As a case in point, a report published in the April issue of The American Naturalist details how the ‘mimic poison dart frog’ (Ranitomeya imitator) parted ways with promiscuity to adapt a lifestyle as the first scientifically recognized genetically monogamous amphibian.

Like other frog species, poison dart frogs incur a certain amount of risk by laying their eggs in water. Although water is a biological prerequisite for frog survival, ponds, lakes and puddles also house predatory fish and other animals that prey on vulnerable eggs and tadpoles. During its evolutionary past, the menace of predation pushed the mimic poison dart frogs away from larger, riskier ponds to the considerably smaller, but safer, pools held by leaves of large bromeliad plants. Unfortunately, although the tree-top bromeliads decreased the rate of frog young predation, the movement from the big ponds raised a separate issue - nutrient limitation.

The big ponds definitely had more predators; but, they also had substantially more food. In fact, the ponds had so much food that a single frog-parent (in this case the male) was able to handle the tadpoles all by himself - a single parent family arrangement was all that was necessary to raise the next generation. In contrast, the waters held by the bromeliads averaged only about 24 milliliters in volume, far too little to hold ample provisions for a startup tadpole. In order to maintain their newly acquired safe housing, the mimic dart frogs had to adapt a new tactic.

Male mimic dart frogs had previously evolved the capacity to both transport and guard young tadpoles, but having moved to the suburbs, the females needed to help-out with feeding; rearing had become too difficult a task for the males to handle on their own. If they were to ensure the survival of their young, the days of leaving dad to care for the kids were over - monogamy was the best option. Unlike males, female mimic darts have the ability to produce eggs. To do their part, mom frogs adopted a strategy called trophic egg feeding, a practice in which they lay unfertilized eggs in the bromeliad pools for the tadpoles to eat.

An absolutely amazing video of this monogamous behavior was recorded by the BBC during the dissertation work of Jason Brown. Jason was the lead author of the cited paper, and the mimic dart footage was included in the David Attenborough narrated documentary “Life in Cold Blood.”

This is awesome:

#

Reference:

Brown, J., Morales, V., & Summers, K. (2010). A Key Ecological Trait Drove the Evolution of Biparental Care and Monogamy in an Amphibian The American Naturalist, 175 (4), 436-446 DOI: 10.1086/650727

At the time of the lead paint cases, some corporate lawyers worried about the implications of the rulings for their clients, while activists hoped the cases could be a jumping-off point for public nuisance lawsuits against known polluters, gun manufacturers and other corporate baddies.

But despite all the worry and hype, nothing much happened immediately following those rulings. Then, in late 2008, Kivalina, an Inupiat Eskimo village, proved all those corporate worry-warts right. The small barrier island Kivalina sits on is eroding, a fact that will eventually require the mass-evacuation of the entire village. And Kivalina villagers are suing the dozen or so oil companies they believe are responsible, citing the companies’ practices, and the climate change that results, as a “public nuisance.” An Oakland court dismissed the case, but the people of Kivalina and their lawyers are appealing and it’s starting to look like they may get somewhere.

Meanwhile, a case that actually pre-dated the 2006 lead paint cases, and which trial watchers at the time believed would be almost immediately affected by those rulings, is just now getting its day in court. Back in 2005, Hurricane Katrina victims brought a class-action lawsuit against the country’s main greenhouse gas emitters, including Shell, ExxonMobil, BP and Chevron, as well as Honeywell and American Electric. The plaintiffs claimed that these companies had a duty to “avoid unreasonably endangering the environment, public health, public and private property.”

Like the Kivalina case, the Katrina case was dismissed by a lower court. Then last October a three-judge federal appeals court allowed the case to move forward. In February, the same court decided to re-examine the case with nine justices. “The plaintiffs allege that the defendants’ operation of energy, fossil fuels, and chemical industries in the United States caused the emission of greenhouse gasses that contributed to global warming,” the lawsuit reads. The increase in global surface and air temperatures “in turn caused a rise in sea levels and added to the ferocity of Hurricane Katrina, which combined to destroy the plaintiffs’ private property, as well as public property useful to them.”

There’s a pretty good likelihood that one or the other of these cases will end up before the Supreme Court, a fact that has big polluters pooping their pants. The Kivalina case is particularly worrisome because in addition to public nuisance, it claims that the defendants in the case (Big Oil) knew the consequences of their practices and deliberately covered it up. If the case were to make it all the way to the Supreme Court and any embarrassing emails or, say, whistleblowers were to suddenly appear, the impact could be drastic for the whole industry, and for the environment.

Which leaves me with one big question: Who will play the whistleblower in the climate change version of the Insider? I’m thinking it’s gotta be DiCaprio.

Evidence of that truth was on display last night during the 82nd Annual Academy Awards, when Ric O’Barry - protagonist of the film, The Cove, which took home the trophy for Best Documentary–tried to use his 15 seconds of screen time to jolt new energy into the campaign to halt the dolphin capture and slaughter in Taiji, Japan.

As soon as he got on stage, co-director Fisher Stevens rattled off the obligatory Thank-Yous then included, “My hero, Ric O’Barry, who is not only a hero to this species but to all species.” That’s when O’Barry unfurled a small, plain, black-and-white banner reading, “Text DOLPHIN to 44144.”

That was enough to get the Oscar censors’ attention. Before the other co-director, Louie Psihoyos, could get a word in, the camera cut to the audience and then the orchestra started in on its “exit-the-stage-now” theme.

But the Oscar producers’ shoddy treatment of O’Barry and company only succeeded in getting even more attention to the cause to protect Japan dolphins. This morning’s LA Times gave O’Barry a thumbs up, and the Seattle Post Intelligencer also offered a nod, as did all sorts of bloggers.

