, it turns out Brown did say he supported such a canal in the September 28 debate with Whitman:

"Brown said he supports the idea of a peripheral canal to ship more water to Southern California but supports more water conservation. He implied Southern Californians should pay for the new delivery system."

"The beneficiary has to pay, not the general taxpayer," Brown said.

His support for the proposal is nuanced, but sounds pretty clear.

Also noteworthy: the environmentally-minded chairman of the vast SoCal water wholesaler known as Metropolitan Water District was replaced this week, apparently voted out because he opposed the same water bond. Voted in as chairman is an engineer and former Army Colonel named John V. Foley.

Hmmmm….

the people a hundred years from now

OPTIMISM

I write poems
they don't get published
but they will

I'm waiting for a letter with good news
maybe it will arrive the day I die
but it will come for sure.

the world's not ruled by governments or money
but by the people
a hundred years from now
maybe
but it will be for sure.

Nazim Hikmet
2 September l957
Leipzig

Tennessee Williams: the playwright at age two

Turns out Tennessee Williams' mother Edwina Williams published her memoirs, called Remember Me to Tom, back in l963. It's a very good thing she did, for she tells a slew of great stories.

Reading her "as told to" book, it's easy to hear her speak, and easy to guess where Williams got the model for Amanda, the desperate mother character in his first great play, The Glass Menagerie.

Here's the story with which Amanda, er, Edwina, opens the book:

I recall a day when he was about two years old and we were living with my parents in Columbus, Mississippi…it was a hot summer day and I looked out of the window to make sure Tom [Tennessee] was all right as he played in a yard dotted with rocks. There he was, with his little spade, digging madly away amidst the rocks. Perspiration dripped own his chubby face and his little golden curls clung damp to his head.

"What are you doing, Tom?" I called out, wondering why all this great labor under the hot sun.

"I'm digging to de debbil," he explained as he doggedly shoveled out another spadeful of dirt.

Ozzie, his colored nurse, had probably been telling him stories in which the devil starred, and Tom, no doubt, had asked where the devil lived. Ozzie, thereupon, told him in the middle of the earth where it was dark and deep and Tom set out, the first chance he had, to find the devil's lair.

You might say Tom went on "digging to de debbil" the rest of his life, trying to discover where the devil lives inside all of us. Through his searching words, he turned the tragedy in his life to art.

[Thanks to Betsy Randle, who performed spectacularly in the version of The Glass Menagerie that played in Los Angeles this month, understudy to the great Judith Ivey, for recommending the book. And here's a family picture from the book of Tennessee, aka Tom, with Ozzie.]

The future won’t be futuristic, says Douglas Coupland

Or it won't feel futuristic, according to Douglas Coupland, one of our most visionary novelists (inventor of the great phrase McJob, which today seems more apt than ever). Of the future, he says:

It's simply going to feel weird and out-of-control-ish, the way it does now, because too many things are changing too quickly. The reason the future feels odd is because of its unpredictability. If the future didn't feel weirdly unexpected, then something would be wrong.

In his radical pessimists guide to the next ten years, Coupland has a number of other intriguing thoughts, including the suggestion to move to Liverpool, Shannon, or Vancouver. The weather will still be "freaky," he says, but at least it won't be "broiling hot or cryogenically cold."

He has a point…as this "world revs its heat engine" image from NASA shows.

As sun warms slightly, earth cools slightly — wha?

The always helpful MIT/Knight Science Journalism Tracker points to a slew of stories about a counterintuitive, to say the least, study in Nature that finds that during a three-year period from 2004-2007, when solar radiation rose a little, global temperatures slightly declined.

In the measured words of The Independent:

The sun's role in climate change may have been overplayed, according to a study indicating that the Earth could actually get slightly cooler, rather than warmer, as the activity of the 11-year solar cycle increases.

The researchers stress this does not mean that global warming is not real. Nor does it suggest that the sun has no influence on earth's atmospheric temperature.

"We cannot jump to conclusions based on what we have found during this comparatively short period," Dr [Joanna] Haugh, [of the Imperial College of London] said."However, if further studies find the same pattern over a longer period of time, this could suggest that we may have overestimated the Sun's role in warming the planet."

But publishing a study like that in Nature is in an invitation to reach a conclusion, isn't it?

If this is damnation, I don’t want to be saved

Damnation Creek Trail, Redwood NP, originally uploaded by lindsay_kaun.

A ridiculously good tree picture, via the mind-blowing Treeporn site.

Happy 70th Birthday, John Lennon

Thirty-three years ago, long before John Lennon was shot and killed, the late great David Levine imagined what he would look at when he was sixty-four, or, today, when he would have been seventy.

Something tells me that Lennon, quite a line artist himself, would have been a little tickled to see himself in the future this way.

For more on Lennon, Fresh Air offers a typically great listen, including snippets of interviews with McCartney, Starr, Cynthia Lennon, and Jon Weiner, the historian who wrote about his battle with the FBI, and, in fact, forced the agency to give up the papers chronicling its harrassment of this great man.