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.

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.

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. 

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.

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/

Sorry for the absence, all three of us were very busy over Summer with college, high school, trips, and other things. From now on you’ll see much more activity from Change Tomorrow. Thank you to everyone who has helped us so far, we have a lot of plans for this year and we hope that everyone helps in making this project a success.

The time for “we should” and “we could” to “we must”. Global warming is no longer a theory to be forgotten, it’s a fact that we must deal with before it’s too late. The world we live in changing and by the time us high school students are older, the changes we’ve made will be irreversible. Our reliance on nonrenewable fuels needs to be cut. Our industrial practices and regulations need to change. Our carelessness with regards to the nature around us needs to remedied. Our harvesting and damaging the natural beauty of this world needs to be stopped. In short, our whole mindset needs to change. It’s up to us to change the way we live. Don’t wait for the people around you to change before you consider doing the right thing. We NEED to do the right thing.

Let’s make things right.

A study led by a Purdue University researcher projects a 200 percent to 500 percent increase in the number of dangerously hot days in the Mediterranean by the end of the 21st century if the current rate of greenhouse gas emissions continues. The study found France would be subjected to the largest projected increase of high-temperature extremes.

This image illustrates heat stress in the 21st century for two greenhouse gas emissions scenarios. The top panel shows the expected intensification of the severity of extreme hot days given accelerating increases in greenhouse gas concentrations. The bottom panel shows the expected decrease in intensification associated with decelerated increases in greenhouse gas concentrations. (Credit: Purdue University image/Diffenbaugh Laboratory)

The study also showed a reduction in greenhouse gas emissions could reduce the intensification of dangerously hot days projected in the scenario by up to 50 percent.

“Rare events today, like the 2003 heat wave in Europe, will become much more common as greenhouse gas concentrations increase,” said Noah Diffenbaugh, the Purdue assistant professor of earth and atmospheric sciences who led the study. “The frequency at which that scale of event occurs at high greenhouse gas concentrations is staggering. Rare events become the norm, and the extreme events of the future are unprecedented in their severity.”

A 2003 heat wave led to 15,000 deaths in France and almost 3,000 in Italy. The researchers found that global warming causes summer temperatures to dramatically exceed the range that was correlated with the increased number of deaths.

“The thresholds of the 2003 event are substantially exceeded in the future in both of our research scenarios,” said Diffenbaugh, who is a member of Purdue’s Climate Change Research Center. “This research is about understanding the response to different emissions levels. We find that decreases in greenhouse gas emissions greatly reduce the impact, but we see negative effects even with reduced emissions. Technological and behavioral changes that are made now will have a big influence on what actually happens in the future.”

In addition to the human health risks, extremely high temperatures could impact the economy of this region, which includes metropolitan areas such as Rome, Paris and Barcelona, said Jeremy Pal, co-researcher and associate professor of civil and environmental engineering at Loyola Marymount University.

The study covered the entire Mediterranean area, which includes 21 countries in Europe, Africa and Asia. Major cities covered in the study include: Prague, Zurich, Bucharest, Athens, Istanbul, Tel Aviv, Cairo, Algiers and Casablanca.

“When high temperature extremes increase, it could have significant negative impacts on human health, water resources, agriculture and energy demand,” Pal said.

The results of the study, which originated at the International Centre for Theoretical Physics in Trieste, Italy, will be published in the Friday (June 15) issue of Geophysical Research Letters.

In addition to Diffenbaugh and Pal, Filippo Giorgi of the International Centre for Theoretical Physics and Xuejie Gao of the National Climate Center in Beijing are co-authors of the paper. The researchers used a supercomputer in the National Climate Center in Beijing to run the climate model.

The model offers a resolution of 20 kilometers, about 12.5 miles, and is believed to have the highest spatial resolution available for the Mediterranean region. Much like increased resolution in a photo makes a clearer picture and allows one to zoom in without blurring the image, the powerful resolution of the climate model allows researchers to gather detailed information about particular areas.

Giorgi, who is head of the Earth System Physics Section of the International Centre for Theoretical Physics, said the Mediterranean is of interest because it is one of the most susceptible areas to climate changes – both climatically and socially.

“In the global warming scenario, there is more warming and drying in the Mediterranean than in other regions of the world, which makes the Mediterranean a climate change ‘hotspot,’” Giorgi said. “The Mediterranean also is a very vulnerable region to climate change in terms of the impacts to the way of life of those who live there.”

The researchers found that this warming and reduced precipitation contribute to a preferential warming of the hottest days of the year.

“We found that the hottest days of the year, or the ‘hot tail,’ warm more than the typical summer days warm,” Diffenbaugh said. “One might expect that an average warming of four degrees would equate to each day warming by four degrees, but in fact the hottest days warm quite a bit more.”

