Environment Forum
Global environmental challenges
Coke’s new look: polar-bear white
Coca-Cola has one of the most recognizable brands on the planet: the red can with the white letters. World Wildlife Fund has an equally eye-catching logo: a black-and-white panda. This week, the two are joining forces to change the Coke can’s look from red to white. It’s meant to raise awareness and money to find a safe haven for polar bears, listed as a threatened species because their icy Arctic habitat is melting under their paws due to climate change.
In a project called Arctic Home, Coke plans to turn 1.4 billion of its soft-drink cans white for the first time in its history, replacing the familiar red with an image of a mother polar bear and two cubs making their way across the Arctic. There will also be white bottle caps on other drinks the company sells. The new look is to show up on store shelves from November 1 through February 2012.
The whole point is to raise money to protect a far-north area where summer sea ice will probably persist the longest, WWF and Coke said in a statement. The Arctic Home plan is to work with local residents to manage as much as 500,000 square miles of territory to provide a home for polar bears.
Coke and polar bears are something of a classic combination, according to the company’s Katie Bayne, who said in a statement that the big white bears were first introduced in the beverage-maker’s advertising in 1922. But the color change is more than tin-deep. Coca-Cola is making an initial $2 million donation to World Wildlife Fund to support polar bear conservation work. Those who buy the white cans can text the package code to 357357 to make individual donations of $1, or donate online at ArcticHome.com. The company plans to match all donations made with a package code by March 15 up to $1 million.
“Polar bears inspire the imagination,” Carter Roberts, CEO and president of WWF, said in a statement. “They’re massive, powerful, beautiful and they live nowhere else except the Arctic. Their lives are intimately bound up with sea ice, which is now melting at an alarming rate. By working with Coca-Cola, we can raise the profile of polar bears and what they’re facing, and most importantly, engage people to work with us, to help protect their home.”
Photo credits: REUTERS/Geoff York/World Wildlife Fund (World Wildlife Fund photograph taken along the western shore of Hudson Bay in November 2010 shows a female polar bear with two cubs near Churchill, Canada, in this image released to Reuters on February 9, 2011.
New Coke cans (World Wildlife Fund/Coca-Cola)
Some good news for a thirsty world
Amid the worry about water and food scarcity, some hints of good news: a five-year, 30-nation analysis suggests there might be enough water – and therefore enough food — for Earth’s hungriest and thirstiest as the human population heads toward the 9 billion mark sometime around mid-century.
Anxiety about food and water supplies stems in part from the effects of climate change, with its projected rise in droughts, wildfires, floods and other events that cut down on food production. Another factor is the increase in population, much of it grouped around water sources in the developing world. But water experts said at a conference this week in Brazil that there could be plenty of water over the coming decades if those upstream collaborate with those downstream and use water more efficiently.
The leader of the study, Simon Cook of the International Center for Tropical Agriculture, said this is actually possible. And he said it wouldn’t require the repeal of the more selfish impulses of human nature.
Citing an article in Harvard Business Review, Cook said, “It’s not necessarily human to be totally individualistic. There’s substantial evidence that people can collaborate.”
In fact, Cook said, this kind of discussion between upstreamers and downstreamers — the ones most likely to be at odds over how water should be used — is already taking place. There is evidence that China’s involved in a project to enable hydropower development along the Mekong River, one of several huge river basins examined in the water study. “They’re actually engaged in dialog with the people who will be affected by it” in Laos, Cook said, with a bit of wonder in his voice. “So there are some glimmers of hope.”
That would be different from what has often happened in developed countries, including the United States, where those who use water for irrigation may have scant discussion with those who use it for rain-fed farming, hydropower, aquaculture or other purposes.
The key is to communicate across borders and across sectors, Cook said. One problem is that those who have power tend to want to hang onto it.
Floods? Droughts? Wildfires? Hurricanes? Yes, there is a climate change connection
For years, climate scientists were circumspect when asked if a specific bit of violent weather — for example, Hurricane Irene, the late-summer storm that slammed the heavily populated U.S. East Coast — could be blamed in some way on climate change.
“Climate is what you expect,” the scientists would say, “while weather is what you get.” They would often go on to say that while increasingly severe weather and correspondingly serious costs and consequences were forecast in climate change computer simulations, there was no way to directly blame a given storm on human-generated heat-trapping gases in Earth’s atmosphere.
