Welcome to the Progressive Pathway blog, the virtual home of Corbett Kroehler’s climate crisis advocacy and authorship!

Living in Central Florida, along a common hurricane tracking path, I’ve been asked whether I believe that global warming causes wind storms. The short answer is that no, it does not.

However, it has a cause in common with the intensity and number of hurricanes, deforestation. The same apocalyptic burning of old-growth cloud forests and rain forests in Central America, South America and West Africa adds unspeakable tons of carbon to the atmosphere and robs the planet of a key defensive weapon in regulating wind storms.

By halting mass deforestation in those areas and replacing it with new plantings and sustainable forestry, we can begin to reverse the trend toward greater and greater levels of carbon in the atmosphere and reduce the intensity of hurricanes at the same time.

Political inaction on global warming and climate change shares a cause with another crisis, voter apathy in the United States. The average citizen of this country now is more likely to vote in an American Idol competition that a national election.

While laughable, this statistic represents a grave threat to a fundamental principle which underpins our republic.

President Lincoln give it to us very succinctly in the final stanza of his Gettysburg Address: “Government of the people, by the people and for the people.”

If voters deliberately opt out of the political process, either in protest or because they believe that their time on election day is wasted, they diminish the sacrifices of their forebears who fought to give everyone the right to vote and they make it easier for politicians to base their decisions on national TV ratings and poll results rather than healthy discourse with their constituents.

Please visit my next three posts to read how inaction on global warming and voter apathy have a common solution.

Sustainable Justice For All!

Corbett Kroehler

Congratulations go out to the leadership of most of the G-8 nations last week! Most of the G-8 will do more to reduce their contributions to global warming and the climate crisis.

Sadly, at least for now, the United States will not be among them.

Here in the America, some states have made great strides while others struggle with archaic approaches, including Florida. At the national level, of course, the results are similar. Some progress has been erased by retrograde policies while other successes go unheralded.

What we need to do is look to a pair of G-8 peers and one of our largest trading partners.

Austria and Germany now are a full decade ahead of the United States in their investment in solar and wind technology in order to save their electric ratepayers millions of dollars in future rate increases and, not coincidentally, bring about a corresponding drop in emissions of greenhouse gases.

China, on the other hand, while moving in exactly the wrong direction in the construction of hundreds of new coal-fired power plants, is setting global records for installation of solar-powered water heaters, such as my wife Catrin and I have on our Orlando home.

Indeed, there are more than 700 manufacturers of solar water heating systems in China and together, they install more than 5,000,000 square meters of new rooftop solar collectors each year, an amazing statistic.

How have these nations managed to forge ahead with next-generation energy solutions while some members of their domestic energy sector advocate the status quo?

They did two key things:

1) They helped their citizens focus their collective voice in demanding consumer and environmentally-friendly solutions so that the small number of special interest mouthpieces were not heard; and

2) They made it cultural.

It is these two methods which I try to emulate and the reason for the existence of my expert blog here on Keyboard Culture.

The State of Florida, which welcomed me open arms in 1987, is threatened by rising seas. The solution to the problem is not a mystery. We know how to prevent catastrophic sea rise. What is missing is the will to stop it.

In Austria and Germany, the government has reached out to the people to convince them to participate in buying electricity produced from renewable energy as a matter of national pride. In China, there are entire towns which turn out for fairs and parades to celebrate the environment and how heating their water with the power of the sun helps keep the air they breathe clean. In some of those towns, the fairs adopt a green theme and nearly all of the people turn out to participate, dressed in the same color. The photographs I’ve seen struck me as St. Patrick’s Day in the Far East.

Environmental Defense, of which I am a proud member, has a convenient website which lays out steps you can take to blend conservation into your lifestyle. Please visit http://fightglobalwarming.com

To every reader who lives in the eastern half of the United States: the 2007 hurricane season is off to a troubling start, with the Southeast suffering from a severe subtropical storm (Andrea) fully 3 weeks before the beginning of the annual hurricane season.

Then, Tropic Storm Barry accelerated to 50mph wind speeds on June 1, among the earliest storms ever. 2006 may have been a quiet year in terms of hurricanes which struck the United States but globally, it was quite bad.

We did not receive a reprieve, just a temporary detour.

Environmental Defense has another very good section of their website which walks you through the bad news. It definitely is worth an hour of your time. http://www.environmentaldefense.org/page.cfm?tagid=489

Sustainable Justice For All!

