The rapidly expanding use of bluish-white outdoor lighting threatens visibility at night and jeopardizes the nocturnal environment worldwide.
This surge is fueled by the promise of energy savings and reduced lighting maintenance. The demand for energy efficient lighting is a laudable imperative. This effort has resulted in a new generation of electric light sources such as LEDs and induction lamps that emit a cold, bluish white light. The blue tone of the light is a result of how the light source operates and it is not visually necessary. The blue portion of the color spectrum produces only a small percentage of light that is useful to the human eye.
Unfortunately, bluish light produces high levels of light pollution with significant environmental impact. These lights are known to increase glare and compromise human vision, especially in the aging eye. Short wavelength light also increases sky glow disproportionately. In addition, blue light has a greater tendency to affect living organisms through disruption of their biological processes that rely upon natural cycles of daylight and darkness, such as the circadian rhythm. For only a modest improvement in outdoor lighting efficiency, these new sources dramatically escalate the environmental damage caused by artificial lighting.
Some manufacturers and government agencies are misrepresenting the visual effectiveness of these bluish-white light sources and the environmental impacts are not being considered. IDA discourages the use of bluish-white lamp sources with a Correlated Color Temperature above 3000 Kelvin. Developers of light sources should be required to refine their products to limit blue light at wavelengths shorter than 500 nm.
IDA encourages government and other concerned parties to support additional scientific research on this subject. This research will help to understand fully the impact of bluish white light and guide the evolution of lighting technology to protect human health and the nocturnal environment while providing safe and efficient outdoor lighting.
Human visual sensitivity is primarily in the green and yellow part of the spectrum and is depicted by the thin solid line. Circadian rhythms are controlled by light emitted within the dashed curve. The color of light emitted by a typical bluish-white 5500 Kelvin LED is depicted by the bold line. A large portion of light emitted by this light source falls outside of the human photopic vision range, and falls within the circadian rhythm curve. IDA recommends limiting blue light emitted below 500 nm, as indicated by the shaded section of the graph.
About the IDA
The IDA is a 501 (c) (3) not-for-profit organization whose mission is to preserve and protect the nighttime environment and our heritage of dark skies through environmentally responsible outdoor lighting. The information above was developed by the IDA Technical Committee using published research and input from professional members of the environmental, astronomical and lighting design communities.
Thursday, October 8, 2009
Kingsnorth puts a break on the plan for a new dirty coal fired power station
We have stopped Kingsnorth!
After months of amazing campaigning, EON announced last night that they have put the breaks on plans for a new dirty coal fired power station at Kingsnorth for at least three years.
This is a fantastic victory for campaigners, but even more so for the world’s poorest people who would suffer most from climate change caused by a new power station at Kingsnorth. The new power station would have emitted more carbon dioxide every year than the whole of Tanzania and could have left 100,000 people without water in the dry season because of the damage caused to the global climate by its emissions.
We have only been able to achieve this thanks to your help. We'd like to thank everyone who signed an action card, took one of our online actions, or turned up at one of our protests, vigils and information meetings. We'd like to thank all the local WDM groups for their inspiring campaigning work. By holding up the consent of Kingsnorth for over two years, people across the UK who have taken action, including everyone who joined The Big If, have effectively stalled one of the biggest climate destroying pieces of infrastructure at a crucial time.
Especially we'd like to thank all of our financial supporters, our members and everyone who responded to our recent climate change appeal, without you this campaign would not have been possible.
We are still awaiting an announcement from the government about their future coal policy. If the UK wants any credibility at Copenhagen this December, Ed Miliband must prove that the UK is prepared to address its massive climate debt by cutting dirty coal from our energy future. We will keep you posted.
Yours,
Kirsty Wright, Climate justice campaigner at the World Development Movement.
PS for the latest news about our campaign, reports from Copenhagen and more actions to stop coal visit our website at www.wdm.org.uk
After months of amazing campaigning, EON announced last night that they have put the breaks on plans for a new dirty coal fired power station at Kingsnorth for at least three years.
This is a fantastic victory for campaigners, but even more so for the world’s poorest people who would suffer most from climate change caused by a new power station at Kingsnorth. The new power station would have emitted more carbon dioxide every year than the whole of Tanzania and could have left 100,000 people without water in the dry season because of the damage caused to the global climate by its emissions.
We have only been able to achieve this thanks to your help. We'd like to thank everyone who signed an action card, took one of our online actions, or turned up at one of our protests, vigils and information meetings. We'd like to thank all the local WDM groups for their inspiring campaigning work. By holding up the consent of Kingsnorth for over two years, people across the UK who have taken action, including everyone who joined The Big If, have effectively stalled one of the biggest climate destroying pieces of infrastructure at a crucial time.
Especially we'd like to thank all of our financial supporters, our members and everyone who responded to our recent climate change appeal, without you this campaign would not have been possible.
We are still awaiting an announcement from the government about their future coal policy. If the UK wants any credibility at Copenhagen this December, Ed Miliband must prove that the UK is prepared to address its massive climate debt by cutting dirty coal from our energy future. We will keep you posted.
