SOLAR PANEL THEFT BECOMING A PROBLEM

Katherine Bourzac, Technology Review - KQED, a public radio station in San Francisco, reported that as the cost of scrap metal has fallen thieves have turned to solar panels. According to the story, California has over 34,000 solar installations and one of the highest solar-panel theft rates in the nation. Many wineries have the systems--it certainly makes a nice blurb on the label--and they've become favored targets. These agricultural installations are easy pickings. One vintner interviewed in the story was burgled twice before installing a security system that alerted the police when thieves targeted his solar installation a third time.

Solar-cell theft is such a big problem that Congressman Mike Thompson, who represents Napa Valley, one of California's major wine-making regions, added a provision to the Solar Technology Roadmap Act that would create a national registry of solar panels and require the secretary of energy to come up with a plan to deal with theft. (The House has passed the bill; the Senate has not.) And startups that provide security systems that alert the owner when a panel is disconnected are blossoming.

Presumably the thieves are motivated by the demand for solar coupled with the inability of people to pay for it given the tanking economy and the technology's expense. (Or, as a Fast Company story suggests, maybe the thieves are motivated by something else--a free source of power for the lamps used to grow another one of California's biggest cash crops, marijuana.) But their actions could create a vicious circle. If it's necessary to include a security system with each solar installation, that will just make solar even more expensive and accessible to fewer companies and people.

PET DOGS LEAVE BIGGER PAW PRINT ON EARTH THAN DO SUVS

Vancouver Sun -- Man's best friend could be one of the environment's worst enemies, according to a new study which says the carbon pawprint of a pet dog is more than double that of a gas-guzzling sports utility vehicle.

But the revelation in the book "Time to Eat the Dog: The Real Guide to Sustainable Living" by New Zealanders Robert and Brenda Vale has angered pet owners who feel they are being singled out as troublemakers.

The Vales, specialists in sustainable living at Victoria University of Wellington, analyzed popular brands of pet food and calculated that a medium-sized dog eats around 164 kilos (360 pounds) of meat and 95 kilos of cereal a year.

Combine the land required to generate its food and a "medium" sized dog has an annual footprint of 0.84 hectares (2.07 acres) -- around twice the 0.41 hectares required by a 4x4 driving 10,000 kilometers (6,200 miles) a year, including energy to build the car.

To confirm the results, the New Scientist magazine asked John Barrett at the Stockholm Environment Institute in York, Britain, to calculate eco-pawprints based on his own data. The results were essentially the same.

"Owning a dog really is quite an extravagance, mainly because of the carbon footprint of meat," Barrett said.

Other animals aren't much better for the environment, the Vales say.

Cats have an eco-footprint of about 0.15 hectares, slightly less than driving a Volkswagen Golf for a year, while two hamsters equates to a plasma television and even the humble goldfish burns energy equivalent to two mobile telephones.

But Reha Huttin, president of France's 30 Million Friends animal rights foundation says the human impact of eliminating pets would be equally devastating.

"Pets are anti-depressants, they help us cope with stress, they are good for the elderly," Huttin told AFP.

"Everyone should work out their own environmental impact. I should be allowed to say that I walk instead of using my car and that I don't eat meat, so why shouldn't I be allowed to have a little cat to alleviate my loneliness?"

WHAT CLIMATE CHANGE?

Reuters - Inuit communities need funds to adapt to climate change in the Arctic, including measures to build communal deep freezers to store game because warming is reducing their hunting season, an Inuit leader said . . .


ICC chairman James Stotts from Barrow Alaska told the news conference that his 78-year-old uncle fell through the ice and froze to death at a time of year when the ice normally would be thick and safe.

"Inuits have to find other ways to store their meat. Some of our villages are literally falling into the seas because of erosion," he said.

GLOBAL WARMING IS NOT SLOWING, SAYS WEATHER AGENCY

NY Times - The decade of the 2000s is very likely the warmest decade in the modern record, dating back 150 years, according to a provisional summary of climate conditions near the end of 2009, the organization said.

The period from 2000 through 2009 has been "warmer than the 1990s, which were warmer than the 1980s and so on," said Michel Jarraud, the secretary general of the international weather agency, speaking at a news conference at the climate talks in Copenhagen.

The international assessment largely meshes with an interim analysis by the National Climatic Data Center and NASA in the United States, both of which independently estimate global and regional temperature and other weather trends.

