Carbon offsets are controversial these days, but as our understanding of how the feedbacks work in the dyanmics of planting trees, the utility of this mechanism is clear.

It's true that forests sequester co2 and alter the weather, but now we know that a tree planted in the tropics does more to cool the earth than a tree planted in a temperate zone. Work with Global Climate Models at Lawrence Livermore Laboratory uncovered some of the complex dynamics that occur as forest cover fluxuates.

Much more research is needed into the ways that shifts in forest affect climate dynamics. Livermore has studied how water in mountains changes from this epoch as the precipitation comes in shorter, perhaps more intense, more liquid form as climate changes evolve. In california for example the snow pack will be gone in summer, glaciers gone, and that will of course affect streams and the rivers below.
Clearly then the forests will also be affected in a major way. We need more resources here, as our models are not much used yet to explore the ways that our offset programs can achieve maximum leverage.

This means that we need an effective mechanism to ensure that the tree planting is efficient and effectively established in the right areas. So we must learn how to operate real carbon offset programs. How to prevent and catch fraud, a way to make a viable economic system. This will not only create jobs, it can be a weapon against desertification. It can help our watersheds.

I say this in the context of a belief that we need to make every effort to reduce emissions and improve energy efficiency, offsets must not absolve the purchaser of the duty to work to reduce emissions. I recognize that some changes will take time and carbon offsets could create a stabilizing and conserving effect on the climate.

The agenda now includes developing effective communications that will convey the importance of building honest, scientifically valid systems providing carbon offsets. The science and understanding of why one forest is better for the climate than another must become common knowledge.

Bruce Bagnoli

Suvival notes :

These desperate times call for desperate measures, we must keep the carbon in the atmosphere below 450 ppm according to Dr. Hansen, to avoid the "run away" feedbacks that may make our planet so hot that our descendents will suffer for hundreds of years, and our civilization will be the cause of the worst extinction event since the astroid hit 230 million years ago!

In his latest scientific post : Implications of "peak oil" for atmospheric CO2 and climate by P.A. Kharecha, J.E. Hansen (NASA GISS and Columbia Univ. Earth Institute)our dilema is explained at some length.

The action that we must take is really quite simple : We must work with China and the emerging Asian economies to build Coal fired power plants that sequester the CO2 produced or die.

Simple, yet a profound challenge as until now it has been everyone for themselves and the "market" will sort it out. Since the "market" is an artificial construct, it needs to be changed to fit our current situation, and this can be done if we value both the current environment and our future generations.

THe problem is that there is no real technology that is up to the challenge since we dabble in this vital technology but haven't committed to commercialization of sequestration.

The action needed is to engage with the Chinese as if our lives depend on it ( they do) and immediately begin to produce electric cars for their market, immediately begin to build nuclear power plants on an industrial scale in China to meet their need while we develop the technology for sequestration on a global scale. China won't do this without economic help from the rest of the world, and we must also do this whereever economic growth would attract a new coal fired plant.

The United States should immediately devote a significant resource stream to developing the sequestration techonology and retrofit our many coal plants as a first step, a technology development program, and a leadership act.

Without dealing with the issue of Coal, we risk raising the CO2 beyond the 450 ppm level, and that's a point where the feedback loop will rapidly get out of control.

Hansen and Kharecha don't discuss what happens when the feedback loop goes non-linear but the scenarios we've all seen on the media for global warming understate the reality. Once the co2 gets to a certain ( we don't know precisely where this is) level, then other sources of carbon release kick in like the release of trapped methane hydrates, forest die back, Amazon desert feedback, and the rest. The increase in temprature would be huge, and while the earth may have feedback mechanisms that will compensate, we won't live long enough to find out. The feedback that may balance warming above the 450 ppm level might take the form of an ice age, something that's limited us before. Indeed during the last ice age there may have been only 10,000 humans in Europe and New York may have been covered in a glacier. Either way, it's ugly for civilization and avoidable.

The big message is that if we act now, we can avoid the big desert, the oven. Only if we act together as intellegent beings will we be spared. We don't have to look to the sky for an astroid threatening us, as our threat is already on the horizon and it's only avoidable if we act now.

