Thought you folk might enjoy my song "Tears in The Atmosphere"
Kindest regards Rene Dwight
I feel like I am at a personal crossroads...
Growing up I have always had a huge heart and have always been very aware the impact that I may or may not have on the world. I feel that, finally, I am at a point where I need to make a decision about the type of life that I want to lead.
I have been through enough tough times to write a best-selling memoir at the age of 23 (I haven't, but I could..) and my experiences could lead me in two distinct directions:
1. I could become a grouchy, mean, cynical, unhappy person that doesn't care about any real consequences of my actions.
OR
2. I could become the person that doesn't waste time with the trivial, someone who lives each moment IN the moment (how very Buddhist of me), a person that sees the good in everything, someone who truly tries to make a positive impact on the planet and all the creatures on it (I'm starting to sound like a hippie... ugh).
Alot of contemplation and soul-searching has led me to number 2. Starting today I will try my hardest to live the type of life that I want. Hopefully when I go through rough patches I can come back and look at this and it will help me get back to the middle.
]]>Thought you folk might enjoy my song "Tears in The Atmosphere"
Kindest regards Rene Dwight
Tuur Van Balen is my age. He has already got a Master of Science in Industrial Design of Design Engineering at Delft University of Technology. Not happy with his (cum laude) thesis project for the National Dutch Museum in Amsterdam, he decided to go for another Master of Arts at the Royal College in London. His new project is called My City=My Body and just had an interim show at the RCA.
This "preview" is part of his "ongoing research into future biological interactions with the city and more precisely into how the increasing understanding of our DNA and
the rise of bio-technologies will change the way we interact with each
other and our environment". For this occasion, Van Balen decided to start exploring the city of London from its river. "The Thames is London's largest 'drinking water and wastewater service company", he says.
From the Saturday, November 17, 2007, front page and pages A16-17, an article about the changes in the Arctic because of global warming:
Arctic in Peril
Within 60 years, climatologists predict most of the Arctic will be free of summer ice, just as it was 1 million years ago when giant beavers and camels roamed the North, Ed Struzik, this year's Atkinson Fellow, travelled the remote region to explore how Canadians can adapt to and even exploit this precarious return to warmer times
THE NEW COLD WAR
Ed Struzik
Atkinson Fellow
Devon Island, Nunavut - In the summer of 1985, helicopter pilot Paul Tudge was flying over Axel Heiberg Island in the High Arctic when he spotted what he thought were tree stumps near the edge of a giant ice cap.
When Tudge reported the sighting to scientists, they were skeptical. The nearest tree was 2,500 kilometres south. Nevertheless, geologist James Basinger flew up the new year to have a closer look. It didn't take him long to realize he had found the Holy Grail of Arctic paleobotany.
Not only were tree trunks sticking out of the permafrost,some buried below were more than 2 1/2 metres wide and five metres long.
What really amazed Basinger was the realization that these trees were 45 million years old. Many of the nuts, seeds and cones were so perfectly preserved they look as if they had just fallen to the ground.
By the time Basinger finished excavating the site 14 years later, he had assembled a picture of a dawn redwood swamp filled with royal ferns and cypress that flourished downstream from pine, spruce and walnut trees. The High Arctic, Basinger concluded, was once as warm and lush as the Carolinian forests of Georgia in the United States are today. Several scientists have since discovered evidence that the Arctic was warm for a very long time after that.
* On Devon Island, Richard Grieve and a team of scientists unearthed, among other fossils, remains of a primitive rhinoceros in and around a 39-million-year-old meteorite impact site. While not as warm as it was 45 million years ago, Grieve says it was warm enough to sustain a mixed conifer-hardwood forest. The mean annual temperature was between 8 and 12C.
* On Ellesmere Island, there's a 4.5-million-year-old beaver pond site where Dick Harington and a team of scientists from the Canadian Mueum of Nature spent more than a decade unearthing fossils of miniature beavers that were preyed upon by ancestral black bears, weasel-like carnivores and Eurasian badgers. Some of the fossils were so detailed they were able to determine what tundra bunnies were eating at the time. Temperatures then were at least 10C warmer in the summer and 15C warmer in winter than they are today.
