The Dirty Water Underground

LAURA ALLEN’S modest gray house in the Oakland flatlands would give a building inspector nightmares. Jerry-built pipes protrude at odd angles from the back and sides of the nearly century-old house, running into a cascading series of bathtubs filled with gravel and cattails. White PVC pipe, buckets, milk crates and hoses are strewn about the lot. Inside, there is mysterious — and illegal — plumbing in every room.

Ms. Allen, 30, is one of the Greywater Guerrillas, a team focused on promoting and installing clandestine plumbing systems that recycle gray water — the effluent of sinks, showers and washing machines — to flush toilets or irrigate gardens.

To her, this house is as much an emblem of her belief system as a home. Although gray water use is legal in California, systems that conform to the state’s complicated code tend to be very expensive, and Ms. Allen and her fellow guerrilla, Cleo Woelfle-Erskine, are out to persuade the world that water recycling can be a simple and affordable option, as well as being a morally essential one.

They are part of a larger movement centered in the West — especially in arid regions like Arizona, New Mexico and Southern California — that includes both groups that operate within the law and ones that skirt it. The goal is the reuse of home gray water as a way to live within the region’s ecological means. Using their own experience and contributions from others, they have just published a do-it-yourself guide to gray water systems that is also a manifesto for the movement, “Dam Nation: Dispatches From the Water Underground.”

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Superbugs Emerge Among Urban Poor

Drug-resistant staph infections have spread to the urban poor, rising almost seven-fold in recent years in some Chicago neighborhoods, a new study finds.

Researchers said the crowded living conditions of public housing and jails may speed up the person-to-person spread of infection.

The superbugs, first seen mainly in hospitals and nursing homes, have turned up recently among athletes, prisoners and people who get illegal tattoos.

Called methicillin-resistant staphylococcus aureus, or MRSA, these staph germs can cause skin infections that in rare cases have led to pneumonia, bloodstream infections and a painful, flesh-destroying condition. MRSA is hard to treat because the bacteria have developed resistance to the penicillin drug family.

From 2000 to 2005, the infection rate seen in patients seeking care at Chicago's main public hospital and its affiliated clinics climbed from 24 cases per 100,000 to 164 cases per 100,000, the study found.

Dr. Bala Hota of Chicago's Stroger Hospital, a lead author of the study, said the increase is similar to that seen in other cities.

Public housing could be a bridge between high-risk people, the researchers wrote in their study, which appears in Monday's Archives of Internal Medicine.

Dr. Susan Gerber of Chicago's Department of Public Health said it would be a mistake to assume the infection isn't also in affluent neighborhoods. The study looked only at people using the public hospital system. The infection rate in the general population is unknown.

more from the AP via the LA Times

Concern about environment creates shift in school design

Nestled in the lush trees of suburban Atlanta's Davidson-Arabia Mountain Nature Preserve sits the foundation of a school that is being built with partly recycled materials. When it's finished, Arabia Mountain High School will have naturally lit classrooms and an aggressive recycling program.

It's part of a "green school" movement that is growing in popularity nationwide, with schools leaning toward solar panels, living roofs and wetlands. School districts say the environmentally friendly properties save energy costs while educating students about the world around them.

"In the past six months, it's been overwhelming," said Lindsay Baker, manager of the U.S. Green Building Council's school certification program. "There is a general agreement in schools that this is the issue that schools need to be thinking about."

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It Won't Be Easy Being Green

In Berkeley's green future, there will be no incandescent lightbulbs, Wedgewood stoves or gas-powered water heaters. The only sounds will be the whir of bicycles and the purr of hybrid cars -- and possibly curses from residents being forced to upgrade all their kitchen appliances.

Six months after Berkeley voters overwhelmingly passed Measure G, a mandate to reduce the city's greenhouse gas emissions by 80 percent by 2050, the city is laying out a long-term road map for residents, business and industry. It includes everything from solar panels at the Pacific Steel foundry to composted table scraps.

While San Francisco, Oakland and other local governments in the Bay Area have approved policies aimed at reducing greenhouse gas emissions, Berkeley is the first to begin spelling out how people would be expected to reduce their carbon footprints.

Some measures will be popular and easy, like a car-share vehicle on every block and free bus passes. But others will be bitter pills, such as strict and costly requirements that homes have new high-efficiency appliances, solar-powered water heaters, insulation in the walls and other energy savers.

"It will challenge people, and it will be difficult," said Cisco DeVries, chief of staff to Mayor Tom Bates and one of those coordinating the city's greenhouse gas reduction efforts. "But if Berkeley's niche isn't leadership on this issue, then what is it? This is what we should be doing."

It won't be quick, and it won't be easy, especially in a city where even the most mundane zoning minutia can become mired in months of debate. Few of the proposals have been approved yet, and some might not be ready for decades.

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Bloomberg Proposes Energy Efficient Taxi Fleet

Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg announced today a plan to replace the city’s entire yellow cab fleet with environmentally friendly hybrid vehicles over the next five years.

The proposal is the latest push in Mayor Bloomberg’s PlaNYC to create a more environmentally sustainable city and to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 30 percent by 2030. The new taxi standards would be phased in over a four-year period and would lead to a full fleet of hybrids by 2012.

“There’s an awful lot of taxicabs on the streets of New York City obviously, so it makes a real big difference,” Mayor Bloomberg said this morning on the NBC News program “Today.” “These cars just sit there in traffic sometimes, belching fumes; this does a lot less. It’s a lot better for all of us.”

The city has already experimented with using hybrids as yellow cabs in the past. In the last two years, it has added about 400 such vehicles to its fleet, including models like the Toyota Prius, Toyota Highlander Hybrid and Ford Escape. Under the new proposal, that number would increase to 1,000 by October 2008 and would grow by about 20 percent each year after that until the entire fleet is converted.

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Harnessing Methane, Cutting Waste, Recycling Tiles

The urge to conserve is obvious at the Interface Corporation, from slogans painted on the factory floor (“One Planet/Zero Harm”), to prize parking spots reserved for car-poolers, to packing boxes so relentlessly recycled that they sit, wrinkled and battered, festooned with the remains of previously applied masking tape (bought from Germany, because the extra adhesive in American masking tape causes more wear and tear).