Mr. Jarraud also said that 2009, with some uncertainty because several weeks remain, appears to be the fifth warmest year on record.

MORE AMERICANS BELIEVE IN ANGELS THAN HUMANS' ROLE IN GLOBAL WARMING

Raw Story - More Americans believe in guardian angels than humans' role in global warming, according to recent polls.

A Pew poll released late last month found that . . . while 57 percent believe that the earth's climate is changing, just 36 percent believe that humans are responsible. 77 percent believed that global warming existed in Pew's poll conducted in 2007.

The 36 percent who believe in human-caused climate change is fewer than the number of Americans who apparently believe they're protected by guardian angels, some 55 percent, according to a poll published in 2008.

"Half of all Americans believe they are protected by guardian angels, one-fifth say they've heard God speak to them, one-quarter say they have witnessed miraculous healings, 16 percent say they've received one and 8 percent say they pray in tongues, according to a survey" conducted by Baylor University published in September of 2008.

34 percent of Americans said they believed in UFOs and ghosts in a Halloween 2007 survey conducted by Ipsos.

Just 39 percent of Americans said in a February poll that they believe in evolution.

OVER 20% OF WATER SYSTEMS VIOLATE POLLUTION LAWS

NY Times - More than 20 percent of the nation's water treatment systems have violated key provisions of the Safe Drinking Water Act over the last five years, according to a New York Times analysis of federal data. The water system in Ramsey, N.J., has illegal concentrations of arsenic and the solvent tetrachloroethylene, both linked to cancer.

That law requires communities to deliver safe tap water to local residents. But since 2004, the water provided to more than 49 million people has contained illegal concentrations of chemicals like arsenic or radioactive substances like uranium, as well as dangerous bacteria often found in sewage.

Regulators were informed of each of those violations as they occurred. But regulatory records show that fewer than 6 percent of the water systems that broke the law were ever fined or punished by state or federal officials, including those at the Environmental Protection Agency, which has ultimate responsibility for enforcing standards.

WHY CAP AND TRADE WON'T WORK. . .AND WHAT WILL

James Hansen, NY Times - Because cap and trade is enforced through the selling and trading of permits, it actually perpetuates the pollution it is supposed to eliminate. If every polluter's emissions fell below the incrementally lowered cap, then the price of pollution credits would collapse and the economic rationale to keep reducing pollution would disappear.

Worse yet, polluters' lobbyists ensured that the clean air amendments allowed existing power plants to be "grandfathered," avoiding many pollution regulations. These old plants would soon be retired anyway, the utilities claimed. That's hardly been the case: Two-thirds of today's coal-fired power plants were constructed before 1975.

Cap and trade also did little to improve public health. Coal emissions are still significant contributing factors in four of the five leading causes of mortality in the United States — and mercury, arsenic and various coal pollutants also cause birth defects, asthma and other ailments. . .

To compound matters, the Congressional carbon cap would also encourage "offsets" - alternatives to emission reductions, like planting trees on degraded land or avoiding deforestation in Brazil. Caps would be raised by the offset amount, even if such offsets are imaginary or unverifiable. Stopping deforestation in one area does not reduce demand for lumber or food-growing land, so deforestation simply moves elsewhere. . .

There is a better alternative, one that would be more efficient and less costly than cap and trade: "fee and dividend." Under this approach, a gradually rising carbon fee would be collected at the mine or port of entry for each fossil fuel (coal, oil and gas). The fee would be uniform, a certain number of dollars per ton of carbon dioxide in the fuel. The public would not directly pay any fee, but the price of goods would rise in proportion to how much carbon-emitting fuel is used in their production.

All of the collected fees would then be distributed to the public. Prudent people would use their dividend wisely, adjusting their lifestyle, choice of vehicle and so on. Those who do better than average in choosing less-polluting goods would receive more in the dividend than they pay in added costs.

For example, when the fee reached $115 per ton of carbon dioxide it would add $1 per gallon to the price of gasoline and 5 to 6 cents per kilowatt-hour to the price of electricity. Given the amount of oil, gas and coal used in the United States in 2007, that carbon fee would yield about $600 billion per year. The resulting dividend for each adult American would be as much as $3,000 per year. As the fee rose, tipping points would be reached at which various carbon-free energies and carbon-saving technologies would become cheaper than fossil fuels plus their fees. As time goes on, fossil fuel use would collapse.