* Remarkably, Haringon did this after he and Peter Lord, a Gwich'in native from Old Crow in the western Arctic, unearthed fossil remains of six-foot-tall beavers that shared part of the Yukon and Alaska with scimitar cats, American camels, mastodons and woolly mammoths between 70,000 and 90,000 years ago.
These are heady times for climatologists. The more they learn about the Arctic past, the better they are creating models that will predict the future.
In the next 15 to 60 years, they're predicting, most of the Arctic will be free of summer ice just as it was 1 milllion years ago.
When that occurs, the polar world could be beyond the "tipping point" - the term climatologist Mark Sereze uses to describe what happens when sea ice becomes so thin and vulnerable that winter's deep freeze will no longer be able to manufacture enough ice to offset the melting that occurs in summer.
The climate change that killed primitive rhinoceros, scimitar cats and American camels could be equally devastating to current species, even is this time the Arctic is warming once again, not cooling.
"The rest of the world will be in for a few surprises," predicts Serreze, a senior research scientists at the National Snow and Ice Data Center in Boulder, Col. "What happens in the Arctic matters to the rest of the world. If we ignore what's going on, it's going to bite us down here, and it's going to bite us hard."
Unless the rest of the world finds a way of mitigating or adapting to the myriad effects of climate change, many scientists agree that history will be kind to former U.S. vice-president Al Gore, who was recently awarded a Nobel Peace Prize for his work on publicizing the issue.
For Canada, one of the world's dominant Arctic nations, the stakes are even higher. Not only are there risks but also opportunities. Climate change could mean an economic bonanza, allowing shipping through the Northweest Passage enabling mining and oil projects not currently feasible.
The question is, how will Canada manage climate change?
NO ONE KNOWS why the Arctic was so warm for so long previously.
Ocean currents, volcanic activity, methane burps and other natural warming mechanisms may have been responsible. But the fossil evidence found in ancient lake beds, ice cores and permafrost suggests a cooling began after large mammals replaced the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. This gradual cooling, interspersed as it was by periods of warmth, continued until the time Harington's miniature beavers were avoiding predators on Ellesmere Island.
Then rapid-fire fashion - at least in geologic time - the cold wiped out the forests, the tiny beavers and, on the other side of the Arctic, the woolly mammoths, American mastodons, scimitar cast and giant beavers.
Now that the polar regions are warming rapidly, scientists fear there will be a similar catastrophic impact on the fish and wildlife and the people who inhabit the Arctic today. With sea ice melting, glaciers receding and Arctic storms getting harsher, many coastal communities are becoming vulnerable to flooding and erosion. A warmer and shorter ice season also means less time for polar bears to hunt seals and more time for mosquitoes and blackflies to afflict caribou, musk oxen and nesting birds. Beluga whales and narwhal, which hide under the ice to avoid killer whales, could also be threatened.
A warm Arctic gives diseases normally killed by the cold the opportunity to move north and infect species that have no immunity to them.
Heat threatens Arctic species in other ways, as well. There's evidence that caribou, Arctic fox, char and other Arctic species may not be able to compete if deer, red fox, and Pacific salmon continue to migrate north into their territory. The possibility is no longer science fiction. In recent years, Pacific salmon species that are declining on the West Coast have been showing up in Inuit nets.
Theoretically, a polar meltdown could shut down the ocean "conveyeor belt" that brings warm water into the North Atlantic and moderates the climate of Great Britain and northern Europe. The cold water moving south could compromise important fisheries in the North Atlantic just as it did in the early 1990s.
Rising sea levels brought on by this meltdown could also displace the 104 million people who live in coastal areas that are within a metre of the ocean surface.
Those who live on higher ground won't escape the changes that are coming. Polar ice is the genesis of cold fronts that bring rain and snow to much of the world. If it shrinks, droughts could worsen, as could heavy rains.
The rest of the world will also be vulnerable to forest fires caused by lightning strikes in the hotter north. Few people in Toronto may realize it, but part of the suffocating smog that the city endured in the summer of 2004 was fallout from fires in Alaska and the Yukon. Five per cent of Alaska and the Yukon burned that record hot year.
Serreze cautions skeptics who think there's time to adjust. So far, he notes, the climate models that he and others have put together have seriously underestimated how quickly the changes that have happened already would occur.
Yesterday in Spain, the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change backed that view. The IPCC - which share the Nobel with Gore - completed a scientific summary that is to be released today that says the damage from global warming may be "abrupt or irreversible."