There still is no direct line between a certain amount of warming and a certain storm, wildfire, drought or flood. But there is a “new normal,” detailed by scientists on a new website . Staffed and advised by some of the most well-known climate change experts in the United States and elsewhere, the site says plainly that what the computer models foretold in 2007 is clearly documented to be occurring.
“All weather events are now influenced by climate change because all weather now develops in a different environment than before,” the Climate Communication site noted in an article released days after Irene dumped record amounts of rain on the U.S. Mid-Atlantic and Northeast.
“While natural variability continues to play a key role in extreme weather, climate change has shifted the odds and changed the natural limits, making certain types of extreme weather more frequent and more intense. The kinds of extreme weather events that would be expected to occur more often in a warming world are indeed increasing.”
So what has really changed? For one thing, it’s just plain getting hotter, the Climate Communication scientists say, citing U.S. and global statistics.
Sixty years ago, the number of new record high temperatures in the contiguous United States was about the same as the number of new record lows. Now, the number of new record highs each year is twice the number of new record lows, a sign of a warming climate, these scientists said.
@cayotte – this thread has remained i open since 912. It is probably too late for you to even see this question.
But where did you find any reference to 16 mass extinctions in the planetary record? The only one I ever heard about was the mass extinction of the dinosaurs.
I don’t even think the ice ages – and there weren’t 16 of them caused similar scaled mass extinction of anything but the mammoth. T I thought the mammoth may have been hunted to extinction by early man.
I’m not saying you’re full of it, but I would love to know where you found that info.
Enviro-word of the moment: Anthropocene
A word has entered the language — at least, the language of environmental concern — that may be ready for prime-time. That word is Anthropocene. It’s the epoch we’re apparently living in, roughly translated as the Age of Man. The theory behind the name is that human beings have made such an impact on Earth’s geology that we should have an era named for us that differentiates this time from the tired old Holocene period.
Holocene means “entirely new,” but it’s been some 10,000 years since it started. Scientists and others meeting in London figure it may be time to move on.
In a note about their meeting at The Geological Society, they ask: “Has humanity’s impact on the Earth been so significant that it defines a new geological epoch? In the blink of a geological eye, through our need for energy, food, water, minerals, for space in which to live and play, we have wrought changes to Earth’s environment and life that are as significant as any known in the geological record.”
They may have a point. Homo sapiens has been particularly expert at exploiting natural resources, warming up the planet by 1.3°F (0.74ºC) over the past century. But the impact goes beyond the extraction and burning of fossil fuels; increasing human appetites for land, food and water put pressure on every other species on Earth. Some scientists believe Earth is on the brink of a sixth mass extinction (the last one was 65 million years ago) and see human activities as being at least partly to blame.
Nobel Laureate Paul Crutzen gets most of the credit for coining the word. Back in 2000 he reckoned that human impacts on the world, its ecosystems and the geologic record constitute a new “Anthropogenic” geological epoch (he wrote it up for the journal Nature two years later). Andrew Revkin, who runs the New York Times’ Dot Earth environmental blog, gets some points for using the term “Anthrocene” in 1992 to describe the same phenomenon.
Photo credit: REUTERS/Beck Diefenbach (Google Earth demonstration at the Google I/O Developers Conference in San Francisco, California)
REUTERS/Mariana Bazo (Tomas, an endangered Humboldt penguin, on a boat en route to a penguin colony on San Lorenzo Island, Peru, January 26, 2011)
Cows, climate change and the high court
If you took all the cows in the United States and figured out how much greenhouse gas they emit, would you be able to sue all the farmers who own them?
That interesting legal question came from Justice Antonin Scalia during Supreme Court oral arguments about whether an environmental case against five big U.S. power companies can go forward.
At issue is whether six states can sue the country’s biggest coal-fired electric utilities to make them cut down on the climate-warming carbon dioxide they emit. One lower court said they couldn’t, an appeals court said they could and now the high court will consider where the case will go next. A ruling should come by the end of June.
For now, though, the question was cows.
Attorney Barbara Underwood argued that the five power companies were the largest emitters of carbon dioxide in the United States, making up 10 percent of U.S. emissions. No other company comes close, she said.
Scalia then leaped into the fray.
