Association of EnergyEngineers New York Chapter www.aeeny.org

September 2010 Newsletter Part 2

(AP Photo/Jeff Chiu) (Jeff Chiu - AP)

Cool Roofs

RONNEN LEVINSON, a scientist with Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, left, shows California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, second from left, a sample from the Cool Colors Project, a roof product that keeps buildings cool, at the exhibit hall at the United Nations World Environment Day 2005 in San Francisco, Wednesday, June 1, 2005. Also pictured are Anessa Begum Mirza, mayor of Ahmedabad, India, second from right, and David Cadman, mayor of Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, right.

'Green' Building Achieves Mainstream Popularity [From ASHRAE Industry NEWS, Sept 9 10]

ANN ARBOR, Mich.—Green building now accounts for nearly one-third of new construction in the U.S., according to McGraw-Hill Construction. The figure was only 2% in 2005. According to a National Public Radio report, the increase is primarily due to the popularity of the U.S. Green Building Council's LEED certification program. "They created a cachet around the LEED certification," says a University of Michigan professor who teaches a course in sustainable construction. "And they got people to want to do this as a marketing pitch—and I think that was really a stroke of genius to get a rather inertial industry to start to shift." ### Rock Snot Challenges California Water Utility [From ASPE Pipeline, Sept 9 10]

A TYPE OF ALGAE nicknamed “rock snot” because of its slippery appearance is infesting the Bear River and causing problems for the Placer County Water Agency, located northeast of Sacramento, because the algae clogs screens and filter beds, decreasing treatment efficiency and increasing water and energy use and costs. The algae can reduce filter runs as much as 20-30 hours and is forcing the utility to backwash filters around the clock in hot weather, which means the utility is purchasing energy at peak costs and using 25 percent more water to remove the algae from the filter media. According to an article in the Sacramento Bee, the algae’s potential effects on the environment, recreation, and plumbing are so severe that New Zealand recently adopted penalties of five years in prison and a $100,000 fine for anyone intentionally transporting it. ###

ADVERTISEMENT

The Superintendents Technical Association (aka the Supers Club) is the first technical society of multifamily building maintenance personnel. For free e-mail edition of monthly newsletter, visit our Web site: www.nycSTA.org.

Current NY Chapter AEE Sponsors:

The New York Chapter of AEE would like to thank our corporate sponsors who help underwrite our activities. Please take a moment to visit their websites and learn more about them: • Duane Morris LLP • Constellation Energy • Innoventive Power • Association for Energy Affordability • R3 Energy Management If you or your firm is interested in sponsoring the New York Chapter of AEE, please contact Jeremy Metz at [email protected].

Scientist: Wind, Solar Energy Is Future

UPI Aug 24, 2010 - A Nobel Prize-winning U.S. scientist says the world could soon enter an era where renewable wind and solar power will be the globe's main sources of energy. Walter Kohn, who shared the 1998 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, told a meeting of the American Chemical Society that total oil and natural gas production, which today provides about 60 percent of global energy consumption, is expected to peak about 10 to 30 years from now, followed by a rapid decline, an ACS release said Tuesday. But ongoing research and development of alternative energy could lead to a new era in human history in which two renewable sources - solar and wind - will become Earth's dominant contributors of energy, Kohn said. Global photovoltaic energy production increased by a factor of about 90 and wind energy by a factor of about 10 over the last 10 years, Kohn said, and he expects vigorous growth of these two effectively inexhaustible energies to continue. Kohn, from the University of California, Santa Barbara, cited students on his campus who spent their own funds to convert an athletic building to total solar power. "When it comes to providing leadership by young people in the area of energy conservation and energy efficiency and global warming - they are fantastic," he said. "It is a major social commitment for our times." ###

Digital Devices Deprive Brain of Needed Downtime By Matt Richtel, NYTimes, Aug 24 10

SAN FRANCISCO — It’s 1 p.m. on a Thursday and Dianne Bates, 40, juggles three screens. She listens to a few songs on her iPod, then taps out a quick e-mail on her iPhone and turns her attention to the high-definition television. Just another day at the gym. As Ms. Bates multitasks, she is also churning her legs in fast loops on an elliptical machine in a downtown fitness center. She is in good company. In gyms and elsewhere, people use phones and other electronic devices to get work done — and as a reliable antidote to boredom. Cellphones, which in the last few years have become full-fledged computers with high- speed Internet connections, let people relieve the tedium of exercising, the grocery store line, stoplights or lulls in the dinner conversation. The technology makes the tiniest windows of time entertaining, and potentially productive. But scientists point to an unanticipated side effect: when people keep their brains busy with digital input, they are forfeiting downtime that could allow them to better learn and remember information, or come up with new ideas. Jim Wilson/The New York Times Rhiana Maidenberg listened to an audio book on her mobile phone while watching television during a workout in San Francisco.