Already, the latest data shows that the Arctic ice cap was 20 per cent smaller this year than it was in 2005, a record year.
"It's not so much what we know that's a problem," says Serreze. "It's what we don't know. The paleo-climate record tells us that the system changes very, very quickly, on the order of just 10 years. I suspect that there are surprises ahead that we won't be ready for."
UNTIL THIS SUMMER, John Falkingham, chief of Forecasting for the Canadian Ice Service, was reluctant to push the button so hard. But this summer, the ice retreated so far beyond all expectations that he was left shocked. Not only was the ice cover at record lows inthe Arctic, the so-called "mortuary" of old ice that normally chokes McClintock Channel in the Northwest Passage was almost all gone. What's more, Viscount Melville Sound, "the birthplace" of a lot of Arctic ice, was down to half of its normal summer cover. That's why a Russian ship was able to deliver a load of fertilizer to the Port of Churchill in October - a first.
"The ice is no longer growing or getting old," says Falkingham, who then echoes Serreze's choice of words. "Ten years from now, we may look back on 2007 and say that was the year we passed the tipping point,"
The big challenge is what to do about it.
Reducing greenhouse gases is one solution because it's accepted that carbon dioxide, and other greenhouse gas emissions caused by human activity, are a big driver of the warming. But even if world leaders muster the will to do something meaningful in the coming years, it will take a century or more to stop or even slow the warming that is already melting the polar world.
Many think that adaptation is the key. Not only do governments like Canada's have to control emissions, they need to develop strategies that will mitigate, exploit and help communities and ecosystems adjust to the changes that are coming. A new environmental state requires a new way of managing it.
The View From the North
Edmonton journalist Ed Struzik has been writing about Canada's Arctic for 28 years.
In July, he set off on the first of nine northern journeys to examine the implications of climate change as part of the 2007 Atkinson Fellowship in Public Policy.
He travelled by plane, icebreaker, snowmobile, dogsled and skis, making his way from Churchill, Man., to Ellesmere Island, and from the Alaskan border to the coast of Greenland. Struzik saw first-hand evidence that the Arctic is warming almost twice as fast as the rest of the world. The change, he determined, offers economic opportunities for Canada, but also poses special risks. Watch his video at thestar.com/arctic.
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One reason I like to follow green business articles is because of the many innovative ideas. From the Business section of the Saturday, December 29, 2007, Toronto Star, page B4:
HOT PAVEMENT TAPPED FOR HEAT AMONG SOLAR-POWER INNOVATIONS
Dutch engineering firm siphons reuable energy from roads, parking lots
Arthur Max
Associated Press
Scharwoude, Netherlands - If you've ever blistered your bare feet on a hot road you know how asphalt absorbs the sun's rays. Now, a Dutch company is siphoning the heat from roads and parking lots to heat homes and offices.
As climate change rises on the international agenda, the system built by civil engineering firm Ooms Avenhorn Holding BV doesn't look as wacky as it might have 10 years ago when it was first conceived.
Solar energy collected from a 200-metre stretch of road and a small parking lot helps heat a 70-unit, four-storey apartment building in the northern village of Avenhorn. A 160,000-sq.-ft. industrial park in nearby Hoorn is kept warm in winter with the help of heat stored during the summer from 36,000 sq. ft. of pavement. The runways of a Dutch air force base supply heat for its hanger.
And all that under normally cloudy Dutch skies, with only a few days a year of truly sweltering temperatures.
The Road Energy System is one of the more unusual ways scientists and engineers are trying to harness the power of the sun, the single most plentiful, reliable, accessible and inexhaustible source of renewable energy - radiating to Earth more watts in one hour than the world can use in a whole year.
But today, solar power provides just 0.04 per cent of global energy, held back by high production costs and low efficient rates.
Solar advocates say that will change within a few years.
Other renewable sources have drawbacks: Not every place is breezy enough for wind turbines; waves and tides are good are good only for coastal regions; hydroelectricity requires rivers and increasingly objectionable dams; biofuels take up land needed for food crops.
"But solar falls everywhere," says Patrick Mazza of Climate Solutions, a Seattle consultancy group.
Compared with other energy sources, "solar comes out as the one with the real heavy lift. It's the one we really need to get at," he said.