Less obvious is the way the company now looks at all of its processes, from the time designers think of a new pattern until customers return their worn-out carpet for recycling.

For example, when the company decided in 2000 to introduce a new line of carpet tiles, designers began by asking, “How would nature make a floor?” They thought of forests, where the ground is covered by pebbles, leaves, twigs, soil. “What they discovered was everything is random, it’s never the same, and it’s always beautiful,” said Stuart Jones, vice president of sustainable development for Interface Research and Development.

This biomimicry produced Entropy, now one of Interface’s hottest patterns. Its randomness allows it to be applied any-which-way and tremendously reduces the amount of finished tiles that must be rejected as “off-quality.”

The nylon cloth facing for Entropy, and other patterns, is made a few miles from here, in another Interface plant at West Point. An engineer there figured out that running the tufting machines with many relatively small creels of fiber, rather than fewer large creels, would greatly reduce waste — “about $180,000 worth of first-quality nylon” annually, Mr. Jones said.

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The Road to Curitiba

On Saturday mornings, children gather to paint and draw in the main downtown shopping street of Curitiba, in southern Brazil. More than just a charming tradition, the child’s play commemorates a key victory in a hard-fought, ongoing war. Back in 1972, the new mayor of the city, an architect and urban planner named Jaime Lerner, ordered a lightning transformation of six blocks of the street into a pedestrian zone. The change was recommended in a master plan for the city that was approved six years earlier, but fierce objections from the downtown merchants blocked its implementation. Lerner instructed his secretary of public works to institute the change quickly and asked how long it would take. “He said he needed four months,” Lerner recalled recently. “I said, ‘Forty-eight hours.’ He said, ‘You’re crazy.’ I said, ‘Yes, I’m crazy, but do it in 48 hours.’ ” The municipal authorities were able to accomplish it in three days, beginning on a Friday night and installing paving, lighting, planters and furniture by the end of the day on Monday. “Being a very weak mayor, if I start to do it and take too long, everyone could stop it through a juridical demand,” Lerner went on to explain. “If they stop the work, it’s finished. I had to do it very fast, at least in part. Because we had discussed it a great deal. Sometimes they have to have a demonstration effect.”

The demonstration worked. Within days, impressed by the increase in their business, the once-recalcitrant shop owners were demanding an extension of the traffic-free district. Some diehard motorists, however, sulked. Lerner heard that a group of them were planning to disregard the prohibition and drive their cars into the street on a Saturday morning. So he contrived an unbreachable defense. With the cooperation of the city’s teachers and a donation of rolls of newsprint and boxes of paint, on that morning he assembled several hundred children in the street, where they sat and drew pictures. “It was to say, ‘This is being done for children and their parents — don’t even think of putting cars there,’ ” he told me. The sputtered-out protest was the last resistance to the pedestrianization of the shopping area, which has since expanded from the original 6 blocks to encompass about 15 today. “Of course, this was very emblematic,” Lerner recounted. “We were trying to say, ‘This city is not for cars.’ When many mayors at the time were planning for individual cars, we were countervailing.” He observed that it was emblematic in another way also: “From that point, they said, ‘If he could do this in 72 hours, he can do anything.’ It was a good strategy.”

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Why Are They Greener Than We Are?

The headquarters of the federal environment agency in Dessau, Germany, occupies a low-slung building on the edge of an abandoned gasworks. Dessau, a center for munitions production during the war, was virtually obliterated by Allied bombs. Over the next 50 years, East German factories saturated the soil with chemical and industrial waste. Yet both the agency building and its location might be said to embody a new, ecologically sensitive Europe.

Designed by a young Berlin-based firm, Sauerbruch Hutton, the building is touted as one of the most efficient in the world, but it doesn’t wear its sustainability on its sleeve. Four stories high, it wraps around a vast interior courtyard that is cooled and heated by a system of underground pipes. Vents in the glass roof allow hot air to escape, and an occasional breeze passes through the courtyard’s gardens. The sinuous wood structure is clad in horizontal bands of candy-colored, enameled glass panels, in shades of green, red and blue. The pattern, it turns out, is carefully tuned to the surrounding environment: the green reflects a nearby park; the red, the brick facades of an industrial shed; and the blue, the sky.

After more than a decade of tightening guidelines, Europe has made green architecture an everyday reality. In Germany and the Netherlands especially, a new generation of architects has expanded the definition of sustainable design beyond solar panels and sod roofs. As Matthias Sauerbruch put it to me: “The eco-friendly projects you saw in the 1970s, with solar panels and recycled materials: they were so self-conscious. We call this Birkenstock architecture. Now we don’t need to do this anymore. The basic technology is all pretty accepted.”

In the United States, architects cannot make the same claim with equal confidence. Despite the media attention showered on “green” issues, the federal government has yet to establish universal efficiency standards for buildings. Yet, according to some estimates, buildings consume nearly as much energy as industry and transportation combined. And the average building in the U.S. uses roughly a third more energy than its German counterpart.

Americans did not always lag so far behind; much of our most celebrated architecture has had a green strain. Frank Lloyd Wright, Rudolf Schindler and Richard Neutra all sought to create a more fluid relationship between indoor and outdoor spaces, man and nature. At the height of the cold war, architect-engineers like Buckminster Fuller envisioned marshaling the immense resources of the American military-industrial complex to create a more ecologically balanced world. Fuller’s geodesic domes, which he hoped would one day house all humanity, were cheap and lightweight yet held up in extreme weather. They could also be erected in a matter of hours. In the late 1960s and ’70s, the Whole Earth Catalogue, with its D.I.Y. ethic and living-off-the-land know-how, encouraged a whole generation to dream of dropping off the grid.

By the ’80s the green dream had faded somewhat. Faced with corporate and governmental clients who saw little financial benefit in investing in sustainable design, American architects often ignored ecological questions. The few who didn’t tended to focus on small-scale projects that could serve local populations: mud-brick construction in Arizona or rural shacks made of recycled materials in Alabama.

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Remote Calhoun County eyed for environment-saving town

Homes here could be heated or cooled using the Earth's natural underground temperature. Appliances would be run by solar-powered batteries. Houses will be oriented to avoid the summer sun.

And everyone could grow some of their own food in the garden each house will have or in community orchards. If all goes as planned, the 600 families in this proposed Florida Panhandle town will lessen the carbon they spew into the atmosphere by walking just about everywhere they go, except maybe work or school.

