While the actual event is scheduled for between 8:30 and 9:30 p.m. Saturday, at least 22 schools across the Limestone District School Board are taking part in Earth Hour during the lunch hour Friday. Participating schools will turn off or unplug as many electrical devices as possible.

Earth Hour is a teaching opportunity more than a practical attempt to save energy, said Dan Hendry, the school board’s sustainable initiatives co-ordinator.

“You don’t always think of all the control you have over your life,” Hendry said. “Anytime you have an action in life you can see consequences, good and bad.”

Each participating school will receive a report detailing how much electricity was saved during the 60 minutes.

Last year, one school reduced its energy consumption by 66%.

While participation in Earth Hour has increased, not all are on board with the idea it is a useful tool for fighting climate change.

David Thomson, a math professor from Queen’s University who has extensively researched climate change, says the event is a minor acknowledgement of a serious problem.

“It’s roughly equivalent to giving a two cent tip to a waiter,” Thomson said.

Thomson said the public needs much more education about climate change.

He says there are too many large corporations and governments heavily invested in the coal and oil industries that work to limit scientists’ warnings about global climate change.

“I suspect the coming generations will wish they had more simple problems to deal with,” he said.

“You look at a lot of the data and think how incredibly sensitive the system is.”

Overall, it’s difficult to judge how much energy consumption is reduced during the one-hour event, said Paul MacLatchy, director of environment and sustainable initiatives for the City of Kingston.

“What we’ve seen in the past is if it is a particularly cold or warm day, the electricity consumption rate is way different,” he said.

MacLatchy echoed Hendry’s description of Earth Hour as more of a teaching tool than an effort to cut power usage.

“What’s more important is to raise awareness about how much power we use every day,” MacLatchy said.

In Kingston, Earth Hour is being celebrated with Kingston Unplugged’s fifth annual festival at Springer Market Square, starting shortly after 6:30 p.m.

The free event will have live drumming, vendors, a silent auction and free candles and hot chocolate. Two bands and a fire circus will perform on a concert stage powered by wind and solar energy.

The concept is simple: Whichever city receives maximum participation from its citizens, organisations, institutions and government will be declared the Earth Hour Champion. That city will set an example of exemplary achievement and the power of individual action behind a common cause. Six cities — Delhi, Mumbai, Kolkata, Chennai, Hyderabad, and Bangalore — are participating in the race to become the Earth Hour Champion.

Earlier, Bangalore had been one of the epicenters of the Earth Hour movement in India with some of the biggest IT companies, as well as the citizens and local government. Major landmarks in Bangalore like the Brigade Road, Vidhan Soudha and many others switch off in support.Marking the fourth year of Earth Hour in India, Ravi Singh, secretary general and CEO, WWF-India, said, “Last year, Earth Hour encouraged individuals to adopt eco-friendly practices in their everyday life.”

This issue has been very important to me, and as someone who went to Washington D.C. to protest the pipeline back in November, I believe that President Obama did the right thing both for the environment and the United States.

On Nov. 6, our goal was to surround the White House to draw attention to the issue, but since more than 12,000 people came from all over the country, we were able to surround the White House three times.

This was a very exciting and powerful protest to attend. The protest proved effective, because less than a week later President Obama sent the pipeline project back to the State Department to be reviewed. It was a step in the right direction, but the fight was not over.

Even though all leading climate scientists, including James Hanson the head climate scientist for NASA, agree that the pipeline would be a major contributor to the global climate crisis, the president is still under a lot of pressure to approve it. Unfortunately, people don’t understand that jobs and money are not the only important things involved in this discussion.

The Keystone pipeline project would run approximately 1,700 miles from the tar sands of Alberta, Canada, to refineries on the Gulf Coast of Texas.

It would cross the Yellowstone River, the Sand Hills in Nebraska, which is a fragile farming region, and the Ogallala Aquifer, which is one of our nation’s largest freshwater sources.

It provides 78 percent of Nebraska’s public water and 83 percent of its irrigation water. The Keystone pipeline already exists in Canada and has spilled 14 times since June 2010, according to the National Wildlife Federation. One of the biggest problems with Tar Sands Oil is that extracting it creates three to five times more greenhouse gases than regular oil.

