Tim O’Reilly has a recent post about energy issues making it onto what he calls the “alpha geek radar”. I think another way of saying this might be that more and more people are having conversations like ours. He says, “It’s really interesting the way ideas spread and catch on, and suddenly get on everyone’s radar at the same time. It makes me think of Danny Hillis’ definition of global intelligence: ‘It’s that which decided that decaf coffeepots should be orange.’”

Friends,

I would like to suggest we ask if a policy of replacing liquid fossil fuels for transportation with ANY form of ethanol makes any sense at all? Does this strategy yield the greatest degree of energy independence?

Consider, even cellulosic ethanol at 5:1 net energy will be burned in an I.C.E. with only 30% efficiency. As a result, the true net energy of the ethanol I.C.E. system is a mere 1.5:1

Given that buildings are the source of 48% of climate changing gases, perhaps we should look at a displacement strategy. That is, if we use solid biofuels for space conditioning we can re-allocate the displaced fossil fuels to transportation.

Our grass-based pellet fuels have a net energy of 14:1 and are combusted in systems with at least an 83% efficiency [USDA FS & PFI data]. As a result, the true net energy of grass fueled space conditioning is on the order of 11.6:1. This is a 673% increase in net energy of the system compared to ethanol.

This is a photo I took in April of 2004 in Resolute Bay. I was there with the film crew for our NOVA show, and they wanted the iceberg as a backdrop for their interview with Roy “Fritz” Koerner. They’d had Koerner bring an ice core from the Greenland glacier from which he had just returned, and his protest that standing in front of bay-ice with a core from a glacier might be misleading was ignored. He certainly looked the part of an arctic personality, with a narrow, grizzled face that could have stood beside an old photograph of Amundsen. He remained remarkably cordial throughout his interview, despite the cold and the fact that the producer kept having him re-do his lines to hit the specific points she was looking for.

Hi, in thinking about the conversations of the last month I’ve been struck by the many interesting ways of connecting and seeing science and art together. In windows around the world one thing I’m always struck with is light and in one of Jane’s last posting she had a number of photos of light on winter days. light is a powerful part of the arctic as at certain times of the year the sun is not up and othertimes it’s always up. light is also a powerful aspect of art.

A local network of home gardens = A community of food producers!
Victory Gardens 2007+ calls for a more active role for cities in shaping agricultural and food policy. It is a concept we are trying to get adopted by the city of San Francisco that would provide a subsidized home gardening program for individuals and neighborhoods.

This program offers tools, training & materials for urban dwellers to participate in a city-wide transformation of underutilized backyards into productive growing spaces.

The project draws from the historical model of the 1940’s American Victory garden program to provide a basis for developing urban agriculture as a viable form of sustainable food practice in the city.

See the Video

Sitting down with a scotch tonight, I wanted to answer the question of why I called this site Climate Commons. I think the first word is obvious, but what is this notion of the commons? I went through my writing on it, and then starting surfing around the various sites I have found that use it as their central tenet. Daunted, I decided to collect phrases that seem to point at its varied form:

a public sphere in which community values are expressed

a collaborative working space

distributed problem solving

a public library

an invisible college

a space for community owned assets

a piece of land over which other people—often neighbouring landowners—could exercise one of a number of traditional rights, such as allowing their cattle to graze upon it

any sets of resources that a community recognizes as being accessible to any member of that community

Images by Jock Gill, Peacham, Vermont

Solid biomass energy in general offers attractive [net energy] ratios.
grass energy in particular, with a net energy of 14:1 in the pellet
state, yields, after combustion in an industrial system with 83%
efficiency [USDA & PFI data] a systems net energy of 11.6:1. No
liquid biofuel can come close to this systems net energy factor. Thus
we anticipate a significant future role for herbaceous energy crops in
our nation’s drive to energy independence and energy security.
Evidence of this can be found in the new farm bill with its attention
to incentives for growing grass as a dedicated energy crop.

Clearly, it is far better to BURN grass than turn it into ethanol.
7.7X better. All of the heating oil displaced by grass can then be
used to reduce oil imports required by transportation! This is a
faster, better, cheaper solution with a whole lot less entropy than
the ethanol route. N.H.’s own [Charlie Bass] new this years ago.