This is due, in large part, to a surface moisture feedback. The surface gets dryer as it gets hotter and the dry soil leads to less moisture in the area and less evaporative cooling. The locations of intensified warming on hottest days of the year matched the locations where surface drying occurred, Diffenbaugh said.

With the projected shift to more severe temperatures, the daily temperatures currently found in the hottest two weeks of the summer instead are found in the coldest two weeks of the summer in the future climate scenario, Diffenbaugh said.

“The hottest temperatures we are used to experiencing will become the normal temperatures of the summer, and the hot periods will be magnified,” Diffenbaugh said. “Take Paris: If we look at the temperatures that occurred there during the heat wave in 2003, when 15,000 people died, those temperatures are exceeded a couple dozen times every year in the future projection. That means that severe heat waves, such as those rare events that have occurred in the past couple of years, are likely to become far more common.”

The study used the National Weather Service Heat Index in the analysis of the heat stress response to increasing greenhouse gas concentrations. The researchers found that areas most likely to face substantial increases in the dangerous heat index were concentrated largely in coastal areas.

“Coastal regions were more affected than inland regions, which is of particular importance because many large cities in the Mediterranean are on the coast,” Giorgi said. “This is the first time this amplification signal over coastal areas could be seen and quantified. Coastal regions are particularly vulnerable because they will likely be affected by other important climate change related stresses, such as a rising sea level.”

Diffenbaugh said without the high resolution of the climate model, the researchers would not have been able to identify the coastal effects.

“This underscores the importance of advancing our technology and examining a number of scenarios in great detail,” he said. “If we want to quantify the risks associated with climate change, it is critical to understand the local and regional impacts as well as the global impacts.”

For the study’s standard future scenario, the research group used a commonly accepted emissions scenario from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that assumes greenhouse gas emissions continue to increase exponentially. The reduced emissions scenario incorporated a reduction in population growth and greater environmental concern, Diffenbaugh said.

The researchers are currently using the high-resolution model to further evaluate the effects that increased temperatures and surface drying could have on agriculture and energy and water resources.

This research was funded by the Italy-USA collaborative agreement on climate change research and in part by the National Science Foundation.

The Purdue Climate Change Research Center is affiliated with Purdue’s Discovery Park. The center promotes and organizes research and education on global climate change and studies its impact on agriculture, natural ecosystems and society. It was established in 2004 to support Purdue in research and education on regional scale climate change, its impacts and mitigation, and adaptation strategies. The center serves as a hub for a range of activities beyond scientific research, including teaching, public education and the development of public policy recommendations.

Science Daily — Caribbean coral species are dying off, indicating dramatic shifts in the ecological balance under the sea, a new scientific study of Caribbean marine life shows.

Two colonies of brain coral (Diploria strigosa) on Curacao show the effects of a coral disease called white plague. The colony on the left has died completely, and the disease has spread to the colony on the right, where it shows as a stark white band encroaching on the still-living, colorful part of the colony. (Credit: Andy Bruckner, NOAA Fisheries)

The study found that 10 percent of the Caribbean’s 62 reef-building corals were under threat, including staghorn and elkhorn corals. These used to be the most prominent species but are now candidates to be listed as Critically Endangered on the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species.

“One of the Atlantic Ocean’s most beautiful marine habitats no longer exists in many places because of dramatic increases in coral diseases, mostly caused by climate change and warmer waters,” said Dr. Michael L. Smith, director of the Caribbean Biodiversity Initiative at Conservation International.

A gathering of 23 scientists in Dominica in March 2007 analyzed data on Western Tropical Atlantic corals, seagrasses, mangroves and algae, which are fundamental components of marine ecosystems providing food and shelter for numerous other organisms and local communities.  The study was funded in part by the Royal Caribbean Cruises’ Ocean Fund.

This was the first in a series of Global Marine Species Assessments (GMSA) of key marine primary-producers on a global scale.  The GMSA is headquartered at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia, USA, and is a partnership between Conservation International (CI) and the World Conservation Union (IUCN).  It aims to dramatically increase the number of marine species assessed under the rigorous criteria of the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species to provide up-to-date information for marine policy and conservation efforts.

After a final review, the species assessed during the Dominica workshop will be added to the 2008 IUCN Red List.

“Coral reefs support some of the richest areas of biodiversity in the world. When the coral reefs disappear, so will many other species which rely on reefs for shelter, reproduction and foraging,” said Dr. Suzanne Livingstone, GMSA program officer.

The threats to corals and other marine species include coastal pollution and human development; increased sedimentation in run-off water; thermal stress and heightened severity of hurricanes from climate change; and shifts in species dynamics due to over-fishing, according to the study.  Scientists explained that the Caribbean has undergone the longest and most sustained impacts from human development since the colonization of the Americas.