Tar sands are not a normal source of oil because the oil is in the form of bitumen, which must be chemically treated to make it useful. The Alberta Tar Sands are located under boreal forests, which have been home to native peoples and countless species of wildlife for centuries.

To me, all of this seems like reason enough not to try to extract tar sands oil. Why do people think that any possibility of jobs is more important than degradation of our planet? How many jobs the Keystone pipeline might create is up for debate, but most of what I have read says that the jobs would be temporary and not as many as the oil industry is saying. Personally, I’d rather we protect the Earth than have a few temporary jobs that are going to cause tons of damage and go away soon.

I think that it makes more sense to create jobs in the clean energy industry. Why not look to the future instead of to the past?

Although I do not yet vote, I will continue to support President Obama for standing up to the big oil companies. At this time, in this century, we need to move forward, like a lot of other countries, and work to get away from fossil fuels and degradation of the earth.

We are capable of becoming less dependent on oil, and of creating technologies and producing electricity through renewable energies. It’s the best thing for us, for the future and for our planet.

Source: http://www.therepublic.com

“This will be the biggest thing that we’ve done,” she told me yesterday evening. “This is what we’re made for-getting like-minded people to common destinations.”

Chase, in case you missed the debut of GoLoco on Earth Day this April, is the co-founder of Zipcar. She zeroed in on networked ridesharing as her next big thing because it’s a potentially powerful means of helping the environment while saving people money on the costs of maintaining a car, which she says typically account for 18 percent of household expenses. “People think if they buy their Prius they’re home free. It turns out if everybody in America bought a fuel-efficient car when they bought a new car, 10 years from now that would reduce demand for fossil fuel by 5 percent,” she says. Carpooling, though, can have a much bigger effect. “If everyone shared just one trip a week, we would reduce demand by 5 percent immediately,” says Chase. “The miles they travel alone in the car is what people really should think about reducing, and that’s what GoLoco addresses.”

The idea is straightforward: take advantage of today’s huge Internet penetration and the popularity of social networking to let people offer or find rides-to work, the store, or wherever. The social networking aspect of it allows users to post trips to friends, colleagues, or other groups and see the profiles of people whose trips match theirs. If the drivers choose to split travel costs with riders, GoLoco charges a transaction fee.

But while Chase says strong sign-up rates demonstrate demand for the service, the small number of rides posted has prevented the idea from really taking off. The situation has left her a bit frustrated. “They’re expecting a trip database without realizing they’re the database,” she says. “People haven’t grasped that this is them and their networks-that they have to personally invite the friends they want to go with and post the destinations they want to go to,” she says. As with other web 2.0 applications, only when there gets to be a critical mass of such user-generated content can the system really hum into high gear.

That’s what Chase is hoping Live Earth can help accomplish. She realized that the concert and GoLoco were made for each other-since they both seek to bring together people motivated to reduce their carbon footprints. “About 50 percent of an event’s carbon emissions comes from people getting there,” she relates. “Imagining people going to any kind of climate change anything without thinking of the mode of transportation is kind of preposterous.” Her 8 a.m. email to concert officials on July 4 offered hard numbers on how much CO2 was averted by ridesharing. By 9 a.m. she had the answer: ‘Yes.’ “Need Someone To Carpool With? Go Loco!” reads a section of the Live Earth site.

Chase and her husband, Roy Russell, who is handling technical matters at GoLoco the same way he did at Zipcar, have just finished tweaking their web site to make posting rides easier for the expected rush leading up the Live Earth concert and afterwards.

“It’s a great opportunity,” Chase says of the concert. As a one-time public health consultant, she sees a parallel with infectious diseases. “Large events are the source of infection, and then people go back to their lives and disseminate the experience-and so we’ll see if this plays out to be true. This is that test.”

Source: http://www.xconomy.com

Insurance industry losses from these disasters reached a record $105 billion in 2011, according to Munich Re, the world’s biggest reinsurer.