Ms. Bates, for example, might be clearer-headed if she went for a run outside, away from her devices, research suggests. At the University of California, San Francisco, scientists have found that when rats have a new experience, like exploring an unfamiliar area, their brains show new patterns of activity. But only when the rats take a break from their exploration do they process those patterns in a way that seems to create a persistent memory of the experience. The researchers suspect that the findings also apply to how humans learn. “Almost certainly, downtime lets the brain go over experiences it’s had, solidify them and turn them into permanent long-term memories,” said Loren Frank, assistant professor in the department of physiology at the university, where he specializes in learning and memory. He said he believed that when the brain was constantly stimulated, “you prevent this learning process.” At the University of Michigan, a study found that people learned significantly better after a walk in nature than after a walk in a dense urban environment, suggesting that processing a barrage of information leaves people fatigued. Even though people feel entertained, even relaxed, when they multitask while exercising, or pass a moment at the bus stop by catching a quick video clip, they might be taxing their brains, scientists say. “People think they’re refreshing themselves, but they’re fatiguing themselves,” said Marc Berman, a University of Michigan neuroscientist. Regardless, there is now a whole industry of mobile software developers competing to help people scratch the entertainment itch. Flurry, a company that tracks the use of apps, has found that mobile games are typically played for 6.3 minutes, but that many are played for much shorter intervals. One popular game that involves stacking blocks gets played for 2.2 minutes on average. Today’s game makers are trying to fill small bits of free time, said Sebastien de Halleux, a co-founder of PlayFish, a game company owned by the industry giant Electronic Arts. “Instead of having long relaxing breaks, like taking two hours for lunch, we have a lot of these micro-moments,” he said. Game makers like Electronic Arts, he added, “have reinvented the game experience to fit into micro-moments.” Many business people, of course, have good reason to be constantly checking their phones. But this can take a mental toll. Henry Chen, 26, a self-employed auto mechanic in San Francisco, has mixed feelings about his BlackBerry habits. “I check it a lot, whenever there is downtime,” Mr. Chen said. Moments earlier, he was texting with a friend while he stood in line at a bagel shop; he stopped only when the woman behind the counter interrupted him to ask for his order. Mr. Chen, who recently started his business, doesn’t want to miss a potential customer. Yet he says that since he upgraded his phone a year ago to a feature-rich BlackBerry, he can feel stressed out by what he described as internal pressure to constantly stay in contact. ###

A New York Hurricane: So Long, Subways From The Wall Street Journal, September 1, 2010

