November Green Business Roundtable to Feature Marty Spitzer of WWF

Now starting our 7th year, Green Business Roundtable invites all interested in the intersection of business and sustainability to join us for networking, discussion and insight.  
I look forward to seeing you there.

Date: Thurs., November 13
Time: 11:30 - 1:00

Location: 505 9th Street, N.W., Suite 800
(Offices of the Solar Energy Industries Association)
Washington, DC  20004
(near Gallery Place & Metro Center)
Includes Lunch

Register Today! 

November 13 Green Business Roundtable

Walk-in $25.00 USD

Speaker: Marty Spitzer, Director - US Climate and Renewable Energy Policy at World Wildlife Fund

For over 15 years, Marty has worked at the interface of climate science, sustainability and business action, building bipartisan partnerships with industry, governments and nonprofit groups to create practical solutions to the climate crisis. He brings a broad perspective to the issues having previously served at USEPA, the White House, Congress and several think tanks and environmental organizations.

Topic: Scaling Business Climate Action
Major breakthroughs in corporate climate action are unfolding as climate science and corporate profit come together in ‘The 3% Solution’ and major US brand companies use their buying power to drive renewable energy into the mainstream.  

November 13 Green Business Roundtable

Walk-in $25.00 USD

Thank you to SEIA for hosting this month's Roundtable.

Green Business Roundtable and Climatini back to back on August 21

Come for the Green Business Roundtable; stay for the Climatini Happy Hour

Date: Thursday, August 21
Time: 3:30 - 4:50 (includes snack)
   Climatini Happy Hour will 
   immediately follow

Location: Elizabeth's on L
1341 L St. NW
Washington, DC  20005
(near McPherson Square metro)

Regular registrations now closed.  Please register as Walk-in.

August 21 Green Business Roundtable

Regular $18.00 USD Walk-in $25.00 USD

Speaker: Timothy Juliani is Director of Corporate Engagement at the Center for Climate and Energy Solutions (C2ES) (formerly the Pew Center on Global Climate Change). He directs the multi-sectoral, invitation-only C2ES Business Environmental Leadership Council (BELC). With combined revenue of $2 trillion and 3.1 million employees, the BELC is the largest U.S.-based group of companies devoted to climate- and energy-related policies and solutions.

Topic: Tim will discuss the Business Environmental Leadership Council and how businesses are profitably and ethically leading the way to solutions to the climate crisis. 

August 21 Green Business Roundtable

Regular $18.00 USD Walk-in $25.00 USD

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Thanks to Going Green Today and the Do it for DC Challenge for partnering on the summer Green Business Roundtable events
 

Book Signing Party! - Jigar Shah will discuss and sign copies of Creating Climate Wealth

Creating Climate Wealth: Unlocking the Impact Economy

DC Net Impact and Green Business Roundtable(TM) are co-sponsoring a book signing event with environmental entrepreneur and author, Jigar Shah

Monday, November 11
5:00 - 6:30 PM
575 7th St. NW, Washington DC (Offices of Venable LLP)

Free! Register here

"Jigar Shah is a force of nature!  Here he recounts his unique journey - as entrepreneur, investor and nature's defender.  His outlook: a fast changing world where enterprise places greater value on our climate and society.  A timely book from a Thinker and Doer, both."

 - Ann Goodman, Ph.D.  Co-Founder of Women's Network for a Sustainable Future

Jigar Shah to be guest at November 11 Green Business Roundtable

Join us for the November Green Business Roundtable^TM

Date: Monday, Nov. 11
Time: 11:30 - 1:00 (includes lunch)
Location: SEIA Conference Room - 505 9th St. NW, Washington, DC (Close to  Gallery Place and Metro Center stations)

Registration: $22 early bird (until Nov. 7); $27 regular registration; $30 walk-in (includes lunch)

Register

TOPIC: How Climate Change represents a multi-trillion dollar entrepreneurial opportunity

There are already 100,000 businesses deploying climate change solutions, companies that see the promise in addressing this monumental issue.  Jigar will discuss five tools to scale up these businesses and industries, expanding the pie for everyone while ensuring a better future for our environment.  


SPEAKER: Jigar Shah

Jigar Shah was the Founder and CEO of SunEdison, a transformative solar company that helped redefine the business model for solar energy.  He was the first CEO of the Carbon War Room - the global organization founded by Sir Richard Branson and Virgin Unite to help entrepreneurs address climate change. He is the author of Creating Climate Wealth: Unlocking the Impact Economy.

Register

Next Green Business Roundtable scheduled for October 1

The next meeting of the Green Business Roundtable will be Tuesday, October 1.  Exact location is still TBD.  If you are on the Green Business Roundtable mailing list, you will receive updates and reminders (to join the mailing list, click here)

Our guest will be Jonathan Estes of Green Diamond Solutions.  Jonathan is and expert in gaming and simulation as tools for solving complex challenges.  In particular we will discuss how these strategies can be used to assist decision making to find solutions to environmental challenges like climate change.