Still need more convincing? Consider the perverse effect cap and trade has on altruistic actions. Say you decide to buy a small, high-efficiency car. That reduces your emissions, but not your country's. Instead it allows somebody else to buy a bigger S.U.V. - because the total emissions are set by the cap.

In a fee-and-dividend system, every action to reduce emissions - and to keep reducing emissions - would be rewarded. Indeed, knowing that you were saving money by buying a small car might inspire your neighbor to follow suit. Popular demand for efficient vehicles could drive gas guzzlers off the market. Such snowballing effects could speed us toward a pollution-free world.

James Hansen is the author of the forthcoming "Storms of My Grandchildren: The Truth About the Coming Climate Catastrophe and Our Last Chance to Save Humanity."

LEAKED DOCUMENTS CAUSE COPENHAGEN FUROR

Guardian, UK - The UN Copenhagen climate talks are in disarray today after developing countries reacted furiously to leaked documents that show world leaders will next week be asked to sign an agreement that hands more power to rich countries and sidelines the UN's role in all future climate change negotiations.

The document is also being interpreted by developing countries as setting unequal limits on per capita carbon emissions for developed and developing countries in 2050; meaning that people in rich countries would be permitted to emit nearly twice as much under the proposals.

The so-called Danish text, a secret draft agreement worked on by a group of individuals known as "the circle of commitment" - but understood to include the UK, US and Denmark - has only been shown to a handful of countries since it was finalized this week.

The agreement, leaked to the Guardian, is a departure from the Kyoto protocol's principle that rich nations, which have emitted the bulk of the CO2, should take on firm and binding commitments to reduce greenhouse gases, while poorer nations were not compelled to act. The draft hands effective control of climate change finance to the World Bank; would abandon the Kyoto protocol - the only legally binding treaty that the world has on emissions reductions; and would make any money to help poor countries adapt to climate change dependent on them taking a range of actions.

The document was described last night by one senior diplomat as "a very dangerous document for developing countries. It is a fundamental reworking of the UN balance of obligations. It is to be superimposed without discussion on the talks".

A FEW REASONS TO TAKE CLIMATE CHANGE SERIOUSLY

Arctic & Antarctic
 
ANTARCTIC ICE MELTING FASTER THAN THOUGHT
GREENLAND ICE MELTING FASTER
STUDY: IN 20 YEARS NO ARCTIC ICE IN SUMMER
WATCHING THE ARCTIC MELT
LARGE ANTARCTIC GLACIER THINNING FOUR TIMES FASTER THAN A DECADE AGO
ARCTIC ICE AREA SMALLEST IN 800 YEARS
OLDER ARCTIC SEA ICE DECLINING
ANTARCTIC ICE SHELF ON THE VERGE OF COLLAPSE
HUGE ANTARCTIC ICE SHELF ON BRINK OF COLLAPSE
IMPORTANT GLACIER MELTING AT MORE THAN GLACIAL SPEED
ARCTIC ICECAP MELTING IN WINTER AS WELL AS SUMMER
SCIENTISTS FIND METHANE TIME BOMB IN ARCTIC
POLAR BEARS RESORT TO CANNIBALISM
ARCTIC ICE MELTING FAR FASTER THAN THOUGHT
ANTARCTIC ICE SHELF CONTINUES TO BREAK UP. . . IN WINTER
GREENLAND IS RISING WITH LOSS OF ICE
ANTARCTIC RISE IN FRESH WATER WORRIES SCIENTISTS
NEW ARCTIC SEA ICE UNABLE TO SURVIVE SUMMER SUN
FAST MELTING GLACIERS ENDANGER GLOBE
ICE LOSS IN ANTARCTICA MATCHES THAT IN GREENLAND
SUMMER ARCTIC SEA ICE COULD DISAPPEAR BY 2012
ANTARCTICA'S PENGUINS FADING BECAUSE OF CLIMATE CHANGE


Climate change

GLOBAL TEMPS SET TO RISE OVER TEN DEGREES BY 2100
HOW CLIMATE CHANGE COULD PRODUCE DRASTICALLY COLD WEATHER
DAILY RECORD HIGH TEMPS BEAT RECORD LOW TEMPS BY 2 TO 1 OVER PAST DECADE

