A lot of people refused to see "An Inconvenient Truth" because of their dislike for Al Gore. Still more people have been swayed by the FUD from the oil lobby and believe that global warming is just a natural trend. Even among people that respect the work of scientists and acknowledge global warming, human nature dictates that it is easier to continue doing what we have been doing than to make a change.

As 2006 comes to an end, this is a good time to reflect on global warming, on what we have been doing and on what we could/should be doing moving forward. This series of articles from MIT's Technology Review back in July are a terrific read.

Global warming is not a natural cycle and we continue to ignore it at our peril. As these articles and others point out, the problem here are not technological they are political. Until we elect and support leaders who will change the laws, little if anything will change. We are in this position today because the cheapest course of action is inaction and that means more pollution.

The answer is political action and the first step towards that is an educated public. So do the world a favor and spend 30 minutes reading this set of articles, particularly The Messenger and The Dirty Secret.

Technology Review: July/August 2006

read it - please

The first article is about one of the chief scientists studying climate change. He was also featured in a 60 Minutes story earlier this year. A lot of people spend 5 minutes thinking about global warming and dismiss it; here is a real scientist who has spent his life studying this issue and I find it hard to dismiss him, which is probably why the PResident has tried to so hard to silence him

The Messenger

By Mark Bowen

The best scientists, scrutinizing atmosphere, ice, earth, and sea, say global warming is approaching a tipping point. But we still have time to keep it from reaching catastrophic levels.

On December 15, he and three colleagues posted a routine monthly analysis on the GISS website, summarizing data from thousands of weather stations around the globe. It showed that 2005 was coming in as the warmest year since the mid-1800s. He was interviewed about this by ABC News.

According to NASA memorandums provided by Hansen, senior political appointees at NASA headquarters in Washington quickly called career public-affairs officers at the agency and directed them to give headquarters advance notice of Hansen's speaking schedule, his "data releases," and his attendance at scientific meetings. The career officers also understood from the phone calls that the posting of all content on the GISS website, including scientific data sets, would now require headquarters approval; that no NASA employees or contractors could grant media interviews without approval; and that public-affairs officers had the right to stand in for scientists in all interviews. Hansen emphasizes that the political appointees made sure to leave no paper trail. But by throwing off this muzzle, Hansen propelled himself -- and global warming -- into the headlines. The story broke on the front page of the New York Times ; Hansen appeared on NPR and 60 Minutes , too.

He says he's been muzzled before -- during the Reagan and first Bush administrations -- but that in more than three decades as a government employee, he has seen nothing to equal the recent clampdown. He is angry, but he expresses his anger calmly.

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For about 25 years, however, the data have been telling him that Earth is getting warmer, humans are causing it, and this is bad news. In his view, moreover, the science has become so airtight in the last five years that the immense danger posed by greenhouse emissions can no longer be denied. This has placed him on a collision course with politicians and business leaders who want a different answer.

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More than 20 years ago, Hansen also explained why global warming has lagged the greenhouse buildup. In 1985, he suggested that it should take between 50 and 100 years for the excess energy reaching the planetary surface to have its full effect on temperature, because the energy will first go to heating the oceans; only when they begin to warm will the atmosphere follow suit. Just last year, when studies demonstrating a global rise in ocean temperatures confirmed his thinking, Hansen began referring to the heating of the oceans as the "smoking gun" of global warming.

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Still, the main greenhouse promoter in coming decades will be carbon dioxide. In 2001, Hansen assembled the "A-Team," made up of GISS researchers and students and teachers from schools in the New York City area, to tackle the problem of providing for the world's growing energy needs while adhering to the A-Scenario. They found that efficiencies based on existing technologies could buy time for a few decades, after which we must employ new technologies to cut global carbon dioxide emissions by 60 to 80 percent.

The A-Team found that growing emissions from coal-burning power plants and transportation posed the greatest threats. "Efficiency of energy end-use in the near term is critical for the sake of avoiding new, long-lived CO 2 -producing infrastructure," Hansen notes. "Green" building codes, combined with energy-efficient lighting and appliances, would be sufficient to hold electrical needs -- and the number of power plants -- constant for many years. The team also developed an achievable plan for limiting vehicular emissions, a plan that starts by improving fuel efficiency with existing technologies. It is "technically possible to avoid the grim 'business-as-usual' climate change," said Hansen last December. "If an alternative scenario is practical, has multiple benefits, and makes good common sense, why are we not doing it?"

He knew the answer from personal experience. Few remember that Vice President Dick Cheney chaired a cabinet-level climate-change working group in 2001, shortly after convening his infamous energy task force. Hansen briefed the group twice. He believed in those early days that the White House was open to a discussion of facts and potential solutions. But as he remembers it, Cheney picked only the cherry he liked from the Alternative Scenario: its emphasis on soot and the lesser greenhouse gases. He used this to justify ignoring carbon dioxide.

