Wednesday, July 29, 2009

Wine, Terroir, and the Changing Climate – How Vineyards are the Canary in the Mineshaft for Global Warming (but GIS and telemetry might save them)

By Paul K. Haeder

It’s been a pleasure recently working with some fantastic wineries throughout Washington and Oregon. They are working to pair up with local restaurants to position food growers, producers and chefs to develop a true food culture with true resiliency for impending climate change and rising fuel costs and economic complications caused by more globalization. We’ve got quite the winemaking industry in this neck of the woods with over 30,000 acres of wine grapes planted serving more than 600 wineries.

http://www.washingtonwine.org/

We’ve also got Washington State University working on the technical, economic, and sustainability angles of wine making and grape growing –

http://winegrapes.wsu.edu/organic.html

http://www.wawgg.org/index.php?page_id=69

What I am finding is a group of dedicated artisans looking to maximize their sustainability by coming together as collectives and associations, in concert with some of the leaders in technology and agriculture, to bring their passion for this drink to the next stage of production – pooling resources, preparing for soil, weather and other conditions that will change what they grow and turning their operations green, and in some cases, zero carbon, or carbon neutral. The number of charity events and the increasing community involvement by wineries is a statement on how they see their role as leaders in this form of cultivation. They are working to adjust and improve marketing, growing and taste. There is no debate about climate change – in the case of California especially – global warming effecting the very livelihoods of the vintners and viability of the grapes.

Like corn, the grapevine is one of the oldest cultivated plants. This rich tradition has created a culture and long history of the development of the wines of the world. The analysis of geologic and climatic conditions to grow grapes is part of the total geographical history of this agricultural process. Today’s viticultural regions for real quality wine production are located in what many describe as ultra-narrow geographical regions and climatic niches that put them at greater risk from both short-term climate variability and long-term climate change than other more “broad acre crops.” We’re seeing in Washington especially these 12 regions or appellations where soil, microclimates, wind, rain patterns, and pest challenges and the total amount of sun and humidity and fog can really determine the taste of the wine and fecundity of the grapes. This terrior, or the earth influence determines wine style that a region produces -- and that can only occur as a result of the baseline climate. That climate variability determines vintage quality differences. Change is in the vine, as both variability and average conditions fluctuate and change the wine styles – this is what determines the texture and drama of wine.

This study of climate change and the impacts on viticulture and wine production has become important, according to the Inter government Panel and Climate Change, because the levels of greenhouse gases have increased and human induced alterations in Earth surface characteristics have brought about changes in the Earth’s “radiation budget,” atmospheric circulation, and hydrologic cycle. The last 100 years has seen greatest warming -- occurring during the winter and spring and at night.

All agriculture is now shifting to a much more computer-based and satellite-aided practice, because increases in temperatures can be tied to agricultural production viability by impacting winter hardening potential, frost occurrence, and growing season lengths, for many crops, but especially grapes.

The California wine industry is gigantic: 2008 California wines sales to the U.S. market edged up 2% in volume over the previous year to an estimated 467 million gallons. The estimated retail value of these shipments totaled approximately $18.5 billion, down slightly from 2007, according to Gomberg-Fredrikson & Associates. Total California winery shipments to both the U.S. and export markets increased 3% in volume to 570 million gallons last year.

But climate change – warming, changing rain patterns, snowpack shrinkages, winds, and other factors – is the biggest challenge for wine makers in California, Australia, and France, to name just a few of the more than 50 countries that have some sort of wine grape growing tradition. In 2006, the National Academy of Sciences predicted in a report that anywhere from 50 percent to 81 percent of America's premium winegrowing regions would be unsuitable for viticulture by the end of 2100. Almost all of the affected regions are in California.

There are some creative and holistic moves winemakers are making to mitigate the damage and the carbon impact of their trade on the planet. But at the end of the day, there are some stark choices to make, and sometimes that’s just throwing in the towel or moving on . . . or up. In California, it’s a matter of looking for cool winds, moist mornings, and that means moving up – in latitude or altitude, or move closer to the ocean. Napa Valley’s known for its reds, but with climate change, the industry is thinking that if climate change shifts hard and warms quickly, Napa Valley could be known for chardonnay and pinot noir. Are maybe it will have to move to BC’s Okanagan Valley. Even overseas, those questions plague vintners -- Will Burgundy become the new Bordeaux and Germany's Mosel the new Burgundy?