REPORT: CLIMATE CHANGE WILL FORCE 75 MILLION PACIFIC ISLANDERS TO RELOCATE
CLIMATE CHANGE ALREADY AFFECTING COUNTRY
MIT STUDY: 90% PROBABILITY OF 6-13F DEGREE RISE IN TEMPERATURES BY 2100
WHAT A WORST CASE CLIMATE SCENARIO MIGHT LOOK LIKE
EPA DECLARES GREENHOUSE GASES A PUBLIC HEALTH THREAT
UK'S CHIEF SCIENCE ADVISOR SEES ECO DISASTER LOOMING BY 2030
SCIENTISTS: FIVE FOOT RISE IN SEA LEVEL BY 2100 POSSIBLE
SCIENTISTS TELL CONGRESS HEAT WAVES MIGHT MAKE LIFE UNBEARABLE IN SOME CITIES
TOP SCIENTIST: CLIMATE CHANGE IRREVERSIBLE
TREE DEATH RATE DOUBLES
HOTTER SUMMERS WILL DRASTICALLY CUT CROPS YIELDS

WEATHER-RELATED DISASTERS DOMINATE
EXPERTS: WE'RE MOVING TOO SLOW TO PREVENT CLIMATE CATASTROPHE
SCIENTIST WHO WARNED OF GLOBAL WARMING 20 YEARS AGO SAYS TIME IS RUNNING OUT

GREENHOUSE GASES HIGHEST IN AT LEAST 800,000 YEARS
WARM CLIMATE CAN BRING BEETLE INFESTATIONS THAT LIMIT FORESTS' ABILITY TO ABSORB CARBON
CARBON AND METHANE IN AIR UP SHARPLY
EARLY GLOBAL WARMING SPOTTER SAY IT'S WORSE THAN WE THINK
PRINCE CHARLES SAYS ECO CRISIS SHOULD BE TAKEN AS SERIOUSLY AS WAR
RECOVERED HISTORY: SECRET PENTAGON REPORT SEES ECO DISASTER COMING
2007 WAS WARMEST YEAR EVER FOR EARTH'S LAND AREAS
EVEN CLIMATE ACTIVISTS DON'T UNDERSTAND HOW BAD IT IS
REPORT DETAILS BUSH'S MANIPULATION OF CLIMATE CHANGE INFORMATION
CLIMATE CHANGE MAY WIPE OUT OR DAMAGE 60% OF AMAZON BY 2030
SCIENTISTS UNITE ON DANGER OF CLIMATE CHANGE


WHY THE EARTH IS RUNNING OUT OF TIME
'VERY UNLIKELY' WE CAN AVOID CATASTROPHIC CLIMATE CHANGE


Drought
 

TREE RINGS SUGGEST SOUTH CAROLINA HAVING WORST DROUGHT IN 800 YEARS
LAKE MEAD MAY BE DRY BY 2021

CLIMATE CHANGE: A GUIDE FOR THE PERPLEXED

AUSTRALIAN CITY GETS FIRST SPRING HEAT WAVE SINCE RECORDS BEGAN IN 1887

NASA - A spring heat wave scorched southeastern Australia in mid-November 2009, pushing the fire danger to the “catastrophic” category in parts of South Australia and New South Wales and to “extreme” in other surrounding areas. Many cities, including Melbourne and Adelaide experienced record-breaking temperatures that continued for many days. . .

Around Adelaide in South Australia and Melbourne in Victoria, the land surface temperatures were up to 12 degrees Celsius (22 degrees Fahrenheit) above average in mid-November. For Adelaide, the event was the first springtime heat wave since records began in 1887, according to the Australian Bureau of Meteorology. The city had temperatures above 35 degrees Celsius (95 Fahrenheit) for 8 consecutive days.

DOES BIGGER MEAN GREENER?

Hank Green, Ecogeek - Busses are greener than cars, and apartment buildings are greener than houses. But is a 747 greener than a Cessna? Is an interstate greener than Route 66? Is a 55 inch flat screen greener than a 20 inch tube television? Is a cruise ship greener than a pontoon boat?. . .

Often, efficiency just becomes one more pathway to profligate waste. Let's take interstate highways as an example here, since they're both the solution to and cause of so many of our problems.

Let's say you wanted to move 100,000 cars from one city to the next city before interstates. The gridlock would have been tremendous. Cars would have idled for days, traveling at low, inefficient speeds with start and stop traffic that would have wasted a huge amount of gasoline. With interstates, those 100,000 cars can speed along a seven lane highway at efficient speeds without ever tapping the breaks. Highways are much more efficient.

