Wednesday, October 31, 2007

The Day After Tomorrow

The sequel might soon be playing at a beach front near you...

Going, Going... Gone!

So Al, what happens next? A head long rush into new nukes and assured radioactive contamination of the whole earth for all future generations, or massive investments in nano-solar technologies... better batteries... light-emitting diodes... proper investigation of every energy conversion claims... military technology transfers... Manhattan Project-like global mobilization for survival to unearth energy secrets buried by the National Secrecy Act of 1947?

Are you up to the challenge, peel back the veil of the Shadow Government, lift the velvet curtain so humanity will stand a chance of survival? Or at the secrets too deep to raise... afraid of captains of industry up for environmental crimes against humanity for suppression of ecological solutions, to benefit the ever growing profit margin of the oil, coal and nuke cartels?

Listen to your friend Shirley MacLaine... she "knows"!

Green Issue of Vanity Fair

We've all see this image in the Green Issue of Vanity Fair, June 2007... But since this is a new blog, and the topic is rising sea level, I figured... upload.

Now the question is, how realistic is this, other than shock value? Who out there has calculated how high the water could go, if or once all the ice on land mass, in the Artic and Antartica, melted away?

I'll try to find out... home work.

Sunday, October 28, 2007

Smashing Pumpkins's Halloween Threat!

Zeitgeist by the way, for those of you who don't already know, is this documentary everybody on the web has seen about how the Rockfellers and the Rothschilds swindled trillions of dollars from the American people by establishing the Federal Bank Reserve, collecting both interest on the loan of currency, and collecting what some now say is an unconstitutional income tax from US citizens, the issue the political foundation of Ron Paul's presidential campaign.

Zeitgeist will premiere at the Artivists Film Festival on November 10th, 10 PM at the Egyptian Theater on Hollywood Blvd.

Listen to tracks from the CD on the band's MySpace page.

Friday, October 26, 2007

Sea ice could disappear completely in the Arctic summer before 2040


Mothers, Students, Everyone
Posted by Jamie on October 4th, 2007

As Thomas Homer-Dixon writes in todays New York Times, science is telling us that our window to do something serious about global warming is closing quickly. Now, more than ever, this country and world needs a movement, strong and united, to take on the challenge of building a clean energy future.

He writes:

In response to the new dangers of climate change, we need a similar mobilization — of mothers, of students and of everyone with a stake in the future — now.

Take a moment to forward this article to friends, family, and colleagues and ask them to join you in taking action on November 3rd:

A Swiftly Melting Planet
By Thomas Homer-Dixon

THE Arctic ice cap melted this summer at a shocking pace, disappearing at a far higher rate than predicted by even the most pessimistic experts in global warming. But we shouldn’t be shocked, because scientists have long known that major features of earth’s interlinked climate system of air and water can change abruptly.

A big reason such change happens is feedback — not the feedback that you’d like to give your boss, but the feedback that creates a vicious circle. This type of feedback in our global climate could determine humankind’s future prosperity and even survival.

The vast expanse of ice floating on the surface of the Arctic Ocean always recedes in the summer, reaching its lowest point sometime in September. Every winter it expands again, as the long Arctic night descends and temperatures plummet. Each summer over the past six years, global warming has trimmed this ice’s total area a little more, and each winter the ice’s recovery has been a little less robust. These trends alarmed climate scientists, but most thought that sea ice wouldn’t disappear completely in the Arctic summer before 2040 at the earliest.

But this past summer sent scientists scrambling to redo their estimates. Week by week, the National Snow and Ice Data Center in Boulder, Colo., reported the trend: from 2.23 million square miles of ice remaining on Aug. 8 to 1.6 million square miles on Sept. 16, an astonishing drop from the previous low of 2.05 million square miles, reached in 2005.

The loss of Arctic sea ice won’t be the last abrupt change in earth’s climate, because of feedbacks. One of the climate’s most important destabilizing feedbacks involves Arctic ice. It works like this: our release of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases around the planet causes some initial warming that melts some ice. Melting ice leaves behind open ocean water that has a much lower reflectivity (or albedo) than that of ice. Open ocean water absorbs about 80 percent more solar radiation than sea ice does. And so as the sun warms the ocean, even more ice melts, in a vicious circle. This ice-albedo feedback is one of the main reasons warming is happening far faster in the high north, where there are vast stretches of sea ice, than anywhere else on Earth.