Just last night I read a post to arXiv.org by J.E. Hansen urging scientists to speak out on sea level rise before it is too late. http://arxiv.org/ftp/physics/papers/0703/0703220.pdf It's about Scientific reticence, but it's really a call for a Paul Revere to bring us to our senses while there is still time to act to prevent the greatest calamity in history.

Our science gives us the chance to look ahead and see that without acting now, the world will loose forever many of the beautiful ecosystems that god gave us in trust, and we may loose our civilization as well. I'm not exaggerating at all, maybe understating the seriousness of the problem.

Hansen himself has been censored by the Bush Administration and speaks in a guarded manner, the voice that has already been attacked but won't be silenced because he can clearly see that this train is heading for a wreck and we can still avert the crash if we act!

Hansen looks at the non-linear way that ice sheets change in response to warming, factors in what we know about the changes to our climate, and comes to the conclusion that we can make a difference if we act now, a difference that will be important to our descendents and to the billions of life forms that may continue to live for millions of years if we act now.

It's really a moral question, is our short term greed reason enough to condem our descendents to a world where climate change brutally destroys ecosystems, societies and countless families ? Can we use the intelligence to find a way to live on earth without destroying the very environment that we depend on? Are we smarter than the yeast that makes our beer?

The thing about non-linear climate change and environmental response to that change is that by the time it's obvious to most, it will be too late to do more than cringe and cry. We'll be so busy then adjusting and coping that the chance to build the sort of systems that could enable our civilization to continue will be gone. Desperate times will force competition for scarce resources like food, water, and peace.

When we look ahead and see the wreck, stepping on the brakes is not only the right thing to do, it's relatively painless. Except that the challenge is that we've created this new organism called the corporation and it's rootless. Corporations have no real stake in the future, no built in mechanism to consider their fate and to act in the best interests of humans and other life forms.

The emergence of corporations must be only a stage in their evolution, since for our civilization to be worthy of continuance we must evolve corporations to incorporate a forward vision, to have some value placed on how they relate to the future history of the planet. We can do it, but we haven't and it's the biggest challenge to our civilization in our history.

We humans must resolve to live in harmony with our fellow beings, to live with the understanding that all life is sacred. We have no right to kill future generations of beings here with us for some abstract corporate gain.

Even with conventional economics when we discount the future costs of coping with the disasters that we know are coming, it's worth acting now. The folks who just want to "get theirs" before things change have suppressed the knowledge of what could be done, what is coming for reasons that I condemn but don't understand. No doubt there is much that I don't understand that is known by the ones who distract us with the latest "crises", but the outlines are clear and our opportunity is real : Act now and both we and our descendents will benefit for ever!

Thanks to Dr. Hansen for not keeping quiet, to Al Gore for bringing "an Inconvenient Truth" to the millions and to the Hopi for reminding us that we sit in a kiva that has been home forever, a kiva that need not become an oven.

om

Doing lessons learned on a project gone sour exposes the most basic lesson in project management : when communication is muddled, trouble follows!

The project that I was given to try to resusutate started out as a "partnership" and a lump sum job. Once it got rolling, the design project manager jumped right in, and immediately ran into internal difficulty staffing the project with skilled professionals skilled in collaboration as part of a geographiclly distributed team. The company had just acquired a design firm, but the technical integration of the cad groups was incomplete.

On the client side, the data that was promised on the existing conditions including "as built" drawings and program information for the new project turned out to be incomplete and fragmented. The actual data flow took six months to evolve instead of the 4 weeks promised during the bidding for the work, and both sides became defensive.

Forensic examination of the contract reveals that the bidding manual from the client and the proposal from the design firm contain contridictory statements, and both are included by reference into the contract.

The two project managers, client and design firm, never really came to grips with the differing assumptions, approaches and espectations until divergence was too great to resolve. The design firm offered to provide a project plan, but instead just jumped right in and started "fast tracking". Indeed the project plan was never given to the client.

Had the project plan been given to the client, or had the client actually read the design proposal, the job might have been saved.

Once the fast track got rolling, the defensive design PM gave notice on only two occasions that change orders were needed, when an extra review of a mechanical system was needed, and when a hazardous material situation was encountered. In both cases the PM for the client gave approval, and honored that approval to some degree.

However the design PM failed to follow the risk management steps included in the proposal. Specifically the proposal called for a design development phase that would culminate in a client sign off. The proposal stated that any change after this point would be a change order, but such sign off was not obtained.

