Tornado Victims Struggle to Cope with Damage

Mayor Walter Maddox of Tuscaloosa, Alabama, describes the deaths, destruction and injuries following the direct hit on the north side of their city during last Wednesday's swarm of tornadoes across the Southeastern United States.


Tuscaloosa lost a 5.9 mile stretch of their city of 100,000. They lost their city services. President Obama arrived today. He expressed his heartbreak at the loss of life and pledged emergency funds, full support with FEMA, and ways to coordinate through HUD to rebuild.

Officials are calling the tornado swarm to hit the Southeast, US, the 'worst national disaster since Katrina.' Jack Hayes, the director of the National Weather Service is not calling this climate change. He cited prolonged flow of more humid air from the Gulf with a strong Jet Stream from Canada. Heated air was the triggering catalyst.

Massive tornadoes hit populated cities head-on. Forecasters had warned of an "insane" storm system for days, so it's unlikely that the tornadoes caught many by surprise. But with few basements in Dixie Alley, not many places were safe in the paths of tornadoes that had nearly 200-mph (322-kph) winds. Even solidly built houses were swept away. Many entire neighborhoods were completely obliterated.

Though rare, extreme tornadoes have touched down in the southeast in the past. Hayes could not rule out climate change as a factor in the severity or sheer number of tornadoes. April has been one of the worst for tornado deaths in U.S. history. The deciding factor will have to be established over a period of years (climate vs. weather patterns) to determine if the warming of the climate was the catalyst in this extreme event and whether they will continue to grow in frequency.

Some of the storms were a mile wide with wind speeds for over 200 miles per hour (EF5). The people of the Southeast don't have to wonder whether the climate has become unstable. They are at effect of it. Whether it will continue, their need is now. Red Cross Link.

Martin Sustainable Books Literary Contest

Martin Sustainable Books, the sponsor of The Environmentalist Magazine, has an annual contest that opens their process up to unsolicited submissions. It's the only time they open up submissions.

The grand prize is an offer of a publishing contract for the winning book and inclusion in a published collection for the top winning short stories. We're one of the contest sponsors, so there's also an opportunity to be taken on as a writer for our magazine and a list of other prizes that provide exposure for writers.

Writers can submit one query for free. Books and short stories manuscript submissions have an early bird 5% discount until May 15th. Every submission will be read.

Here's the contest link: contest.martinsbooks.com

About Martin Sustainable Books about.martinsbooks.com

Good luck!

'All of the Above' Is No Energy Policy

by William S. Becker

Even renewable energy hawks -- most of us anyway -- will concede that the United States cannot go cold turkey from oil tomorrow, or shut down all coal-fired power plants this week, or flip the off-switch tonight on nuclear power.

What we should not concede, however, is the need for the most aggressive possible push to get renewable energy on line. It should be our top national energy priority for many reasons, ranging from environmental protection to national security, and from economic vitality to social equity.

President Obama's recent "Blueprint for a Secure Energy Future" is as close as he's come so far to issuing a comprehensive national plan for the transition to clean energy. I credit the president for understanding that energy efficiency and renewable energy are a practical, vital and near-term part of our national energy mix.

Not everyone gets that, or admits it. In a recent example of cluelessness, USA Today published a vigorous defense of plastic grocery bags by Jonah Goldberg, a visiting fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. Goldberg panned the president for being "convinced that we can 'win the future' with such boondoggles as high-speed rail and impractical fads such as wind and solar energy (emphasis mine)." USA Today notes that Goldberg is a member of the newspaper's Board of Contributors, as though defending grocery bags and classifying renewable energy as a "fad" qualifies as a contribution to public discourse.

What's really impractical, of course, is the idea that America can compete and thrive in the 21st Century with the same finite dirty fuels that powered us the past 200 years. From childhood asthma to foreign wars, there are myriad reasons fossil energy industries should be, and inevitably will be, dead men walking. Continued...

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Agriculture: The Unlikely Earth Day Hero

Nourishing the Planet

For over 40 years, Earth Day has served as a call to action, mobilizing individuals and organizations around the world to address these challenges. This year Nourishing the Planet highlights agriculture—often blamed as a driver of environmental problems—as an emerging solution.

Agriculture is a source of food and income for the world’s poor and a primary engine for economic growth. It also offers untapped potential for mitigating climate change and protecting biodiversity, and for lifting millions of people out of poverty.

This Earth Day, Nourishing the Planet offers 15 solutions to guide farmers, scientists, politicians, agribusinesses and aid agencies as they commit to promoting a healthier environment and a more food-secure future.

1. Guaranteeing the Right to Food. Guaranteeing the human right to adequate food—now and for future generations—requires that policymakers incorporate this right into food security laws and programs at the regional, national, and international level. Governments have a role in providing the public goods to support sustainable agriculture, including extension services, farmer-to-farmer transmission of knowledge, storage facilities, and infrastructure that links farmers to consumers.

2. Harnessing the Nutritional and Economic Potential of Vegetables. Micronutrient deficiencies, including lack of vitamin A, iodine, and iron, affect 1 billion people worldwide. Promoting indigenous vegetables that are rich in micronutrients could help reduce malnutrition. Locally adapted vegetable varieties are hardier and more dependable than staple crops, making them ideal for smallholder farmers. Research organizations like AVRDC/The World Vegetable Center are developing improved vegetable varieties, such as amaranth and African eggplant, and cultivating an appreciation for traditional foods among consumers.  Continued...

