Climate Basics: What Does The Number 350 Mean?

Image:  350.org

SPF. MPG. HIV. Three letter identifiers we all know and understand. Here is a short term that can save the Planet: PPM. That stands for parts per million. And in this case, this the level of CO2 in the atmosphere that supports life as we know it. Guess what. We are over the limit. See image above, and to learn more, see the 350.org link. Who agrees and is a 350 messenger? A partial list below. Good company to be in. Join the 350 movement! The Planet you save may be your own.

Bill McKibben Rajendra Pachauri Vandana Shiva Abp. Desmond Tutu Dr. James Hansen Liz Thomson Pres. Mohamed Nasheed David Suzuki Van Jones

Lester Brown George Monbiot Sheila Watt-Cloutier Will Steger Barbara Kingsolver Hermann Scheer Alex Steffen Mathis Wackernagel Colin Beavan Dr. Karl-Henrik Robèrt

Homero Aridjis Paul Loeb Deepa Gupta Ross Gelbspan Keibo Oiwa Claudio Angelo Thomas Homer-Dixon José María Figueres Bo Ekman Bulu Imam

A Climate Majority In America, Stanford Poll Says

 The global warming evidence and solutions are now overwhelmingly obvious to most Americans. 
Repost from the Sierra Club and The New York Times, June 8, 2010