“I didn’t know until this morning that holding up the sign was the right thing to do,” O’Barry told me this morning as he prepped for an interview with CNN’s Anderson Cooper that will take place later today. “People are taking action because of it. But the Academy doesn’t like that. And I thought I was screwing up Louie’s speech when they turned on the exit music.”

Psihoyos got a chance to get say his piece backstage, telling reporters that, “The biggest thing will be when dolphins are no longer slaughtered for meat,” and  “If people take action, [they] can solve this problem.” As of this morning, about 40,000 people have sent the “dolphin” texts, which connects them to an online petition sponsored by Care2.

Far more important, though, is that the Oscar award will open the way for a widespread theatrical release for The Cove in Japan. As O’Barry wrote in an email to supporters at 2 am this morning:

“Japan has 126 million people; only 600 have seen The Cove so far. Those who saw it were shocked and dismayed that this slaughter was happening in their country. We need to enlist their help and the help of millions of their fellow citizens to stop the Japanese government from issuing 23,000 permits annually to slaughter dolphins.”

As I came to learn when I traveled to Japan with O’Barry last September to write a profile of him for Earth Island  Journal, the only way the dolphin slaughter will stop is if  Japanese citizens come to oppose it. The movie will have to be a key part of generating that opposition, since many Japanese are unaware of the annual hunt. “It’s really all about Japan for us,” O’Barry said to me this morning. “It guarantees there is interest in seeing this, even if the government doesn’t want people to see it. People will see it now.”

He said, “If another documentary had won, we would have gotten bumped. It’s a major breakthrough in the campaign. It guarantees a theatrical release in Japan. The distributor was struggling. But a movie that has won the Academy Awards will get into theaters.”

O’Barry said he was extremely nervous as he and the filmmakers walked on stage, but he knew that he had to unfurl his banner message:  “I had butterflies in my stomach. I wanted to throw up on my shoes. But I knew that one billion people were watching, and I had to do it.”

O’Barry is no stranger to the movie-making business, having spent years as a stuntman and animal trainer on the Flipper series and number of other television shows and films. Still, he said that being at the Oscars made him feel a bit like an odd fish. “I felt different than everyone else in the room,” he said, recalling his emotions in the moments before the award was announced. “I’m not in the industry. I am out of time and out of place. I don’t belong there at all. I am thinking what this will mean to the campaign if The Cove is mentioned.”

O’Barry said that it was great that James Cameron shook his hand as he walked down the aisle, and that backstage George Clooney told Psihoyos that it was lame he didn’t get a chance to talk. Oh, and that “the guy” who gave them the Oscar trophies was very encouraging and complimentary and said he had seen The Cove twice. O’Barry might not have recognized him, but “the guy” was, well, Matt Damon.

To learn more about the effort to halt the dolphin killing in Japan, visit: www.savejapandolphins.org.

]]> http://thefastertimes.com/science/2010/03/08/the-coves-ric-obarry-recaps-his-oscar-moment/feed/ http://thefastertimes.com/science/2010/03/04/is-cap-and-dividend-the-answer-to-all-this-carbon-business/ http://thefastertimes.com/science/2010/03/04/is-cap-and-dividend-the-answer-to-all-this-carbon-business/#comments Thu, 04 Mar 2010 23:29:19 +0000 Jason Mark http://thefastertimes.com/science/2010/03/04/is-cap-and-dividend-the-answer-to-all-this-carbon-business/ This post appears courtesy The EnvironmentaList.

If you were searching for a parable about the dangers of tactical absolutism (you know, my-way-or-the-highway type thinking), the rise and fall of cap-and-trade legislation would be a good place to start.

In the months leading up to the passage of the Waxman-Markey climate bill in the House last summer, many influential enviros were in a  don’t-rock-the-boat mood. Privately, most greens agreed that the legislation was deeply flawed, especially its giveaway of 85 percent of polluter permits and its cave-in to agribusiness interests. But the conventional wisdom among green mandarins was that any discussion of other options was politically naïve, quixotic even. The cap and trade defenders were often so convinced of their own sophistication that they descended to condescension. At Climate Progress, Joe Romm upbraided NASA Scientist James Hansen for backing a carbon tax: “Your opposition to Waxman-Markey is ill-conceived and unhelpful,” a headline there blared. “There isn’t going to be a carbon tax nor should there be. Get over it and move on.” Grist.org columnist David-shut-yer-piehole-Roberts was nearly hysterical in his defense of cap-and-trade, trashing a Thomas Friedman column in support of a carbon tax and concluding that “It’s Friedman who doesn’t seem to ‘get’ cap-and-trade.”

After Waxman-Markey passed, all eyes turned to the Senate and, to their credit, critics of cap-and-trade kept up their debunking in an effort to influence legislation in the upper chamber. At the same time, cap-and-trade defenders continued to proclaim that other options had no legislative chance sand so should stay out of the discussion. When the Story of Stuff’s Annie Leonard had the temerity to question cap-and-trade’s logic, Roberts slammed her for her “Romanticism.” He wrote: “This is the worst feature of the C&T bashers (and carbon tax advocates): their utter political naivete.” Environmental Defense Fund, which has staked its reputation on cap-and-trade success, hastily put together a rip off video, “The Facts of Cap and Trade.” The video tries to impress viewers with its seriousness by highlighting the fact that the presentation comes “From an Economist.”

