The Earth is warming at an alarming rate, and one of the principal dangers associated with global warming is the loss of multi-year ice in the polar regions. Climate change expert Dr. Henry Pollack’s book, A World Without Ice, presents a clear picture of what the loss of polar ice will mean for our planet and just how different life on Earth will be without it.

“Of the sunshine falling onto Earth, about 30 percent is reflected back into space, mostly by white clouds in the atmosphere and white ice at the surface. The polar ice caps, covering virtually all of Antarctica, the Arctic Ocean, and Greenland, make up less than one tenth of Earth’s surface, but account for much of the sunshine reflected from the surface. Polar ice also generates huge wind streams that spill ferociously off the ice caps and flow far beyond the ice perimeter to shape weather systems that influence the entire globe.”

A World Without Ice examines the polar ice caps through geological history, from times of extremely warm global temperatures, to ice ages so severe that much of the surface may have been completely frozen over, to the temperate comfort we’ve experienced over the past 10,000 years. Historical warming and cooling trends are explored, using data gathered from geological records and ice core samples, and not only does the data confirm that we’re changing the climate faster than it has ever been changed before; it also reveals what’s in store for the Earth at the end of this path we’ve created for ourselves.

With current warming trends, we’re on track for a global temperature rise of up to 6°C, and this will have catastrophic effects for the planet based on our current way of life. From the loss of meltwater that many countries rely on for drinking and irrigation, to the coming rise in sea level which will force upwards of 400 million people to relocate, to the changing of global weather patterns, a comprehensive picture is portrayed of just how much we rely on ice.

Brilliantly written, A World Without Ice paints an alarming yet realistic picture of the next few decades unless immediate drastic action is taken to curtail emissions and reduce atmospheric CO2 concentrations. Dr. Pollack presents clear and concise data about our planet’s temperature through geological history, and answers many of the climate skeptics who are often unscientific (yet still opinionated) and claim that rising levels of CO2 and a warmer Earth would be a good thing. The numbers simply don’t work; the loss of polar ice will have very harsh consequences for our planet as we know it, and we’re simply not prepared for what will be the greatest challenge our civilization has ever faced.

Dr. Pollack offers some solutions for mitigating the worst of the effects from climate change, discussing reducing carbon emissions, sustainable energy, as well as carbon capture and geoengineering schemes. He also touches on the controversial issue of population control just long enough to acknowledge that it’s an issue not many people want to deal with.

Overall, this is an extremely well-researched book; clearly written so both scientific and non-scientific readers can fully understand the concepts and data presented. If you’re at all concerned about the major changes we’ll be facing in the coming decades, read A World Without Ice. It’s sobering, thought provoking, a little scary, and very important.

“Nature’s best thermometer, perhaps its most sensitive and unambiguous indicator of climate change, is ice. When ice gets sufficiently warm, it melts. Ice asks no questions, presents no arguments, reads no newspapers, listens to no debates. It is not burdened by ideology and carries no political baggage as it crosses the threshold from solid to liquid. It just melts.”

Henry Pollack, Ph. D., and his colleagues on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change shared the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize with former Vice President Al Gore. Pollack, who has been a professor of geophysics at the University of Michigan for more than forty years, travels regularly to Antarctica and has conducted scientific research on all seven continents. He now services as a science advisor to Gore’s Climate Project. Also the author of Uncertain Science… Uncertain World, Pollack lives in Ann Arbor.

Recently I picked up a copy of George Monbiot’s Heat to read, because I’d read about the controversy surrounding some of his environmental ideas and I wanted to read a few of his ideas for myself. The book’s core premise is based on the question, what would the world look like after a 90% CO2 reduction?

This book is essentially a compilation of many different ideas spanning areas such as green building to urban planning, but doesn’t offer a lot of ideas that well-read environmentalists aren’t already familiar with. What author George Monbiot brings to the table with this book, is the notion that most current carbon caps are woefully inadequate. Rather than the 5.25% reduction the Kyoto Protocol calls for by 2012, Monbiot argues that in order to avoid catastrophic climate change we need to achieve a much larger 90% reduction in CO2 emissions. Heat looks at technological and behavioural solutions to achieve this reduction, as well as examining what the world would look like with this reduction.

On the subject of housing, Monbiot echos the sentiment of the community in saying that greening our buildings would have a major impact on our carbon emissions. He points out the fact that an average home in Sweden or Norway that meets building codes uses about 25% of the energy of a home that meets the UK building codes. He follows this up with the point that the building code in Sweden was tougher in 1978 than it is today in Britain. The UK’s Minister of Housing and Planning dismissed proposals to introduce proper energy-efficiency standards for the refurbishment of houses as “unnecessary gold plating”. With out homes and buildings contributing up to half of all CO2 emissions, making our buildings as efficient as possible is critical to reduce our carbon footprint by the required amount.

Monbiot takes on a somewhat pessimistic and conservative view of power generation, with a strong focus on natural gas-based power stations employing carbon capture technology. His proposed solutions would work fairly well in countries that had natural gas reserves, but wouldn’t be feasible in places that didn’t have any. The discussions on alternative power solutions such as wind, biomass, solar PV, solar thermal and geothermal are well researched and presented, but Monbiot ignores breakthrough technologies like Nanosolar, and spends much time discussing the shortcomings of intermittent power, a problem that can be addressed with a broader range of energy sources.

