Stuart Gaffin is a climate researcher at Columbia University and a regular contributor with his blog “Exhausted Earth”. ThomsonReuters is not responsible for the content - the views are the author’s alone.

A retrospective exhibit about the life and inventions of R. Buckminster Fuller (a.k.a. Bucky) is about to open at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City . Fuller was truly one-of-a-kind-an iconoclastic architect, inventor, engineer, and philosopher.

I still have vivid memories of a public talk he gave at Columbia University in the late 1970’s. He died in 1983. He is best known as the leading proponent, if not inventor, of the geodesic dome, the sturdy spherical structure, composed of triangular elements, that closely approximates a sphere.  

It’s hard to imagine Bucky not being engaged by the modern problems of global warming. It would have attracted him on all fronts: the energy challenges, the technological challenges and the ‘geo-engineering’ challenges.

Geo-engineering is the term used to describe large-scale human interventions that could possibly offset climate change such as deliberate releases of particles into the stratosphere to block sunlight, or the capture and sequestration of carbon dioxide directly from the atmosphere and power plants.

Certainly, Bucky thought on such scales. For example, he envisioned covering mid-town Manhattan with a  large geodesic dome as a way to create a controlled climate!

How this would work is puzzling to me. For example, if the dome was clear to sunlight, the greenhouse effect inside in summer would be astounding and I can’t imagine it would require less electricity to cool it off than it does now-it would likely need vastly more electricity.

Still, as an urban climate scientist, I don’t like to dismiss such conceptual ideas completely out of hand because if a geo-engineered way were found to cool cities down this would be of enormous socio-economic value. Cities are where the world’s population will increasingly live and we are going to have to find ways to make them more habitable as summer heat waves become more brutal and common.

Right now the main ‘technologies’ we have to do so are tree planting, light-colored surfaces and green roofs. However, if large-scale initiatives were found that could artificially shade large sections of cities or increase wind ventilation during heat-waves, that would be much more effective, saving vast amounts of energy and lives. I’ve heard anecdotally of Japanese researchers orienting new buildings to channel winds in certain directions and even of trying to bring cold bottom water up from Tokyo Bay.  

Any Fuller-esque ideas out there?

 Stuart Gaffin is a climate researcher at Columbia University and a regular contributor with his blog “Exhausted Earth”. ThomsonReuters is not responsible for the content - the views are the author’s alone.

Colleagues of mine at Columbia have just published a large study of physical and biological changes recorded around the world since 1970 , during which the globe has been warming.

The massive database they compiled describes an extraordinary and fascinating range of phenomena that would likely be sensitive to climate changes like spring flowering of plants, migration times and ranges for birds, fish and insects, spring river flows from winter snow melt, lake freezing and melting times, pollen release, egg-laying, and even the time that bullfrogs start calling in Spring. (It’s hard to find bullfrogs in a lake but it sure is easy to hear them so I trust that data!)   

The database also included long-term changes in things like mountain glaciers, lake algae levels, permafrost and alpine tree ranges. In all, close to 30,000 records were studied. They found that around 90% of the records showed a change that is consistent with a warmer climate.  So, for example, leaves and flowers are budding earlier, ground hogs in the Rockies end hibernation earlier, mountain glaciers are retreating, there are earlier high water river flows and so on. 

We know the planet has been warming but this study shows how sensitive living and physical systems are to temperature changes already. Now try to imagine what it will be like if we get three times the warming of the last century, as is roughly predicted.

Stuart Gaffin is a climate researcher at Columbia University  and is a regular contributor with his blog “Exhausted Earth”. ThomsonReuters is not responsible for the content - the views are the author’s alone.

On April 16 President Bush gave a speech laying out a new United States climate policy goal - stabilizing US emissions by the year 2025.

During the course of this speech the President reported as progress a previous goal he had announced in 2002: that the “carbon intensity” of the US economy under his administration has been declining at the rate of about 18% per decade — the rate he targeted in 2002. Carbon intensity is the amount of carbon emitted by US fossil fuel combustion per dollar of US economic output.