As the debate continues ad naseum, a funny thing has happened: An alternative solution called cap-and-dividend is gaining ground and could  supplant the much heralded (and equally hated) cap-and-trade proposal. Under cap-and-dividend, producers and importers of fossil fuels will have to buy polluter permits that will be auctioned off by the government. Some of that money will go toward making investments in clean energy. But the rest will be returned to Americans in the form of a rebate — about $1,000 a year for a family of four. Everyone except for the wealthiest 20 percent of us would get some kind of rebate. By raising energy prices, the system would discourage people from being fossil fuel hogs, and would over time reduce emissions.

Pie in the sky? Not exactly. Senator Maria Cantwell, a Democrat from Washington, is pushing a cap-and-dividend bill. She even has a Republican co-sponsor, Susan Collins of Maine. What gives the Cantwell-Collins bill a chance of success is its simplicity: A mere 40 pages long, the CLEAR Act boasts the virtue of brevity; it’s a fraction of the length of the Waxman-Markey bill. And the measure is picking up media endorsements. The Economist recently wrote: “Of all the bills that would put a price on carbon, cap-and-dividend seems the most promising. … The most attractive thing about the bill is that it’s honest.” The Washington Post gave the Cantwell-Collins proposal a nod, writing last week in an editorial that “there is a chance that the failure of the House’s bill in the Senate and the search for a Plan B will yet produce better legislation.”

So, with cap-and-trade on the ropes and a sensible alternative, cap-and-dividend, gaining momentum, I’m wondering if the chorus will change its tune. Will EDF, for example, be willing to ditch their pet project and support another carbon-reduction mechanism? Will the green bloggers lend their support to a different tactic?
I think it’s only fair to ask: Who’s being politically naïve now?

By Tom Athanasiou, director of Eco Equity and a member of the Greenhouse Development Rights authors group. This piece originally appeared in

First, a confession: This is not another enumeration of confident judgments. I will not tell you that Copenhagen was an unmitigated failure. Or that this failure was Obama’s fault. Or that, as is the new fashion, China was the ugliest of them all. I will not say that the South’s negotiators made impossible demands. Or argue that the United Nations’ process is unwieldy and obsolete. I will not claim that only domestic US action really matters. Nor will I talk of a “North-South impasse” or a “US-China polluters pact,” two popular formulations that misleadingly imply an equal division of blame.

I will say this: Almost two decades after I started working on climate change, I was happily astounded to witness the crystallization, on the streets of Copenhagen, of a grassroots movement that was both energetic and sophisticated, and to see global civil society groups working in solidarity with the leaders of the world’s poorest and most vulnerable nations to press a collective agenda. And I can tell you something else: Our chances of preventing climate catastrophe rests in large part on the ability of this new alliance to communicate to the world’s richest and most powerful peoples that the emissions emergency is, above all things, a crisis of justice.

As everyone knows, the Copenhagen talks failed to catapult us into the ambitious global mobilization we need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. But this was never going to happen anyway. What did happen, as the veteran Bangladeshi policy activist Saleemul Huq put it, was “a shaking of the traditional pieces of the global geo-political puzzle and their landing in a new and unfamiliar configuration.” In this sense, the question of success and failure is moot. The real question is whether the new configuration offers us fresh ways forward.

This question cannot be answered by the usual logic of environmental campaigning. Now is a time for reflection – not for pushing forward one more meeting, one more demonstration, one more demand. Of course we need action, and we need it fast. But we also need strategy, because Huq’s “unfamiliar configurations” are going to settle in the midst of another big year that will culminate with another major December climate showdown, this time in Mexico City. If 2010 is major, 2011 and 2012 promise (or threaten) to be just as important, as do the other years in the brief time ahead – the post-Copenhagen era in which we must begin to act.

The Copenhagen summit marked a pivot in world history, a defining moment – if not a decisive one. The climate negotiations saw the debut of a new geopolitics. In it, China looms large, the United States appears weakened (though still with the ability to do great harm or good), Brazil and India are rising, the European Union looks progressive but ineffectual, and a chorus of smaller states have been emboldened to defend their interests in the face of an existential crisis. As for that “second superpower” – world public opinion – it is, frankly, divided against itself. Seen in this way, the end of 2009 may well mark the real beginning of the twenty-first century, in the sense that 1914 and the start of World War I are commonly taken to mark the real beginning of the twentieth. The hope must be that our new century won’t be as hot and brutal as the last one was cold and bloody.

Copenhagen was about far more than the climate talks. To make sense of it, look at it as a milestone in a process that’s still unfolding. The negotiations did not just occur in the official meeting halls of the Bella Center. They took the form of countless debates that happened in the NGO “Convergence Center” on Copenhagen’s Nørrebro, on countless internet comment boards, in civic spaces around the world. The critical debates of Copenhagen spanned the entire globe and a huge swath of opinion. Justice and science, realism and necessity, capitalism and democracy, the cost of affluence and the rights of the poor – it was all in play, encoded in the chants and banners of the estimated 100,000 people who clogged Tivoli Square on December 12 demanding meaningful action. And – most importantly – these debates were a key background to the blow-by-blow negotiations occurring among nation-states.

This surely is one of the core achievements of Copenhagen. Were it not for the “street heat,” even the provisional possibilities of the new situation would not be ours. The massive demonstrations outside the summit halls, the activist flash mobs within the conference, the demonstrations, and constant in-your-face pressure – this and much more had an effect not just on the tone of the negotiations, but on the substance as well. Even after civil society groups were ejected from the Bella Center, their demands echoed in the formal negotiating rooms. The green movement showed itself to be far clearer on the logic of climate justice than it was even a year ago. The ubiquitous placards calling for an accord that would be “fair, ambitious, and binding” were the right ones. The demonstrators showed smartness and savvy wrapped in a sense of urgency.