"You've got almost a zero-carbon footprint just by living here," said Bruce White, one of the developers of the town, who envisions creating the climate steward's dream community. "Just by being here you will be an environmentalist."

Part of a growing $12 billion a year sustainable building industry, Sky is meant to be the green town of the future - the way Americans will live when they realize they use too much energy, its developers say. They hope it will serve as an experiment into what can be done to accomplish that goal, and maybe be a model for other communities.

Right now, it's mostly pine trees, grassy meadow, creeks and scattered gladiolus flowers - which were grown commercially on the property by the previous owner.

And it may be in one of the last places you'd expect to find the mecca of green building, along a backroad in remote and rural Calhoun County. It's a half hour from the nearest interstate, an hour from the coast and an hour from the nearest good-sized city, Tallahassee.

Florida grows by about 900 people a day and new homes have to be built. White and his partner, architect Julia Starr Sanford, wonder why it all has to be suburban sprawl.

"Things have got to change," said White, a self-described "outdoorsy environmentalist."

Florida State University's Center for Advanced Power Systems is collaborating on the project, its engineers helping design the town. Then, they'll study what works and what doesn't.

Engineers think the most promising element is simply that the energy efficiencies will be done community-wide, rather than house-by-house.

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Passive energizes

Back in an era of bad haircuts and awful disco music, homebuilder Hugh Heron tried to market a seemingly great idea. But, in keeping with the tastes of the times, it flopped.

Heron, then with Tartan Homes in Ottawa, helped build a group of houses that employed passive solar technology – a cost-effective way to slash dependence on traditional energy sources.

"We developed lots with a southern exposure," Heron explains. "The houses were not square to the street, but at an angle. This angle was enough to put people off and these were the last homes in the development to sell."

Heron, now president of Heathwood Homes and a partner in the Heron Group of Companies in Toronto, laughs when he looks back. He also emphasizes that "the world has changed since 1978.

"People have always been willing to spend more for granite (countertops), but now solar is starting to come into people's lexicons.''

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NYC Neighborhoods Short on Healthy Foods

In Harlem, fast-food restaurants are more prevalent than shops selling fresh vegetables, according to a city health report.

Food stores in the area in upper Manhattan are mostly bodegas, and the small groceries are half as likely to carry low-fat dairy products as their counterparts in swankier neighborhoods and seven times less likely to sell fresh vegetables, the report said. Only 3 percent of corner stores in Harlem sell leafy green vegetables, compared to 20 percent on the nearby Upper East Side, it said.

"Large health disparities exist between Harlem and other New York City neighborhoods, but we can close those gaps," said Dr. Andrew Goodman, associate commissioner of the East and Central Harlem District public health office, a division of the health department.

In addition, one in six restaurants in Harlem is a fast-food joint. All this adds up to serious health problems for neighborhood residents, who are three to four times more likely to be obese or have diabetes than people who live on the Upper East Side, Goodman said.

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Building the towns of the future

It is unlikely any residents of 10 Downing Street have found time to read Garden Cities of Tomorrow, published in 1902.

Gordon Brown is unlikely to be any different if he becomes Prime Minister.

But his dream of building five so-called "eco-towns", providing up to 100,000 new homes, would undoubtedly have struck a chord with its author Ebenezer Howard.

A journalist and social reformer, Howard's call for new conurbations to be designed for "humanity at large", to recognise the "social side of our nature" and to give full expression to "modern scientific methods" would have met with the Chancellor's approval.

Finished in 1903, Letchworth Garden City in Hertfordshire was the fruit of Howard's vision for a carefully planned town, limited in size, architecturally refined and in harmony with the rural landscape surrounding it.

The Garden City movement which Howard hoped to launch internationally never caught on, with Letchworth's neighbour Welwyn the sole other example of the concept in the UK.

But a hundred years later, is there anything that Mr Brown and other supporters of carbon-neutral towns can learn from the housing projects of the past?

Letchworth certainly thinks so, describing itself as a "model" for contemporary efforts to develop sustainable and environmentally friendly communities.

"It is quite unique," Terry Gray, from the Letchworth Heritage Foundation - the body which owns and administers much of the town's property and amenities - says of the town.

"It was Howard's idea to bring town and country together. One of Gordon Brown's ideas is to build more council-owned social houses. That is what Howard did 100 years ago."

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Scientists Back Off Theory of a Colder Europe in a Warming World

Mainstream climatologists who have feared that global warming could have the paradoxical effect of cooling northwestern Europe or even plunging it into a small ice age have stopped worrying about that particular disaster, although it retains a vivid hold on the public imagination.

The idea, which held climate theorists in its icy grip for years, was that the North Atlantic Current, an extension of the Gulf Stream that cuts northeast across the Atlantic Ocean to bathe the high latitudes of Europe with warmish equatorial water, could shut down in a greenhouse world.

Without that warm-water current, Americans on the Eastern Seaboard would most likely feel a chill, but the suffering would be greater in Europe, where major cities lie far to the north. Britain, northern France, the Low Countries, Denmark and Norway could in theory take on Arctic aspects that only a Greenlander could love, even as the rest of the world sweltered.

All that has now been removed from the forecast. Not only is northern Europe warming, but every major climate model produced by scientists worldwide in recent years has also shown that the warming will almost certainly continue.

“The concern had previously been that we were close to a threshold where the Atlantic circulation system would stop,” said Susan Solomon, a senior scientist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. “We now believe we are much farther from that threshold, thanks to improved modeling and ocean measurements. The Gulf Stream and the North Atlantic Current are more stable than previously thought.”

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Scientists: State suffers from warming

Fishermen first noticed the change near Cedar Key.

Cabbage palms along the coast, ones they had used for years for navigation, were gone. Dying off as well were the cedar trees for which the island is named.

Researchers who studied the trees came to alarming conclusions: A rise in sea level that is accelerating with global warming is taking out Florida's coastal forests.

The oceans have been rising for 17,000 years, creeping up the state's beaches at the rate of roughly 0.6 millimeters a year. But since the Industrial Revolution, that rate has accelerated, and since 1993 it has reached about 3 millimeters a year, according to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.