There are other destabilizing feedbacks in the carbon cycle that involve the oceans. Each year, the oceans absorb about half the carbon dioxide that humans emit into the atmosphere. But as oceans warm, they will absorb less carbon dioxide, partly because the gas dissolves less readily in warmer water, and partly because warming will reduce the mixing between deep and surface waters that provides nutrients to plankton that absorb carbon dioxide. And when oceans take up less carbon dioxide, warming worsens.

Scientists have done a good job incorporating some feedbacks into their climate models, especially those, like the ice-albedo feedback, that operate directly on the temperature of air or water. But they haven’t incorporated as well feedbacks that operate on the atmosphere’s concentrations of greenhouse gases or that affect the cycle of carbon among air, land, oceans and organisms. Yet these may be the most important feedbacks of all.

Global warming is melting large areas of permafrost in Alaska, Canada and Siberia. As it melts, the organic matter in the permafrost starts to rot, releasing carbon dioxide and methane (molecule for molecule, methane traps far more heat in the atmosphere than carbon dioxide).

Warming is also affecting wetlands and forests around the world, helping to desiccate immense peat bogs in Indonesia, contributing to more frequent drought in the Amazon basin, and propelling a widening beetle infestation that’s killing enormous tracts of pine forest in Alaska and British Columbia. (This infestation is on the brink of crossing the Canadian Rockies into the boreal forest that extends east to Newfoundland.) Dried peat and dead and dying forests are vulnerable to wildfires that would emit huge quantities of carbon into the atmosphere.

This summer’s loss of Arctic sea ice indicates that at least one major destabilizing feedback is gaining force quickly. Scientists have also recently learned that the Southern Ocean, which encircles Antarctica, appears to be absorbing less carbon, while Greenland’s ice sheet is melting at an accelerating rate.

When warming becomes its own cause, we might not be able to stop extremely harmful climate change no matter how much we cut our greenhouse gas emissions. We need a far more aggressive global response to climate change. In the 1960s, mothers learned that the milk they were feeding their children was laced with radioactive material from atmospheric tests of nuclear weapons and that this contamination could increase the risk of childhood leukemia. Soon women organized themselves in the tens of thousands to demand that nuclear powers ban atmospheric testing. Their campaign largely succeeded.

In response to the new dangers of climate change, we need a similar mobilization — of mothers, of students and of everyone with a stake in the future — now.

Thomas Homer-Dixon, a professor of peace and conflict studies at the University of Toronto, is the author of “The Upside of Down: Catastrophe, Creativity and the Renewal of Civilization.”

Monday, October 22, 2007

Scientists: Rising seas will flood historic sites ~ CNN

(These estimates are much, much too conservative... the sea level rise will happen a lot quicker than this... already scientists are predicting one foot rise a year... possibly 20 feet rise by 2050... perhaps even sooner... The hell with historic sites... SOUTH BEACH is gonna be under water!!! ;o) Rem)

Scientists: Rising seas will flood historic sites
Scientists: Rising seas will likely swamp Jamestown, Virginia
CNN

(AP) -- Ultimately, rising seas will likely swamp the first American settlement in Jamestown, Virginia, as well as the Florida launch pad that sent the first American into orbit, many climate scientists are predicting.

Rising waters will flood the first American settlement of Jamestown within a century, scientists predict.

In about a century, some of the places that make America what it is may be slowly erased.

Global warming -- through a combination of melting glaciers, disappearing ice sheets and warmer waters expanding -- is expected to cause oceans to rise by one meter, or about 39 inches. It will happen regardless of any future actions to curb greenhouse gases, several leading scientists say. And it will reshape the nation.

Rising waters will lap at the foundations of old money Wall Street and the new money towers of Silicon Valley. They will swamp the locations of big city airports and major interstate highways.

Storm surges worsened by sea level rise will flood the waterfront getaways of rich politicians -- the Bushes' Kennebunkport and John Edwards' place on the Outer Banks. And gone will be many of the beaches in Texas and Florida favored by budget-conscious students on Spring Break.