Winemakers over the globe met scientists and others in 2008 in Barcelona for the Second World Conference on Climate Change and Wine. Environmental awareness was stressed, and the workshops and trade shows provided the evidence: ways to limit carbon emissions, alternative energy sources, water being used more wisely. Just two decades ago winemakers would have nothing to do with the issues tied to the so-called “environment.” Now that’s almost all they talk about.

Water. It’s been recently featured in magazines like Smithsonian and National Geographic as Australia’s main concern, and that country’s make or break point, but the winemakers of that continent are especially worried: Prue and Stephen Henschke run one of Australia's finest wineries, but they are flagging under huge climate change impacts: "The country is enduring one of the worst droughts in history, with no relief in sight. We are okay with our vineyards [in south Australia's Eden Valley and Adelaide Hills], but other parts of the country are facing severe shortages. And it isn't just winegrowing; it's other agriculture as well. We're having to rethink all our practices," Prue said.

While the winemakers in Washington are starting to see climate and water and the issue of organic versus heavy fossil fuel input growing as major concerns, Prue and Stephen are beyond organic: it’s called biodynamic farming. Everything is based on sustainable practices – from the carbon footprint, the computers used, where bottles come from, how to label, where to move the product, what to do to reduce waste, and what to do with the waste stream.

At the conference, discussion about research done in the United States, Europe and Australia that suggests a long-term warming trend could create a world without great Burgundy alarmed many in the industry. It’s amazing that one grape variety could vanish due to climatic and soil conditions. Snow has to harden many grapevines, but some of the winemakers in Burgandy, including Jacques-Frederic Mugnier, see the climate effecting volume, chemistry and viability of the Burgandy grapes. "I keep records of the weather," he says, "but the changes are clear for all to see. When I was a boy we frequently had snow. Now it is rare. Spring comes earlier every year. I am afraid when it comes time for my grandchildren to replant the vineyards, they will be using syrah."

Finally, we see that in 2006 the National Academy of Sciences reported that “anywhere from 50 percent to 81 percent of America's premium winegrowing regions would be unsuitable for viticulture by the end of this century.” Almost all of the affected regions are in California. For more on this issue, go to this link:

http://www.u-bourgogne.fr/chaireunesco-vinetculture/Actes%20clima/Actes/Article_Pdf/Jones.pdf

Given this knowledge, society’s role should now shift from one of uncertainties, blame, or attribution, to one of mitigation and adaptation. While the wine industry has some leeway to mitigate fossil fuel use and sequester carbon through more efficient processes both in the vineyard and winery, the bulk of the response will likely be through adaptation. Because we know that winegrapes can only be grown across a fairly narrow range of climates for optimum quality and production, it all depends on where a region is today in terms of climate and the magnitude and rate of the future warming.

Observations show and models predict that one of the most important issues for the wine industry will be whether or not achieving optimum varietal ripeness and wine balance will occur in the warmer environment or will we be forced to change varieties or shift regions to achieve the same wine styles.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terroir

Here are two pieces on the wine industry adapting to climate change -- a video and radio piece.

http://www.kqed.org/quest/television/view/490

http://www.kqed.org/quest/radio/high-tech-in-the-vineyards

And this is a great article on climate change and wineries here in Washington:

http://www.prosser.wsu.edu/pdf%20files/davenport%20et%20al.,%202001%20.pdf

Check out the tools wineries are making to manage vineyards and the entire system of winemaking and wine delivery: precision agriculture tools like GPS and GIS have a role in vineyard management. Techniques for yield and mid-season crop adjustment pruning monitoring are still needed to make this monitoring more reliable. These are also key to directing insect and disease pressure scouting. For canopy management such as stopping “Blackleaf” and monitoring the quality of the sugars and volume of the grapes, the industry is still looking to engineers, scientists and computer experts for this more rarified development of non-destructive, “georeferenced” monitoring techniques remains.

Yes, it’s still about warm summers, cool summers, rain, deluges, dry spells. That’s the poetic quality of winemaking and why many go into the business, many who have had careers in fields so far afield from wine growing or anything to do with agriculture. These days the wineries are looking to climate specialists and experts in soils and watershed management and alternative building and energy to lead them into this climate change environment. Many know they too must go green, so to speak, and last year Oregon Governor Kulongoski challenges his state’s wineries and vineyards to go carbon neutral.

