A couple weeks ago we looked at a study the AP commissioned showing that for nearly every span of time you care to look at, the planet's temperature is on the rise. Shockingly, climate-change deniers were no more convinced by those hard numbers than they have been by the overwhelming mass of studies and indicators that continue to emerge every week pointing to anthropogenic climate change.

Skeptics were doubtless heartened by the unusually cool summer Philadelphia enjoyed this year, following the logic of "if there's global warming, why is it getting cooler here?" Well, the answer is it depends on where you happen to be looking. The National Center for Atmospheric Research in Colorado reported that over the last decade, there were twice as many record-high temperatures in the United States as record lows. The numbers came from "data from thousands of weather stations across the country over the last six decades."

The Reuters version of the story (you know, in case an AP version would feed the AP conspiracy theory) notes that if the climate were not warming, "the number of record highs and lows each year would be about equal. But for the period between January 1, 2000 and September 30 this year, the continental United States had 291,237 record highs and 142,420 record lows." So, technically speaking, there were actually more than twice as many record highs, to the tune of around 6,400 more.

Lead researcher Gerald Meehl added that "there have also been decreases in frost days, when the nighttime temperature goes below freezing -- there are fewer of those documented for many areas of the world, including the United States."

When it comes to math, "frosty" is the new "fuzzy!"

Jibes aside, the numbers aren't winning or losing scores - they're part of a big picture that needs to be addressed in a real, tangible way, and soon. That's why it's a pity that Copenhagen is already beginning to look like NoHopenhagen.

Jonathan Safran Foer is in town tonight to talk about his new book Eating Animals. Part of the case he makes against consumers participating in the factory-farm industry is environmental: He details many of the egregious effects of wide-scale animal agriculture with which Earth to Philly readers will be all too familiar.

Another part of the case, though, is an ethical one - that what is happening in our names (and by way of our funding) on factory farms and conglomerate slaughterhouses is so commonly, relentlessly cruel that it's a violation of the values we all really believe in. He goes so far as to say these practices should be illegal.

The two concepts, pollution and cruelty, are not as distinct as they may seem: Foer agrees that the general population is now beginning to awaken to how badly animals are being abused in a way that mirrors how people eventually came to realize climate change and environmentalism were not just the wacky fringe concerns of a handful of crackpots. And he believes we might see factory farming "rejected" in a major way within the next ten years.

These are some of the topics we discuss in this audio interview (MP3, 7 MB) from last Thursday.

We’ve known forever that cigarette smoking is deadly.  But so are the butts that smokers toss aside after their last puff, claim researchers from San Diego State University, the University of California-San Francisco and consulting groups Oxford Outcomes and the Varda Group.

That’s why the team is leading an effort to have the butts considered toxic waste.

The researchers will present their findings today at the 137th annual meeting of the American Public Health Association, right here at the Philadelphia Marriott.

According to SDSU public health professor Rick Gersberg, cigarette butts allowed to soak in both fresh and salt water kill half the exposed fish in a standardized hazard assessment at a concentration of about one butt per liter. Further research is planned to identify the organic and inorganic chemicals in the cigarette butt that are lethal to fish and may be identified in natural environments.

The research is part of the Cigarette Butt Pollution Project funded by the California Tobacco Related Disease Research Program of the University of California.

According to a press release from SDSU, project participants are committed to eliminating toxic cigarette butt waste from the environment using science, awareness raising and policy interventions at local, state and national levels.

The big, bad tobacco industry is not amused, notes the release, because an alliance among environmental and tobacco control groups would demand that the industry take responsibility for discarded cigarette butts.

Regulatory policies that may help reduce cigarette-butt waste, the research suggests, might include levying litter fees on tobacco products, strengthening the enforcement of existing penalties for illegally disposing of cigarette butts and possibly bringing lawsuits against the industry to recover costs to communities of cigarette butt blight and butt cleanups.

The research will be presented today from 12:30-2pm in Marriott’s Grand Ballroom, Salon B. Immediately following, the research team will hold a press conference from 2:30-3:30pm in the Pennsylvania Convention Center, Room 301.

Read our lead editorial from today musing on how the Phillies' win - and potential loss - on Tuesday might have influenced SEPTA's strike timing.

"We agreed not to strike during the World Series. We took people to the game because we are professionals. Now it's time to reward us."

And for everybody scrambling to get somewhere, some things to remember...

A TRANSIT STRIKE anywhere can be devastating. But in a city known for its kind, compassionate, and helpful people . . .

Oh, wait. Wrong city. We're the ones who boo Santa.

 Read the rest here.

UPDATE 11/05: Is it time for binding arbitration?

It's completely a coincidence in terms of timing, but today's news of a surprise, late-night SEPTA strike was accompanied in our pages by word that Philadelphia may soon be getting a serious fleet of Pedicabs, which are already a fixture in Boston, New York, San Francisco and Seattle. If you were one of the many people trying to shoehorn yourself onto a Regional Rail train today - or if you weren't even that lucky - you may have wished you could jump on the back of one of these oversized trikes and be whisked away.

