• Tag Archives climate change
  • Another Beautiful Day. Bah.

    Imbolc                                                Woodpecker Moon

    Another beautiful day. Yes.  But.  What dark forces work to push the boundaries of weather around like so many children’s blocks, a lego castle on wheels rolling north, careening over everything in its wake?  As I hope I’ve said here before, efforts to control global warming are NOT about saving the planet.  The planet will keep on whirling around the sun as long as gravity and spacetime remain.  Well, not quite, there is that whole red giant business, but it’s a really long time from now.

    No, good ol’ h. sapiens will catch the fever.*  Of course, those with an eye to irony or just desserts might not see this a totally uncalled for solution; but, hell, I love our funny two-legged species, roaming around making babies, art, war, sport, roombas, nailguns and rainbow ponies.  What will the universe do for a laugh when we’re gone?

    Fans of schadenfreude will rejoice.  Though whether one can be very schadenfreudie when you’re baking along with the ones responsible for delaying action, I don’t really know.

    So, as a paid up member of the northern European gene pool, I’m tellin’ you it’s no wonder I’m melancholy.  The world is going to hell in a Hummer, not a handbasket.

     

    *Scientific American

    LONDON (Reuters) – Global greenhouse gas emissions could rise 50 percent by 2050 without more ambitious climate policies, as fossil fuels continue to dominate the energy mix, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) said on Thursday.

    “Unless the global energy mix changes, fossil fuels will supply about 85 percent of energy demand in 2050, implying a 50 percent increase in greenhouse gas emissions and worsening urban air pollution,” the OECD said in its environment outlook to 2050.

    The global economy in 2050 will be four times larger than today and the world will use around 80 percent more energy.

    But the global energy mix is not predicted to be very different from that of today, the report said


  • A Year of No Winter, Now With No Spring?

    Imbolc                                         Woodpecker Moon

    OK.  So, there was this place that used to have winter but had it replaced by a season of cloudy skies and what passes for cold in the southern states.  Then, that season ended and summer began.  Minnesota 2011-2012

    Not kidding.  It’s 60 degrees here today, March 11th.  And this doesn’t seem to be an aberration, the temps go like this for highs:  59, 65, 70, 67, 68.  And that gets us through Friday.  It may throw the bee season into a conundrum since my package bees don’t arrive until mid-April and the bloom cycle could be accelerated by as much as a month.

    This is also a year when I didn’t start any vegetables.  Not a one.  We moved the hydroponics into the garage for storage so we could consolidate the dog crates in one place. I imagine the places I buy plants will have used the same calendar as usual and we could waste a month or so of available warmer weather.  In other words we could have a growing season up to 6 weeks longer than normal.  But we’re not ready for it and won’t be.

    The Great Wheel continues to turn, but the holidays may usher in different weather than usual.  Climate change is well under way.  I hope the climate change deniers have a ringside seat in hell to the catastrophe they’ve created.  I know, that sounds extreme, but I mean it.

    The deniers will not and never could change the basic science behind global warming, all they could ever do was slow down humanity’s response to it, a slowing down that amounts to a criminal act, a felony against generations yet to be born.  They need to be held responsible for their greedy, stupid, infantile actions.

    But they probably won’t be.  They’ll die off before the worst of it hits.  That’s why I hope hell has a special viewing room for these shrunken souls.

    Would you like me to tell you what I really believe?


  • Not With A Bang, But A Fever

    Samain                                 Moon of the Winter Solstice

    Durban.  On the somewhat binding, sort of advanced, might be effective at some point result of this latest climate summit.

    On this point a very interesting column by a philosopher wondering how to make his discipline matter.  On climate science he suggested analyzing the thought and logic of so-called climate skeptics.  Given the weight and quantity of high quality data documenting climate change, climate skepticism is not skepticism, rather it’s the height of credulity.  That is, true skeptics, given the science, would doubt the doubters who somehow swallow, accept as credulous, the patent propaganda of those whose self-interest (as they short-sightedly see it) turns them against facts.

    “The last-minute successful agreement at Durban puts pressure on what has been the world’s biggest obstacle to a climate agreement – the US Republican party.

    For ten years or more, they have walked out of hearings on renewable energy or climate policy with “We won’t act on climate because China won’t!” – a petulant mirror image of the parental favorite: “Would you jump off a bridge, just cause your friend does?””

    But now – China will

    In terms of sheer global impact, there is nothing else within human control that matters more than reducing carbon emissions.  We insist on running our present in a way that commits our grandchildren to a difficult, if not downright dangerous, world.

    Because this is global politics and because the big emitters, China #1 and US #2, have internal political problems on this issue, as does India, and because the world is in the midst of a very unsettled global economic mess, the odds of something substantive happening seems faraway, distant.

