Stop the flood of catalogs!

Greetings of the season! I post this in the interest of promoting a “greener” one. As a Connecticut College Building Environmental Representative and long-term member of the Environmental Modeling Committee, I’d like to share a “waste minimization” resource that I discovered through the Alix in Wonderland Blog of my subscription to National Geographic’s “Green Guide”. There is a FREE online service Web site called CATALOG CHOICE that you can use to stop the flood of unwanted catalogs that clog your mailboxes, both here and at home. Once you’ve thumbed through them all and made your holiday-gift-giving decisions, use Catalog Choice to get off those mailing lists and look forward to seeing an emptier mailbox come January. It takes up to ten weeks to cycle out of many catalog mailing lists, so do it now, and be patient. Simply go to the site and register. You then go through the alphabetized list to select the catalogs that you no longer wish to receive. Your privacy is protected. You can also assist in the effort by adding catalogs that you receive, but that are not in the database as yet.

Companies and merchants also wish to know who does not want their catalogs, as that saves them money, too. Catalog Choice is a sponsored project of the Ecology Center. It is endorsed by the National Wildlife Federation and the Natural Resources Defense Council, and funded by the Overbrook Foundation, the Merck Family Fund, and the Kendeda Fund. They provide all the wonderful reasons why this is so good for the Earth on the Web site. Think of the trees that will go uncut, the barrels of oil saved, the gasoline not used, and smiles on the faces of relieved mail carriers! Happy Holidays.

Very Green SGA meeting

So I attended pretty much the entire SGA meeting tonight, and I’m glad I did. There were three environmentally-related items that were brought up. First, a statement endorsing Focus the Nation was almost unanimously passed. Second, the proposal for a sustainable food co-op potentially in the former Harkness dining hall was overwhelmingly supported but tabled until the plan is elaborated on more. Lastly, the proposal for an SGA exec board position to coordinate environmental efforts was also widely supported, but was quickly voted to be tabled as well, simply due to the fact that everyone was very tired and wanted to give it the full discussion it deserved. It’s kind of ridiculous; I just wrote this week’s Voice article, and acknowledged that things would likely change before it was published, and here they have–this is exactly the sort of thing I would have liked to write about, and also, the congressional energy bill passed the House and will be voted on in the Senate tomorrow. Exciting times at Conn and around the world.

So here’s the summary:

Focus the Nation endorsement: strongly supported, voted, passed

Harkness Sustainable Foods Co-op: strongly supported, tabled

Environmental exec board position: strongly supported, tabled

Green Progress Being Born Right Now

This article was first published in the College Voice on 12/7/07. Written by Alex Krogh-Grabbe and Pat Wallace.

There are so many exciting changes in climate policy happening right now, that this may be old news before it reaches your eyes. While we might be anxious about this from a journalistic perspective, it’s thrilling to see that the changes we desperately need are actually happening.

Before getting to all the positive news, we want to address a few issues presented by Prof. Monce in his most recent letter. First, he tries to argue that we missed his assertion that “a single piece of confirmed contrary evidence” can overturn an established scientific theory. We didn’t miss his claim, but since policy is being formed on climate change right now, policymakers need to rely on the best science available. Even though Prof. Monce might disagree, the best available science about climate change points decisively to human-produced greenhouse gases as the primary cause.

Consider also that ethical-but-misguided scientists like Prof. Monce make up a small minority of “climate deniers”. Most of those who dispute the current state of climate science are in the employ of oil, coal, and auto companies, or far-right political think-tanks. We urge Prof. Monce to be as critical of his own theory as he asks us to be of ours.

But this dry dispute has diluted this column for too long. We’re moving on. News about climate change is now dominated by a happy and hopeful exclamation mark, not a murky question mark.

In the next few days (perhaps by the time you read this) the US Senate will vote on the 2007 Energy Bill, which has provisions raising fuel efficiency standards from 25 to 35 mpg, and possibly a Renewable Portfolio Standard, which requires electrical utilities to get 15% of their power from clean energy by 2020. This will be a fantastic step forward for a political body that has recently been unacceptably stagnant. It’s a great step, but it’s just one step; we must hope and demand that whoever is elected president next fall will bring the US up to par with the rest of the world. We need to work toward much higher investment in clean energy, a moratorium on new coal plants, and a reduction in subsidies for dirty energy. This will inject bright green power into our economy, creating millions of new jobs and the sort of prosperity we demand.