That does not sound like much. But with Florida's low topography, a few millimeters can bring the sea a considerable distance inland, poisoning trees with salt water, said Jack Putz, a professor of botany at the University of Florida.

"When you go along the Gulf Coast of Florida, it's not hard to find areas of dead trees,'' Putz said. "What we are seeing is a pretty rapid transition from forests to salt marshes.''

It is one among many clues that a changing climate will have a powerful effect on Florida, the subject of the state's first conference on global warming, which was held here last week.

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Climate change 'will make millions homeless'

Climate change will take the number of refugees worldwide to a billion by 2050, according to a report.

Global warming and its consequences will exacerbate a global crisis in which 155 million people have been displaced by wars, natural disasters and development projects, the study by Christian Aid warns.

Published to mark Christian Aid Week 2007, the report claims the numbers of displaced people will dwarf the refugee crisis which followed the Second World War.

The report, Human Tide: The Real Migration Crisis, says unless urgent action is taken, the added problems brought by environmental changes will spiral out of control.

John Davison, the report's lead author, said: " We believe that forced migration is now the most urgent threat facing poor people in the developing world.

"The impact of climate change is the great, frightening unknown in this equation. Only now is serious academic attention being devoted to calculating the scale of this new human tide.
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"Even existing estimates, more than a decade old, predict that hundreds of millions of people will be forced from their homes by floods, drought and famine sparked by climate change."

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A Garden in the Sky

Work crews are about to start planting the roof of the new California Academy of Sciences museum in Golden Gate Park -- an architectural capstone that also qualifies as one of the world's most ambitious biodiversity experiments.

Roof gardens are as ancient as Babylon and a deeply rooted fad in Europe, but the vegetated structure taking shape in the park is perhaps the grandest foray yet into what museum visionaries like to call "integrated regenerative architecture."

Gregory Farrington, the new executive director of the California Academy, views the roof as a unique scientific showplace designed to flip the conventional museum concept on its head.

"Most museums have thick walls that separate the inside from the outside and put in the basement or on the roof all the systems that you need to make the place functional. Here, the idea will be to make the building itself into an exhibit, and there is no separation of the inside from the outside," he said.

Visitors to the $300 million science center who make their way up to a rooftop viewing platform after the museum opens next year will see none of the hulking ventilation towers and emergency generators that cap most big buildings.

Those things and other utility systems have been buried underground to make way for 197,000 square feet of native strawberries, stonecrop and California poppies.

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Solar panels find a home with Amish

A drive through the rolling hills of this Holmes County farming community 80 miles south of Cleveland delights the senses with smells of farm manure and sawmill resins mingling with limestone dust rising from the roads.

Amish farmers work the fields with horse-drawn plows while their beef cattle and milk cows slowly graze nearby pastures. Women tend laundry on sagging clotheslines as their toddlers play with wooden toys.

Weaving around horse-drawn buggies, a visitor might miss the sight that seems out of place here - a technology that most Americans only dream about - solar panels.

Designed to turn photons into electrons, the purple-black panels have sprung up in the last five years on the roofs of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of Amish homes, barns and greenhouses.

Though still resisted by a few hard-line Amish denominations, this technology that NASA relies on for its most advanced spacecraft is being heartily embraced by more and more of the plain-spoken folk. They view it as a safe alternative to lighting their homes with natural gas, white gasoline or kerosene.

Organic dairy, beef and chicken farmer Owen Nisley on County Road 600 near Charm, describes solar as natural as nature itself - "no different from my cows eating the grass that has captured the sun's energy."

Nisley's solar panels generate about 500 watts of power.

"The initial setup was very expensive," he said, "but we love the solar, even in the winter when there are a lot of dark days."

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Improving Healthy Food Access

The Prevention Research Center at Tulane University, together with six partner organizations, wants to improve access to fresh, healthy food in New Orleans.

Calling itself the Partnership to Pursue a Food Policy Advisory Committee, the group includes members from Second Harvest of Greater New Orleans and Acadiana, the City of New Orleans Health Department, Steps to a Healthier LA/New Orleans, the Louisiana Public Health Institute, the Renaissance Project and the New Orleans Food & Farm Network.

Access to fresh produce was not plentiful prior to Hurricane Katrina; since the levee failures, however, availability has gotten worse. The partnership has been meeting monthly to discuss the issue and brainstorm ways to address the problem. Out of these discussions came the idea to create a Food Policy Advisory Committee.

Based on partnership testimony, the committee drafted a supportive resolution that went on to the New Orleans City Council on Thursday (May 3), and the council unanimously adopted the resolution.

"Similar councils and committees are common throughout the country," says Erin Baker, assistant director of the Prevention Research Center. "People routinely get the message that they should eat more fruits and vegetables. But that message is ineffective if there is a lack of availability in the neighborhood."

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Bill-backers call for local growing, more organics

Last harvest, Jeff Miller packed organic vegetables into his pickup truck and drove to a farmers market in Palatine. Up at dawn. Behind a stall. Every Saturday, like clockwork. By the end of the season, the Grayslake farmer had pocketed $3,500.

Not bad for a novice working a 2-acre incubator farm. But Miller's proceeds fell far short of the potential that Illinois farmers see if they could fully tap into the state's organic produce market, with annual sales of $500 million. Instead, they produce about 5 percent of the organic food consumed in the state, they say, and 95 percent comes from other states.

"Ideally, I'd like to move to a 5-acre farm," Miller said. "To do that we need more farmers markets, more marketing, more shipping and storage."

After years toiling on tiny farms, organic growers such as Miller might finally get the help they need. For the first time in Illinois, a diverse set of allies, including green activists, small farmers, urban food-policy planners and, most recently, the Illinois Farm Bureau, has joined forces to change the way Illinois residents put food on the table.

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Surge in carbon levels shows vegetation struggling to cope

Climate change may have passed a key tipping point that could mean temperatures rising more quickly than predicted and it being harder to tackle global warming, research suggests.

Bristol University researchers say a previously unexplained surge of carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere in recent years is due to more greenhouse gas escaping from trees, plants and soils. Global warming was making vegetation less able to absorb the carbon pollution pumped out by human activity.

Such a shift would worsen the gloomy predictions of the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change which warned last week that there is less than a decade to tackle rising emissions to avoid the worst effects of global warming.