Yours,
Kirsty Wright, Climate justice campaigner at the World Development Movement.
PS for the latest news about our campaign, reports from Copenhagen and more actions to stop coal visit our website at www.wdm.org.uk
Kingsnorth puts a break on the plan for a new dirty coal fired power station
We have stopped Kingsnorth!
After months of amazing campaigning, EON announced last night that they have put the breaks on plans for a new dirty coal fired power station at Kingsnorth for at least three years.
This is a fantastic victory for campaigners, but even more so for the world’s poorest people who would suffer most from climate change caused by a new power station at Kingsnorth. The new power station would have emitted more carbon dioxide every year than the whole of Tanzania and could have left 100,000 people without water in the dry season because of the damage caused to the global climate by its emissions.
We have only been able to achieve this thanks to your help. We'd like to thank everyone who signed an action card, took one of our online actions, or turned up at one of our protests, vigils and information meetings. We'd like to thank all the local WDM groups for their inspiring campaigning work. By holding up the consent of Kingsnorth for over two years, people across the UK who have taken action, including everyone who joined The Big If, have effectively stalled one of the biggest climate destroying pieces of infrastructure at a crucial time.
Especially we'd like to thank all of our financial supporters, our members and everyone who responded to our recent climate change appeal, without you this campaign would not have been possible.
We are still awaiting an announcement from the government about their future coal policy. If the UK wants any credibility at Copenhagen this December, Ed Miliband must prove that the UK is prepared to address its massive climate debt by cutting dirty coal from our energy future. We will keep you posted.
Yours,
Kirsty Wright, Climate justice campaigner at the World Development Movement.
PS for the latest news about our campaign, reports from Copenhagen and more actions to stop coal visit our website at www.wdm.org.uk
After months of amazing campaigning, EON announced last night that they have put the breaks on plans for a new dirty coal fired power station at Kingsnorth for at least three years.
This is a fantastic victory for campaigners, but even more so for the world’s poorest people who would suffer most from climate change caused by a new power station at Kingsnorth. The new power station would have emitted more carbon dioxide every year than the whole of Tanzania and could have left 100,000 people without water in the dry season because of the damage caused to the global climate by its emissions.
We have only been able to achieve this thanks to your help. We'd like to thank everyone who signed an action card, took one of our online actions, or turned up at one of our protests, vigils and information meetings. We'd like to thank all the local WDM groups for their inspiring campaigning work. By holding up the consent of Kingsnorth for over two years, people across the UK who have taken action, including everyone who joined The Big If, have effectively stalled one of the biggest climate destroying pieces of infrastructure at a crucial time.
Especially we'd like to thank all of our financial supporters, our members and everyone who responded to our recent climate change appeal, without you this campaign would not have been possible.
We are still awaiting an announcement from the government about their future coal policy. If the UK wants any credibility at Copenhagen this December, Ed Miliband must prove that the UK is prepared to address its massive climate debt by cutting dirty coal from our energy future. We will keep you posted.
Yours,
Kirsty Wright, Climate justice campaigner at the World Development Movement.
PS for the latest news about our campaign, reports from Copenhagen and more actions to stop coal visit our website at www.wdm.org.uk
LeasePlan India Launches its Global GreenPlan Initiative in India
LeasePlan India, the country's largest operational leasing company, today announced the launch of its global GreenPlan strategy with the kick-start of its first green initiative, in the Delhi and NCR region as part of its sustained corporate social responsibility programs. The first phase of this initiative will include funding, planting and maintaining over 1000 trees in Delhi & National Capital Region.
LeasePlan strives to discover and develop means and methods to offset vehicle emissions, develop better fleet management practices and proactively advise its customers to opt for fuel-efficient vehicles, amongst other initiatives. GreenPlan is LeasePlan's global initiative in this direction, which is currently being implemented in different forms across 30 countries worldwide.
LeasePlan has forged an alliance with Mokshda Paryavaran Evam Van Suraksha Samiti (Mokshda PEVSS), a charitable non-profit organization actively engaged in multifarious activities related to environment protection, energy conservation and urban reforms. Mokshda will provide the necessary support for the plantation drive by acquiring the necessary expertise required for the sustainability and well-being of these trees. The proposed site for implementing the plantation project is along the Gurgaon-Faridabad Highway.
"LeasePlan recognises the need for sustainable programs to counter the effects of vehicular emissions on the environment. GreenPlan is specifically designed to help companies offset harmful emissions and implement environment friendly fleet management practices. The plantation drive is a part of our initiative to make a tangible contribution to the environment. This is also a platform for us to engage better with our employees and customers as this represents an excellent opportunity to participate in making the world a much better place to live in", said Mr. Sanjeev Prasad, Managing Director LeasePlan India.
"We are happy to see LeasePlan's strong commitment towards the green cause and support them whole-heartedly in their endeavour. We hope that more corporates will come forward in the times to come and make a positive contribution towards environmental conservation," said Mr. Vinod Kumar Agarwal, Founder President, Mokshda PEVSS.