The section on transportation in Heat is overall nothing new, covering the usual subjects of mass transit and energy efficient vehicles, but oddly enough he ignores some of the main points regarding the effectiveness of mass transit-based development and other compact developments. Monbiot also advocates hydrogen fuel cells as a viable technology for transportation, even though this technology is proving to be less than ideal in the near future. Estimates put widespread adoption and use of hydrogen fuel cells around the year 2050 at current rates of development. Monbiot also takes on air travel in this section, calling out alleged eco-tourism destinations that result in massive carbon emissions to get to, and self-proclaimed environmentalist celebrities that travel exclusively (and extensively) by private jet. He takes the opinion that although there are green alternatives for most of our transportation types, at present there are no feasible replacements for airplanes, and even biofuel powered jets still emit far too much carbon. He suggests that airships might be a viable solution at some point in the future, reducing the experience of long flights to something more akin to a cruise ship.

The chapter on retail shopping is very well presented, and clearly demonstrates how the average retail store is already an environmental disaster even before you consider the vast supply chain that stands behind each store. The average UK retail store uses 275 kilowatt hours per square meter, whereas local offices average only 39. Most of this energy goes to 24/7 stage quality lighting, open refrigerators & freezers, and leaving doors open while air conditioning is on. Monbiot doesn’t really seem to see these as solvable problems, but he does offer excellent solutions for smart transportation and delivery technologies using online shopping systems. I suspect that holographic and virtual reality technologies will someday make retail stores a thing of the past, but for now that remains just a dream.

Perhaps the most controversial topic in Heat is the total dismissal of carbon offsets as a viable part of the solution. While there are some obstacles to overcome, Monbiot dismisses the entire concept, commenting that “Buying and selling carbon offsets is like pushing the food around on your plate to create the impression you have eaten it.”. What he fails to recognize, is that money raised from properly implemented carbon offset systems are providing real and valuable environmental improvements, ranging from the construction of wind farms to the protection of old growth forests.

Overall, Monbiot’s Heat isn’t the enthusiastic call to action that Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth” was, but it does convey the message that it’s not too late to fix this mess we’ve gotten ourselves into. Offering some solid (and far reaching) recommendations about real steps we need to take to save our planet, Heat is part of a new breed of climate change books that looks at how to solve the problem, and not merely debating the existence of climate change. This isn’t the book to convince a climate change skeptic, but it’s a good read if you want to see another point of view on what to do about our ailing planet.

Earlier this week online giant Amazon.com released a digital reader called the Kindle, a device that has great potential to revolutionize the way we read. While ebook readers aren’t new, Amazon’s offering brings several new features to the table. Chief among the green features of this device are the power requirements; the Kindle uses electronic ink for it’s display, a technology that only requires energy to change the display, not to maintain it.The Kindle’s e-ink display technology appears similar to normal printed ink, and differs from previous digital readers which used a backlight to illuminate the screen and had much higher power consumption. With the Kindle, reading power usage is measured in page turns instead of operating time, so you can literally read for days or weeks on a single charge with wireless turned off.

The other major feature of the Kindle is the way the digital media is distributed. Typically with digital readers, a computer is required to download and sync the data you would like to read. The Kindle, on the other hand, uses built in EVDO wireless technology; the same technology used for high speed connections over the cellular networks. Better still, instead of requiring a data plan subscription, unlimited network access is included in the initial purchase price. This allows customers to subscribe to blog feeds, online newspapers and magazines, and browse websites like Wikipedia anywhere there is a cellular signal all without any additional charge. Users can wake up each day to find the latest news headlines and blog posts already waiting for them on their device, and these will continue to be retrieved by the reader throughout the day automatically.

Books can be purchased from Amazon through the Kindle’s web store interface, with current best sellers priced at $9.99 and lower. These downloads are archived on the Amazon site, so you can download them again if your Kindle is ever damaged or lost. Your own documents can be transferred to your Kindle via email, a step necessary because the documents require converting to the Kindle’s own format.
I’ve been an active reader for as long as I can remember, and for many of my books I do still prefer real paper. I also enjoy the look of a bookshelf full of the books I’ve collected over the years, so I don’t see something like the Kindle replacing that any time soon in my own life. However, for content that is intended to be read once, such as newspaper articles, this is of immediate benefit. There are tremendous savings possible in paper, printing supplies, materials transportation and many other areas if short-term publications are converted to automatically retrieved digital content. By removing the computer aspect and and adding automated subscriptions the process, the whole system is easier for the end user who may be too rushed in the morning to download rss feeds for reading during the day.

The Kindle comes in a small, easily portable format. About the size of a regular paperback novel, it’s 5″ x 7.5″ x 0.7″, and weighs in at just over 10oz. It comes with 256mb of internal memory, enough to store about 200 books, and has an SD slot to add additional storage capacity.
The only downside to the Kindle I’ve found, is that it’s currently not available outside of the USA. I hope this will change in the future, as well as an eventual reduction in price as this is a technology that truly has green potential.