The cost to insurers from the earthquake and tsunami in Japan in March, which caused nearly 16,000 deaths, was estimated at $35 billion to $40 billion, the company said in its annual review of the prior year’s natural disasters.

That equaled the insured cost of all the natural disasters to strike the United States during the year, it said.

An earthquake in New Zealand in February added a further $13 billion to insurers’ claims payout for the year, Munich Re said.

Global economic losses from natural disasters were two-thirds higher than in 2005, when Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath devastated parts of the US Gulf states.

While monetary costs were high in 2011, fatalities worldwide were extremely low, at 27,000, compared to 296,000 deaths from natural disasters in 2010, Munich Re said in an online briefing.

The vast majority of deaths – 15,840 – occurred in Japan in the earthquake and tsunami that slammed Fukushima. Landslides and floods in Brazil claimed 1,348 lives, Tropical Storm Washi killed 1,257 in the Philippines, floods and landslides cost 813 lives in Thailand and 604 people were killed in an earthquake in Turkey.

The quakes in Japan and New Zealand together made up about half of last year’s total insured losses from natural catastrophes, exceeding the previous record of $101 billion set in 2005. Munich Re compares losses in original dollars, and not adjusted for inflation.

“Normally, it is the weather-related natural catastrophes that are the dominant loss drivers,” Munich Re said.

In the United States, 171 events produced $35 billion in economic losses. Nearly $26 billion of that came from thunderstorm events, shattering the previous record by more than $10 billion.

Among those storms were tornado outbreaks in April and May that rank among the 10 largest U.S. weather disasters ever.

The Insurance Information Institute said that if taken as a whole, and adjusted for inflation, the 2011 spring tornado season was the fourth-costliest disaster in US history, trailing only hurricanes Katrina and Andrew and the September 11, 2001, attacks on the United States.

Despite the heavy payouts, many observers say that the claims were not big enough on their own to provide a broad boost to reinsurers’ pricing strength relative to their insurance company clients, because reinsurers still have plenty of excess capital.

The seeming disconnect between the high financial cost and comparatively low human toll is because the two worst disasters occurred in places with “high insurance penetration,” where a large percentage of people and property are covered by insurance, Munich Re’s Ernst Rauch said.

“When it comes to the monetary impact of disasters, not only the events themselves matter,” Rauch said. “What really matters is where they happen, in which environment in terms of insurance penetration and wealth.”

There were 820 natural catastrophes in 2011, about average for the past 10 years but significantly higher than the 30-year average of 630 events per year.

“At least part of this increasing frequency in number of weather-related natural disasters is driven already by climate change,” Rauch said. The natural patterns known as El Nino and La Nina also play a role, he said.

Munich Re’s figures differ somewhat from those of rival Swiss Re published last month, which include man-made disasters in the calculation.

In the forests, water seeps gently into the ground as vegetation breaks the fall. This groundwater in turn feeds wells, lakes, and rivers. Protecting forests means protecting water ‘catchments’. In ancient India, people believed that forests were the ‘mothers’ of rivers and worshipped the sources of these water bodies.

Ancient Methods Of Water Conservation

The Indus Valley Civilization, that flourished along the banks of the river Indus and other parts of western and northern India about 5,000 years ago, had one of the most sophisticated urban water supply and sewage systems in the world. The fact that the people were well acquainted with hygiene can be seen from the covered drains running beneath the streets of the ruins at both Mohenjodaro and Harappa. Another very good example is the well-planned city of Dholavira, on Khadir Bet, a low plateau in the Rann in Gujarat. One of the oldest water harvesting systems is found about 130 km from Pune along Naneghat in the Western Ghats. A large number of tanks were cut in the rocks to provide drinking water to tradesmen who used to travel along this ancient trade route. Each fort in the area had its own water harvesting and storage system in the form of rock-cut cisterns, ponds, tanks and wells that are still in use today. A large number of forts like Raigad had tanks that supplied water.

• In ancient times, houses in parts of western Rajasthan were built so that each had a rooftop water harvesting system. Rainwater from these rooftops was directed into underground tanks. This system can be seen even today in all the forts, palaces and houses of the region.