OK, maybe only 1.3% of you were thinking along those lines. But there are other reasons to take a good look at the phenomenon also known as "cycle rickshaws" besides save-the-planet rationales.

Among others, two brothers tell of being forced into exile by L&I...

The lack of pedicab regulation in the city had been a problem for local companies and for operators in other cities that wanted to set up shop here.

Ben and Tom Dambman co-own Chariots of Philly, a pedicab company that operated in Manayunk from 2003 until 2005.

When the brothers tried to expand into other parts of Philadelphia, the Department of Licenses and Inspections ordered them to cease operations until pedicab regulation was in place.

For the last three summers, they operated their business in Avalon, N.J.

"We want to work exclusively in Philadelphia - this is our home, and this is where we want to live and work," said Tom Dambman.

Seems like a good idea to let them work at home. But could pedicabs make a difference in city traffic? Ecologically we'd like to say yes. But how would traffic change if we started to see more than one or two pedicabs?

Despite their common eco-friendly underpinnings, pedicabs would seem unlikely to challenge the habits of public-transportation riders, what with their relatively high price. The most obvious industry that might logically fear the rise of pedicabs is that of carriage horses. The colorful, sometimes inaccurate Colonial tour guides compete as "novelty" transportation, have certain liabilities that pedicabs don't, and offer against that a sense of history - an Old City tradition dating back a full 33 years.

But for now, anyway, the costumes and clackety-clop are the draw right around Independence Hall, and if New York is any model, pedicabs won't suddenly knock that out. Outside of Manayunk, one could imagine pedicabs competing with taxicabs in and around that whole Penn's Landing / Society Hill / Independence Mall area, or perhaps University City, where quickly and safely navigating among often unpredictable crowds on both walkways and streets is called for - but then again, cities sometimes ban pedicabs in their most congested areas. A case could also be made for pedicabs concentrating in the parkway / Art Museum area. Hey, if it's good enough for the Segways...

At any rate, the regulation, once in practice, will tell the tale. How will licensed, city-certified pedicabs be identified? Will pedicabs be restricted to bike lanes on roads that have them? What non-car areas would they be permitted to serve? What kind of safety and/or maintenance rules will be in place to prevent the occasional fatal accident?

Council should look at these questions carefully, but now is the time to start looking and answering questions. Let's hope sometime soon the kinks get worked out and Philadelphia pedicabs can pedal us toward "Greenest City in America."

Michelle Obama poses for a photo at the White House garden harvest. (via Huffington Post)

Here are some new developments in stories you may have read about previously here at Earth to Philly - each one not worth a standalone post of its own, perhaps, but certainly worth keeping track of.

You'll recall that when the idea of a White House garden was proposed, at first jokingly it seemed, Earth to Philly was one of the biggest cheerleaders. Well, the garden was planted and worked throughout the summer and now has been harvested with the help of local students. As the Huffington Post reported, Michelle Obama "asked the students how much they thought it cost to plant the garden. They guessed $300, $800, $1000 and $6000 as Michelle acted as auctioneer. She then revealed the answer: 'Over 740 pounds of food have come out of this little piece of land..... It [cost] about $180.'" Wow, that's some math we can all get behind!

More recently, we told you about a conference on cohousing, a system where neighbors plan their own neighborhoods around ideals of sustainability and walkability. That latter quality is now being quantified in an interactive tool from Philly's own Avencia. Their Walkshed scores neighborhoods based on your priorities for how close different amenities are - and closeness is in terms of actual walking distance, rather than "as the crow flies." Your walkability score is "based on the actual walking distance to each amenity, accounting for street connectivity and barriers such as highways and rivers."

The site explains how the score is weighted by personal preference:

Walkability means different things to different people. The empty nesters in Center City may enjoy a wide variety of restaurants. Families in Mount Airy might prefer easy access to Fairmount Park. Young professionals in Manayunk may like the nightlife of Main Street. All of these people love and value walkability, but they all have different preferences that shape it.

Using Avencia’s DecisionTree calculation engine, Walkshed is able to dynamically account for each person’s preferences by giving relative weights to each factor before combining the data.

And even more recently, we tipped you to a new report from the Worldwatch Institute stating that the greenhouse-gas contribution of livestock had been dramatically undercounted. A separate study a couple days ago by the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studieshas lent credence to that claim in its finding that methane, famously produced by one end of a cow, has been underestimated in the proportion of global warming it causes.

In the journal Science, a team led by Drew Shindell of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York finds that chemical interactions between greenhouse gases other than carbon dioxide cause more global warming than previously estimated by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and other efforts.

"The total amount of warming doesn't change, just the balance of gasses behind it," Shindell says.
Methane played a bigger role than expected, suggesting that climate treaties such as the 1997 Kyoto Protocol need to consider it more carefully, the study says.