The proposal stated that any field engineering over a certain allotment would be T&M, but when this allowance was exceeded, notice was not given nor approval to continue received.

The design PM became busy with other jobs, and his time on site deminished. The abusive PM was covering a lack of construction management that went undetected until a new PM was askled to see what went wrong.

Once the CM process was set right, the change orders deminished and the job started to run "right". Once the new PM was on the job, the client's failure to follow the contract was brought out and change orders were sought to cover the changed conditions. Unfortunately the situation was beyond fixing and the job terminated with acromony all around.

This job would have been well served if the design PM had issued a project plan and uncovered the differences in assumptions by both sides. The design PM should have notified the client of the impact that their failure to provide the as-built data and the programming information as promised had on the design effort. The design firm should have modified the plan and the contract once it became apparent that the lump sum job was being treated as a T&M job.

The uncomfortable outcome was just about inevitable once the design PM decided to avoid the uncomfortable little notifications and negotiations. I didn't start out with the assumption that both sides were acting in bad faith, and I started out with a guide who didn't disclose the problems initially. Actually, the critical failure to deliver a project plan wasn't disclosed until the week before termination, as I was drafting what I thought was to be an amendment to the project plan. Turns out my plan would have been the first, but it was stillborn.

I was new to the whole place, but once I saw the "lay of the land" my experience in project management told me that the patient was very sick.

Unfortunately it took me a long time to uncover the whole mess, and digging through the mud got me covered as well. We'll see how this unraveling evolves, but it isn't pretty!

Bruce

What to do about warming ?

There are some immediate steps that will be helpful so I'll list them here :

First we need to immediately recognize the value of our fellow beings on Earth, and take steps to conserve the habitat for endangered species, to learn how to create new ecological niches that contain habitat for the entire web of the engangered ecosystems as these cannot ever be replaced, not in a million years!

Second, research into conservation of energy, research into new sustainable energy sources, and research into climate science must be accelerated. The Bush administration must immediately cease to attempt to censor scientific inquiry, and should expose the industry propaganda that seeks to discredit legimate science while allowing the vital peer review process to proceed. We need solid science and there is still a lot to learn in this nacent field.

The satellite systems that monitor the climate, biology and geophysics of the earth must be made a high priority and data gatherinig must be resumed. The Bush administration seriously impaired this aspect of scientific inquiry and it must be turned around so that we can know as much as possible about the effects of our actions, the changes underway. We need to improve our simulations so we need to have better data to check our models, and we need to use our simulators to try out actions and policy changes that we contemplate before it is too late.

Since many of the changes are inevitable, simple justice dictates that we start now to respond to the changes that are comming such as moving development away from land that will be flooded, creating new zones where poor folks can live, conserving farm land that is above the new flood plains, etc.

This will be vastly less expensive if we are smart. An example is in the California Delta, where developers want to build thousands of new homes on land that will be flooded in the next 50 years even if we reverse the long term trends ( and I don't believe that we have the collective intelligence and will to do so). The corrupt system we now call government won't stop the development, and once the people are living in vulnerable locations it is only a matter of time before some event produces a catastrophy where many thousands or more will perish. This is only avoidable if we take the steps to prevent development where we know floods will come. Doesn't cost anything to conserve this land in reality, just telling some greedy folks who want the rest of us to fund their dreams of riches "no"......

Public health is going to be a huge issue, we need millions more workers who can manage epidemics, who can help deal with the spread of tropical diseases as the climate favors insects, as vectors multiply and as deserts spread. The dispora flowing from the shifts in clear water as the mountains dry up, as the deserts consume crop land and as the seas consume the flat land where so many millions now live will be a challenge unparalled in historical times.

We indeed do live in "interesting times" as the Chinese curse goes.....

By responding now we give our descendents a gift that keeps on giving for thousands of years, by failing to respond we doom ourselves and our descendents to a world that is so sad, so full of pain and dying. I think that life on earth will endure, but we must face the consequences of our inadvertant production of so much climate change, recognize our opportunity and act to make it better. There is tremendous opportunity, new industries and plenty of challenge but to fail to act with clear purpose will be to choose a course with suffering beyond any that we have ever imagined.