The point is that, as a focus for public education and movement building, Copenhagen was an incalculable success. Everyone – from Barack Obama to Lumumba Di-Aping, the Sudanese chair of the South’s G77 negotiating bloc, to you and me – knows a hell of a lot more about climate change and its politics than we did a year ago.

Not that we didn’t already know that we face a planetary emergency. This has been obvious for years. The difference now is that – thanks to the global campaign 350.org, and Mohamed Nasheed, the President of the Maldives, and a whole lot of terrified scientists – we know that we know it. And we know it in an altogether appalling manner. We know, at least in outline, what will happen in Africa, though we may wish we didn’t. And Tibet. And the Australian grain belt, and Florida, and the southern oceans, and of course Greenland. We’ve talked about the bogs, the permafrost, and the risks to forests. We’ve heard, finally, about the threats to people: We know how they will suffer, how they will die.

Copenhagen did not deliver the stringent targets and commitments needed to support the fair and ambitious climate accord the protest banners demanded. But this, fortunately, isn’t the end of the story. We can also ask if Copenhagen was a failure when compared not to what is necessary, but rather to what was possible. We can explore whether (this is a key twist) it opened new possibilities, or at least prevented new possibilities from being foreclosed.

Clearly there were successes in Copenhagen. The emergence of a semi-organized bloc of “Most Vulnerable Countries” (the acronym is MVCs) is news that will stay news, and not just because of the tension between the MVCs and “emerging economies” like China and India. The larger issue is that the MVCs have come to know themselves as frontline states, and in so doing have irrevocably transformed the global politics of climate crisis. It goes without saying that, in the coming battles, the most vulnerable will reserve much of their ire for the wealthy countries of the North.

Witness the open letter that South African Archbishop and Nobel Prize Winner Desmond Tutu sent on December 15, after a walkout by the unified African bloc led to a sudden halt in the official negotiations. The Africans aimed to pressure the wealthy countries into honoring their obligations to accept stringent new reduction targets, and Tutu wished to make the stakes quite clear. His letter was blunt: “If temperatures are not kept down then Africa faces a range of devastating threats such as crop yield reductions in places of as much as 50 percent in some countries by 2020.… A global goal of about two degrees C is to condemn Africa to incineration and no modern development.”

On that same note, the effectiveness of the 350 campaign is another Copenhagen achievement. By the end of the two-week melee-cum-jamboree, 112 countries had endorsed the demand to stabilize carbon dioxide levels at 350 parts per million (it’s now at 387 ppm, and rising.) The 350 ppm target, which once seemed so obscure, had by the end of the talks become an expression of plain speech. And, at least among the activists, it had almost entirely supplanted the 2°C temperature target as the measure of climate stabilization. This happened thanks to the determined efforts of thousands of citizen-activists across the globe who had made the number the cornerstone of their campaigns.

As a goal, 350 ppm is hard to explain without recourse to charts and other technical idioms. Suffice it to say that in Copenhagen 350 emerged as the alternative to reduction targets that would condemn low-lying and island states and other “most vulnerable” areas to near-certain apocalypse. The “official” target, as agreed by the G8 and many others, is commonly expressed in terms of a global emissions reduction to 50 percent below 1990 levels by 2050, a target that is often said, especially by politicians, to be “2°C compliant.” But that’s stretching the arithmetic. More precisely, the G8 supports a slack and politically expedient emissions pathway that the vulnerable countries and their allies are determined to cast aside. The vulnerable nations didn’t settle for a “more honest” 2°C target, but instead counterattacked with the slogan “1.5 to Survive.” This was a call for a 350 ppm target, which has perhaps a 50-50 chance of holding the warming below 1.5°C, and something like an 85 percent chance of keeping it below 2°C.

The Copenhagen Accord (.pdf, ~150k), of course, did not open the road to 350. What it does is provide a process by which governments can step forward to publish reduction pledges. This will be a very big deal, but evaluating these pledges will be complicated. What, after all, should a national emissions pledge be compared to? A projection of business-as-usual emissions? If so, which one? A measure of per-capita “emissions rights?” If so, what to do about the fact that the “atmospheric space” is already exhausted? Should historical responsibility come into play? If so, starting when? How should the obligations of rich countries be compared to those of poor? And what about the rich people within poor countries? Or for that matter the poor people within rich ones?

These questions are not easy. They are further confused by the matter of domestic vs. international obligation. Should the United States – which tops the charts in measures of capacity, responsibility, and per-capita emissions – be able to do its fair share within its own borders? Or does it have obligations to more vulnerable countries around the world?

Then there’s the problem of loopholes. These are critical, because the United States and other wealthy countries have built plenty of them into their emissions reductions projections. The critical loopholes are surplus allowed emissions (so-called “hot air” from the collapse of the Soviet economy in 1990), forestry and agricultural credits (calculated from bogus baselines), and of course “non-additional offsets” (which represent reductions that would have happened anyway). If they’re allowed to stand, then the wealthy countries will have to do almost nothing at all.

The bottom line is that the fundamental impasse over North-South “burden sharing” – who does what, when, and where, and, most importantly, who pays – is still unresolved. The crux of the problem is that we in the wealthy world are simply not carrying our own weight. Consider just a simple comparison between the United States and China. Since 1850, the United States has emitted some 350 gigatons of CO₂, according to the US Department of Energy; during that same time, China has emitted about 125 gigatons. Now take the two countries’ pledged emissions reductions by 2020. China is promising to cut 2.5 gigatons of CO₂, , or a 40 percent improvement in energy intensity; the United States, for its part, has committed to cutting only 1.25 gigatons. In short, our historical responsibility for climate change is greater, yet the Chinese are the ones undertaking the larger obligation.

