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The Campus Carbon Calculator has now been downloaded by over 800 colleges, universities and independent schools, and CA-CP is offering support and guidance to hundreds of these campuses. Recent success stories include the University at Buffalo (SUNY), where the UB Green office has just released its Climate Action Report, outlining comprehensive GHG emissions trends from 1997-2004 and offering recommendations for university stakeholders and decision makers in cutting the overall campus carbon footprint. CA-CP worked with researcher Jim Simon and others at UB to help see this report to completion and the UB office has leveraged the report to do extensive outreach and education, hosting a reception and five town hall meetings, and their efforts have been featured in, among other places, a campus newspaper article.

Last week, over forty members of the community, including representatives from St. Bonaventure University, the University of Rochester, Medaille College and Niagara University met at the Unitarian-Universalist Church in Buffalo to learn more about the UB Green Climate Action Report and how a similar initiative could be completed at their own institutions. Representatives from local businesses and government offices were also present.

Jim Simon and Walter Simpson from UB Green presented on the methodology and recommendations of the UB Green Climate Action Report, focusing on the main sources of UB’s emissions and what can be done to make an impact.

Questions and comments from those gathered centered on what the community can do about climate change as well as how to address issues not quantified in the report, like stormwater management.

If your organization or school is interested in finding out more about the UB Green Climate Action Report, please contact us at 716-829-3535.

Town Hall Meeting on Climate Change

February 20^th 7pm

Unitarian Universalist Church

695 Elmwood Avenue, Buffalo

The UB Green Office recently completed the UB Green Climate Action Report, the University at Buffalo’s first greenhouse gas inventory and a comprehensive set of recommendations which, if implemented, would substantially reduce UB’s carbon footprint. The primary purpose of the Report is to assist UB as it moves toward climate neutrality in the years ahead, as per UB President John B. Simpson’s endorsement of the American College & University Presidents Climate Commitment (www.presidentsclimatecommitment.org).

In order to share the report and facilitate greater action on behalf of climate protection, the UB Green Office in conjunction with the co-sponsors shown below is holding a Town Hall Meeting at 7 pm, Wednesday, February 20^th at the Unitarian Universalist Church of Buffalo at 695 Elmwood Avenue (at West Ferry), Buffalo. We invite you to attend this meeting and ask you to encourage leaders and representatives from local colleges and schools, businesses, religious and community organizations, municipalities, etc. to attend as well. The methodology and greenhouse gas emissions reduction strategies outlined in the report can easily be used by other schools (public and private K-12, area colleges, etc.), businesses, religious and community organizations, and municipalities. The report can be found online at: http://ublib.buffalo.edu/libraries/asl/guides/environment/UBGreenReport.pdf .

Nobel Peace Prize winner Al Gore and scientists worldwide have told us that the “debate is over” about global warming and climate change. The science is now conclusive. We know that the climate is changing rapidly and it is occurring primarily because of our collective addiction to and wasteful use of fossil fuels. Leading U.S. climatologist Jim Hansen recently remarked that we have just 10 ten years to reverse course and adopt a new energy course or it will be impossible to avoid the worst consequences of climate change.

Please join us on February 20^th and, more importantly, help us build the meeting by recruiting representatives of local colleges and schools, businesses, religious and community organizations, and municipalities to attend as well and join the discussion so that they too can become part of the solution to climate change.

For more information, please contact Jim Simon at 829-3535 or jsimon at facilities dot buffalo dot edu.

Biofuels add to greenhouse gases

Cultivation release exceeds carbon cuts

By Alan Zarembo - LOS ANGELES TIMES
Updated: 02/08/08 6:43 AM

One analysis found that clearing forests and grasslands to grow the crops releases vast amounts of carbon into the air — far more than the carbon reductions resulting from using biofuels instead of gasoline.

“We’re rushing into biofuels, and we need to be very careful,” said Jason Hill, an economist and ecologist at the University of Minnesota who co-authored the study. “It’s a little frightening to think that something this well-intentioned might be very damaging.”

Even converting farmed land from food to biofuel crops increases greenhouse gas emissions as food production is shifted to other parts of the world, resulting in the destruction of more forests and grasslands to make way for farmland, the second study found.

The analysis calculated that a U.S. cornfield devoted to producing ethanol would have to be farmed for 167 years before it would begin to achieve a net reduction in emissions.

“Any biofuel that uses productive land is going to create more greenhouse gas emissions than it saves,” said Timothy Searchinger, a researcher at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University and the study’s lead author.

Since 2000, annual U.S. production of corn-based ethanol has jumped to 6.5 billion gallons from 1.6 billion gallons, supplying about 5 percent of the nation’s fuel for transportation, according to the Renewable Fuels Association, an industry lobbying group.

Federal legislation passed last year calls for more than doubling ethanol production over the next decade.

Hill’s analysis looked at the amount of carbon in forests and grasslands that is released into the air when soils are turned over and vegetation rots or is burned away.

The study found that clearing an Indonesian peat land rain forest to make way for a biofuel plantation — a conversion that is rapidly occurring to satisfy Europe’s rising demand for biodiesel — releases so much carbon that starting to achieve a net reduction in emissions would take 423 years.

Searchinger’s study focused on the global effect of changing the use of farmland. U.S. farmers have been replacing soybean fields with cornfields to meet the rising demand for ethanol, lowering the world supply of soybeans and driving up their price. As a result, farmers in Brazil are clearing rain forest to plant soybeans.

