Since stories have started surfacing more recently, many have wondered, if the rumors are true. Are there really ‘continents’, or massive floating garbage patches residing in the pacific ocean? Apparently, the rumors are true, and these unsightly patches are reportedly killing marine life and releasing poisons that enter the human food chain, as well. However, before you start imagining a plastic version of Maui, keep in mind that these plastic patches certainly aren’tsolid surfaced islands that you could build a house on! Ocean currents have collected massive amounts of garbage into a sort of plastic “soup” where countless bits of discarded plastic float intertwined just beneath the surface. Indeed, the human race has really made its mark. One enormous plastic patch is estimated to weigh over 3 million tons altogether and cover an area roughly twice the size of Texas.

Daily Galaxy: Are There Really ‘Continents’ of Floating Garbage?

(via Atom Jack)

Just days after Cisco signaled it will horn into IBM’s turf by rewiring an aging city in Massachusetts, Hewlett Packard announced this morning the first commercial application of its own holistic blueprint–the torturously acronymed “CeNSE” (short for Central Nervous System for the Earth). Much like IBM’s “Smarter Planet” campaign, HP proposes sticking billions of sensors on everything in sight and boiling down the resulting flood of data into insights for making the world a better, greener place. But what sets HP apart from its rivals is its determination to create a smarter planet almost entirely within house, from sensors of its own design and manufacture to servers to software to the consultants who will tie it all together. And its first customer could not be less green: Shell Oil.

Fast Company: HP Invents a “Central Nervous System for Earth” and Joins the Smarter Planet Sweepstakes

(via Grinding)

A saffron-coloured crystal could provide a step towards greener electronics.

Some types of low-power computer memory store information using metals that are ferroelectric, meaning they form positive and negative poles when placed in an electric field. However, many of the more common metals used are either rare or toxic.

Now Sachio Horiuchi at the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology in Ibaraki, Japan, and colleagues have discovered ferroelectric behaviour in crystalline croconic acid, which contains just carbon, oxygen and hydrogen.

New Scientist: Organic crystals promise low-power green computing

(via Atom Jack)

Globally, roughly 13 million hectares of forest fall to the blade or fire each year. Such deforestation has long been driven by farmers eking out a slash-and-burn living or loggers using new roads to cut inroads into pristine forest. But now new data appears to show that, at least for the first five years of the 21st century, big block clearings that reflect industrial deforestation have come to dominate, rather than smaller-scale efforts that leave behind long, narrow swaths of cleared land.

Scientific American: City Dwellers Drive Deforestation in 21st Century

(via Chris Arkenberg)

It’s a tiny organ that, the superstition goes, holds the secrets of the future. When smoked and inhaled, the brain of a vulture is said to confer the gift of premonition. To put it bluntly, most users hope to sneak a look at next week’s national lottery numbers.

Such is the demand for vulture brains to use in muti – traditional medicine – that wildlife experts fear the birds could be driven to extinction within two or three decades. They also warn that hunting could intensify as gamblers seek an advantage when betting on the football World Cup in South Africa.

Vultures’ acute vision, and ability to find prey, has kindled a belief that they possess clairvoyant powers. Their brains are dried and rolled into a cigarette or inhaled as vapours in the hope they will bring a vision of the future – including lottery numbers and sports results.

Guardian: Vultures face extinction as gamblers seek visions of the future

(Thanks Paul)

*The messages, which span 13 years, show a few scientists in a bad light, being rude or dismissive. An investigation is underway, but there’s still plenty of evidence that the earth is getting warmer and that humans are largely responsible.

*Some critics say the e-mails negate the conclusions of a 2007 report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, but the IPCC report relied on data from a large number of sources, of which CRU was only one.

*E-mails being cited as “smoking guns” have been misrepresented. For instance, one e-mail that refers to “hiding the decline” isn’t talking about a decline in actual temperatures as measured at weather stations. These have continued to rise, and 2009 may turn out to be the fifth warmest year ever recorded. The “decline” actually refers to a problem with recent data from tree rings.

factcheck.org: Climategate

When geologists like James Hutton and Charles Lyall first began to read the past of our planet in fossils and in the strata of rock 200 years ago, they noticed something ominous. There were fossilized seashells on mountaintops. Mountaintops had once been at the bottom of seas. What’s more, solid land had once been swamp. And coastal real estate had been the most unstable of all, ending up underwater or high and dry. We humans are coast-hugging creatures. As Plato put it, we are like frogs dotted around a pond. Over 60% of us live near coasts. And coasts are fragile places to be.