Hope you can make it.  Registration and more details will follow on this page when they are available.

Washington Post misses another prime opportunity to report on climate change

The July 21 Washington Post contained an article written by reporter Martin Weil called Record nightly warmth followed last week's daily heat.  It was a pretty long article that discussed how the daily highs in the 90's each day were made more unbearable by the fact that the nights did not cool off below 80 degrees for several nights in a row.

"There’s a way of coping with day after day of temperatures in the 90s, besides staying in the shade, wearing loose clothing and drinking lots of water. It is to go home, let the sun set and feel the swelter subside.

But that traditional method of riding out a heat wave has not been particularly effective in recent days for those living close to the Washington area’s urban core near Reagan National Airport, where the National Weather Service takes the city’s temperature.

It has been hot during the day, yes. Saturday, with a high of 94, was the sixth consecutive day on which Washington’s official temperature was well above 90. But even beyond each day’s heat and humidity, Washington’s weather woes were made all the worse by how warm it remained at night."

This was the perfect set up to discuss how increased greenhouse gases increase the moisture content of the air, both of which serve to keep it warmer at night (and in winters).  But nothing.  Not a single word.

One would hope that this clear connection of dots between local weather conditions and the consistency of those conditions with anthropogenic global warming would be a key point made in an article like this.  Seems almost like negligence.

Climate Change Gets Personal - My Sister's House is Lost in Black Forest Fire

For 20 years I have worked on the issue of climate change--mostly from the angle of energy efficiency.  I understand the severity of the crisis and the need for fast and significant action.  But it's been a bit abstract from a personal standpoint.  I was not one of the 20 million Pakistanis dislocated by the flooding there in 2010.  I don't live in parts of New Jersey or New York that were ravaged by Hurricane Sandy.

But now it's different. 
Last year the Waldo Canyon Fire in Colorado Springs destroyed 346 homes.  The most destructive day of that fire occurred when Colorado Springs experienced its first 100-degree temperature in recorded history.  And there had been a 3-year drought at that point.  My brother is a firefighter in Colorado Springs, and he worked on the fire.

George Will wrong again on climate change issue

Today's Washington Post included George Will's regular op-ed column.  Although the column's topic was not climate change, he couldn't help himself but to try to bring the issue up.  He has been wrong so much on climate change, it is surprising (and disheartening) that the Post keeps publishing his errors.  (For more on this topic, Joe Romm at Climate Progress has written quite a bit).

From today's column:

Often the goals government pursues by surreptitious indirection are goals that could not win legislative majorities — e.g., the Environmental Protection Agency’s regulation of greenhouse gases following Congress’s refusal to approve such policies.

This statement is wrong in almost every way.  He has completely missed with all three branches of government.

Humankind wins the Darwin Award with anthropogenic climate change

People like me who follow climate-change news closely often find it difficult to understand why it is that we ("we" as in humankind) are doing so little to stop it.  Maybe I can't speak for everyone, but I certainly find it difficult.

Bill McKibben

Bill McKibben's recent article in Rolling Stone was another hard slap in the face that exposed how close to doomed we are.  So close, yet so little is being done.  Why?

There have been many articles and studies and opinions written about this, claiming everything from genetics to politics to economics to obliviousness--most of which contains at least a little truth.  I think that the real answer is more Darwinian.  Like this:

Margaret Thatcher understood environmental dangers like climate change way back in 1989

Watch this video of Margaret Thatcher speaking on the dangers of environmental degradation and continuing human interference with nature. The section on climate change begins about 5:30.

Keep in mind that Ms. Thatcher was a staunch Conservative in the mold of Ronald Reagan (or perhaps he was in the mold of Margaret Thatcher.  Well, either way.)

Declines since 1982!!! (A global warming analogy)

I get the occasional email from my skeptic friend highlighting the latest study he's seen on Watt's Up With That and how the entirety of global warming science is thrown into question.  He included this statement in his last email:

". . .the earth has been cooling now for the last 15 years, while CO2 is still rising."

This is a common meme among the skeptics: that there has been no warming recently despite increasing CO2, therefore global warming has stopped.

The main problem with this argument is that 15 years is too short a period to make any definitive statements about long-term trends.  It also fails to take into account other forcings, such as solar intensity (down), ENSO (more La Nina lately) and increased aeresols from Chinese coal burning (study here).

For today, though, I want to show this:

Robert Samuelson redefines "reassuring," downplays seriousness of climate change

In a short op-ed piece today in the Washington Post (January 26, 2012), Robert Samuelson invokes a strange reality on our future.

"A week after President Obama denied the application for the Keystone XL pipeline — which would carry oil from Canada’s tar sands deposits in Alberta to U.S. refineries along the Gulf of Mexico — it’s time for an energy reality check. What does the future hold? It may be better than you think."

