Climate of Our Future

Group Erects Purple Mountain Majesty At EPA; Say “If Administrator Lisa Jackson Won’t Visit the Appalachian Mountains, They Will Bring The Mountains to Her”

WASHINGTON— In an attempt to further pressure EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson to enforce the Clean Water Act and halt mountaintop removal coal mining (MTR), activists early this morning erected two 20-foot-tall, purple tripod structures in front of the agency’s headquarters. A pair of activists perched at the top of the tripods have strung a 25-foot sign in front of the EPA’s door that reads, “EPA: pledge to end mountaintop removal in 2010.” Six people are locked to the tripods and say they won’t leave unless Administrator Jackson commits to a flyover visit of the Appalachian Mountains and MTR sites, which she has never done before.

This is the latest in a series of actions and activities aimed at pressuring the EPA to take more decisive action on mountaintop removal coal mining. Today’s tactic is modeled on the multi-day tree-sits that have been happening in West Virginia to protect mountains from coal companies’ imminent blasting. Called the worst of the worst strip mining, the practice blows the tops off of whole mountains to scoop out the small seams of coal that lie beneath.

“We’re losing our way of life and our culture,” said Chuck Nelson, who worked as a coal miner in West Virginia for three decades and came to DC to support today’s protest. “Mountaintop removal should be banned today. The practice means total devastation for communities, the hardwood forests, the ecosystems, and the headwaters. Why should our communities sacrifice everything we have?”

Despite the Obama administration’s big announcement last year that it was going to take “unprecedented steps” to reduce the environmental damage from mountaintop removal coal mining in Appalachia, the EPA has been slow moving. Two weeks ago, the EPA delayed action on a set of broad-ranging and specific measures to reduce the environmental impacts of mountaintop removal, after details of the plan were leaked to coal-state mining regulators. The EPA has for months been close to finalizing these permit guidelines, which many hope will mandate tougher protections to limit damage to water quality and be a step in the right direction toward abolishing the practice.

The delay in EPA’s announcement of more detailed permit guidelines came just as the agency also asked U.S. District Judge Robert C. Chambers for more time to decide if it will veto the largest mountaintop removal mining permit in West Virginia history, the nearly 2,300-acre Spruce No. 1 Mine in Logan County.

“The science has become clear that mountaintop removal is harming water resources in real and measurable ways,” said Kate Rooth of the Rainforest Action Network, which organized the protest. “The EPA definitely can and must do much more on mountaintop mining and that includes exercising its full regulatory authority to block every single mining permit application that seeks to remove America’s oldest mountaintops and dump the waste into waterways.”

Based on EPA Administrator Jackson’s statements on March 8th at the National Press Club, it appears that the EPA is seeking ways to “minimize” the ecological damage of mountaintop mining rather than halt the most extreme strip mining practice. A paper released in January by a dozen leading scientists in the journal Science, however, concluded that mountaintop coal mining is so destructive that the government should stop giving out new permits all together. “The science is so overwhelming that the only conclusion that one can reach is that mountaintop mining needs to be stopped,” said Margaret Palmer, a professor at the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Sciences and the study’s lead author.

“Ultimately, what is clear is that mountaintop removal cannot be regulated. It must be abolished. Otherwise, we will continue to jeopardize our historic mountains, precious drinking water and especially the lives of the people who call Appalachia home. All of this for a tiny percent of dirty coal, the tradeoff doesn’t add up,” said Kate Finneran, one of the two main climbers in today’s protest.

Called the worst of the worst coal mining, mountaintop removal coal mining results in the clear-cutting of thousands of acres of some of the world’s most biologically diverse forests, the burying of crucial headwaters streams and the contamination of groundwater with toxic levels of heavy lead and mercury. According to the EPA, this destructive practice has damaged or destroyed nearly 2,000 miles of streams and threatens to destroy 1.4 million acres of forest by 2020.

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Rainforest Action Network campaigns to break North America’s oil and coal addictions, protect endangered forests and Indigenous rights, and stop destructive investments around the world through education, grassroots organizing, and nonviolent direct action. For more information, please visit: www.ran.org.