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One Year Later, Not One Oil Spill Law Passed

One year after the worst oil spill in American history, the U.S. has yet to pass a single law addressing all the dangers associated with deep water drilling or adjusting the cap limits on damages. 

"NEW YORK -- Soon after his son Gordon died in the Deepwater Horizon explosion last April, Keith Jones made eight trips to Washington D.C. to push for stronger safety measures in offshore oil drilling and to increase the compensation paid to victims of the tragic accident. He met with President Obama, who apologized for the families' "unimaginable grief" and cradled Gordon's baby boy Maxwell in his arms.

When Jones arrived on Capitol Hill, he says he was mobbed by Senators and Representatives eager to express their condolences and to promise that they would swiftly pass legislation to make sure such a tragedy never happens again.

He is still waiting."

Although the Obama Administration released a comprehensive report along with recommendations for safer drilling operations and for lifting liability caps, no significant legislation has been adopted by Congress. One year later, BP's stock is doing well, TransOcean has given what they've called safety bonuses to their executives, many Gulf residents are waiting to recover damages and baby dolphins are showing up dead on shore.

The BP Disater, one year later.

Earth's Energy Imbalance and Implications

James Hansen, Makiko Sato, Pushker Kharecha, Karina von Schuckmann

Improving observations of ocean temperature confirm that Earth is absorbing more energy from the sun than it is radiating to space as heat, even during the recent solar minimum. This energy imbalance provides fundamental verification of the dominant role of the human-made greenhouse effect in driving global climate change. Observed surface temperature change and ocean heat gain constrain the net climate forcing and ocean mixing rates. 

The basic physics underlying this global warming, the greenhouse effect, is simple. An increase of gases such as CO2 makes the atmosphere more opaque at infrared wavelengths. This added opacity causes the planet's heat radiation to space to arise from higher, colder levels in the atmosphere, thus reducing emission of heat energy to space. The temporary imbalance between the energy absorbed from the sun and heat emission to space, causes the planet to warm until planetary energy balance is restored. Continued...

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Congress Passes a Budget That Curbs Global Warming (but still not enough)

by Jake Schmidt

The long drama of whether or not the US Congress would invest in international efforts to curb global warming pollution or gut these investments is finally over – at least for the rest of this fiscal year.  Last week President Obama signed into law a budget for the rest of this fiscal year (fiscal year 2011).  Investments in international climate activities fared alright.  The final bill would fund core international climate activities at $750-950 million, with other activities potentially adding to this total.  This is a continued investment in these critical programs, but still far away from the ultimate need.

As others have pointed out there is good, ok, and bad news.  This budget could have been much, much worse as the original House Republican passed bill would have gutted these critical investments by zeroing out some of the funding levels.  In addition, the House Republican version would have eliminated funding to help the best scientists in the world document and communicate the science behind carbon pollution (effectively having the house Republicans pretending global warming doesn't exist and muffling the scientists that would tell them otherwise).  Thankfully that provision wasn’t included.

On the rest of the funding picture it is a mixed story.  So let’s look at the numbers in a bit greater detail (I’ll compare to last year’s amount and the President’s request where possible*).  Continued...

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Perceptions of Climate Change

by James Hansen and Makiko Sato

This past winter, for the second year in a row, seemed pretty extreme in both Europe and the United States. So this is a good time to check quantitatively how seasonal climate change is stacking up against expectations.

People's perception of climate change may be the most important factor determining their willingness to accept the scientific conclusion that humans are causing global warming (or global climate disruption, as you please). It is hard to persuade people that they have lying eyes.

In the paper attached to my congressional testimony in 1988 (1) we asserted that the perceptive person would notice that climate was changing by the early 21st century. I used colored dice to illustrate how the frequency of unusually warm seasons was expected to change.

We considered three scenarios for future greenhouse gas amounts. Figure 1 shows that the real world so far is close to scenario B. Temporary aside: there are two main reasons that greenhouse gas growth moved off the track of scenario A onto scenario B in the early 1990s, as shown in Figure 2: (1) the growth of CFCs (chlorofluorocarbons) was greatly diminished by successive tightenings of the Montreal Protocol, (2) the growth of methane slowed sharply.

Fig. 1. Update of Fig. 2 of Reference 1, scenarios A, B and C being climate forcings of greenhouse gases used in climate model simulations. The real world (red curve) has closely followed scenario B.

Fig. 3. Surface temperature anomalies in Northern Hemisphere winter 2010-2011 relative to 1951-1980 mean. See reference 3.

Let's start with this past winter, compare it with the last few winters, and then check whether the odds of warm seasons have changed as expected.   Continued...

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International Action on Climate Change

by Jake Schmidt

Coming out of the successful global warming negotiations in Cancun, Mexico this past December a key question is where are things headed now? Three words capture where international action on global warming needs to head: implementation, strengthening, and widespread. On each of these there are important discussions about to occur as countries are meeting in Bangkok, Thailand for the first preparatory climate negotiations before the high-level meeting in Durban, South Africa (December 2011). Beginning in Bangkok countries will have to show that the new spirit of working together that emerged in Cancun can produce tangible results that will spur and reinforce actions in all key countries.  Continued...

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