"The Climate Majority By JON A. KROSNICK Stanford, Calif.  On Thursday, the Senate will vote on a resolution proposed by Lisa Murkowski, Republican of Alaska, that would scuttle the Environmental Protection Agency's plans to limit emissions of greenhouse gases by American businesses.. . But a closer look at... polls and a new survey by my Political Psychology Research Group show just the opposite: huge majorities of Americans still believe the earth has been gradually warming as the result of human activity and want the government to institute regulations to stop it.  In our survey, which was financed by a grant to Stanford from the National Science Foundation, 1,000 randomly selected American adults were interviewed by phone between June 1 and Monday. When respondents were asked if they thought that the earth's temperature probably had been heating up over the last 100 years, 74 percent answered affirmatively. And 75 percent of respondents said that human behavior was substantially responsible for any warming that has occurred.  For many issues, any such consensus about the existence of a problem quickly falls apart when the conversation turns to carrying out specific solutions that will be costly. But not so here.  Fully 86 percent of our respondents said they wanted the federal government to limit the amount of air pollution that businesses emit, and 76 percent favored government limiting business's emissions of greenhouse gases in particular. Not a majority of 55 or 60 percent - but 76 percent.  Large majorities opposed taxes on electricity (78 percent) and gasoline (72 percent) to reduce consumption. But 84 percent favored the federal government offering tax breaks to encourage utilities to make more electricity from water, wind and solar power.  And huge majorities favored government requiring, or offering tax breaks to encourage, each of the following: manufacturing cars that use less gasoline (81 percent); manufacturing appliances that use less electricity (80 percent); and building homes and office buildings that require less energy to heat and cool (80 percent).  Thus, there is plenty of agreement about what people do and do not want government to do.  Our poll also indicated that some of the principal arguments against remedial efforts have been failing to take hold. Only 18 percent of respondents said they thought that policies to reduce global warming would increase unemployment and only 20 percent said they thought such initiatives would hurt the nation's economy. Furthermore, just 14 percent said the United States should not take action to combat global warming unless other major industrial countries like China and India do so as well.  Our findings might seem implausible in light of recent polls that purport to show that Americans are increasingly skeptical about the very existence of climate change. But in fact, those polls did not produce conflicting evidence at all.  Consider, for example, the most publicized question from a 2009 Pew Research Center poll: "From what you've read and heard, is there solid evidence that the average temperature on earth has been getting warmer over the past few decades, or not?" This question measured perceptions of scientific evidence that the respondent has read or heard about, not the respondents' personal opinions about whether the earth has been warming. Someone who has had no exposure to scientific evidence or who perceives the evidence to be equivocal may nonetheless be convinced that the earth has been heating up by, say, the early blossoming of plants in his garden.  Or consider a widely publicized Gallup question: "Thinking about what is said in the news, in your view, is the seriousness of global warming generally exaggerated, generally correct or is it generally underestimated?" This question asked about respondents' perceptions of the news, not the respondents' perception of warming. A person who believes climate change has been happening might also feel that news media coverage of it has been exaggerated.  Questions in other polls that sought to tap respondents' personal beliefs about the existence and causes of warming violated two of the cardinal rules of good survey question design: ask about only one thing at a time, and choose language that makes it easy for respondents to understand and answer each question.  Imagine being asked this, from a poll by CNN: "Which of the following statements comes closest to your view of global warming: Global warming is a proven fact and is mostly caused by emissions from cars and industrial facilities like power plants and factories; global warming is a proven fact and is mostly caused by natural changes that have nothing to do with emissions from cars and industrial facilities; or, global warming is a theory that has not yet been proven."  Notice that the question didn't even offer the opportunity for respondents to say they believe global warming is definitely not happening - not the sort of question that will provide the most valid measurements.  When surveys other than ours have asked simple and direct questions, they have produced results similar to ours. For example, in November, an ABC News/Washington Post survey found that 72 percent of respondents said the earth has been heating up, and a December poll by Ipsos/McClatchy found this proportion to be 70 percent.  Our surveys did reveal a small recent decline in the proportion of people who believe global warming has been happening, from 84 percent in 2007 to 80 percent in 2008 to 74 percent today. Statistical analysis of our data revealed that this decline is attributable to perceptions of recent weather changes by the minority of Americans who have been skeptical about climate scientists.  In terms of average earth temperature, 2008 was the coldest year since 2000. Scientists say that such year-to-year fluctuations are uninformative, and people who trust scientists therefore ignore this information when forming opinions about global warming's existence. Citizens who do not trust climate scientists, however, base their conclusions on their personal observations of nature. These low-trust individuals were especially aware of the recent decline in average world temperatures; they were the ones in our survey whose doubts about global warming have increased since 2007.  This explanation is especially significant, because it suggests that the small recent decline in the proportion of people who believe in global warming is likely to be temporary. If the earth's temperature begins to rise again, these individuals may reverse course and rejoin the large majority who still think warming is real.  Growing public skepticism has, in recent months, been attributed to news reports about e-mail messages hacked from the computer system at the University of East Anglia in Britain (characterized as showing climate scientists colluding to silence unconvinced colleagues) and by the discoveries of alleged flaws in reports by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.  Our new survey discredited this claim in multiple ways. First, we found no decline in Americans' trust in environmental scientists: 71 percent of respondents said they trust these scientists a moderate amount, a lot or completely, a figure that was 68 percent in 2008 and 70 percent in 2009. Only 9 percent said they knew about the East Anglia e-mail messages and believed they indicated that climate scientists should not be trusted, and only 13 percent of respondents said so about the I.P.C.C. reports' alleged flaws.  Interestingly, Americans are not alone in having their views portrayed inaccurately. A February BBC News survey asked Britons, "From what you know and have heard, do you think that the earth's climate is changing and global warming is taking place?" Seventy-five percent of respondents answered affirmatively, down a somewhat improbable eight percentage points from 83 percent in November. A BBC headline blared, "Climate Skepticism on the Rise," when it should have proclaimed that a huge majority of Britons still share common ground with one another and with Americans on this issue.  GLOBAL warming has attracted what political scientists dub an "issue public": millions of Americans who are passionate about this subject and put pressure on government to follow their wishes. For over a decade, this group has been of typical issue-public size, about 15 percent of American adults.  Although issue publics usually divide about equally on opposing sides - think of abortion or immigration - 88 percent of the climate change issue public in our survey believed that global warming has been happening; 88 percent attributed responsibility for it to human action; 92 percent wanted the federal government to limit the amount of greenhouse gases that businesses can emit. Put simply, the people whose votes are most powerfully shaped by this issue are sending a nearly unanimous signal to their elected representatives.  All this makes global warming a singular issue in American politics. Even as we are told that Americans are about equally divided into red and blue, a huge majority shares a common vision of climate change. This creates a unique opportunity for elected representatives to satisfy a lot of voters.  When senators vote on emissions limits on Thursday, there is one other number they might want to keep in mind: 72 percent of Americans think that most business leaders do not want the federal government to take steps to stop global warming. A vote to eliminate greenhouse gas regulation is likely to be perceived by the nation as a vote for industry, and against the will of the people. Jon A. Krosnick is a professor of communication, political science and psychology at Stanford."

Happy Mother Earth Day

On Mothers Day, it certainly is appropriate to wish your birth mother well. She doesn't need a greeting card, and please don't send cut flowers. Do something great for Mother Earth. She made you, she keeps you alive. Happy Mother Earth Day.