• Underground baked earthen pipes and tunnels to maintain the flow of water and to transport it to distant places, are still functional at Burhanpur in Madhya Pradesh, Golkunda and Bijapur in Karnataka, and Aurangabad in Maharashtra.

Rainwater Harvesting

In urban areas, the construction of houses, footpaths and roads has left little exposed earth for water to soak in. In parts of the rural areas of India, floodwater quickly flows to the rivers, which then dry up soon after the rains stop. If this water can be held back, it can seep into the ground and recharge the groundwater supply.

This has become a very popular method of conserving water especially in the urban areas. Rainwater harvesting essentially means collecting rainwater on the roofs of building and storing it underground for later use. Not only does this recharging arrest groundwater depletion, it also raises the declining water table and can help augment water supply. Rainwater harvesting and artificial recharging are becoming very important issues. It is essential to stop the decline in groundwater levels, arrest sea-water ingress, i.e. prevent sea-water from moving landward, and conserve surface water run-off during the rainy season.

Town planners and civic authority in many cities in India are introducing bylaws making rainwater harvesting compulsory in all new structures. No water or sewage connection would be given if a new building did not have provisions for rainwater harvesting. Such rules should also be implemented in all the other cities to ensure a rise in the groundwater level.

Realizing the importance of recharging groundwater, the CGWB (Central Ground Water Board) is taking steps to encourage it through rainwater harvesting in the capital and elsewhere. A number of government buildings have been asked to go in for water harvesting in Delhi and other cities of India.

All you need for a water harvesting system is rain, and a place to collect it! Typically, rain is collected on rooftops and other surfaces, and the water is carried down to where it can be used immediately or stored. You can direct water run-off from this surface to plants, trees or lawns or even to the aquifer.

Some of the benefits of rainwater harvesting are as follows

• Increases water availability

• Checks the declining water table

• Is environmentally friendly

• Improves the quality of groundwater through the dilution of fluoride, nitrate, and salinity

• Prevents soil erosion and flooding especially in urban areas

Agriculture

Conservation of water in the agricultural sector is essential since water is necessary for the growth of plants and crops. A depleting water table and a rise in salinity due to overuse of chemical fertilizers and pesticides has made matters serious. Various methods of water harvesting and recharging have been and are being applied all over the world to tackle the problem. In areas where rainfall is low and water is scarce, the local people have used simple techniques that are suited to their region and reduce the demand for water.

• In India’s arid and semi-arid areas, the ‘tank’ system is traditionally the backbone of agricultural production. Tanks are constructed either by bunding or by excavating the ground and collecting rainwater.

• Rajasthan, located in the Great Indian Desert, receives hardly any rainfall, but people have adapted to the harsh conditions by collecting whatever rain falls. Large bunds to create reservoirs known as khadin, dams called johads, tanks, and other methods were applied to check water flow and accumulate run-off. At the end of the monsoon season, water from these structures was used to cultivate crops. Similar systems were developed in other parts of the country. These are known by various local names ¾ jal talais in Uttar Pradesh, the haveli system in Madhya Pradesh, ahar in Bihar, and so on.

Reducing Water Demand

Simple techniques can be used to reduce the demand for water. The underlying principle is that only part of the rainfall or irrigation water is taken up by plants, the rest percolates into the deep groundwater, or is lost by evaporation from the surface. Therefore, by improving the efficiency of water use, and by reducing its loss due to evaporation, we can reduce water demand.

There are numerous methods to reduce such losses and to improve soil moisture. Some of them are listed below.

• Mulching, i.e., the application of organic or inorganic material such as plant debris, compost, etc., slows down the surface run-off, improves the soil moisture, reduces evaporation losses and improves soil fertility.

• Soil covered by crops, slows down run-off and minimizes evaporation losses. Hence, fields should not be left bare for long periods of time.

• Ploughing helps to move the soil around. As a consequence it retains more water thereby reducing evaporation.

• Shelter belts of trees and bushes along the edge of agricultural fields slow down the wind speed and reduce evaporation and erosion.

• Planting of trees, grass, and bushes breaks the force of rain and helps rainwater penetrate the soil.

