There is a simple solution that could quickly end our conflicts in the middle east. Imagine the President gets up in front of an emergency session of Congress and announces that he is launching a full blown plan to eliminate all US reliance on foreign oil in three years. He asks the American people, businesses and political leaders to make serious short term sacrifices to achieve this goal. He then tells the oil-producing nations of the world that if they don’t clean up their backyards and stop funding terrorism and tribal infighting that three years from now the US will stop buying any oil from them, no matter what it costs us.

We could do this and I believe we could get other (EU) countries on board with it. It would be on a par with Kennedy’s Space Race to the Moon speech. Don’t see this President touching it tho…

You may notice I’ve included the venerable (and venerated) sci-fi classic Dune by Frank Herbert on my Reading list. That’s because this environmental tale has a lot of resonance when compared with various climate change scenarios. The universe revolves around a substance called Spice (oil) that comes out of the ground in the desert. Spice is the only thing that makes space travel possible and without it civilization will fall back into medieval ways.

The mythology and names (Bashar) are Arabic and the Fremen are nomads like the Bedouin. They control the oil, …err I mean spice.

A finely balanced environment creates the climate for spice production. Global powers seek to unbalance that environment to pursue their own agendas. A war breaks out over control of the spice, throwing the entire system into chaos.

The message is familiar: Our addiction to oil has led us to the potential destruction of our planet as a place friendly to human life, yet we continue to burn it and fight over it. And our political leaders don’t have the will to take any action.

Edit: I completely skipped over the response to environmental disaster that underlies the story. Arrakis, the desert planet, has no surface water. It is implied that it once was different. The native people have had to adapt drastically to survive this ancient cataclysm: moisture-reclaiming suits, a society that prizes toughness over any other consideration, the ability to live on very limited resources. Think about what a ten degree increase worldwide would mean to us. These fictional issues wouldn’t seem too draconian in a world where most major cities would be underwater, diseases run rampant and weather is violent and unpredictable.

Some MIT researchers posted an important announcement regarding the debate on whether the increasing intensity of hurricanes is caused by global warming. Their position is that this argument is distracting us from a much more immediate problem: The continued rapid expansion of building in coastal areas. Whether we caused the hurricane intensity is not as important as the fact that we’re continuing to build homes and condos in places where that intensity will cause destruction.

It’s the lemming effect. Even though we know its dangerous, we take the gamble so we can enjoy being by the water. The problem is that the people whose waterfront homes are destroyed by hurricanes expect the government to rebuild them, at everyone’s expense. This gets debated but no one ever suggests that maybe we should ban all building within a certain distance from the shorelines. My suggestion would be that it be based on altitude above sea level, since we all know you need to go to the high ground in a flood.

Of course there’s no chance this is going to happen. Washington, DC itself is built on a swamp that is close to sea level and essentially a part of the Chesapeake bay basin. This spring we saw floods on the Mall closing government buildings and public transportation throughout the capitol. Yet we heard no warnings in congress or elsewhere that we should consider the consequences of building our capitol in such a vulnerable spot.

So, while I salute the MIT geniuses for their effort, realistically I doubt anyone is going to pay attention- its just too nice out there by the beach.

Gardeners are the first observers of changes in climate. Their intimate knowledge of how plants respond to changes in temp, light, humidity, micro-climates and more gives them a sense of environmental change earlier than most of us. Most serious gardeners base their planting choices on hardiness maps that divide the planet into Zones which indicate average low winter temps.

Because we are near Lake Ontario, our climate is moderated by the slower changes in temperature of the water in the lake. It acts as a heat sink, stabilizing temps through seasonal changes. As a result our hardiness zone is warmer than those to the south of us. However, in recent years, our zone has changed to the next level warmer which cannot be explained by proximity to the lake. This change is graphically shown by this hardiness map comparing changes throughout North America in the period from 1990-2004. The striking thing about this is how the entire range of warmer zones is moving northward.

For my girlfriend, who is a plant fiend, this means we are increasingly able to plant semi-tropical plants in warmer areas of our garden without worrying about them wintering over. It’s not just us: municipal arborists in England are now replacing dying street trees with species that can survive warmer climates. Given the lifespan of a tree, this indicates a committment on their part to acceptance of warming.

Watch the gardeners….