GREATER NY APPEARS LIKELY TO AVOID THE WORST OF HURRICANE EARL, churning up the East Coast. But the possibility of a major hurricane striking the area has long concerned local disaster specialists whose job it is to imagine, and prepare for, the worst. Were a major hurricane–a Category 3 or higher–to make a direct hit, those experts envision massive destruction in New York City and Long Island (here’s a YouTube video if you’re really curious). Worse, experts say they fear that no one would take warnings seriously, even with a storm headed their way. People in the region, especially those who’ve been through a bad nor’easter, think they know the worst of what Mother Nature can deliver. But even a minor hurricane that lands in the wrong spot at the wrong time would bring destruction far worse than the region has ever seen. “When people ask me what the biggest risks to New York are in a hurricane, I say ‘New Yorkers,’” said Nicholas K. Coch, a professor of Coastal Geology at Queens College. “They think they’re immune. They’ve survived terrorist attacks and blackouts, and they think hurricanes can’t happen here, but they’ve never seen what one can do.” Long Islanders who endured Hurricane Gloria in 1985 saw sustained winds of 100 miles per hour and recall widespread flooding, but they largely forget that the storm weakened before its arrival and made landfall at low tide–factors that spared the island from a severe storm surge. Coch points to the so-called Long Island Express of 1938 as a better indication of what could befall Long Island someday. A major hurricane could wash out the dunes of the barrier islands, long-island-portal.com A scene from the Long Island shoreline after a 1938 storm. bringing the Atlantic to the doorsteps—and living rooms–of Long Islanders more accustomed to seeing the Great South Bay outside their windows. The 1938 storm created the Shinnecock Inlet, decimated portions of the Hamptons, swept a 10,000-ton ship onto train tracks in New London, Conn. and turned downtown Providence, R.I. into a lake., according to “Sudden Sea,” a 2003 book on the storm by R.A. Scotti. To learn about New York City’s last direct hit from a severe storm, you’d need to look all the way back to 1893, when a so-called “West Indian Cyclone” carried sailing ships to Sixth Avenue, created a river on Canal Street that briefly connected the East River and the Hudson, swept much of Coney Island into the sea and entirely destroyed a barrier beach called Hog Island that once lay south of the Rockaways in Queens. When–not if, say experts–it happens again, a storm will find both New York and Long Island far more populated than the last time. In the city, a hurricane’s storm surge would cause sudden, extensive flooding, submerging much of Lower Manhattan and crippling the subway system and tunnels. The powerful winds would uproot thousands of trees, down power lines and send debris flying in all corners of the city. And those winds could shatter windows on skyscrapers, especially in the taller buildings that would bear the brunt of powerful gusts that occur at higher elevations. The canyons of Manhattan could magnify the winds, and would be a deadly place for anyone caught beneath the raining glass. Flooding may be more extensive in Brooklyn and Queens, and not just in Brighton Beach and the Rockaways. The city’s official map of hurricane evacuation zones warns that JFK and LaGuardia would see serious flooding in even a Category 2 storm; a Category 3 could send several hundred thousand residents from Dyker Heights and Canarsie, East New York and Laurelton in search of higher ground. So would people living in Mott Haven and Hunts Point in the Bronx, in East Harlem, and in coastal parts of Staten Island. Many of those neighborhoods are poor and have large minority populations, raising the troubling possibility of a Katrina-like scenario where the disenfranchised endure a disproportionate amount of suffering Other comparisons to Hurricane Katrina are hard to ignore. Katrina, the most costly natural disaster in U.S. history, caused insured losses of more than $40 billion in 2005. AIR Worldwide, a firm that models disaster scenarios for insurance companies, has said that a repeat of the Long Island Express would cost $33 billion if it happened today. In the most dire projections, a direct hit on New York City could cost upwards of $100 billion. The impact would be felt long after flood waters recede. Coch predicts that the salt water in the subway would corrode the switches and cripple the system for months or years, and disable much of the communications infrastructure in Lower Manhattan. “In 1893, Wall Street was cut off from the rest of the country when the telegraph lines went down,” he said. “Imagine what would happen now when the fiber optic cable failed.” Copyright 2008 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.

His Corporate Strategy: The Scientific Method By Andrew Pollack, NYTimes, Sept 4 10

Sandy Huffaker for The New York Times J. Craig Venter is moving past the human genome — For example, by designing algae that could replace fossil fuels