The plantation drive will be undertaken through the active participation of LeasePlan employees, Mokshda volunteers including over 100 school children.
About LeasePlan India
LeasePlan India is a wholly owned subsidiary of the world's leading vehicle leasing and fleet management company. With offices in 30 countries and over 45 years of experience, LeasePlan manages a total fleet of 1.4 million cars around the globe. As India's #1 operational car leasing company, LeasePlan India delivers a comprehensive range of corporate car mobility solutions.
About Mokshda
Mokshda Paryavaran Evam Van Suraksha Samiti (Mokshda PEVSS) is an ISO 9001:2000 charitable and non-profit organization registered under the Societies Registration Act, 1860 of India and under Section 12/A of Income Tax Act. The NGO is engaged in multifarious activities related to environment protection, energy conservation and urban reforms since 1992 under the aegis of the Ministry of Environment and Forests (MoEF), Government of India. The Governing Body of Mokshda PEVSS consists of eminent environmentalists, technocrats, scientists and social activist having more than 30 years of experience in their respective fields.
LeasePlan strives to discover and develop means and methods to offset vehicle emissions, develop better fleet management practices and proactively advise its customers to opt for fuel-efficient vehicles, amongst other initiatives. GreenPlan is LeasePlan's global initiative in this direction, which is currently being implemented in different forms across 30 countries worldwide.
LeasePlan has forged an alliance with Mokshda Paryavaran Evam Van Suraksha Samiti (Mokshda PEVSS), a charitable non-profit organization actively engaged in multifarious activities related to environment protection, energy conservation and urban reforms. Mokshda will provide the necessary support for the plantation drive by acquiring the necessary expertise required for the sustainability and well-being of these trees. The proposed site for implementing the plantation project is along the Gurgaon-Faridabad Highway.
"LeasePlan recognises the need for sustainable programs to counter the effects of vehicular emissions on the environment. GreenPlan is specifically designed to help companies offset harmful emissions and implement environment friendly fleet management practices. The plantation drive is a part of our initiative to make a tangible contribution to the environment. This is also a platform for us to engage better with our employees and customers as this represents an excellent opportunity to participate in making the world a much better place to live in", said Mr. Sanjeev Prasad, Managing Director LeasePlan India.
"We are happy to see LeasePlan's strong commitment towards the green cause and support them whole-heartedly in their endeavour. We hope that more corporates will come forward in the times to come and make a positive contribution towards environmental conservation," said Mr. Vinod Kumar Agarwal, Founder President, Mokshda PEVSS.
The plantation drive will be undertaken through the active participation of LeasePlan employees, Mokshda volunteers including over 100 school children.
About LeasePlan India
LeasePlan India is a wholly owned subsidiary of the world's leading vehicle leasing and fleet management company. With offices in 30 countries and over 45 years of experience, LeasePlan manages a total fleet of 1.4 million cars around the globe. As India's #1 operational car leasing company, LeasePlan India delivers a comprehensive range of corporate car mobility solutions.
About Mokshda
Mokshda Paryavaran Evam Van Suraksha Samiti (Mokshda PEVSS) is an ISO 9001:2000 charitable and non-profit organization registered under the Societies Registration Act, 1860 of India and under Section 12/A of Income Tax Act. The NGO is engaged in multifarious activities related to environment protection, energy conservation and urban reforms since 1992 under the aegis of the Ministry of Environment and Forests (MoEF), Government of India. The Governing Body of Mokshda PEVSS consists of eminent environmentalists, technocrats, scientists and social activist having more than 30 years of experience in their respective fields.
Wednesday, October 7, 2009
John Warner ties security, jobs to climate change
John Warner wants Congress to pass legislation designed to curb climate change.
But instead of arguing on moral grounds — as many environmentalists do — the former Virginia senator is relying on what he knows the best: the military and the economy.
"China and India and the rest of the nations in the world are going to eat our lunch," if the United States doesn't swiftly react to climate change, he said.
Warner, who appeared at a climate change conference with scientists, politicians, and military brass on Tuesday in Norfolk, spoke with the Daily Press earlier that morning.
He said climate change is interlocked with national security and energy dependence, and that the United States needs to reduce its reliance on foreign oil.
Warner, who steered thousands of defense jobs to Hampton Roads during his career, said the nation needs to invest in solar and wind energy, nuclear power, and clean coal technology.
"This is a huge, huge, jobs opportunity," said Warner, who is working with Pew Charitable Trusts, a nonprofit organization that focuses on environmental issues.
The former GOP lawmaker, who did not seek re-election in 2008, called on Congress to pass climate change legislation. The House approved a bill earlier this summer; but the Senate, mired in a debate over health care, has yet to act.
By not doing so, the United States puts its armed forces at risk, Warner said. For example, the military is typically among the first to respond to natural disasters, such as tsunamis or hurricanes, associated with climate change.
"These young men and women in uniform are taking the risks," Warner said.
He was joined Tuesday by John B. Nathman, a retired Navy admiral who, like Warner, said climate change impacts the military.
