Toss that toxic couch

Whether you're a design junkie who obsesses over every piece of furniture in the house or a low-maintenance IKEA type, there's no question that the surfaces on which you sleep, eat and lounge are a big part of your everyday life. And like most choices we make, the furniture that fills our home not only affects our comfort levels, but also has an impact on the environment and our health.

There are many good reasons to seek out green furniture: Keeping excessive manufacturing waste out of landfills; saving endangered forests; and improving indoor air quality by reducing the use of toxic chemicals are a few of the big ones. And as innovative designers become increasingly tuned in to the desires of the consumer who is as style savvy as she is environmentally conscious, options abound for outfitting your pad with supremely cool gear that doesn't forget the planet.

Sound too good to be true? Economically, it may be. Though rapidly growing, green design is still a relatively small segment of the furniture market, which often results in hefty price tags for even simple pieces. The solution? Start slowly.

Just as it's impossible to instantly transform every piece of your wardrobe into organic cotton, it's unrealistic to quickly fill your home with furniture crafted from sustainably harvested wood. While you're saving up for the big-ticket items like the Isabella Bed from RC Green — made from Forest Stewardship Council (FSC)-certified wood and natural latex — you can score furniture that is eco- and wallet-friendly by seeking out previously owned pieces. Reusing is always the greenest option as it doesn't require new materials or the energy required for manufacturing, and it keeps another item out of the landfill. You can go the craigslist.org or freecycle.net route or you can hunt for vintage and antique items.

But if you've got the green to purchase new green pieces, keep these tips in mind as you shop:

• Look for furniture made from reclaimed materials. Houses, kitchen tables, pianos, baseball bats — think of all the wood that is used to make things each day and then think about all the scraps left over from construction and manufacturing and the landfill waste from discarded wood items. Instead of using new wood to make dining room chairs and beds and bookshelves, some green designers are turning to wood that's already in play. NYC-based RG Furniture Design turns lumber from historic buildings under demolition in New York City into striking tables, benches, shelves and lamps.
• Seek out furniture made from FSC-certified wood. We need trees. Lots of them. They produce oxygen, absorb carbon dioxide, and help to keep the planet cool, among several other very commendable attributes. Purchasing furniture made from wood sourced from sustainably harvested forests helps to ensure that many trees will be with us for a long, long time. The Forest Stewardship Council is the biggest certifier. Look for its seal of approval before investing in an eco-friendly piece of furniture. Check out Woodshanti's stunning FSC-certified computer desk.
• Purchase furniture made without toxic chemicals. Your couch may look harmless, but unless you know exactly how it was manufactured, there's a good chance that it's off-gassing (emitting substances into the air) harmful chemicals into your home. The most common off-gassed substances are VOCs, or volatile organic compounds, which actually sound as scary as they are — they've been connected to cancer and birth defects — and can be found in substances like formaldehyde, flame retardants, finishes, adhesives and foam cushions. Check out the Brave Space Hallow Coffee Table with low VOC adhesives and a nontoxic finish.

(via Newsweek)

The truth about climate change

The legendary broadcaster and naturalist Sir David Attenborough was long unsure about the causes of the observed climate warming. In his documentary, The Truth About Climate Change, he sheds doubt and explains what convinced him.

Climate models based on purely natural processes such as solar activity and volcanic eruptions fail to explain the observed change in Earth's climate in the latter part of the 20th century. Models factoring in the human impact, that is, the increase of carbon dioxide in the athmosphere, depict the transpired warming accurately, however.

A surprising idea for "solving" climate change

Environmental scientist David Keith proposes a cheap, effective, shocking means to address climate change: What if we injected a huge cloud of ash into the atmosphere to deflect sunlight and heat?

India climate solutions road tour, on the road to 350

Not so long ago, the Indian Youth Climate Network (IYCN) was formed to give a voice to the next generation of India in the climate dialogue. The Network called for youth to come together in order to ensure a clean, bright future. Several city summits amidst a National Youth Summit on Climate Change, and the first ever Indian youth delegation sent to the COP at Poznan ensured that the Indian youth got its voice heard both nationally and during the international climate negotiations.

Now, members of the Indian Youth Climate Network along with a solar powered band are traveling a distance of more than 3500 kilometers in the country in solar plug-in electric cars and alternative-fueled buses. The focus of this journey is to both raise awareness and convert awareness into tangible actions. Climate solutions would be documented all through the journey and the underlying objective is to communicate the message of working to bring down the Carbon concentration to well below 350 ppm.

