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Ecocities Emerging

INTERNATIONAL DAY OF CLIMATE ACTION
To support humanity's transition into the Ecozoic Era


Greetings,

Welcome to the October 2009 edition of Ecocities Emerging, an initiative of Ecocity Builders and the International Ecocity Conference Series.....

Since 1750, man has emmitted aprox 555,471,233,276 tonnes of carbon dioxide into the atmostphere. It comes from a website launched by the Oxford e-Research Centre called trillionthtonne.org
which allows you to track emissions in real time. Watching the digits fly by and imagining tonnes and tonnes and tonnes of gas being pumped out leaves quite an impression.
The trillionth tonne refers to the net emissions that would result in dangerous global temperature increases of more than 2 degrees C. The aim of the project is to highlight that it is cumulative emissions, not how quickly we bring emissions down, that really counts. Carbon dioxide hangs around in the atmosphere acting as a blanket pretty much indefinitely as far as human timescales are concerned.
Under a business-as-usual scenario, we are set to hit the trillionth tonne in March 2040. But slowing down emissions will push this date further into the future.



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Palm trees 'flourished' in Arctic - study

PALMS flourished in the Arctic during a brief sweltering period about 50 million years ago, according to a study that hints at big gaps in scientific understanding of modern climate change.
The Arctic "would have looked very similar to the vegetation we now see in Florida," Appy Sluijs of Utrecht University in the Netherlands said.
Evidence of palms has never been found so far north before.
The scientists, sampling sediments on a ridge on the seabed that was about 500km from the North Pole 53.5 million years ago, found pollens of ancient palms as well as of conifers, oaks, pecans and other trees.
"The presence of palm pollen implies that coldest month mean temperatures over the Arctic land masses were no less than 8C, the scientists, based in the Netherlands and Germany, wrote in the journal Nature Geoscience.....