Since the summit didn’t succeed, the inevitable question becomes, “Why not?” One possible answer is that, as the street protesters had it, we need “system change not climate change”: Our governments, in thrall to corporate interests, are incapable of organizing a decisive response to the climate crisis. Another explanation is that the United States was willing to undermine a multilateral agreement with the cynical goal of avoiding real emissions commitments while, if possible, looking good. A third possibility is that the Obama administration, desperate to break Senate Republicans’ hold on climate policy, was willing to take any deal, no matter how weak, as a way to “unlock” the Congressional stalemate. Jamie Henn of 350.org captured this point of view when he quipped to me, “This isn’t a negotiation; it’s a hostage crisis.”

Alternatively, Copenhagen’s failure may have been China’s fault. This explanation, alas, has become quite popular. It demands discussion, beginning with a widely read, and rather fantastically misleading article titled “How Do I Know China Wrecked the Copenhagen Deal? I Was in the Room,” by Mark Lynas, a reporter-activist who was part of the Maldives’ negotiating team. Here’s Lynas’ key paragraph:

To those who would blame Obama and rich countries in general, know this: it was China’s representative who insisted that industrialized country targets, previously agreed as an 80% cut by 2050, be taken out of the deal. “Why can’t we even mention our own targets?” demanded a furious Angela Merkel. Australia’s prime minister, Kevin Rudd, was annoyed enough to bang his microphone. Brazil’s representative too pointed out the illogicality of China’s position. Why should rich countries not announce even this unilateral cut? The Chinese delegate said no, and I watched, aghast, as Merkel threw up her hands in despair and conceded the point. Now we know why – because China bet, correctly, that Obama would get the blame for the Copenhagen accord’s lack of ambition.

It’s easy to see why Lynas’s fly-on-the-wall account is so compelling, particularly to Westerners primed to see China as an implacable mercantilist threat to their preferred style of capitalism. Certainly Lynas’s conclusions are much in line with the North’s strategy of hiding behind the emerging economies. But caution is in order here. It’s important to go to the core of China’s inflexibility, which, as Lynas subsequently put it, is that “Copenhagen has opened up a chasm between sustainability and equity.” How so? Because, although “NGOs that ideologically support equity defend the right of developing countries to increase their emissions for two to three more decades at least,” in fact, “there is no room for expansion by anyone.”

This, alas, is almost true. The central fact of our carbon-constrained future is that China – along with India and South Africa, Brazil and Mexico, and indeed the entire “emerging” world – stands at the edge of an impossible future. These countries are expected to constrain their carbon emissions while at the same time (here’s the punch line) pulling hundreds of millions of their citizens out of poverty. Yet the only model of modern prosperity that they have to work with is one based on huge per-capita emissions. No wonder they balk at demands from the North.

In order to halt catastrophic climate change, the major emitters must act decisively. All of them, at once. But this will only be fair, and indeed it can only happen, if the wealthiest among us pay for most of the action. That, however, is politically impossible (see: US Senate). And it’s impossible, in part, because the debate about “fair burden sharing” that has raged among climate negotiators during the last few years has not reached the public consciousness. We do not know our duties. The Northern climate movement has quite failed to explain the structure of the global problem to its home constituencies. The term “climate justice” might be well understood by green NGO-istas and, say, Bolivian president Evo Morales, but that doesn’t mean that most people get it.

What exactly is this “global problem”? First, that we’ve reached the limits to growth, and done so in a world that’s bitterly divided between haves and have-nots. Second, that despite decades of warning, the wealthy nations have neglected to demonstrate that low-carbon development is possible. Third, that the industrialized countries have stonewalled, rejecting the demand for meaningful reduction commitments. And finally, that China – which, despite its faults, has lifted hundreds of millions of people from poverty – has emerged as the chief voice of a bloc that refuses to choose between developmental justice and climate stabilization.

The situation is easy enough to visualize. Consider the “G8 style” emissions pathway that provoked China’s backroom confrontation with the North. The details of this pathway are that: 1) global emissions peak soon (about 2020) and decline by 2050 to 50 percent below 1990 levels; and 2) Northern emissions simultaneously decline to at least 80 percent below 1990 levels. Now ask yourself – why might China’s rejection of such an offer be reasonable? The answer lies in arithmetic: The remaining global emissions budget is so small that, despite a relatively ambitious program of Northern emission reductions, Southern emissions must still peak soon after global emissions, and then drop almost as rapidly. Further, they must do so while the people of the South are still struggling to escape poverty, and more generally to invent new, dignified, and sustainable models of life. The climate crisis is, in other words, a crisis of development.

I want to be very clear here: The problem is not that poverty alleviation or sustainable development are impossible in a carbon-constrained world. The problem is that they have not been pioneered, that the only proven routes up from poverty still involve an expanded use of energy and seemingly inevitable increase in fossil-fuel use. Which is why it’s almost impossible for the South to imagine an equitable future in which its emissions precipitously decline. The South is concerned that an inequitable climate regime will force a choice between developmental justice and climate protection. And justly so.

This brings us back to China, which despite its wealthy enclaves is a deeply impoverished country. The targets that the Chinese insisted on expunging from the Copenhagen Accord have developmental implications. The South in general has made it quite clear that it will not allow itself to be trapped into sacrificing development for climate protection. More specifically, the Chinese have repeatedly insisted that the North accept an aggregate reduction target that is at the “upper end” of the 25 percent to 40 percent range (from the 1990 baseline) by 2020. Yet the North was attempting to enshrine a global emissions reduction pathway without making any such short-term commitment. Given the North’s refusal to accept stringent targets, what (other than explaining themselves coherently) should the Chinese have done differently? The answer is not obvious.