There has been both just and unjust criticism about using this benchmark for progress on US climate. Just criticism is the fact that the US economy has long been ‘decarbonizing,’ including under the Clinton Administration, at a little less than 18% per decade, without any climate change policies.

The forces driving this include continual improvements in energy efficiency, structural changes in the economy like the growing information technology sector and environmental concerns unrelated to climate, like air pollution control. Therefore the US administration did not make clear to the public the actual meekness of the 2002 goal.

The US administration should not be faulted however for focusing on carbon intensity as a key metric for progress, in addition to total emissions. Carbon intensity must indeed drop if we are ever going to control emissions. It just has to do so fast enough to offset economic growth.

So, for example, the new goal of stabilizing US emissions in 2025 simply means carbon intensity has to decline at the same rate as US economic growth then: if the economy is growing at say 3%, then carbon intensity must decline at 3%. Eventually, to bring actual US emissions down, the intensity will have to decline at a faster rate than the economy is growing.

There is nothing wrong with framing climate policy this way (although many do not feel that US emission stabilization in 2025 is enough.)

Indeed, we ought to be speaking much more about carbon intensity so that it attains the same familiarity in the public mind as economic growth rates and population growth rates. It is going to be one of the most important economic and environmental numbers of the 21st century.

The symbolic color associated with environmentalism is obviously “green.” 

From ‘green movement,’ ‘Green Party,’ ‘green collar jobs,’ to ‘Greenpeace,’ the color reference is to plants, chlorophyll, the green pigment central to photosynthesis, which is the basis of all life. Quite often, however, the chief environmental goal being advocated has little to do with plants, but rather promoting low-impact technologies, practices and lifestyles.

This is the case with “green building design” which is receiving growing attention because of the under-appreciated magnitude of building emissions worldwide. Recently, New York City audited the source of all its CO2 emissions and found that nearly 80 percent is from building energy consumption. Worldwide the estimate is closer to 45 percent, making “buildings the biggest single contributor to anthropogenic climate change - a worse offender than all the world’s cars and trucks put together.”

The vast bulk of green building design focuses on efficient heating, cooling, lighting,  insulation and window technologies. All of these are great things of course, but what’s not mentioned in the Nature article is a truly ‘green’ building technology - living green roofs and living walls. These are technologies that introduce plants into building facades, especially rooftops.

Typical dark rooftop temperatures in summer sunlight can reach extraordinary levels of 150 degrees F (~65 degrees C) or more. It makes little sense not to address such an extreme building heat source in green building design. Moreover, in cities, rooftops, among other dark, impervious surfaces like streets and parking areas are a chief contributor to the “urban heat island” effect which elevates the temperature and climate in cities well above surrounding suburban and rural areas. This extra heat can be deadly during heatwaves, especially if air-conditioning is not available or fails during blackouts. Resident proximity to high-floors and rooftops was a risk factor in both the deadly 1995 Chicago and 2003 European heat waves.

Green roofs harness the unrivaled power of plants to remain cool when exposed to sunlight during the summer, as I showed in my last post. There is an ever-increasing palette of plant choices available, but the most common and reliable are “sedums.”  They are members of the succulent family of plants and are very tough in surviving all sorts of weather conditions, including extreme heat and droughts.  The plants grow in a porous medium that is usually a few inches deep, depending on the building structural support.

Green roofs give back to the urban environment in multiple ways however. Along with urban heat source reduction they are great at reducing storm-water runoff from buildings as well. This runoff leads to a ubiquitous problem in cities known as “combined sewer overflow” where combined sanitary and runoff water is released to nearby waterways because of limited water treatment capacity. Green roofs can also create new ecological habitats that are generally limited in urban areas. It’s estimated that New York City may have 10 or more times the area of Central Park available for green roof adoption. 

Green living walls, including ivies and vines, are a more challenging technology and will take longer to develop into a common building practice. But already fascinating potential properties of living walls are being noted, such as how in summer they can provide shade to cool buildings down, while in the winter they will allow light to penetrate and warm the building.