SAN DIEGO - The scientific rebel J. Craig Venter created headlines — and drew comparisons to Dr. Frankenstein — when he announced in May that his team had created what, with a bit of stretching, could be called the first synthetic living creature. Two months later, only a smattering of reporters and local dignitaries bothered to show up at a news conference to hear Dr. Venter talk about a new greenhouse that his company, Synthetic Genomics, had built outside its headquarters here to conduct research. The contrast in the fanfare reflects the enormous gap between Dr. Venter’s stunning scientific achievements and his business aspirations. Dr. Venter, now 63, made his name as a gene hunter. He was co-founder of a company, Celera Genomics, that nearly left the federally funded Human Genome Project in the dust in the race to determine the complete sequence of DNA in human chromosomes. He garnered admiration for some path-breaking ideas but also the enmity of some scientific rivals who viewed him as a publicity seeker who was polluting a scientific endeavor with commercialism. Now Dr. Venter is turning from reading the genetic code to an even more audacious goal: writing it. At Synthetic Genomics, he wants to create living creatures — bacteria, algae or even plants — that are designed from the DNA up to carry out industrial tasks and displace the fuels and chemicals that are now made from fossil fuels. “Designing and building synthetic cells will be the basis of a new industrial revolution,” Dr. Venter says. “The goal is to replace the entire petrochemical industry.” His star power has attracted $110 million in investment so far, in addition to hundreds of millions of dollars in research financing, making Synthetic Genomics among the wealthiest companies in the new field known as synthetic biology. “If you think of an iconic, Steve Jobs character in the life sciences field, he comes to mind,” says Steve Jurvetson of the venture capital firm Draper Fisher Jurvetson, which invested in Synthetic Genomics. But the path is long, with no guarantee of success. And as with DNA sequencing, Dr. Venter is stirring some unease in the synthetic biology field. Some competitors say designing entire cells is too far-fetched and that less flashy companies are ahead of Synthetic Genomics. “I don’t know how many decades his funders have given him,” says Jay Keasling, co- founder of Amyris Inc., which is trying to produce biofuels and a malaria drug by modifying existing organisms, not by creating entirely new ones. Moreover, Dr. Venter’s track record as a businessman is mixed. While Celera succeeded in sequencing the human genome, it failed to make a business of selling the genomic data, and Dr. Venter was fired by the president of Celera’s parent company, with whom he had had many disagreements. What really drives him, Dr. Venter and those close to him say, is the desire for scientific accomplishments, publications and recognition, and for the Nobel Prize that still eludes him. Business is just a means to a scientific end. “Craig is just a hopeless businessman,” Alan G. Walton, a venture capitalist and a friend of Dr. Venter, says only half-jokingly. Yet Dr. Venter has a history of defying skeptics, and many people are betting that he will succeed this time as well. Dr. Walton, in fact, invested personally in Synthetic Genomics, and his venture firm, Oxford Bioscience Partners, recently wanted to sink a hefty sum into the company but was turned down when Dr. Venter found other investors offering better terms. Exxon Mobil is giving Synthetic Genomics $300 million in research financing to design algae that could be used to produce gasoline and diesel fuel. (The new greenhouse will be used for that research.) BP has invested in the company itself, turning to Synthetic Genomics to study microbes that might help turn coal deposits into cleaner-burning natural gas. Another investor, the Malaysian conglomerate Genting, wants to improve oil output from its palm tree plantations, working toward what its chief executive calls a “gasoline tree.” And in a deal expected to be announced this week, the pharmaceutical giant Novartis will work with Dr. Venter to synthesize influenza virus strains as a potentially faster way to make flu vaccines. Synthetic Genomics is also exploring the use of algae to produce food oils and, possibly, other edible products. Dr. Venter muses, “What if we can make algae taste like beef?” SCIENTISTS have long been able to insert foreign genes into organisms. Human insulin is manufactured for diabetics by bacteria containing the human insulin gene. Bacterial genes are put into corn plants to give them resistance to herbicides and insects. But until now, genetic engineering has been mainly a process of cutting and pasting a gene from one organism to another. Only one or a few genes are spliced into a cell, and considerable trial and error is required before a gene functions properly in its new host. Synthetic biology aims to allow more extensive changes, and in a more efficient and predictable way. That would make engineering a cell more like designing a bridge or a computer chip, enabling biologists to put prefabricated components together in different combinations. In the approach toward which Dr. Venter is driving, engineers would specify the entire genetic code of a cell — essentially the software that runs the cell — on computers, making design changes as if on a word processor. They would then press the “print” button, so to speak, and the DNA would be manufactured from its chemical components. The synthetic DNA would then be transplanted into an existing cell, where it would “boot up” and take control of the cell’s operations. This is essentially what Dr. Venter’s team announced in May. It synthesized the million- letter genome of a simple bacterium, the longest synthetic piece of DNA produced so far, and transplanted it into a slightly different type of bacterium, which then began to replicate. A critic called the synthetic creature Synthia, a name that has started to stick. Reaction was swift. “We heard from the pope and the president the same day,” Dr. Venter said. President Obama immediately asked his bioethics commission to examine the potential benefits and risks of synthetic biology. The main concerns are bio-terror and bio-error — the deliberate or inadvertent creation of organisms that are toxic or ecologically harmful. The president’s action seemed to confirm concerns in the field that Dr. Venter’s bold claims would stir public fear and lead to burdensome regulation. “The only regulation we need is of my colleague’s mouth,” says Dr. Keasling of Amyris. The Vatican, somewhat surprisingly, cautiously praised the work as a potential way of treating diseases, saying it did not regard the synthesis of DNA as the creation of life. Dr. Venter concedes that he was not creating life from scratch, because an existing cell was used to house the synthetic DNA. But he argues that it was still accurate to call this a synthetic cell. Because the synthetic DNA took control of producing the cell’s components, replicated cells would gradually lose characteristics of the original host cell. Dr. Venter says that he has long supported and paid for research into the ethics and regulation of the field and that there should be restrictions on letting synthetic cells loose in the environment. Regardless of the work’s ethical implications, some experts say it will have limited industrial use. Synthia’s creation took 15 years and cost $40 million. The synthetic bacterium is not robust enough for industrial production of chemicals. Most important, the synthetic genome was nearly a replica of the genome from an existing bacterium. The truth is, scientists do not yet know enough to design a genome from scratch. Even if they could, it would be overkill, says George Church, a Harvard genetics researcher who has helped start two companies that are modifying organisms to produce fuel. He says that only a few genetic changes are needed. “One of the things that is missing,” he says of Dr. Venter’s work, “is a clear articulation of why you would want to change the whole genome.” Dr. Venter says his company will use more limited genetic engineering for its first algae- based biofuels. But he says the ability to synthesize DNA is improving rapidly. And while the first synthetic genome had “plagiarized nature,” he says scientists will eventually learn how to design genomes. Exxon is also hopeful the technique will be useful. “It can be applied to Synthia or it can be applied to biofuels,” says Emil Jacobs, a top research executive at Exxon, who says that it will nonetheless take years and billions of dollars before algae will be producing meaningful amounts of fuel.

