In his book Blessed Unrest, our friend Paul Hawken said that the movement that is rising to stop global warming and many other planetary inequities will be the largest our planet has ever seen. We want to give you the tools to ensure he’s right. Only three years ago, global warming was off the radar screen for many Americans. Today, it is in the national spotlight and a diverse network of groups is rising to the challenge of stopping it. Hundreds of colleges and universities are working to become carbon neutral, reducing emissions from campuses to zero. Community organizers in Oakland, New Orleans, Detroit, and elsewhere are taking on polluters and fighting for environmental justice. In Appalachia, rural communities are banding together to fight mountaintop removal, a heartbreaking new method for mining coal from that region. People of faith are organizing their churches, synagogues, and mosques, declaring global warming as the moral crisis of our time. Traditional businesses are greening up, while entrepreneurs are building a clean-energy alternative economy that has the potential to create thousands of new jobs. And this is just the beginning.

In 1968, observing the state of civil rights in America, Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. said, “We are now faced with the fact, my friends, that tomorrow is today. We are confronted with the fierce urgency of now.” Today, we are feeling that fierce urgency again for two reasons. The first is that scientists are telling us that we are running out of time even faster than we thought. If we don’t act within the next few years, we won’t be able to avoid the worst effects of climate change. The second reason is a more hopeful one. Recent political changes in Washington DC and around the country have finally created an opportunity for genuine political action on global warming. There is no guarantee that this situation will last. If you’ve been a little paralyzed by the sheer size and horror of global warming, now is the time to start moving forward, fast. ...   more »

SAN FRANCISCO — A frail partnership between Intel and the One Laptop Per Child educational computing group was undone last month in part by an Intel saleswoman: She tried to persuade a Peruvian official to drop the country’s commitment to buy a quarter-million of the organization’s laptops in favor of Intel PCs. -- Intel and the group had a rocky relationship from the start in their short-lived effort to get inexpensive laptops into the hands of the world’s poorest children.

But the saleswoman’s tactic was the final straw for Nicholas Negroponte, the former Massachusetts Institute of Technology computer researcher and founder of the nonprofit effort.He demanded that Intel stop what he saw as efforts to undermine the group’s sales, which meant ceasing to sell the rival computer. Intel chose instead to withdraw its support from One Laptop this week.

The project has been a lightning rod for controversy largely because the world’s most powerful software and chip making companies — Microsoft and Intel — had long resisted the project, for fear, according to many industry executives, that it would compete in markets they hoped to develop. ...   more »

Here's an interesting article re the OLPC (One Laptop Per Child) Project. I disagree with the article's conclusion (it omits the vast online support to be provided to olpc students), but I think it deserves further discussion here on SCIY. What do you think?

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At the Consumer Electronic Show this week, the One Laptop Per Child foundation was supposed to make two announcements—the number of computers it sold under the Give One, Get One holiday program and a new olpc machine made jointly with Intel. But now Intel has pulled out or been pushed out of the project with olpc, depending on who you believe. It’s a mess and a mess of huge dimensions that encompasses a conversation of profit vs. nonprofit, nationalism vs. colonialism, technology vs. pedagogy, rote vs. experiential learning, Western design vs. Eastern design, good intentions vs. bad intentions. It doesn’t get bigger, or nastier. ...   more »

This recent report, from the session on 'Tipping Points' at the important Dec.07 American Geophysical Union meeting in San Francisco, illustrates the complexity of current technical discussions about the validity of the increasingly disruptive climate change scenarios being projected by various Climate Change computer models. The bottom line is that our models may be seriously underestimating the rapidly of the coming changes, as indicated in the previously posted article re the melting of arctic sea ice. ~rj

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...In Hansen's talk, he did try to clarify what he meant by a tipping point. His notion of this has less to do with what mathematicians understand as "bifurcations," and more to do with a kind of inertia in the climate system. He means things like having passed a threshold of CO2 which, given warming in the pipeline and the lifetime of CO2, commits a certain discrete event — e.g. loss of perennial sea ice or the Amazon rainforest– to occurring even if we were to later reduce emissions to zero. He tried to distinguish between reversible and irreversible tipping points...

...where things get interesting is where you try to explain a magnitude of signal this big in terms of basic physics. This is important because there is a perception that GCM's vastly underestimate the amplitude of the response to total solar luminosity, leading to a perception that there is some "missing physics" (whether it be exotic amplification of a stratospheric response, or something like clouds and cosmic rays)...

But — the take-home point is that at this point the study of solar cycle response very strongly supports the notion that there is no need to invoke any mysterious or exotic missing physics (like cosmic ray modulation of clouds) in order to represent the response of climate to solar variability. If some models underestimate the response, this is likely to have more to do with errors in the vertical mixing of heat than any missing fundamental physics. ...   more »

Scientists in the US have presented one of the most dramatic forecasts yet for the disappearance of Arctic sea ice. -- Their latest modelling studies indicate northern polar waters could be ice-free in summers within just 5-6 years.

Professor Wieslaw Maslowski told an American Geophysical Union meeting that previous projections had underestimated the processes now driving ice loss.

Summer melting this year reduced the ice cover to 4.13 million sq km, the smallest ever extent in modern times. -- Remarkably, this stunning low point was not even incorporated into the model runs of Professor Maslowski and his team, which used data sets from 1979 to 2004 to constrain their future projections.

"Our projection of 2013 for the removal of ice in summer is not accounting for the last two minima, in 2005 and 2007," the researcher from the Naval Postgraduate School, Monterey, California, explained to the BBC. -- "So given that fact, you can argue that may be our projection of 2013 is already too conservative." ...   more »