That's the troubling outlook projected by coastal maps reviewed by The Associated Press. The maps, created by scientists at the University of Arizona, are based on data from the U.S. Geological Survey.

Few of the more than two dozen climate experts interviewed disagree with the one-meter projection. Some believe it could happen in 50 years, others say 100, and still others say 150.

Sea level rise is "the thing that I'm most concerned about as a scientist," says Benjamin Santer, a climate physicist at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California.

"We're going to get a meter and there's nothing we can do about it," said University of Victoria climatologist Andrew Weaver, a lead author of the February report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in Paris. "It's going to happen no matter what -- the question is when."

Sea level rise "has consequences about where people live and what they care about," said Donald Boesch, a University of Maryland scientist who has studied the issue. "We're going to be into this big national debate about what we protect and at what cost."

This week, beginning with a meeting at the United Nations on Monday, world leaders will convene to talk about fighting global warming. At week's end, leaders will gather in Washington with President Bush.

Planet in Peril: Anderson Cooper, Animal Planet's Jeff Corwin & Dr. Sanjay Gupta explore the Earth's environmental issues in a CNN worldwide investigation. October 23-24 at 9 p.m. ET on CNN

Experts say that protecting America's coastlines would run well into the billions and not all spots could be saved.

And it's not just a rising ocean that is the problem. With it comes an even greater danger of storm surge, from hurricanes, winter storms and regular coastal storms, Boesch said. Sea level rise means higher and more frequent flooding from these extreme events, he said.

All told, one meter of sea level rise in just the lower 48 states would put about 25,000 square miles under water, according to Jonathan Overpeck, director of the Institute for the Study of Planet Earth at the University of Arizona. That's an area the size of West Virginia.

The amount of lost land is even greater when Hawaii and Alaska are included, Overpeck said.

The Environmental Protection Agency's calculation projects a land loss of about 22,000 square miles. The EPA, which studied only the Eastern and Gulf coasts, found that Louisiana, Florida, North Carolina, Texas and South Carolina would lose the most land. But even inland areas like Pennsylvania and the District of Columbia also have slivers of at-risk land, according to the EPA.

This past summer's flooding of subways in New York could become far more regular, even an everyday occurrence, with the projected sea rise, other scientists said. And New Orleans' Katrina experience and the daily loss of Louisiana wetlands -- which serve as a barrier that weakens hurricanes -- are previews of what's to come there.

Florida faces a serious public health risk from rising salt water tainting drinking water wells, said Joel Scheraga, the EPA's director of global change research. And the farm-rich San Joaquin Delta in California faces serious salt water flooding problems, other experts said.

"Sea level rise is going to have more general impact to the population and the infrastructure than almost anything else that I can think of," said S. Jeffress Williams, a U.S. Geological Survey coastal geologist in Woods Hole, Mass.

Even John Christy at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, a scientist often quoted by global warming skeptics, said he figures the seas will rise at least 16 inches by the end of the century.

But he tells people to prepare for a rise of about three feet just in case.

Williams says it's "not unreasonable at all" to expect that much in 100 years. "We've had a third of a meter in the last century."

The change will be a gradual process, one that is so slow it will be easy to ignore for a while.

"It's like sticking your finger in a pot of water on a burner and you turn the heat on, Williams said. "You kind of get used to it."

Copyright 2007 The Associated Press.

643 million people live in low-lying areas

What Will Mark The Beginning of The End Of Global Trade? - Climate Change.
by John Laumer, Philadelphia on 10.22.07

Few of us have thought much about the trade implications of climate change-induced coastal flooding. World Watch has clarified it for us. Flooded ports: all done. That's why they're called World Watch. Good stuff.

Cities around the world are facing the danger of rising seas and other disasters related to climate change. Of the 33 cities predicted to have at least 8 million people by 2015, at least 21 are highly vulnerable, says the Worldwatch Institute. They include Dhaka, Bangladesh; Buenos Aires, Argentina; Rio de Janeiro, Brazil; Shanghai and Tianjin in China; Alexandria and Cairo in Egypt; Mumbai and Kolkata in India; Jakarta, Indonesia; Tokyo and Osaka-Kobe in Japan; Lagos, Nigeria; Karachi, Pakistan; Bangkok, Thailand, and New York and Los Angeles in the United States, according to studies by the United Nations and others.

