Portfolio Life .net

Earth2Tech posts about the question “Can the world trade its way out of the climate change mess?”

Carbon Primer: The Chicago Climate Exchange

business/bytes/genes/molecules has a post - Ecoinformatics - Information for our planet - that cites:

The New Bioinformatics: Integrating Ecological Data from the Gene to the Biosphere

Bioinformatics, the application of computational tools to the management and analysis of biological data, has stimulated rapid research advances in genomics through the development of data archives such as GenBank, and similar progress is just beginning within ecology. One reason for the belated adoption of informatics approaches in ecology is the breadth of ecologically pertinent data (from genes to the biosphere) and its highly heterogeneous nature….

Ecoinformatics, I like the term!
And gives hope to the Cities in the Wilderness idea over on my other blog.

Earth2Tech had a post: All Global Warming Is Local.

And there’s a different post: Kill a Bug, Spare the Planet

…SpringStar, a nine-year-old start-up based outside of Seattle, has developed an array of earth-friendly products for home and agricultural use that are built around natural insect attractants and adhesive traps instead of poisons. Specific traps are available for everything from cockroaches to mosquitoes to garden slugs….

Meanwhile digital divide network posts:How the USA Can Cut 28% of Greenhouse Gases
They don’t link to the report but a New York Times article does - it’s a McKinsey report located here (pdf).

And we begin by beginning. And hoping for building momentum quickly.

The Herald Tribune then posts Ban calls climate change ‘defining challenge of our age’

Secretary General Ban Ki Moon of the United Nations called climate change “the defining challenge of our age” Saturday and called on the United States and China, the greatest emitters of greenhouse gases, to be “playing a more constructive role” in coming negotiations for a new global climate treaty….

That’s simplicity step one.

The Herald Tribune posts on UN report describes risks of inaction on climate change

“In its final and most powerful report, a United Nations panel of scientists meeting here describes the mounting risks of climate change in language that is both more specific and forceful than its previous assessments, according to scientists here.”

While the New York Times posts Some Hunches About Intuition

Can people improve their intuition?

The question, of course, sounds oxymoronic on its face. People make decisions intuitively or they don’t….

[they proceed with a summary of various articles and research on intuition, then…]
“Like any good thing, a reliance on intuition can be taken to extremes. Executives should reflect on their intuitive decisions before they execute them.”…

New managers are typically told to keep their message to the basics so that employees can understand it.

But… “the point of simplicity is more fundamental.”

“Simplicity allows people to act.”

Research in numerous fields, they point out, shows that if decision makers are given too many choices they will either freeze and take no action or they will stick with their initial decision, even if one of the numerous other options would be objectively better. Sorting among the choices proves to be too confusing….

Notice the linkage… simplicity allows people to act.
The trick is to have effective simplicity.
Most cities have recycle programs. But the reality is that the basic separation of materials once done isn’t done now.
Why? Well two or three things at play
1. The range of materials in recyclable trash has exploded.
2. That makes the old classification to simple
And any new one complex.
So many cities don’t sort in the home at all now.
Rather they
1. sort at the dump, or
2. pretend to sort at the dump - they bury the recyclables with the idea it can be sorted later.