Scientists to U.S. Congressional Committee:

Time for Serious Action on Black Carbon

Aggressive mitigation of second largest contributor to climate change can provide significant environmental and health benefits

Washington, D.C., March 16, 2010 – Black carbon soot, produced from incomplete combustion of diesel fuel and biomass, is one of the largest contributors to climate change apart from CO2, as well as a danger to public health, and should be a prime target of policymakers according to scientists and experts testifying at today’s hearing of the U.S. House Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming chaired by Congressman Edward Markey.

“Black carbon packs a powerful punch when it comes to climate change, absorbing solar radiation while in the atmosphere and also darkening the surfaces of snow and ice, contributing to increased melting in vulnerable regions such as the Arctic and Himalayas,” said Durwood Zaelke, President of the Institute for Governance & Sustainable Development (IGSD). “The good news is that it only stays in the atmosphere for up to a few weeks, making it an ideal target for achieving fast cooling through aggressive mitigation measures.”

Reducing black carbon emissions and other short-term climate forcers such as HFCs, methane, and tropospheric ozone can serve as a complement to CO2 reduction measures, which can take up to 1,000 years to produce significant cooling because of CO2’s long atmospheric lifetime.

“A drastic reduction in BC has the potential of offsetting CO2-induced warming for a decade or two. Effectively, BC reduction may provide a possible mechanism for buying time to develop and implement effective steps for reducing CO2 emissions,” said Dr. V. Ramanathan from Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California, San Diego, in his written testimony.

Because developed countries have been successful in reducing black carbon emissions in recent years, the technology exists to help developing countries, such as China and India, significantly cut their soot emissions, through diesel-particulate filters for vehicles and cleaner-burning cookstoves. Dr. Ramanathan has spear-headed a program called Project Surya to bring solar cookstoves to India to assist in gathering additional data on the climate forcing potential of black carbon and its impact on local health – emissions of black carbon contribute to respiratory illness, the fourth leading cause of excess mortality in developing countries.

Installing particulate filters in current and new fleets of diesel vehicles in the U.S. is also an important strategy; filters can cut particulate emissions by up to 90 percent. “We already have the technologies needed to achieve deep reductions,” said Chairman Markey in his opening statement. “Developing and installing technologies would create jobs and move us forward in the clean energy economy.”

Black carbon will also be the topic of discussion at an event hosted by the Woodrow Wilson Center’s China Environment Forum in D.C. tomorrow, March 17. IGSD’s black carbon expert, Dennis Clare, will participate in “U.S.-China Cooperation: The Co-Benefits of Reducing Black Carbon” along with Dr. Ramanathan and John Guy from the U.S. EPA, to discuss possible ways for the U.S. and China to collaborate on mitigation of black carbon and the major benefits that could be obtained from such collaboration.

“Policymakers are beginning to take note of black carbon and other short-term climate forcers like HFCs, methane, and tropospheric ozone, where emissions reductions are cost-effective and can yield major climate and health benefits,” added Zaelke. “These “fast-action” strategies are low-hanging fruits that need to be picked now to avoid the dangerous near-term consequences of abrupt climate change.”

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For more information on the Woodrow Wilson Center event, please see: http://www.wilsoncenter.org/index.cfm?fuseaction=events.event_summary&event_id=602636

For more information on black carbon and the importance of tackling non-CO2 climate forcers, please see:

Turning Down the Heat: The Forgotten 50%: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iT6Kjf7q6lU

Turning Down the Heat: The Montreal Protocol & HFCs: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ozR-iP9yQA

Reducing abrupt climate change risk using the Montreal Protocol and other regulatory actions to complement cuts in CO2 emissions (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2009): http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2009/10/09/0902568106.full.pdf+html

Category: climate
Posted on: February 2, 2010 9:15 AM, by James Hrynyshyn

Never mind that the first decade of the 21st century was the warmest on record. Or that 2009 tied for the second-warmest year. Neither of those stories are consuming much airtime and web- and print-space. No, the biggest stories on the climate beat involve allegations of fraudulent activity on the part of some of the world’s most experienced climatologists. The latest example concerns the lack of records specifying the location of remote Chinese weather stations and just how much they moved.