The bottom line? Weather change will come. Massive weather change. It will come with or without the mitigation of greenhouse gases. And—like the indigenous people of Indonesia’s Aceh who build their houses on stilts–we have to be prepared to triumph over disaster. We cannot waste trillions on just one form of climate change. We have to be prepared for both fire and ice. Or, to put it differently, we have to realize that Mother Nature is not nice.

Howard Bloom: Buckle Up For Catastrophe

(via Justin Boland)

More Americans believe in guardian angels than humans’ role in global warming, according to recent polls.

A Pew poll released late last month found that just 36 percent of Americans believe humans are responsible for accelerating global climate change, which scientists say mushroomed after the industrial revolution due to humans’ dependence on carbon-based fuels. [...]

The 36 percent who believe in human-caused climate change is fewer than the number of Americans who apparently believe they’re protected by guardian angels, some 55 percent, according to a poll published in 2008. [...]

That’s not all. A blog at the website of Foreign Policy notes that more Americans believe in UFOs and ghosts than do anthropogenic (human-caused) global warming.

Raw Story: More Americans believe in angels than humans’ role in global warming

Beginning in the Carter years, the Democrats later called neoliberals supported the deregulation of infrastructure industries that the New Deal had regulated, like airlines, trucking and electricity, a sector in which deregulation resulted in California blackouts and the Enron scandal. Neoliberals teamed up with conservatives to persuade Bill Clinton to go along with the Republican Congress’s dismantling of New Deal-era financial regulations, a move that contributed to the cancerous growth of Wall Street and the resulting global economic collapse. As Asian mercantilist nations like Japan and then China rigged their domestic markets while enjoying free access to the U.S. market, neoliberal Democrats either turned a blind eye to the foreign mercantilist assault on American manufacturing or claimed that it marked the beneficial transition from an industrial economy to a “knowledge economy.” While Congress allowed inflation to slash the minimum wage and while corporations smashed unions, neoliberals chattered about sending everybody to college so they could work in the high-wage “knowledge jobs” of the future. Finally, many (not all) neoliberals agreed with conservatives that entitlements like Social Security were too expensive, and that it was more efficient to cut benefits for the middle class in order to expand benefits for the very poor. [...]

Instead of the updated Rooseveltonomics that America needs, Obama’s team offers warmed-over Rubinomics from the 1990s. Consider the priorities of the Obama administration: the environment, healthcare and education. Why these priorities, as opposed to others, like employment, high wages and manufacturing? The answer is that these three goals co-opt the activist left while fitting neatly into a neoliberal narrative that could as easily have been told in 1999 as in 2009. The story is this: New Dealers and Keynesians are wrong to think that industrial capitalism is permanently and inherently prone to self-destruction, if left to itself. Except in hundred-year disasters, the market economy is basically sound and self-correcting. Government can, however, help the market indirectly, by providing these three public goods, which, thanks to “market failures,” the private sector will not provide.

Salon: Can Obama be deprogrammed?

(via Disinfo)

Scientists in the United States are developing a “synthetic tree” capable of collecting carbon around 1,000 times faster than the real thing.

As the wind blows though plastic “leaves,” the carbon is trapped in a chamber, compressed and stored as liquid carbon dioxide.

The technology is similar to that used to capture carbon from flue stacks at coal-fired power plants, but the difference is that the “synthetic tree” can catch carbon anytime, anywhere.

“Half of your emissions come from small, distributed sources where collection at the site is either impossible or impractical,” said Professor Klaus Lackner, Ewing-Worzel Professor of Geophysics in the Department of Earth and Environmental Engineering at Columbia University.

“We aim for applications like gasoline in cars or jet fuel in airplanes. We are going after CO2 that otherwise is nearly impossible to collect,” he told CNN.

CNN: ‘Synthetic tree’ claims to catch carbon in the air

(Thanks Bill)

For those of us trying to make more sustainable choices within our daily lives, the decision to buy local produce appears to be an obvious next step. The transportation sector contributes nearly one quarter of greenhouse gas emissions in developed countries. It seems logical then that cutting down on the distance between consumers and producers should also have a direct impact on emissions. For this reason the last few years have seen a push for food miles labeling particularly in Europe. However, many critics of food miles feel that this system is at best tokenistic and in some cases does more harm than good.