Next to corals, mangroves appear to be the hardest hit. Mangrove cover in the region has declined by 42% over the past 25 years, with two of the eight mangrove species now considered Vulnerable to extinction and two more in Near Threatened status.

“Mangroves protect shorelines, shelter fish, and filter pollution,” said Aaron Ellison of Harvard University.  “The Caribbean was blessed with an abundance of these useful plants, but the consensus of this workshop is that mangroves are in trouble everywhere and need to be protected and restored,” he added.  Mangrove forests are being cut down to make way for coastal housing, tourism, and aquaculture development.

Beds of sea-grasses in shallow coastal waters, like mangroves, provide a vital nursery habitat for fish, including many commercially important species and are subject to similar threats.  They are in equal need of protection to safeguard the wealth of marine life they support.

Unlike corals, seagrasses and mangroves, Caribbean algae appear to be surviving well and perhaps are taking advantage of the corals’ demise. Algae thrive on dead or dying coral reefs and can overgrow and smother newly settled corals. In addition, the fishes that feed on algae are being overexploited and their reduced populations enable algae to form dense growths that prevent corals from re-colonizing.

The scientists noted that some healthy Caribbean coral reefs still exist in well-managed marine protected areas such as Bonaire Marine Park in the Netherlands Antilles.  Direct human impacts are reduced in these areas allowing most corals to thrive; however, thermal stress from global warming affects all corals in the Caribbean and must be reversed if these refuges of Caribbean beauty are to survive, they added.

“The Caribbean tourism industry relies heavily on the beauty and health of its sea life,” said Dr. Kent Carpenter, GMSA Director.  “Concentrated marine conservation and a global effort to halt man-induced climate change are necessary to preserve this vital economic engine in the region.”

Science Daily — Global warming and the destruction of natural habitats will lead to significant declines and extinctions in the world’s 8,750 terrestrial bird species over the next century, according to a study conducted by biologists at the University of California, San Diego and Princeton University. Their study, the first global assessment of how climate change and habitat destruction may interact to impact the distribution of a large group of vertebrates over the next century, appears in the June 5 issue of the journal PLoS Biology.

The scientists warn in their study that, even under the most optimistic scenarios of controlling climate change and protecting habitats, at least 400 bird species are projected to become imperiled by the year 2050 due to reductions in their geographic ranges of greater than 50 percent. All estimates in the study are based on the assumption that birds will not dramatically shift their geographic ranges in response to a changing climate.

“We found in our study that under certain assumptions by the year 2100, 950 to 1,800 bird species may be imperiled or even driven to extinction by climate change and habitat destruction,” says Walter Jetz, an assistant professor of biological sciences at UCSD and the lead author of the study. “Most of these species are currently not recognized as imperiled.”

“It’s clear that both climate change and habitat destruction pose grave threats to many of the world’s birds and, by analogy, to other species as well,” says David Wilcove, a professor of ecology, evolutionary biology and public affairs at Princeton University and a co-author of the study. “Neither problem can be addressed in a vacuum.”

Climate change and deforestation have already been implicated in the extinctions and geographical range reductions of many terrestrial species of vertebrate animals in recent decades. But the researchers point out that based on global warming and deforestation projections this loss of diversity appears to be accelerating. “Even more dramatic environmental change is projected for this century,” they write in their paper.

To estimate the impact of climate and land use changes in their study, the researchers combined information on four projections of future global warming, agricultural expansion and human population growth from the global Millennium Ecosystem Assessment with current geographic ranges of the world’s 8,750 species of terrestrial birds.

“The most intense climate change is expected at higher latitudes, where birds are relatively species-poor and have large ranges,” says Jetz of UCSD. “Dramatic levels of deforestation and other forms of land conversion are projected to continue or even increase in much of the tropics. There birds and most other taxonomic groups are especially diverse and tend to have small ranges, making them particularly vulnerable to extinction.”

The researchers say that in the near future more bird species may be imperiled by deforestation than by the change of their habitat due to climate change. But together these two factors will be devastating for bird populations.

“This is akin to killing two birds with one stone,” says Wilcove of Princeton. “Deforestation drives tropical species to extinction and also contributes to global climate change. Climate change, in turn, drives temperate species to extinction. The good news is that by halting deforestation we can protect both tropical and temperate birds.”

The researchers say a vastly expanded network of wildlife reserves in the tropics, coupled with more ambitious goals to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and monitor the biodiversity impacts of climate change, will be needed to minimize global extinctions.

“The tragic irony here is that the protection of tropical forests is also one of the strongest buffers against future climate change,” says Andrew Dobson, the third author of the paper and a professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at Princeton. “It is crucial that international environmental policy be swiftly developed to focus both on climate change and on habitat loss; the two are not only intimately related, but are arguably the greatest threats not only to birds, but also to human welfare and economic well-being.”

“These hundreds of bird species headed toward extinction are like thousands of dying canaries in coal mines,” Dobson adds.  “It’s time we paid attention to them.”

