Mid November Update

The carwash is set for Saturday December 8th at the Pep Boys parking lot. Please, please, please sell your tickets and show up for a few hours on Saturday so we can make some money and get these projects started.

I will be talking to Armstrong to try and work out a deal to get our supplies at a lower price.  That woud be nice.

Come by Mr. Ho’s at lunch, or find me during the day to pick up your letters, envelopes, and addresses. And bring stamps!

I will be trying to order the shirts soon. Still deciding on a design.

It’s a go

Rachel, Chris, and I went to talk to Mr. Zepeda, and I think we got a lot accomplished. I’m glad we have a principal who is proactive in creating a better school enviornment.

Here is this years objectives, approved by Mr. Zepeda.

1. Host two concerts to raise awareness and money for the final project.
2. Sell shirts, pass out pamphlets, put up posters.
3. Earth Day project. We are not sure on the details.
4. Plant small gardens at the Senior Wall, that planter outside of Segal’s class, and the planter outside of the library.
5. Create a greenhouse.
6. Possibly install a windmill or solar panels if we raise enough money.

We hope that everyone will participate in the club activities so that we can make this year productive.

We need help!

Thanks to everyone who has shown an interest in Change Tomorrow at Monrovia High School, I think it’s going to be a good year. To start off all of our projects, we need some help from all of Change Tomorrow’s members. Take a look at the list below and see if there is anything on there that you can help out with. Hopefully if we all put in what we can we can make MHS and Monrovia a better place.

What we need:

1. At least ten garbage cans with lids that can be used as recycling bins around school.
2. A lot of large boxes that we can use for recycling paper.
3. People to help with planning the two concerts.
4. People to help with distributing pamphlets and asking local businesses for their cooperation.
5. People to help with recycling after school on Fridays.
6. People to help with shirts.
7. Fundraising ideas.

I’ll be updating this list as more things are needed. Please be at the meeting this Friday. While on that topic, meetings will be every other Friday with the first official meeting being Friday October 12th in Mr. Ho’s room. If you have any questions, please let me know. We would love it if everyone could be at the meeting so we can work out some of the details for some of our plans. 

Recycling Center

Hello all,

As one of our major projects, Change Tomorrow will be creating a type of recycling center at Monrovia High School. I (Justin) will be talking with our school officials so that we can try to get this project up and running as soon as possible.

Our recycling center will consist of the following:

• Large bins around campus specifically for recyclables.
• Large bins in classes for paper recycling.
• Large bins for toner/ink cartridges and electronics.

Also, we want to set the dates for our concerts as soon as possible so that we can start promoting.  There will be on in early January and one in late May.

The club will also be getting our shirts soon and we will be looking into ways to make our school more energy efficient.

We appreciate all questions and comments, and we would love to know a list of bands that would be willing to perform at the concert.

Updated

We’ve updated our goals for the year. Let me know what you all think and what else you would like to do.

http://changetomorrow.wordpress.com/goals-for-2007/

Pelosi Attends European Climate Talks

By CHARLES BABINGTON

The Associated Press
Saturday, May 26, 2007; 2:06 PM

WASHINGTON — House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is on an overseas trip to embrace an audience and a topic for which President Bush has shown scant affection: “Old Europe” and global warming.

Pelosi, D-Calif., and seven other House members left Saturday for meetings with scientists and politicians in Greenland, Germany and Belgium on ways to reduce emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases.

The trip comes shortly before a climate change summit next month involving the leading industrialized nations and during a time of increased debate over what should succeed the Kyoto Protocol, a 1997 international treaty that caps the amount of carbon dioxide that can be emitted from power plants and factories in industrialized countries. It expires in 2012.

Bush rejected that accord, saying it would harm the U.S. economy and unfair excludes developing countries like China and India from its obligations. Pelosi, who strongly disagrees with that decision and many other of Bush’s environmental policies, told The Associated Press on Friday that she said she wants to work with the administration rather than provoke it.

But Pelosi stopped short of condemning the president’s call for slowing the nation’s growth rate in carbon emissions, an approach that many say is too meek.

“I think there are better ideas,” Pelosi said. “I want to keep the door completely open to working with the president on the issue of energy independence and global warming. … There are plenty of areas where we can find common ground.”

Since Democrats took over Congress in January, both the House and Senate have proposed to push the nation more aggressively to reduce carbon emissions.

Pelosi set up a new House Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming and appointed Rep. Edward Markey, D-Mass., as its chairman. The committee cannot write legislation, but was created to study and offer recommendations on how to deal with global warming.

Markey said Saturday that contrary to the Bush administration, Europeans recognize the scientific consensus that the worst effects of global warming are yet to come if no action is taken.

“The administration needs to explain what alternative science it is still hanging its hat on, because most people believe that hat has already been blown away by overwhelming scientific evidence,” Markey said.

The House Foreign Affairs Committee recently approved a bill to obligate the administration to send senior diplomats to international meetings on climate change “with instructions to secure binding commitments for reform,” according to a committee statement.

The Senate Foreign Relations Committee is pushing a nonbinding resolution that would press the administration to work on several diplomatic fronts to combat global warming.

Tropical Trees Help Most

Planting a tree for Earth Day may do more good if you live in Buenos Aires than if you live in New York. A new study finds that tropical trees are better at combating global warming than trees in higher latitudes.

“Our study shows that only tropical rainforests are strongly beneficial in helping slow down global warming,” said study team leader Govindasamy Bala of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California.