    It may be that this is the way the world ends, not with a bang, but a fever.  But, maybe not.*

    “So does the outcome in Durban truly represent a “remarkable new phase,”  as U.N. Climate Chief Christina Figueres put it? Does the Durban Platform really “set a new course for the global fight against climate change”  (the phrase from an Associated Press wire story that many media outlets have picked up)? Maybe, but it will require a whole lot of work by the likes of the United States and China to keep the world on that course. At the very least, perhaps one could say, in that regard, that in the Durban Platform two of the world’s biggest emitters have agreed to stop squabbling and have shaken hands.”


  • Natural Disasters on the rise in the United States

    Lughnasa                                                                         Waxing Honey Extraction Moon

    “This has been a devastating year,” National Weather Service director Jack Hayes said. “Natural disasters are on the rise in the United States,” he noted, including records for heat, tornadoes, floods and fires, and with the bulk of hurricane season still remaining.

    So.  The economy has tanked.  The climate has raised hell, at least that’s one explanation that the right wing might find congenial.  Much warmer in that theological realm.  And, it might well have come up first through Texas and Oklahoma, seems possible to me.

    Then.  Our political parties stumble over themselves in making ridiculous policy, then bending the knee to the most extreme right wing and  apologizing for not having made worse policy.

    If these are the end times, it will be because the Great Spirit got so distracted from laughing at our self-defeating ways that She forgot to run the universe.

    Consider that the natural disasters Jack Hayes refers to are probably caused or at least dramatically reinforced by human action.  Then, consider the all to0 human disasters in Washington, Rome and Athens.

    If shooting ourselves in our collective feet were an Olympic sport, we’d all be medal winners and hearing our national anthems over and over again.

    It is also human that our Asian brothers and sisters, especially the Chinese, see all this as evidence of the inevitability of their rise.  Well.  Probably not.  World history shows the rise and fall of great powers to be a rule, played out over and over again on continent after continent in era after era.  The Qin Dynasty.  Rome.  The Khmer.  The Mughals.  The Macedonians.  The Persians.  The Greeks.  The Maya.  The Aztecs.  At some point in world history others will add, the United States of America, Europe and, yes, even China and Japan and India.

    We need to step back, take a look from the long view.  These are neither the worst of times, look at the fate of Carthage, for example, nor are these the best of times, see the Song Dynasty or the Classical Mayan period or Persian culture.

    Yes, I find the politics of our time, of this millennium, disheartening in their mean-spiritedness, their lack of charity and compassion, their polarization, but, as Cicero said, “No reign lasts forever.”  It could be that our knuckle-headed policy directions will put paid to the human race, it’s possible, for sure, but history tells me that we’ll muddle through somehow, in spite of ourselves.


  • A More Violent World

    Mid-Summer                                                                          Waning Honey Flow Moon

    A violent, but quick storm blew through this morning, sheets of rain and bending trees, water flowing in the gutters; in it I saw the world that is to come and is now, heat and deluge followed by tornadoes and flooding, the world we have wrought and one whose future looks only more chaotic and wild.  It is not yet a world impossible for human kind, but we seem bent on creating one.  In Death of the Liberal Class Chris Hedges says the only way our communitarian values will survive is if we hunker down and ride out the dramatic changes ahead, all the while resisting the oligarchy and its all consuming maw.

    While I tend to agree with Hedges’ diagnosis and his prognosis, the optimist in me, the non-doomsday guy wants to keep struggling, trying to push our collectivity towards a sustainable future.  A piece of me wants to hang on to the political actions I take now, the measures Kate and I have already taken, not to head off in what might be a monastic and quietist direction.  Not sure right now how I’ll make a decision to change course, but it feels like I may be headed there.  A more violent storm still comin’.

    We intended to spread mulch today, but canceled because of the storm.  Maybe tomorrow.  A good day to rest, collect ourselves for the week ahead.


  • Day by Day

    Samhain                                                           Waxing Moon of the Winter Solstice

    Thursday is art day; Friday is Latin day.  Today Greg and I will go over my (rough) translation of verses 36-48 of Book I of Ovid’s Metamorphosis.  Though slow going, I get a thrill each time I crack a phrase, write it down and it makes sense.  Even if Greg later points out I’m wrong.   I have a lot of opportunity for improvement and that makes the learning worthwhile.  Saturday is errand day and around the house work day.  Sunday, again, is Latin.  Monday is business meeting and Woolly day.  This leaves me Tuesday and Wednesday as buffer days.  So far, this schedule seems to work pretty well for me, though my lackluster performance yesterday made me wonder a bit.

    (this graphic illustrates the verses I’ve translated for today.)