As Fred Pearce writes in The Guardian, “It is difficult to imagine a more bizarre academic dispute.” But attention it is gathering, and before anyone accuses us “warmists” of ignoring another scandal, it behooves us to address it.

The story seems to involve the troubled Phil Jones of the University of East Anglia and his colleague, Wei-Chyung Wang of the University at Albany in New York, who published an oft-cited paper in Nature 20 years ago. The paper concluded that there was no “urban heat island effect” lending a warming bias to temperature records. But because Jones can’t produce the documentation attesting to just where many of the Chinese weather stations that supplied some of the data were and how far, it at all, any were moved during the period of time the study involves, allegations of cover-up are raging.

It will probably be a while before we get to the bottom of the story. It is possible that the paper’s findings will have to be retracted, which would be a shame. But it changes nothing of importance beyond the reputation of the scientists concerned.

First, there are plenty of other sources of independent data confirming anthropogenic global warming. Second, even if there was an urban heat island effect biasing a few Chinese data points, the effect is clearly not systemic through the world’s weather stations. Here’s the abstract to a paper from the National Climatic Data Center’s Tom Peterson from seven years ago titled “Assessment of Urban Versus Rural In Situ Surface Temperatures in the Contiguous United States: No Difference Found.”

Better yet, here’s a hot off the presses paper from three of Peterson’s NCDC colleagues, “On the reliability of the U.S. Surface Temperature Record,” that’s basically a peer-reviewed version of a statement released last year by the station on why U.S. weather station records do not show a warming bias. In fact, not only is there no warming bias, but the opposite seems to the case:
Results indicate that there is a mean bias associated with poor exposure sites relative to good exposure sites; however, this bias is consistent with previously documented changes associated with the widespread conversion to electronic sensors in the USHCN during the last 25 years. Moreover, the sign of the bias is counterintuitive to photographic documentation of poor exposure because associated instrument changes have led to an artificial negative (“cool”) bias in maximum temperatures and only a slight positive (“warm”) bias in minimum temperatures.

So by all means, let’s get to the bottom of Jones’ latest travails. But we should no more confuse controversies surrounding a single paper with an entire body of science than we should confuse one blustery day in January with 150 years of an inexorably warming planet.

Mississippi dead zone in 2006. The increased frequency and intensity of oxygen-deprived “dead zones” along the world’s coasts can negatively impact environmental conditions in far more than just local waters. (Credit: NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center Scientific Visualization Studio)

ScienceDaily (Mar. 12, 2010) — The increased frequency and intensity of oxygen-deprived “dead zones” along the world’scoasts can negatively impact environmental conditions in far more than just local waters. In the March 12 edition of the journal Science, University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science oceanographer Dr. Lou Codispoti explains that the increased amount of nitrous oxide (N2O) produced in low-oxygen (hypoxic) waters can elevate concentrations in the atmosphere, further exacerbating the impacts of global warming and contributing to ozone “holes” that cause an increase in our exposure to harmful UV radiation.

“As the volume of hypoxic waters move towards the sea surface and expands along our coasts, their ability to produce the greenhouse gas nitrous oxide increases,” explains Dr. Codispoti of the UMCES Horn Point Laboratory. “With low-oxygen waters currently producing about half of the ocean’s net nitrous oxide, we could see an additional significant atmospheric increase if these ‘dead zones’ continue to expand.”

Although present in minute concentrations in Earth’s atmosphere, nitrous oxide is a highly potent greenhouse gas and is becoming a key factor in stratospheric ozone destruction. For the past 400,000 years, changes in atmospheric N2O appear to have roughly paralleled changes in carbon dioxide CO2 and have had modest impacts on climate, Keep Reading

EarthJustice.org

Sign on to petition for long term protections, immediate no-spray buffer zones where kids live, learn, play

March 10, 2010

Lindsay, CA — Genoveva Galvez knows there are pesticides inside her 14-year-old body. What she really wants to know is this: how does she get rid of them?

Genoveva and her family live surrounded by orange and olive trees in this small Central Valley town. When the cropdusters spray nearby, the sickly smell burns their eyes and sends them reeling indoors (click here to view a video.)