The wheel is still in spin. As Copenhagen passes into history, the politics of climate obligation may well shift in significant ways. For one thing, although the rich countries may have succeeded in sidelining the Kyoto Protocol (we don’t know yet) they did not manage to remove the presumption that it’s still their move. Nor, despite Copenhagen’s adoption of a pledge-based system, was the momentum of the UN negotiations broken. Copenhagen reaffirmed the need to devise a formal global accord that’s fair, stringent, and capacious enough to contain both the United States and China – while stabilizing Earth’s climate system.

To get there will require admitting a few difficult truths. Like the fact that the United States did a great deal to poison the Copenhagen waters and that, going forward, it may do even more. And that there will be no breakthrough until the wealthy countries pursue stringent domestic reductions, and help to underwrite the larger transition as well. The fact that the South’s biggest emitters have, to a small extent, stepped outside the G77’s overall ranks does nothing to change this underlying reality. The new game is one in which the players as well as the rules belong to a still-emerging world. China’s end-game posture makes this clear enough.

The toughest admission will be that of national obligation, of duty. If we in civil society are to do better than our putative leaders, we must escape the “dysfunctional system” frame that spreads the blame around so thinly. More precisely, we’re going to have to actually work out a coherent way of assigning responsibility for the fundamental deadlock in the international climate negotiations. This gives us a clear mandate: We must fight for a framework within which all countries, but first of all the wealthy ones, make the commitments demanded by the science, by their own record of emissions, and by their fiscal capacity to act. If we’re to assign responsibility, we must also assume it.

Copenhagen, for all its disappointments, marked a turn. The need for an emergency mobilization is obvious, and with it a set of challenges that can no longer be denied. These will get clearer in the years ahead, but the essential situation is before us: With the atmosphere’s ability to absorb carbon critically limited, we face the greatest resource-sharing problem of all time. For all its complexity, the core of this problem can be stated simply enough: What kind of a climate transition would be fair enough to actually work?

The climate problem is and remains a justice problem. It’s more than this, of course, but justice is nonetheless the key. If we fail to solve it in time, it will be in large part because we refused to see it as such.

It all boils down to what venture capitalist and Silicon Valley golden boy Vinod Khosla calls “being technology-neutral”: essentially, if you are too financially or emotionally invested in any one solution, you may lose out on other, possibly better, solutions. Whereas the UK government is the primary funder of research in that country, in the United States, corporations are responsible for about 65% of university research. And while there are issues connected to both government- and corporate-funded research, it seems as though the UK’s model is geared more toward finding appropriate solutions, while the corporate investors and venture capitalists responsible for funding innovation tend to focus on the solutions that will deliver the most profit, not necessarily the most energy savings or emissions reductions.

A study currently underway by the UK Technology Strategy Board is a prime example. About 90 percent of UK buildings are over 100 years old. “We love our old buildings, but they consume an incredible amount of energy and we need to find ways to improve their performance while preserving the existing structure,” Richard Miller, Innovation Platform Leader for the Board told me.

To that end, his agency, which has 1 billion pounds of government funds to spend over the next three years funding projects that explore solutions to the country’s most pressing issues, is funding studies of 87 different technologies. The technologies are being tested in council homes(that’s “the projects” for us Yanks), because, according to Miller, the landlords of these developments are typically responsible for thousands of dwellings. “We wanted to start there because if they find a solution they like, they’ll deploy it across thousands of residences and deliver a meaningful benefit fairly quickly,” Miller said.

The Board is testing a wide range of technologies, from home energy monitoring systems to more invasive add-ons and retrofits to buildings. They are monitoring the performance of each study building and also surveying tenants to determine whether occupants are comfortable with the solutions they’ve been given. After two years, they’ll compile the results into a report and make it publicly available.

“That way, if you’re a council landlord for example, you can read the report and say okay that solution looks like one that would work well for my buildings and my tenants in this location,” Miller explained.

In the United States, on the other hand, venture capitalists have worked themselves into a frenzy over the last few years over all things “smart grid,” an umbrella term that essentially refers to technologies that allow utilities and customers to better understand and thus modify energy usage patterns. The excitement over smart grid applications and technologies has led to increased private funding in that space, which in turn helped to fuel more public interest, culminating in several billion dollars of stimulus package money being thrown at smart grid pilot projects throughout the country.

I’m not saying this technology isn’t worth looking into, or that the government is blindly following the venture community. Clearly Department of Energy Secretary Chu, who is a big fan of smart grid, is an extremely smart guy. The problem is more that with so much money and excitement now flowing around smart grid, there’s little incentive to explore other options. So, while the UK will have 87 solutions to choose from, we will have one. That doesn’t seem like the smartest strategy.

Corporations are corporations and they exist to make money, so no one’s saying they should suddenly take an altruistic approach to research and development investments. Ditto private investors. However, concern has been mounting over the past several years that the lack of state and federal funds for university research in the United States is putting us at a disadvantage in the race toward innovation. Which, funnily enough, could end up hurting those bottom lines in the end, too.