• Fog and dew contain substantial amounts of water that can be used directly by adapted plant species. Artificial surfaces such as netting-surfaced traps or polyethylene sheets can be exposed to fog and dew. The resulting water can be used for crops.

• Contour farming is adopted in hilly areas and in lowland areas for paddy fields. Farmers recognize the efficiency of contour-based systems for conserving soil and water.

• Salt-resistant varieties of crops have also been developed recently. Because these grow in saline areas, overall agricultural productivity is increased without making additional demands on freshwater sources. Thus, this is a good water conservation strategy.

• Transfer of water from surplus areas to deficit areas by inter-linking water systems through canals, etc.

• Desalination technologies such as distillation, electro-dialysis and reverse osmosis are available.

• Use of efficient watering systems such as drip irrigation and sprinklers will reduce the water consumption by plants.

Water Conservation

The most important step in the direction of finding solutions to issues of water and environmental conservation is to change people’s attitudes and habits¾this includes each one of us. Conserve water because it is the right thing to do. We can follow some of the simple things that have been listed below and contribute to water conservation.

• Try to do one thing each day that will result in saving water. Don’t worry if the savings are minimal¾every drop counts! You can make a difference.

• Remember to use only the amount you actually need.

• Form a group of water-conscious people and encourage your friends and neighbours to be part of this group. Promote water conservation in community newsletters and on bulletin boards. Encourage your friends, neighbours and co-workers to also contribute.

• Encourage your family to keep looking for new ways to conserve water in and around your home.

• Make sure that your home is leak-free. Many homes have leaking pipes that go unnoticed.

• Do not leave the tap running while you are brushing your teeth or soaping your face.

• See that there are no leaks in the toilet tank. You can check this by adding colour to the tank. If there is a leak, colour will appear in the toilet bowl within 30 minutes. (Flush as soon as the test is done, since food colouring may stain the tank.)

• Avoid flushing the toilet unnecessarily. Put a brick or any other device that occupies space to cut down on the amount of water needed for each flush.

• When washing the car, use water from a bucket and not a hosepipe.

• Do not throw away water that has been used for washing vegetables, rice or dals¾use it to water plants or to clean the floors, etc.

• You can store water in a variety of ways. A simple method is to place a drum on a raised platform directly under the rainwater collection source. You can also collect water in a bucket during the rainy season.

According to Prof. Eyal Ben-Dor of TAU’s Department of Geography, his soil dipstick will help scientists, urban planners and farmers understand the changing health of the soil, as well as its agricultural potential and other associated concerns. “I was always attracted to drug development and diagnostics, which spurred the development of this OSD device,” he says. “It’s like a diagnostic device that measures soil health. Through a small hole in the surface of the earth, we can assess what lies beneath it.”

As climate change alters our planet radically, Prof. Ben-Dor explains, this dipstick could instantly tell geographers what parts of the U.S. are best – or worst – for farming. For authorities in California, it is already providing proof that organic farms are chemical-free, and it could be used as a whistle-blower to catch environmental industrial polluters.

The efficacy of the OSD was recently reported in the Soil Science Society of America Journal.

“Precision agriculture”

Today, there is no simple and inexpensive way to test for soil health in the field. Soil maps of individual states are only compiled every 10 or 20 years, and each one costs millions. One testing process even requires the use of a bulldozer, which dredges up large tracts of land to be sampled and analyzed in a laboratory.

Testing can be much simpler with Prof. Ben-Dor’s dipstick, which can be used by non-professionals. The thin catheter-like device is inserted into a small hole in the soil to give real-time, immediately accurate and reliable information on pollution and the all-round health of the soil. Analyzing chemical and physical properties, the dipstick outputs its data to a handheld device or computer. “To optimize production and save costs, farmers need to know if their crops are getting the right blend of minerals. This tool could permit them to pursue ‘precision agriculture,’” says Prof. Ben-Dor.

The OSD, which is expected to cost about $10,000 per unit per application, allows technicians to determine if the soil needs water or is contaminated. It also provides information about the condition of root zones where crops are growing. And the quality of information, the researchers explain, is identical to that provided by large government laboratories. Prof. Ben-Dor says that these dipsticks can also be remotely and wirelessly networked to airplanes and satellites, providing the most detailed, comprehensive and reliable soil map of the U.S.