Of course, before Atlanta had seven lane highways, no one was driving 60 miles to work every morning. The waste per mile driven has dropped dramatically, but much more dramatic is the rise in miles driven. . .

This story re-plays itself over and over again. Technology lets us build more efficient televisions, so we make them gigantic. Technology allows us to build the Airbus A380, with room for 853 passengers, by far the most efficient plane per passenger mile, and suddenly a billion more people can afford air travel. Technology allows us to build a cruise ship that holds 6,300 passengers, transporting them with 30% less fuel per passenger, and there are 6,300 people eating crab cakes and surfing on artificial waves on a boat that's too big to dock anywhere in Europe.

Bigger is greener when you're replacing needs that were met inefficiently elsewhere. If you're getting someone on a bus instead of in a car, or in an apartment building instead of a house, that's greener. But if you're creating new and exciting ways for people to over-consume efficiently or, worse, unsustainable infrastructure that will only lead to an unstable future for our world, then bigger is better for someone's wallet in the short term, but bad for us all in the end.

FOR BANKS, IT'S ABOUT DERIVATIVES, NOT ECOLOGY

Washington's Blog, Global Research - Bloomberg notes that the carbon trading scheme will be centered around derivatives:

The banks are preparing to do with carbon what they've done before: design and market derivatives contracts that will help client companies hedge their price risk over the long term. They're also ready to sell carbon-related financial products to outside investors.

[] [Blythe] Masters says banks must be allowed to lead the way if a mandatory carbon-trading system is going to help save the planet at the lowest possible cost. And derivatives related to carbon must be part of the mix, she says. Derivatives are securities whose value is derived from the value of an underlying commodity -- in this case, CO2 and other greenhouse gases'. . . []

Who is Blythe Masters?

She is the JP Morgan employee who invented credit default swaps, and is now heading JPM's carbon trading efforts. As Bloomberg notes:

[] Masters, 40, oversees the New York bank's environmental businesses as the firm's global head of commodities'. . .

As a young London banker in the early 1990s, Masters was part of JPMorgan's team developing ideas for transferring risk to third parties. She went on to manage credit risk for JPMorgan's investment bank.

Among the credit derivatives that grew from the bank's early efforts was the credit-default swap. []

Some in Congress are fighting against carbon derivatives:

[] "People are going to be cutting up carbon futures, and we'll be in trouble," says Maria Cantwell, a Democratic senator from Washington state. "You can't stay ahead of the next tool they're going to create."

Cantwell, 51, proposed in November that U.S. state governments be given the right to ban unregulated financial products. "The derivatives market has done so much damage to our economy and is nothing more than a very-high-stakes casino -- except that casinos have to abide by regulations," she wrote in a press release. . . []

However, Congress may cave in to industry pressure to let carbon derivatives trade over-the-counter:

[] The House cap-and-trade bill bans OTC derivatives, requiring that all carbon trading be done on exchanges'. . . The bankers say such a ban would be a mistake'. . . The banks and companies may get their way on carbon derivatives in separate legislation now being worked out in Congress'. . . []

Financial experts are also opposed to cap and trade:

[] Even George Soros, the billionaire hedge fund operator, says money managers would find ways to manipulate cap-and-trade markets. "The system can be gamed," Soros, 79, remarked at a London School of Economics seminar in July. "That's why financial types like me like it -- because there are financial opportunities"'. . .

Hedge fund manager Michael Masters, founder of Masters Capital Management LLC, based in St. Croix, U.S. Virgin Islands [and unrelated to Blythe Masters] says speculators will end up controlling U.S. carbon prices, and their participation could trigger the same type of boom-and-bust cycles that have buffeted other commodities'. . . []

The hedge fund manager says that banks will attempt to inflate the carbon market by recruiting investors from hedge funds and pension funds.

[] "Wall Street is going to sell it as an investment product to people that have nothing to do with carbon," he says. "Then suddenly investment managers are dominating the asset class, and nothing is related to actual supply and demand. We have seen this movie before." []

Indeed, many environmentalists are opposed to cap and trade as well. For example:

[] Michelle Chan, a senior policy analyst in San Francisco for Friends of the Earth, isn't convinced.

