Alarmism

The London Financial Times notes a series of recent studies that suggest reason for concern on the effect of global warming on plant growth and on agriculture. I'll probably write more about that another time.

A report commissioned by the European insulation manufacturers association Eurima suggests that better building insulation could greatly reduce energy demand and carbon dioxide emissions in eastern Europe (via PeakOil). This would be a wise step considering the disruption that an active hurricane season is dealing oil production in the Gulf of Mexico. Austin City Limits is also in danger. Finally, one can always worry about the H5N1 strain avian flu, which is spreading, at least in birds, over most of Asia.

Climate drama

Science fiction writer Kim Stanley Robinson, who wrote a well-regarded trilogy on human colonization of Mars in the 90s, is coming out with the second book, Fifty Degrees Below in a new trilogy set in a warming earth of the near future. I'll plan on reading it. Apparently in this volume he has Europe and northeastern America freeze because the Gulf Stream shuts down, but I'm convinced by the arguments of the oceanographer Carl Wunsch that the strength of the Gulf Stream is unlikely to change much, since that it's mostly due to the Earth's rotation. In the simulations I've seen, any cooling due to ocean circulation changes would only offset greenhouse warming over most of the North Atlantic. RealClimate had a discussion that presents different perspectives on this.

Grist has an interview with the Weather Channel's resident climate change reporter, a PhD climatologist: "In general, it's still somewhat of a luxury to talk about global warming -- it often gets bumped to the back page. Keep in mind that in a regular newsroom, the question is always, What do you need to know immediately? Usually that doesn't include background on the big-picture state of the atmosphere.". She's learning to put in more pop-culture references to get through to viewers better.

Information that wants to be free

E Magazine covers the environmental challanges faced by big cities in the Third World, using Mexico City and Lagos as examples: "It’s worth looking at some of these emerging mega-cities in detail, because daily life there is likely to be the pattern for a majority of the world’s population."

WorldChanging notes the debut of an online database of biomimickry projects, meant to eventually serve as a sort of encyclopedia of design ideas adopted from life forms.

When planning the tool, we went through the process of trying to design something biomimetic, and discovered it wasn't just a bucket of ideas we needed--we needed a way of finding the right people, something that was a "matchmaking" tool as well as a knowledge source. We wanted to make something with the best aspects of Wikipedia, a relational database, and ThinkCycle. We may or may not have succeeded, but we've at least created a new kind of tool.

This should be fun to contribute to...

On an older-fashioned note, Megan Prelinger writes in Bad Subjects about starting her own public library in San Francisco. It's a charming story, and the subjects include "landscape, land use history, the built environment, natural history, ornithology, media, philosophy, history, political science, radical studies, and American cultural history".

Fuel

UNplanner is concerned that a resurgence in wood heating due to heating oil shortages will result in harmful deforestation. A lot of houses in LA have fireplaces even though we don't have any forests to speak of nearby, but most of them burn gas logs anyway.

Hilarious as always, Dave Barry sounds off on gasoline prices in an old column reprinted by the Miami Herald.

Sparklets

AP has also picked up on solar companies' stocks. Meanwhile, truckers in Spain are planning to strike next week to protest gas prices, and motorists in Britain are becoming concerned about a similar strike.

Energy Sunday

The NY Times has learned about the recent run-up in share prices of small companies that specialize in solar energy devices. These companies' prices are volatile and I would guess already too expensive, but finally attracting the attention of mainstream investors should be beneficial for the sector.

Also, with gas prices rising after the havoc on the Gulf coast, there is renewed interest in ethanol-gasoline blands, though this can only be cheaper than gasoline because of government subsidies. More exotically, scientists are looking at genetically engineering algae to release burnable molecular hydrogen when they split water molecules during photosynthesis (via PeakOil).

Intelligent design

The LA Times has a reasonable editorial on some of the measures that need to be taken to live with hurricanes in the Mississippi delta.

Grist looks at how to encourage organic farming and at the factors that control the price of organic food.

Transgression

Last week we lost the country's 31st most populous city (in the 2000 census) and leading port. Rebuilding will be very expensive and also ill-advised, since the Mississipi delta keeps eroding and equally violent storms are likely to strike every few years. The destruction of busy port cities has been a literary theme for thousands of years - think Tyre, Troy, Atlantis - and perhaps this one will also be remembered for generations, its watery ruins sought by adventurers.

As New Orleans flooded, I was reading a birthday present, Thomas Friedman's The World Is Flat, which for many pages touts the wonders of globalized business. It's a worthwhile book despite the unfortunate metaphor in the title (compounded by the introduction's ridiculous assertion that Columbus showed scientifically that the world was round), and Friedman does include reservations about the environmental degradation caused by industrialization and reiterate his laudable call for a crash program (similar to the Apollo initiative) to end our dependence on fossil fuels. But the flooding in the Gulf coast, in India, and in central Europe, and the varying levels of chaos that followed make it starkly clear that sustained global trade can't take place at all without reality-based societies that can take care of themselves to be the trade partners. Corporate boosterism and high-tech consulting turn helpless before even entirely predictable bad weather. Prudence can't be outsourced.