At the moment about half of human carbon emissions are re-absorbed into the environment, but the fear among scientists is that increased temperatures will reduce this effect. Wolfgang Knorr, a climate researcher at Bristol, said: "We could be seeing the carbon cycle feedback kicking in, which is good news for scientists because it shows our models are correct. But it's bad news for everybody else."

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NASA Study Suggests Extreme Summer Warming in the Future

A new study by NASA scientists suggests that greenhouse-gas warming may raise average summer temperatures in the eastern United States nearly 10 degrees Fahrenheit by the 2080s.

"There is the potential for extremely hot summertime temperatures in the future, especially during summers with less-than-average frequent rainfall," said lead author Barry Lynn of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies and Columbia University, New York.

The research found that eastern U.S. summer daily high temperatures that currently average in the low-to-mid-80s (degrees Fahrenheit) will most likely soar into the low-to-mid-90s during typical summers by the 2080s. In extreme seasons — when precipitation falls infrequently — July and August daily high temperatures could average between 100 and 110 degrees Fahrenheit in cities such as Chicago, Washington, and Atlanta.

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Wildfire Threatens a California Resort Island

Firefighters struggled early Friday to prevent a wildfire from reaching homes on the edge of Santa Catalina Island's main city as residents and visitors fled the resort isle off the Southern California coast.

People lined up at the harbor Thursday night to board ferries back to the mainland. Many covered their faces with towels and bandanas as ashes fell.

A few homes burned but firefighters were protecting other properties late into the night, Avalon Fire Chief Steven Hoefs said. About 1,200 homes were under voluntary or mandatory evacuation orders.

''We're hanging in for now,'' Hoefs said.

The blaze that began five miles east of the island's airport grew to 4,000 acres, feeding on dry brush as winds steadily blew throughout the day and into the night. Winds later calmed and the air grew moist, although the threat remained.

An orange inferno loomed behind the quaint crescent harbor, landmark 1929 Catalina Casino and homes, restaurants and tiny hotels clinging to slopes above the waterfront.

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City still vulnerable

Just weeks before the start of a new hurricane season, New Orleans' hurricane levees are incomplete leaving the city at risk from even small hurricanes.

The New Orleans metropolitan area will enter the 2007 hurricane season with an incomplete levee protection system that could fail on its eastern and southern borders -- even during smaller hurricanes, independent critics and officials with the Army Corps of Engineers agree.

Lt. Col. Jeffrey Bedey, commander of the corps' Hurricane Protection Office that oversees levees on the east bank of the Mississippi River, agreed that the protection offered levees, walls and gates does not yet meet levels authorized by Congress before Hurricane Katrina.

But major strides have been made since the August 29, 2005 disaster, he said.

"In general, the repairs have strengthened the levees enough to prevent another catastrophic breach, but haven't yet raised them enough to prevent overtopping in places.Even a strong Category 2 hurricane entering the Gulf Intracoastal Waterway from Lake Borgne could overtop levees guarding eastern New Orleans and the Lower 9th Ward to the north, and St. Bernard Parish to the south. As during Katrina, that channel can still funnel high water into the Industrial Canal, where it would top levee walls on its western side, which remain as much as two feet too low.

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For a warmer future, Australia employs Aboriginal wisdom

To white Australians, the flocks of red-tailed black cockatoos which flap above tree canopies are a memorable highlight of any weekend hike. But to Aborigines, the parrots are living, squawking barometers.

"A month ago when the cockatoos were flocking and the wattle bushes were flowering, we saw that as signs of rain," says Jeremy Clark, chief executive of the Brambuk Aboriginal Cultural Centre in the Grampian Mountains of Victoria State. "Sure enough, we've just had two weeks of rain."

Where meteorologists base their prognostications on satellites and synoptic charts, generations of Aborigines have observed the behavior of animals and the continent's flowering of plants.

More than two centuries after the first British settlement was established in 1788, there is a belated recognition that 40,000 years of Aboriginal lore may contribute to the complicated science of Australia's capricious climate.

After seven years of scant rainfall – the worst drought on record – have left vast swathes of the country parched and barren, the Bureau of Meteorology's Indigenous Weather Knowledge Project hopes to harness Aborigines' ancient understanding of weather patterns.

"Our primary focus is mapping the seasons as they are understood by indigenous people," says Harvey Stern, the head of the project. "From there could emerge all sorts of gems which will help us better understand the weather and how it impacts on the environment."

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Carving Out Havens and Facing Down the Skeptics

Enforcement officers from the city’s Department of Parks and Recreation sat in two cars and guarded the locked gates of Hunts Point Riverside Park in the South Bronx last Wednesday.

“When is the park opening?” they were asked.

“Who are you?” came the reply, delivered without even a glance at the questioner.

“A reporter,” they were told.

“No comment.”


Who would have imagined the hours of a public park would be given on a need-to-know basis? Yet that was the question people in Hunts Point had been asking ever since work on this hidden gem was finished — more or less — last September.

It finally opened this weekend, after hundreds of calls to the city from eager schoolchildren, parents and community organizers who felt slighted that the park’s twisty paths, new benches, grills and boat ramp lay within their sight but out of their reach.

Officially, the lack of a traffic light along the busy street — where tractor-trailers speed to and from the sprawling regional produce market — accounted for part of the delay. The other reason was that even after crossing the intersection, park visitors have to cross an active railroad track that is used by a slow-moving freight train that serves the market. These were hardly unknown problems, yet it still took eight months before the city installed traffic lights and crosswalk lines at the intersection and stationed a flagman by the tracks.

“The city moves in geologic time,” said Adam Green, the executive director of Rocking the Boat, an educational and environmental group that was given special permission to launch hand-built boats from the park last fall. “It moves even slower than that freight train.”

Hunts Point Riverside, also known as Lafayette Avenue Park, is one of two new waterfront parks on the mostly industrial peninsula, which has been enjoying a rebirth in recent years. The other oasis, Barretto Point Park, was carved out of what had once been the site of a paint factory and, later, a squatter’s village of Caribbean-style wooden shacks where not too long ago only free-ranging Bronx chickens and a few hardy souls could enjoy sweeping vistas of the East River. While Barretto Point Park has been open to the public since September, its hours and staffing have been erratic, residents and advocates said, with the park closed sometimes as early as midafternoon in recent months.

