Bo Shaffer pours dry ice on the frozen body of "Grandpa" Bredo Morstoel in Nederland in 2006. Grandpa Bredo died in 1989, in Norway.

In the last several years, the city and county of Boulder have been working to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions. But it’s possible they’ve forgotten one significant source of carbon: the frozen dead guy who’s kept in a Tuff Shed in Nederland.

As most Boulderites — and anyone who’s ever headed up the hill to Frozen Dead Guy Days — probably knows, the body of “Grandpa” Bredo Morstoel, a Norwegian who died of a heart condition in 1989, has been kept at the International Cryonics Institute and Center for Life Extension, or ICICLE (aka the Tuff Shed), since the mid 1990s. (Before that, he was briefly put in a deep freeze at a cryonics joint in Oakland.)

Grandpa Bredo is being kept on ice at the behest of his family, who apparently believe that, at some point in the future, medical technology will advance to the point that Grandpa can be rewarmed, and therefore, “reanimated.”

But until he is, a Boulder County man who was hired by the family, Bo Shaffer, drives up to the Tuff Shed once a month with 1,600 pounds of dry ice in his truck to keep Grandpa cold.

A story in today’s Daily Camera advancing this year’s Frozen Dead Guy Days noted the 1,600 pounds number, and one astute commenter (Moran_Bunrift) wrote this at the end of the article:

1600 pounds of dry ice per *month* for 15 years….. Ya know what “dry ice” is kiddies? Frozen carbon dioxide.

This guy has left a 270,000+ pound carbon footprint since he DIED, boys and girls. And there’s no end in sight.

Ironic, isn’t it?

So should Boulder County be ringing the environmental alarm on Grandpa Bredo? Well, it’s true, dry ice is essentially carbon dioxide in its solid form. And 1600 pounds of dry ice is about the same amount of carbon dioxide that the average car emits into the atmosphere when it’s driven for 2,726 miles.

But here’s the thing, the carbon dioxide gas that is turned into carbon dioxide solids (i.e. dry ice) probably already existed in the atmosphere. In most cases, the carbon dioxide that’s used is a byproduct of another process, such as producing ammonia from nitrogen and natural gas, or large-scale fermentation. So, if the carbon dioxide didn’t become dry ice (that ultimately ended up melting in Grandpa Bredo’s sarcophagus), it would have just been floating around in the atmosphere anyway.

That doesn’t mean, however, that there’s no added carbon footprint associated with keeping a frozen dead guy in Ned. First of all, it takes energy to turn carbon dioxide gas into dry ice (first it’s compressed to a liquid, and then its allowed to expand, turning the liquid into the solid that we know as dry ice). And secondly, Bo Shaffer puts some serious miles on his truck bringing the dry ice up from Denver every month.

So, from a global perspective, we at BigGreenBoulder aren’t convinced thatGrandpa Bredo will push global warming to the tipping point. But we want to know what you think. Leave us a note in the comments section below!

NCAR's Mesa Lab in south Boulder.

A 1972 article in the Daily Camera “NCAR, Others Will Study Man’s Effects on Shaky Equilibrium of Earth Climate” appears to be one of the first in the Boulder newspaper to tackle the idea that humans might be able to drive the world to some sort of climatic tipping point.

NCAR scientist William Kellogg said this in the article:

There are obviously stabilizing factors that are strong enough to keep our global climate within reasonably narrow bounds, permitting ice ages to come and go, but damping out any large fluctuations.

But, now, man has entered the scene, and we must ask whether he can reach any of the lever  points on this gigantic environmental mechanism and influence it. If there are any lever points that he can reach, history has shown that he will probably be tempted to tamper with them.

The article didn’t talk much about greenhouse gases, other than to mention a growing “carbon dioxide blanket” that had the potential to warm the Earth.

In 1979, Kellogg and a colleague, Warren Washington, received a grant to study how CO2 interacts with the climate. They used the money to run a rudimentary climate model — one that didn’t include any interaction between the atmosphere and the oceans, land or ice caps — to see what would happen if the carbon dioxide was increased by a factor of two.

In the story, Washington points out that no one is yet sure exactly what effect CO2 will have on the climate:

We anticipate a warming effect in both the atmosphere and the oceans. It will probably be changes of a few degrees or less. But a few degrees have a  big effect on glaciers and the amount of water stored in them. …

I don’t think society ought to start making changes until we have a better understanding. It’s not an immediate crisis although it could be in the next 20, 30 or 50 years.