His model estimated that devoting 12.8 million hectares of cornfields in the United States for ethanol production would bring 10.8 million hectares of additional land into cultivation worldwide, including 2.8 million hectares in Brazil and 2.3 million hectares in China and India — much of it forests and grasslands.

link: http://www.buffalonews.com/nationalworld/national/story/271257.html#

Also, be sure to check out this great resource page on climate change put together by UB librarian Fred Stoss!

Q:  Why all the fuss?  All they’re talking about is a few degrees warmer in a hundred years.  So why are the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and Al Gore making such a big issue of it?  After all, the temperature change from morning to afternoon or from winter to summer is a LOT more.  And a few degrees in a hundred years – why, that’s only a few hundredths of a degree per year!

A:  It’s easy to see why the amount of heating of the Earth doesn’t seem like much and the rate seems very, very slow – especially when compared with all of the other changes buzzing around us.  But some perspective may help to understand why the few degrees the IPCC projects over a hundred years really is a big deal.

We all know about the Ice Ages, when huge ice sheets spread southward.  Those ice sheets were so large that here, where Buffalo now exists, the ice was a mile thick.  In recent decades it has become possible to determine the average global temperature when glaciers were that big, and the change of temperature throughout several Ice Age glacial and interglacial periods.  But let’s just consider the time from the end of the last glacial period and the transition into the beginning of our present interglacial.  At the time of the maximum extent of the ice sheets with the deepest cold, about 14,000 years ago, the average global temperature was about 5 degrees Celsius (9 degrees F) colder than it was 200 years ago – about when human-caused warming began.  Then, over the next 5,000 years the Earth temperature increased about 5 degrees C.  About 9,000 years ago Earth temperature stabilized and the temperature has varied only a little since then.  The change from the coldest time with maximum glaciation to recent Earth temperature was only 5 degrees C and it happened over about 5000 years.  A change of one degree per thousand years. But that was enough to change our world from a glaciated world to what it is today.

But if, for example, Earth’s average temperature were to increase an additional 3 ½  degrees C by 2100, we will have had a temperature increase above the past 9000 year average of more than 4 degrees C from the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, with the beginning of intensive burning of fossil fuels, to 2100.

Another way of putting it: during the 21^st century Earth’s temperature would increase about 35 times faster than it did as the last Ice Age glaciation ended, and that change was extremely fast by natural standards.

Q:  OK, we are anticipating a temperature increase that will be very big and very rapid as compared with natural rates of change.  So what?  Why worry?

A:  As the last major glaciation ended and climate changed, Earth’s ecosystems responded.  As the ice front retreated ecosystems migrated northward.  At the latitude of Buffalo the climax forest is now one of oak, maple, and beech.  14000 years ago those trees existed in refuges down in Georgia.  But with climate change the forests marched northward – slowly, but keeping up with what climate allowed.  With temperature changing a degree per thousand years ecosystems could keep up, they could adjust and adapt.

But a temperature change of a few degrees in a hundred years?  We have every reason to expect that will be too fast for many species.  Some species are mobile and may move quickly, but many are not.  Forests, for example, do not migrate quickly (the lifespan of many trees is well over 100 years).  So we must expect many species and ecosystems to become extinct; some species will try to move but much of their ecosystem will not keep up, and the synchronization and interdependence that characterizes ecosystems will be disrupted.  Result: ecosystem failures both on land and in the sea.

We might be able to build dikes and move our societies in response to sea level rise.  But we are not able to construct ecosystems, even though we depend upon them.

The only prudent choice we have is to make the changes needed in how our societies live so that we minimize global heating. Are we able to be farsighted?  Is that possible?

As Al Gore said in his Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech in Oslo, Norway, on December 10, 2007, “We have everything we need to get started, save perhaps political will ….”.

1/29/2008 12pm, 210 Student Union, UB North Campus

1/30/2008 3pm, 210 Student Union, UB North Campus

1/30/2008 7pm, Screening Room, CFA, UB North Campus

2/4/2008   7pm, Room 105, Harriman Hall, UB South Campus

2/5/2008   12pm, 301 Crosby Hall, UB South Campus

2/20/2008 7pm, Unitarian-Universalist Church, 695 Elmwood Ave., Buffalo, NY 

Questions? Contact UB Green at 829-3535 or ubgreen at facilities dot buffalo dot edu.

“glacial and lacustrine records to study climate change in the Arctic. We
employ standard paleolimnologic techniques to understand paleoenvironmental
change during warm interglacial intervals (e.g., last century, early Holocene, last
interglacial, earlier interglacials). In particular, chironomids allows us to quantify
past temperature magnitude and variability. We also study ice sheet processes and
the history of glaciation to understand arctic climate change during glacial
intervals. We use cosmogenic radionuclides to understand basal ice sheet
processes and to date glacial features.” http://wings.buffalo.edu/research/paleoclimate/

Visit their webpage to check out photos and learn more about what they do. While you are at it, check out this article from UB Geology Grad student Elizabeth Thomas–Behind the Scenes: Getting to the Core of Climate Change. It talks about the work that Elizabeth and other UB folks do on Baffin Island in Arctic Canada, while reflecting on the impacts that climate change will have on places we know, like Buffalo, NY to places far away, such as the Inuit communities on Baffin Island. Elizabeth and others are also working to educate the Inuit community about the changes that are occuring right before their eyes.

 Enjoy!