For example, droughts in Africa have caused food and water shortages. This poses a threat to unstable governments such as Somalia and Kenya, where the U.S. and its allies have a military presence, he said.
Asked if the war in Iraq is the result of climate change manifesting itself, Nathman said "it's hard to say."
Having the admiral and Warner, a respected voice in defense issues, involved in the climate change debate illustrates how far the issue has advanced, said Phyllis Cuttino, director of Pew Environment Group's U.S. Global Warming Campaign.
Warner sponsored climate change legislation in 2007 that ultimately failed to make it through Congress.
The effort, like the current legislation, faced opposition from the power, manufacturing, and transportation industries.
Plus, he said the Bush administration "simply wasn't going to take this battle on."
Warner said he is encouraged so far by President Barack Obama, who made climate change legislation part of his election platform. Still, Warner said Obama needs help from Congress to make climate change legislation a reality.
"We've got to get Congress and the President working together," he said
But instead of arguing on moral grounds — as many environmentalists do — the former Virginia senator is relying on what he knows the best: the military and the economy.
"China and India and the rest of the nations in the world are going to eat our lunch," if the United States doesn't swiftly react to climate change, he said.
Warner, who appeared at a climate change conference with scientists, politicians, and military brass on Tuesday in Norfolk, spoke with the Daily Press earlier that morning.
He said climate change is interlocked with national security and energy dependence, and that the United States needs to reduce its reliance on foreign oil.
Warner, who steered thousands of defense jobs to Hampton Roads during his career, said the nation needs to invest in solar and wind energy, nuclear power, and clean coal technology.
"This is a huge, huge, jobs opportunity," said Warner, who is working with Pew Charitable Trusts, a nonprofit organization that focuses on environmental issues.
The former GOP lawmaker, who did not seek re-election in 2008, called on Congress to pass climate change legislation. The House approved a bill earlier this summer; but the Senate, mired in a debate over health care, has yet to act.
By not doing so, the United States puts its armed forces at risk, Warner said. For example, the military is typically among the first to respond to natural disasters, such as tsunamis or hurricanes, associated with climate change.
"These young men and women in uniform are taking the risks," Warner said.
He was joined Tuesday by John B. Nathman, a retired Navy admiral who, like Warner, said climate change impacts the military.
For example, droughts in Africa have caused food and water shortages. This poses a threat to unstable governments such as Somalia and Kenya, where the U.S. and its allies have a military presence, he said.
Asked if the war in Iraq is the result of climate change manifesting itself, Nathman said "it's hard to say."
Having the admiral and Warner, a respected voice in defense issues, involved in the climate change debate illustrates how far the issue has advanced, said Phyllis Cuttino, director of Pew Environment Group's U.S. Global Warming Campaign.
Warner sponsored climate change legislation in 2007 that ultimately failed to make it through Congress.
The effort, like the current legislation, faced opposition from the power, manufacturing, and transportation industries.
Plus, he said the Bush administration "simply wasn't going to take this battle on."
Warner said he is encouraged so far by President Barack Obama, who made climate change legislation part of his election platform. Still, Warner said Obama needs help from Congress to make climate change legislation a reality.
"We've got to get Congress and the President working together," he said
Noted lecturers grapple with water, 'the uncertain resource'
On Tuesday morning I drove south on highway 169 through a thick rain and the car wash-spray of semis, following the Minnesota River south to St. Peter. Even with water puddling in the ditches, the Minnesota remains a piddly remnant of the boiling, gouging glacial river that carved this valley out. All that water is still out there, somewhere on the earth, but never has it been so desired, so sought after, so precious.
The biological holy trinity — hydrogen-oxygen-hydrogen — is the subject of this year's Nobel Conference at Gustavus Adolphus College in St. Peter. "H20, Uncertain Resource," Oct. 6-7, includes lectures from six highly credentialed speakers.
The loftiest of these is perhaps R.K. Pachauri, the current chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the organization that shared the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize with former Vice President Al Gore. With doctoral degrees in industrial engineering and economics, Pachauri is credited with playing a major role in laying the groundwork for the Kyoto Protocol
The biological holy trinity — hydrogen-oxygen-hydrogen — is the subject of this year's Nobel Conference at Gustavus Adolphus College in St. Peter. "H20, Uncertain Resource," Oct. 6-7, includes lectures from six highly credentialed speakers.
The loftiest of these is perhaps R.K. Pachauri, the current chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the organization that shared the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize with former Vice President Al Gore. With doctoral degrees in industrial engineering and economics, Pachauri is credited with playing a major role in laying the groundwork for the Kyoto Protocol
But how does Pachauri's expertise in climate change make him qualified to talk about water?
"It's certainly no coincidence that whenever civilizations and human activity began, it is essentially because of access to water," Pachauri explained at the start of his address. "And it's also no coincidence that those societies which ran into problems in the management of their water resources — all had to encounter natural debacles that led to the depletion or vanishing of water resources — are the societies that actually failed."