Nearly a billion pounds of pesticides are sprayed in fields and orchards across the country each year. But as families like Genoveva’s can tell you: those pesticides don’t always stay where they’re sprayed.

That’s why some 42,000 people and 51 groups in 18 states have publicly supported a petition asking the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to set safety standards protecting children who grow up near farms from the harmful effects of pesticide ‘drift‘ — the toxic spray or vapor that travels from treated fields. The petition also asks the agency to immediately adopt no-spray buffer zones around homes, schools, parks and daycare centers for the most dangerous and drift-prone pesticides.

The deadline for public comment on the petition before EPA was midnight Friday.

The public interest law firms Earthjustice and Farmworker Justice filed the petition in October on behalf of farm worker groups United Farm Workers, Oregon-based Pineros y Campesinos Unidos del Noroeste, California Rural Legal Assistance Foundation, and the Farm Labor Organizing Committee, AFL-CIO as well as Physicians for Social Responsibility, Washington-based Sea Mar Community Health Center, Pesticide Action Network, and the million-plus member MomsRising.org

Genoveva’s story is not unique. From apple orchards in Washington to potato fields in Florida, poisonous pesticide ‘clouds’ plague the people who live nearby – posing a particular risk to the young children of the nation’s farm workers, many of whom live in industry housing at the field’s edge.

“When farm workers come home after a long day in the fields and orchards, they’re faced with yet another worry – the poisons that are settling in their homes, their lawns, their children’s bodies,” said Erik Nicholson, National Vice President of United Farm Workers. “We can’t let another growing season go by. That’s why more than 42,000 people and dozens of organizations are asking EPA to put an end to this today.”

In 1996, Congress required EPA to set standards by 2006 to protect children from pesticides. Four years have passed since that deadline, and EPA’s job is only partially complete. The agency has made some progress — banning the use of some pesticides in the home and on lawns. But the agency has failed to protect children from these same pesticides when they drift from treated fields into nearby yards, homes, schools, parks and daycare centers.

“In farming communities throughout the country, children have been abandoned by federal pesticide protections,” said Earthjustice attorney Janette Brimmer. “Tens of thousands of Americans and dozens of organizations are asking EPA to finish the job it started so children who live, learn, and play near farms and orchards are kept safe from poisonous pesticides.”

EPA has acknowledged the risk of pesticide drift, but still chose to go ahead with a double-standard: protecting urban and suburban areas, while leaving the children of farm workers and other rural kids vulnerable.

“We traditionally think of farms as healthy places,” said MomsRising.org President Joan Blades. “But children and families across the country are being poisoned by pesticides that travel from the fields into their houses and bedrooms, causing serious and long-lasting damage to their health. We already have standards barring the use of such pesticides for homes and lawns to protect children. But all children deserve such protection. You shouldn’t have to live in the suburbs to be safe from deadly pesticides.”

“It’s time the EPA put an end to this double-standard for farm workers. The public has made it clear: EPA’s policies must protect farm workers and their children from unnecessary poisoning,” said Farmworker Justice attorney Virginia Ruiz.

Pesticide poisoning reports and scientific studies show that pesticides are ending up in the air and in people’s bodies at unsafe levels. Among a host of examples: air monitoring conducted near the Southwoods Elementary School in Hastings, Florida, detected pesticides in every sample, sometimes at levels that may pose serious health risks to young children.

“Children are especially vulnerable to pesticide exposures both because their smaller bodies cannot break down toxins as well as adults, and because their developmental processes are prone to being derailed — even by very low-level exposure,” explains Karl Tupper, Staff Scientist for Pesticide Action Network. “The particular pesticides we’re finding in our drift catching and biomonitoring results are some of the worst: chlorpyrifos, diazinon, endosulfan… these are associated with serious short- and long-term health effects. They are also entirely unnecessary.”

One of the pesticides identified as being so dangerous that the groups have asked EPA to adopt immediate no-spray buffer zone is chlorpyrifos — among a class of pesticides that was initially developed as a nerve toxin by the Nazis. The short term effects of exposure to chlorpyrifos have been likened to a chemically-induced flu: chest tightness, blurred vision, headaches, coughing and wheezing, weakness, nausea and vomiting, coma, seizures, and even death.