Corbett Kroehler

The final days of the month of August will not be the same for my generation or the next on account of the unspeakable devastation which befell America’s Gulf Coast in 2005. However, even as the region takes small, painful steps toward recovery, we must remember some of the lessons which that disaster taught us.

Positive results? Yes, it’s true. Naturally, we don’t want any loss of life or property from wind storms but in terms of the planet’s atmosphere, hurricanes and other such tropical systems play an important role. Because the earth is round, sunshine heats the surface at different intensities each day and as the seasons change. Cyclones act as, in a way, blowing off steam to keep the atmosphere’s vital filtration system healthy. In short, hurricanes can have positive results.

In Friday’s post, I told you about the American Standard Green Envirohome. In the process of inviting the owners to speak at Green Earth Expo 2008, I had an amazing, 40-minute conversation with Nonnie Chrystal, pictured in Friday’s column. Wow! It’s not every day that I encounter someone with my passion and zeal for environmental issues, especially the holistic approach of not just consuming less but healing the earth whenever possible.

It turns out that the story in USA Today which led me to Nonnie in the first place only tells half the story. As I described in my last column, Nonnie’s and Mark’s family was impacted severely by the rapid-fire hurricanes of 2004. However, I came to learn that the devastation of the next year’s hurricane season hit them hard as well. In fact, Nonnie is an alumna of Tulane University in New Orleans and has strong ties to the Crescent City. That is why the arduous journey of designing and building the American Standard Green Envirohome, in collaboration with multiple companies and governmental bodies, is like a Hurricane Katrina Poem in Concrete and Steel.

As we ponder what happened and what could have been prevented in the national disaster known as Hurricane Katrina (and rightly so), it is important that we not lose sight of the meteorological aspects of that fateful week which closed August, 2005. Indeed, that fatal storm set 3 atmospheric records for cyclones:

1) Katrina was the largest storm ever in terms of area;
2) In the hours before landfall, Katrina had the highest wind gusts ever recorded; and
3) Katrina accelerated from a Category 1 to a Category 5 hurricane faster than any storm recorded.

The third and last of the above is among the most important Hurricane Katrina environmental lessons.

I first moved to Florida from Maine in 1987. Sure enough, just a few months after calling the Sunshine State home, a tropical storm blew through. The damages were relatively mild and I counted myself lucky. It wasn’t until 1992 that I had another chance to see what nature’s fury can do to this lovely and low-lying peninsula. The name of the fury was Hurricane Andrew.

There were devastating similarities between Andrew and his gruesome successor Katrina but also differences. Andrew caused the greatest portion of damage with gales which lasted for brutal, extended periods. Katrina, on the other hand, killed mostly with water, both in the storm surge and the rainfall which breeched levies.

The other key similarity in the destruction of Hurricane Andrew and Katrina points to a trend: the $100 billion natural disaster.

In this blog, I tend to discuss the environmental ramifications of current events. I am an environmentalist so my choice of topics should come as no surprise. However, I also am a Floridian and a homeowner, a risky and often expensive combination. Everyone who owns property or plans to buy property must consider the impact of hurricanes, not just in their immediate effects but the toll they take on the property casualty industry.

The Orlando home which Catrin and I share with our 4 cats (6 if you count the 4-legged patrol on our block) weathered the 2004 hurricane season (no pun intended) well on the whole. We lost over 100 roofing shingles but never had a major water leak.

60 miles east of us in Indialantic, the story was quite different. The home which Nonnie Chrystal and her husband Mark are rebuilding suffered terrible damage, so much that it became uninhabitable and very quickly overrun with mold. Here is a photograph of the loss of roofing shingles endured at 216 Coral Way South.

Nonnie Chrystal and her husband Mark are determined to design Florida’s Showcase Green Envirohome to bear up under the greatest stresses which nature can hurl at it in this age of global warming.

The process began for them with extreme water damage which led to tremendous mold infestations. They are using SIP panels for the exterior of the home placed from the corner in so as to reduce the ability of strong winds to bow or lift the house.

Those panels, then, are arranged to allow rainfall to form channels and remain outside. However, if a leak should occur, the guts of the house will be highly resistant to mold, fungus and termite infestation thanks, in part, to BluWood.