"Should we really create a new $2 trillion market when we haven't yet finished the job of revamping and testing new financial regulation?" she asks. Chan says that, given their recent history, the banks' ability to turn climate change into a new commodities market should be curbed'. . . []

COPENHAGEN CRAP SHOOT

John Feffer, Foreign Policy in Focus - President Obama won't show up until the end of the Copenhagen confab. But no one is expecting him to make a major splash. Obama has said that he can't go further than what Congress is willing to do. The bill in front of the House calls for a 17% reduction in U.S. greenhouse gas emissions from 2000 levels by 2020. "This works out to a 4% cut from 1990 levels, the standard baseline for measurement, and yet scientists have calculated that the major industrialized nations need to cut their emissions by 40% to have any hope of getting us on a path back towards safety," writes Bill McKibben in Tom Dispatch. "And even that 17% cut may turn out to be far too high a figure for the Senate."

While the U.S. Congress fiddles with its toothless legislation, the rest of the world is preparing. Because of the increased risk of flooding, the Netherlands is spending millions to build floating communities and, simultaneously, to require all children to learn how to swim with their clothes on by the time they're six years old. In the face of rising temperatures and plummeting rainfall in Africa, farmers are integrating small trees into their farming to boost yields and restore soil fertility. . .

Reducing our greenhouse gas emissions is not going to be easy. The casino game of "cap-and-trade," the crapshoot that Copenhagen conferees will be discussing, won't do the trick. As climate scientist James Hansen points out, cap-and-trade will just shift emissions around and, as in most casino games, the vast majority of us will lose out in the end. "We are going to have to move beyond fossil fuels at some point. Why continue to stretch it out longer?" he recently told the Times of London. "The only way we can do that is by putting a price on carbon emissions. The business community and the public need to understand that there will be a gradually increasing price on carbon emissions.". . .

GREAT MOMENTS IN ECOLOGY

Telegraph, UK - On a normal day, Majken Friss Jorgensen, managing director of Copenhagen's biggest limousine company, says her firm has twelve vehicles on the road. During the "summit to save the world", which opens here tomorrow, she will have 200. "We thought they were not going to have many cars, due to it being a climate convention," she says. "But it seems that somebody last week looked at the weather report."

Ms Jorgensen reckons that between her and her rivals the total number of limos in Copenhagen has already broken the 1,200 barrier. The French alone rang up on Thursday and ordered another 42. "We haven't got enough limos in the country to fulfill the demand," she says. "We're having to drive them in hundreds of miles from Germany and Sweden."

And the total number of electric cars or hybrids among that number? "Five," says Ms Jorgensen. "The government has some alternative fuel cars but the rest will be petrol or diesel. We don't have any hybrids in Denmark, unfortunately, due to the extreme taxes on those cars. It makes no sense at all, but it's very Danish."

The airport says it is expecting up to 140 extra private jets during the peak period alone, so far over its capacity that the planes will have to fly off to regional airports - or to Sweden - to park, returning to Copenhagen to pick up their VIP passengers. . .

WHAT BASEBALL, POKER AND THE STOCK MARKET CAN TEACH US ABOUT CLIMATE CHANGE

Sam Smith

One thing is clear as the climate change debate chugs along: we need to teach math better in our schools. And it wouldn't hurt if journalism schools taught some math as well. 

For example, it is apparent that those who argue that one good snow storm destroys the case for climate change never got a good introduction to odds and averages.

An exception seems to be baseball. I have never heard a critic of ecological theory argue that a good hitter's failure to get to base in a particular game  indicates that he should be immediately traded. Sometimes it's because he swings badly and sometimes because the pitch is low and outside, but nobody says that's proof he's a bad hitter.

Yet, have one cold winter and they want to dump climate change.

I'm mystified by this. How can a culture that understand formulas like

have such a hard time with temperature variations?

My only explanation is that sports writers have done a far better job getting people to understand (or just accept) things like odds and averages than scientists or journalists. The unfortunate thing is that too many seem to think they only apply to sports.

Maybe we should forget about Copenhagen and have a Monday Night Climate Countdown.

There are some other people good at figuring out odds and averages, such as poker players.

Over a decade ago, I offered a poker player's guide to environmental risk assessment. Key points included:

1. Figure the stakes as well as the odds.

2. The odds of something happening at any moment are not the same as the odds of something ever happening. In ecological calculations - especially ones in which the downside could ruin your whole millennium - it is the latter odds that are important.

