global warming

I live in a hundred year-old house where most everything is original: the windows (drafty), the walls (uninsulated), the furnace (burns oil). I need only look at my heating bill every month to deduce what the Commission for Environmental Cooperation has determined through a two-year study—homes and office buildings in North America account for over one-third of the continent's greenhouse gas emissions. They are terribly inefficient.

The unsettling prospects of climate change seem to be inspiring a flurry of research on the innate ability of humans to cooperate for the common good. In my last post, I described a clever game by German scientists that found that freeloading impedes cooperation among a group of individuals chipping in to prevent a global warming disaster.

Welcome to the inaugural post of Future Human: Covering the prospects of Homo sapiens and the future of humanity.

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If we were assured that climate change would doom the planets future, we'd all chip in to help stop it, right? Well, maybe not. An interesting forecast from researchers at Germanys Max Planck Institute contends that humans have a fifty-fifty shot of cooperating on climate for the benefit of the common good.

AAAS 2008, Boston, MA

Sallie Baliunas, an astrophysicist at the Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, is pointing to a slide called Interdecadal Magnetic Variability Berillium 10. Its supposed to communicate something about the relationship between the suns intensity and climate change. All I see is a collection of squiggly lines. It could be an EKG or a seismograph test. The man sitting next to me appears to be equally lost. Hes snoring. The woman next to him is staring at her shoelaces.

The waters around Antarctica are an anomaly; they're home to a marine ecosystem straight out of the Paleozoic era (the period spanning from 541 million to 251 million years ago). But global warming is about to change that, according to research presented today at AAAS. The reason for the preponderance of ancient organisms is the cold water: Predators that are capable of breaking the skeletons of their prey—modern fish, sharks, skates, and so on—simply can't live there. In fact, the most vicious predator in the Antarctic marine ecosystem right now is either a big sea star or an acid-oozing worm.

Those waters are warming, though, and possibly faster than the rest of the world's oceans.

Last week, the oil company Royal Dutch Shell announced plans to build an algae biodiesel plant in Hawaii. The project will progress in stages: first, the company will build a small research plant, with hopes to build a full-scale commercial plant within two years.

On page 13 of the introductory pamphlet A Brief Guide to Alcoholics Anonymous, the organization's famous 12 steps begin as such: We admit we are powerless over alcohol—that our lives have become unmanageable. Although President Bush maintains that he quit the sauce on his own, without the help of AA, he is evidently familiar with their directives, for on Tuesday night in his State of the Union address, Bush admitted that we have a problem: global warming.

David Keith never expected to get a summons from the White House. But in September 2001, officials with the President's Climate Change Technology Program invited him and more than two dozen other scientists to participate in a roundtable discussion called "Response Options to Rapid or Severe Climate Change." While administration officials were insisting in public that there was no firm proof that the planet was warming, they were quietly exploring potential ways to turn down the heat.

Now it’s really serious: Global warming could endanger champagne. French physicist Grard Liger-Belair, author of the forthcoming book Uncorked: The Science of Champagne, says that changes in the climate of the Champagne region of France could affect the local grapes. Warmer weather would boost photosynthesis in the leaves of the vine, producing added sugars, which migrate into the grape. This would reduce the acidity in the grapes and, as a result, disturb champagne’s delicate taste.