More than one-tenth of the world's population, or 643 million people, live in low-lying areas at risk from climate change, say U.S. and European experts.

Just as an aside: how long before some cable talk show pundit equates coastal flooding with religious prophecy? We can wait.

Sunday, October 21, 2007

Is Blue the new Green?

That's the question the new November "Blue issue" of Women's Health magazine is asking this month. On October 24th their website will go "blue" through December 6th. The articles are edited by brother and sister Philippe and Alexandra Cousteau... yet the question remains for Winafish, can we save the oceans, if we don't handle the nuke problem, and the waste that will flow into the sea as coastlines are eaten up by rising tides?

The debate is going to rage on until the evidence is overwhelming, impossible to deny. Isn't always the way, that when you're finally ready to tackle one problem, another comes biting you in the rear?

This said, there's a good blurb about the Dee-Luxe Car Wash, claims automated car washes use up to 100 gallons less per vehicle, and most recycle rinse water too. Put away the garden hose and sponge, and head to the car wash, with pumps and high-pressure nozzles.

I don't know... one bucket of water always did the trick for me, and a quick spray... I don't understand how the average American uses 100 gallons a day? Every drop counts in LA.

Friday, October 19, 2007

above the water line

Mother Earth amid rising sea level
This is a representation of the mythical Mother Earth, or Gaia as she is sometimes called. Her hands in the clouds and legs in the water show the hydrological cycle. Her body is the color of arctic ice, ranging from white to deep blue. On her person you can see a human hand brushing the surface of the water. Those are typical Northern California hills in the background, and it appears that the water line is rising.

If you enjoyed the movie An Inconvenient Truth and are interested in areas susceptible to global warming, you can view dynamic maps created about climate change and sea level.

Only 15 feet...

Rising seas will have dramatic effects on regions with low topography like Florida. The dark blue areas are less than 5 meters (16 feet) above sea level. This means no more Gold Coast... No more Miami, no more South Beach, no more Palm Beach, no more Fort Lauderdale... the pricest, most beautiful beach front real estate in the world gone!

Twenty years ago there was a beach at the end of Worth Avenue in Palm Beach, Florida... it is all but washed away... nothing left but the retaining sea wall... Once the ice in Greenland has melted... Florida will look like this image. Millions of people displaced... seeking food, shelter... this could happen in a matter of months. Nobody is ready for this. Noone.

From NASA website
Image credit: Shuttle Radar Topography Mission

Angela Lindvall & the Ocean...

Nano particles in cosmetics is a silly, dangerous idea... for sure... yet nanotechnology in solar cells and battery chemistry could save our collective bacon. Scientific breakthroughs are always a double edge sword.
Angela's non-profit organization is a wonderful thing... The Collage Foundation... go check it out... they're helping Camp Hill Farm in Pomona, NY which is just a few miles away from the Indian Point nuclear power plant we're all trying to mothball. They grow a wide variety of organic heirloom tomatoes.
Angela is a host for Our Planet on MySpace where she takes a look at the state of the ocean and what we all should be doing about it. She also talks about her plans for her own natural cosmetics line in this interview.
Angela has a huge fan in Hong Kong in the person of Stankens, who hosts a beautiful website dedicated to her fashion work... She is and will forever remain the greatest cat walker who ever graced the runways... Nobody can put her foot down like she can.
Stankens's web homage is still under construction, plans to chronicle her environmental activism.
www.angela-lindvall.net

Thursday, October 18, 2007

Doug Ritter's eQ Multi Light

Doug Ritter of Equipped To Survive® and Aeromedix have teamed up with the folks at Essential Gear to offer the perfect companion to the Doug Ritter Photon Freedom Micro; the Doug Ritter eQ Multi Light is available exclusively from Aeromedix.com for just $14.95!

Weighing less than 1 ounce, with the same "twice-as-bright" Nichia 5mm white LED as the DR Photon and featuring a versatile clip mount that provides 9 light positions.

It is powered by a pair of CR2032 Lithium coin cells. These lithium batteries have a 10-year storage life and excellent cold weather performance. Run time is given as 20 hours and it'll run at maximum brightness for 2.5 hours.