Despite realizing the gravity of the situation, the world has not yet mobilized into massive action against climate change. This, even when climate solutions exist and are in practice. One of the major barriers for this is that many people are not aware of what is already happening and need to be mobilized. For example, inspirational climate solutions have already been put into action in pockets across India, with enormous co-benefits. However, these are neither documented, nor have the policy makers shown any interest in replicating these successful models.

Thus, the India Climate Solutions Road Trip not just aims to raise awareness among people, it is also making efforts to document all such solutions, engineered models, community actions as a capacity building measure. The month long trip will visit more than 15 cities and several towns and villages sharing solutions in clean tech showcases, empowering youth in leadership training programs, and using art, dance and music by Solar Punch and other local musicians and artists to communicate the message in as many ways as possible.

The IYCN maintains that it is the present generation’s choice to take action and to create the future we all wish to see. And since that is the case, the greatest climate solution is our human capacity to take action.

India Climate Solutions Project: http://indiaclimatesolutions.com/

(via Ecoworldly)

Can climate chnage makes us sicker?

What do we talk about when we talk about global warming? It'll get hotter, that's a safe bet; polar ice caps will be melting, and wildlife that can't adapt to warmer temperatures could be on the way out. But what does it really mean for the health of us, the human race? It's a question that remains surprisingly difficult to answer — research into climate change's impacts on human health have lagged behind other areas of climate science. But what we do know has scientists and doctors increasingly worried — a rising risk of death from heat waves, the spread of tropical diseases like malaria into previously untouched areas, worsened water-borne diseases. "When we think about climate change, we think about ice caps and biodiversity, but we forget about human health," says Dr. Jonathan Patz, a professor of environmental studies and population health sciences at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. "There are a huge number of health outcomes that are climate sensitive."

The World Health Organization (WHO) and other global health bodies are working to remind us of that fact. On March 31 the American Public Health Association (APHA) launched its first blueprint for combating the health impacts of climate change, and on April 7, WHO will dedicate its annual World Health Day to the intersection between disease and global warming. The message is that severe climate change could fundamentally weaken global public health, that doctors need to be ready to deal with the consequences — and that there is a moral case to be made for reducing carbon emissions to save future lives. "If you look at climate change over the long term, it will profoundly affect the pillars of public health: water, sanitation, air quality and sufficient food," says Dr. David Heymann, Assistant Director-General for Health Security and Environment at WHO. "The fact is that human health should be at the center of the political debate on climate change, but right now that's not the case."

The first step to making that case is understanding exactly what warmer temperatures will do to us and our diseases — and few scientists know more about the topic than Patz, a member of the UN's Nobel Prize–winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). (Hear Patz talk about global warming and health on this week's Greencast.) As temperatures increase, and hotter, drier summers become the norm in regions that were once temperate, powerful heat waves — like the one in Europe in 2003, which killed an estimated 35,000 people — will take a toll. At the same time, climate models suggest that rain could become less frequent overall but more intense when it does fall, leading to a double whammy. Longer and fiercer droughts in some areas will worsen hunger, but severe rainstorms carry an increased risk of water-borne diseases like cholera. "It's not just warming, it's climate change," says Patz. "It's changing the air cycle, creating more extreme flooding, more extreme droughts."

For some diseases, climate change will be boon. Take malaria — right now, the insect-borne disease is mostly confined to hot tropical areas, which is why you don't need to take quinine when you're hiking through Central Park. But if temperatures increase, the mosquitoes that carry the malaria parasite will be able to expand their range, while more intense rainstorms will give them more places to breed. A report this year by Australia's Center for Epidemiology and Public Health estimated that between 20 to 80 million more people will be living in malarial regions by 2080, as the parasite expands its range; another study released on April 3 by British doctors raised the possibility that insect-borne diseases — virtually unknown in the cool U.K. — could hit the British isles thanks to climate change. "There's real worry about malaria," says Heymann. "Malaria becomes a more threatening disease as it spreads to new areas where people lack immunity because they haven't had it before."

WHO and other bodies are pushing to strengthen the global public health system in preparation for the changes that global warming might bring. That means readying societies to deal with heat waves — ensuring that the most vulnerable elderly aren't left on their own — and improving defenses against vector-borne diseases, with anti-malaria nets and medicines like artemisinin. Such preparations will be especially needed in those parts of the developing world — sub-Saharan Africa, south Asia — that will bear the brunt of climate change. But Patz would also like to see public health tackle carbon emissions directly, cutting off global warming at the source. For him, carbon dioxide should be treated as a pollutant that damages human health, albeit indirectly, and it's in our medical interests to reduce it. "Energy policy becomes one and the same as public health policy," says Patz.