If these green building facade technologies catch on, along with traditional street trees, plants will partially re-conquer the urban spaces they originally occupied, and make cities much more liveable for us in the process.
 

Stuart Gaffin is a climate researcher at Columbia University  and is a regular contributor with his blog “Exhausted Earth”. Reuters is not responsible for the content — the views are the author’s alone.

An interesting environmental debate is taking place with regard to the growing proliferation of synthetic turf sports fields in outdoor settings.

These fields are modern versions of the original “AstroTurf” installed inside the Houston Astrodome in the late 1960s, after it was found living turf grass would not survive there. Synthetic fields are becoming increasingly popular as outdoor recreational fields, usually replacing grass fields.

In cities they are also becoming popular as playground surfaces, instead of the old “asphalt jungle” pavements. Concerned individuals from many different quarters, including environmental scientists and park advocates, health researchers, parents and community groups, are raising many questions about the potential environmental and health consequences of unmitigated synthetic turf usage.

A good summary article can be found in the March 2008 issue of Environmental Health Perspectives .  Among the main health concerns is the fact that a large component of the synthetic field is made of crumb rubber pellets derived from recycled vehicle tires. 

 Tires contain a number of known chemical toxins that prevent them from being placed even in landfills. Ground-up tire pellets are therefore even more worrisome as they tend to erode even faster and leach into groundwater. Parents are naturally concerned when they see their children in direct contact with the crumb on the fields, possibly ingesting it and bringing it home on their clothing and shoes.

To make matters worse, I and other scientists have recently been reporting how hot these playing surfaces are on summer days. A graph of synthetic turf temperatures I measured last summer, compared to a nearby grass field, is shown at the end of this blog. I often find that synthetic turf fields run 60° F hotter than grass fields on sunny afternoons, easily reaching temperatures of 140° F or more. This is close to the temperatures I have recorded on black ‘tar beach’ rooftops. So, when children play on synthetic turf fields in the summer heat, it may be like sending them to play on a rooftop surface.

Which brings me to the interesting science question: Since synthetic turf fields look like grass fields and have a similar dark-green color, how do grass fields and plants in general manage to avoid reaching such high temperatures and dying as a result?

 The answer is evaporation of soil moisture through their leaves. Plants are nature’s “geniuses” when it comes to evaporating water to stay cool in the sunlight. They need sunlight for photosynthesis of course so they perfected mechanisms of evaporation to avoid burning up. So what can plants do for those burning hot tar beach roofs? The answer is “a lot” in the form of “green roofs”, which I’ll post about next time.

Graph showing surface temperatures over time: Ambient air temperature 78 F on July 3, 2007, at 1:00 p.m. The blue line, starting at just above 140 F, is the temperature for artificial turf and the lower green line, starting at 90F, is grass. Temperatures in Fahrenheit (vertical scale), time (30 minutes) (horizontal)

Stuart Gaffin is a climate researcher at Columbia University and will be a regular contributor with his blog “Exhausted Earth”. Reuters is not responsible for the content — the views expressed are the author’s alone.

The root cause of all environmental problems-from beer cans floating on a lake to global warming-can be explained using the following two contrasting scenes:

Scene 1: We are sitting in an automobile inside a small, closed garage.

You are in the passenger seat and I am at the wheel. We are waiting for a third passenger from inside the building. Suddenly I reach for the ignition and turn the engine on. Alarmed by the thought of being poisoned by the exhaust, your eyes widen in amazement as you say, “What are you doing?” When you reach to turn the ignition off, I block your hands and soon a life-and-death struggle begins for control of the vehicle. You are screaming: “Are you crazy! You’re going to kill us both!”  If we manage to survive the episode you will seek to have me put under psychiatric care. Heck, I might even end up in prison for attempted manslaughter. My days as an ordinary law-abiding citizen are over.

Scene 2: Exact same situation except that now the car is sitting a mere ten feet back on the driveway outside the garage.