Over at New Republic, Al Gore puts all insults to our mother planet in perspective, in the context of the Gulf spill.

The continuing undersea gusher of oil 50 miles off the shores of Louisiana is not the only source of dangerous uncontrolled pollution spewing into the environment. Worldwide, the amount of man-made CO2 being spilled every three seconds into the thin shell of atmosphere surrounding the planet equals the highest current estimate of the amount of oil spilling from the Macondo well every day. Indeed, the average American coal-fired power generating plant gushes more than three times as much global-warming pollution into the atmosphere each day—and there are over 1,400 of them.
Just as the oil companies told us that deep-water drilling was safe, they tell us that it’s perfectly all right to dump 90 million tons of CO2 into the air of the world every 24 hours.

Senator Nelson (D-FL) Declares Obama Drilling Proposal Dead On Arrival

 The BP oil spill reaction in the Congress grows.

 Source: cqpolitics.com
"Florida Democrat Bill Nelson, who has been one of the most vocal opponents of new offshore drilling, has introduced legislation to do both. One bill would halt new exploratory wells such as the exploded Deepwater Horizon, until an investigation of the current disaster is complete. Another would dramatically raise the cap on an oil company’s liability for economic damages in a spill from $75 million to $10 billion.

Drilling opponents such as Nelson also hope to gain momentum for stronger measures, such as repealing President Obama’s recent proposal to allow oil and gas exploration off the southern Atlantic coast.

“The president’s proposal for offshore drilling of the coast of the southeast United States is D.O.A.,” Nelson said at a press conference Tuesday morning." More...

http://www.cqpolitics.com/wmspage.cfm?docID=cqmidday-000003654799

Worst Case Scenario: Gulf Oil Gusher

I know we are all hoping for the best case scenario in the Gulf oil gusher disaster. Here is a view on the worst case scenario from Mission ToHumanity.com and Business Insider.com

"Worst Case May Spill Into Economy

Unless the Gulf gusher is capped soon, the impact on the national economy could result in a double dip recession. Of particular enviro concern is the expected heavy hurricane season, which could stir up the massive muck and push it around the region. The concern is that the Gulf may be dead for a decade or more, and clean up can take that long, or longer. I hope the housing being prepared to cap the seabed leak works, for all of our sake.

http://www.businessinsider.com/david-kotok-125-billion-is-just-the-start-of-the-oil-cleanup-costs-and-a-double-dip-is-now-way-more-likely-2010-5"

- Posted using BlogPress mobile by Kathleen

Inclusive, Safe Green Economy Improves Jobs for California

 Eureka, I have found something interesting from the State of California. This morning I got an email from the California Labor Department, as follows:

You've been invited to be a part of Green Economy Ideas. We'd like to ask you to pay a visit to submit and vote on ideas. Help us determine what is most important to you and the larger community.
To protect your email address we require that you confirm your email address by clicking the link below:

http://ca.green.ideascale.com/a/pvrfy/438090-gykdjuexnf-8262

Thank You
Green Economy Ideas
For more information please email : evan.mcginnis@labor.ca.gov

The California Labor Department is soliciting ideas online about content around a Green Economy and Green Jobs. Kudos to the Labor Department for entering the open government waters! Here is my submission, below. Hit the header to go there and submit your idea and vote.  It looks that there is actually a link to track their progress. Let's see how they do.

Inclusive, Safe Green Economy Improves Jobs for Californians

10

Vote

The new CA green economy has an opportunity to:
-Explicitly welcome all workers, regardless of sex, race, gender,
disability, age, sexual orientation,
et al, and other criteria, not really honored in the carbon based economy.

In addition, other best practices- like buying American, and reducing global outsourcing, should get priority for government support in the Green jobs arena.

Thirdly, CA government must do more to
reach out to displaced white collar workers, who number in the millions.

These and other content areas are not
yet adequately addressed on the web, such that they are searchable. This can be dealt with by creating:
•A one-stop Green jobs web portal, aggregating
all truly Green companies, (with links to
external verification of such Green claims), would assist job hunters in finding positions as they become available.

On the policy side, CA must focus utilization of truly safe clean tech technologies that
are already available-such as solar. This content should be prioritized for both job creation and environmental protection. Killer technologies- like nuclear or off-shore drilling should not be highlighted or green washed in California as a Green job. These jobs are dangerous for workers, and the climate, as the recent Gulf oil spill disaster proves once again.