Governor Kulongoski made a bold call to Oregon’s wineries and vineyards: Become “carbon neutral.” The Oregon Environmental Council and the Oregon Wine Board joined the Governor’s Carbon Neutral Challenge, which asks participants to reduce greenhouse gas emissions while increasing energy generation toward the goal of net-zero carbon use. That’s more than 30 wineries and vineyards committed to making dramatic shifts in their “business as usual.” Only a few of wineries around the world have gone carbon neutral; Oregon’s moves and the outcomes of this plan could influence the wine industry worldwide.

Oregon’s Pinot Noir from Eyrie Vineyards shook up the wine-drinking world by placing second in an internationally-renowned competition in Paris known euphemistically as the Wine Olympics. That was in 1980. The Oregon wine industry has taken off since then. The Carlton Winemakers Studio pledged to provide “a creative, state-of-the-art facility for artisan producers crafting boutique wines – it is also the first winery registered with the U.S. Green Building Council)

http://www.greenerbuildings.com/news/2009/07/18/leed-gold-for-california-winery

The Sokol Blosser Winery in Oregon was the first in the U.S. to receive LEED certification; it earned a silver rating in 2002. In 2006, Stoller Vineyards and Winery, also in Oregon, achieved the first gold rating for a U.S. winery.


The wine industry has stepped up its efforts to become more environmentally responsible in the past decade. In California, an industry group published its first report measuring the level of sustainable practices among vintners and growers in the state in 2004.



The growing efforts include changing packaging and bottling to reduce the amount of materials used and lighten the weight for shipment. Use of solar power also is on the upswing. As we see in marketing and with criticism leveled at the “greenwashing angle” of why companies shift to some “green” practices, firms are wary of touting their efforts for fear of being accused of greenwashing, this according to a survey conducted by Professor Robert Smiley, director of wine studies at the Graduate School of Management at the University of California, Davis.

What can wineries do to mitigate climate change?

Wineries can reduce their carbon output in a number of ways. Some have become certified as Carbon Neutral as previously stated. Wineries such as Wairau River Wines in New Zealand have become accredited with carboNZero certification, New Zealand’s program for organizations that reduce and offset their emissions.

New Zealand has led the world in carbon-neutrality for wineries, with Grove Mill, a Marlborough-based company, becoming the first-ever. This was followed by South Australia’s Elderton Wines and then Backsberg Estate in South Africa. Since then a few more have popped up in the rest of the world.

Gaining accreditation involves reducing the carbon output as far as possible, increase carbon sinks in the winery and then purchasing carbon credits for the remainder. Creating carbon sinks could be to plant trees, as the trees grow they absorb carbon. Many organic producers increase the organic matter in their vineyards but this will only help for a short period, as the organic matter will decompose releasing the stored carbon back into the atmosphere. Reducing carbon consumption would include looking at the following areas:

Fertilizer is often added to the soil of many modern vineyards. This is sometimes to replace missing nutrients such as nitrogen, iron or to bolster organic material.

Frost protection in cool regions can be carbon expensive as well as very costly. Whether it is burning pots of oils in the vineyard or hovering a helicopter over the site, protecting vines requires energy. One of the lowest energy methods is to have windmills that can be used to move often warmer air above the vine, (known as an inversion layer) onto the vines.

Pumping in the winery uses power, but are not used as often as pumping water for irrigation. To counter this, gravity feed water systems are best.

Tractors, like all vehicles, use diesel. Minimizing tractor and vehicle use can reduce the vineyard's carbon footprint.

Fermentation by its nature produces carbon and creating wine involves fermenting grape juice. The process of fermentation causes sugars to split into alcohol and Carbon Dioxide. In recent times some wineries have considered capturing the carbon dioxide rather than vent this into the air.

Refrigeration is required in both the production of wine and the storage of wine and can be expensive to run in both CO2 and money terms. Good building design, insulation and placement can reduce this. But some form of active cooling will always be required since fermentation produces heat. Co-generation, Living Building and LEED are the architectural ways to help, as is solar power.

Packaging is a significant source of carbon. Typically half the weight and volume is wasted in a case of 12 bottles. Wineries can reduce their effects on weight and wastage by reducing the amount of glass. Recent initiatives by WRAP (http://www.wrap.org.uk/ ) has resulted in less glass being used in wine bottles. However other options are becoming available, including wine in plastic PET bottles, Bag in Box and Tetra packs. All reduce the amount of packaging used over glass.