Well, 30 years later, scientists are calling it a crisis, and NCAR has grown from an organization where a couple of its scientists study CO2 on a short-term grant to a group to hundreds of PhD scientists studying climate change.

In the decades since Washington and Kellogg’s study, NCAR scientists have researched all aspects of the climate — including how such seemingly small variables like soil moisture and changing vegetation cover affect global climate patterns — and they still have a long way to go to create a more accurate climate model.

Here’s a look at one of the more light-hearted studies undertaken by NCAR scientists to understand climate change. This is from a 1991 Daily Camera article (and you’ll notice that by then, the greenhouse effect isn’t in quotes anymore).

The burp — the self-satisfied sign of a meal’s end — has global implications when it comes to cows.

Research that originated at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder is aimed at discovering what contribution bovine burping is making to the greenhouse effect.

Backpacks containing gas-measuring gear will be strapped onto hundreds of cows at Washington State University in Pullman. Each pack holds a gas monitor connected to a tube placed near the cow’s mouth.

Read more about NCAR’s history at DailyCamera.com.

This book of essays, many by Colorado authors, explores how climate change is affecting the Rockies.

Driven by the desire to localize the issue of climate change, a former editor of High Country News compiled a book of essays by locals illustrating what a warmer climate means for Colorado.

On Monday evening at the Boulder Bookstore on Pearl Street, nine of the contributors of the book read parts of their essays from, “How the West Was Warmed:  Responding to Climate Change in the Rockies,” published in November and edited by Beth Conover.

“I had an opportunity to convene views and speak to the locality and diversity of climate change in Colorado,” said Conover, who also worked as an environmental policy advisor from 2004 to 2007 for Denver Mayor John Hickenlooper and helped develop the largest urban sustainability program, Greenprint Denver.

Mayor Hickenlooper provides the foreword to a book filled with essays about trash scavenging, recycling, pine beetles, water scarcity, eco-tourism, hitchhiking, renewable energy and Iraq veterans working to train fellow veterans in green jobs.

A former environment and science reporter at The Boulder Daily Camera, Todd Neff, wrote the essay “Getting the Fever,” which examines the driving effect fear can have on making changes to lessen impacts on the environment.

“Its about getting people to understand that its a massive issue,” Neff said.  “We don’t live in a fish tank.”

A Colorado native, Laura Pritchett, is the author of five books including “Going Green: True Tales From Gleaners, Scavengers, and Dumpster Divers,” contributed an essay about her experiences hunting for usable, resellable and recyclable items in trash bins.  Everything Pritchett wore to the reading was found in the trash.

“I want to see the shift of thinking that dumpster diving is cool and throwing useful things in the garbage is oddball,” Pritchett said.

Lisa Jones, a journalist and former editor of High Country News tells about her realization that flying all over world to write about eco-tourism was actually the “messy business of airplane travel.”  Her flights to South America and Africa were making her carbon footprint bigger than she realized.   Jones’ essay follows her and her boyfriend on a hitchhiking trip. They left Paonia, Colo. with just twenty dollars, took jobs in grant writing and restaurants and ended up in Mississippi after being hired by a blind man to drive them there.

The book is an attempt by Conover and the contributing writers to bridge the gap between scientific-heavy books and guides to green living.  
“My hope was that my mother or sister would pick up the book and relate climate change issues to their lives,” Conover said.

A Boulder resident of 22 years and sustainability consultant, Kim Hedberg, attended the reading.

“The problem is the message.  Not everyone is getting the message,” Hedberg said.  “Hopefully people reading this book will get it.”

— Sarah Horn

“How the West Was Warmed: Responding to Climate Change in the Rockies” can be found at the Boulder Bookstore, 1107 Pearl Street, (303) 447-2074

Ice covers citrus in a grove in Lake Wales, Fla. on Wednesday.

It’s cold — tooth achingly, face numbingly frigid.

In Boulder, the average high temperature in December was about six degrees cooler than normal, and so far this season the city’s been pounded with 70 inches of snow, roughly twice the average.

But this doesn’t mean climate change isn’t affecting Colorado, threatening our snowpack, agricultural lands and water supply, according to local climate gurus.