“Billions of philanthropic and government dollars are spent annually on clearly crucial biomedical research to avert the future impacts of diseases,” says Jetz of UCSD. “Yet, the support for the necessary research and development to deal with the looming biodiversity crisis, and its multi-fold effects on human well-being, remains at abysmal levels. Drastically increased support for field surveys and impartial biodiversity research is needed to avoid future generations rightfully asking uneasy questions about the limited scope of today’s science support.”

The researchers say their study may also help future investigations because it introduces a novel way of combining geographic socioeconomic projections with biodiversity information.

“Our analysis is only a starting point, but with the increased quality of models and data our approach may offer a powerful, general way for a continued assessment of the future of biodiversity,” says Jetz.

Note: This story has been adapted from a news release issued by University of California – San Diego.

Science Daily — NASA and Columbia University Earth Institute research finds that human-made greenhouse gases have brought the Earth’s climate close to critical tipping points, with potentially dangerous consequences for the planet.

From a combination of climate models, satellite data, and paleoclimate records the scientists conclude that the West Antarctic ice sheet, Arctic ice cover, and regions providing fresh water sources and species habitat are under threat from continued global warming. The research appears in the current issue of Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics.

Tipping points can occur during climate change when the climate reaches a state such that strong amplifying feedbacks are activated by only moderate additional warming. This study finds that global warming of 0.6ºC in the past 30 years has been driven mainly by increasing greenhouse gases, and only moderate additional climate forcing is likely to set in motion disintegration of the West Antarctic ice sheet and Arctic sea ice. Amplifying feedbacks include increased absorption of sunlight as melting exposes darker surfaces and speedup of iceberg discharge as the warming ocean melts ice shelves that otherwise inhibit ice flow.

The researchers used data on earlier warm periods in Earth’s history to estimate climate impacts as a function of global temperature, climate models to simulate global warming, and satellite data to verify ongoing changes. Lead author James Hansen, NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, New York, concludes: “If global emissions of carbon dioxide continue to rise at the rate of the past decade, this research shows that there will be disastrous effects, including increasingly rapid sea level rise, increased frequency of droughts and floods, and increased stress on wildlife and plants due to rapidly shifting climate zones.”

The researchers also investigate what would be needed to avert large climate change, thus helping define practical implications of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. That treaty, signed in 1992 by the United States and almost all nations of the world, has the goal to stabilize atmospheric greenhouse gases “at a level that prevents dangerous human-made interference with the climate system.”

Based on climate model studies and the history of the Earth the authors conclude that additional global warming of about 1ºC (1.8ºF) or more, above global temperature in 2000, is likely to be dangerous. In turn, the temperature limit has implications for atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO₂), which has already increased from the pre-industrial level of 280 parts per million (ppm) to 383 ppm today and is rising by about 2 ppm per year. According to study co-author Makiko Sato of Columbia’s Earth Institute, “the temperature limit implies that CO₂ exceeding 450 ppm is almost surely dangerous, and the ceiling may be even lower.”

The study also shows that the reduction of non-carbon dioxide forcings such as methane and black soot can offset some CO₂ increase, but only to a limited extent. Hansen notes that “we probably need a full court press on both CO₂ emission rates and non-CO₂ forcings, to avoid tipping points and save Arctic sea ice and the West Antarctic ice sheet.”

A computer model developed by the Goddard Institute was used to simulate climate from 1880 through today. The model included a more comprehensive set of natural and human-made climate forcings than previous studies, including changes in solar radiation, volcanic particles, human-made greenhouse gases, fine particles such as soot, the effect of the particles on clouds and land use. Extensive evaluation of the model’s ability to simulate climate change is contained in a companion paper to be published in Climate Dynamics.

The authors use the model for climate simulations of the 21st century using both ‘business-as-usual’ growth of greenhouse gas emissions and an ‘alternative scenario’ in which emissions decrease slowly in the next few decades and then rapidly to achieve stabilization of atmospheric CO₂ amount by the end of the century. Climate changes are so large with ‘business-as-usual’, with additional global warming of 2-3ºC (3.6-5.4ºF) that Hansen concludes “‘business-as-usual’ would be a guarantee of global and regional disasters.”

However, the study finds much less severe climate change – one-quarter to one-third that of the “business-as-usual” scenario – when greenhouse gas emissions follow the alternative scenario. “Climate effects may still be substantial in the ‘alternative scenario’, but there is a better chance to adapt to the changes and find other ways to further reduce the climate change,” said Sato.

While the researchers say it is still possible to achieve the “alternative scenario,” they note that significant actions will be required to do so. Emissions must begin to slow soon. “With another decade of ‘business-as-usual’ it becomes impractical to achieve the ‘alternative scenario’ because of the energy infrastructure that would be in place” says Hansen