Three of the five members in my immediate family smoke. My Dad, after a breast cancer scare, quit. He’s been a non-smoker for almost three years now! Yay! At eleven years old, I took my first puff on a cigarette. And fainted. Clearly, the thrill was lost on me.

Which brings me to my rant of the month. It is estimated that 4.3 trillion cigarette butts are littered each year. It takes 12 years for the filters to decompose.

It is estimated that one in five New Yorkers smoke. My guess, from random observations, is that it is probably one in four. By comparison, the San Francisco Bay area has far fewer smokers. My guess is one in ten. I have pondered the reasons for this difference, and conclude that New Yorkers think it is part of the style image, and Californians weigh in on the healthy living side of things.

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Actually no… most of them aren’t.  Cut flowers that you purchase in the majority of flower shops may be beautiful, but they come at a high price, both environmentally and socially.

Most of the flowers in these shops come from far away – so start with a
good dose of greenhouse gases from the transportation to get them here.
While growing, they are sprayed with a cocktail of pesticides –
sometimes as many as 100 times what they would spray on foods at the
same farm.  These pesticides have very negative impacts to the local
environment, not to mention the local people employed on the farm to
pick them and ship them here – people who don’t have options to demand
better.

So what should you look for?

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Now that the media spotlight is gone, and a couple of months have passed, what does the Copenhagen Accord really mean for the past, present and future of climate change?

January 31, 2010 was the deadline for participating countries to submit their proposals to the UNFCCC to reduce greenhouse gas emissions reductions. How did they fare?

Currently, with no changes, the forecast for average global temperature increase by 2100 is 4.7 degrees Celsius.  Scientific consensus is that this would be catastrophic, with sea levels rising by one metre.

The Copenhagen Accord was a promise (non-binding, remember) that the participating countries would reduce emissions so that we have a minimum average global temperature increase of only 2.5 degrees by 2100.

When you look at these projections, it is worth noting that many African countries, who are particularly sensitive to the drought and desertification brought about by higher temperatures, walked out on the Copenhagen summit at one point because their position is that average temperature rise by 2100 of more than 1.5 degrees will be catastrophic for them.

So how are the proposals that were just submitted on January 31? According to Climate Interactive, a collaborative project to use open-source tools to accurately predict the future of climate change, the proposals that have just been submitted don’t even take us to where we’re supposed to be ~ that is, reducing emissions such that the temperature only increases by 2.5% by 2100. (more…)