Thursday February 5th, the University of Massachusetts participated in the National Teach-In on Global Warming Solutions by welcoming a host of UMass researchers, research directors, and Amherst community leaders to talk about Global Warming. Vice Chancellor Paul Kostecki made the introductory remarks on the university-wide research efforts in clean energy. He praised the recent decrease in energy and water consumption on campus. He explained that currently the university pays for the removal of used cooking oil from the DiningCommons but that there are plans to use the cooking oil to create biofuel. The future of this and other projects looks bright according to Kostecki. Many “shovel ready” projects are poised to begin. He said, “I think the stars are in alignment and we finally have a president who gets it”.
His remarks were followed by those of Professor James Manwell, the director of the Renewable Energy Research Laboratory. Manwell spoke on the university’s history with wind turbine research. He also discussed the logistical difficulties in developing turbine technology like transport and permitting. He referred to the CapeWind project and General Electrics inability to keep up with the demand for turbine production.
Professor Raymond Bradley, Director of Climate System Research Center, took on the question: Is global warming real? His answer was unequivocally yes. He presented NASA data, data gleaned from a weather station on Kilimanjaro, and computer modeled climate scenarios based on that data.
Opposition is essential. You can't have a debate with out it. The Great Global Warming Swindle serves a purpose, beyond presenting Britain's historic relationship with CO2, it also acts as a catalyst creating dialogues about how the environment is studied, modeled, and prioritized. People draw conclusions from film but a good film does not dictate truth so the bottom line is usually... well... it's complicated. Thank god there is a Facebook status for that one. Everyone knows what's happening between the Earth and us? Yeah, it's complicated.
This usually kills the conversation or romantic interest. But things with The Great Global Warming Swindle are different. Questions are posed, answers are posed, all and all it's pretty ambivalent... until the second half of the film. Somehow a film about the 'faux-climate change' becomes about... the world vs. Africa? Climate change may still be debatable but Sub-Saharan Africa has undeniable problems, big problems. Worse still, monies earmarked for it's problems have constantly been misspent. Along with the neglect there are decades long abuses reaching far back before zealous environmental initiatives. From the progressive environmentally conscious resource development (mentioned in the film) to critical life saving drugs, the people of Africa don't always get what they need. In 2004 $14.5 million of a $80 million USAID budget was spent on malaria drugs. The rest on salaries. The unnecessary inefficient solar panels that the film dwells on are the tip of the iceberg (don't worry this one doesn't appear to be melting).
The film glaringly omits that malaria is such a danger in Sub-Saharan Africa not because of it's tropical location (or even because of the continuousdistribution of the ineffective chloroquine) but because 22 million people have HIV/AIDS and are vulnerable to parasitic diseases that flourish is the tropics . Furthermore, according to the U.S. National Debate Topic 2007-2008 Heath Care in Sub-Saharan Africa, because there is a stigma in the developed world, Africans (especially men) are reluctant to find out if they have HIV/AIDS but regardless many suspect they do and so they take doses of their spouses ARV drugs, making the drugs less effective and thus requiring a greater expense to develop new drugs. Like many things on earth, attitudes as well as diseases are interrelated like this recent cholera outbreak in Zimbabwe illustrates. Sure Africa could join the big leagues, burn some coal and spray some DDT, but if you learn anything from the global climate change debate let it be that things are interrelated and very complicated.
Nemo, and many of hispomacentridae brethren, are actually lost this time. Not like last time when they were merely haphazardly misplaced. Nope. Baby fish -excuse me- sea kittens can not find their respective parents and thus can not learn how or even where to survive. If Disney magic doesn’t make you sympathetic maybe this report by NPR will.
That climate change may be creating oceanic bubbles of death should be unsurprising... manbearpig IS real. Enough said. What really piqued my interest however was a quick reread of the Fourth Assessment Report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change(IPCC), released just two years ago. It seems like the Nobel Prize winning organization failed to catalog increased wind speed as a climate driver for coastal systems. (See Chapter 6 Table 6.2)
Perhaps it was ment to fall under ‘storm intensity’, perhaps no one could have foreseen oxygen deprived expanses of the ocean devastating ecosystems, or maybe the IPCC is really as bad as they say. Joseph Romm, author of Hell and High Water, went so far as to suggest the IPCC’s last report became obsolete shortly after it was published. So when’s the next one due? 2014. If only the ocean could hold its breath until then.
