December 2008

SCIENTISTS have warned that Christmas lights are bad for the planet due to huge electricity waste and urged people to get energy efficient festive bulbs.

Winter officially arrives today with the solstice. But for many Americans, autumn 2008's final days already felt like deepest, coldest January.

Los Angeles has a solar power measure on the ballot for the city referendum this March. Measure B, titled “Green Energy and Good Jobs for Los Angeles,” would require the LA Department of Water and Power to build 400 megawatts of distributed generation on publicly owned rooftops. The LA Times reports today that Chief Legislative Analyst Gerry Miller warned that the solar measure could result in "substantial increases" to the electricity bills of DWP customers. In 2000, L.A. announced it would become the "Solar Capital of the World," with solar panels on 100,000 rooftops by 2010. Three years and $80 million later the city cancelled the project as cost-ineffective, 99,400 buildings short of its goal.

“China’s addition of 90GW of coal-fired power plants installed in 2006 alone is expected to emit over 500 million tons of CO2 per year for their 40 year lifetimes. This is (sic) compared to the entire European Union’s Kyoto reduction commitment of 300 million tons of CO2.”—From Dr. Steven Chu’s congressional testimony March 2007. President-elect Barack Obama has nominated Dr. Chu to become Secretary of Energy.

The meeting's theme is "Science and Technology for Sustainable Well-Being." John Holdren, the association's president, said Wednesday that the greatest threat to the Earth's well-being is increasingly rapid global climate change.

The evidence for dangerously climbing temperatures is "absolutely stunning," Holdren said in a discussion with The Chronicle's editorial board. He cited such phenomena as the damage now caused worldwide by floods and wildfires, the spread of malaria in the tropics where mosquito populations are increasing, and the rapid melting of permafrost in the Arctic tundra as well as the swiftly increasing loss of ice in both polar regions of the globe.

He noted that virtually all climate scientists agree that global temperatures are rising, and that the major cause is increased greenhouse gases

— largely from the burning of fossil fuels.

The world's most urgent need, he said, is "a massive effort to slow the pace of global climatic disruption before intolerable consequences become inevitable."

The scientific community can certainly help develop new technologies to cope with the problems, he said, but with the pace of climate change increasing so rapidly, "we've only got about a decade to get things right."

Then, ten minutes after the second Drax interview, the BBC's environment correspondent, Roger Harrabin, was sitting down with John Holdren, the eminent president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and discussing global warming. Holdren put it bluntly: "We are already experiencing dangerous human disruption of the global climate." To continue to ignore the problem would, he suggested, be "flirting with catastrophe", given that carbon-dioxide levels in the atmosphere have already "passed the safe level".

Only last week, John Holdren, new president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, suggested that global sea levels could rise 13ft by the end of this century -much higher than previous forecasts.

 If we want to improve our chances of averting this century the extinction of 50 percent of the species or dramatic drops in grain yields or devastating sea level rises, we have to get worldwide CO2 emissions to start a real decline as fast as possible. Scientist Jim Hansen says that if we wait until 2018 to "stop the growth of greenhouse gas emissions" then we have close to no chance of avoiding catastrophic effects. Scientist John Holdren tells us that if we plateau in 2015, our chances of averting these catastrophic effects are down to 50 percent.

 "Coal is by far the cheapest fuel because there's no price on how much damage it causes," said John Holdren, a Harvard University professor of environmental science and director of the Woods Hole Research Center in Falmouth, Massachusetts.