AN indifferent student in his youth, Dr. Venter spent his time surfing and skirt-chasing, according to his 2007 autobiography, “A Life Decoded.” But harrowing experiences as a medic in the Vietnam War instilled in him a sense of purpose. After returning from Vietnam, he progressed rapidly from community college to a doctorate in physiology and pharmacology from the University of California, San Diego. Eventually, he joined the National Institutes of Health, where he developed a way to find genes without waiting for the genome to be sequenced. In 1992, venture capitalists set up a new company, Human Genome Sciences, to commercialize the technology. But Dr. Venter, reluctant to give up academic freedom, did not join the business, instead starting a nonprofit research institute that supplied data to the company. The arrangement fell apart after a few years. Then came his up-and-down experience with Celera. It was later revealed that the genome it had sequenced was mainly Dr. Venter’s own. He came away from the experience wealthy. He estimates that his net worth is in the tens of millions of dollars, even after giving more than $100 million in Human Genome Sciences and Celera stock to endow his research organization, which is now called the J. Craig Venter Institute. He has a 5,000-square-foot house overlooking the Pacific, a 95-foot yacht, a Tesla electric car, fancy motorcycles and other toys to satisfy a lust for adventure that is as outsize as his lust for science. Dr. Venter said he started Synthetic Genomics in 2005 mainly to fund the research on the synthetic cell. “I think it’s comical that I keep being referred to as a businessman,” he said. “What I’ve been successful in is finding alternate ways to fund research.” Hamilton Smith, his longtime research partner and a Nobel laureate, co-founded Synthetic Genomics with Mr. Venter. Also involved were two friends who are now directors of the company: David Kiernan, a Washington lawyer whom Dr. Venter met through sailing, and Juan Enriquez, who was an international affairs researcher at Harvard until meeting Dr. Venter at a New Year’s gathering 15 years ago. “I saw this guy sitting off in a corner by himself,” Mr. Enriquez says. “I went and talked to him and disappeared on my wife for the rest of the evening.” Mr. Enriquez changed the focus of his research to life sciences and started a venture capital firm that participated in the first $30 million round of investment in Synthetic Genomics. Half of that $30 million came from Alfonso Romo Garza, a Mexican industrialist. Two other rounds followed. As part of the most recent round, Life Technologies, a leading manufacturer of laboratory equipment and chemicals, invested $15 million for a 2.9 percent stake, giving Synthetic Genomics an imputed valuation of over $500 million. Dr. Venter says he now owns about 15 percent of the company. The Malaysian conglomerate and its chief executive, K. T. Lim, together own nearly 20 percent, making them the largest holders, Dr. Venter says. Synthetic Genomics has about 130 employees. But much of its research, including the development of the synthetic cell, is done at the J. Craig Venter Institute. Synthetic Genomics pays for about 25 of the institute’s roughly 300 researchers, and has rights to their results. The rest of the institute’s funding comes mainly from federal grants and its endowment. Dr. Venter, who turns 64 in October, has not worked directly with test tubes or gene sequencers for decades. He only charts the course and steers. “He knows exactly what we’re doing every day,” says Dr. Smith, who still does work in the lab. “Craig tends to come in when things get stalled and points us in the right direction.” Mr. Romo, who is on the board of Synthetic Genomics, says the number of deals the company has negotiated “is proof that he is a good manager.” Still, there have been efforts to install a No. 2 person to handle day-to-day business. That has not proved easy. Joel McComb, a General Electric veteran, served as chief operating officer for only a few months this year. Aristides Patrinos, a former Department of Energy official who is president of Synthetic Genomics, works mostly on government affairs.