3. When confronted with conflicting odds, ask what happens if each projection is wrong. Temporary job loss because of environmental restrictions may come and go, but the loss of the ozone layer is something you can have forever.

4. When confronted with conflicting odds, remember that you don't have to play the game. There are other things to do with your time - or with the economy or with the environment - that may produce better results. Thus, instead of playing poker you could be making love. Or instead of getting jobs from some air or water degrading activity, the same jobs could come from more benign industry such as retrofitting a whole city for solar energy.

5. Don't let anyone - in industry, government, or the media - define an "acceptable level of risk" for your own death or disease. They may not have the same vested interest in the right answer as you do.

6. If the stakes are too high, the game is not worth it. If you can't stand the pain, don't attempt the gain.

Lately I've been wondering how a successful stock market investor might figure out whether global warming was a good investment.

Most stock market charts look much like climate records kept by NASA - an awful lot of detail in a small space that is hard for the impatient or untrained to figure out.

But there is one kind of chart that addresses the key issue: which way a stock really headed. It's called a point and figure chart. It consists of columns of Xs and Os - the former indicating a rising stock, the latter a falling one.

The neat trick is that you only change directions if the stock moves a certain amount - typically three points. What this does is to eliminate minor fluctuations and emphasizes the important stuff.

For example, let's say you bought a stock for 20 and it went up to 22. You would do nothing, but when it hit 23 you would show three Xs in a column.

Now let's say the stock goes down to 21 and then back to 23. You would do nothing because it hasn't moved three points. But let's say it goes down to 18. Then you would show five Os.

A normal chart of such things shows change in neatly divided time frames. Point & figure charts don't care much about time - mostly about movement.

I tried this approach on global temperatures since 1880 as reported by NASA. Using as the basis the average temperature for 1951-1980, here's what resulted:

Note the consistency in the patterns until 1981. Then suddenly there is a breakout combined with rising peaks. This is known as an ascending triple top breakout - and in the stock market it's a really good thing. The stock continues to rise and fall but the peaks keep getting higher. If this is a stock you may well want to buy it, but if it's climate change you don't want it at all.

Note also that the temperature has bounced up and down 3-6 points about a dozen times since 1880 just like the stock market. And just like the rest of life, come to think of it.

Of course, to those who think climate change is a purely ideological or theological issue, none of this means much.

Still, if someone tells you that the snow outside proves there's no global warming, remind them that in 2009 Albert Pujols only got a hit 33% of the time.  

HOW I WISH THE CLIMATE CHANGE DENIERS WERE RIGHT

Johann Hari, Independent, UK - Every day, I pine for the global warming deniers to be proved right. I loved the old world - of flying to beaches wherever we want, growing to the skies, and burning whatever source of energy came our way. I hate the world to come that I've seen in my reporting from continent after continent - of falling Arctic ice shelves, of countries being swallowed by the sea, of vicious wars for the water and land that remains. When I read the works of global warming deniers like Nigel Lawson or Ian Plimer, I feel a sense of calm washing over me. The nightmare is gone; nothing has to change; the world can stay as it was.

But then I go back to the facts. However much I want them to be different, they sit there, hard and immovable. Nobody disputes that greenhouse gases trap heat in the atmosphere, like a blanket holding in the Sun's rays. Nobody disputes that we are increasing the amount of those greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. And nobody disputes that the world has become considerably hotter over the past century. . . .

Yet half our [British] fellow citizens are choosing to believe the deniers who say there must be gaps between these statements big enough to fit an excuse for carrying on as we are. Shrieking at them is not going to succeed.

Our first response has to be to accept that this denial is an entirely natural phenomenon. The facts of global warming are inherently weird, and they run contrary to our evolved instincts. . .

It's tempting to allow this first response to harden into a dogma, and use it to cover your eyes. . .  But the basic science isn't actually very complicated, or hard to grasp. As more carbon dioxide is pumped into the atmosphere, the world gets warmer. Every single year since 1917 has been hotter than 1917. Every single year since 1956 has been hotter than 1956. Every single year since 1992 has been hotter than 1992. And on, and on. If we dramatically increase the carbon dioxide even more - as we are - we will dramatically increase the warming. Many parts of the world will dry up or flood or burn.