Yes, but hasn't modern technology and science changed all that? It did for a while, perhaps, but two factors are changing how we humans relate to water: Continued population growth means there are more of us than ever who need it; and global climate change is making water, as the Nobel conference title says, an uncertain resource.
"It's not just a smooth and steady increase in temperatures that climate change brings with it," Pachauri noted. "It also brings a major disruption for the entire climate system, as a result of which several extreme events are increasing both in frequency and intensity." Extreme weather might be good for the Weather Channel, but it won't be good for the people living through it, particularly for those already living in marginal conditions due to poverty or their geographical location.
As Pachauri described it, climate change promises more of everything: heavier rains bringing more flooding; in other areas more severe droughts; more severe typhoons and hurricanes whose power will be augmented by rising sea levels. Other changes will be slow, but no less violent in the long run. The glaciers of the Himalayas are the water cooler for 750 million people living in China and Asia, including Pachauri's native India. But these glaciers are melting away at an alarming rate, and when they're gone there will be a lot of thirsty people on the move.
If you've read up on the implications of climate change, Pachauri's presentation might have only come as an impassioned reminder of what could be waiting for us. And Pachauri doesn't think we'll have to wait very long. "This is not something that is going to happen two generations from now," Pachauri cautioned the audience. "It is likely that major changes will take place in the next 10 to 20 years." And that's why he sees the here-and-now as crunch time.
"I've said this before: The next two or three years are going to be crucial to what's going to happen, to what's going to define the future," Pachauri said.
Pachauri fielded a question from the Internet that seemed to point to North America's cool summer as proof that global warming is anything but.
"Well, the point is, look: The IPCC and anyone who is researching on climate change is not in the business of predicting weather," Pachauri responded. "Weather prediction is totally distinct from changes in the climate. The weather will change. Just because you have one cool summer or one cool winter doesn't mean that climate change has gone away."
The dead zones
Dr. Nancy Rabalais was the day's second presenter. As executive director and professor of the Louisiana Universities Marine Consortium (LUMCON), Rabalais has spent her career studying the Mississippi delta ecosystem (all of it provided courtesy of Midwestern topsoil).
Rabalais began her lecture by asking, "What is the second most pressing issue on a global scale other than carbon?" The answer, she explained, is nitrogen, and also phosphorus. Each of these is a critical nutrient for life forms, but they are also key players in the "dead zones" that are appearing each spring and summer in areas along the Louisiana coast.
As Rabalais explains it, the story of excess nutrients in the Gulf is one of too much of a good thing. "The beneficial parts [of nitrogen and phosphorus] are that they increase phytoplankton, which is good — it feeds the marine food web," she explained. "It also generates more zooplankton, which feed more fish, and we can have some tremendous fisheries in coastal areas offshore of large rivers where a lot of nutrients are entered into the coastal watershed."
But too much nutrients can lead to the growth of filamentous algae, which choke out the sunlight that powers the sea grass beds which are critical to the survival of younger fish. And as Rabalais explained it, when large amounts of nitrogen-fueled phytoplankton die and sink to the bottom, bacteria feed on them and in the process use up all of the available oxygen. A dead zone is created, where nothing lives. Fish will swim out of these areas if possible, but if they happened to be trapped in one, they'll die. The size of this annual dead zone is growing, and the most recent one covered an area the distance from Des Moines to Chicago. So who is responsible for all this excess nutrients?
Rabalais is an intelligent woman, she knows she's the Nobel Conference is in the middle of farm country, but she tells it like it is: The biggest culprit is the agricultural use of fertilizers. In particular, tiles buried in order to better drain wet cropland have made it easier than ever for fertilizers to leave the farm and enter the watershed. The pie graph speaks!
Farm fertilizers may be the major contributor, but the problem is further complicated by a Mississippi River watershed that has been engineered not to flood. Flooding had the effect of spreading nutrients back up onto the land and into the soil; but levees keep the floodwaters at bay, whisking the nitrogen-rich water down to the delta.
Rabalais closed her lecture by discussing various initiatives she's been involved with that have sought to limit the amount of fertilizer making it into out watersheds. All have been voluntary in nature, and by her description they've been disappointingly ineffectual. The dead zones continue to grow, and worse yet, many of the changes of global warming — sea level rise, increased winds, increased temperature, increased flows from heavier runoffs — all seem to have a positive feedback on the bottom low-oxygen phenomenon.
So the question is, can we have our record corn and soybean yields, and our gulf shrimp, too? There must be a way. Let's be selfish and ask the question, whom do we want to be feeding? These oxygen-sucking bacteria, or ourselves?
Confessions of a wastewater chemist
Dr. David Sedlak is a professor of civil and environmental engineering at the University of California, Berkeley. He's an expert on the chemistry and toxicology of the human waste stream.
For most of human civilization, humans have used water for personal and agricultural purposes and then sent it down river. This approach worked well under two conditions: There was always a new supply of fresh water to replace the water you dirtied (i.e. no one was living upstream from you, and/or you were living in non-arid climate), and there was no one living downstream who was capable of stopping you.