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Why hurricanes inevitably will be more costly

The unimaginable devastation of Hurricane Katrina emphatically affirmed the frightening future of tropical storms.

If you follow climate issues, you are aware of the debate over what impact worldwide warming had on Katrina in 2005 and what it means for the hurricane seasons to come, a subject we touched on two weeks ago. We will leave that debate to the scientists, whom we are loath to pit against each other.

We can say with some certainty, however, that even if global warming slows, stops or reverses tomorrow, hurricane seasons will become ever more destructive and expensive along the coasts, from Texas to Florida to New Jersey to Cape Cod.

It is a direct result of human activity - oceanside development, that is.

Very simply, more is in the way than ever before.

In raw dollars, Katrina was the costliest hurricane on record, causing more than $80 billion in damages. That price tag was the result not only of the storm's power, but the fact that it occurred in 2005.

But what if the same storm had hit the same areas 35 years earlier, in 1970? We mention that year because it was the beginning of a hurricane-lull period that lasted until 1995. That calm coincided with an incredible building boom along the nation's coasts.

A 1970 Katrina would have cost $32 billion in inflation-adjusted dollars - 2½ times less damage. That figure is based on an analysis, performed at The Inquirer's request, by disaster specialist Roger Pielke Jr.

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Critic Says Levee Repairs Show Signs of Flaws

Some of the most celebrated levee repairs by the Army Corps of Engineers after Hurricane Katrina are already showing signs of serious flaws, a leading critic of the corps says.

The critic, Robert G. Bea, a professor of engineering at the University of California, Berkeley, said he encountered several areas of concern on a tour in March.

The most troubling, Dr. Bea said, was erosion on a levee by the Mississippi River Gulf Outlet, a navigation canal that helped channel water into New Orleans during the storm.

Breaches in that 13-mile levee devastated communities in St. Bernard Parish, just east of New Orleans, and the rapid reconstruction of the barrier was hailed as one of the corps’ most significant rebuilding achievements in the months after the storm.

But Dr. Bea, an author of a blistering 2006 report on the levee failures paid for by the National Science Foundation, said erosion furrows, or rills, suggest that “the risks are still high.” Heavy storms, he said, may cause “tear-on-the-dotted-line levees.”

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the National Geographic Report

Plant-covered roof wins award

The plant-covered rooftop of Sanitation District No. 1's headquarters won a Green Roof Award of Excellence at a trade show last week in Minneapolis.

"This is really an exceptional project because of the way it incorporates research, public education, the way it's part of an integrated stormwater-management system on site," said Steven Peck, president of Green Roofs for Healthy Cities, a nonprofit industry association based in Toronto.

"It's a fantastic project," Peck said about the district's rooftop, which is covered with ornamental grasses, chives and broadleaf plants - all drought-tolerant because nobody wants to have to water a roof. The plants grow in about 2 inches of soil above grains of drainage materials, which sit atop roof membranes.

The 3,600-square-foot "green" roof, one of six projects to win, was installed for about $13.50 per square foot when the district's headquarters at 1045 Eaton Drive was expanded in 2004.

That's a significantly higher cost per square foot than a conventional roof, but officials say such roofs are environmentally friendly and can cut building energy costs. Officials also believe the heavily supported roof will last longer than a conventional roof.

"We do the stormwater education with 3,000 or so students who come through here every year," said Jim Gibson, program manager of the sanitation district's water resource management group. "They go up to the green roof, and they have a model of it, and they talk about the benefits of green roofs for stormwater management."

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Buying local

You open the refrigerator and peer inside: organic grapes from Chile, bottles of German beer, crafted the same way for generations, and the best grass-fed, antibiotic-free lamb New Zealand has to offer -- all purchased with environmental responsibility in mind.

If we put the average consumer squarely at the geographic center of the United States -- Lebanon, Kansas -- the grapes will have traveled some 5,300 miles to reach your home. The beer, 4,800 miles. And the lamb chops, 7,600 miles.

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They come by cargo ship, by train, by truck, burning fossil fuels all along the way. And then you drive them home from the grocery store.

It almost starts to make the pesticides look good.

The idea of "food miles" has taken hold in Britain, where Tesco, the dominant supermarket there, promised in January to add labels detailing a product's carbon footprint. In the United States, however, the so-called "100-Mile Diet," while only just moving in from the fringe, is getting something of a following.

At its core, those who adhere to it promise to get all their food from within a 100-mile radius of their homes. The diet's Web site, 100milediet.org, even lets you enter your ZIP code and draws the circle for you. Sounds good if you live in California or Florida, but if you live in New England and it's February and you're down to turnips and butternut squash, things can start to look grim -- especially if you're not much of a cook.

"You have to leave it to people's conscience on what they value more. I look for local more than organic. I think the overall ecological footprint of petroleum burned is probably bigger for the petroleum rather than the pesticides," said Jason Mark, who helps run Alemany Farm in San Francisco.

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Climate change added to Modesto planning

Concerns about climate change stand to reshape Modesto's future environmental impact reports under a policy the City Council approved Monday.

By a 4-3 vote, the council expanded an ongoing update of Modesto's primary planning document to incorporate references to global warming.

The move is targeted at complying with a 2006 state law that requires reductions in emissions that contribute to global warming, such as carbon dioxide.

Smaller cities in Stanislaus County, such as Hughson and Waterford, addressed aspects of global warming in recent revisions to their general plans, the documents that describe where and how the communities can grow.

Their general plans now encourage builders to develop energy-efficient homes, plant trees and create walking-friendly neighborhoods.

The work that Modesto approved piggybacks on a $937,280 contract the council awarded in September to bring the city's general plan and master environmental impact report into compliance with new studies that describe demands on roads, sewers and storm drains.

Patrick Kelly, planning division manager, said including the global warming study would add about $11,500 to the contract.

Council members Janice Keating, Will O'Bryant and Kristin Olsen voted against incorporating the climate change discussion into the general plan update.

They argued that it made more sense to consider climate change when the city completely revises the general plan, a task the city is expected to undertake soon after it completes the more limited contract it launched in September. Also, the state has not detailed what it expects of local governments under the climate change law.