Green is not just another pretty color in the rainbow flag (cross post from SDGLN)

Green is not just another pretty color in the rainbow flag

Kathleen Connell - Special to SDGLN | Wed, 04/21/2010 - 10:16am 

ENLARGE

On the eve of the 40th anniversary of Earth Day, it is worth observing that a recent survey demonstrates that LGBT adults lead the nation in awareness of, and concern over, global warming.
The LGBT sector is leading America in “green” consciousness, and has already embraced ideas that green organizers hope the rest of the nation will endorse and act on.
An Echelon Magazine 2009 online survey reports that “two-thirds (66%) of lesbian, gay, bisexual and/or transgender adults, say that it is important to support environmental causes, compared with 56% of non-LGBT adults. Three-quarters (75%) of LGBT adults (compared with 53% of heterosexuals) believe global warming is happening right now, and by more than two-to-one proportions, 39% of LGBT adults say they have seen or read Al Gore’s ‘An Inconvenient Truth’ while only 20% of heterosexuals say they have seen or read it.”
Apparently our LGBT community also cares about the environment and the future of next generation, whether we have children or not.
“Most significant,” said Bob Witeck of Echelon, “is the measure of global environmental stewardship. Although LGBT households are not parenting as frequently as our non-gay counterparts, 51% say they are concerned about the planet we are leaving behind for future generations – compared with 42% of heterosexual adults. This signals a very high sense of community and cooperation that many LGBT citizens know first-hand.”
What does it mean to say we understand global warming? It means that we understand that human civilization, our planetary ecosystem, and our companion species are all in great peril, as we reach, or may be now surpassing, carbon-induced climate tipping points and the warming of the earth’s land, sea and sky.
Two moral issues: equality and global warming
Dr. Jim Hansen, a NASA climate expert (and the first scientist to warn Congress about global warming 20 years ago at a hearing held by then-Sen. Al Gore), recently declared in The Huffington Post: "The predominant moral issue of the 21st century, almost surely, will be climate change, comparable to Nazism faced by Churchill in the 20th century and slavery faced by Lincoln in the 19th century. Our fossil fuel addiction, if unabated, threatens our children and grandchildren, and most species on the planet."
Hansen is right about the moral implication of continued dependence on carbon energy to fuel our lives and economy. There is also another moral struggle going on by which this generation will be judged. That is the continuing dehumanization, discrimination, hate and violence directed at LGBT people.
Our own hampered civil and personal lives mirrors a disregard for our home planet, which is in crisis from a century of abuse. The mentality that allows desecration of the ecosystem is the same mindset that continues to allow the second-class citizenship of LGBT people everywhere. Ironically, we who are wronged by today’s social norms are the very folks standing on the moral high ground when it comes to the planet and the future of society.
Rebuilding the LGBT and Green alliance
Harvey Milk was a master strategist in terms of alliance building, and 40 years ago, included the environmental movement in the big tent of the fight for LGBT equality.
"The plaque” covering Milk's ashes reads, in part: “[Harvey Milk's] camera store and campaign headquarters at 575 Castro Street and his apartment upstairs were centers of community activism for a wide range of human rights, environmental, labor and neighborhood issues.”
Alliances are good politics in general, as Milk and others have shown in the pursuit of full LGBT equality. Many Greens have also moved beyond eco-purism to embrace alliances with labor, business and other sectors, so the time is right to join forces on issues that matter to both groups.
The time to act is now, as neither Equality nor Greening our society can wait.
It is also appropriate that Greens, clean energy entrepreneurs and a host of other eco-mavens openly welcome the LGBT community to the clean tech revolution and support our equality as well. We are already present at the solar job forums, adopting energy efficiency, leading Green organizations.
We can be seen reliably voting as a block for Green candidates like Sen. Barbara Boxer, who is a leader of climate legislation in the U.S. Senate and is running for re-election in California.
We also need to create our own Green groups within our community.
Ultimately we will need to be at the ballot box for one another, whether the issue is No on Proposition 16, an anti-energy choice bill on the ballot this fall, or a future vote to overturn the gay marriage ban in California.
After all, a world worth living must be both equal and green.
Kathleen Connell, M.A., is from San Francisco. She is a sustainability consultant in San Diego, with a career background at NASA. She is a founding member and current board member of The Sustainability Alliance of Southern California. She blogs about LGBT Equality and Green issues at www.EqualityGreen.blogspot.com