The food miles debate highlights a clash between differing sustainable development agendas. From an environmental perspective, encouraging consumers to alter their purchasing patterns and limiting transportation emissions can only be a good thing. However, from an economic development point of view, food miles labeling can damage important industries in poor countries.

The article concludes food miles are an inadequate measure of the ecological impact of a particular food and suggests more rigorous analysis including:

* Transportation measurements that include all the distances involved in production and distribution, as well as final food delivery (one item is often harvested in one location, processed in another, packaged elsewhere before being sent to a regional distribution center and finally a retail store);
* Allowances for different means of transportation and fuels;
* Emissions associated with packaging, storage procedures, harvesting techniques and water usage;
* Different emissions factors based on methods of cultivation. For instance, the UK Department for International Development have found that ‘the emissions produced by growing flowers in Kenya and flying them to the UK can be less than a fifth of those grown in heated and lighted greenhouses in Holland’;
* An analysis which includes all greenhouse gases. Most studies incorporate only the carbon emissions associated with particular foods, but other greenhouse gases with varying global warming potentials also play a key role;

World Resources Institute:

(via Appropedia)

Even more important than solving problems is identifying error. This Appropedia article is a work in progress, but is important.

Organics

Food miles

Rejecting Vaccinations

Recycling

Antibacterial Soap

Hybrid Vehicles

Carbon offsets and planting trees

Appropedia: How not to save the world

I think it’s worth pointing out that sustainability is not just about the environment, but about social and economic impacts too. There are non-environmental reasons to support to local food and recycling initiatives, for instance.

See also:

5 Ways People Are Trying to Save the World (That Don’t Work)

Wired’s “environmental heresies” examined

In January 2007 a blog post titled Black Google Would Save 750 Megawatt-hours a Year proposed the theory that a black version of the Google search engine would save a fair bit of energy due to the popularity of the search engine. Since then there has been skepticism about the significance of the energy savings that can be achieved and the cost in terms of readability of black web pages.

We believe that there is value in the concept because even if the energy savings are small, they all add up. Secondly we feel that seeing Blackle every time we load our web browser reminds us that we need to keep taking small steps to save energy.

Blackle

(via Wadester23

Controversial stand: That technology can be green. The book I just finished, “Whole Earth Discipline,” has chapters on why nuclear is green, cities are green, genetic engineering is green. The romantic nature-is-perfect approach is just horse exhaust.

What he drives: A Land Rover LR2. As soon as there’s a good hybrid S.U.V., we’ll get one. We need a mountain vehicle.

New York Times:.

(via Stephen Walling)

Over the years, I’ve often wondered at the unique and sometimes confusing situation of the urban-renter-beginner-permaculturist: trying to figure out how to utilize the ethics and principles of a framework originally conceived to develop areas thousands of acres in size, while often finding oneself without access to an area even hundreds of square feet in size.

While most permaculture teachers will tell you that the ethics and principles of permaculture are not limited to rural broadacre applications, the vast majority of literature on the subject (not to mention course curriculum) displays no uncertain preference for rolling food forested hills, cascading ponds, and just beyond, the beckoning vastness of Zone 5.

(My point of entry into this wonderful world, Permaculture Two, mostly referred to properties that were comparable in acreage to the more notable state parks in the area! Meanwhile, I was trying to figure out how to reconcile a desire to grow massive amounts of food with reality that I couldn’t dig up the lawn.)

Permaculture for Renters

(via Biohabit)

Thomas Friedman:

More than any nation I’ve ever visited, Costa Rica is insisting that economic growth and environmentalism work together. It has created a holistic strategy to think about growth, one that demands that everything gets counted. So if a chemical factory sells tons of fertilizer but pollutes a river — or a farm sells bananas but destroys a carbon-absorbing and species-preserving forest — this is not honest growth. You have to pay for using nature. It is called “payment for environmental services” — nobody gets to treat climate, water, coral, fish and forests as free anymore.

The process began in the 1990s when Costa Rica, which sits at the intersection of two continents and two oceans, came to fully appreciate its incredible bounty of biodiversity — and that its economic future lay in protecting it. So it did something no country has ever done: It put energy, environment, mines and water all under one minister.