Indeed, the energy policy Cheney introduced poses a tremendous climatic danger. It relies on increasing supplies through oil drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge; opening other public lands to coal, natural-gas, and oil exploitation; and constructing more than 1,000 new power plants. So Hansen convened the A-Team. He had a second interaction with the White House in 2003, again with little effect. By the time of his talk in honor of Charles David Keeling, he had run out of patience. "It seems to me," he said, "that special interests have been a roadblock wielding undue influence over policymakers."

Everyone talks about oil and cars but the biggest problem in the US and around the globe is burning coal. Not only is coal the biggest polluter already but we are building even more plants to burn even more coal - because it is cheap. Even though there are less destructive alternatives, they will no be used unless people speak up and there is political action.

So forget about the Prius vs SUV debate for a moment, and write your congressman about coal power plants.

The Dirty Secret

By David Talbot

Better technologies exist for extracting coal, a major source of carbon dioxide emissions. The challenge is getting people to adopt them.

Coal is the black sheep of the energy family. Uniquely abundant among the fossil fuels, it is also among the worst emitters of greenhouse gases. Mindful of coal's bad reputation, President Bush promised the world three and half years ago that the United States would develop a superclean coal plant in an initiative known as FutureGen. The plant would have zero emissions; even the carbon dioxide it released would be pumped underground.

Today there is a patch of land in Great Bend, OH, where an advanced coal plant may one day be built. The plant could eventually include equipment for siphoning off carbon dioxide. But it's not FutureGen, which today remains a collection of research projects. No FutureGen plant has been constructed, and no site for one has been chosen. The proposed plant at Great Bend could more appropriately be called "PresentGen." The technology involved doesn't demand a White House neologism suggesting that clean coal is something for which we must wait.

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What's lacking is broad action to build such plants in significant numbers. Coal presents the world's single largest opportunity for carbon dioxide mitigation. Coal consumption produces 37 percent of the world's fossil-fuel-related emissions of carbon dioxide, the chief greenhouse gas. While oil consumption produces more -- nearly 42 percent -- much of that comes from cars, trucks, planes, and other means of transportation for which carbon dioxide capture is practically impossible. In the United States, coal contributes 51 percent of the electricity but 81 percent of the carbon dioxide related to power generation. The technology for cleaner coal plants and carbon dioxide capture exists. But in a story repeated across many energy sectors, little of it is actually being used.

AEP expects the Great Bend IGCC plant to cost 15 to 20 percent more overall than a conventional coal plant, but it could recoup the difference from customers under pending regulation in Ohio and West Virginia (site of a second proposed AEP IGCC plant). Capturing the carbon dioxide emitted by the plant, however, is another story. This part of AEP's site plan is literally a blank space, reserved for some future day when carbon dioxide emissions might be regulated. AEP says it is already deploying its own strategies to cut carbon dioxide emissions by 6 percent. But like the White House, it opposes carbon dioxide limits -- on the grounds that the United States shouldn't do anything China and India aren't doing. Yet the technology for carbon capture is mature, too. For years, the Norwegian company Statoil has been capturing and sequestering carbon dioxide produced by its natural-gas wells in the North Sea. And AEP maintains the position that underground sequestration seems feasible in regions it serves.

Coal supplies 24 percent of all global energy and 40 percent of all electricity, and it spews more carbon than any other fossil source -- kilowatt for kilowatt, twice as much as natural gas. Yet coal is the most abundant fossil fuel, and its use is intensifying. While estimates of remaining fossil supplies vary, the World Coal Institute says there are 164 years' worth of coal still in the ground, in contrast to just 41 years' worth of oil. Coal is being enthusiastically mined not only in the United States but also in India and China (where at least 79 percent of electricity comes from coal). The equivalent of more than 1,400 500-megawatt coal power plants are planned worldwide by 2020, according to the Natural Resources Defense Council. This includes 140 U.S. plants of various sizes. "Coal is going to be used. It was a bad joke played by God that oil and gas were put where there is no demand, and coal was put in China, India, and the United States," says Ernest J. Moniz, an MIT physicist and a former under-secretary of the U.S. Department of Energy.

In short, we're stuck with coal. Since there's little reason to expect that humankind will stop digging for it, we will have to find cleaner ways to burn it. This was made clear by a Princeton University analysis that showed immediate ways to reduce carbon dioxide emissions. The analysis goes like this: Already, humankind is pumping about seven billion tons of carbon per year into the atmosphere, about three times as much as in the 1950s, and that figure looks likely to double by 2055. (These tonnages are for carbon; for carbon dioxide, multiply by 3.7.) At that rate, we're on track to triple atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations from preindustrial levels, creating temperatures not seen since three million years ago, when sea levels were 15 to 35 meters higher (see "The Messenger").