Shipping wines can be very carbon intense, but most wines are not flown to their destination instead they are shipped by sea in containers. Some methods of shipping are better than others. A typical wine box containing 12 bottles is 30cm x 30cm x 27cm = 0.0243 cubic meters or 24.3 liters of space but with only 12 bottles it ships 12 x .75liters = 9 liters of wine, under half the spaces capacity if filled completely with wine. This method of shipping in bulk, while very efficient, is limited to large branded producers who have the volume to invest in such operations and have their wine bottled overseas. Many smaller producers prefer to have control over the bottling process to ensure quality standards and are too small to ship bulk wine.

Who controls the carbon rules

Wine is a non-essential luxury good that produces 0.1% of manmade greenhouse gases. So what should a winery do to manage this? There are a number of important things a winery can do to manage climate change both to mitigate the effects, but also to reduce their own carbon footprint.

In recent times you have seen many wineries becoming carbon zero and following The New Zealand Wine Company, who make Grove Mill, Sanctuary and Frog Haven. But this piecemeal approach has created a problem, the crux of which is that each country is developing its own certification body, with each body able to set a different standard. With a range of different standard the question is, what do you include in deciding your CO2 footprint, where do you stop? Frost protection, fertilizers, harvesting the grape production and bottling many people would agree on. But what happens after the wine is made, shipping the wine to the market and moving it to the shop to be sold. What about the person buying the wine, going to the shop, chilling the wine down and recycling the glass? These could all be taken into account. Then on the flip side, how do you account for the carbon produced in making the tractor used on the winery in the first place. What is needed is an international body setting the rules!

The problem is who, and how do they get agreements quickly. After all what is green to one person is not green to another. No, the calculations to value a carbon foot print are going down a similar path to Organics. That is where each country or Bloc (as in the EU) decides on what is required to become a standard and if two countries agree to a common minimum standard then the wines can be labelled as such in the country where the wine is purchased. This type of system has many advantages, for example, if a standard is constructed but later needs to be changed perhaps due to more information becoming available, it is easier to get two countries to agree a change in a bilateral contract than an international agreement. It would also be quicker to agree.

There have been a number of standards created. In New Zealand CarboNZero was what The New Zealand Wine Company used. But since then carbon zero status has been applied to wines in Bordeaux and South Africa, with each country having their own standards. The next step is to create international bilateral agreements that will support and develop brands that the consumer will become aware of. Work is already underway between the New Zealand Australian and Californian governments to come up with the first international bilateral definition of carbon free.

Information for the above comes from: (http://www.thirtyfifty.co.uk/spotlight-climate-change.asp)

Check out this winery’s moves toward sustainability:

http://www.hallwines.com/green-winery

Finally, there are some interesting technical reports on telemetry architecture; here’s the abstract to one that shows the use of sensors and uplinks to satellites can make a difference:

http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1482015

"This paper describes recent advances in sensor technology and wireless radio frequency (telemetry architecture) with the capability for measuring changes in weather and atmospheric conditions that permit modellers to analyse the climate change, its variability and effects on viticulture across the world's major wine producing regions. When combined with GPS (global positioning system) functionality enabling geo-referenced information to be gathered and analysed in real-time, new opportunities emerge for the development of wireless sensor networks (WSN) for decision making in precision agriculture (PA). The use of WSN technologies in precision viticulture (PV) to date is mostly confined to on-farm and narrow regions within a city or in the case of a larger region the data collection is limited to monitoring weather conditions alone. This paper reviews three application scenarios: a) within a vineyard b) regionally within the state of Washington in the USA and c) cities within the Asia Pacific Region. It then details the development of a system proposed for comparative analysis of viticulture management information from two countries, namely Chile and New Zealand that have the same latitude but are at different longitude points. The paper looks at a variety of remotely located real-time sensors (telemetry devices), associated hardware devices (server, workstation, architectures and topologies) and software suitable for data collection, logging, distribution and streaming. Data gathered by the sensors is relayed via a series of repeaters to a workstation, which logs the data and is connected directly to the Internet for transmission to a server acting as the final collection and data analysis point for a comparative information matching synthesis. The data collected is to be used for building models that could enhance our understanding about the effects of climate change on grapevine growth and wine quality within major wine regions in the two countries being studied in this initial research. Finally, the paper describes variable parameters considered for analysis in this research so far in relation to plant growth, weather, climate, atmospheric influences such as climate change, pollution and also wine quality determinants such as soil, terrain and grape variety."

Finally, we have associations and some movies that add to this wine interest. UC-Davis has a huge budget for wine and grape and marketing research. Three movies about wine are there for the taking – two dramas – “Sideways” and “Bottle Shock,” and then the one about the globalization of wine and the battle against it, “Mondovino.”