FOR now, Dr. Venter is where he wants to be. With most of the company’s money coming from corporate partners rather than from impatient venture capitalists, he says he is under less pressure to deliver in the short term. And he says he is in greater control of his own destiny than in previous business ventures. “Science is the business right now,” he said. “If the science works, the business works, and vice versa.” ###

Johann Hari: How Much Proof Do the Global Warming Deniers Need? Everything the climate scientists said would happen - with their pesky graphs and studies and computers - is coming to pass. This is proving the hottest year ever The Independent, August 2010

THANK GOD man-made global warming was proven to be a hoax. Just imagine what the world might have looked like now if those conspiring scientists had been telling the truth. No doubt NASA would be telling us that this year is now the hottest since humans began keeping records. The weather satellites would show that even when heat from the sun significantly dipped earlier this year, the world still got hotter. Russia's vast forests would be burning to the ground in the fiercest drought they have ever seen, turning the air black in Moscow, killing 15,000 people, and forcing foreign embassies to evacuate. Because warm air holds more water vapour, the world's storms would be hugely increasing in intensity and violence – drowning one fifth of Pakistan, and causing giant mudslides in China. The world's ice sheets would be sloughing off massive melting chunks four times the size of Manhattan. The cost of bread would be soaring across the world as heat shrivelled the wheat crops. The increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere would be fizzing into the oceans, making them more acidic and so killing 40 per cent of the phytoplankton that make up the irreplaceable base of the oceanic food chain. The denialists would be conceding at last that everything the climate scientists said would happen – with their pesky graphs and studies and computers – came to pass. This is all happening today, except for that final stubborn step. It's hard to pin any one event on man-made global warming: there were occasional freak weather events before we started altering the atmosphere, and on their own, any of these events could be just another example. But they are, cumulatively, part of a plain pattern where extreme weather is occurring "with greater frequency and in many cases with greater intensity" as the temperature soars, as the US National Climatic Data Centre puts it. This is exactly what climate scientists have been warning us man-made global warming will look like, to the letter. Ashen-faced, they add that all this is coming after less than one degree of global warming since the Industrial Revolution. We are revving up for as much as five degrees more this century. Yet as the evidence of global warming becomes ever clearer, the momentum to stop it has died. The Copenhagen climate summit evaporated, Barack Obama has given up on passing any climate change legislation, Hu Jintao is heaving even more coal, David Cameron has shot his huskies, and even sweet liberal Canada now has a government determined to pioneer a fuel – tar sands – that causes three times more warming than oil. True, the victims are starting to see the connections. The Russian President, Dmitri Medvedev, had been opposed to meaningful action on global warming until he found the smoke-choked air in the Kremlin hard to breathe. But if we wait until every leader can taste the effects of warming in their mouths, the damage will be irreparable. Given the stakes, the reasons why so many people still refuse to accept the evidence can seem oddly trivial. A common one is: "It snowed a lot in the US and Britain last year. Where was your warming then, eh?" But scientific theories are based on patterns, not individual events. You might know a 90-year-old woman who has smoked a pack of cigarettes every day of her life, and is totally healthy. (I do.) It doesn't disprove the theory that smoking causes lung cancer. In the same way, one heavy snowfall doesn't prove anything if it is part of a wider overall pattern of dramatic warming. And that snow probably was. While it snowed a lot in a few places, there were at the very same time harsher, more bitter droughts in many more places – making it globally the fifth hottest winter ever recorded, according to the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. (All the others were in the past decade). And that winter is your punchline proof that warming isn't happening? But the broader public mood, smeared like sun-screen over us all, isn't active denial. No – it's the desire to endlessly postpone this issue for another day. In 1848, a 25-year-old man called Phineas Gage was working on constructing the American railroads. It was his job to lay explosives to clear rocks out of the way – but one day his explosive went off too soon, and a huge metal rod went through his skull and out the other side. Amazingly, he survived – but his personality changed. Suddenly, he was incapable of thinking about the future. The idea of restraining himself was impossible to grasp. If he had an urge, he would act on it at once. He could only ever live in an eternal present. As a civilisation, we are beginning to look like Phineas Gage on a planetary scale. Yet scattered among us there is a fascinating group of people who are offering a path to safety. Every summer since 2006, ordinary British citizens have built impromptu camps next to some of the most environmentally destructive sites in Britain, and taken direct action to shut their pollution down. So far, it has worked: they played a crucial role in the cancellation of the third runway at Heathrow and a big new coal power station at Kingsnorth. That's how earlier this week I found myself on a high wooden siege tower in a camp in the Scottish hills, staring down across a moat towards the glistening, empty offices of the Royal Bank of Scotland. You own this bank: 84 per cent of it belongs to the taxpayer after the bailouts. Yet it is using your money to endanger you, by financing the most environmentally destructive behaviour on earth, like burning the tar sands. The protesters chose to come here democratically – everything at the climate camps is done by discussion and consensus – because they have a better idea. Why not turn it into a Green Investment Bank, transforming Britain into a global hub for wind, solar and wave power? Why not go from promoting misery across the world to being a beacon of sanity? So the protesters risked arrest in marching on RBS's offices because they know the stakes. As Professor Tim Flannery, one of the world's leading climate scientists, explains: "My great fear is that within the next few decades – it could be next year, or it could be in 50 years, we don't know exactly when – we will trap enough heat close to the surface to our planet to precipitate a collapse, or partial collapse, of a major ice shelf... I have friends who work on the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, and they say [when a collapse happens] you'll hear it in Sydney... Sea levels would rise pretty much instantaneously, certainly over a few months. We don't know how much it would rise. It could be 10 centimeters, or a metre. We will have begun a retreat from our coasts... Once you have started that process, we wouldn't know when the next part of the ice sheet would collapse, we don't know whether sea level will stabilise. There's no point of retreat where you can safely go back to... I doubt whether our global civilisation could survive such a blow, particularly the uncertainty it would bring." Nature doesn't follow political fashion. Global warming may not be hot today, but the planet is – hotter than ever. When you stare out over the wave of Weather of Mass Destruction we are unleashing, who looks crazy – the protesters, or the people who have yet to join them? ###