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A Farm Grows In The Hudson

Recently, we’ve been hearing about a lot of ideas for cutting the city’s greenhouse gas emissions and reducing pollution. But there’s another way of making the city green. In our ongoing series about how New York is preparing for climate change, WNYC’s Beth Fertig looks at an urban farm that’s opening today.

REPORTER: On a barge off Manhattan’s West Side, Ted Caplow shows off his greenhouse.

CAPLOW: As soon as we go in here you can see that it’s much warmer.

REPORTER: Warmer and more humid. This is a hydroponic greenhouse. The crops thrive on rain water, which is collected off the slanted rooftop and re-circulated through a series of pipes. There’s no soil. The plants are kept in pots filled with a crunchy blend of rocks and straw that soaks up the water and passes along the nutrients. These crops are constantly well-fed. When the seedlings sprout this summer, Caplow says lettuce and strawberries will grow in the front of the room.

CAPLOW: And in the back we have the vine crops. So we have tomatoes, cucumbers and peppers and they grow in these buckets down on the floor and they’re trained up the strings, and they reach ten feet high. And in fact the tomato plants will keep going until the stems are 30 feet long. But because our greenhouse isn’t 30 feet high we have to lower the bottom part of the stem and wrap it around a pot.

REPORTER: Caplow’s 1300 foot glass and aluminum greenhouse is the centerpiece of his Science Barge. He started the project a couple of years ago with money he inherited from his environmentally-conscious grandmother.

The greenhouse is on a 50-foot long barge that’s completely sustainable: powered by solar panels, wind turbines and bio-fuels including used cooking oil. So it doesn’t emit any carbon dioxide. As an environmental engineer with a background in energy and water pollution, Caplow says he wanted to demonstrate the potential for urban farming. But the barge is just an example of the bigger, higher picture.

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Coe Says London 2012 Can Set Environmental Benchmark

Sebastian Coe said on Thursday that the London 2012 Games will herald a new era of environmental sustainability in the Olympic movement and inspire young people to think about safeguarding the planet.

"The days of building big simply because the last Games were big are over," Coe, chairman of the London organising committee (LOCOG), told delegates at a conference on the environment held at ExCel, one of the proposed 2012 venues.

"No Games should pass through a city without leaving a lasting impression. The Olympic Movement can be a vehicle for raising environmental awareness among new audiences."

The Olympic Deliver Authority (ODA) launched an ambitious sustainable development strategy in January with chief executive David Higgins saying 2012 can be the "greenest Games" ever.

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As the Climate Changes, Bits of England’s Coast Crumble

This winter a 50-foot-wide strip of Roger Middleditch’s sugar-beet field fell into the North Sea, his rich East Anglian lands reduced by a large fraction of their acreage. The adjacent potato field, once 23 acres, is now less than 3 — too small to plant at all, he said.

Each spring Mr. Middleditch, a tenant farmer on the vast Benacre Estate here, meets with its managers to recalculate his rent, depending on how much land has been eaten up by encroaching water. As he stood in a muddy field by the roaring sea recently, he tried to estimate how close he dared to plant this season.

“We’ve lost so much these last few years,” he said. “You plant, and by harvest it’s fallen into the water.”

Coastal erosion has been a fact of life here for a century, because the land under East Anglia is slowly sinking. But the erosion has never been as quick and cataclysmic as it has been in recent years, an effect of climate change and global warming, many scientists say. To make matters worse for coastal farmers, the government has stopped maintaining large parts of the network of seawalls that once protected the area.

Under a new policy that scientists have labeled “managed retreat,” governments around the globe are concluding that it is not worth taxpayer money to fight every inevitable effect of climate change.

Land loss at Benacre “has accelerated dramatically,” said Mark Venmore-Roland, the estate’s manager. “At first it was like a chap losing his hair — bit by bit, so you’d get used to it.” But in the past few years, he said, “it’s been really frightening.”

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On the rise in American cities: the car-free zone

Every Saturday starting May 26 through Sept. 30, bicyclists, joggers, and pedestrians will have free rein on almost a mile of John F. Kennedy Drive, the main drag through Golden Gate Park. The usual denizens of the road – autos – will be banned, detoured elsewhere.

Vehicles are already prohibited in parts of the park on Sundays, and the decision to "go carless" on Saturdays as well concludes a heated seven-year debate. In the end, arguments that such road closures promote family activities, more active lifestyles, and tighter-knit communities carried the day.

The auto's demotion at Golden Gate Park follows dozens of similar moves in at least 20 American cities in the past three years. It's a trend that is gaining ground rapidly in the US, say urban planners.

• New York is proposing to shut down perimeter roads of Central Park and Brooklyn's Prospect Park all summer long.

• Atlanta plans to transform 53 acres of blighted, unused land into new bike-friendly green space.

• Philadelphia, Cleveland, Chicago, and El Paso, Texas, are planning events to promote car-free days in public parks, most in the hope that the idea will become permanent or extend for months.

"Cities across America are increasingly declaring that parks are for people, not cars, ... and closing roads within parks is one result of that," says Ben Welle with The Trust for Public Land's Center for City Park Excellence, in Washington.

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Refugees of global warming

Muhammad Ali, a wiry 65-year-old, has never driven a car, run an air conditioner or done much of anything that produces greenhouse gases. But on a warming planet, he is on the verge of becoming a climate refugee.

In the past 10 years the farmer has had to tear down and move his tin-and-bamboo house five times to escape the encroaching waters of the huge Jamuna River, swollen by severe monsoons that scientists believe are caused by global warming and greater glacier melt in the Himalayas.

Now the last of his land is gone, and Ali squats on a precarious piece of government-owned riverbank -- the only ground available -- knowing the river probably will take that as well once the monsoons start this month.

"Where we are standing, in five days it will be gone," he predicts. "Our future thinking is that if this problem is not taken care of, we will be swept away."

Bangladesh, which has 140 million people packed into an area a little smaller than Illinois, is one of the most vulnerable places to climate change. As the sea level slowly rises, this nation that is little more than a series of low-lying delta islands amid some of Asia's mightiest rivers -- the Ganges, Jamuna-Brahmaputra and Meghna -- is seeing saltwater creep into its coastal soils and drinking water. Farmers near the Bay of Bengal who once grew rice now are raising shrimp.

