Who ever would’ve guessed that there would be a Labor Day card for global warming?  But that is what SomeEcards are for:

But “The Onion” of e-card companies makes a serious point:  In the not-too-distant future, people are going to be amazed that anybody ever thought Labor Day signified the unofficial end of summer.  As Climate Progress discussed in “Mother Nature is Just Getting Warmed Up” last year:

Stanford climate scientists forecast permanently hotter summers

The tropics and much of the Northern Hemisphere are likely to experience an irreversible rise in summer temperatures within the next 20 to 60 years if atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations continue to increase, according to a new climate study by Stanford University scientists….

“According to our projections, large areas of the globe are likely to warm up so quickly that, by the middle of this century, even the coolest summers will be hotter than the hottest summers of the past 50 years,” said the study’s lead author, Noah Diffenbaugh.

And this could happen even sooner since, “actual GHG emissions over the early 21st century have exceeded those projected in the SRES scenario used here, suggesting that our results could provide a conservative projection of the timing of permanent emergence of an unprecedented heat regime.”

Climate scientist Katherine Hayhoe has a figure of what staying on the business as usual emissions path (A1FI or 1000 ppm) would mean for the end of this century (derived from the NOAA-led impacts report):

Yes, absent a sharp and deep reduction in national and global emissions, by century’s end, Kansas (!) could well be above 100°F for three full months.  Labor Day will mean a return to those pleasant mid-to-upper 90s!

It truly will be an endless summer over much of Texas and Arizona and the Central Valley of California (see also NASA’s Hansen: “If We Stay on With Business as Usual, the Southern U.S. Will Become Almost Uninhabitable”).

Not only will it be hot, but if we don’t reverse emissions trends ASAP, it will be very, very dry :

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by Rob Painting, via Skeptical Science

Although sea level rise might, at first glance, seem to be a relatively easy subject to grasp, much of the misunderstanding that exists in the blogosphere (and elsewhere) can be put down to the flawed notion that the sea behaves like water in a swimming pool, or bathtub. In reality the Earth’s surface (lithosphere) is elastic and deformable which contributes to a complicated picture where  local sea level might be somewhat different than the global sea level trend. In order to make sense of this it’s necessary to cover some of the fundamentals of sea level rise — starting with Glacial Isostatic Adjustment (GIA).

What is Glacial Isostatic Adjustment?

The term describes the deformation of Earth’s surface from the growth and decay of giant ice sheets over time, or more specifically, from the exchange of mass, in the form of water or ice, between the continents and ocean during the ice age cycles. The planet-wide changes which result  from this loading and unloading are due to the Earth’s lithosphere wanting to reach equilibrium (isostasy).

In the last several million years the Earth’s climate has been dominated by the ice age cycles — alternating cold and warm periods driven by small changes in Earth’s orbit and tilt as it circles the sun. During the much longer cool periods (glacials) global temperature dropped sufficiently for gigantic ice sheets to grow upon Antarctica and the Northern Hemsiphere land masses. As water was evaporated off the ocean and dumped upon the colder land masses (at, or near the poles) in the form of snow, this in turn lowered global sea level.

Figure 1 – Ice sheet coverage (white) at the last ice age maximum. Image adapted from Peltier & Fairbanks (2006).

At the height of the last ice age (glacial maximum) global sea levels were a remarkable 120 metres lower than today (Clark & Mix [2002], Peltier [2002]) . For comparison, at most there is around 65-70 metres worth of global sea level rise volume currently locked up in the ice sheets of Greenland and Antarctica, so the ancient ice sheets were much larger than the land-based ice which currently remains. The vast Laurentide ice sheet which once sat over modern-day Canada, was at least 3 kilometres thick at its highest point (Dyke [2002], Peltier [2004]), and contained around 80 metres of global sea level volume, which gives some idea of how enormous it was.

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by Elisa Wood, via Renewable Energy World

Blend a little new energy tech with a pinch of behavioral psychology and you’re bound to get something unexpected.

Consider what happened when New York City-based ThinkEco recently lead a four-month energy challenge for international industrial packaging company Greif.

The goal, of course, was to save energy. And that they achieved. Sixty employees in two Greif buildings cut their energy use 2,400 kWh over 10 weeks. But it was something else that made the challenge interesting, especially for businesses.

The story begins with the Ohio-based Greif already high on the sustainability charts.  The manufacturer, which had $4.2 billion in sales last year, reduced its energy use company-wide 10 percent between 2007 and 2010. Further, Greif plans to achieve a 15 percent cut in energy use by 2015 and 20 percent by 2020 (measured by per unit of production with 2008 as a base year). The company also has aggressive goals to reduce greenhouse gases and landfill waste.

Having done the obvious to save energy, Greif was in search of the innovative. Enter The Modlet, developed by energy efficiency tech company ThinkEco (Thank you, ThinkEco, for not calling it a plug-load demand-side management optimization solution.)

The modlet is a small box that you plug into an electrical outlet. It comes with a USB port that goes into your computer. This sets up a wireless signal that allows the modlet to talk to your computer.  You plug an appliance into the modlet, and then your computer screen shows the energy use of the appliance.

Most interesting, from your computer you can control the power flow into the appliance, and even schedule shut offs in advance. For example, you might set up a schedule to turn off power to devices not in use on nights and weekends.

Using the modlet, ThinkEco arranged a competition between two Greif buildings, with a team of 30 employees in each. The project stems from behavioral research that indicates people are more apt to save energy when comparing their performance against others – one of several ideas emerging in the study of how and why we use energy.

Modlets were handed out to the employees. The teams used the devices to uncover ways to save energy, achieve reductions, and build an energy IQ.  Members of each team shared a common web dashboard where they could monitor results and share ideas.

The teams performed well. But what surprised Mei Shibata, ThinkEco’s chief strategy officer, wasn’t the energy savings, but how employees went above and beyond what was required.

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