A Risk Management View of Global Warming

This 10-minute video and the sequence of follow-up videos available on YouTube present a sensible line of reasoning, and questioning, on the issue of human-instigated global warming -- or, as the author suggests is a more accurate term, global climate destabilization.

Physicist Discusses Global Warming on MPR

Physicist and astronomer James Hansen, lead climate scientist at NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Study, was Gary Eichten's guest on MPR's Midmorning show yesterday. It was a very interesting and enlightening discussion. Hansen views coal-burning as the activity contributing most to global warming, explains why scientists can be virtually certain that human activity is leading to the global warming we are seeing (as evidenced in part by rapid melting of the arctic ice cover), and says that if coal-fired plants converted to carbon-sequestration technology we would not have much to worry about.

Read more and listen to the show here.

Why Eat Locally? (Part one of an ongoing discussion)

What's the big deal? Why should we make a point of eating more locally grown and produced foods? Over the next few weeks I'll discuss some of the reasoning I've found persuasive, starting with one of the real biggies:

• Reduce fuel dependency: According to research summarized in Animal, Vegetable, Miracle ("AVM"), Americans consume about 400 gallons of oil a year per citizen for agriculture. About 20% is due to fuel use in production, including large-scale farming's heavy reliance on petroleum-based fertilizers, pesticides and herbicides. 80% is attributable to getting food from the farm to the table, including transport, warehousing, packaging and refrigeration.

"Each food item in a typical U.S. meal has traveled an average of 1,500 miles... If every U.S. citizen ate just one meal a week composed of locally and organically raised meats and produce, we would reduce our country's oil consumption by over 1.1 million barrels of oil every week." (AVM, p.5)

We've come to a point, here in the year 2007, where talk of man-made global warming is no longer dismissed as fiction and the environmental and political costs of being so reliant on fossil fuels have finally penetrated the American psyche. The need for a change in our fuel-consumption behaviors is almost universally acknowledged. Eating locally is something we can do about it, starting today.

To be continued...