Animal agriculture is, of course, not the only anthropogenic source of methane, but it's a big one, and given its many other envioronmental and social liabilities (including yet another mysteriously late beef recall for E.Coli that's now killing people) it's something we might "consider more carefully" in general.

While it's amazing to consider that there's still a huge bloc of people bending over backwards to deny the reality of global warming, there sure are - and these people have most recently latched onto a throwaway line in the contrarian-statistics anthology Super Freakonomics to bolster their pollyanna worldview.

The world isn't warming, it's cooling, goes this argument. Just look at the (temperature) numbers. Ignore the ice sheets melting, the kids swimming at the North Pole, the weather patterns and dozens of other indicators and just look at the numbers.

Well, the Associated Press took the deniers at their word and just looked at the numbers. The news organization had two independent statisticians look at only the numbers involved in global temperatures over various periods of time, from nine to ten to eleven to thirty to 130 years, without telling them what the numbers represented. In other words, a blind study, to remove the influence of any bias on the parts of the humans examining the data.

The statisticians found an upward trend to the numbers in all cases - except if you start following the data exactly in 1998, one of the hottest years, if not the hottest year, ever, in which case you can get a small downward trend. But notably, starting in either 1997 or 1999 gives you an upward trend, i.e. warming. And to reiterate, neither of the statisticians found the ten-years-after-1998 aberration to contradict the overall pattern of upward movement in the numbers.

Though it will obviously take a while before the climate-change deniers come around, they're only hurting their own cause - because everything they spout about "cooling" trends is just a bunch of hot air.

Image from the Worldwatch report "Livestock and Climate Change."

When the United Nations' Food and Agriculture Organization released its blockbuster report Livestock's Long Shadow in November of 2006, the authors cautioned that in some cases they were using more conservative figures than probably necessary to calculate animal agriculture's contribution to greenhouse gas emissions. Even so they generated the notable stat, which we've quoted here, that animals raised for food generate more greenhouse gases than all of human transportation, i.e. 18% of total emissions versus 14% for trains, planes and automobiles.

Yesterday the Worldwatch Institute released the findings of Robert Goodland and Jeff Anhang, who scoured the 2006 FAO report to identify and quantify the undercounted factors and areas, and whose report puts it bluntly: Livestock now accounts for at least 51% of greenhouse gas emissions. The raising of animals for food is a bigger threat to the planet than every other factor put together. This is huge.

At the opening of their article (from the November/December issue of World Watch), the authors explain that

[T]he life cycle and supply chain of domesticated animals raised for food have been vastly underestimated as a source of GHGs, and in fact account for at least half of all human-caused GHGs. If this argument is right, it implies that replacing livestock products with better alternatives would be the best strategy for reversing climate change. In fact, this approach would have far more rapid effects on GHG emissions and their atmospheric concentrations—and thus on the rate the climate is warming—than actions to replace fossil fuels with renewable energy.

Later, they go into more detail on why the animal-agriculture sector is not just a bigger player, but an easier one to change quickly:

[R]enewable-energy infrastructure has both long and complex product-development cycles and capital-intensive requirements. Converting vehicle fleets and power plants is forecast to cost trillions of dollars, and to require political will and consensus that do not appear close at hand. Even if money and politics were up to the task, such solutions are expected to take more than a decade to implement fully, by which time the tipping point may long since have been passed for irreversible climate disruption.

Goodland and Anhang all but declare that there should be a shift of focus at the upcoming Copenhagen talks

Action to replace livestock products not only can achieve quick reductions in atmospheric GHGs, but can also reverse the ongoing world food and water crises. Were the recommendations described below followed, at least a 25-percent reduction in livestock products worldwide could be achieved between now and 2017, the end of the commitment period to be discussed at the United Nations’ climate conference in Copenhagen in December 2009. This would yield at minimum a 12.5-percent reduction in global anthropogenic GHGs emissions,which by itself would be almost asmuch reduction as is generally expected to be negotiated in Copenhagen

And in a supplemental FAQ they address the wishful thinking that maybe we can all just eliminate beef and everything will be fine...

There is little variability between types of livestock when it comes to livestock respiration, land used to grow feed, and most of the other factors discussed in this article, which are responsible for most of the GHGs attributable to livestock products generally.  The main factors involving significant variability are enteric fermentation, grazing, and amount of feed required to produce beef and dairy products.  However, the difference that these factors make in total GHGs attributable to beef and dairy products vs. other livestock products is relatively insignificant.  Therefore, eating chicken instead of beef (for example) would not result in any appreciable slowing of climate change.

With this newly-crunched data, the authors point out that it's now clear that

the dramatic expansion of the livestock sector in recent decades may imperil humanity, and that there may be no way to manage the climate risk of either the food industry or the world at large other than by replacing livestock products with better alternatives. 

»  More Worldwatch bombshell: #1 threat to planet: Meat