Recent data suggest that the oceans have cooled slightly in recent years. But this doesn’t necessarily imply that the planet is not warming. Instead, it illustrates how poorly we understand the deep oceanic thermal environment – we don’t know where the heat that should be there is going.

Apparently we still don’t understand cloud cover is terms of net planetary temperature. We don’t know how quickly oceans can radiate heat into space. We don’t know what’s happening, and at a time when we really need some help from our models.

For a long time Antarctica has been thought to be cooling over time, and this has confounded some of the science of global warming, as well as providing easy ammunition to those who require declaratory yes/no answers to the questions of climate change.

In 2007 the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change stated that “Current global model studies project that the Antarctic ice sheet will remain too cold for widespread surface melting and is expected to gain in mass due to increased snowfall.”

Now it appears that Antarctica has been warming all along, as a recent paper from Nature (subscription required) shows:

Here we show that significant warming extends well beyond the Antarctic Peninsula to cover most of West Antarctica, an area of warming much larger than previously reported.
- Warming of the Antarctic ice-sheet surface since the 1957 International Geophysical Year

Joe Romm at Climate Progress has been on top of this for a long time, and last month wrote a penetrating summary:

The AP reports on new data to be presented today at the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union:

More than 2 trillion tons of land ice in Greenland, Antarctica and Alaska have melted since 2003, according to new NASA satellite data that show the latest signs of what scientists say is global warming.

This staggering ice loss is all the more worrisome because it was not predicted by the IPCC’s climate models. As Penn State climatologist Richard Alley said in March 2006, the ice sheets appear to be shrinking “100 years ahead of schedule.” In 2001, the IPCC thought that neither Greenland nor Antarctica would lose significant mass by 2100. They both already are.
- Two trillion tons of land ice lost since 2003, rate of Greenland summer ice loss triples 2007 record

He offers as his final word in this latest story on the Nature report:

So notwithstanding the amateur meteorologist-deniers who sometimes comment on this blog and elsewhere about how cold it is outside right now, the whole damn planet is warming and melting — even in places that are much, much colder than anywhere in the continental United States.
- Antarctica has warmed significantly over past 50 years, revisited

In many ways the Earth is still a great mystery to us, it seems. But whether it has been the stranger to us or whether we have been the stranger here, is another question. The lesson here is to slow down in our explanations, and speed up with our solutions. We don’t have the models to show us exactly what’s happening and how. All we have is the damage occurring before our bewildered eyes.

The Economist has a special report on the state of the world’s oceans. Their condition is perilous, and so perhaps is ours.

Surface acidification caused by carbon dioxide interaction is rapidly killing the coral reefs, which may be gone within a few short decades. This, says the publication’s Leader summarizing the report, “would be the end of the rainforests of the seas.”

There are plenty of other ills besetting the oceans. There’s the melting ice. And the continent-sized mass of discarded plastic swirling in the Pacific. And where have all the fish gone?

Each of these changes is a catastrophe. Together they make for something much worse. Moreover, they are happening alarmingly fast—in decades, rather than the aeons needed for fish and plants to adapt. Many are irreversible. It will take tens of thousands of years for ocean chemistry to return to a condition similar to its pre-industrial state of 200 years ago, says Britain’s most eminent body of scientists, the Royal Society. Many also fear that some changes are reaching thresholds after which further changes may accelerate uncontrollably. No one fully understands why the cod have not returned to the Grand Banks off Canada, even after 16 years of no fishing. No one quite knows why glaciers and ice shelves are melting so fast, or how a meltwater lake on the Greenland ice sheet covering six square kilometres could drain away in 24 hours, as it did in 2006. Such unexpected events make scientists nervous.

What can be done to put matters right? The sea, the last part of the world where man acts as a hunter-gatherer—as well as bather, miner, dumper and general polluter—needs management, just as the land does. Economics demands it as much as environmentalism, for the world squanders money through its poor stewardship of the oceans. Bad management and overfishing waste $50 billion a year, says the World Bank.

Yet solutions to the situation appear to lie outside the reach of economics, or even global public policy. The situation may be advanced far beyond any solutions short of full-on disaster management.

Yet the mass extinction, however remote, that should be concentrating minds is that of mankind. It is not wise to dismiss it where CO2 emissions, the other great curse of the oceans, are concerned. In the long run, the seas are the great sink for nearly all carbon. They may be able to help avert some global warming—for instance, by providing storage for CO2, by providing energy through wave or tidal power, or by somehow taking carbon out of the atmosphere faster than at present. They will, however, continue to change and be changed as long as man continues to put so much carbon into the atmosphere.