I am in search of any information pertaining to the Order 81. Iraqi Order 81 prohibits Iraqi farmers from using the methods of agriculture that they have used for centuries. The common worldwide practice of saving heirloom seeds from one year to the next is now illegal in Iraq.
PRESS ACTION

“The American Administrator of the Iraqi CPA (Coalition Provisional Authority) government, Paul Bremer, updated Iraq’s intellectual property law to ‘meet current internationally-recognized standards of protection’.
The updated law makes saving seeds for next year’s harvest, practiced by 97% of Iraqi farmers in 2002, and is the standard farming practice for thousands of years across human civilizations, to be now illegal.. Instead, farmers will have to obtain a yearly license for genetically modified (GM) seeds from American corporations. These GM seeds have typically been modified from seeds developed over thousands of generations by indigenous farmers like the Iraqis, and shared freely like agricultural ‘open source.’”
GRAIN

Not promoting, just found this interesting.

a quote from Barry Lopez, author of one of my favorite books about the Arctic, arctic Dreams:

It is my belief that a human imagination is shaped by the architecture it encounters at an early age. The visual landscape, of course, or the depth, elevation, and hues of a cityscape play a part here, as does the way sunlight everywhere etches lines to accentuate forms. But the way we imagine is also affected by streams of scent flowing faint or sharp in the larger ocean of air; by what the North American composer John Luther Adams calls the sonic landscape; and, say, by an awareness of how temperature and humidity rise and fall in a place over a year.Over time I have come to think of these three qualities–paying intimate attention; a storied relationship to a place rather than a solely sensory awareness of it; and living in some sort of ethical unity with a place–as a fundamental human defense against loneliness. If you’re intimate with a place, a place with whose history you’re familiar, and you establish an ethical conversation with it, the implication that follows is this: the place knows you’re there. It feels you. You will not be forgotten, cut off, abandoned.

In the wake of the most significant scientific report to date on the potentially dire consequences of global warming, a ray of hope has emerged. Ironically, it emanates from the convergence of forces that have often been at odds. One force, the world of science, has long been on the forefront of the issue of climate change. Another equally powerful force, religion, has often remained on the sidelines — until recently.
The Intergovernmental Panel on climate change (IPCC), a body of more than 2,000 of the world’s top scientists from more than 100 nations, stated in a Feb. 2 report that global warming is “unequivocal,” that it is rapidly changing the nature of our planet and its ecosystems, and that it is “very likely” being caused by human activities such as the burning of fossil fuels.
In the course of the last decade, a significant movement within the faith community has been mobilizing around the call to care for God’s creation, the web of life that sustains us all. This calling is the essence of religious life, and people of faith are beginning to hear it, even as scientists sound the alarm that we may be nearing a climactic tipping point.

Speaking of kids and the IPY, I’m involved with several projects for the International Polar Year. These are primarily field projects, doing useful arctic things like installing new long-term weather stations, measuring glacier volume change, extracting lake sediment cores to understand prior climate, etc. In the past, my wife has always been my chief field assistant. Now that we have a son, we all go out together. However, the National science Foundation is not very happy about our working together and makes our lives quite difficult in the regard. I know most of the decision makers there personally and they all know we are quite competent in the field and have no personal issue with us doing this, however, as professional bureaucrats they feel they have an obligation to say No to anything that might give the public cause to give them grief. My position on this is two-fold — 1) as the National science Foundation, their decisions should be based on objective facts rather than speculation and 2) that I shouldnt have to make a choice between a life of science and a family life (considering this work takes months of field work). So I’m wondering what others think? Is the marginal extra expense of bring a child along in the field a waste of taxpayer money? Is it morally wrong? Does the public really have an issue with this? Considering that 50,000 people in the US die each year in auto accidents, half of which have no fault assigned to any of the drivers involved, and that this is just one of many crazy risks the public considers normal, personally I think we’re much safer and saner to spend as much time as we can in the Arctic. Ideas?
-Matt

International Polar year 07/08 begins on March 1 and there are amazing outreach efforts particularly in education. There are some interesting launch events and education initiatives you can check out on their website.

For those of you with kids, maybe some of these activities can fit into your school, church, etc…
To become part of this exciting international scientific effort:
1. Do some ice investigations like the ones suggested below.
2. Launch a virtual balloon representing your school on the map.
3. Check back frequently to see balloons go up around the world.
4. Continue to take part in IPY by learning about polar science in your classroom. More resources will be added to the educators’ page throughout IPY.

We’re having a series of power outages at my house this evening, so I’m posting from my cell phone. This of course leads me to all sorts of thoughts about the large roll of electronics in my life, etc. For all of the environmental concerns that cell phones bring with them, every instance in which I’ve used one to call 911 has made them completely worthwhile in my mind. The worth of making this post with one might be more debatable…