This blog will continue to cover the tech-architecture-agronomic angle of wine making, vineyard management and moving wines to get to our tables. Salud and cheers:

http://wineserver.ucdavis.edu/devo/

http://www.bottleshockmovie.com/

http://www.haro-online.com/movies/mondovino.html

http://www.foxsearchlight.com/sideways/

Monday, July 27, 2009

Space Race, Earth Race, and Where the Money Falls: Climate Change on Earth or Mars? Who Benefits?

By Paul K. Haeder

Okay, so the news just zips on by in a few days away from the blog, even after having a few moments of respite on a pretty mellow USA weekend. But there’s always the groundbreaking technology news tied to some old ways of fighting terror or boogeymen:

  • new biometric software to track Americans

"Face recognition devices failed in test at Logan" By Shelley Murphy and Hiawatha Bray, Globe Staff

http://www.boston.com/news/local/articles/2003/09/03/face_recognition_devices_failed_in_test_at_logan/

  • new ways to track people’s buying and purchasing habits

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=100450780

  • how to catch terrorists (or illegal US government purchases) by putting in our bank information into a big computer mountain

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=106479613

  • or recruit more CIA operatives in the financial downturn

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=106290889

  • DARPA

http://www.counterpunch.org/schaefer08132003.html

http://www.alternet.org/story/16823/ The Technological Theft of Our Privacy By Jim Hightower

and

The Wild Weapons of DARPA

By Nicholas Turse

"When, in October 1957, the USSR launched the first man-made earth satellite, the basketball-sized Sputnik, it caught the United States off guard and sent the government into fits. Not only had the Soviets exploded an atomic bomb years before the Americans predicted they would, but now they were leading the "space race." In response, the Defense Department approved funding for a new U.S. satellite project, headed by former Nazi SS officer Wernher von Braun, and created, in 1958, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to make certain that the United States forever after maintained "a lead in applying state-of-the-art technology for military capabilities and to prevent technological surprise from her adversaries."

Almost half a century later, what's left of the USSR is a collapsed group of half-failed states, while the U.S. stands alone as the globe's sole hyperpower. Yet DARPA, the agency for an arms-race world, seems only to be warming up to the chase. There may be no country left to take the lead from us, the nearest military competitor being China which reportedly had $65 billion in military expenditures in 2002 (compared to our $466 billion according to GlobalSecurity.org) and which, only in 2003, put its first "Taikonaut" into outer space. Undaunted, DARPA continues to develop high-tech weapons systems for 2025-2050 and beyond – some of them standard fare like your run-of-the-mill hypersonic bombers, others more exotic."

[article continues at http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/1290/turse_on_weaponizing_the_wild_kingdom]

We now know China’s run for a lunar landing is being pressed hard, and it’s about colonizing to grab resources – and for space exploration beyond the galaxy. After Carl Sagan said there were billions and billions of galaxies out there, some scientists believe that there is one earth out there for every person on earth. Yikes. An earth a person. I doubt those 2 billion folk who make $2 a day or less who live on our earth could get in line for that deal.

The moon race is on with Russia shooting for 2015 as a moon colony starting date, five years before China’s expected real push for lunar landings and then a space station on the moon by 2024. Here’s some news on it all:

Ouyang Ziyuan, head of the first phase of lunar exploration, was quoted on government-sanctioned news site ChinaNews.com describing plans to collect three dimensional images of the Moon for future mining of Helium 3: "There are altogether 15 tons of helium-3 on Earth, while on the Moon, the total amount of Helium-3 can reach one to five million tons."

"Helium-3 is considered as a long-term, stable, safe, clean and cheap material for human beings to get nuclear energy through controllable nuclear fusion experiments," Ziyuan added. "If we human beings can finally use such energy material to generate electricity, then China might need 10 tons of helium-3 every year and in the world, about 100 tons of helium-3 will be needed every year."

Helium 3 fusion energy - classic Buck Rogers propulsion system- may be the key to future space exploration and settlement, requiring less radioactive shielding, lightening the load. Scientists estimate there are about one million tons of helium 3 on the moon, enough to power the world for thousands of years. The equivalent of a single space shuttle load or roughly 25 tons could supply the entire United States' energy needs for a year.

Thermonuclear reactors capable of processing Helium-3 would have to be built, along with major transport system to get various equipment to the Moon to process huge amounts of lunar soil and get the minerals back to Earth.

"After four-and-half-billion years, there should be large amounts of helium-3 on the moon," said Gerald Kulcinski, a professor who leads the Fusion Technology Institute at the University of Wisconsin at Madison.