“You’re lumping them all together,” he said of the five big power companies. “Suppose you lump together all the cows in the country. Would that allow you to sue all those farmers? I mean, don’t you have to do it defendant by defendant? … Cow by cow or at least farm by farm?”
The only load is the garbage coming out of Justice Scalia’s mouth. It would be interesting to see our Supreme court Justice’s investment portfolios. Cows and humans are living beings, power plants are not. Burning fossil fuels are not the only way to generate power.
JDoddsGW, you have hit on the truth of the matter. Greenhouse gases absorb and retain light(radiation) from the Sun. The Earth’s atmosphere can only absorb so much light energy(photons)in any given time period. At some point available light energy for photosynthesis diminishes as agriculture and greenhouse gases increase in the biosphere. The result is climate change/ global warming.
An increase in human population means an increase in livestock production and power generation. As most power generation comes from burning fossil fuels it becomes clear that we are producing a double whammy. More livestock generates more methane and CO2. More gas and coal fired electric generators more CO2.
Amazon’s drought, seen from space
How green is the Amazon?
Not as green as it used to be, as shown in an analysis of satellite images made during last year’s record-breaking drought.
Because greenness is an indication of health in the Amazon, a decline in this measurement means this vast area is getting less healthy — bad news for biodiversity and some native peoples in the region.
What does a drop in the greenness index look like? It looks gold, orange and red in a graphic accompanying an article to be published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters:
Gray areas are the norm, based on a decade of satellite observations that cover every acre (actually every square kilometer) on the planet. Dots that are gold, orange or deep red show areas with a decrease in greenness. Scientists call this the Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI on this chart) or the greenness index.
The chart shows what happened during July, August and September of 2010, the height of the dry season — a deep loss of greenness. The researchers found that the 2010 drought reduced the greenness of approximately 965,000 square miles (2.5 million square kilometers) of vegetation in the Amazon, more than four times the area affected by the last severe drought in 2005.
Even when rains came in late October, greenness didn’t bounce back, according to Ranga Myneni, one of the scientists who worked on this research.
All of this destruction in order to provide for modern industrial and economic might. Only humans can keep the forest from drying up by moving away from fossil fuels if it is not already too late. There is no such thing as clean coal, just look at the destruction to Kingston Tennessee from the compromised fly ash slurry containment. Geo-thermal holds the best promise for the future. Still man must also chart a path of population control and conservation.
“The Harry Potter theory of climate”
Climate doesn’t change by magic.
Just ask Mark Serreze, director of the U.S. National Snow and Ice Data Center in Colorado. On a conference call with other scientists and reporters, Serreze and others linked climate change to the last two harsh winters over much of the United States and Europe. And they squarely blamed human-caused greenhouse gas emissions for the rise in world temperatures that got the process going.
“Climate doesn’t change all by itself,” Serreze said. “It’s not like the Harry Potter theory of climate, where he flicks his magic wand and the climate suddenly changes. Climate only changes for a reason.”
He crossed off other possible drivers for climate change one by one.
“Could it be that the Sun is shining more brightly than it was? No, that doesn’t work. We’ve been monitoring energy coming from the Sun and apart from the 11-year sunspot cycle, there’s not much happening.
“Is it that the warming is coming from the oceans — the oceans are releasing heat into the atmosphere? … Well, if that were the case, we’d have to observe that the oceans are cooling … but oceans are not cooling, the oceans are warming like the atmosphere.
“We might be able to argue that it’s something we don’t understand, something like a cosmic ray flux modulated by the Sun … That’s pretty much of a cop-out, OK? Because you’re not really making an explanation, you’re making a supposition.”
“We might be able to argue that it’s something we don’t understand, something like a cosmic ray flux modulated by the Sun … That’s pretty much of a cop-out, OK? Because you’re not really making an explanation, you’re making a supposition.”
But wait.. Isn’t that exactly what they are doing with CO2? Kettle.. Black.. Etc..
How else to explain the Maunder, Dalton minimums & other short term “ice ages” other than lack of sunspots, cosmic ray flux etc – which the persons quoted simply dismiss out of hand.
I would suspect that the 1.4 degree temperature rise is simply noise. Would not instrument error (noise) be greater than 1.4 degrees in 100 years? What surprises me is how *little* change there has been. Possibly the most stable climate ever seen by mankind in recorded history?? Natural variation has depopulated continents before.