Even at the peak of the hurricane season (which falls right now, as you read this), Florida is a wonderful place to live. The people are friendly and at no time are we far from the beach. The natural beauty which fills the Sunshine State comes with a price, however, high dew points and humidity during more than half the year. In addition to lots of perspiration and steady work for air conditioning repair technicians, Florida’s climate has another byproduct, mold.

In other parts of the United States which have 4 distinct seasons, mold is less of an issue and it usually affects clothing and luggage more than buildings. The solution can be as simple as storing those articles in the cellar until fall. For people like Nonnie Chrystal and her husband Mark, however, seaside Florida living can be moldy, just as it is for most every Floridian.

Even though the 2007 hurricane season will be with us for a few more weeks, the autumnal equinox has passed. It’s fall! From the perspective of another record-breaking summer, it couldn’t come a moment too soon.

After the unspeakable loss of life of Hurricane Katrina, I have developed a habit of fearing the month of August. Before 2005, my fear was derived mostly from what Florida’s oppressive heat index would do to my cooling bill. I intend to install a solar electric array next summer to keep the numbers steady and now, I get butterflies every August when I access the National Hurricane Center website for predictions.

Call it fortunate happenstance. Call it karma. Call it providence. Call it what you will. The year 2007 will go down in history as a turning point in the world’s understanding of and response to global warming. We saw record polar melting. We saw record hurricane acceleration and the first time a pair of category 5 storms struck the same general area in the same year.

Residents of the Western world such as this author rail against needlessly wasteful forest practices as a significant inhibitor to reforestation. Our argument is valid. However, the air we breathe is blind to territorial borders, as are cyclones, forest fires and hurricanes. In short, if we wish to save ourselves from the worst effects of global warming, we need to take a global perspective on reforestation.

Poverty around the world, including fuel poverty, whether in cities or rural areas, is a big problem not just for the moral fabric of society but for environmental protection. What’s more, many of the regions with the most at-risk species of wildlife are desperately poor, with the average resident earning less than $2.00 per day.

Such regions also are fraught with civil war, coup d’etat activity and rebellion. Arguably the worst side effect of these conflicts between people is the fact that aid workers cannot do their job because of the danger – including the management of reforestation projects.

Since my previous column covered the role of plastic shopping bags in supermarkets, today’s installment may seem a departure. Trust me, my friend. The two issues are related. If we ever hope to succeed in jump starting reforestation projects around the world in order to return our biome to its pre-industrialization state, we must address the question of reforestation in conflict zones.

Despite the awful damage which they can inflict on people and property, hurricanes play an important role in the functioning of our atmosphere. My assertion may seem counterintuitive and I will endeavor to share with you here that it is not (and include an anecdote to help me be more persuasive).

As you may know from geology, our planet is in constant motion, spinning and tilting on its axis and orbiting the sun. This motion gives us the force of gravity and an electromagnetic field which helps deflect harmful cosmic rays. For a demonstration of what would happen if we lost the field, rent the DVD The Core because Stanley Tucci’s character explains it well.

The importance of hurricanes is this: even as the planet’s electromagnetic field wards off spaceborne nasties, we need to harness some of the sun’s radiation in order to heat our world and produce oxygen through photosynthesis (without the sun, plants would die and cease to produce oxygen for us to breathe).

So, what we need is a way of keeping the good aspects of sunlight but shedding the bad. Temperature is a big deal in this equation. Because of our orbital track, orbital tilt and the position of the moon, the sun heats the surface of the planet to varying extents at any given moment. If it didn’t, we’d be more like Mars or Venus.

The intensity differential of sunlight striking the dark side of the world and the light side at any given moment is tremendous. It is the difference between night and day, no pun intended.

This is why the spacesuit visor for astronauts is so highly reflective. Conditions in space are such that without a proper suit, an astronaut literally could fry on one side of his/her body and freeze on the other because of the importance of solar radiation. Here on earth, those conditions also point to the importance of hurricanes.

Simply put, sunlight is very harsh. We need our atmosphere to regulate that harshness. During my second commercial airline flight Down Under, I flew between Los Angeles and Honolulu. It was a morning flight so the position of the sun was nearly constant along the port side of the aircraft. Indeed, the sunlight was so intense that my wife Catrin had to close the window shade for our row of seats.

The laudable partnership between Delta Air Lines and Habitat For Humanity is headed toward its second anniversary. Both of these fine organizations continue to drive public awareness of environmental issues. As part of its Force for Global Good initiative, Delta Air Lines has raised hundreds of thousands of dollars for various worthy causes. Second only to its carbon offset program, in my estimation, though, is Delta’s close interaction with Habitat for Humanity.