In an increasingly crowded world, neither of those conditions can be met. According to Sedlak, cities like Los Angeles and New York City spend huge amounts of money on the infrastructure to secure the 4 billion liters of potable water their system needs every day. "New York City acts as a landlord in the area where it gets water," Sedlak explained, referring to the power the city must use to protect and manage the two upstate watersheds it draws its water from. Of course LA's water-thirsty tentacles stretch much farther. According to Sedlak, relatively newer big cities like Denver, Dallas, and Atlanta have arrived late to the water rights game, and so they find their growth potential stunted by the lack of water.
"Where can rapidly growing cities find more water?" Sedlak asked the conference attendees. "They can drink out of the toilet," he suggested, drawing a mix of laughter and "oooh" from the audience. But Sedlak was serious. In the future, more and more of the water we drink will go from the toilet bowl to the tap — not directly, of course. Cities like LA and Singapore are already doing it.
Whether it's Singapore or St. Peter, all sewage first must go through the same standard treatment to remove suspended solids, ammonia and organic carbon. At this point, the wastewater is called "effluent."
"It doesn't look like that brown sewage that came in," Sedlak told conference-goers. "It looks pretty good. It looks like surface water that you take out of a river."
And for many communities, that's where the effluent goes: into the river. Somewhere downstream that water is pulled out, treated, and put into the drinking water system. Depending on a variety of factors, some rivers are in fact mostly effluent. Sedlak pointed to the Trinity River between Dallas and Houston as an example of what he called an "effluent-dominated ecosystem." By the time the Trinity reaches the Gulf of Mexico, it is 90 percent effluent.
'If it tastes good, drink it'
The idea of drinking someone else's treated sewage may take your thirst away, but it doesn't scare Sedlak. "If it tastes good, drink it — it's probably safer than some of the foods you eat," he counseled. Sedlak should know: The focus of his work has been to study the myriad of chemicals — antibiotics, blood-pressure medications, steroids, household chemicals, etc., — that continue to taint our drinking water. That's because they're not removed by the treatment of raw sewage or by the process that makes effluent drinkable. These are the chemicals like the birth-control-pill hormones that have been turning some male fish into sterile intersex (both male and female) fish.
As Sedlak's most recent research has shown, river systems are pretty good at breaking down these chemicals, either by bacteria or by exposure to natural ultraviolet light. Currently, energy-intensive technology like reverse osmosis and treatment with artificial UV light is being used to eliminate these man-made contaminants. Sedlak's goal is find more natural, low-energy systems that can do the same work but at a lower financial and ecological cost.
Dr. Craig Bowron
"It's certainly no coincidence that whenever civilizations and human activity began, it is essentially because of access to water," Pachauri explained at the start of his address. "And it's also no coincidence that those societies which ran into problems in the management of their water resources — all had to encounter natural debacles that led to the depletion or vanishing of water resources — are the societies that actually failed."
Yes, but hasn't modern technology and science changed all that? It did for a while, perhaps, but two factors are changing how we humans relate to water: Continued population growth means there are more of us than ever who need it; and global climate change is making water, as the Nobel conference title says, an uncertain resource.
"It's not just a smooth and steady increase in temperatures that climate change brings with it," Pachauri noted. "It also brings a major disruption for the entire climate system, as a result of which several extreme events are increasing both in frequency and intensity." Extreme weather might be good for the Weather Channel, but it won't be good for the people living through it, particularly for those already living in marginal conditions due to poverty or their geographical location.
As Pachauri described it, climate change promises more of everything: heavier rains bringing more flooding; in other areas more severe droughts; more severe typhoons and hurricanes whose power will be augmented by rising sea levels. Other changes will be slow, but no less violent in the long run. The glaciers of the Himalayas are the water cooler for 750 million people living in China and Asia, including Pachauri's native India. But these glaciers are melting away at an alarming rate, and when they're gone there will be a lot of thirsty people on the move.
If you've read up on the implications of climate change, Pachauri's presentation might have only come as an impassioned reminder of what could be waiting for us. And Pachauri doesn't think we'll have to wait very long. "This is not something that is going to happen two generations from now," Pachauri cautioned the audience. "It is likely that major changes will take place in the next 10 to 20 years." And that's why he sees the here-and-now as crunch time.
"I've said this before: The next two or three years are going to be crucial to what's going to happen, to what's going to define the future," Pachauri said.
Pachauri fielded a question from the Internet that seemed to point to North America's cool summer as proof that global warming is anything but.
"Well, the point is, look: The IPCC and anyone who is researching on climate change is not in the business of predicting weather," Pachauri responded. "Weather prediction is totally distinct from changes in the climate. The weather will change. Just because you have one cool summer or one cool winter doesn't mean that climate change has gone away."
The dead zones
Dr. Nancy Rabalais was the day's second presenter. As executive director and professor of the Louisiana Universities Marine Consortium (LUMCON), Rabalais has spent her career studying the Mississippi delta ecosystem (all of it provided courtesy of Midwestern topsoil).
Rabalais began her lecture by asking, "What is the second most pressing issue on a global scale other than carbon?" The answer, she explained, is nitrogen, and also phosphorus. Each of these is a critical nutrient for life forms, but they are also key players in the "dead zones" that are appearing each spring and summer in areas along the Louisiana coast.