That's how he starts the article.  Not that he supports the canceling of the KXL pipeline.  No, he's optimistic because we will continue to burn fossil fuels on into the interminable future no matter what.  That's the "better than you think" line.

Skeptics are not statisticians: 1% of a data set does not disprove the whole data set.

A friend of mine likes to provoke me by sending links to posts and articles that contradict the established science on climate change. Recently he pointed me to this post that appeared in Watt's Up With That: NCDC data shows that the contiguous USA has not warmed in the past decade, summers are cooler, winters are getting colder.  My friend accompanied this link with this comment:

Well, the figures are in from the NOAA National Climate Data Center and the rest is just high school math. While US CO2 emission has gone up precipitously in the last 100 years the average temperature in the US has gone down. Of course you could look at just the last 15 years and ignore the rest. In this case CO2 has still gone up a lot and temperature was flat. Does this fit with saying the controversy is over and global warming is an established fact.

I countered with some points, but only later realized the biggest flaw with this reasoning, which I'll get to shortly.

"Natural" equals Magic

photo from Purple Phoenix on flickr

Follow the comment thread after virtually any on-line article on climate change, and you will find deniers/skeptics who will claim that the warming we are experiencing is just "natural forces," not caused by humans.  They will often make a statement like, "since it is UNPROVEN that CO2 is a contributor to climate change." or " I believed global warming was occurring not because of mankind's actions but because of the natural rhythms of the planet and our sun."

A friend of mine, in fact, has invoked this same idea to me: that climate change is some sort of natural artifact.  This is the equivalent of saying that what is happening is caused by magic.

State of Folly 4 - How Michael Crichton was wrong: 1970s Global Cooling

This is the fourth in a series of posts related to Michael Crichton's State of Fear, which I just read this summer. [previous posts here and here and here]

On page 394, the "arch-villain" Henley (in the plot, he is the key character behind the efforts to manufacture big climate events) says:

Science textbook gets science right!!!

Last summer my son was required to read "State of Fear" by Michael Crichton in preparation for his Geosciences class that all high school seniors are required to take at his school (it's a school that specializes in science and technology).  That made me nervous, knowing that "State of Fear" has been widely debunked as a source of useful information on climate science (see my series on State of Fear here).  I was hoping that his teachers were not going to use it as some sort of instructional material on climate change.

I was immensely relieved, though, when I read the very first sentence in his textbook:

State of Folly 3 - How Michael Crichton was wrong: Humans insignificant?

This is the third in a series of posts related to Michael Crichton's State of Fear, which I just read this summer. [previous posts here and here]

On p. 709, one of Crichton's key characters, John Kenner, who he presents as the level-headed, intelligent understander of all things climate, says, after describing the ordinary violence of the earth's weather:

The nasty little apes that call themselves human beings can do nothing except run and hide.  For these same apes to imagine they can stabilize this atmosphere is arrogant beyond belief.  They can't control the climate.

Yet we know that to be undeniably false.  We are, in fact, already controlling the climate.  We've raised it a degree or so Celsius in the last 100 years.  "Unequivocally" according to the best climate science on the planet.  We may not be "controlling" it very well--more like sending it out of control.  The point he was trying to make is that humans are just too small to make any difference to the enormity of the earth's systems.  Wrong.

State of Folly 2 - More Why Michael Crichton is Wrong

This is the second in a series of posts about Michael Crichton's State of Fear. (Previous post here)

Mr. Crichton's book was widely hailed by the climate deniers/skeptics, despite the fact that Mr. Crichton has no credentials whatsoever in regards to climate science.  Nonetheless, the book covered a lot of ground related to global warming.


On pages 490-492 (in my paperback version), in the chapter titled "Culver City: Tuesday, October 12, 1:20 PM" Mr. Crichton presents 14 different temperature graphs from around the world showing temperature trends from 1875 to 2003.  Some go up, some go down, some go sideways.  In the story, one of the main protagonists comes across a stack of these graphs and is disturbed that so many do not seem to agree with his preconceived notion of global warming.

State of Folly - How Michael Crichton was Wrong

I finally got around to reading State of Fear by Michael Crichton. Interestingly, my son was assigned this book as a summer reading assignment (I'll follow up on that shortly). So I read it, too.

There have been many people who have reviewed and criticized the book. This is the first of a series of posts that look at particular claims and issues raised in the book as I see them. Enjoy.

Crichton adds an "Author's Message" at the end, in which he clarifies his personal views on the climate science. One of his bullet points reads:

The heat wave and human influence on climate

Most of the United States just endured a remarkable heat wave in which hundreds of daily temperature records were broken and a number of all-time high records were also broken.  Additionally, because of the flooding of the Mississippi River, humidity levels were also very high, leading to extremely high heat indexes, as high as 131 degrees in Knoxville, Iowa on Monday, July 18.