“Is everything spinning out of control? Midwestern levees are bursting. Polar bears are adrift. Gas prices are skyrocketing. Home values are abysmal. Air fares, college tuition and health care border on unaffordable.... Horatio Alger, twist in your grave.”

Alan Fram and Eileen Putnam

Associated Press

June 22, 2008

With so many natural disasters occurring simultaneously, it can be quite tempting to lump them into a single nightmarish disaster. If we are to survive the growing frequency and ferocity of killer storms in this age of global warming, we must resist the temptation to wallow in helplessness. Humanity can and will learn from the Mississippi River levee failures of 2008 and adapt our disaster planning models where possible.

So, was the horrendous flooding of 2008, which caused multiple Mississippi River levees to fail, all that different from what happened along the American Gulf Coast in 2005 with Hurricane Katrina? The answer is yes and no but we can learn from both.

Katrina was at the time the largest and fastest hurricane on record. While much blame justifiably was passed from one government agency to another, from a mechanical perspective, the sea swells which Katrina sent hurtling toward New Orleans and the rest of that section of coastline were quite high but not unimaginably so.

Giant Wind Storm Incubators

Everyone can be grateful that Hurricane Gustav and Hurricane Ike left in their wake a death toll well below that of Hurricane Katrina. However, the similarities remain quite destructive. Hurricane Gustav gave us widespread flooding, displaced more than 1 million people and left more than 2 million homes without electrical service for weeks. At its worst, Hurricane Ike covered an area roughly equal in size to the unified nation of Germany and erased entire towns along the Texas coast rendering more than 100,000 people permanently homeless.

As regards global warming, Gustav’s acceleration from a relatively weak storm to a powerhouse category 4 hurricane in under 3 days’ time points us back to the contemporary effects of abnormally high water temperatures. Hurricane Ike approached the Caribbean Basin as a strong storm before raining down death and destruction on Hispaniola and Cuba. When it was done killing islanders, it took its dear, sweet time gathering ferocity on its way to shred Galveston and immerse Houston.

I have written about Katrina’s record acceleration. Frightening as it was, the record was broken just 2 years later by Hurricane Felix. Then, Gustav came along and nearly entered itself in the record books. When Gustav failed to break the record, residents of the Gulf Coast region of the United States breathed a sigh of relief. It lasted just a few days, though, because in crossing from the Atlantic Ocean to the Caribbean Sea, Hurricane Ike went from a category 1 to a category 4 in just 6 hours – 6 hours!

To global warming skeptics, I ask: how can you explain away these statistics? Atlantic hurricanes form in 2 two general ways:

1) When prevailing winds of central Africa meet the ocean; and

2) When tropical waves spawned by equatorial wind patterns are nourished by the recycling currents of the Caribbean Sea and Gulf of Mexico.

Hence, if the prevailing winds of Africa accelerated because of deforestation and desertification (both of which are ameliorated by a proper response to global warming), how can we ignore the effects on North America?

If the Caribbean Sea and Gulf of Mexico contain large dead zones because of skewed temperature cycles and atmospheric wind patterns which have shifted because of high carbon content, how can we ignore either the consequences or our responsibility?

The bottom line is this: everyone benefits from fighting global warming, even energy companies because winning the battle requires innovation. When humanity innovates, there are ancillary benefits. So, if you doubt the existence of global warming or the fact that human behavior is the main cause, you still can climb aboard the Remediation Express and help millions of people who live in coastal areas fret a little less often about the frequency of killer hurricanes.

Fomenting the Triple Bottom Line

Corbett Kroehler

The Answer is Blowing in the Wind

The growing frequency and intensity of hurricanes is a very personal issue for me. My wife Catrin and I were very lucky to survive the repeated onslaughts of killer storms in Central Florida since moving here in 1992, not just hurricanes but tropical storms and tornados. Alas, a good friend of ours was not so lucky. Indeed, Nonnie Chrystal took the desperate hurricane-borne heartbreak which her family suffered just a few years ago and turned it into a beautiful monument to conservation and low-impact living with Florida’s Showcase Green Envirohome.

What do memorably horrible storms with names such as Katrina and Ike bode for the future? Well, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, NOAA, part of the government of the United States, has concluded that the frequency and intensity of large storms are growing. Is there a hidden meaning in that statistic, however? After all, 2005 has been the most active year in terms of large storms in recent memory, with a total of 28, yes, 28.