Saving money and avoiding headaches

Soil maps are important tools of the trade for land developers, city planners, farmers and environmental prosecutors. Those employed today tend to be outdated, rendering them useless for many applications, and only about 30% of the planet has been mapped in this way. Soil maps for the Far East, the Arctic, and Africa, which can be more readily developed with Prof. Ben-Dor’s dipstick, will better tell scientists, researchers and government agencies how climate change and population growth are affecting our planet and its resources.

“Soil mapping is a national undertaking,” Prof. Ben-Dor observes. “It takes years and millions of dollars worth of manual labor and laboratory analysis, not to mention exhausting headaches with government authorities and ministries. For a fraction of that energy and money, and with a staff that has minimal training, the OSD could do the same job, and could continue doing it on a yearly, monthly, and possibly even a daily basis. The headaches would be gone, and we would finally get an accurate picture of the earth’s crust in these environmentally critical years.”

The OSD is currently in a prototype stage and is set for commercialization. If the right strategic partner is found, a new device could be on the shelves, and in the ground, within the year.

Whether or not that is precisely true, the implication almost certainly is.

Little progress can be made in addressing the global climate crisis, after all, unless common cause is found between rich countries, who created the problem in becoming so, and poorer countries, which understandably resent the idea that they ought not pursue a similar, CO2-belching path to vitality.

“The world has got to get past the long-standing division between rich countries and poor countries,” Mr. Gore said.

Such was at least one of the underlying themes of the forum, a three-day affair organized by Cornell University’s Center for Sustainable Global Enterprise.

The purpose was to bring together entrepreneurs working in renewable energy and other sustainable technologies with their counterparts working to address the needs of the billions of people subsisting at the bottom of the globe’s economic pecking order.

Why? The idea is a sort of kill-two-birds-with-one-stone approach to global warming and global poverty (while making money at the same time).

The developing world, the forum’s philosophy holds, is in many ways the ideal incubator for the sorts of clean-technology innovations (small-scale solar and wind power, for example) that often have a difficult time gaining a foothold in developed markets, where demands for scale can be overwhelming, business models are entrenched and financial incentives favor the established way of doing things.

“For me it came from a realization a couple years back that as exciting as it was that we had these two groups of innovators, there was no connection between the two,” said Stuart L. Hart, the chief architect of the forum, a professor at Cornell’s Johnson School of Management and the author of the book “Capitalism at the Crossroads: The Unlimited Business Opportunities in Solving the World’s Most Difficult Problems.”

“It didn’t bode well for the long term,” Mr. Hart said, “and 80 percent of this was getting these people in the same room.”

About 100 delegates — from academia, industry and the financial and entrepreneurial worlds — participated in the event, which concluded  with a lively roundtable discussion that included Mr. Gore and Mr. Hart, as well as Ratan N. Tata, the chairman of the Indian carmaker Tata Group and the manufacturer of the new, low-priced Nano automobile, and H. Fisk Johnson, the chairman and chief executive of the household product giant, S.C. Johnson & Son.

Mr. Johnson, whose company was praised by Mr. Gore as “one of the most sustainable in the world,” chatted about S.C. Johnson’s development of natural insecticides in Rwanda and the company’s use of biofuels to power factories in Vietnam and Indonesia.

“Disruptive,” Mr. Hart said, invoking the buzzword of the evening.

Mr. Tata pointed to the mobile phone’s ubiquity in the developing world as an example of a disruptive, leapfrog technology (albeit not exactly a green one) that has proliferated in poorer nations, providing communications to millions of people in places where landline infrastructure remains sparse or nonexistent.

“When I was a kid, you waited seven years for a telephone connection,” he said.

Mr. Tata expects the Nano, the new low-priced car, to bridge the mobility gap between rich and poor similarly. The Nano, with some models for sale for less than $2,500, went on presale for a two-week period in April. During that brief window, the company reported 203,000 sales. It is expected to begin delivery in July.