Last year NASA administrator Mike Griffin named Kulcinski to lead a number of committees reporting to NASA's influential NASA Advisory Council, its preeminent civilian leadership arm.

The Council is chaired by Apollo 17 astronaut Harrison Hagan "Jack" Schmitt, a leading proponent of mining the moon for helium 3.

Okay, I’ve been working with students looking at the good, bad, ugly of space exploration. And manned versus unmanned space flight, or terra forming – geo-engineering of Mars or mining the Moon. We have this month’s National Geographic discussing geo-engineering back on the table (recall Paul Crutzen’s idea to put sulfur dioxide into our earth’s atmosphere to cool the earth). Putting these discs out there into orbit will reflect or shade the earth enough to bring it down, theoretically, two degrees. Millions of dollars, or billions?

Then there’s “fertilizing” the ocean with iron as a way of stimulating algal growth so algae can transport carbon dioxide to the deep sea. Algae produces dimethyl sulphide which is involved in the formation of sunlight-reflecting clouds. Or course, the unintended consequences of this scheme is a dead ocean. James Lovelock, author of the Gaia hypothesis, and Chris Rapley, director of the Science Museum in London, wants to place vertical pipes 600 feet long in the dea and pump nutrient rich water to seed the upper ocean with algae. Both innovators admit that the scheme could fail or impact the ocean negatively. Both argue the stakes are too high not to try it. Here is a section on geo-engineering by the Guardian newspaper of London:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/geoengineering

And then Greenpeace’s Doug Parr’s nice piece:

Geo-engineering is no solution to climate change

Tinkering with our entire planetary system is not a silver bullet. It's an expression of political despair, writes Greenpeace's Doug Parr

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2008/sep/01/climatechange.scienceofclimatechange1

************************************************************************

Okay, is it clear yet that we have a huge deficit in coming to some unified level of consciousness here on earth, and we have no real evidence of working as a conglomeration of cultures that make up this so-called global community to help humanity and our natural world move into sustainability on the real level. We need science to look here at Earth, to help with what we in planning and the other fields and disciplines tied to sustainability are calling for – preparing the planet for global warming, tipping points, positive feedback loops, lag time scenarios, the entire breadth of issues. That means looking at our problems and the solutions– scientifically, culturally, legally, engineering-wise, socially conscious directed. To work on our planet. It’s a good deal in the scheme of trillion-dollar funding: $850 million for the Mars Rover deal may seem a great bargain, since those rovers lasted more than 5 years, way beyond the 90-day warranty they were given by NASA and other scientists. But we have real problems on earth with land, air, water, people, animals, disease, equity, war, and climate change playing into all of that, and more. Science should be redirected to work on those very pressing issues. Exobiology? Well, maybe on a smaller scale. But Mars villages for mining resources? Nope.

And terra forming? We are already weather makers, and we have morphed the DNA and the climate of man and the planet by mining carbon-hydrocarbon and burning it. Our civilization’s farming and our species population bomb have reformed life on earth, and the coral reefs and the fisheries and the very water we drink have been contaminated by human greed and the toxins we release. We are in a race to stop forests from being eaten up by climate change induced pine bark beetle explosions and wild fires. We are seeing more vector-borne disease in places that have longer springs and longer falls and warmer temperatures overall. We are in a race to feed the world without collapsing nature. Alternative fuels, transportation, new living arrangements on earth, more collective and global action to help local communities survive. Perennial wheat and bio-intensive farming. Stopping obesity with diet and policy. It’s just not in the global psychological and economical budget now to have governments allow farmers to commit suicide, aquifers to drain, forests to be razed and entire future generations forced to see all of these collapses and peaking resources while spending trillions on getting guys and gals to the Moon and Mars. Do we need hundreds of millions of US taxpayer money a year spent by on figuring out how to terra-form Mars and seed it with sulfur dioxide to see if the theoretical ice will melt? Pluto, the next earth?

It is a testament to the world's catastrophic levels of inertia that when it comes to dealing with climate change, a relatively simple physical phenomenon, "geo-engineering solutions" are now being seriously looked at by scientists.

----Doug Parr

And I refer to George Monbiot (Heat) all the time as a decent journalist and thinker when it comes to climate change. He too has bitten into the geo-engineering smorgasbord, and look at Treehugger’s forum on this:

“I generally like George Monbiot's writing, but in his latest piece in The Guardian on the benefits and consequences of using biochar (aka, charcoal) buried in the ground to sequester carbon is a bit sloppy.

