Climate Change

VIC LEIPZIG AND LOU MURRAY The world is constantly changing. With changes in climate come changes in communities of plants, which are the habitats of animals. With natural changes in habitat, come changes in the kinds and numbers of animals that live there. But the biggest change for plant and animal life occurs when humans enter the scene. For more than 10,000 years, small numbers of humans lived in the Huntington Beach area. They gathered plants and shellfish, and they hunted birds and mammals for food, feathers and fur. We don't know for certain what changes they caused directly because the last Ice Age ended at about the same time as the arrival of those first Paleo-Indians.

On June 27, California State Senator Tom Harman of Huntington Beach threw a barbecue in Sacramento for a little-known, pernicious group of California activists who call themselves "Republicans for Environmental Protection," or "REP" for short. REP fashions itself as the "green" wing of the Republican Party, citing Teddy Roosevelt (also a eugenics proponent who at one point quit the party), Barry Goldwater (a "conservationist" not a "preservationist") and Richard Nixon (not exactly a paragon of domestic conservatism)

Environmental groups gathered at Huntington Beach Pier to tout a new national study arguing that the fastest way to stop climate change is to cut down on trash. Officials with the local Earth Resource Foundation and the Orange County Interfaith Coalition for the Environment spoke at a June 5 news conference to promote the study. They chose Huntington Beach because the city has signed the U.S. Mayors Climate Protection Agreement to cut down on emissions, representatives said. “Our goal is to get Huntington Beach and the surrounding areas to adopt zero waste,” said Stephanie Barger, executive director of the Earth Resource Foundation.

Mother Nature cooked up a recipe for the perfect disaster. Take the wettest season in 121 years during the El Niño season of 2004-05 that grew lots of potential fuel in the wild lands. Add the record-breaking drought of 2006-07 with only 2 inches of rain. Drop the humidity into the single digits, ratchet the heat to 100 degrees, and stir well with winds up to 100 mph. Poof! Seventeen separate fires ignited in Southern California, from Santa Clarita to San Diego. More than 350,000 acres burned.

Vic Leipzig and Lou Murray We went to see the movie "Ice Age" this weekend. We enjoyed the comic adventures of a giant sloth, a wooly mammoth and a saber-toothed tiger as they embarked on an unlikely journey across a frozen wasteland to return a human baby to its "herd." The time setting was 20,000 years ago during the Pleistocene era. The physical setting could have been here. During the last Ice Age, huge glaciers covered most of North America, including the mountains to the east of us. With so much of earth's water tied up in ice, ocean levels were 300 feet lower than they are today.

Alex Coolman Kirsten Cappel is going international. The energetic 21-year-old from Huntington Beach has been interning at Earth Resource Foundation, an environmental group in Costa Mesa. The experience, she says, has given her a sense of the way local politics work. But Cappel's professional and intellectual aspirations go far beyond Costa Mesa. Later this month, she'll be heading to Geneva, Switzerland, where she will be part of a delegation of American students who will participate in a human rights summit.

Some things take time. Eight years ago, conservative Christian broadcaster and former Republican presidential candidate Pat Robertson plunked down a sizable bankroll in hopes of reviving a has-been oil refinery east of Los Angeles. According to documents cited by Communities for a Better Environment — the California nonprofit environmental health and justice organization that filed a federal lawsuit to stop him — the Robertson Charitable Foundation invested $75 million in the venture.

It’s no secret that California is facing a water crisis. Environmentalists have been warning the public for years, and now public policy makers are beginning to pay attention. Fountain Valley is looking to boost water prices because the city needs the money to maintain its water system. The Huntington Beach Public Works Department is cutting down on its watering, a move that will save more than $87,000 each year. Last week Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa announced a 20-year, $1.5 billion water supply strategy.

Huntington Beach Rep. Dana Rohrabacher hasn't been in step with President Bush on issues such as immigration, but he stuck closer to Bush last week in his comments on climate change. Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger hobnobbed with British Prime Minister Tony Blair in Long Beach last week to talk about how to reduce emissions that some consider responsible for global warming. In response, Rohrabacher's office sent out a press release offering his take on "the myth of human-caused global warming."