The anti-CO2 movement suffers from premature politicalization. Let the science run its course. Let the satellites give us a few more decades of data.
And no, you can’t have your socialism, thats just plain bad manners after all you’ve been given.
Cheers!
A winter’s tale of climate skepticism
Another winter storm is brewing in Middle America. So what else is new?
It’s been one spate of severe weather after another even before 2011 began. And you would expect those skeptical of climate change to capitalize on the cold snap by questioning whether human-spurred global warming is a real deal.
Strangely enough, climate skeptics appear to be less vocal than they were last year, when Republican Sen. James Inhofe of Oklahoma built an igloo as a blizzard blew through Washington DC, and dubbed it “Al Gore’s new home.” If it’s so cold, the argument went, how can there be global warming?
Gore himself offered an answer last week, in a blog post meant to respond to just such a question from Fox News’s Bill O’Reilly.
“In fact, scientists have been warning for at least two decades that global warming could make snowstorms more severe,” Gore wrote. “Snow has two simple ingredients: cold and moisture. Warmer air collects moisture like a sponge until it hits a patch of cold air. When temperatures dip below freezing, a lot of moisture creates a lot of snow.”
All the numbers indicate the planet as a whole is warming, which means climate change is already under way. But climate skeptics remain unpersuaded.
That was evident on Capitol Hill today, where measures that could help combat the causes of climate change — environmental protection, scientific research, weatherization programs — got short shrift in a new Republican spending plan.
I keep reading the statement that global warming has increased atmospheric moisture, and therefore heavy snowfalls are to be expected. It is true that warmer air holds more water vapor, but it can’t snow unless it is below freezing. So heavy snowfalls would be evidence for global warming if they occur in regions where it is usually too cold to snow much. But the heavy snowfalls of the last two winters have largely been in the South, where it usually does not snow at all. The heavy snowfalls have been accompanied by colder than normal weather. This has nothing to do with global warming. The unusual snowfalls have been caused by a persistent negative phase of the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO) which drives cold air south into the southeast US and southwest from Siberia into Western Europe. The negative NAO may be related to abnormally low sunspot activity, but this is still in dispute.
Hu’s visit is over, but China’s ecological footprint lingers
The Chinese flags have disappeared from Washington’s wide avenues after China’s President Hu Jintao’s visit this week, but one statistic is still in the air: the rapidly expanding size of the Chinese ecological footprint, compared to the huge but slowing impact U.S. consumers have on global supplies of food, water, fuel — everything, really.
China and the United States are generally considered to hold the top two spots in the world for emissions of climate-warming greenhouse gases. But how do they compare when consumption of all goods is taken into account?
A report by Global Footprint Network indicates both countries are living beyond their means, ecologically speaking.
The Ecological Footprint measures the land and sea area needed to produce the resources a population consumes and absorb its carbon dioxide emissions. By this measure, it would take just under 3 billion global hectares (about 7.4 billion global acres) to produce what China’s people consume. If everybody on the planet lived as the Chinese do, it would take the resources of 1.2 Earths.
(The numbers are a bit different when focusing just on Hong Kong, where it would take 2.2 Earths to supply the world’s demand if everybody lived as people do in Hong Kong. A new report with this focus is here.)
The total U.S. ecological footprint is 2.5 billion global hectares (about 6.1 billion acres) — substantially less than China, but far higher for each individual U.S. consumer. If the whole world used as much stuff as people in the United States do, it would take five Earths to provide it.
However, the Global Footprint Network notes another difference between these two economic powers: China’s ecological footprint is growing faster than that of the United States. Between 1992 and 2007 (the most recent year for which data is available), China’s total ecological footprint grew 74 percent, more than triple the U.S. growth of 23 percent over the same time span.
Yea, a joke. Certainly not serious science. Or serious journalism.
Greenland ice melt sets a record — and could set the stage for sea level rise
Greenland’s ice sheet melted at a record rate in 2010, and this could be a major contributor to sea level rise in coming decades.
The ice in Greenland melted so much last year that it formed rivers and lakes on top of the vast series of glaciers that covers much of the big Arctic island, with waterfalls flowing through cracks and holes toward the bottom of the ice sheet. Take a look at video from Marco Tedesco of City College of New York, who is leading a project to study what factors affect ice sheet melting. The photo at left shows a camp by the side of a stream flowing from a lake — all of it on top of the ice sheet.