Ooms' thermal energy system is too expensive and inefficient to solve the world's energy problems. It was actually a spin-off of a method to reduce road maintenance.
A latticework of flexible plastic pipes, held in place by a plastic grid, is covered over by asphalt, which magnifies the sun's thermal power. As cool water in the pipes is heated, it is pumped deep under the ground to natural aquifers where it maintains a fairly contant temperature of about 20. The heated water can be retrieved months later to keep the road surface ice-free in winter. The same system pumps cold water from a separate subterranean reservoir to cool buildings on hot days.
Though it doubles the cost of construction, the system's first benefits are a longer life for roads and bridges, fewer ice-induced accidents and less need for repaving.
"We found we were gathering more energy in summer than we needed, so we asked ... what we can do with the extra energy," said commercial manager Lex an Zaane. The answer was to construct buildings near there and pipe hot water under the floor.
The water usually must go through an electric-powered heat pump for an extra boost, Van Zaane said. The installation cost is about double that for normal gas heating, but the energy required is about half of what would otherwise be needed. That translates into lower heating bills and a 50 per cent savings in carbon emissions..
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From the November 2007 National Geographic, pages 110-111, an article about the threat caused to certain ocean creatures as carbon dioxide makes the ocean more acidic:
THE ACID THREAT
As CO2 rises, shelled animals may perish
Tiny creatures near the base of the marine food chain lead perilous lives at best. Now they face a man-made threat. No, not global warming this time though the root cause is the same. As the level of atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) rises, it is not only heating the globe but also dissolving in ocean waters, turning them more acidic. For shell-building animals that can mean a corrosive, even deadly environment.
Oceans are a natural sink for CO2, already soaking up more than a quarter of what's released into the atmosphere. Today we're pumping out massive quantities - a surge that began more than a century ago as factories, power plants, and cars began devouring fossil fuels. By now the oceans are taking in 25 million tons a day of excess CO2, and it is starting to show. Already scientists have measured a rise in acidity of some 30 percent in surface waters and they predict a 100 to 150 percent increase by the end of the century.
No ill effects have been documented so far in the open ocean, but the threat is clear. Absorbed by seawater, CO2 reacts to form carbonic acid, which turns the normally alkaline water more acidic. In the process, fewer carbonate ions are lift floating around - and many marine organisms, including mollusks and corals, rely on carbonate from seawater to build their shells and their hard parts. Eventually, vital species will no longer be able to build or maintain their shells and skeletons.
Users of the mineral aragonite - a very soluble type of calcium carbonate - are especially vulnerable. They include tiny pteropod snails, which help feed commercially vital fish like salmon. Computer models predict that polar waters will turn hostile for pteropods within 50 years (cold water holds the most CO2, so it is already less shell-friendly). By 2100, habitat for many shelled species could shrink drastically, with impacts up the food chain. And as the acidification reaches the tropics, "it's a doomsday scenario for coral reefs," says Carnegie Institution oceanographer Ken Caldeira. If current trends continue, he predicts, reefs will one day survive only in walled-off, acid-controlled refuges.
Massive outbursts of CO2 and other greenhouse gases have acidified the oceans in the geologic past, but equilibrium returned as the oceans stored away excess CO2 in minerals on the sea floor. This time nature may be slow to heal. "Our emissions are huge compared with natural fluxes," Caldeira says."If you could stop emissions and wait 10,000 years, natural processes would probably take care of most of it." These days we're simply dishing it out faster than the oceans can mop it up. --JSH
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The Jeep Renegade actually runs on two 16kWh lithium ion battery packs, one for the front wheels and another for the back. After 40 miles of pure electric juice a 1.5L three cylinder BluTech diesel kicks in. Jeep estimates 400 miles on 10 gallons of gas, but that is likely to include several stops to plug her into the grid.
From the Friday, January 11, 2008, Toronto Star, Living Section, page L5, an article about a store that provides environmentally friendly clothing:
Eco Logic
ALL SHADES OF GREEN
Store caters to fashion-conscious shoppers seeking environmentally friendly options
Karin Kobayashi
Special to the Star
Kerry MacMullin, a former model and a vegan since she was 17, never believed in shopping therapy. In fact, MacMullin felt as if she needed therapy after she went shopping.
