John Williams has been making wine in California’s Napa Valley for nearly 30 years, and he farms so ecologically that his peers call him Mr. Green. But if you ask him how climate change will affect Napa’s world famous wines, he gets irritated, almost insulted.

“You know, I’ve been getting that question a lot recently, and I feel we need to keep this issue in perspective,” he told me. “When I hear about global warming in the news, I hear that it’s going to melt the Arctic, inundate coastal cities, displace millions and millions of people, spread tropical diseases and bring lots of other horrible effects. Then I get calls from wine writers and all they want to know is, ‘How is the character of cabernet sauvignon going to change under global warming?’ I worry about global warming, but I worry about it at the humanity scale, not the vineyard scale.”

Williams is the founder of Frog’s Leap, one of the most ecologically minded wineries in Napa and, for that matter, the world. Electricity for the operation comes from 1,000 solar panels erected along the Merlot vines. The heating and cooling are supplied by a geothermal system that taps into the earth’s heat. The vineyards are 100 percent organic and — most radical of all, considering Napa’s dry summers — there is no irrigation.

Yet despite his environmental fervor, Williams dismisses questions about preparing Frog’s Leap for the impacts of climate change. “We have no idea what effects global warming will have on the conditions that affect Napa Valley wines, so to prepare for those changes seems to me to be whistling past the cemetery,” he says, a note of irritation in his voice. “All I know is, there are things I can do to stop, or at least slow down, global warming, and those are things I should do.”

Williams has a point about keeping things in perspective. At a time when climate change is already making it harder for people in Bangladesh to find enough drinking water, it seems callous to fret about what might happen to premium wines.

But there is much more to the question of wine and climate change than the character of pinot noir. Because wine grapes are extraordinarily sensitive to temperature, the industry amounts to an early-warning system for problems that all food crops — and all industries — will confront as global warming intensifies.

In vino veritas, the Romans said: In wine there is truth. The truth now is that Earth’s climate is changing much faster than the wine business, and virtually every other business on earth, is preparing for.

Read on: http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2010/04/climate-desk-wine-industry/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed:+wired/index+(Wired:+Index+3+(Top+Stories+2))&utm_content=Google+Feedfetcher

Energy secretary Steven Chu has been in office for only a little over a year, but he's nonetheless managed to help lay the groundwork for a fundamental shift in how the US tackles climate change. (Photo: Peter Yang)

It’s late November 2009, and US energy secretary Steven Chu is leaning against a fake sink in a fake kitchen. Chu is 62 years old and athletically trim with graying black hair.

He’s wearing a rumpled pin-striped suit, argyle socks, and gold-framed glasses. Chu is a renowned physicist, a cabinet appointee, and the winner of a Nobel Prize. But that’s not why he’s now being treated like a rock star. This morning a small crowd of scientists, politicians, and local businesspeople are flocking to him because he’s got cash, specifically $75 million in stimulus funds for the Ohio subsidiary of the American Electric Power utility.

Read on: http://www.wired.com/magazine/2010/04/ff_stevenchu?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed:+wired/index+(Wired:+Index+3+(Top+Stories+2))&utm_content=Google+Feedfetcher

Image: 2009 (c) Nancy Battaglia

Yet because of a recent onslaught of attacks on the science of climate change, fewer Americans now believe humans are warming the planet than did just a few years ago.

The doubters of climate science have launched an enormously clever — and effective — campaign, and it’s worth trying to understand how they’ve done it. The best analogy is perhaps the O.J. Simpson trial.

Read on: http://www.oregonlive.com/opinion/index.ssf/2010/03/the_oj_tactic_climate_change_s.html

[Bill McKibben is an author, environmentalist, and activist. In 1988, he wrote The End of Nature, the first book for a common audience about global warming. He is the co-founder of 350.org, an international climate campaign that organized the most widespread day of action on global warming in history.] ]]> http://www.rcareygersten.com/the-o-j-tactic-climate-change-skeptics-sound-like-simpsons-lawyers-if-the-winter-glove-wont-fit-you-must-acquit/feed/ 0 http://www.rcareygersten.com/fog-decline-threatens-california%e2%80%99s-towering-redwoods/ http://www.rcareygersten.com/fog-decline-threatens-california%e2%80%99s-towering-redwoods/#comments Tue, 16 Feb 2010 17:21:16 +0000 Carey http://www.rcareygersten.com/?p=1090 By Tia Ghose | Wired Science | February 15, 2010

(Image: sharloch/Flickr)

The California coast has seen fewer foggy days in the last century, threatening the health of the region’s majestic redwood trees.

Over the last century, new research suggests the average daily fog has decreased more than three hours, causing the coast redwoods to lose more water in the dry summer season, leaving them more susceptible to drought.

“Redwoods are an iconic species and we all love them, but I think it’s important to note that lots and lots of species depend on fog,” said climate scientist Phil Duffy of Climate Central in Palo Alto, California, who was not involved in the study. “So if you really do increase or decrease the fog, then that will have effects on whole entire ecosystems in these coastal hills.”

Read on: http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2010/02/fog-decrease-threatens-coastal-redwoods/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed:+wired/index+(Wired:+Index+3+(Top+Stories+2))&utm_content=Google+Feedfetcher

What? You want me to do something more to help the environment? I recycle, ya know!

So environmentally, my frame of mind was: No pain, no gain.

Read on: http://invw.org/2010/02/consumers-really-can-affect-global-warming-particularly-if-they-live-in-the-united-states/

By Anthony B. Robinson | Crosscut.com | February 5, 2010

Carbon offsets: If you fly, must you buy? Airplanes landing at Amsterdam's Schiphol airport (Photo: Magnus Baeck/via Wikimedia Commons)

Actually, I liked the idea and the website, and was heartened to see that driving my Honda Insight (hybrid) for the last 10 years, a car that still gets 55 miles a gallon, helped balance out my sins as a frequent flyer.

But the Protestant in me did find myself wondering if this were some sort of new system of indulgences. Remember indulgences? It was abuse of the system of indulgences within the Catholic Church that was a spur to the Protestant Reformation some 500 years ago. The wealthy could buy their way into heaven, or into the good graces of the church hierarchy, or both, depending on your view. Martin Luther thought it tacky.

Read on: http://crosscut.com/2010/02/05/climate/19571/

This story was written by Faiz Shakir, Amanda Terkel, Matt Corley, Benjamin Armbruster, Zaid Jilani, and Alex Seitz-Wald.

As delegates from countries across the globe gather at the U.N. Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen, Denmark, the world is waiting to see if international leaders will commit to the bold reductions in carbon emissions needed to curb the effects of global warming. One group of individuals who is doing everything it can to prevent progress is the climate change deniers — a coalition of dirty energy-funded groups and their political allies on the far right. The newest ammunition employed by these deniers is “Climategate” — a smear campaign claiming that there is a “coordinated campaign to hide scientific information” about the supposed hoax of global warming. The conservative swiftboating attack in “Climategate” involves illegally hacked e-mails from the University of East Anglia’s Climactic Research Unit (CRU) in the U.K., which skeptics are using to claim that leading climate researchers are suppressing scientific data that shows that climate change is not occurring. The truth is that the hacked e-mails offer no proof of the suppression of scientific data, the mainstream media has given undue credibility to the story, and the science behind global warming is as undeniable as ever.

Read on: http://www.alternet.org/story/144494/why_is_mainstream_media_faking_a_climate_scandal_when_there’s_real_reporting_to_be_done/