Hmm…

Brazil blackout cause uncertain, president says

Brazil says it will voluntarily cut carbon emissions by at least 36 percent

This… means… something!

Rousseau’s Revenge

From The Economist: Anthropogenic global warming started when people began farming.

Long before the Industrial Revolution—indeed, long before a worldwide revolution in intensive farming, the results of which kept humanity alive—people caused unnatural exhalations of greenhouse gases that had an impact on the world’s climate.

So although the size of the effect has increased markedly since the industrial revolution, it looks as if humanity has been interfering with the climate since the dawn of civilisation.

We’ll never be rid of the Noble Savage, unless civilization actually collapses.  He’s an artifact of the human psyche, and no appeal to science, history or reason will banish him.

Five hundred years ago, it was common to see Apparitions of Mary.  In the late 20th Century, aliens abducted and molested us en masse.  What manifestation of our fears will the new century bring, perhaps time-travelling wizened dwarfs from the future begging us not to exhale so much CO₂?  [Better they should tell Cain not to bother planting that wheat-offering.]

Green Sahara

I missed this item last month: Sahara Desert Greening Due to Climate Change. (Nat’l Geographic)

Scientists are now seeing signals that the Sahara desert and surrounding regions are greening due to increasing rainfall.

If sustained, these rains could revitalize drought-ravaged regions, reclaiming them for farming communities.

This desert-shrinking trend is supported by climate models, which predict a return to conditions that turned the Sahara into a lush savanna some 12,000 years ago.

Has the Sahara been a sea of shifting sand for all of civilized human history?  Think of Joseph and his seven fat cow years, followed by seven skinny cows that ate the fat cows. If I watched as the land outside my door transformed from grass to sand after a locust storm and darkness, I might consider changing Gods and leaving town as well.  (Didn’t this nearly happen in the American Midwest during the Dust Bowl?)

If we live to see a scrub grass Sahara, still arid but able to support grazing livestock and date palms or–think of it!–olive trees, it will be a boon to humanity akin to penicillin.  Of course, all that new grazing land will be suddenly worth fighting over.

In 2008 Kröpelin—not involved in the new satellite research—visited Western Sahara, a disputed territory controlled by Morocco.

“The nomads there told me there was never as much rainfall as in the past few years,” Kröpelin said. “They have never seen so much grazing land.”

He explained it’s a similar story in the eastern Sahara area of southwestern Egypt and northern Sudan, a remote desert region that he has studied for two decades.

I recall that some UN official gave a speech blaming climate change for the massacres in the Sudan, only as he told it, the land was worsening and squeezing resources, causing a deadly scramble for food.  But this story makes more sense: only when the land becomes more productive will there be tension between herders and farmers.  Even so, I hope to see the Sahara bloom.  Africa is due a break.

“Before, there was not a single scorpion, not a single blade of grass,” [Kröpelin] said.

“Now you have people grazing their camels in areas which may not have been used for hundreds or even thousands of years. You see birds, ostriches, gazelles coming back, even sorts of amphibians coming back,” he said.

“The trend has continued for more than 20 years. It is indisputable.”

Environmentalism Disaster Looms

No, you didn’t misread the headline.  From The Atlantic:

Just a decade ago, every one of these schemes was considered outlandish. Some still seem that way. But what sounded crankish only 10 years ago is now becoming mainstream thinking.

By now, even staunch environmentalists and eminent scientists with long records of climate-change concern are discussing geo-engineering openly.

Spread powdered iron over the surface of the ocean, and in very little time a massive bloom of plankton will grow, [oceanographer John Martin] predicted. “Give me half a tanker of iron,” Martin said, “and I’ll give you the next Ice Age.”

Another scheme involves spewing sulphur dioxide into the atmosphere to scatter sunlight; still another proposes pumping carbon underground or into the oceans.  [Coal mining in reverse?]  All of them pose far greater risk to you and me than a negligible risk of insignificant temperature increase, and by golly, they’re going to execute one or perhaps several of them with some software mogul’s grant money!

The scariest thing about geo-engineering, as it happens, is also the thing that makes it such a game-changer in the global-warming debate: it’s incredibly cheap. Many scientists, in fact, prefer not to mention just how cheap it is. Nearly everyone I spoke to agreed that the worst-case scenario would be the rise of what David Victor, a Stanford law professor, calls a “Greenfinger”—a rich madman, as obsessed with the environment as James Bond’s nemesis Auric Goldfinger was with gold. There are now 38 people in the world with $10 billion or more in private assets, according to the latest Forbes list; theoretically, one of these people could reverse climate change all alone. “I don’t think we really want to empower the Richard Bransons of the world to try solutions like this,” says Jay Michaelson, an environmental-law expert, who predicted many of these debates 10 years ago.

Enjoy your next sandwich, folks.

The Perfect Solution

Americans have a lot of body fat, and not enough fuel.  Well…

For a time, Beverly Hills doctor Craig Alan Bittner turned the fat he removed from patients into biodiesel that fueled his Ford SUV and his girlfriend’s Lincoln Navigator.

I don’t care that this is probably a hoax.  I love any story that turns an intractable problem into an ingenious solution.