So far, the rising sea levels, dying corals and spreading algal blooms are only minor distractions for most people. A few more hurricanes like Katrina, a few dramatic floods in the coastal cities of the rich world, perhaps even the shutting down of a part of the world’s great conveyor belt of ocean currents, especially if it were the one that warms up western Europe: any of these would catch the attention of policymakers. The trouble is that by then it may be too late.

The argument for agribusiness is that larger operations can produce food more efficiently, but what if part of the goodness of our food comes from the goodness of the people who grow it? What if bringing the efficiencies of modern corporate methods has poisoned the land and made the crops not worth eating?

The singer Dave Matthews spoke at Farm Aid 2008 last month, and gave a beautifully warm yet penetratingly logical description – in 3 minutes – of how the corporate approach to farming has been destroying the nutritive quality of our food as well as our ecological habitat. And he explained why this happens.

Take a listen:

Farm Aid 2008 – Dave Matthews Speaks Out

I love the way he delineates in 3 minutes the values that will have to prevail in the economics of sustainability. He talks about money, and how money works regardless of how we are – how, in fact, money cannot care, is philosophically opposed to caring about us.

This quality of money serves useful purposes in bringing a leveling logic to the play of free markets – but it has proved disastrous, in fact fatal, when applied to the food we eat.

This model has failed, says Matthews, because the informing dynamic is, how can we make as much “food” as we can, as cheaply as we can, regardless of what it tastes like, regardless of what it does to our children, regardless of if it destroys the land in the process.

The difference between this mentality and the mentality of the small farmers who feed their children and their neighbors the food they grow, and who work to preserve the land, is part of the answer to the ecosystem’s distress. The factory farms destroy the planet, because that’s what they do, says Matthews, and the small farmers can save it, because that’s what they do, naturally.

One of the frustrating things about changing to a sustainable practice model is finding ways to measure the total impact of your actions. The World Business Council for Sustainable Development, after two years of work, has just launched a framework for measuring this very thing.

The Measuring Impact Framework is designed to “help companies measure and assess the impact of their business
activities on economic and broader development goals wherever they
operate.”

The Framework includes: the business case for measuring impacts; a four-step methodology to identify, measure, assess and manage impacts; and a spreadsheet helper for organizations to make their assessments.

A new report from WWF-UK warns that efforts to extract so-called “unconventional oil” from shales and sands in Canada and Colorado will produce a far heavier carbon footprint than existing oil recovery systems – thus hastening, in the effort to gain the last drop of oil, the dangers of climate change.

Tar sand and shale extraction increases emissions as much as eightfold, while also destroying vast areas of forest. Scientists have predicted that, if fully exploited, the emissions from these oil sources could accelerate climate change to levels that would threaten a mass species extinction.

The Environmental News Network, analyzing the report, notes the risks to investors of unconventional oil:

Scraping the bottom of the barrel outlines potential risks to investors
from the high capital costs of sand and shale to oil projects, looming
regulatory restrictions, the likelihood of litigation, environmental
liabilities from tailing ponds and restoration requirements and
reliance on unproven technologies such as carbon capture and storage.
Investors could end up with stranded assets
- Scraping the bottom of the oil barrel a significant new climate risk

WWF (formerly known as the World Wildlife Fund) and CFS are calling for a global halt to the licensing of new unconventional oil and for strong legislation, similar to the Emissions Standard currently in force in California, to be introduced in North America and Europe, prohibiting the sale of fuels with higher emissions than traditional oil.

Is government the friend of sustainability or its enemy? The most generous opinion on this matter from sources I consult is that government is slow, and this alone renders it inadequate to the emergency needs of the current global eco-decay.

Politics is supposed to be the discourse out of which government receives its consensual thrust forward, but there is an animal called Party Politics, and this, as we have seen most acutely in the last eight years, has had a tendency to strangle the discourse of the nation, acting as a deterrent to innovation.

The power of the political parties to get things done has thus been shown to have its limitations at the point where all their members become entrenched at the party line.

Enter now the disruptive force of Senator Obama, whose adherents at any rally are notable for their diversity, sprawling across the whole demographic spectrum of America.