What sort of mileage does it get? “Sixty-five miles per gallon,” Mr. Tata said, to applause. That range is the equivalent of 3.6 liters per 100 kilometers.

And in the spirit of marketing up from the base of the pyramid, the company expects to begin selling a version of the car in the United States and in Europe within the next few years, Mr. Tata announced.

Of course, some critics — including Rajendra Pachauri, the Nobel Peace Prize-winning head of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, who was quoted earlier this year as saying he was “having nightmares” about the Nano — have worried about the impact on the climate of millions of wildly-inexpensive, CO2-spewing cars.

But Tata engineers have said that the vehicle emits 120 grams of carbon dioxide per kilometer, or .26 pounds per 0.6 miles — far below the current European average of about 160 grams per kilometer. And Mr. Tata said at the gathering that the company was planning to introduce an electric version of the car in September.

(More applause.)

So it might be for innovations like small-scale wind and solar power, generated at the community or even household level, Mr. Hart noted — technologies that, in the developed world, face an infrastructural status quo that favors centralized power production and long-distance transmission.

The developing world provides an ideal laboratory, the thinking goes, for perfecting small-scale, renewable generation and distribution technologies, which can reduce energy loss — as well as infrastructure costs — by avoiding long-range transmission.

In such a scenario, clean-technology entrepreneurs benefit from a ready and needful market in poorer countries, the climate benefits by establishing a baseline of renewable energy at the lowest end of the socioeconomic spectrum and, as the technology is perfected, similar forms of distributed generation can be ported to rich countries, where it becomes part of a larger portfolio of fossil-fuel displacing energy sources.

Of course, it is hardly ever so simple, and as Mr. Hart intimated in a phone call late last week, the base of the pyramid is hardly free of barriers. Kerosene subsidies in India, for example, favor its continued use over cleaner alternatives. And even well-meaning development organizations wielding free money can make things difficult.

“When aid agencies dump money on solar,” Mr. Hart said, “it kills the market.”

But that is the sort of thing that the forum was designed — through networking and initiative building — to help overcome.

It can’t come too soon, Mr. Gore suggested. “The clock is ticking,” he said.

“The phrase sounds shrill to many ears,” he added, “but unfortunately, it’s dead-on accurate.”

While scientists can pinpoint this pivotal period as leading to life as we know it today, it is not completely understood what caused the Cambrian explosion of life. Now, researchers led by Arizona State University geologist L. Paul Knauth believe they have found the trigger for the Cambrian explosion.

It was a massive greening of the planet by non-vascular plants, or primitive ground huggers, as Knauth calls them. This period, roughly 700 million years ago virtually set the table for the later explosion of life through the development of early soil that sequestered carbon, led to the build up of oxygen and allowed higher life forms to evolve.

Knauth and co-author Martin Kennedy, of the University of California, Riverside, report their findings in the journal Nature. Their paper presents an alternative view of published data on thousands of analyses of carbon isotopes found in limestone that formed in the Neoproterozoic period, the time interval just prior to the Cambrian explosion.

“An explosive and previously unrecognized greening of the Earth occurred toward the end of the Precambrian and was an important trigger for the Cambrian explosion of life,” said Knauth, a professor in Arizona State’s School of Earth and Space Exploration.

“During this period, Earth became extensively occupied by photosynthesizing organisms,” he added. “The greening was a key element in transforming the Precambrian world – which featured low oxygen levels and simple, bacteria dominant life forms – into the kind of world we have today with abundant oxygen and higher forms of plant and animal life.”

Knauth calls the work “isotope geology of carbonates 101.”

In order to understand what happened on Earth such a long time ago, researchers have studied the isotopic composition of limestone that formed during that period. Researchers have long studied these rocks, but Knauth said many focused only on the carbon isotopes of Neoproterozoic limestones.

Knauth and Kennedy’s study looked at a bigger picture.

“There are three atoms of oxygen for every atom of carbon in limestone,” Knauth says. “We looked at the oxygen isotopes as well, which allowed us to see that the peculiar carbon isotope signature previously interpreted in terms of catastrophes was always associated with intrusions of coastal ground waters during the burial transformation of initial limestone muds into rock. It’s the same as we see in limestones forming today.”