Notorious for its deadly cyclones, Bangladesh is likely to face increasingly violent storms as the weather warms and see surging seas carry saltwater farther and farther up the country's rivers, ruining soils, according to scientists.

On Bangladesh's southern coast, erosion driven in part by accelerating glacier melt and unusually intense rains already has scoured away half of Bhola Island, which once covered an area nearly 20 times the size of Chicago. Land disputes, many driven by erosion, now account for 77 percent of Bangladesh's legal suits. In the dry northwest of the country, droughts are getting more severe. And if sea level rises by 3 feet by the turn of the century, as some scientists predict, a fifth of the country will disappear.

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Urban Sediments After Hurricanes Katrina, Rita Contained High Levels of Contaminants

In the first study to evaluate urban sediments after a natural disaster, scientists have found that floodwaters in New Orleans from Hurricanes Katrina and Rita in August and September 2005, contained high levels of fecal indicator bacteria and microbial pathogens.

The scientists collected water and sediment samples from the interior canal and shoreline of New Orleans and the offshore waters of Lake Pontchartrain, which showed higher-than-normal levels of bacteria and pathogens. Levels of the microbes fell within a few weeks after flooding had completely subsided.

"Our findings emphasize the importance of including environmental monitoring in disaster management plans," said Helena Solo-Gabriele, an environmental engineer at the University of Miami and co-author of the study. "A rapid assessment of conditions can protect emergency workers and residents from potential illnesses that could result from exposure."

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A Starring Role for ‘Green’ Construction

NOT too long ago, the concept of “green” building was discounted as impractical, something that might be good for the environment but not necessarily for the business climate. But that mind-set is changing rapidly.

As concerns mount about global warming and oil prices, so, too, has interest in more sustainable, or green, construction — that is, developments that balance style and function with protection of the environment and conservation of natural resources.

“You can’t open a newspaper or a real estate publication these days without seeing the word ‘green,’ ” said John Fleming, the director of commercial real estate for Johnson Controls, whose sales of products that monitor energy output have been strong.

An estimated 6 percent of commercial developments are certified as “sustainable” or have applied for certification through the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design, or LEED, program of the United States Green Building Council. Industry experts say they expect that the percentage could rise to as high as 10 percent by 2010. And many more buildings are being retrofitted with devices that curtail energy consumption and carbon gas emissions.

What does it all mean for real estate investors?

“Green for the environment and for your bottom line,” said George Caraghiaur, a vice president for energy services at the Simon Property Group, one of the largest owners of shopping malls. “Energy expenses make up 25 to 35 percent of our controllable operating costs.”
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Recruiting Plankton to Fight Global Warming

Can plankton help save the planet?

Some Silicon Valley technocrats are betting that it just might. In an effort to ameliorate the effects of global warming, several groups are working on ventures to grow vast floating fields of plankton intended to absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and carry it to the depths of the ocean. It is an idea, debated by experts for years, that still sounds like science fiction — and some scholars think that is where it belongs.

But even though many questions remain unanswered, the first commercial project is scheduled to get under way this month when the WeatherBird II, a 115-foot research vessel, heads out from its dock in Florida to the Galápagos and the South Pacific.


The ship plans to dissolve tons of iron, an essential plankton nutrient, over a 10,000-square-kilometer patch. That’s equivalent to 2.47 million acres (3,861 square miles on land or 2,912 square nautical miles). When the trace iron prompts growth and reproduction of the tiny organism, scientists on the WeatherBird II plan to measure how much carbon dioxide the plankton ingests.

The idea is similar to planting forests full of carbon-inhaling trees, but in desolate stretches of ocean. “This is organic gardening, not rocket science,” said Russ George, the chief executive of Planktos, the company behind the WeatherBird II project. “Can it possibly be as easy as we say it is? We’re about to find out.”

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Arctic Sea Ice Melting Faster, a Study Finds

Climate scientists may have significantly underestimated the power of global warming from human-generated heat-trapping gases to shrink the cap of sea ice floating on the Arctic Ocean, according to a new study of polar trends.

The study, published online today in Geophysical Research Letters, concluded that an open-water Arctic in summers could be more likely in this century than had been estimated in the latest international review of climate research released in February by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

“There are huge changes going on,” said Julienne Stroeve, a lead author of the new study and a researcher at the National Snow and Ice Data Center in Boulder, Colo. “Just with warm waters entering the Arctic, combined with warming air temperatures, this is wreaking havoc on the sea ice, really.”

The intergovernmental panel concluded that if emissions of heat-trapping gases like carbon dioxide were not significantly reduced, the region could be end up bereft of floating ice in summers sometime between 2050 and the early decades of the next century.

For the new study, Dr. Stroeve and others at the ice center reviewed nearly six decades of measurements by ships, airplanes and satellites estimating the maximum and minimum area of Arctic sea ice, which typically expands most in March and shrinks most in September.

With an expert from the National Center for Atmospheric Research, also in Boulder, they then compared the observed trends with the projections made for the climate panel’s review using the world’s most advanced computer models of climate.

Dr. Stroeve’s team found that since 1953 the area of sea ice in September has declined at an average rate of 7.8 percent per decade. Computer climate simulations of the same period had an average rate of ice loss of 2.5 percent per decade.

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Coral Is Dying. Can It Be Reborn?

Clouds were moving across the sun and a 20-knot northeast wind was stirring a 3-foot chop as Meaghan Johnson headed her open boat into the Florida Straits.

Ms. Johnson, a program coordinator for the Nature Conservancy, headed the boat into the swells, to minimize swamping, as her passengers tried in vain to avoid soaking spray.

One of them, Ken Nedimyer, stood next to her at the console, gazing out at the seemingly featureless welter of waves, seeking signs — a slight change in water depth here, a barely visible underwater patch of reef there — that only he could recognize and triangulate with the rapidly disappearing onshore landmarks of Key Largo.

About two and a half miles out, he told Ms. Johnson to throttle back a bit. “Over there,” he said, pointing off the starboard bow. “About 400 yards.”

The boat pulled up to the site and Philip Kramer, who directs the conservancy’s Caribbean Marine Program, set its anchor. Soon he, Ms. Johnson and Mr. Nedimyer were over the side, peering into the water through their snorkeling masks. Below them was what they had come to see, an array of concrete disks set in the sand. Each one held a tiny piece of coral.

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