As Rabalais explains it, the story of excess nutrients in the Gulf is one of too much of a good thing. "The beneficial parts [of nitrogen and phosphorus] are that they increase phytoplankton, which is good — it feeds the marine food web," she explained. "It also generates more zooplankton, which feed more fish, and we can have some tremendous fisheries in coastal areas offshore of large rivers where a lot of nutrients are entered into the coastal watershed."
But too much nutrients can lead to the growth of filamentous algae, which choke out the sunlight that powers the sea grass beds which are critical to the survival of younger fish. And as Rabalais explained it, when large amounts of nitrogen-fueled phytoplankton die and sink to the bottom, bacteria feed on them and in the process use up all of the available oxygen. A dead zone is created, where nothing lives. Fish will swim out of these areas if possible, but if they happened to be trapped in one, they'll die. The size of this annual dead zone is growing, and the most recent one covered an area the distance from Des Moines to Chicago. So who is responsible for all this excess nutrients?
Rabalais is an intelligent woman, she knows she's the Nobel Conference is in the middle of farm country, but she tells it like it is: The biggest culprit is the agricultural use of fertilizers. In particular, tiles buried in order to better drain wet cropland have made it easier than ever for fertilizers to leave the farm and enter the watershed. The pie graph speaks!
Farm fertilizers may be the major contributor, but the problem is further complicated by a Mississippi River watershed that has been engineered not to flood. Flooding had the effect of spreading nutrients back up onto the land and into the soil; but levees keep the floodwaters at bay, whisking the nitrogen-rich water down to the delta.
Rabalais closed her lecture by discussing various initiatives she's been involved with that have sought to limit the amount of fertilizer making it into out watersheds. All have been voluntary in nature, and by her description they've been disappointingly ineffectual. The dead zones continue to grow, and worse yet, many of the changes of global warming — sea level rise, increased winds, increased temperature, increased flows from heavier runoffs — all seem to have a positive feedback on the bottom low-oxygen phenomenon.
So the question is, can we have our record corn and soybean yields, and our gulf shrimp, too? There must be a way. Let's be selfish and ask the question, whom do we want to be feeding? These oxygen-sucking bacteria, or ourselves?
Confessions of a wastewater chemist
Dr. David Sedlak is a professor of civil and environmental engineering at the University of California, Berkeley. He's an expert on the chemistry and toxicology of the human waste stream.
For most of human civilization, humans have used water for personal and agricultural purposes and then sent it down river. This approach worked well under two conditions: There was always a new supply of fresh water to replace the water you dirtied (i.e. no one was living upstream from you, and/or you were living in non-arid climate), and there was no one living downstream who was capable of stopping you.
In an increasingly crowded world, neither of those conditions can be met. According to Sedlak, cities like Los Angeles and New York City spend huge amounts of money on the infrastructure to secure the 4 billion liters of potable water their system needs every day. "New York City acts as a landlord in the area where it gets water," Sedlak explained, referring to the power the city must use to protect and manage the two upstate watersheds it draws its water from. Of course LA's water-thirsty tentacles stretch much farther. According to Sedlak, relatively newer big cities like Denver, Dallas, and Atlanta have arrived late to the water rights game, and so they find their growth potential stunted by the lack of water.
"Where can rapidly growing cities find more water?" Sedlak asked the conference attendees. "They can drink out of the toilet," he suggested, drawing a mix of laughter and "oooh" from the audience. But Sedlak was serious. In the future, more and more of the water we drink will go from the toilet bowl to the tap — not directly, of course. Cities like LA and Singapore are already doing it.
Whether it's Singapore or St. Peter, all sewage first must go through the same standard treatment to remove suspended solids, ammonia and organic carbon. At this point, the wastewater is called "effluent."
"It doesn't look like that brown sewage that came in," Sedlak told conference-goers. "It looks pretty good. It looks like surface water that you take out of a river."
And for many communities, that's where the effluent goes: into the river. Somewhere downstream that water is pulled out, treated, and put into the drinking water system. Depending on a variety of factors, some rivers are in fact mostly effluent. Sedlak pointed to the Trinity River between Dallas and Houston as an example of what he called an "effluent-dominated ecosystem." By the time the Trinity reaches the Gulf of Mexico, it is 90 percent effluent.
'If it tastes good, drink it'
The idea of drinking someone else's treated sewage may take your thirst away, but it doesn't scare Sedlak. "If it tastes good, drink it — it's probably safer than some of the foods you eat," he counseled. Sedlak should know: The focus of his work has been to study the myriad of chemicals — antibiotics, blood-pressure medications, steroids, household chemicals, etc., — that continue to taint our drinking water. That's because they're not removed by the treatment of raw sewage or by the process that makes effluent drinkable. These are the chemicals like the birth-control-pill hormones that have been turning some male fish into sterile intersex (both male and female) fish.