Also going down this week are the international climate negotiations in Bali, Indonesia. Delegations from nearly every country in the world are meeting this week and next to generate a successor to the Kyoto Protocol. The Kyoto agreement required that signatory nations reduce their greenhouse gas emissions to 5% below 1990 levels by 2012. Until now, only Australia and the US were the only industrialized countries to not ratify the Protocol. But just a few days ago, the brand new Australian prime minister announced that he would sign the treaty, leaving the United States as the last industrialized nation holding out against it. There are great hopes that Bali will set the stage for a meeting after the Bush administration leaves office in which a new international climate action plan can be created.

These phenomenal political initiatives show that the American people, and the people of the world, have realized that the time for environmental action is now.

Monce Letter #3

This letter originally appeared in the College Voice on 11/30/07

I’d like to respond again to Mr. Krogh-Grabbe, and now also the Renewable Energy Club (REC).

First, Mr. Krogh-Grabbe: he seems to have missed my argument in the first part of my article of November 9,16th, in which I state that all it takes is a single piece of confirmed contrary evidence to overturn a hypothesis, while it takes a very large amount of data to confirm a hypothesis. This is the way science operates. The fact that the data I presented is a “small sample” has nothing to do with its validity in refuting a hypothesis. I’ll present another example: in the late 1800’s a truly “overwhelming majority” (to use the REC’s phrase) of physicists were convincced that light traveled through a substance called the “ether”. Then along came Michelson and Morley who did an experiment to measure the ether. They failed in their attempt. In fact, Michelson remained so convinced, even after their failed experiment, that he would not give up the idea of the ether. However, that ONE single experiment overturned our notions of light, and laid the foundations for Einstein’s relativity. The experiment wasn’t really a failure, it was just nature telling us we were wrong in our thinking.

The REC accuses me of scaring them because of I offer no alternative to stopping solar variation. Of course I do not; there isn’t a solution. We live with the star we have. There is absolutely nothing we can do at present to alter in any way our star’s output. However, I don’t think all is lost. Looking at the historical data I presented I would have assumed that when presented with the fact that the Middle Ages were much warmer than today and no major ecological disaster occurred, that would be a comforting revelation. I look forward to perhaps some wine from Great Britain again. In fact, looking at the data for 10-100,000 year time frames shows the current variation to be well within past trends; there is nothing today outside of the variability the planet has shown in the past. The REC also is irresponsible when it invokes the scare image of imminent coastal flooding of New England and Florida, which I assume refers to the rising ocean levels. A very recent paper reappraises sea-level rise rates and adjusts the data using GPS techniques, thus giving an even more accurate estimate than that given in the recent IPCC report. The IPCC reports 1.8 mm/year, while the new report gives a value of 1.3 mm/yr (Woppelman et al, Global Planetary Change, vol 57, 396 (2007). I assume New London qualifies as coastal region and has an average elecation of maybe at most 2 meters. So using both the IPCC and the new values we find that New London will be under water in either 1100 years or 1500 years. That’s a long time from now. It also assumes the climate won’t change again, which the historical data tells us is most unlikely.

Where in my article did I ever exhibit a “do-nothing attitude”? If the REC is going to use personal insults as an intellectual argument, they could at least back up such statements. In the very last paragraph of the article I state quite clearly that I would like to see the entire US transportation system to be petroleum free. How is that “doing nothing?” I also never stated anywhere that I thought reducing CO2 emissions is a worthless effort. The REC might want to look back into the Environmental Modeling Committee minutes of a couple of years ago and see who was the prime supporter of installing a large number of solar panels for campus energy generation before they accuse me of trying to “stop their greening efforts.” Further, would the REC support the construction of nuclear power plants for electric generation? They have absolutely no CO2 emission. If not, I cannot take their rather emotional and political fight for CO2 reduction too seriously from a scientific standpoint.

- Michael Monce, Professor of Physics