Disruptive technologies are what we champion here at Hunter and Associates, and what we love to play with. The Web itself is the great disruptive platform, subverting all the cozy ways that used to be, and that don’t work anymore, and replacing them with better ways for humans to do things.

Disruption of the man-made status quo is a natural event that comes with life, and danger arises when the man-made so refuses to change that it distorts the natural systems themselves – the principal platform of which to most of our concerns is planet Earth itself of course. It is the distortion of the natural by the willful that needs to be disrupted.

So disruption is always worth a generous look, to see if change for the better may be coming. In the worlds of government, politics, party politics, and stagnant policy, a solo change agent like Obama promises much that may redound to the good of all.

Obama is a disruptive force like any other disruptive technology. And as Bob Morris points out talking in the same terms of analogy, disruptive technologies don’t just change systems, they replace them:

The key point about disruptive innovations is that they do not co-exist with what came before it, but rather that they replace it.
– Obama campaign as “disruptive innovation”

For Obama may not simply come in and deploy different policies within the same old order; the old order itself may be swept away, not so much from anything Obama does as by what he stands for in terms of change and possibility. After Obama, and the energy released from the numerous choke points loosened – and the new wealth and power represented by this unleashed energy – will the old order find any purchase anywhere anymore?

So let me be clear that while this piece of writing will stand nicely as the Hunter and Associates formal endorsement of Senator Obama for the next President of the United States of America, this viewpoint is not about him, the man, as opposed to any others, men or women. This is about change from a change agent – any change agent, of any stripe – as opposed to a system grown so obsolete that it costs increasingly more to sustain it every day than it will ever produce in true new wealth again.

The system I refer to is party politics, which stifles debate, and which obscures the underlying influence of interest money, and which increasingly seems to crush any scruple of principle.

A change agent such as Obama seems the greatest force imaginable still to exist within a party. The alternative is the further disruption of a rise of independents, with all their random mutational combinations, and the Web could enable this easily with current technologies.

Obama, then.

We delude ourselves when we believe that thought occurs in our brains, and ignore the knowledge of reality that speaks directly to our hearts. And so, since this IS a formal endorsement, what better than a taste of hope to end this piece:

For boomers Obama represents the last chance to see in their lifetimes the different world they wanted to create that was stolen from them by the assassinations of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King.
– McCain is a Lousy Candidate: He Will Be Clobbered in November

How does a business start developing sustainable business practices, and go green?

I attended the first annual UT Sustainable Business Summit last month, and I learned two surprising things. One is that when you start to turn your company towards sustainable practices, the hardest thing to do is to talk about it.

Why? Because unless a company starts green, no company can just “go green” overnight. So it’s very easy to become a target when you announce some of the things you’re doing as a first effort along the way. I made some comments about this here: Sustainability Gets Weak Publicity

The other thing I took away from the Summit is that developing and instituting sustainable practices can be a very complicated process.

So going green is stabbed with a two-pronged fork: the complicated and slow effort required, and the low odds of getting any positive encouragement along the way.

All of this speaks to me about the need for better green communication. It’s clear that the old stereotype of good guys being all green and bad guys being all toxic is just not useful – it never was completely accurate, and it certainly doesn’t reflect the situation today.

Many corporations are quietly trying to “green up” the way they do things. And they’ve learned the hard way not to brag about it. What I want to do is help them brag about it.

We all want to have a sustainable way of life, on a sustainable planet, in sustainable markets, making sustainable profits. All of these factors have to work together. And the messages about how to achieve this need to be communicated.

Look for more here on the business of green business as Hunter and Associates starts to develop better ways to talk about sustainability.

A sustainable business begins with your customers. If you don’t have customers it doesn’t matter how eco-positive your business model is. You’ll never get the chance to make your contribution back to the Earth without having some action to drive your sustainable practices.

When we talk about having a sustainable business, the first defining element should be having a customer base that will endure for a long time. How about customer loyalty that lasts for, say, seven generations? That would be a sustainable business.

I just achieved this breakthrough in my thinking from talking with Synthia Smith, business consultant and executive coach with the Mitra Group. She pointed out that my desire to build a sustainable business is not separate from the desire to have a business that continually renews itself.

The goal of today’s company is to survive the great changes of the modern world, and a large piece of both the problem and the solution at the heart of these changes lies in the fickle and daunting challenges of modern customer service. Getting new customers used to be the principal method of business growth, and it still is for many companies, but there are better ways now. The new advice is to create new markets, blue-ocean markets, and for this task existing customers can be perfect.