    On the climate change front.  The world has begun to lurch forward on two aspects of climate change:  reduction of carbon emissions and adaptation.  In the more radical wing of the environmental movement adaptation or mitigation has been capitulation, something to avoid since it muddies the gravity of the problem we face.  A tipping point may be at hand.  Folks have begun to put forth adaptation in the context of realizing the global warming train has not only left the station, but is well on its way.  A certain, not insubstantial amount of warming is now inevitable, perhaps as much 2 degrees, possibly more.   Given that, mitigating projects that can help soften the damage, are not only a good idea, but necessary.  If proposed in the context of inevitable warming, mitigation projects can also underscore the need to take dramatic steps now to prevent more warming.  I’m hopeful we’ll see progress out of Cancun.

    My comments above do fly in the face of polling numbers that suggest climate change has receded in the public’s mind, especially as the economic crisis has shoved personal financial peril forward.  Understandable, but not good.  My hunch about a tipping point comes more from the gradual roll out of an increasing consensus about the science.  We’ll see.


  • Booming One More Time

    Fall                                 Waning Back to School Moon

    Metro Lounge                  Union Station

    This is the first class lounge, folks who’ve bought rooms.  My next trip to Lafayette had no rooms, but I convinced the lady here to let me in since I had rooms on the Empire builder both ways.

    Old folks pass by, some in the early years of aging, like me, others in the thin, papery skin and tottering walk phase.  How many of them in the former, I wonder, marched in Washington, fought for student rights, worked hard to end the Vietnam war, protested to achieve civil rights for African-Americans?  Age and accommodation hide the former marks of my kind, the long hair, the frayed jeans, the combat boots, the green book bags, the peace symbol pins,the flower print dresses and plaited hair.

    We walk past each other, joined by other links, the cane, the gray hair, balding pates, bum knees, expanded middles.  Makes me think of another addition to symbolic logic:  the law of the expanded middle.

    One of our own, Tom Brokaw, wrote a book, the Greatest Generation, talking up the folks of the WWII era as saviors of our culture.  Maybe they were, I don’t know, history is difficult to judge; but, the next spate of articles and books focused on how the Baby Boomers are not the Greatest Generation.  Somehow we have failed to live up to pundits self-made expectations of us.  Balderdash.

    An article this month in the Atlantic offers a guide as to how we can retrieve our lost promise by solving the economic crisis at home.  C’mon.  A minimum sized group of greedy bastards almost sunk the American economy, a breed that, like the poor, has always been with us.  It is the chattering class that needs to fix the economy and they’ve worked at it in fits and starts.  The economy never was our forte.

    No,we fought our battles for change at the level of the personal,the local, the national foreign policy level, not in the canyons of wall street or the board rooms of the Forbes 500.  We challenged US military policy so successfully that a generation of military leaders has vowed never again to make the same mistakes as Vietnam.  We supported the African-American community among us and Lyndon Johnson in a push for civil rights.  Women and men of our generation took the gender controversy into our private lives, struggling for a just place for women one bag of garbage, one diaper and one sink full of dishes at a time.

    We have had our share, more than our share, of brilliant scientists and innovative artists.

    Where we still have a big opportunity is not in the stock market or its ancillary phenomenon like the Department of Treasury.  No, our opportunity lies in the self same area we did early work in during the 60’s when we took the advice of such gurus as Scott and Helen Nearing and tried to go “back to the land.”

    Climate change, local food, energy independence, forest and water health, these are the areas where our generation can still act and act forcefully, this time for the future of the unborn generations who will suffer from the profligacy of our time.  We know how to use the levers of popular power.  We know how important it is to speak truth to power and to use our personal lives as leverage in the pursuit of deep social change.

    I hope we take the challenge and begin to acknowledge each other in the metro lounges and streets and lobbies and town halls and legislatures of our country.


  • Six Degrees Can Change the World

    66  bar rises 30.07  2mph NNE dew-point 56 Sunset 7:22  Summer night, cool and clear

    Waning Gibbous Thunder Moon

    National Geographic Channel had a program called Six Degrees Can Change the World.  Geez was it depressing.  A lot of the early stuff was material I’d heard before, but as it went on from 1 degree to 2 degrees, then to 3 degrees with the Amazonian rain forest becoming a scrub land and the Greenland ice sheet melting down and other very nasty stuff, I began to feel powerless, a victim before the inevitablity of increasing energy consumption which will drive the very worst scenarios into being.