Forests affect the climate in three different ways: by absorbing carbon dioxide (a major greenhouse gas) to help cool the planet; by evaporating water that forms clouds, also helping to keep the planet cooler; and by absorbing sunlight with their dark leaves, which warms the Earth.

Trees in snowy places like Canada, Scandinavia and Siberia absorb sunlight that would otherwise be reflected back to space by the bright white snow.

But tropical rainforests trap larger amounts of carbon dioxide and evaporate more water to produce clouds that reflect sunlight back to space.

“Tropical forests are like Earth’s air conditioner,” said Ken Caldeira of the Carnegie Institution of Washington, Bala’s colleague.

By simulating the effects of deforestation in different parts of the world, the study, published in the April 9 online issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, found that deforestation in the tropics is more devastating to Earth’s climate than deforestation in higher latitudes, and that trees in mid- to high-latitudes could actually cause warming.

But these findings don’t mean it’s time to take out the axes and chop down all the trees outside of the tropics, the scientists warn.

“A primary reason we are trying to slow global warming is to protect nature,” Caldeira said. “It just makes no sense to destroy natural ecosystems in the name of saving natural ecosystems.”

Oceans absorbing less greehouse gases

One of Earth’s most important absorbers of carbon dioxide (CO2) is failing to soak up as much of the greenhouse gas as it was expected to, scientists say.

The decline of Antarctica’s Southern Ocean carbon “sink” – or reservoir – means that atmospheric CO2 levels may be higher in future than predicted.

These carbon sinks are vital as they mop up excess CO2 from the atmosphere, slowing down global warming.

The study, by an international team, is published in the journal Science.

This effect had been predicted by climate scientists, and is taken into account – to some extent – by climate models. But it appears to be happening 40 years ahead of schedule.

The data will help refine models of the Earth’s climate, including those upon which the predictions of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) are based.

Of all the CO2 emitted into the atmosphere, only half of it stays there; the rest goes into carbon sinks.

There are two major natural carbon sinks: the oceans and the land “biosphere”. They are equivalent in size, each absorbing a quarter of all CO2 emissions.

The Southern Ocean is thought to account for about 15% of all carbon sinks.

Sink efficiency

It was assumed that, as human activities released more CO2 into the atmosphere, ocean sinks would keep pace, absorbing a comparable percentage of this greenhouse gas.

The breakdown in efficiency of these sinks was an expected outcome, but not until the second half of the 21st Century.

Lead researcher Corinne Le Quere and colleagues collected atmospheric CO2 data from 11 stations in the Southern Ocean and 40 stations across the globe.

Measurements of atmospheric CO2 allowed them to infer how much carbon dioxide was taken up by sinks. The team was then able to see how efficient they were in comparison to one another at absorbing CO2.

“Ever since observations started in 1981, we see that the sinks have not increased [in their absorption of CO2],” Corinne LeQuere told the BBC’s Science in Action programme.

“They have remained the same as they were 24 years ago even though the emissions have risen by 40%.”

The cause of the decline in the Southern Ocean sink, the researchers explain, is a rise in windiness since 1958.

This increase in Southern Ocean winds has been attributed to two factors.

The first is the depletion of ozone in the upper atmosphere, which changes the temperature of this region.

The second is recent climate change, which warms the tropics more than the Southern Ocean.

Both these processes change atmospheric circulation over the Southern Ocean, resulting in stronger winds.

Churning waters

Oceans store much of their CO2 in deep waters. But, explained Dr Le Quere, “as the winds increase, the water in the ocean mixes more”.

The British Antarctic Survey (BAS) scientist added: “The CO2 that would normally be in the deep ocean and would just stay there instead gets brought up to the surface and outgasses to the atmosphere.”

The ocean surface becomes saturated with CO2 and cannot take up any more from the atmosphere.

Dr Sus Honjo, from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) in Massachusetts, US, is working on a separate project to assess the efficiency of the Southern Ocean carbon sink, using a different method.

He said recent developments in technology now made possible very detailed monitoring of marine carbon sinks, with some data available in real time.

“We have been way behind the modellers, who are hungry for numbers. But now we are starting to catch up because of the new tools and instruments available,” he told BBC News.

Dr Honjo said recent evidence suggested the north-western Pacific appeared to be another significant CO2 sink.

As CO2 is absorbed by the oceans, it makes them more acidic, harming populations of marine organisms such as coral. The latest study suggests that phenomenon will only get worse over the century.

“The problem is that the extra CO2 from human emissions stays in the surface ocean and does not get removed to deep waters,” said Dr Le Quere.

“So the problem gets worse, because the biological organisms affected by ocean acidification live, of course, at the surface where there is sunlight.”

Original article here.

Change Tomorrow on the Streets #1

Today Lynsey and I went out to the Monrovia Days Parade to pass out brochures with tips and facts concerning global warming and climate shift. We left a few at the Monrovia Coffee Company for people to take and read. We’ll probably be going to the street fair on Friday and be out in the city on Saturdays passing out brochures if anyone wants to help.

Hello world!

    This blog is a place to keep up with events and articles that Change Tomorrow finds important. Change Tomorrow, as stated in our About page located at the top, was a group founded by three students in high school who want to do their part to make a difference. Controlling global warming and spreading awareness is our goal. Anyone is welcome to join in our activities and anyone is allowed to repost the articles, links, banners, and advertisements. We need everyones help. Three students can only do so much, but together we all can make a significant difference before it’s too late. It’s amazing how a few small changes in our day to day life and a few changes in the norm can benefit both the earth we live in and ourselves.