If you do have customers they in turn will force you eventually to become an eco-positive company. Customer opinion over time will force you into sustainable business practices, and not mere replacement measures but eventually enhancement practices that enrich the environment.

To create a business that will last for hundreds of years you could be a privileged corporation like the East India Company, or you can buy the advantages of sovereign assistance by bribing your regulators. But eventually the resource you’re selling must run out, or the platform for all commerce starts to fail as its ice-caps melt, and the voters start to get wise to the shortfalls in your accounting.

Then the community – the folk – through political administration will sweep you away along with your abettors. Much smarter in the long run is to get on the good side of these ordinary citizens. Cheating the system or the people is a short-term strategy. Long term, which is what every business may as well be, and what every sustainable business can be – long terms calls for customer loyalty.

The 2008 UT Sustainable Business Summit illustrated first hand the two biggest surprises for any business going green. First, transforming business procedures into sustainable procedures is surprisingly complicated. And secondly, when you do start making the transition, you’ll find it surprisingly difficult to talk about.

It quickly became apparent, after listening to some of the speakers and panel questions, that the mainstream idea of bad guys on one side and green guys on the other is not a realistic picture anymore. The Whole Foods keynote speaker on Friday evening, Lee Matecko, restated company founder John Mackey’s view that setting up the good guys against the bad guys is a false dichotomy, and gets in the way of dealing with the true complexities of sustainable practices.

Good guys versus bad guys

Let it be said that the original impulses to turn green started to resonate in corporate boardrooms largely because of activists exposing embarrassing truths and legislatures tightening regulations, and this will always be the underlying stick. There are carrots, however, and some of them are starting to work.

The keynote speaker from General Electric, Jeff Renaud, made it clear that GE’s green initiatives are part of a set of goals that include increased revenues. The company is learning, and teaching, that green business can turn a profit. Even with clear numbers on the table however, the old ways take time to overturn, and ROI expressed in any timespan longer than one year is a tough hurdle.

Institutionally too, the process of changing a company’s ways is not a simple matter. For one thing, companies that make large impacts on the Earth are themselves large, with multiple thousands of employees spread throughout the world in numerous clusters of hierarchy and focus. Internal communications within large companies are far from perfect: it takes time and often purely chance encounters for one part of the company to learn what another is doing.

Susan Ghertner, Environmental Affairs Manager for H-E-B, all but threw her hands in the air expressing this last point: she would ask people, what about the emails, the newsletters, the special notices everywhere? She was saying, try as hard as you may to communicate a new policy throughout the company, when you talk to people later it will still be the first they’ve heard of it.

But there’s a bigger problem than internal communication, and this is the publicity issue.

You think it’s hard to do, try talking about it

Where the real publicity risk lies in going green is talking to people outside the company. If companies are surprised at the number of tiny steps it requires to develop sustainable procedures just in one small part of their system, they recoil in amazement when they announce what they’re doing, and get slapped for it.

If a company is perceived as calling itself green, it will draw a storm of attacks pointing to all the areas that aren’t green. GE exemplified this in the keynote presentation, drawing several questions about cleanup efforts in its polluted brownfields. Jeff Renaud could only answer that a company 130 years old has a lot of legacy from earlier times.

This is a poignant concept. A company with a bad history will continue to be hammered even as it tries to change its ways. And rather than take the beating, many companies simply don’t publicize their sustainability efforts – they don’t want to draw fire.

In consequence of this fear of bad publicity, there are far more companies involved in proactive sustainable development than we realize. Making the situation even cloudier, parts of companies should still be activist targets, while other parts may even deserve acclaim.

The weak link

So the takeaway from the Summit for me was that going green is very complicated, and talking about it is even more complicated. But this is exactly what should be communicated. People in the mainstream should become familiar with the difficulties of going green, so they can extend support in meaningful ways at this fledgling stage.

Traditional corporate communications to the outside world have always been focused either on technical white papers or on artfully crafted releases designed to bolster the brand image. Portraying the complexities of genuine change seems to overtax the existing communications structures and resources of most companies.

It looks to me that traditional marketing communications methods and resources are just not up to the task of describing the growth of sustainability. We need better ways of spreading the word, and developing authentic engagement between companies and the mainstream public, their customers. For this, Web 2.0 methods are called for.

I’m off to the Sustainable Business Summit at UT in Austin this evening. I’ll report back after the weekend is over.