From the Associated Press:

Beijing had its coldest morning in almost 40 years and its biggest snowfall since 1951. Britain is suffering through its longest cold snap since 1981. And freezing weather is gripping the Deep South, including Florida’s orange groves and beaches.

Whatever happened to global warming? Such weather doesn’t seem to fit with warnings from scientists that the Earth is warming because of greenhouse gases. But experts say the cold snap doesn’t disprove global warming at all — it’s just a blip in the long-term heating trend.

“It’s part of natural variability,” said Gerald Meehl, a senior scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder. With global warming, he said, “we’ll still have record cold temperatures. We’ll just have fewer of them.”

Maybe the message that global warming will cause large-scale displacement of people in Bangladesh doesn’t really resonate with you.

Perhaps the fact that coral atolls in the Pacific — whole countries like Kiribati  and Tuvalu — are predicted to be completely consumed by sea level rise doesn’t really concern you.

But maybe this little fact about global warming will hit home with you: climate change = less power, a shorter ski season and fewer resorts.

That’ the hope of a Boulder-based group called Protect Our Winters, or POW, that’s hoping to motivate the winter sports community to do something about global warming.

Check out the video above to get a feel for their message, visit the group’s Web site, or read more about Protect Our Winter’s efforts at DailyCamera.com.

CU journalism professor Tom Yulsman has created a free online course called covering climate change.

In today’s Daily Camera, James Collector asked Yulsman five questions about the science of climate change and how journalists are covering it:

1. What exactly is the climate change debate?

There is no one debate. Reporters fall into this trap, and readers fall into this trap of accepting that there is just one debate. There’s science, and there’s policy. Within science, there are dozens of debates about the various risks that we can expect over the future. There’s not terribly much debate on the big question whether humans are causing climate change. There’s pretty robust agreement on that. Within policy, there are all sorts of debates. There are even debates about how should science inform policy-making decisions.

Read the rest of the interview at DailyCamera.com, or read Yulsman’s blog at CEJournal.net.

From left, Carson McDonough, Patrick McGlynn and Matthew McAllister produced films as part of their "climate change and video production" class at the University of Colorado | DailyCamera.com

Students from the University of Colorado who participated in a class on film and climate change will screen their own global warming flicks tonight on campus.

From the Daily Camera:

Matthew McAllister flips off the lights when he leaves his dorm room. He refills his water bottle instead of buying plastic ones, and he rations himself one paper towel when he dries his hands.

But a single flight to Washington, D.C., that he took this semester for a political science course canceled out his efforts, the University of Colorado student says.

He calculates that he would need to recycle 708 aluminum cans to offset his portion of the carbon dioxide emitted by the plane.

“While I would like to think these small, conscious efforts make a difference, the truth is I know they don’t,” McAllister says.

For a course on film and climate change, McAllister produced a short video about the challenges he has with his carbon footprint, as well as environmental equality. (His portion of CO2 for the plane trip was about the same amount that an average person in Tanzania uses all year).

Read the full story at DailyCamera.com.

Hundreds of folks turned out this weekend on their bikes and rode from downtwon Boulder to the Valmont coal plant as part of the “Power Past Coal” rally.

The event was one of more than 4,500 organized across the world as part of the 350.org global campaign.

From the Daily Camera:

Eric Robbins rode to Boulder’s Central Park on Saturday with a battery-powered amplifier strapped to the back of his Schwinn bicycle. The Beatles’ song “All You Need Is Love” blared from his speaker into a crowd of more than 200 cyclists busy chanting “power beyond coal.”

“We need to put an end to coal and promote the use of renewable energy,” Robbins said, preparing to ride to the Valmont power plant in east Boulder to raise awareness of global climate change and voice support for the plant’s closing. “It would be nice if this plant became a wind farm or a solar installation.”

Robbins, a freshman at the University of Colorado, was a participant in Saturday’s International Day of Climate Action. The bike ride in Boulder was one of more than 4,500 similar events occurring across the globe. Activists called on local governments, state and national leaders to promote renewable energy and secure a strong energy agreement among nations at the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen this December.

The protest in Boulder was coordinated by 350.org, an international organization whose goal is to reduce the Earth’s atmospheric carbon dioxide emissions. Their name refers to 350 parts per million, which is the level some scientists have identified as the safe upper limit for the amount of carbon dioxide in the Earth’s atmosphere.

