Please consider this letter notice of your termination, effective immediately. Despite clear expectations and requirements — January temperatures not to exceed 40° F, consistent snow and blustery conditions, minimum of one blizzard with white-out per annum, &c. &c. — you have failed to date to meet expectations and deliver even rudimentary winter weather. A forecast high of 72° today in New York City is clear proof of your failure to do your job.

Make a template, a form, a petition – whatever. I’m so gonna sign this too, Meg!

Now it’s raining cats and dogs again. It’s supposed to be -10 C (14 F). My daughter said today “Dad, do we have something we can cover the snow fortress with?”. A friend and her collected absolutely ALL the snow in our neighbourhood, to make a snow fortress that covered both of them – if they were flat on the ground and didn’t move (it was 30 cm/a foot tall). This is miserable winter.

If you live in Norway, you can give money to Medecins Sans Frontieres by contributing when people are coming to your door today. See the official site of Leger uten grenser (Medecins Sans Frontieres in Norwegian).

Here are the slogans that ends the first of two 60-second “masterpieces” (you can see both of them on the page as both QT and WMV).

Carbon dioxide. They call it pollution. We call it life.

I can’t find words for how UTTERLY stupid this is. It’s like someone at Comedy Central or Saturday Night Live made a parody, but couldn’t make it funny enough. And just forgot about the whole thing. But these people mean it. Seriously.

(still from the most stupid ad ever made)

You should think that people in an educated country as USA should be smart enough to not produce plain stupid things like this. But no. Amazing.

Here’s what Wikipedia has to say about carbon dioxide

Carbon dioxide is an end product in organisms that obtain energy from breaking down sugars or fats with oxygen as part of their metabolism, in a process known as cellular respiration. This includes all plants, animals, many fungi and some bacteria. In higher animals, the carbon dioxide travels in the blood from the body’s tissues to the lungs where it’s exhaled.

Carbon dioxide content in fresh air is approximately 0.04%, and in exhaled air approximately 4.5%. When inhaled in high concentrations (about 5% by volume), it is toxic to humans and other animals. This is sometimes known as choke damp, an old mining industry term, and was the cause of death at Lake Nyos in Cameroon, where an upwelling of CO2-laden lake water in 1986 covered a wide area in a blanket of the gas, killing nearly 2000.

“Bhutan” on Flickr, by babasteve.

Have a look at some of the links and facts here.

Women are poorer. Women constitute about 70% of the world’s absolute poor – those living on less than a dollar a day. In the United States in 2004, there were 20.1 million women living below the poverty level. Worldwide, women’s access to resources and education still lags behind boys/men due to double standards.

Slavery still exists! Women and girls are the majority of the 800,000 to nearly 4 million people trafficked (bought and sold as property) internationally every year.

The Idea behind the current crop of Hybrid cars is well known; the cars main energy comes from gasoline which recharges batteries that move the car at low speeds. Hydraulic Hybrids work in the same manner, only instead of batteries, excess energy is stored in hydraulic cylinders.That in itself is not revolutionary, except for the fact that Nickel Metal Hydride batteries used today are not an efficient way to store energy, and hydraulic storage blows them away with 3X the efficiency. Even next generation Lithium Ion batteries do not come close to Hydraulic Energy Storage.

On the other: 2008 is far away, so let’s see what happens.

China is already the world’s second-biggest producer of greenhouse gas emissions and is expected to surpass the United States as the biggest. Roughly a third of China is exposed to acid rain. A recent study by a Chinese research institute found that 400,000 people die prematurely every year in China from diseases linked to air pollution.

Nor does China’s air pollution respect borders: on certain days almost 25 percent of the particulate matter clotting the skies above Los Angeles can be traced to China, according to the United States Environmental Protection Agency. Environmental experts in California predict that China could eventually account for roughly a third of the state’s air pollution.

Unfortunately NY Times has a lame subscription system preventing me from reading the actual article, but the excerpt Xeni posted had me think about a few things.

In 1998, the world produced almost 400 quadrillion BTU of energy (BTU – British Thermal Units – is a way to calcualte energy, no matter where it comes from – see wikipedia entry). USA alone consumed about 95 quadrillion BTU of these (several sources, but this is one easy to read).

(continues…)

There are about 6,5 billion people living on earth. And about 260 million in the USA. Every 25th person on earth is an American. Or 4%.

4% of the world population consume 25% of the world energy.

I’m also worried when I read about the increasing pollution from growing economics in the east. And frankly, who am I to talk living in Norway, who spend almost as much energy per person as USA?!