Policies that cut carbon emissions can have a direct positive impact on human health now as well. Imagine how much better off our environment and our cholesterol levels might be if more of us biked to work rather than drove — or if city planners put greater emphasis on designing more walkable communities and ensuring sustainable public transportation. But the reality is that climate change is happening today, and will be worse tomorrow, even if we manage to pull together a global effort to reduce carbon emissions, which seems less likely and more difficult every day. (A commentary in the April 3 edition of Nature argued that the technological changes needed to decarbonize energy could be much harder than we thought; meanwhile, over in Bangkok, diplomats at the U.N. climate conference last week made little progress on hammering out the successor to Kyoto.) If there is money to be spent on preparing the world for the health impacts of climate change, the priority should be adapting our public health system to a warmer world, versus spending on carbon mitigation. Global warming to some degree will be inevitable — but human suffering needn't be, if we're smart enough to prepare.

(Via Time.com)

Global warming 101

Global warming could do more than just melt polar ice. It could change our maps, and displace people from cities and tropical islands.

Wake up, freak out then get a grip

Wake Up, Freak Out - then Get a Grip from Leo Murray on Vimeo.

Please take a moment to look at this great short animation from Leo Murray. Just click to play.

It starts out with a polar bear floating on a chunk of ice, playing a violin. Then the narrator hops out and grabs the violin, saying "Give me that. This really isn't about polar bears anymore!" And you're off and running, for a compact, very clever, and scientifically sound run-through of some major climate tipping points — all left out of the current IPCC projections — and what these might mean to us.

Toward the end, there's even a rewind of the worst effects scenario, and a chance for a happy ending!

A chance which is particularly happy this week, as news is released on the latest worldwide carbon emissions report card (details here) from the Global Carbon Project. To quote Olive Heffernan, writing in the climate blog at Nature, one of the world's top scientific journals:

"Most striking is that, despite years of effort, carbon dioxide emissions are increasing at an alarming rate of 3.5% a year — faster than the 2.7% predicted by the IPCC in their worst case scenario, and miles ahead of the 0.9% annual rise in the 1990s. Worst still, current measures have been based on a middle-ground IPCC scenario. Pep Candell from the Global Carbon Budget told me that this was 'astonishing'."

Please don't be distracted by some news coverage that will trumpet minor changes in the ranking of the leading greenhouse-gas-emitting countries. Even setting aside real accounting complications due to economic globalization, the United States still emits about 20% of the world's greenhouse gases, some five times more than its per-capita share (with 4.6% of the world's population).

The animation and the latest annual carbon report both highlight this essential truth: climate change is now everyone's problem.

It can be solved. There's overwhelming evidence for optimism if we get a collective grip, and make real change now.

Global warming greatest in the past decade: Study

Surface temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere were warmer over the last 10 years than any time during the last 1,300 years, according to a study.

If climate scientists include the somewhat controversial data derived from tree-ring records, the warming is anomalous (deviating from the normal or common order) for at least 1,700 years. "Some have argued that tree-ring data is unacceptable for this type of study," said Michael Mann, associate professor of meteorology and geosciences and director of Penn State's Earth System Science Centre.

"Now we can eliminate tree rings and still have enough data from other so-called 'proxies' to derive a long-term Northern Hemisphere temperature record." The proxies used by the researchers included information from marine and lake sediment cores, ice cores, coral cores and tree rings. "We looked at a much expanded database and our methods are more sophisticated than those used previously," said Mann.

The researchers noted that "conclusions are less definitive for the Southern Hemisphere and globe, which we attribute to larger uncertainties arising from the sparser available proxy data in the Southern Hemisphere". The research team included Mann, Ray Bradley, university distinguished professor, geosciences and director of Climate System Research Centre at the University of Massachusetts; Malcolm Hughes, regents' professor, and Fenbiao Ni, research associate at the Laboratory of Tree Ring Research, University of Arizona; Zhihua Zhang and Sonya Miller, research associates, meteorology, Penn State; and Scott Rutherford, assistant professor of environmental sciences at Roger Williams University.

Results of this study without tree-ring data show that for the Northern Hemisphere, the last 10 years are unusually warm for not just the past 1,000 as reported in the 1990s paper and others, but for at least another 300 years going back to about A.D. 700 without using tree-ring data.

The same conclusion holds back to A.D. 300 if the researchers include tree-ring data. "Ten years ago, we could not simply eliminate all the tree-ring data from our network because we did not have enough other proxy climate records to piece together a reliable global record," said Mann. "With the considerably expanded networks of data now available, we can indeed obtain a reliable long-term record without using tree rings," he added.

The new study shows that, with caveats, tree-ring data can be used, but that even without including that data, it is clear that the anomalous nature of recent warmth, which most scientists believe to be a result of human impacts on climate, is a reality. These findings were published on Tuesday's online edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences .

(via Times of India.)