“In Costa Rica, the minister of environment sets the policy for energy, mines, water and natural resources,” explained Carlos M. Rodríguez, who served in that post from 2002 to 2006. In most countries, he noted, “ministers of environment are marginalized.” They are viewed as people who try to lock things away, not as people who create value. Their job is to fight energy ministers who just want to drill for cheap oil.

But when Costa Rica put one minister in charge of energy and environment, “it created a very different way of thinking about how to solve problems,” said Rodríguez, now a regional vice president for Conservation International. “The environment sector was able to influence the energy choices by saying: ‘Look, if you want cheap energy, the cheapest energy in the long-run is renewable energy. So let’s not think just about the next six months; let’s think out 25 years.’ ”

New York Times: (No) Drill, Baby, Drill

(via Appropedia)

See also: The original “Natural Capitalism” article from Mother Jones.

The city of Venice hopes to get at least 50 per cent of electricity from renewable sources by the year 2011. It plans to use algae to generate electricity.
Venice, known as the City of Bridges, plans to end its reliance on fossil fuels in the near future by primarily using biofuels.

As a first step the city officials have invested €200 million ($264 million) for a biofuels plant. They will use two types of algae, Sargassum muticum and Undaria pinnafitida. They will cultivate them in laboratories, which will then be used to generate electricity in a new 40 MW power plant. This plant will provide up to 50 per cent of the city’s electricity needs.

Full Story: Venice To Get Half Its Electricity From Algae By 2011

(Thanks Nova)

Oil companies have gained control over billions of gallons of water from Western rivers in preparation for future efforts to extract oil from shale deposits under the Rocky Mountains, according to a new report by an environmental group that opposes such projects.

The group, Western Resource Advocates, used public records to conclude that energy companies are collectively entitled to divert more than 6.5 billion gallons of water a day during peak river flows. The companies also hold rights to store, in dozens of reservoirs, 1.7 million acre feet of water, enough to supply metro Denver for six years.

ndustry representatives said they have substantial holdings of water rights for future use in producing oil from shale, though they could not confirm the precise numbers in the report.

Full Story: Wall Street Journal

Skeptical Science takes a walk through the various arguments presented by global warming doubters and skeptics. Great resource.

Skeptical Science

(Thanks Biohabit)

Q: What can we expect?

A: Pretty much what you read about in New Scientist every week. Climate change, dust bowls caused by over-cultivation necessitated by over-population, resource depletion in obscure and irritatingly mission-critical sectors (never mind oil; we’ve only got 60 years of easily exploitable phosphates left — if we run out of phosphates, our agricultural fertilizer base goes away), the great population overshoot (as developing countries transition to the low population growth model of developed countries) leading to happy fun economic side-effects (deflation, house prices crash, stagnation in cutting-edge research sectors due to not enough workers, aging populations), and general bad-tempered overcrowded primate bickering.

Oh, and the unknown unknowns.

Q: Unknown unknowns? Are you talking about Donald Rumsfeld?

A: No, but I’m stealing his term for unprecedented and unpredictable events (sometimes also known as black swans). From the point of view of an observer in 1909, the modern consumer electronics industry (not to mention computing and internetworking) is a black swan, a radical departure from the then-predictable revolutionary enabling technologies (automobiles and aeroplanes). Planes, trains and automobiles were already present, and progressed remarkably well — and a smart mind in 1909 would have predicted this. But antibiotics, communication satellites, and nuclear weapons were another matter. Some of these items were mentioned, in very approximate form, by 1909-era futurists, but for the most part they took the world by surprise.

We’re certainly going to see unknown unknowns in the 21st century. Possible sources of existential surprise include (but are not limited to) biotechnology, nanotechnology, AI, climate change, supply chain/logistics breakthroughs to rival the shipping container, fork lift pallet, bar code, and RFID chip — and politics. But there’ll be other stuff so weird and strange I can’t even guess at it.

Q: Eh? But what’s the big picture?

A: The big picture is that since around 2005, the human species has — for the first time ever — become a predominantly urban species. Prior to that time, the majority of humans lived in rural/agricultural lifestyles. Since then, just over 50% of us now live in cities; the move to urbanization is accelerating. If it continues at the current pace, then some time after 2100 the human population will tend towards the condition of the UK — in which roughly 99% of the population live in cities or suburbia.

