Blogger Action Day: Climate Change

Various reflections related to climate change, factoids to note, things we can all do that might help, prayers, etc.:

--RantWoman was distressed to learn yesterday via a radio broadcast that people dislocated by war and civil disorder have rights under current international law as refugees in neighboring countries. People uprooted as their low-lying homelands get flooded by rising sea levels do not.

--To what extent are internet communications substitutable for some of the travelling we all do? What would be the implications of this thought for public policy and reduced emission of greenhouse gases?

--Green buildings: RantWoman did not have a good time when she was studying black body radiation in physics class in college so the following is definitely not fine-grained analysis: if you build a lot of cities of concrete and steel, you change all sorts of parameters about absorptivity and reflectivity compared to forest or savannah. RantWoman knows the meaning of "large uncertainties when talking about different kinds of modeling. However, RantWoman thinks it is entirely fair to ask whether we are doing enough in urban design to compensate for the impacts of these issues on wind flows, rainfall.... RantWoman realizes she is posing several very big questions and she wishes she knew someone who does more climate modeling who could at least tell her whether she is completly nuts even to pose the question.

--RantWoman also finds herself very interested in economic models that attempt to assign economic value to things like carbon sequestration of tropical forests. The next step of course is political will to address the implications of this, but it's like not eating sugar in protest of slavery: give me something small and concrete I can do at my house.

--STEP AWAY from the xerox machine and the printer. Do you REALLY need more paper? RantWoman knows for many people the answer is Yes. RantWoman is fairly ruthless about how her ow answer frequently is No even though she does need to interact with the same information. RantWoman is still seasoning how to address this topic in her very own meeting. The fallibility and substitutability of electronic media is also a topic for discernment.

--Carry your own eating utensils. RantWoman lives in a city where the mayor put a lot of political capital into efforts to get people to reduce their usage of disposable shopping bags by proposing a tax on disposable bags. In fact, twice as high a percentage of local voters voted in support of the bag tax as voted for the mayor. Both still lost, but RantWoman's impression is that a lot more places are selling good reusable bags and a lot more people are using them as a result. Disposable eating utensils exist in RantWoman's mind as something many of us use a lot of but that most of us could easily carry with. RantWoman has her own chopsticks and also a spoon. RantWoman sometimes has to go through search in government building so even a metal table knife can be a problem. One day RantWoman will have a plastic set in her RantWoman bag.

--Use efficient software. The other day RantWoman downloaded some open source software and took particular note that the software mentioned climate change as one good reason to prefer efficient software.

--Renewable energy renewable energy renewable energy sources.

--Nuclear power: RantWoman KNOWS this is controversial and goes there cautiously. The main point is that a successful international civilian nuclear power regime depends on not automatically assuming that a nation's civilian nuclear power efforts are equivalent to weapons development. RantWoman knows perfectly well once one country has nuclear weapons there are automatically reasons for more countries to want them. RantWoman is going to avoid ranting too much about these topics in one small blog entry. She is also going to concentrate on some of the other small steps here. But RantWoman is noting the way to further discussion of this.