While I agree with his larger message that collectively there is the tendency to look for a techno-fix to our environmental problems, when the real solution is much more complex and has at least as much to do with behavioral solutions, Monbiot overreaches in blaming several leading scientists (James Lovelock and Jim Hansen among them) for stoking the fires of over-enthusiasm. Fortunately The Guardian gave room for rebuttal. Here's the back and forth:”

http://www.treehugger.com/files/2009/03/biochar-is-no-climate-change-miracle-cure-george-monbiot-says.php

We have this idea that we have piles of money and scientific and technical energy to direct at the Mars and Moon missions while planet earth is barely conceived of, when we have pressing issues here for 6.6 billion people on the planet. We can’t even get off of coal as an energy source. We need an Apollo program for earth, not Mars. And then we have more aberrations that might unfortunately come to fruition – one-way missions piggybacking to Mars? Take a look:

March 4th, 2008

A One-Way, One-Person Mission to Mars Written by Nancy Atkinson

Okay, so let’s look at the political action side of things tied to CO2, global warming, and us, humans, dealing with our planet, Earth, not Mars and Pluto. We really have to get serious about change. Check out Beyond Talk, http://beyondtalk.net/ , as well as all the climate change and post carbon sites I’ve already presented on this blog. Look for those sites to be listed on our links section soon. This is just one blurb from Beyond Talk.

This December, at Copenhagen, our leaders can choose to save our civilization. After that it may be too late. It's up to all of us to hold them accountable. Won't you join us?

Scientists tell us that the maximum level of CO2 our atmosphere can safely bear is 350 parts per million. Beyond that, our planet is at imminent risk of catastrophic changes we'll never be able to stop — meaning billions of people will die. Today, the level of CO2 in the atmosphere is already at 390 worldwide — and it's rising at 2 parts per million per year.

Finally, this entire space race and bowing to the almighty NASA/Cosmonaut/Helium-3 fantasy is problematic when searching on the Internet for real cogent information and opinion writing on maybe doubting NASA’s and Russia’s and Japan’s and China’s space fever. It’s about resources, science, engineering and national consciousness, and this deluded belief that technology shunted to space will feed the world and help us move people –entire countries – around so we don’t have to witness millions dying monthly because of the impacts of global warming. You just won’t find those web articles. Really.

You can search today about the China and helium-3 story, and try hard with metacrawler.com or ecosearch.com to see refutations of the program. Gosh, you can find a million sites on why green energy is good, bad, ugly, magic. The same goes with the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. The same with creationism, evolution, abortion, human population, no-till farming, and on and on. But when it comes to the Space Game, the harsh and smart criticisms of putting that much collective energy into these space schemes just aren’t there. You will find on the Internet a sort of "scrubbing of thought," or some filtering pyramid, or something very odd when it comes to hunting for criticism of manned and unmanned space exploration. ON almost any subject, on the Internet, you can find deniers, reprobates, conspiracy folk, pro and con debates, and the infinite nuancing of topics. Try it for space travel. You won’t find a lot of intellectual and philosophical criticism.

So, I did some digging on the Internet and now give you an interesting space exploration site – Space Cynic. And then a look from Carl Wunsch, oceanographer, who questions manned space and space stations on the moon and mars. Some links, and then the report about how so-called developing countries need to reap the benefits of space science/exploration. That the science and data and developments and the planets belong to the world, not just major corporations or multi-national monopolies or the governments of powerhouse G-8.

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Reference -- http://spacecynic.wordpress.com/money-cynics-view/

Published on January 23, 2008. Popular Mechanics

NASA's current plan for manned space exploration focuses on establishing a base on the moon, as a vital stepping stone for a visit to Mars. The initiative has been trumpeted by the Bush administration, which wants the first mission to launch by 2020. But trouble is brewing as a growing group of former mission managers, planetary scientists and astronauts argues against any manned moon mission at all. One alternative, they say: Send astronauts to an asteroid as a better preparation for a Martian landing.

The dissenters plan to gather in mid-February at a meeting of the Planetary Society at Stanford University. “We want to get a positive recommendation to the new administration,” says Planetary Society executive director Louis D. Friedman. He supports an eventual mission to Mars, but argues that the current moon scheme was selected with inadequate debate after a speech by President Bush in January 2004. “If you said ‘humans’ and ‘Mars’ [to NASA officials] in the same sentence, you would receive a figurative slap on the face, and then four months later [the moon-to-Mars plan] was the main point on a viewgraph at the highest levels.”