For those of you who haven’t heard, Plastiki is a boat made out of recycled bottles that billionaire Brit and self-proclaimed “eco-adventurer” (or “eco-warrior,” depending on which interview you’re reading) David de Rothschild plans to sail across the Pacific. The aim is to draw attention to the Great Pacific Garbage Patch and de Rothschild has said he plans to include a few scientists in his crew who will conduct studies on how the litter is affecting the ocean. The New York Times has already pointed out that if the boat, which so far has only taken test runs between the San Francisco pier where it’s docked and the nearby seaside town of Sausalito, falls apart in the middle of the treacherous journey to Australia, it could dump thousands of bottles straight into the ocean. I would add to that the fact that even if the boat stays together, the PET bottles it’s made of will be leaching toxic chemicals throughout its journey. With a hull made of 12,000 used plastic bottles and a frame made of virgin (though recyclable) srPET, de Rothschild runs the risk of exacerbating the ocean pollution problem more than he helps to solve it.

Also, while de Rothschild has been great about saying that recycling is not the answer, by creating a boat out of used bottles and pushing the whole “second use” thing, his actions are furthering the idea that we can still use plastic for disposable items, just so long as we recycle it. C’mon folks, when has anything outside of Catholic confession ever really been that easy? Recycling plastic is not only extremely energy-intensive, it doesn’t actually cut down on the use of virgin plastics. The Berkeley Ecology Center, the organization that practically invented recycling, breaks it down on a list of seven misconceptions about plastic and plastic recycling:

Collecting plastic containers at curbside fosters the belief that, like aluminum and glass, the recovered material is converted into new containers. In fact, none of the recovered plastic containers from Berkeley are being made into containers again but into new secondary products such as textiles, parking lot bumpers, or plastic lumber – all unrecyclable products. This does not reduce the use of virgin materials in plastic packaging. “Recycled” in this case merely means “collected,” not reprocessed or converted into useful products.

What irritates me about the project almost as much as its unintended environmental drawbacks, though, is the fact that de Rothschild and the people constantly sucking up to him act as though this is the first time such a venture has been undertaken. In fact, it has been done several times (see here and here for the most recent examples). Awareness has been raised … how about doing something real about it and spending your considerable fortune on working with industry to reduce the use of packaging entirely, or funding research on a less toxic packaging option?

At least de Rothschild seems to be fairly well informed and is not pushing the “let’s clean up the Pacific Garbage Patch” agenda. The thing is, and people really don’t want to hear this: You can’t clean up the Pacific Garbage Patch. Ditto the newly found Atlantic Garbage Patch. They will stand forever as testaments to the harm humans have caused to the planet. But while that thought is pretty disheartening, the good news is that there’s a way to stop feeding the garbage patches: Just say no to disposable plastic packaging or items. I had a great conversation with Manuel Maqueda from the Plastic Pollution Coalition, of which de Rothschild’s group is a member, the other day and he put it really well: “It makes no sense to take a material that lasts forever and use it for something disposable.”

Duh. So simple! And yet so difficult. The point is, while it’s nice that the Plastiki expedition and others like it want to boost awareness of environmental issues, it would be even better if they were focusing on projects that could actually deliver something more than a ton of press. And while I’m at it, it sucks that HP and Kiehl’s are funding this instead of more worthy projects, but I guess they wouldn’t get nearly the same level of publicity.

The most common question any paleontologist ever gets asked has also been, historically, the one with the least satisfying answer. When faced with it, many launch into an explanation of how colors don’t fossilize, the mechanics of reconstructing animals from the bones up, the idea of drawing from related or convergent species. Others, more taciturn, simply say “We don’t know.”

For the most part, that edict still stands. When gazing into the eye sockets of the mighty Tyrannosaurus rex, or staring in awe at the jumble of Triceratops, Stegosaurus, and Apatosaurus that litter our institutions like lions in a zoo, we must simply throw up our hands and say in essence, “We don’t know what color they are, and likely never will.”

It’s part of the mystery of dinosaurs. To such visual creatures as Homo sapiens, the lack of color in dinosaurs is a driving bit of their mystique. How strange these creatures must be, if we cannot tell even their patterns and hues with certainty!

And then…this happened.

Sinosauropteryx Colors, by Asher Elbein

In a frankly stunning one-two punch, two separate teams of scientists broke a color barrier that’s been in place for millions of years. The first team, Led by University of Bristol’s Mike Benton, used electron microscopes to scan the preserved feathers of the tiny Sinosauropteryx and concluded that the tail and portions of the body were covered in ginger hued fluff, as well as white rings that adorned the tail.

Anchiornis color scheme

Only weeks later, the second team did them one better. Where Benton’s team had gotten a fairly good glimpse at bits of feathers, they hadn’t seen the color scheme of the entire animal. Dr. Prum’s team, on the other hand, had. Analyzing a little protobird known as Anchiornis, Prum and his colleagues found that it was patterned like a pileated woodpecker (and thus proving that what’s black, white, and red all over is neither newspaper nor unfortunate zebra, but a dinosaur.)

This is all very exciting, but what’s really interesting is how this was all found out. It turns out that there are microscopic structures in feathers called melanosomes. Melanosomes come in all kinds of different shapes, and each shape codes for a different color. Knowing this, the scientists analyzed the preserved feathers of Sinosauropteryx and Anchiornis for melanosomes, and to their delight they found them. From there it was a (relatively) simple task to decode the colors of the animals. The discovery also had the happy side effect of proving, more or less once and for all, that the preserved feathers were exactly that, not artifacts in the rock or collagen fibers as some had posited.

So what now? A door has opened before us, one thought to be locked forever. Any feathered dinosaur can be analyzed this way, as long as its melanosomes are sufficiently well preserved. A new and exciting oppurtunity has opened up before us. But as for dinosaurs will scaly skin, the prospects are a bit more mixed. It’s not not clear that the same processes that analyze feathers can be made to work for skin impressions, especially those of scales. But who knows? Perhaps one day we will know for certain what colors even beasts like Tyrannosaurus were.