“This past melt season was exceptional, with melting in some areas stretching up to 50 days longer than average,” Tedesco said in a statement. “Melting in 2010 started exceptionally early at the end of April and ended quite late in mid- September.”
Summer 2010 temperatures in Greenland were up to 5.4 degrees F (3 degrees C) above average, and there was reduced snowfall, Tedesco and his co-authors noted in an article in the current edition of Environmental Research Letters. Nuuk, Greenland’s capital, had the warmest spring and summer since records began there in 1873. Average summer temperatures vary widely, but in coastal areas hover around freezing.
This is in tune with studies released in the last week by the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the World Meteorological Organization finding 2010 was tied with 2005 and 1998 for the warmest year since modern global temperature record-keeping began in 1880.
With less snow cover, more bare ice was exposed to the sun, and because bare ice is darker than snow, it absorbs more solar radiation. So the more ice is uncovered, the more warming sunlight it absorbs and the more vulnerable it is to melting. Tedesco said other factors being examined include the impacts of lakes on the glacial surface, dust and soot deposited over the ice sheet.
The study was sponsored by World Wildlife Fund, NASA and the National Science Foundation.
Wither is global warning or climate change does it matter? The facts are something is happen around the world. Can we just focus on the matter right now! If we are going to blame anyone is far too late, the damage is done. The axis shifted twice, pole shifted to Russia’s, the Gulf Stream has change, Arctic Ocean Currents Changed Increasing Climate Change, increasing earthquakes around the world, increasing volcano around the world, Death tolls increasing in Europe of unexpected winter record breaking events that haven’t happen over 15 to 20 years, oil is on the raises and War is on the way, Virus and diseases is making headlines around the world, our sun is increasing with CME and others impulses, asteroids and comet is also making headlines, violence is happen around the world and we still going back and forward on who to blame or who is correct and who is not? REALLY!! And this is the best social networks can offer! Sure is all your opinion and thought but come on now? When we hear the government rambling day and night and the media are we any better? STOP the blame and let’s all work together and make our own government, our own science, Ect. I have giving you the facts, now let’s work together and find the real answer. The world we living are never straight up with any answer but half. We all know in case of the worst we or the government cannot stop all events or save 7 billons of people, but we can have a fighting chance to live, to survives and save our loving ones. We still have 30 to 40 millions of years before there is NO more earth, before that time happens we all are going on a roller coaster ride. The earth is going on changes like no human ever seen before. You tell me or name me one human who has lived either 25,000 years or 100,000 years. The point is change is about to happen and we just have to deal with the new changes when it happen. But at less we can give ourselves a time lap a head start to be prepared was coming. Use the internet for good use and better cause. It’s a helpful tool. In time what we have and what we see might not be there tomorrow, two days, two weeks, two months or a year from now. Let’s gather our information and let’s show the people and the government that we know! Remember no matter who is the president he or she still has to follow the protocol and must NOT alarm the people. But we still have access to the internet. So they’re not all bad! They do want us to know on their term. Is not right but who say we all must follow the rules anyway. Let’s gather what we know once again and let’s make a difference. If you have one or less you will not survive but if you have tens and more then the chances of living went up. Enough with the drama time is wasting.
Fools, their money and FREEDOM will soon be parted.
There is no reason to put the polar bear on any list but Dangerous – When you get too close. A study, ongoing since 1964, shows that there has been at least a 20% increase in the polar bear population in Alaska to date. Polar bears don’t need any help. Coke and the WWF are a scam to relieve people of there money, just like Global Warming is. Oh…BTW, polar bears can swim over 100 miles at a time. Look up the facts people!
How in the heck is a carbon credit going to solve the so called “Global Warming Problem?” IT’S NOT! The CO2 will still be here and people like Al Gore are going to become filthy rich from it, while you and me become dirt poor. Isn’t that wonderful?
How did the “Ice Age” end, over 10,000 years ago? The Ice melted!
Blame God. It certainly didn’t melt from SUV’s, Industry, People, Bar-B-Q’s, Farming, Excess CO2(plant food), etc.
Wake Up! The EPA is nothing more that a “USA put to a slow death” organization. AMEN.