In addition to examining alternatives for manned missions, the February meeting will discuss a greater emphasis on Earth science and other potential NASA space exploration priorities, Friedman says.

Article continues in Popular Mechanics

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Carl Wunsch, a professor of physical oceanography at MIT, was interviewed by PM to find out how Earth scientists view the agency’s shifting priorities—and how those may affect the study of the planet. Wunsch has been involved with three reviews of NASA’s science plan, including this most recent report.

He has been misquoted and misrepresented by global warming deniers after a British TV series. Here’s a quip from him after a big climate change news series misdirected his comments about climate change:

Carl Wunsch: "I should never have trusted Channel 4"

“I believe that climate change is real, a major threat, and almost surely has a major human-induced component. But I have tried to stay out of the ‘climate wars’ because all nuance tends to be lost, and the distinction between what we know firmly, as scientists, and what we suspect is happening, is so difficult to maintain in the presence of rhetorical excess. In the long run, our credibility as scientists rests on being very careful of, and protective of, our authority and expertise.”

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Wunsch’s words from Popular Mechanics

PM: The phrase excised from NASA’s mission statement only dates back to 2002. Has Earth science always been a priority for the agency?


Wunsch: If you look at the satellites NASA has flown over the years, much of that activity was directed at measuring the Earth—its land surface, biosphere, atmosphere and oceans. NASA had a real interest in Earth science. And it had scientists who really badly wanted to make these measurements. The reason the change in mission statement is troubling is because NASA has started chopping Earth missions. If it hadn’t done that, people probably would have just shrugged. But the change seems to be more than symbolic. These days, it isn’t clear why a good engineer or scientist interested in the Earth would want to work for NASA.

What missions has NASA cut?


There’s a very long list. One example that comes to mind is something called Landsat, which started 35 years ago. Data from these satellites have proved extremely useful to people who study things like deforestation, urban sprawl and changing crop types. NASA has made no provision to continue it. The Earth Observing System is a series of satellites launched in 1999 for making long-term global observations. It has yielded valuable information about changes to the Earth, such as shifts in sea level and ground-water content. It’s not been renewed. The GRACE satellites are attempting to determine, among other things, if the ice sheets are growing or shrinking. The five-year mission will end this year, and there’s no plan at the moment to fly a second one.

Why is it important to make observations over many years?


Long-term research is critical because the Earth changes comparatively slowly. If you live in New York and get three cold winters in a row, you might say, “Oh, the world is cooling off.” But that would be a very foolish conclusion. The system fluctuates and in order to see trends you need very long records.

Do you use satellite data in your own research?


I’m an oceanographer. I study primarily the way the ocean affects climate. You can’t put enough instruments in the ocean to get the kind of global coverage provided by NASA satellites. If they stop measuring the ocean, we won’t be able to predict what’s going to happen when we get events such as El Niño.

Have NASA’s plans for a permanent lunar base caused concern among Earth scientists?


Of course. It is going to cost billions of dollars and it’s not clear what the scientific utility is.

PM: For 2007, astrobiology programs such as the Terrestrial Planet Finder also were cut or deferred indefinitely. Is there room for both astrobiology and Earth science in NASA?


Wunsch: I think most scientists, including me, would say yes. The country can afford both an Earth-oriented program and a planet and exobiology program. The trouble comes when you get crazy things like the space station, which has cost billions of dollars and seems increasingly pointless. It’s not astrobiology that’s the issue, it’s the manned program that is eating the national budget—the space station, the shuttle, neither of which seems to make any sense.

But couldn’t political momentum just as easily shift back to funding Earth-oriented programs?


It is important to understand that NASA is, in large measure, a way the government funds the aerospace industry. Enormous companies such as Lockheed Martin get contracts that are worth billions of dollars to build vehicles to go to the moon. They’re not going to just sit there if scientists come along and say we ought to be funding less expensive Earth-looking satellites instead. The lobbying that goes on around NASA is intense. Why do you think we fly the shuttle?

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http://www.nasa.gov/missions/solarsystem/Why_We_03_pt2.html

http://www.nasa.gov/missions/solarsystem/Why_We_03_pt1.html

“Benefits from space exploration must be shared among all nations, fourth committee is told”

Developing Countries Said to Need Help to Take Full Advantage

http://www.un.org/News/Press/docs/2004/gaspd291.doc.htm

http://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/getting-space-exploration-right

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