This is such an uncomfortable claim that I too I have tried to grasp at any straw that suggests it is wrong. One of the most tempting has come in the past few weeks, when the emails of the Hadley Centre at the University of East Anglia were hacked into, and seem on an initial reading to show that a few of their scientists were misrepresenting their research to suggest the problem is slightly worse than it is. Some people have seized on it as a fatal blow - a Pentagon Papers for global warming.

But then I looked at the facts. It was discovered more than a century ago that burning fossil fuels would release warming gases and therefore increase global temperatures, and since then, hundreds of thousands of scientists have independently reached the conclusion that it will have terrible consequences. It would be very surprising if, somewhere among them, there wasn't a charlatan or two who over-hyped their work. Such people exist in every single field of science (and they are deplorable).

So let's knock out the Hadley Centre's evidence. Here are just a fraction of the major scientific organisations that have independently verified the evidence that man-made global warming is real, and dangerous: Nasa's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, L'Academie des Sciences, the Indian National Science Academy, the US National Academy of Sciences, the Deutsche Akademie der Naturforscher Leopoldina, the UK's Royal Society, the Academia Brasileira de Ciencias, the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the Russian Academy of Sciences, the US Environmental Protection Agency. . .  I could fill this entire article with these names. . .

BOLIVIAN CAPITAL MAY FACE WATER SHORTAGE

BBC - Fears are growing for the future of water supplies in one of Latin America's fastest-growing urban areas - Bolivia's sprawling capital of La Paz and its twin El Alto.

Scientists monitoring the glaciers high in the Andes mountains - a key source of water - say the ice is showing signs of shrinking faster than previously forecast.

Faced with a booming population and a combination of glacial retreat and reduced rainfall, the governor of the La Paz region is even contemplating moving people to other parts of Bolivia.

Water is already in short supply among the poorest communities and has become a cause of tension. It's a problem that begins now but will become more serious as other, much larger glaciers melt as well.

AMERICANS WASTE 40% OF THEIR FOOD

Greg Plotkin, Change - A new study has found that Americans waste 1,400 calories per person per day, or nearly 40% of county's entire food supply. But that's not even the most disturbing statistic.

In order to produce the 1,400 calories that Americans toss into the trash everyday, we use one-fourth of the country's supply of fresh water. In addition, three hundred million barrels of oil are used each year to produce food that eventually just gets thrown away. . .

HOW CLIMATE CHANGE COULD PRODUCE DRASTICALLY COLD WEATHER

We have argued since the 1990s that climate change was a more accurate term than global warming. Here's one reason why:

Live Science - In the film, "The Day After Tomorrow," the world gets gripped in ice within the span of just a few weeks. Now research now suggests an eerily similar event might indeed have occurred in the past.

Looking ahead to the future, there is no reason why such a freeze shouldn't happen again - and in ironic fashion it could be precipitated if ongoing changes in climate force the Greenland ice sheet to suddenly melt, scientists say.

Starting roughly 12,800 years ago, the Northern Hemisphere was gripped by a chill that lasted some 1,300 years. Known by scientists as the Younger Dryas and nicknamed the "Big Freeze," geological evidence suggests it was brought on when a vast pulse of fresh water - a greater volume than all of North America's Great Lakes combined - poured into the Atlantic and Arctic Oceans.

This abrupt influx, caused when the glacial Lake Agassiz in North America burst its banks, diluted the circulation of warmer water in the North Atlantic, bringing this "conveyer belt" to a halt. Without this warming influence, evidence shows that temperatures across the Northern Hemisphere plummeted.

Previous evidence from Greenland ice samples had suggested this abrupt shift in climate happened over the span of a decade or so. Now researchers say it surprisingly may have taken place over the course of a few months, or a year or two at most.

"That the climate system can turn on and off that quickly is extremely important," said earth system scientist Henry Mullins at Syracuse University, who did not take part in this research. "Once the tipping point is reached, there would be essentially no opportunity for humans to react."

Looking ahead to the future, [isotope biogeochemist William Patterson] said there was no reason why a big freeze shouldn't happen again.

"If the Greenland ice sheet melted suddenly it would be catastrophic," he said.

This kind of scenario would not discount evidence pointing toward global warming - after all, it leans on the Greenland ice sheet melting.

"We could say that global warming could lead to a dramatic cooling," Patterson told Live Science. "This should serve as a further warning rather than a pass."