The crafty and the curious

Outside the Piecemakers Country Store in Costa Mesa Saturday, Diane Calderwood was surrounded by gourds — cat gourds, sun gourds, tassel gourds.

She'd made them herself — painting some to resemble felines or flattening and carving others to look like celestial bodies.

"It's more of a utilitarian plant like cotton would be," she said. "They do eat it but it's very bitter. Most of the time in history it's been used for instruments and dishes and all kinds of artwork and things like that."

About 30 teachers exhibited their crafts and offered signups for classes taught at the store throughout the year.

The location on Adams Avenue in Mesa Verde is home to the Piecemakers, a group of Christians who live communally at the store where they sell homemade wares. They also invite teachers outside their community to exhibit and lead classes.

"Piecemakers has always been preserving the hand crafts from generations ago," said Piecemaker Jean Moller, an organizer of the event.

For more than 20 years, the annual open house has given customers a chance to peek into what skills they can learn at the Piecemakers' store, ranging from quilting to dollmaking, sewing, jewelry design and more, Moller said.

In a tent outside the store, Jen Kosman's edible offerings were far from the gourds' bitterness.

Open house attendees signed up for her baking and cooking classes, whether they wanted to learn pizza from scratch, cinnamon rolls or the comprehensive brunch class that includes quiches and a loaf of bread stuffed with eggs.

ne afternoon last fall, Armand Neukermans, a tall engineer with a sweep of silver bangs, flipped on a noisy pump in the back corner of a Sunnyvale lab. Within moments, a fine mist emerged from a tiny nozzle, a haze of salt water under high pressure and heat.

It didn't look like much. But this seemingly simple vapor carries a lot of hope - and inspires a lot of fear. If Neukermans' team of researchers can fine-tune the mechanism to spray just the right size and quantity of salt particles into the sky, scientists might be able to make coastal clouds more reflective.

The hope is that by doing so, humankind could send more heat and light back into space, wielding clouds as shields against climate change.

The fear, at least the one cited most often, is that altering the atmosphere this way could also unleash dangerous side effects.

"Ten years ago, people would have said this is totally wacky," Neukermans said. "But it could give us some time if global warming really becomes catastrophic."

It's now beyond debate that the globe is getting hotter. The ice caps are melting, sea levels are rising, and extreme weather events like droughts, floods and hurricanes are increasing.

Even if public policymakers manage to significantly curtail future fossil-fuel emissions - the carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases that the vast majority of climate scientists blame for climate change - the hundreds of gigatons we've already pumped into the atmosphere have probably locked in a series of life-altering consequences.

Neukermans and his colleagues are among an unofficial cadre of Bay Area scientists, technologists, designers and engineers who have begun the hard work of preparing for a warmer world. They're exploring unconventional concepts that might help us live with the consequences - or prevent them from spinning out of control.

It's not clear yet if any will work, or find the support to move off the drawing board. All are sure to be costly and controversial.

But as the threat of global warming rises, it and other "geoengineering" strategies have shifted from the scientific fringes into mainstream debate. Geoengineering is a broad category for techniques that could remove greenhouse gases from the atmosphere or reflect away more heat, including things as innocuous as painting roofs white and as controversial as spraying sulfate particles into the stratosphere.

The basic idea behind cloud brightening is to equip ships with mechanisms like the ones Neukermans' team is designing and aim them at the relatively low-lying clouds that hug the western coasts of continents. It would probably require hundreds - if not thousands - of vessels (see related story).

Few are eager to tweak a system as complicated, sensitive and interconnected as the climate. But many scientists worry that nations simply won't cut fossil-fuel emissions enough to prevent rising temperatures from unleashing humanitarian and ecological calamities.

"If we have to intervene, we should be doing the research now, because these ideas are extremely complicated and extremely risky," said Jane Long, a former associate director at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. "I hope we never have to do it, but I think it's irresponsible not to understand as much as we possibly can in case we need it."

Critics, however, argue that scientists are talking about tinkering with a system they don't fully understand. Altering the clouds could affect rainfall patterns, with potentially devastating consequences, they say.

I heard three interesting comments during the past couple of weeks. One was from a former Adelaidian who has made a fortune in London. He has a fine house in fashionable Holland Park and a 200-year-old country house in Wiltshire. So he's done OK, to say the least.

He made a simple point: "South Australia has fantastic potential. What a shame you don't develop it."

On a walk with someone from Sydney, we travelled the 4km from the north beach at Carrickalinga to the Normanville Beach Cafe. After we had been raving about the beauty of the beach, the pretty view of Rapid Head and the idyllic weather, she turned to me and said: "You know, the trouble with South Australia is it isn't fashionable. It just doesn't have a good name."

Later the same day, someone told me she had mentioned to some Melburnians she was going to Adelaide for a beach holiday. "A beach holiday in Adelaide!" they laughed. "There aren't beaches in Adelaide, are there?"

These are just anecdotes, of course, not a scientific survey.

But it says something about how we've been doing at promoting our state in the past decade or so. We have sensational natural beauty but we don't make the most of it.

I'm lucky enough to have seen some beautiful holiday resorts: Bali, the Cote d'Azur, Copacabana Beach in Rio, the Greek islands, Dubai and so on. Call me biased, but it's hard to find anywhere that beats the Fleurieu Peninsula in summer.

The golden beaches, the blue sea, the gently rolling hills, the vineyards, the charming little townships, the excellent weather (usually) - and all this just an hour or so's drive from a city of more than one million people.

Go to Normanville and there, right on the beach, in a prime position looking down to Rapid Head, is the Normanville Beach Cafe. It could be turned into a first-class business with a bit of investment. It has friendly staff so that's not the problem.

This is just the place where there should be a great restaurant, like the Star of Greece at Port Willunga, combined with a deli selling fish and chips, coffees and ice creams.

And in the summer it should be open from 7.30am until after dinner. It could be a real driver of tourism.

The locals at the Surf Lifesaving Club next door have started selling coffee and egg and bacon rolls at breakfast time. That's because the Beach Cafe doesn't open before 10am. That's great for the club. They'll raise plenty of money. And perhaps the people who run the Beach Cafe will realise they are losing market share.