Recent research has demonstrated how evolution has equipped simple viruses with the ability to manipulate the behavior of animals.

Viruses infect everything from the smallest of bacterial cells to the largest of whales. And though these miniscule pathogens often bring illness, they do so out of necessity. Lacking the prerequisite internal anatomy for self-reproduction, viruses invade the cells of the living as a means of insuring their posterity. They splice their DNA (or RNA) into the nucleus of the host’s cells and effectively subvert its cellular mechanics to meet viral reproductive ends. Hijacked cells are re-programmed by the viruses and become factories dedicated to manufacturing more viruses — viruses which ultimately move on to other victims. In addition to hacking programming codes for the building of replicates, viruses often include sub-routines, or additional programming hacks, that facilitate their journey to new hosts.

By undermining the normal life-processes of the host’s cells, viruses are detriments to health; however, more than just illness can remain in the wake of a virus’s biological sabotage. For example, recent work out of Penn State University has shown that a virus common to the squash group of plants does more than just hack a virus-building program into the cells of its vegetative victims - it also includes a program that attracts insects. The cucumber mosaic virus (CMV) infects plants with a gene that causes the plant to synthesize and release chemicals that draw-in hungry aphids. Normally, aphids use their capacity to chemically sense plants as a way to zero-in on healthy and nutritious foodstuffs essential to their survival. By manipulating the aphids’ chemo-sense, the virus’s genes trick the insects into locating and then taking a bite from the diseased leaves of an infected plant. Even though the plant may emit a ‘delicious smell,’ because it has been subjected to disease, it lacks the nutrients needed by the aphids. Luckily for the aphids, after just one bite their tasting-sense overrides their smelling-sense and they’ll bugger-off in search of better food. Unfortunately for other squash plants, the aphids now have a mouthful of CMV virus! Thus, the virus spreads.

Other studies have shown that a similar dynamic exists between sandflies and hamsters; the parasitic protozoa Leishmania causes infected hamsters to produce chemicals that attract sandflies as vectors. And in humans, there is some evidence that Plasmodium falciparum causes more than just malaria, it also hijacks human bodies to produce chemicals that attract more mosquitoes.

Reference:

Mauck, K., De Moraes, C., & Mescher, M. (2010). Deceptive chemical signals induced by a plant virus attract insect vectors to inferior hosts Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences DOI: 10.1073/pnas.0907191107

Aphid photo by John Humphreys

Speaking to climate change, Republican Mike Noel (at left) explained recently that, “This is absolutely, in my mind, in fact a conspiracy to limit population not only in this country but across the globe.”

Being both a Republican and an enthusiast of the equestrian arts, Noel isn’t the type to quietly lie down and let the lefties fondle his reproductive liberties! To the contrary, he has been an outspoken proponent of Utah’s House Joint Resolution 12; a proposition that aims to stop the Environmental Protection Agency from establishing policies that reduce carbon dioxide. Noel’s good friend, Republican Kerry Gibson, sponsored Resolution 12 because… Well…

Well, because there’s a global conspiracy going on!

Here are a few proofs of the conspiracy as listed in House Joint Resolution 12:

1. “…Climategate, indicate[s] a well organized and ongoing effort to manipulate and incorporate “tricks” related to global temperature data in order to produce a global warming outcome…”

2. “…there has been a concerted effort by climate change alarmists to marginalize those in the scientific community who are skeptical of global warming by manipulating or pressuring peer-reviewed publications to keep contrary or competing scientific viewpoints and findings on global warming from being reviewed and published…”

3. “…the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a blend of government officials and scientists, does no independent climate research but relies on global climate researchers”

4. “…the climate change “gravy train,” estimated at more than $7 billion annually in federal government grants, may have influenced the climate research focus and findings that have produced a “scientific consensus” at research institutions and universities”

In addition to deducing the above listed ‘hard facts,’ Noel and Gibson also arranged for a hired gun to testify as an expert witness at Utah’s legislative proceedings. The hired gun was non other than the infamous Roy “shunned by the system” Spencer, a climatologist from Alabama whose work has been continuously rejected by the scientific community - yet further evidence of the conspiracy!

Checking Roy’s facts during the proceedings was a group of 18 scientists from Brigham Young University. The group unanimously concluded that he was full of crap and even “patently false.” Accordingly, they put their findings into an open letter (available here), which each scientists signed. The letter was mailed to the State legislature in hopes of dissuading them from passing the resolution.

What was the result of this unified effort?

Republican chairman of the Utah farm group Randy Parker publicly demanded a formal apology from Brigham Young University. Parker in part stated that, “I guess the bottom line here, from my perspective, is that science is an open process of ongoing research and debate, and a group of scientists should not make these kinds of statements about another scientist…” (Note: I couldn’t agree more with this sentiment. The art of debating without debating is under-appreciated.)

So unfortunately, it looks as though Mike Noel, Kerry Gibson, and Randy Parker’s fight for breeding rights has paid-off for the republicans. House Joint Resolution 12 passed committee yesterday morning. The state of Utah is about to tell the Federal Government that climate change is nothing but a conspiracy theory, take the EPA regulations and shove ‘em!

This should be great for tourism: Welcome to Utah - the State of Denial!

References & Credits:
Sovacool, B., & Brown, M. (2009). Scaling the policy response to climate change Policy and Society, 27 (4), 317-328 DOI: 10.1016/j.polsoc.2009.01.003

Article by Chris Vanocur-ABC Channel 4

Article by Judy Fahys- Salt Lake Tribune

Photo: Mike Noel