As the UN sets out its food crisis measures, and setting aside the climate change, population growth and other globalisation issues, this image caught my attention

and made me wonder, what colour *should* it be to start actually balancing trade “balances”.

One very naive photoshop crayon trip later, I coloured in a different perspective.

I wonder what the outcomes would be…

We’re losing 44,000 square kilometers (17,000 square miles) of ice per year in winter (March-to-March).

Last year, we watched the lowest ever sea ice measurement unfold. It wasn’t happy viewing. Here’s the graph just after the low point - as of October 16, the extent was 3.20 million square kilometers (1.23 million square miles) below the long-term average.

(source: http://nsidc.org/)

If we now look at winter, when the ice is reforming you can see what looks like good recovery, but note that the solid black line is the average and the dotted line the previous record low… so it’s still bad.

“While the March 2008 maximum was 780,000 square kilometers (301,000 square miles) greater than the past record low, set in March 2006, it was 540,000 square kilometers (208,000 square miles) less than the 1979 to 2000 mean and occurred later in the year. Including 2008, the linear trend for March indicates that the Arctic is losing an average of 44,000 square kilometers (17,000 square miles) of ice per year in March. Although March 2008 extent is greater than in recent years, the setup looks right for another dramatic ice loss this summer.” [emphasis mine]

These images and graphs should be part of the weather forecast every day on every TV and Radio channel.

“Carbon target is a guaranteed catastrophe”

This was the headline on the front page of The Guardian today.

“If you leave us at 450ppm for long enough it will probably melt all the ice - that’s a sea rise of 75 metres. What we have found is that the target we have all been aiming for is a disaster - a guaranteed disaster,” Hansen told the Guardian.

It’s fascinating watching the public-facing language around the climate change issue morph into something that is accurate, even though most of the people I know in the scientific community have felt it for a very long time - they’ve also felt that overstating the issue would be alarmist, or that they wouldn’t be taken seriously.

Even though we all have the greatest access to mass communication in the history of human-kind, we’ve also systematically undermined and crippled our ability to communicate. We’ve turned everyone into broadcasters.

“He … was himself one of the architects of a 450ppm target. But he told the Guardian: “I realise that was too high.”

The fundamental reason for his reassessment was what he calls “slow feedback” mechanisms which are only now becoming fully understood. They amplify the rise in temperature caused by increasing the concentration of greenhouse gases. Ice and snow reflect sunlight but when they melt, they leave exposed ground which absorbs more heat.

As ice sheets recede, the warming effect is compounded. Satellite technology available over the past three years has shown that the ice sheets are melting much faster than expected, with Greenland and west Antarctica both losing mass.”

I think we all knew this was coming. The scientific method moves slowly, and for good reason, but we already know we are exploiting our resources faster than they can recover. We’ve know this for a very long time - certainly more than my lifetime.

Given what’s at stake, why are we so afraid of communication?

I was impressed with Defra when they asked us to make a minor amendment to the name of AMEE. Originally we’d called AMEE the “Avoiding Mass Extinction Engine”, partly to bring a little bit of a wry smile to everyone we dealt with.

When Defra hired us, however, they took this a little more seriously and, after some considerable deliberation asked if we could amend it to the “Avoiding Mass Extinctions Engine”.

This was impressive government intervention on several counts - firstly they asked very politely if we wouldn’t mind changing the name even though it was our project. Secondly, as they felt that “Extinction” might lead to mass panic, “Extinctions” was a little, well, softer. And finally, they were right, they based their amendment on facts - it’s not going to be one big extinction event - like a meteor - but a build up to potentially many extinction events.

Doesn’t that make you feel so much better. When we look back, assuming we can, with our 20:20 hindsight and question how we’d created a global society where broadcasting is primary and listening is secondary, I wonder what we’ll build to avoid it “next time”.

Interesting coincidence of acronyms:

Gross World Product

vs Global Warming Potential

vs Global Water Partnership

AMEE is in the USA (California and Texas) from 2nd - 13th March.