Equipped with a magnifier lens to provide a super focused beam. Available in an exclusive bright yellow case for easier location if dropped.

Rem Alert has purchased an eQ Multi Light to test drive as a hand held video torch for shooting Vlog interviews in darkened situations.

Dominant Wave Theory by Andy Hughes

Andy Hughes's photographs from Dominant Wave Theory illustrated the Polymers Are Forever article by Alan Weisman published in the May/June 2007 issue of Orion magazine.


The US publisher Abrams of this Booth-Clibborn UK title refused to send me a review copy of the book once I started questioning the motives and dedication of the artist, inquiring as if this was just an exercise in style, or a commitment to clean this mess up... Like Cristo in 1989 who drove 600 miles spewing smog all along the Long Island coast with photographer Gianfranco Gorgonijust just to find the perfect beach spot to place his Earth Wrap globe for the Planet of the Year cover of TIME magazine!

Blue Movement Directory

This amazing tour-de-force of a directory can no longer just be viewed as a resource of organizations dedicated to preserve and protect the oceans, but as a listing of groups and individuals who need to immediately start preparing for the mass exodus from coastal shore lines by millions of people all over the world. RemyC.


Ocean and Coastal Conservation Guide 2005-2006:
The Blue Movement Directory
published by Island Press & edited by Reef Relief Board Member David Helvarg
Paperback, 234 pages $26.95

This one-of-a-kind new reference book details more than 2,000 organizations and institutions working to understand, protect, and restore our ocean and coastal resources and marine heritage. For each entry, the book gives contact information, web addresses, and a brief description of what the organization does. Along with the state-by-state listings of groups involved in fisheries conservation and other causes, the directory includes three detailed sections that identify relevant government agencies, academic marine programs and science centers, and marine and coastal parks.

The Ocean and Coastal Conservation Guide is being launched by The Blue Frontier Campaign, a group working to strengthen America’s ocean constituency.

Editor David Helvarg is a journalist turned activist and author of “Blue Frontier” and “The War Against the Greens.” He is also a Reef Relief Board Member. In addition, Reef Relief's DeeVon Quirolo serves on the Board of The Blue Frontier Campaign.

P.O. Box 19367
Washington, D.C. 20036
(202) 387 - 8030

Purchase at Amazon

Hundreds Nude on Glacier in Global Warming Protest

The nude volunteers posed for renowned installation artist Spencer Tunick on the Aletsch Glacier in Switzerland.

Read about it on the Greenpeace website.

Tuesday, October 16, 2007

Impacts of Climate Change on Nuclear Power Station Sites

Greenpeace UK
12-03-2007

This review looks at the impacts that climate change will have on the coastal environment around a selection of power station sites, over the lifetime of both existing and proposed nuclear reactors, and examines the risks to which they would be exposed by rising tide levels, coastal erosion and storm surges. It also highlights the even more disastrous consequences that would ensue upon the loss of a significant area of land-based ice such as the Greenland ice shelf, which could result in a catastrophic global sea level rise.
Thanks to Chris Dudley at MDSolar for the story tip.

REM ALERT LAUNCH


I met Bill McKibben last Sunday, at the annual meeting of the Connecticut Fund for the Environment... listening to him, it dawned on me... we're way beyond the threshold point... green design is too little too late... it's time to mobilize for survival... the Winafish blog will collect the technologies required to build moveable cities for the millions of people who are going to be displaced by the rising waters.

I'm on the board of directors of FUSE USA. But I aim to focus my Indian Point efforts on Rock The Reactors, developing concerts and events for any individual or organization interested in building a grassroots movement to sway elected officials, the NRC and Entergy that the time for old nuclear reactors in close proximity to densely populated areas has come and gone.

As the sea level rise from the melting of polar ice on land mass, all the nuclear reactors in the world at water's edge will become vulnerable to flooding and critical failure. This is why so few "bright green" environmentalists dare speak about nuclear power... To quote Bill: "If I had to choose between a coal plant and a nuclear plant, I'd choose a nuclear plant. If I had to choose between spending $3 Billion to build a new nuclear power plant and putting the money into solar and wind, I'd choose solar and wind."