    Those of you who know me well know I don’t like victim status.  A passive victim does not act, but allows reality to act on them.  Not my way.  So, once I got over the feeling of powerlessness, I reminded myself that I have made several distinct decisions related to effecting change.   The Sierra Club work.  The optimal suburb/exurb home.  Keeping the red car intact.  Our plan to purchase a hybrid or all electric when Kate retires.  Growing vegetables.  Turning off the computer at night.  Working over the next few years to find even more ways major and minor that we can reduce our carbon footprint and encourage alternative energy.  I am not a victim, nor do I want to be a rich world antagonist of mother earth’s.   The struggle of our time.


  • Can We Count on an Escape to the Stars?

    63  bar rises 29.81  0mph ESE dew-point 51   Beltane, cloudy and cool

                     First Quarter of the Flower Moon

    “Environmentalism has replaced socialism as the leading secular religion. And the ethics of environmentalism are fundamentally sound. Scientists and economists can agree with Buddhist monks and Christian activists that ruthless destruction of natural habitats is evil and careful preservation of birds and butterflies is good. The worldwide community of environmentalists—most of whom are not scientists—holds the moral high ground, and is guiding human societies toward a hopeful future. Environmentalism, as a religion of hope and respect for nature, is here to stay. This is a religion that we can all share, whether or not we believe that global warming is harmful.” from a New York Review of Books article by Freeman Dyson

    Here’s a bit from his own webpage: Freeman Dyson is now retired, having been for most of his life a professor of physics at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton.

    Dyson is a smart guy and no follower of the crowd.  His article reviews books which count the cost of global warming.  His real point, though, seems to be that those who would silence the critics of global warming may find themselves on the wrong side of history, much like the Catholic Church and Gallileo, for example. 

    Here’s another quote:  “In the history of science it has often happened that the majority was wrong and refused to listen to a minority that later turned out to be right.  It may–or may not–be that the present is such a time.” 

    He seems to look toward a more nuanced stating of the case along the lines of this quote from Ernesto Zedillo, editor of  Global Warming: Looking Beyond Kyoto.  “Climate change may not be the world’s most pressing problem (as I am convinced it is not), but it could still prove to be the most complex challenge the world has ever faced.”  Dyson has written elsewhere that he believe global poverty, starvation and epidemic treatable diseases like malaria, cholera and typhus are more important than global warming.  These are, he argues, clear and present realities.  We should not let climate change take attention away from them.

    This is important stuff for me since I got word last night that I will serve on the Sierra Club’s political committee this year.   I believe in the Great Work Thomas Berry describes in his book by that name, namely, that our generation is the one that will have to change the human presence on the earth to a sustainable one.

    Still, I take the point of some conservative critics who wonder if the emphasis on the health of mother earth detracts from our specie’s self interest, i.e., our own survival.  My belief is that the two have become, or, better, we now recognize that they always have been, intimately related.  Only in the most optimistic space opera science fiction sense can we imagine scenarios in which our species escapes earth to colonize the stars.  Short of that we have to dance with the planet we were given.  This one.

    Somehow we must make progress to mitigate the affects of climate change and to slow it down.  We must make that progress, though, in a way sensitive to the needs and aspirations of the human inhabitants of earth, our fellow creatures.


  • A Sixty Degree Temperature Swing

    24  87%  21%  0mph  SSW  bar29.96  steady  Winter

               Waning Gibbous Winter Moon

    As the winter moon wanes, a warm up heads our way.  Tomorrow the temperature will hit 40.  That’s a sixty degree swing within the week.  Not unusual for Minnesota, but impressive anyhow.  I’ve read that we have the most significant temperature and weather type fluctuations of anywhere on earth, though Siberia is similar.  That’s Siberia.  As in the place to which you were exiled as to the lonliest and most inclement place on earth from Moscow.  One of the most inclement places on earth.  So….

    On this point Paul Douglas, local weather sage, whose long term eye is better than his short term one, has a website up that is worth a visit, www.climatespot.com. I’ve added it to the blogroll, too.

    The sun shines today and small dimples have begun to show up at the base of trees, shrubs and the winter remnants of last year’s flower garden.  As the weather warms, the snow sinks away first at the point where something that can warm up meets the ground.  I hope that this warm up will bring a fresh snowfall, one that will fill in the dimples and freshen up the sagging snow.  It looks, and feels, like early March, deceptive though.  In March I can look out the window, notice the same changes and get the feeling, as I did momentarily this morning, plants have begun to stir underneath, that buds will open on trees and maybe a few early daffodils and the bloodroot will break the ground.  In March that is a fond hope, one with the chance of reality in a month or so, two at most.  In late January, not true.  February can have cold and snow like January.  March often has big snow, but the snow doesn’t last.  That feeling today only leads to dis-ease.  It is not a hope that can sustain itself in the near term future.

    I continue my study of Taoism, look for some new additions to the Taoism pages.