I’m presenting at

1) ETech talk (8:45am Thursday, 6th March 2008, Marina Ballroom D)

2) SXSW panel (3:30-4:30pm Tuesday, 11th March 2008).

If you would like to meet, please get in touch.

EDF are providing bonus schemes to customers if they provide easier access to their data (fuel consumption), and then additional bonuses if they reduce consumption. Its a good stop-gap until smart-meters kick in and, of course, something that AMEE already supports.

Here’s how it works

* EDF email you 10 days before your quarterly bill is produced
* You read your meter and submit your gas and electricity meter reading(s) on-line within 7 days
* For each valid quarterly meter reading submitted on-line, EDF will give you 250 Nectar points per fuel
* If you reduce your energy usage from one year to the next, EDF will give you a further 1,000 bonus Nectar points for each fuel - That’s a possible 4,000 Nectar points in a single year
* You can check your energy usage every quarter using our on-line ‘Energy Tracker’

We’re going to see a lot more of this.

“latest modelling studies indicate northern polar waters could be ice-free in summers within just 5-6 years.” [BBC]

This is following the trends of most of the research I’ve been following, and it’s more than alarming. It’s based on 1979-2004 data - in other words, NOT including the low-point of this year.

This research is from US Scientists, at the same time the US is now the ONLY industrialised country refusing to agree to tangible cuts. The Austrialian PM commented

“There is no plan B; there is no other planet any of us can escape to.”

Which brings me to this piece by Stephen Fry,

“… you see the one overwhelming fact about the great climate debate is what’s at stake. Not scientific reputation, not the fortunes and comforts of capitalists and their populations, not pride or reputation but our very civilization.

… For the eco-believer it’s no-lose situation: we all survive if they’re right and we’ve acted on their belief, we survive if they’re wrong and we’ve acted on their belief. Whereas for the eco-denier we survive if they’re right and we’ve done nothing but we perish if they’re wrong and we’ve done nothing.

Doing nothing risks everything and gains comparatively little, doing something risks comparatively little and gains the whole world. Surely you’d have to be an idiot not to back the believers in this instance.”

and this gem,

“It’s all very hard and I’m not even sure that I can claim that I do my best. But I am doing my best to do my best. If that sounds weaselly and flabby and cowardly, that’s because it is.”

which sums up what we actually need to do

- “I’ll do my best to do my best”.

I’m obviously very, very happy about this.

When we first began our AMEE journey, we thought it would be perfect if we could get buy in from Government and very large web organisations; that doing so could help establish a new set of principles and possibly new kinds of “market” around Climate Change.

Google brings a level of visibility to our efforts that I believe will help to move the agenda forward - to create a neutral, open, common platform for CO2 data and profiling. Their buy-in to support the AMEE platform is both far-sighted and timely.

As Carbon Trading (and Personal Carbon Trading) shoots up the worldwide agenda, we hope that our approach will help aid transparency, trust and neutrality.

Over 250 organsiations and individuals have contacted me so far, since June 2007. Their combined efforts will help carry AMEE and/or its approach forward into many applications, online and off-line, and internationally.

Personally, it’s also rather wonderful to see d::gen ranking next to some slightly larger organisations in the implementation, as described here.

Just an idea…

Web 0.0 — the zero-emission Internet?

The zero-energy web.
The zero-emission Internet.
The zero-net.

“I go all the way to zero”

Apparently the internet accounts for about 3% of energy consumption in the USA.

Further to my last summary on the lowest ever sea ice measurement, things are not getting any better;

(source: http://nsidc.org/)

“Compared to conditions cited in our last entry, we have lost an additional 360,000 square kilometers (138,000 square miles) of ice, an area larger than the size of the state of New Mexico. We noted in our last entry that the daily rate of ice loss was starting to slow; the loss rate has increased again, as Figure 2 shows.” (emphasis mine)

These images and graphs should be part of the weather forecast every day on every TV and Radio channel.