Daily Score Blog

Cool article documenting Portland's progress toward meeting Kyoto Protocol standards. Portland was the nation's first local government to adopt a plan addressing global warming. To date, it has cut the city's emissions to sub-1990 levels, though it has not yet reached the 7 percent reductions that Kyoto calls for the US to make by 2012.

In other climate progress, Seattle mayor Nickel's initiative to bring US cities into Kyoto-compliance has garnered a total of 151 cities in 37 states. The most recent big city to join: Atlanta.

(Warning: In the following post, Eric completely loses his sense of humor.)

Am I annoyed by the Seattle Weekly's cheeky issue: "50 Ways To Celebrate Global Warming"?

A little.

Global warming is fun to celebrate, but do you know what's really worth celebrating? Bankrupt farmers, forest fires, and salmon going belly-up.

What a funny theme the Weekly editors picked! But it's not as funny as global extinctions on an unprecedented scale. Now that's funny! And the only thing funnier than extinction is disease, famine, flooding, and desertification afflicting the world's poorest people. OMG, that is downright hilarious!

In fairness, the article itself consists of a pretty innocuous list of summertime activities. And there are even a few planet-friendly ideas, like not watering your lawn. But the issue's theme is just plain stupid.

But wait: it gets even more stupid. The latest Weekly also includes two articles on the effects of this summer's drought--one on water conservation and one on parched salmon--but utterly fails to mention that there may be a connection to, uh, that global warming thing they're celebrating.

Scientists are quick to point out that the low-snowpack and resultant drought closely mimic their predictions for the coming decades. In fact, local climate researchers are calling the low snowpack, "a warning shot across the bow."

It's sad that the Weekly's irony-laden theme failed to inform their reporting--they could have taken an incisive look at what global warming really means for Seattle.

And here's something else odd. The issue is subtitled, "how to make the most of your ozone-free summer." This is a strange kicker because ozone depletion isn't the same as the greenhouse effect or global warming. It's related in some fairly complicated ways but, if anything, ozone depletion actually cools the planet. But, hey, you know, it's all so darn funny that there's no reason to bother understanding global warming.

UPDATE: I did a bit of re-writing and re-organizing here. I think my self-righteous indignation was an impediment to clarity in the first draft. Clarity added, self-righteous indignation intact.

I haven't had much to say about the drought recently because, well, there hasn't been much new to report.  It's still pretty dry out there -- as this map (courtesy of USDA's Natural Resources Conservation Service) of Northwest snowpack conditions shows:

In Western Washington, some stream and river flows are near record lows. This is obviously troubling for salmon, as this Seattle Weekly article describes. There is a bit of good news, though:  even though the year's snowpack is actually smaller than it was preceding the drought-ridden summer of 2001, improved water conservation has lessened the risk of supply shocks for the city of Seattle's water supply:

Another big difference from 2001 is that water consumption is much lower... According to Seattle Public Utilities, 400,000 more people are living in the metropolitan area, but water usage is back to what it was in the early 1970s.

For agriculture, the news is grimmer; it looks like we can expect the costly and heated controversy between fish, farmers, and tribes in the Klamath Basin in southwestern Oregon and northern California to intensify as the summer wears on.

This is truly bad news: a new study (reported in Environmental Science and Technology, here) has found the highest levels of PBDEs--flame retardants that are added to furniture and fabrics--ever recorded in people.  A 34-year old man had 9,000 parts of PBDE per billion in his fat; and a 23 year old woman had over 4,000. 

In our study of Northwest moms, the highest  PBDElevel we found was 321 parts per billion.  Another PBDE study had a high level that was just over 1,000 parts per billion.  But 4,000 and 9,000 are pretty much unheard of.

And just by way of comparison -- in Northern Europe and Japan, you might find highs in the low teens, or perhaps even lower.  (In case you're curious, the reason our levels are so high is that the vast majority of the particularly dangerous penta-PBDEs--the ones that are most readily absorbed by people--have been used in North America, particularly in the furniture industry.)

Just as significantly, half of the people in the study were more contaminated by PBDEs than by PCBs -- which are class of now-banned flame retardants that have been among the dominant persistent pollutants in human bodies since at least the 1970s.  PCB levels have been declining since then, albeit slowly, while PBDE levels have been rising for several decades.  Now, the lines have crossed -- and in North America at least, PBDEs appear to be the dominant organohalogen pollutant in people's bodies.

Now, I'm especially disappointed by this news because I had harbored a hope that PBDE contamination trends had started to level out a bit.   Of course, there haven't been all that many studies in the US, but from what I'd been able to see, levels in 2003 or so seemed comparable to levels from the late 1990s.  But this study--which in addition to having the two very highly contaminated individuals, also had the highest median and mean levels of any study to date--makes me believe that we may not have topped out yet.

The problem, you see, is that there's tons of PBDEs still in people's homes -- in furniture, carpet pads, and the like -- that are going to serve as reservoirs for contamination for decades.  From ES&T:

Although two of the PBDE formulations that are known to result in human exposure, Penta and Octa, were banned in Europe last year and discontinued in the United States this year, the researchers interviewed for this article say that it will take years, perhaps even decades, for these actions to be reflected in decreasing human body burdens. This is partly because people tend to keep potential sources of the Penta and Octa formulations, such as furniture and mattresses, for extended periods.

Sobering news indeed -- and, perhaps, reason to consider ramping up efforts to get PBDEs out of people's homes.