As Sedlak's most recent research has shown, river systems are pretty good at breaking down these chemicals, either by bacteria or by exposure to natural ultraviolet light. Currently, energy-intensive technology like reverse osmosis and treatment with artificial UV light is being used to eliminate these man-made contaminants. Sedlak's goal is find more natural, low-energy systems that can do the same work but at a lower financial and ecological cost.
Dr. Craig Bowron
The Kelley Blue Book on Climate Change
Whenever anyone buys or sells a car in America, they are likely to settle on a price as listed in the Kelly Blue Book, the authoritative final word on automobile value since 1926.
When you go to the doctor with an illness, your physician is likely to have the Merck Manual on her bookshelf. The Merck Manual was first published in 1899 as an important medical authoritative reference guide and aid to physicians and pharmacists. "By the 1980s, the book had become the world's largest selling medical text and was translated into more than a dozen languages."
And if your physician prescribes you a medication, chances are she has read about it in her Physicians' Desk Reference (PDR), "designed to provide physicians with the full legally mandated information relevant to writing prescriptions" and "a commercially published compilation of manufacturers' prescribing information on prescription drugs, updated annually" for 63 years.
If an article appears in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), it is treated with great respect by the media and the world at large as an important statement related to health or medical care. It carries with it the weight and import of serious authority in its field, as it should. When it comes to cars, refrigerators, solar panels, guns, sports statistics, farm tractors, or almost anything else, there is a gold standard. There is an ultimate final word, a publication or an organization that is trusted by those within and outside the field as representing what is known or accepted as substantially true.
So it is with any scientific issue, including global warming or climate change, For example, there is Nature, "the world's most highly cited interdisciplinary science journal, according to the 2008 Journal Citation Report." A British publication which began in 1869, Nature is one of two of the most important science journals published in the world.
The other is Science, published by the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS).
The other is Science, published by the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS).
Founded in 1880 on $10,000 of seed money from the American inventor Thomas Edison, Science has grown to become the world's leading outlet for scientific news, commentary, and cutting-edge research, with the largest paid circulation of any peer-reviewed general-science journal. Through its print and online incarnations, Science reaches an estimated worldwide readership of more than one million."What do Nature and Science say about global warming or climate change?
Back in February of 2007, when the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) published their fourth report in 17 years which again definitively stated that humans are causing global warming, an editorial from Nature stated:
Until quite recently (perhaps even until last week), the general global narrative of the great climate-change debate has been deceptively straightforward. The climate-science community, together with the entire environmental movement and a broad alliance of opinion leaders ranging from Greenpeace and Ralph Nader to Senator John McCain and many US evangelical Christians, has been advocating meaningful action to curtail greenhouse-gas emissions. This requirement has been disputed by a collection of money-men and some isolated scientists, in alliance with the current president of the United States and a handful of like-minded ideologues such as Australia's prime minister John Howard."
The IPCC report, released in Paris, has served a useful purpose in removing the last ground from under the climate-change sceptics' feet, leaving them looking marooned and ridiculous."
However, this predicament was already clear enough. Opinion in business circles, in particular, has moved on. A report released on 19 January by Citigroup, Climatic Consequences -- the sort of eloquently written, big-picture stuff that the well-informed chief executive reads on a Sunday afternoon -- states even more firmly than the IPCC that anthropogenic climate change is a fact that world governments are moving to confront. It leaves no question at all that large businesses need to get to grips with this situation -- something that many of them are already doing."That same month the AAAS Board released their "New Statement on Climate Change."
The scientific evidence is clear: global climate change caused by human activities is occurring now, and it is a growing threat to society. Accumulating data from across the globe reveal a wide array of effects: rapidly melting glaciers, destabilization of major ice sheets, increases in extreme weather, rising sea level, shifts in species ranges, and more. The pace of change and the evidence of harm have increased markedly over the last five years. The time to control greenhouse gas emissions is now."
The atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide, a critical greenhouse gas, is higher than it has been for at least 650,000 years. The average temperature of the Earth is heading for levels not experienced for millions of years. Scientific predictions of the impacts of increasing atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases from fossil fuels and deforestation match observed changes."
As expected, intensification of droughts, heat waves, floods, wildfires, and severe storms is occurring, with a mounting toll on vulnerable ecosystems and societies. These events are early warning signs of even more devastating damage to come, some of which will be irreversible."
Delaying action to address climate change will increase the environmental and societal consequences as well as the costs. The longer we wait to tackle climate change, the harder and more expensive the task will be."
History provides many examples of society confronting grave threats by mobilizing knowledge and promoting innovation. We need an aggressive research, development and deployment effort to transform the existing and future energy systems of the world away from technologies that emit greenhouse gases."
Developing clean energy technologies will provide economic opportunities and ensure future energy supplies. In addition to rapidly reducing greenhouse gas emissions, it is essential that we develop strategies to adapt to ongoing changes and make communities more resilient to future changes."
The growing torrent of information presents a clear message: we are already experiencing global climate change. It is time to muster the political will for concerted action. Stronger leadership at all levels is needed. The time is now. We must rise to the challenge. We owe this to future generations
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