"Unfortunately, my relationship with fashion became negative. I expected consumers to boycott unethical clothing," admits the environmentalist, who only felt comfortable wearing second-hand clothing." I decided instead of complaining, I would create a solution to the problem."
MacMullin's solution came in the form of her new store, Green is Black, specializing in eco fashion for men and women and featuring only sweatshop-free brands that use hemp, soy, organic cotton and reclaimed materials.
"The idea was to design tthe store I wanted to shop in," says MacMullin who spent hundreds of hours researching ethical and environmentally friendly fashion labels from local designers Passenger Pigeon and Me to We to internationally established brands like Loomstate and Edun.
She paid particular attention to how far the garments would have to travel to get to her store. "A lot of people don't take into account the fossil fuel used for shipping," she says, which is why she carries a lot of brands from Ontario and Quebec.
"I wanted to have as much Eastern Canadian product as possible. You can say something is 'made in Canada' but if you are getting all of your materials from China and outsourcing your sewing, the garment is not ideal," MacMullin says.
She's particularly proud of the reclaimed jewellery and eco labels from Quebec she discovered, including Oom Ethikwear and Okzoo.
"Quebec eco labels are similar to how Quebec films are received," she says." Around the world they are renowned and award-winning but in English Canada they are largely ignored."
The store may seem a little stark but MacMullin's selective and stylish offerings with a price point of $90 make up for the fluorescent lighting in the back. I was ecstatic to discover Green is Black is the only Toronto retailer that carries the Spring 2008 collection of Del Forte Jeans, a U.S. organic denim brand. Even better, MacMullin ordered the must-have style of the season wide-leg, high-waisted jeans that fit like a glove.
The store also carries a selection of shoes including styles from Yellow Port made out of tires and reclaimed leather seating from 18-wheeler trucks. "I didn't want to have a store full of pleather," says MacMulin. "But I do have stock for folks who refuse to wear leather and I look for shoes that are as fabric-based as posssible as opposed to 100 per cent PC-based shoe."
The studded shoes by Mink available at Green is Black are not only a far cry from Birkenstocks but are so chic they were featured in Elle magazine.
Green is Black is open Tuesday to Saturday, 624 Yonge St., greenisblack.ca.
Erin Kobayashi is a Toronto-based writer, ecologicerin@gmail.com.
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Have you signed up for that gym membership yet?
Perhaps you just bought a fresh supply of nicotine patches.
Or maybe you've made that promise to leave work by 5 o'clock every day come January.
It's that time of year again. Whether motivated by guilt or a renewed zest for life, many of us will be making resolutions to change for the better. And New Year's is the perfect time to bring together our passion for making the world a better place with that age-old tradition of making our yearly resolutions.
Let's face it, many resolutions are not, well, completely realistic. (Do you honestly think you'll get back down to that svelte high-school physique by spring?) Fortunately, these five New Year's resolutions are different. They are easy to stick to and can have a truly positive impact on the world.
1. I will become better informed about one global issue that moves me.
From saving the rainforests to opposing unfair trade practices, simply read one book or magazine article on your favourite topic.
Next, spend one hour exploring websites or internet resources relating to this issue. You can then look into whether there are easy action steps you can take to help.
2. I will finally take a serious look into child sponsorship.
Instead of grand plans to shape the entire world, start small and discover how you can change a single life for the better. Click here to learn more about World Vision child sponsorship.
If you're already a child sponsor, resolve to encourage three people to explore child sponsorship. You can explain the difference you have seen it make in the life of your sponsored child and answer any questions that may come up.
3. I will go even greener in my own home and workplace.
As each year goes by, we see the impact of climate change. These changes have the most acute effects on vulnerable individuals in the developing world. You can help in simple ways, like finally replacing all those light bulbs with energy-saving fluorescent bulbs and reducing your weekly garbage to a maximum of two bags.
4. I will express my preference for alternative gifts.
On at least one personal celebration when you expect to receive presents, you can ask people who love you to donate to a charity instead of purchasing a gift you probably don't need.
Click here to browse the World Vision Gift Catalogue.
5. I will start to change the world one person at a time.
Simply invite a neighbour in for coffee (fair-trade coffee, of course). Or host a casual dinner party for friends who need a boost. Or simply smile at just one stranger every day.