This is going to affect everything.

It’s going to affect epidemiology. It’s going to affect wealth production. It’s going to affect agriculture (possibly for the better, if it means a global shift towards concentrated high-intensity food production, possibly in vertical farms, and a re-wilding/return to nature of depopulated and underutilized former rural areas). It’s going to affect the design and layout of our power, transport, and information grids. It’s going to affect our demographics (urban populations tend to grow by immigration, and tend to feature lower birth rates than agricultural communities).

There’s a gigantic difference between the sustainability of a year 2109 with 6.5 billion humans living a first world standard of living in creative cities, and a year 2109 with 3.3 billion humans living in cities and 3.2 billion humans still practicing slash’n'burn subsistence farming all over the map.

Q: Space colonization?

A: Forget it.

Full Story: Charlie Stross’s web page

(via Grinding)

The supposed “global cooling” consensus among scientists in the 1970s — frequently offered by global-warming skeptics as proof that climatologists can’t make up their minds — is a myth, according to a survey of the scientific literature of the era.

The ’70s was an unusually cold decade. Newsweek, Time, The New York Times and National Geographic published articles at the time speculating on the causes of the unusual cold and about the possibility of a new ice age.

But Thomas Peterson of the National Climatic Data Center surveyed dozens of peer-reviewed scientific articles from 1965 to 1979 and found that only seven supported global cooling, while 44 predicted warming. Peterson says 20 others were neutral in their assessments of climate trends.

The study reports, “There was no scientific consensus in the 1970s that the Earth was headed into an imminent ice age.

“A review of the literature suggests that, to the contrary, greenhouse warming even then dominated scientists’ thinking about the most important forces shaping Earth’s climate on human time scales.”

Full Story: USA Today

Ignite Portland 5 was great. Truly Portland’s own TED. It appears all the talks are available online:

Blip TV channel

Embedded above is Chris Sullivan’s talk on HAM radio. I also highly recommend:

Russell Senior – Why Publicly Owned Fiber is the Answer to our Broadband Needs (political, not technical)

Tara Horn – How to be a Refugee: Several not-so-easy steps from oppression to resettlement (poignant)

John Metta – How to creatively destroy pesky, non-moneymaking community efforts (funny)

See also: Technoccult video spot from Ignite 5

Alex Steffan:

What is more, the proper deployment of geoengineering megaprojects would have to be executed through precisely such the kind of international political process of which the megaproject crowd despair, and be subject to just as many delays and constraints as any other international negotiation. Unilateral mega-scale geoengineering on the part of any one nation (much less any one corporation) is pretty much as close to an obvious cause for war as I can imagine, and, given the possible consequences, quite likely could legally qualify as a crime against humanity. There’s no short-cut through the politics here. [...]

First, in order for this point to have any validity, geoengineering mega-projects would have to work. So far, we have no proof that any of them actually would work, and numerous reasons to believe that many of them could go disastrously awry.

Full Story: WorldChanging

I’m all for reducing carbon emissions – for a number of reasons.

But we need to be thinking about what do if attempts to stop or reverse global warming fail (or if it turns out that we are wrong about the causes of global warming). Not large scale mega-engineering projects, but thinking about how to invent climate-flexible solutions. I say “climate flexible” because we don’t know specifically what types of climate change and extreme weather will occur.

The largest series of solar installations in history, more than 1,300 megawatts, is planned for the desert outside Los Angeles, according to a new deal between the utility Southern California Edison and solar power plant maker, BrightSource.

The momentous deal will deliver more electricity than even the largest nuclear plant, spread out among seven facilities, the first of which will start up in 2013. When fully operational, the companies say the facility will provide enough electricity to power 845,000 homes — more than exist in San Francisco — though estimates like that are notoriously squirrely.

The technology isn’t the familiar photovoltaics — the direct conversion of sunlight into electricity — but solar thermal power, which concentrates the sun’s rays to create steam in a boiler and spin a turbine.

Full Story: Wired

1. Velcro
2. Passive Cooling
3. Gecko Tape
4. Whalepower Wind Turbine
5. Lotus Effect Hydrophobia
6. Self-Healing Plastics
7. The Golden Streamlining Principle
8. Artificial Photosynthesis
9. Bionic Car
10. Morphing Aircraft Wings

Full Story: Brainz

(via Free Vermont)