So much of what we hear about the state of the environment is doom & gloom, with predictions of global catastrophe and visions of a dark, overpopulated and hot future. It’s definitely important to heed the warnings about what’s happening to the planet, however focusing only on the negative will result in us feeling as though the situation is hopeless; it’s not. Here are a few of the books that have really inspired me, and made me believe that a bright, green, sustainable high-tech future really is possible.

• Cradle to Cradle – William McDonough & Michael Braungart
• Biomimicry – Janine Benyus
• From Eco-cities to Living Machines – Nancy Jack Todd & John Todd
• Natural Capitalism – Paul Hawken
• Engines of Creation – K. Eric Drexler

Both Cradle to Cradle and Biomimicry promote the message that nature is incredibly efficient in terms of handling waste, because in nature there is no waste. Everything that is produced is used by another organism for food, shelter, etc. These books both made me understand that in order to be sustainable, our products and related packaging must be designed to mimic natural systems. The Cradle to Cradle (C2C) philosophy involves creating products that are composed of ‘biological nutrients’ which are fully biodegradable, and ‘technical nutrients’ which are fully recyclable to an equivalent product. Biomimicry focuses on emulating nature to create products, an example of this is spider silk; stronger tensile strength than steel, more eco-friendly than kevlar, and made only with the input of insects. The books both also give examples of products and systems designed with this philosophy, resulting in environmentally friendly, healthy and sustainable products.

John Todd, a Canadian scientist probably best known for his work with sewage-treating ‘Living Machines’, paints a very compelling picture of a sustainable future in the book From Eco-cities to Living Machines. Dr. Todd’s work also mimics nature, using constructed ecosystems inside large tanks to carry out processes such as treating wastewater and cultivating fish. When I first read this book years ago it introduced many concepts to me such as urban farming, biological waste treatment, and perhaps the most fascinating to me: aquaponics, which involves purifying fish tank water with plants which are able to derive nutrients from the wastes. This would allow both vegetable and crop production, anywhere, without the problems associated with conventional fish farming or the nutrient and fertilizer costs associated with conventional hydroponics.

Natural Capitalism is a book that I initially passed over, as I’m more interested in technology than economics. However, I’m glad I did buy this book because it introduced me to the concept of a service-based economy; an idea that meshes very well with the things I learned from the previous 3 books. In a nutshell, rather than buying a refrigerator or a computer, you would lease the service or functionality provided by this device. For a refrigerator this would be the service of keeping your food cold. This would include not just the physical device, but also any associated costs including electricity. The provider company would be responsible for delivering, installing, maintaining, powering, and ultimately recycling the device, something that would very quickly ensure efficient and easily recyclable products.

Finally, Engines of Creation deals with the subject of nanotechnology. Although there have been many worries about the dangers of nanotechnology, some very valid, I do believe that nanotechnology holds tremendous promise for transforming our society into a very efficient and high tech one. Already nanotechnology is improving batteries and capacitors, improving the efficiency of solar cells, creating more efficient ways to collect and purify water, and many more amazing things. In the future nanomachines will also be able to assemble and disassemble products at a molecular scale, which would eliminate the need for most factories and their related energy consumption. This is just barely scratching the surface of what nanotechnology can do for the environment, there are many more exciting things awaiting us in the future.

The future can indeed be green as well as high-tech, these are a few of the books that show us how.

I came across an article in the NY Times today, about a new e-paper reading device, which sounds like it does all the stuff that I bought my tablet pc for, for a fraction of the price. I can’t wait until everybody has one of these things, and we can stop wasting so much paper. Earlier this month a Belgian newspaper started testing versions of electronic paper, using a device called the iLiad E-reader.

This device is made by a company called iRex Technologies. Sony is releasing their own e-reader device later this year. Both of the devices are able to download newspapers, books, and can double as a notebook for jotting down notes. The reader devices weigh a mere 0.8lbs, making them light enough to hold comfortably in one hand, and are expected to cost USD$400 initially, although this cost is expected to drop as they become more common. Right now when I whip out my PDA on the bus to read an ebook, I’m usually the only one doing so, whereas if I pull out my ipod to listen to some music or a podcast, I’m just the same as everyone else. Ebooks have been around for a while, but haven’t really caught on yet. New technological advances in e-paper indicate these devices may do for ebooks what the ipod did for mp3s by bringing them to the masses. What makes this technology different than other tablet-style readers, is the screens are designed to reflect rather than emit light, which makes it appear more like normal paper, and easier to read in all light conditions. This results in very long battery life, another reason this technology is great. Another benefit of e-paper news readers, is the ability to show dynamic advertising that is not only related to time of day, avoiding showing beer ads in the morning or coffee ads at night, but could also show ads based on the demographic of the reader, and even ads related to location as determined by wifi hotspots.

The other obvious application for this is in the classroom, where an ereader could replace textbooks, notebooks and assignment sheets. Students wouldn’t lose their homework, and assignments could be transmitted digitally to the teacher’s reader. Perhaps instead of blaming the pet dog, students might one day report that their homework has a virus..