Al Gore
The Good Shephard
by Earl Nissen
May 6, 2010

Did you enjoy Earth Day? Sure, a few people still fight over whether or not global climate change is a natural cycle, or exacerbated by mankind’s burning of fossil fuels, or some combination of both ideas. Whatever the cause, everyone agrees the Earth’s temperature is rising. We’ve seen the “before and after” pictures of the melted glaciers and the lonely photos of endangered polar bears.

Al Gore has been our “good shepherd” who sounded the alarm about environmental degradation in his 1992 best-selling book, Earth In Balance. After his defeat in the 2000 Presidential election, his slide show about the impending dangers of climate change were transformed into the 2006 movie An Inconvenient Truth. Last year he released a new book, Our Choice: A Plan to Solve the Climate Crisis, which details proactive actions people, institutions and governments can take to diminish and negate the increase in the planet’s temperature.

Hopefully you’ve already implemented some of the suggested actions from “An Inconvenient Truth” to lower your carbon footprint. What are they? Changing your incandescent light bulbs to compact fluorescent bulbs. Driving your car less and walking, biking, or carpooling more. Recycling your waste. Properly inflating your car tires to maximize the mileage. Using less hot water by installing a low-flow showerhead and washing more clothes in cold water. Avoid buying products with lots of packaging. Moving your thermostat up 2 degrees in the summer and down 2 degrees in winter. Planting a tree. Eating meatless meals at least once a week. Turning off appliances like computers and TVs and unplugging “vampire” energy machines like phone chargers and toaster ovens. And, oh yes, buying or viewing a copy of An Inconvenient Truth.

Did you know that if humans stopped producing excess carbon dioxide, the greenhouse gas which forms the atmospheric layer which bounces back the sun’s heat, then half of it would just fall to earth and be absorbed by the ocean, plants, and trees in 30 years? And power could be generated from tapping methane, another greenhouse gas, instead of just letting it float away? Black carbon, or soot, eventually drops to earth, but when it falls on glacier ice or the Arctic ice or the Antarctic ice it absorbs heat and speeds up melting. And those man-made chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) released by industrial processes can stay in the atmosphere for 50,000 years! Pointing out the sources of the atmospheric pollution, some of which is not even mentioned in the Kyoto Protocol, is an important step to hopefully creating less of them even sooner!

Here in the Coachella Valley we are leaders in renewable energy, which is anything not derived from oil, natural gas, or coal. We are prime property for solar power! Concentrated solar thermal systems employ sunlight to heat a liquid to power turbines, which spin and create electric current. Photovoltaic cells, housed in solar panels, absorb the sun’s photons and use that energy to break off electrons which are gathered into an electrical current. Many people take advantage of “passive solar” design to align windows to take in the sun’s heat and distribute it throughout their home. Our Choice even depicts the science fiction possibility of space-based solar reflector arrays which could orbit the planet, focus solar rays to a microwave transmitter, and beam the energy to the Earth’s surface.

Did you know that Earth’s potential wind resource is so large that it could produce 5 times the power consumed by the whole world from all other energy sources? The turbine blades on the wind farm towers are shaped like airplane wings. The curved shape of the blade cuts the air and increases the air velocity above it while also decreasing the air density around it. This low pressure creates the aerodynamic lift which pulls the blade around, causing the rotation. The only problem with wind energy is how to hook it to the planned “smart grid” so that drops in electricity in one area can be compensated for by other energy sources.

Our Choice covers other revolutionary measures to reduce climate change such as biochar sequestration, cogeneration of energy, a how-to for the “smart grid” to increase efficient distribution of energy, and the possibility of nuclear fusion. The eye-popping photos of the new science behind the proposed solutions are enhanced with easy-to-understand charts and graphs. Sure, climate change may not top your list for bedside reading! But it is Our Choice to learn about how to mitigate the current and perhaps irreversible crisis, or to ignore it.

Thanks to Al Gore and Rodale Inc. and Melcher Media for deleting the fear-mongering and scariness from the debate and explaining the sometimes grim and definitely necessary changes needed to keep Earth habitable for our kids, grandkids, and beyond.