I'm sure somebody's working on it

Remember your kingdoms of living things? Plants, animals, fungi, bacteria (and viruses)? Somehow I missed this, but in 1977 that view of more or less equal dominions was destroyed by Carl Woes, U Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, who used not morphology and eating habits but molecular biology to redraw the tree: Bacteria, Archaea, and Eukarya -- everything with a nucleus. "In terms of gene content, humans and potatoes are more closely related than [these] two bacter are to each other -- one measure of bacterial diversity." ("The Undiscovered Planet" by Jonathan Shaw, Harvard Magazine, Nov/Dec 2007).

Don't worry, I have a point. But first:

And remember "culturing" bacteria on agar? Well, that's pretty meaningless too. It turns out that only a fraction, an infinitesimal fraction, of bacterial species will create those pretty colonies in that simple way. And get this: scientists knew this (vaguely) -- the "plate count paradox." No one told me about this! And I majored in biology...Anyway, it means that through a microscope one can see thousands of different species from a teaspoon of soil, but only a handful grow in the petri dish.

In 1990, Norman Pace took a gram of sediment from Yellowstone National Park, extracted the DNA, cloned it and inserted it into one type of bacterium he knew how to grow. He "discovered more diversity than we ever knew existed before," says Roberto Kolter, co-director of Harvard's five-year old Microbial Sciences Initiative.

"The world of animals is divided into 13 phyla (vertebrates, insects, etc.). In the microbial world, their equivalents are called, for the time being, 'deep-rooting branches.' In 1987, 13 of these big divisions were known in the bacterial domain...by 1997...36...By 2003, 53, by 2004 80 such divisions from which we couldn't cultivate even a single representative." Each of these deep-branching divisions is thought to represent millions, if not hundreds of millions of species. "That means there are lots of genes out there, and we have no clue what they are doing," Kolter says.

Okay, so what's the connection to fighting global warming? These hundreds of millions if not billions of genes have helped shape our planet's surface and climate. Perhaps we can enlist them to help us control the shaping we're doing. Crazy? Here's a clue that it might not be: renowned climate scientist and proselytizer for seriously practical solutions, Daniel Schrag, is on the steering committee of this new cross-disciplinary Microbial initiative, first of its kind.

What time is it? Time to act

Of course it's been time to act for decades, but if you haven't yet, why not start today? That's what I'm doing.

This blog will chart my own learning curve about the things my or any business can do to reduce energy use, reuse, prevent waste -- measure progress, and get others to hop on the anti-global warming bandwagon, both within your company and in your community.

I have questions and huge areas where my knowledge is limited (construction techniques, zoning and permitting regulations, electrical wiring, and well, much much more), but with the Web at our fingertips (yes, we'll look at greening computing, too), I'm hoping we can both learn and make progress.

My first question, in stream-of-consciousness order only: what can we do about the banks of long-tube "sprawling" (opposite of compact?) fluorescent lights that blanket so many office buildings? But first, I think, is to assess your actual energy consumption, CO2 emissions, waste and so on. Open Eco, a joint project of Sun Microsystems and Natural Logic, is a good place to start. (See link at right.) I'll be back soon!