I reach for the ignition and turn the car on. You might look over but you say nothing. The engine could idle 15 minutes or more, but we sit calmly in silence. Our passenger arrives and we drive off. I remain a perfectly well-respected citizen. Indeed if you happened to question me the next day about the engine idling, you’re the one who would probably feel strange.

Economists explain the remarkable difference between scene 1 and 2 as “the tragedy of the commons.” When we pollute a seemingly vast reservoir like the atmosphere (a “common space”) the rapid dilution of our pollution makes us oblivious to what we are doing. Since everyone acts the same self-interested way (the “tragedy”), the pollution accumulates, including carbon dioxide (a greenhouse gas) . If instead, we were forced to inhale all of our own emissions, we would stop this behavior immediately. Since this is never the case, the economic solution is a pollution tax.

Throwing a beer can on a lake is the same thing-the can soon floats away so you don’t have to look at it. But if everyone were to toss empty cans into the same lake, it would soon be blanketed in tin. Who would be responsible for cleaning up the lake? Would it be fair to ask all residents to foot the bill, or just the individual polluters? The same question exists with global warming and greenhouse gas emissions: If rich countries alone were forced to absorb all the impacts of their emissions, we’d have seen a lot more action by now. Instead, less developed countries have the dubious privilege of sharing the impacts.

What makes the oblivion brought on by the commons so extreme that, like with an engine idling, the polluting behavior becomes the “norm” and questioning it feels almost “abnormal”? 

For example, how would you feel asking a stranger to turn off his idling car? How would you react if you had to pay for how much pollution your car emitted while you were idling?

Stuart Gaffin is a climate researcher at Columbia University who will be a regular guest blogger under the title “Exhausted Earth”. Reuters is not responsible for the content– the views expressed are theauthor’s alone.This is hisfirstblog:

As the Northern Hemisphere begins to exit the 2008 winter season, I have found myself once again witnessing a well-known social phenomenon relating to weatherthat I find discouraging as I work on the issue of global warming.

It is the apparent social etiquette that assumes out loud that nobody wants very cold weather and would wish it away if they could. In my hometown of New York City, I encounter it on almost any given day — riding in the elevator of my building with my neighbors, on television fromthe weather reporter, in wintertime travel ads to southern destinations.

Some car advertisements play into this sentiment by portraying how their rugged vehicles effortlessly shield us from even the toughest winter weather, and so on.

As a climate and atmospheric scientist, what bothers me about the ‘hate the cold club’ is that it underscores how little appreciated are the essential, healthful and even life-supporting services of cold weather.

Think of how clean our air is in winter — we don’t get bad ozone and smog days then. Think of how our drinking water reservoirs are cleansed as organic production stops in the winter. Think of how warm weather pests and disease vectors like mosquitoes and ticks are held in check. Think of how indigenous fauna and flora that bond us to our home regions depend on the cycles of winter, as well as the summer.

Most of all, think about how cold temperatures are literally locking up water molecules within the great ice sheets like Greenland and preventing them from running into the seas and inundating forever the world’s coastlines.

So a couple of years ago I launched a personal mini-campaign to start vocalizing my support for coldweather, whenever I heard the standard refrain. If someone in an elevator said “It’s horrible outside”, I would counter with something like “I find it invigorating…” or “I love the winter!” or “I much prefer this to heatwaves in the summer…”

Today I ruefully report that my campaign has only discouraged me further as the reactions have always been negative: strange looks, smirks, shrugs or close-to-angry replies like “Not me!”

Recently a store owner looked at me in some disbelief and asked: “Where were you born?” as if the only plausible explanation could be that I am from Northern Canada or something. When I replied: “Around here, I’m a climate scientist…” she just looked confused. I’ve almost decided to stop my campaign.

Is this a more American phenomenon? Is it playing a role in the sluggish response to global warming? Wouldn’t it be better if we didn’t implicitly drive this simplistic view of climate into the heads of our children?

After all, people don’t like rainy days either but if you say to them “But we need the rain”, they will always agree.