“We’re calling on all levels of government to take action to reduce emission levels to 350 parts per million,” said Micah Parkin, an organizer of the Boulder event. “We’re nearly at 390 parts per million right now, so there’s a lot of work left to do.”

Read the full story at DailyCamera.com, or read more about 350.org on BigGreenBoulder.

Lion Lake No. 1 in Rocky Mountain National Park’s Wild Basin, with Mount Alice and Chiefs Head Peak standing tall in the distance. Photo by Broomfield Enterprise.

In the future, there may be fewer snow-capped peaks to gaze at in Rocky Mountain National Park.

The meadows on the west side of the park may change as the climate warms and dries, making them less hospitable to moose and pine martens, and aspens across the park may disappear along with the plants that call the tundra home.

These are the dire predictions of a report released yesterday by the Rocky Mountain Climate Organization and the Natural Resources Defense Council, which called climate change “the greatest threat ever” to national parks.

The report, called National Parks in Peril, listed the 25 parks most at risk of climate change and included two in Colorado: RMNP and Mesa Verde.

From the report’s Colorado fact sheet:

Mesa Verde is vulnerable to a loss of water, more downpours and floods, a loss of plant communities, a loss of wildlife, and a loss of cultural resources. Rocky Mountain is vulnerable to a loss of ice and snow, a loss of water, more downpours and floods, a loss of plant communities, a loss of wildlife, more crowding, a loss of fishing, and more air pollution. Other parks in Colorado, including Black Canyon of the Gunnison National Park, Great Sand Dunes National Park and Preserve, and Dinosaur National Monument, face similar vulnerabilities.

Many of these impacts are already happening, as human activities—the emission of heat-trapping gases—are now changing the climate. To preserve our national parks for ourselves and future generations, we need to both stop changing the climate and take actions to preserve the resources and values that make our parks special.

Read the full report.

Colorado aspens in full fall colors | Photo by Mark Leffingwell

Foresters are still puzzling over why aspens in the Rocky Mountains are dying, a phenomenon that scientists are calling “sudden aspen decline,” or SAD.

But whatever the reason — many are blaming the added stresses of climate change — the situation doesn’t look good.

In Colorado, the number of acres with sick aspens — which drop their leaves, are ravaged by insects and can’t reproduce — has quadrupled between 2006 and 2008 to more than 850 acres, according to an article published by Reuters.

From Reuters:

“What we think will happen is that aspen will disappear in some areas and there will not be anything we can do about it,” said SAD expert Wayne Shepperd of Colorado State University.

A study by scientists with the federal Rocky Mountain Research Station in Moscow, Idaho presented just such a scenario. It predicted the near total disappearance of aspen in the Rocky Mountain region by 2090.

The research, to be published in Forest Ecology and Management, links ailing aspen to global climate change and concludes that up to 41 percent of Western forests would be unable to support aspen by 2030. That figure would rise to 75 percent by 2060 and as much as 94 percent in 2090.

Read the full story at www.reuters.com, check out information from the U.S. Forest Service about sudden aspen decline, or learn about what Boulder County is doing to preserve aspen stands after the jump.

For years, Boulder County has been trying to protect local aspen stands by having volunteers cut away small pines and spruce  — mimicking a healthy fire cycle by removing trees that would eventually crowd out the aspens.

From DailyCamera.com:

Aspens are relatively short-lived trees — an aspen that lives 150 years is ancient — that grow quickly and love sun, making them the ideal pioneers to re-vegetate land after a forest fire. Once a forest has burned, the aspen roots, which were protected from the blaze by the earth, send up “suckers,” genetically identical shoots.

Lodgepole pines also require fire to regenerate. The heat from the flames melts the wax sealing their cones and allows the seeds to fall onto the ground and germinate. Shade-loving lodgepoles grow slowly, but live longer than aspens.

They take advantage of the shadows provided by the spindly aspens and slowly gather strength until they can overtake them, usually 75 to 100 years after the fire. In a healthy forest, a fire will burn through the conifers and the cycle will repeat itself, allowing younger stands of aspen to flourish again.

Read the full story at DailyCamera.com, or check out the next county-sponsored volunteer day to revitalize aspen stands, which is scheduled for Sept. 23, at BoulderCounty.org.

Read more posts about forest health on BigGreenBoulder:

Beetle-killed trees threaten Colorado power grid

Battle over toxic beetle killer is on in Estes Park