Zombie Walks and Tea Parties

The same day that 2,000 tea party goers went to D.C., 5,000 people showed up in Fremont, Seattle for a record-breaking zombie walk. Fremont is, of course, as much or more of a sister city to Santa Barbara than any of its official sisters. Fremont took in a covey of Santa Barbara artists in the early '80s, and they brought with them the Solstice Celebration, which is now a major Seattle event. Of course, Seattle is a big town, with big-town ideas: like 500 naked bicyclists leading the parade (try that on State Street!).

What do tea parties and zombie walks have in common? They both celebrate something really... dead. Tea parties like to believe that the corpse of big-bank capitalism can be raised again, and the same gravy train that derailed (at which time we discovered... THAT'S NOT GRAVY! EEWW!) can be reassembled, so they can get along with their vision of prosperity.

Meanwhile the rest of the country is looking ahead at the next dream, something emergent and potentially wonderful, even though it might not lead to a billion-dollar bonus at some pirate investment bank.

Tea party zombie walkers, put some zip in your step. Carry the corpse with some elan. Why not. Everyone else is laughing. So go ahead. Step up and go for the full Thriller tango.

Green Academy ties the line at the beach

Drive along Cabrillo this week and you will see dozens of palm trees decke out with ribbons. These ribbons symbolize the scale of sea level rise in the ice on Greenland. Like the lightblueline project, the Santa Barbara High School Green Academy effort uses public art to make a scientific statement. You can visit the green academy website here: http://www.thegreenacademy.org/sea/

Governor tells staff to prepare for warming

Not waiting for the line to get drawn in Santa Barbara, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Governor of California, issued an executive order in November for State agencies to prepare reports on the impacts of sea-level rise due to climate change. Here is the text of the order: http://gov.ca.gov/executive-order/11036/

Not waiting for the Governor, The New Media Studio and the Donald Bren School at UCSB initiated its own study of the impacts of sea-level rise on the City of Santa Barbara last March. And so, by the time the State is just convening its first conference on sea-level rise, Santa Barbara is going to have an initial study completed and ready to use as a model for other cities and coastal regions in California. The City has been very helpful and cooperative with this study, and again Santa Barbara has an opportunity to take a leading position in addressing the challenges of climate change.

As lightblueline also noted, the expected sea-level rise this century is potentially up to 1.5 meters, which, using a conservative linear estimation puts the sea level up more than seven meter in 500 years.

The point of gathering information about future impacts is to assess the various responses we can make, from cutting carbon in the near term, to hardening the coastline if we fail to stop the progress of climate change. Knowing the relative costs of all the options lets us determine, in purely economic terms, the best path. In terms of keeping Santa Barbara's ocean down by the waterfront, for reasons that include economics, but also include our moral obligation to our children's childen to leave the planet like we found it, there is no substitute for reducing greenhouse gasses in the short term as a world-wide goal. This is where the Governor will soon have help from the new White House.

Obama promises to put the US on the forefront of fighting climate change

This makes local action much more proactive and much less reactive. Once we have a federal plan to limit carbon (to match the California and the Santa Barbara plans), and once the current administration handlers are not censoring their own scientists, I would guess we will be better prepared to talk about climate change and its longer-term local impacts.

Of course the only reason property values tanked in Santa Barbara was because we didn't paint the line (thanks Jerry!).

Just in time for the republican convention

I looked at the National Hurricane Center and saw that Gustav is headed directly for New Orleans and should arrive there just in time to remind the nation and the planet how seriously deficient the Bush administration's job was with Katrina, and just how much more of the same we would expect from a McCain administration. We can only hope that the people on the coast are finding safety this time around, although the preparations for the next hurricane might still leave New Orleans swamped again.  

Georgie, that's a heck of a job you're doing!

Kris Krug: Meeting Facilitator Extraordinaire

On a non Climate Change note: I've been working at UC Santa Barbara on a project to plan a whole new Web 2.0 academic social network service. We gathered forty experts from all over the nation to do a one day design charrette. Wanting to get the most out of the day I turned to another expert, this time an expert meeting facilitator: Kris Krug from Rain City Studios in Vancouver, BC.

Kris has done a number of barcamps and other meetings, so I was confident he could keep these uber-nerds on topic for the whole day. With Kris at the helm of the open-space-style meeting day we had probably the best single day meeting most people in the room can remember. At the end of the day one participant said that she'd never had so much fun working so hard. We ended up with seven vision graphic posters and 56 report outs in one day.

Since then a number of participants have asked me how I did it.  So I take a lot of the credit whenever possible... :-)  only I could not have done it at all without Kris.  Kris kept the whole room moving at the speed of conversation. So if you're looking for someone to take control of your next one-day workshop... you know who to call.

Northeast Climate Impacts Assessment

I'm at the University of New Hampshire, where we are getting a report on current situation of climate change. This study is also outlined at ClimateChoices .  Note: this website also looks at California. Cameron Wake is outlining the difference between two futures... one that could be catastrophic and the other, which can be adapted to. Under the high-emissions scenario, New Hampshire's summers will feel like those in North Carolina by the end of the century. 

A range of expected climate features can be predicted. For example, the models all point to more extreme precipitation events. The "100 year" floods might happen every ten years. These events also impact waste water treatment plants around the area.  Under the higher emissions scenario, most of the maple forests in the Northeast will be gone by the end of the century.

In terms of the IPCC (conservative) 17 inch sea level rise, the 100 year flood plain puts large parts of Boston at risk. The current 100 year flood plain becomes the 2 year flood plain. One event like the 100 year flood under the new sea level would cost Boston 70-90 billion dollars in damage.

All of these changes can be, at least in part, avoided if we reduce carbon emissions in the short term.