But this is a partial answer, because I realized he'd seen the data. The powers that be, from Bill McKibben, to Al Gore, to Bill McDonough, to David Rockefeller... all realize that as the water's rise, all the nuclear power plants on the planet will become inoperable, just like the two Entergy nuclear power plants that were flooded by Katrina and required a $300 million dollar HUD bail out. Remember it takes 5 to 10 years after a reactor has been shut down before it has cooled enough to be safely decommissioned. We don't have time to wait, or the oceans are doomed to become a radioactive wasteland.

The leaders of this world are suppressing this analysis from you, they are simply trying to avoid wide spread panic. This is why there are now hundreds of concentration camps built around the USA... to control the dramatic effect Martial Law will have on this country once millions of Americans have to evacuate to higher ground from Florida, all other coastal towns. Bill just mentioned Bangla Desh, but who is he kidding? You know darn well all the White House cares about is Palm Beach, Hilton Head, the Hamptons and Malibu!

Many of these people with beach front homes are extremely wealthy, and are already starting to relocate in and around the Denver, Colorado area, around the Mile High City. I learned last year that Bill Gates is planning a large week long environmental conference in Denver and Boulder. Major corporations are now opening up new offices in Denver in expectation of the exodus. It may be the underlying agenda of the EarthWorks conference.

Since 1992, after I left Wetlands, I revived an old project of mine for a traveling laser show called Big Igloo. For years I have been researching the best possible technology to quickly erect and collapse a structure that would enable me to take an interactive laser show on the road, from town to town, park to park, mall to mall, pitching tent and pulling stakes in record time.

Little did I know that this study would suddenly integrate itself with the engineering knowledge necessary to create moveable cities that would enable massive movements of population from surviving the climate change calamity that is about the come on us. So this blog will be about collecting the information necessary to begin the construction of new nomadic intentional communities, in the Burning Man model.

Already blogs like Inhabitat and Tree Hugger have collected quite a bit of information on emergency structures. The mission of Winafish's Rem Alert will be cross-pollinate with military, FEMA, emergency services, Red Cross, with all those of us who want to remain free men, so this country doesn't fall into the hands of Wackenhut and Blackwater! Only if we start preparing now will we be able to preserve the freedoms this country enjoys in a time of evacuation emergency.

It will be Mad Max, but worse, because it will be real... Millions of people will crowd on each other as homes are destroyed, families and friends will no longer handle the burden of displaced relatives, new cities will have to go up in a matter of months, weeks perhaps. This is what the work Big Igloo has done in the last few years can help with.

Our Big Igloo list serv is comprised of some of the top engineers and thinkers in the field, who have been debating and sharing information about these issues for years. We've all been close friends and colleagues, dreaming of a traveling laser show, and now I ask that we start lending the information we have accumulated to formulate a pre-emptive strategy to avoid a planetary trajedy.

Yes, I know, Remy thinks he's Noah... and yeah, so? I'm suddenly saying, writing, what everyone's been quietly thinking... but dared not share out loud. We've all seen the pictures, we've all done the math... as Greenland melts, the seas rise... it's simple Newtonian physics... someone has to step up to the plate. It just turns out the Big Igloo team is the best qualified to take on the task.

I'm asking all my friends, and all the people I have worked with over the years, to please forgive me my inconsistencies, my temper tantrums, my poverty... I need you all back for this, my heart is crying out. The focus of our lives needs to change... We've designed the green world, brought about green consumer culture, revived the anti-nuclear movement... now it's time to bring it all together into a singular voice, a singular vision.

14.000 years ago, a similar thing happened. In Florida, there are underwater caves 200 feet deep with stalactites and stalagmites. All over the world, there are temples and stone structures off the coast of India, Cuba, Egypt... everywhere, well documented in Underworld by Graham Hancock. The sea rose 200 feet... practically overnight.

I want to thank Bill McKibben for his inspiration... I frankly didn't expect to like him... I'd read his books and I found them to be shallow, exploitative of the green scene... I didn't understand the human dimension of the man. I didn't understand that what he was doing is writing for the mainstream... he brought up the rear... shamed the elitist in me... woke up middle America.

Thanks Bill.