Brave new world

By gathering all of these published measurements and carefully plotting carbon isotopic data against oxygen isotopic data, a process Knauth said took three years, the researchers began to formulate a very different type of scenario for what led to complex life on Earth. Rather than a world subject to periods of life-altering catastrophes, they began to see a world that first greened up with primitive plants.

“The greening of Earth made soils which sequestered carbon and allowed oxygen to rise and get dissolved into sea water,” Knauth explained. “Early animals would have loved breathing it as they expanded throughout the ocean of this new world.”

A key element to this scenario is not so much what the researchers saw in the data, but what was missing. When they plotted the data for various areas from which it was derived they kept noticing an area on the plots that contained little or no data. They dubbed it the “forbidden zone.”

“If previous interpretations of carbon isotope data were correct, there would be no forbidden zone on these cross plots,” Knauth said. “The forbidden zone would be full of Neoproterozoic data.”

“These zones show that the isotopic fingerprints in limestone we see today started in the late Precambrian and must have involved the simultaneous influx of rain water that fell on vegetated areas, infiltrated into coastal ground waters and mixed with marine pore fluids. During sea level drops, these coastal mixing zones are dragged over vast geographic regions of the flooded continents of the Neoproterozoic,” Knauth said. “Vast areas of limestone can form in these mixed pore fluids.”

All of which points to an environmental trigger of the Cambrian explosion of life.

“Our work presents a simple, alternative view of the thousands of carbon isotope measurements that had been taken as evidence of geochemical catastrophes in the ocean,” Knauth explained. “It requires that there was an explosive greening of Earth’s land surfaces with pioneer vegetation several hundred million years prior to the evolution of vascular plants, but it explains how a massive increase in Earth’s oxygen could happen, which has been long postulated as necessary for animals to evolve big time.”

“The isotopes are screaming that this happened in the Neoproterozoic,” he added.

“Resource management and conservation in coastal waters must address a litany of impacts from human activities, from the land, such as urban runoff and other types of pollution, and from the sea,” said Benjamin S. Halpern, first author, who is based at the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis (NCEAS) at UCSB.

“One of the great challenges is to decide where and how much to allocate limited resources to tackling these problems,” he said. “Our results identify where it is absolutely imperative that land-based threats are addressed –– so-called hotspots of land-based impact –– and where these land-based sources of impact are minimal or can be ignored.”

The hottest hotspot is at the mouth of the Mississippi River, explained Halpern, with the other top 10 in Asia and the Mediterranean. “These are areas where conservation efforts will almost certainly fail if they don’t directly address what people are doing on land upstream from these locations.”

Nutrient runoff from upstream farms has caused a persistent “dead zone” in the Gulf of Mexico, where the Mississippi runs into this body of water. The dead zone is caused by an overgrowth of algae that feeds on the nutrients and takes up most of the oxygen in the water.

The authors state that they have provided the first integrated analysis for all coastal areas of the world. They surveyed four key land-based drivers of ecological change:

• nutrient input from agriculture in urban settings
• organic pollutants derived from pesticides
• inorganic pollutants from urban runoff
• direct impact of human populations on coastal marine habitats.

Halpern explained that a large portion of the world’s coastlines experience very little effect of what happens on land –– nearly half of the coastline and more than 90 percent of all coastal waters. “This is because a vast majority of the planet’s landscape drains into relatively few very large rivers, that in turn affect a small amount of coastal area,” said Halpern. “In these places with little impact from human activities on land, marine conservation can and needs to focus primarily on what is happening in the ocean. For example: fishing, climate change, invasive species, and commercial shipping.”

Coauthors from NCEAS are Colin M. Ebert, Carrie V. Kappel, Matthew Perry, Kimberly A. Selkoe, and Shaun Walbridge. Fiorenza Micheli of Stanford University’s Hopkins Marine Station and Elizabeth M. P. Madin of UCSB’s Department of Ecology, Evolution and Marine Biology are also co-authors. Selkoe is also affiliated with the University of Hawaii’s Hawaii Institute of Marine Biology.