Well, the Gulf Coast of the United States will need years to recover from Hurricane Ike. The point here, is that wind storms in this age of global warming can alternate between increased strength and frequency. One year, we can have 28 storms but only a few of them mammoth in scope. Then, other years, such as 2008, we can have one-third fewer storms but several of them killers, such as the succession of Felix, Gustav and Ike this year.

It is this whipsaw between killer size and rapid-fire events which is arguably the most frightening aspect of what we have done to this planet. If, in pondering this simple yet profound reality, you are not moved to trepidation, I encourage you to take a hard assessment of the degradation to our planet. If we can have billion-dollar wildfires in California while simultaneously just a few hundred miles to the north vast areas are flooded from unseasonable accumulations of rain and snow and then observe all of this in the same year, something is very, very, wrong.

Fomenting the Triple Bottom Line

Corbett Kroehler

In early December, I had the profound honor and privilege of representing the Sierra Club of Florida at the Hurricane Science for Safety Leadership Forum, which took place at Walt Disney World. The event was the quarterly fruition of a movement begun roughly a decade ago by a fine organization called FLASH, the Federal Alliance for Safe Homes. If you live in an area which is targeted by hurricanes or other wind storms with any regularity, I exhort you to visit flash.org today and learn more about preparedness.

The Hurricane Science for Safety Leadership Forum was a convocation of dozens of the brightest minds in climatology, meteorology, risk management, urban planning and other disciplines and I left with my head throbbing from the dozens of insights I gleaned. Indeed, while my main purpose was to represent the Sierra Club in order to be certain that a strong environmental voice was present, after the very first plenary session, several people made the effort to approach me and express gratitude for my presence and I knew that I had found a unique conference.

I could fill my posts here on Keyboard Culture for the entire first half of 2009 with all of the material presented at the forum but what left the most lasting impression on me was that of the profound difference in damage to property caused by category 4 and category 5 hurricanes versus category 3. I already knew that global warming has a significant impact on this question but now, thanks to the brilliant presentation of Dr. Amanda Staudt of the National Wildlife Federation, I have a PowerPoint presentation to share with you.

In my next post, I will provide the presentation file to you and the context in which the frightening data on her slides should be consumed.

Fomenting the Triple Bottom Line

Corbett Kroehler

The Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Scale measures local peak gust velocities of wind in meters per second. A relatively weak, category 1 hurricane has wind gusts of around 30 meters per second. Major hurricanes, which I refer to as killers, begin at around 50 meters per second and run off the Saffir-Simpson scale at 100 meters per second.

If ever you have watched live news coverage of a hurricane as it approached land fall, you may have noticed that meteorologists always raise warnings about staying out of harm’s way but seem to twitch whenever discussing storms which are category 3 or above. Why is this? As Dr. Amanda Staudt of the National Wildlife Federation shared with attendees of the Hurricane Science for Safety Leadership Forum, increases in wind speed between category 3 and 4 equal roughly 10% but the reality of materials science is that such an increase equals a 50% increase in property damage.

In other words, movement between categories on the Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Scale is linear but increases in property damage from major storms are logarithmic.

How does this horrible news relate to global warming? Thanks to the brilliant work of Professor Kerry Emmanuel of the tropical meteorology group at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, we know that there is a direct correlation between sea surface temperatures in the Atlantic basin and the wind speed of hurricanes. Indeed, Professor Emmanuel has plotted a graph of the power dissipation index of hurricanes in relation to sea surface temperatures going back more than 40 years and the linkage is clear.

Pages 5, 6 and 7 of Dr. Staudt’s presentation are the most compelling but I encourage you to read the whole thing. Dr. Staudt was gracious enough to grant me access to her file and it is linked here.

I have stated very clearly here on Keyboard Culture that global warming exacerbates the formation and strengthening of hurricanes but admit that a modicum of dissent within the scientific community exists regarding this connection. What no longer is open to debate in the hallowed halls of atmospheric science is the correlation between sea surface temperatures and general hurricane strength. What we also know for sure is that, measured globally, the increases in mean temperatures which we are causing through the reckless burning of fossil fuels carry water temperature right along with them. The connection of A to B to C is sadly all too easy.

Fomenting the Triple Bottom Line

Corbett Kroehler