NY Chapter AEE Board Members David Ahrens [email protected] 718- 677-9077x110 Michael Bobker [email protected] 646-660-6977 Robert Berninger [email protected] 212- 639-6614

Jack Davidoff [email protected] 718-963-2556 Fredric Goldner [email protected] 516- 481-1455 Bill Hillis [email protected] 845-278-5062 Dick Koral [email protected] 718- 552-1161 John Leffler [email protected] 212-868-4660x218 John Leffler [email protected] Robert Meier [email protected] 212-328-3360 Ryan Merkin [email protected] 212-564-5800 x 16 Jeremy Metz [email protected] 212-338-6405 Asit Patel [email protected] 718- 292-6733x205 Dave Westman [email protected] 212-460-6588

Board Members Emeritus Paul Rivet [email protected] George Kritzler [email protected] Alfred Greenberg [email protected] 914-422-4387 George Birman (RIP) Timothy Daniels [email protected] 212- 312-3770 Chris Young [email protected] 914-442- 4387

Past Presidents

John Nettleton, Placido Impollonia, Mike Bobker (2003-05), Asit Patel (2000-03), Thomas Matonti (1998-99), Jack Davidoff (1997-98), Fred Goldner (1993-96), Peter Kraljic (1991-92), George Kritzler (1989-90), Alfred Greenberg (1982-89), Murray Gross (1981-82), Herbert Kunstadt (1980-81), Sheldon Liebowitz (1978-80),

FAIR USE NOTICE: This site contains copyrighted material the use of which has not always been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. We are making such material available in our efforts to advance understanding of environmental, economic, scientific, and technical issues. We believe this constitutes a 'fair use' of any such copyrighted material as provided for in section 107 of the US Copyright Law. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, the material on this site is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. For more information go to: http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml. If you wish to use copyrighted material from this site for purposes of your own that go beyond 'fair use', you must obtain permission from the copyright owner.