But I find it very ironic that pollution from China over Los Angeles is something that make people see that this IS a problem.

US President Bush recently spoke about global climate chnage, but speech doesn’t help at all. USA and China need to start making real efforts to change. Not signing the Kyoto treaty is a bad start!

Think about it: If every Chinese wanting a car got one, and all of them were huge SUVs… Crazy.

The best thing someone could do to world pollution is to make the poorer countries jump over the bad technology we have used in the West: Cars running on oil, appliances using lots of energy and products containing chemicals that hurt us. Not that I think it will happen… We’re all too greedy for that…

Boingboing should probably also mention that pollution keeps us from seeing the effects of pollution. This is called global dimming, and BBC made an excellent documentary about it. Full Full transcript and more information at BBC.co.uk.

…perhaps the most alarming aspect of global dimming is that it may have led scientists to underestimate the true power of the greenhouse effect. They know how much extra energy is being trapped in the Earth’s atmosphere by the extra carbon dioxide (CO2) we have placed there. What has been surprising is that this extra energy has so far resulted in a temperature rise of just 0.6°C.

This has led many scientists to conclude that the present-day climate is less sensitive to the effects of carbon dioxide than it was, say, during the ice age, when a similar rise in CO2 led to a temperature rise of 6°C. But it now appears the warming from greenhouse gases has been offset by a strong cooling effect from dimming – in effect two of our pollutants have been cancelling each other out. This means that the climate may in fact be more sensitive to the greenhouse effect than thought.

Next time you see the clouds over Los Angeles, think about where they come from…

“If there’s one thing that really stands out about Apple lately, it’s that its products keep getting smaller and smaller. Just as Apple shrank the iPod with the nano (and subsequently its packaging), the company’s latest consumer software offerings are also arriving in ultra-thin, super-small retail packaging. The retail boxes are now just big enough to house a single dual-layer DVD and documentation.”

Excellent. Like the author of the article, I have wondered why software boxes have been so big? Maybe it was to prevent theft? And of course to stand out in the shelves.

But the software industry should just agree to make smaller boxes. It saves them shipping, storage space, production costs – and trees.

Last summer I installed lots of new software, both OS, applications and plug-ins, on five computers. You wouldn’t believe the pile of boxes by my desk when finished. Most of the plug-ins were big A4-size boxes with a single CD inside. Fun for the kids (who played with all the boxes), crap for nature.

The worst ones are memory cards and accessories to gaming consoles. The last Xbox controller I got, was wrapped in a plastic that was amazing: No knife or scissor in our house could open it. I tried everything. And in the end I had to search in the woods for hours, until I found an old jedi knight living alone in a cave. After some nagging, he agreed to open the controller with his lightsabre. Which aaaaalmost broke during the operation. I’m sure they could make a space shuttle with the same material, with no problems with heating during landing.

So do nature a favor: Mail the URL of the Gizmodo story to your software developer.

“Apple has finally done software packing right and hopefully sent a telegram to the rest of the huge-friggin’ software box industry.”

For anyone with a fresh idea, expensive oil is as good as a subsidy – with no political strings attached. Indeed, every extra penny you pay at the pump is an incentive for some aspiring energy mogul to find another fuel.

Be sure to read his list about how higher oil prices will create new new technologies.

While no “green” person would ever advocate buying a hybrid for purely economic reasons, it is painfully obvious that existing hybrids lack the ability to make up for their steep prices with gas savings. While a hybrid would present significant savings over something like a new Ford Super Duty, you would always save more with any of a number of economy cars.

True: I wouldn’t buy a hybrid to save money. I would buy it to pollute less when driving, and to encourage car makers to make even better hybrids. They certainly need to get cheaper.

I wish other stars could do the same. Here are just a few I would easily give 100$ (for a good cause) if they called me: Jim Kerr of Simple Minds, Chris Martin of Coldplay, Kate Bush or Bono of U2.

So if you are Jim, Chris, Kate or Bono, use my contact form, and I will mail you my phone number and receipt. I figured if I don’t try, they never will call. And it’s for a good cause.

If you want to help people other places in the world, please consider making a donation to Care. Click on the logo which takes you to the Care homepage, then choose your country.

This is the claim in a discussion on Flickr. Have anyone seen this list before? Who made it?

If it’s true, it would be interesting to know what is being done – and spent – on each of these three.

Way cool. Give me a hybrid 7-seat Corolla Verso.

And maybe some designer chicken houses (and chicken) from Omlet, spread around the greenhouse?

Categories: green
Technorati tags: greenhouse / green