…there’s broad scientific agreement on very basic climate change questions.
via Scientists agree on climate change. So why doesn’t everyone else?.
When it comes to things like flood and droughts, most people seem to have accurately registered the recent trends in their area. But when the subject shifts to temperatures, the actual trends become irrelevant, and ideology and political beliefs shape how people perceive things. As the authors put it, “the contentious nature of the climate change debate has influenced the way in which Americans perceive their local weather.”
via Ideology clouds how we perceive the temperatures | Ars Technica.
A third of summer sea ice in the Arctic is gone, the oceans are 30 percent more acidic, and since warm air holds more water vapor than cold, the atmosphere over the oceans is a shocking five percent wetter, loading the dice for devastating floods.
via Global Warmings Terrifying New Math | Politics News | Rolling Stone.
The latest outlook released by the National Weather Service on Thursday forecasts increasingly dry conditions over much of the nation’s breadbasket, a development that could lead to higher food prices and shipping costs as well as reduced revenues in areas that count on summer tourism.
via Severe Drought Expected to Worsen Across the Nation – NYTimes.com.
Cold is an attitude, that devil-may-care ease with which you fling a sleeveless cardigan around your neck because sleeves make things hot and it falls off your back and down to the floor because there are no sleeves on that cardigan who makes a cardigan without sleeves?, but you casually strut away without looking back because you are cold.
via How to Be Cold: Weather Is a State of Mind – Entertainment – The Atlantic Wire.
So, avuncular, saturnine, sybaritic, antediluvian… and now concomitant. This word has cropped up multiple times for me, including several times in the closing pages of Tuchman’s “A Distant Mirror.”
It is an adjective.
Webster’s Fourth defines it as “accompanying; attendant.” My father wrote, “accompanying in a subordinate or incidental way.”
As in:
This type of dispute is likely to become more common, though, as local water shortages multiply around the country. Once again, Atlanta is living up to its reputation as a city of the future.
via Atlanta’s Water War Is First in a Gathering Flood – Bloomberg.
“In 1989 when I first climbed Everest there was a lot of snow and ice but now most of it has just become bare rock. That, as a result, is causing more rockfalls which is a danger to the climbers,” he told AFP.
via Climate Change May Make Mount Everest Unclimbable : Discovery News.
“Not every outcome of climate change is going to be entirely negative for people,” he said. “The bottom line is that climate change is bad news — its small consolation we have tastier peaches.”
via Gardeners in a new zone, Metro/Region – Omaha.com.
It is clear that continuing to rely on fossil fuels will have catastrophic results, because of the dramatic warming effect of carbon dioxide. But alternative power sources will affect the climate too. For now, the climatic effects of “clean energy” sources are trivial compared with those that spew out greenhouse gases, but if we keep on using ever more power over the coming centuries, they will become ever more significant.
via Power paradox: Clean might not be green forever – environment – 30 January 2012 – New Scientist.
With so little of the Earth’s land still pristine and unaffected by humans, the idea of the ‘wilderness’ has less and less meaning in the modern world. Indeed, if pollution and climate change are taken into account, no part of the planet’s surface is any longer truly wild. This does not mean that we must gloomily accept the continuing diminution of semi-wild areas and the erosion of the vital ecosystem services they provide. It does mean though that we need to challenge some orthodoxies that are no longer useful in this new era of near-total human planetary dominance. ‘Getting close to nature’ or going ‘back to the land’ will generally not be good for the environment, however psychologically fulfilling these objectives may be to individuals seeking escape from industrial living. Instead, we need to intensify agriculture and other human land uses in existing areas as much as possible, and encourage as an environmental boon the growth of the world’s major cities that already successfully concentrate today’s enormous human population onto only a tiny proportion of the world’s land. The most positive trend of all in allowing us to minimise our impact on the planet’s surface is one more often bemoaned than celebrated: urbanisation.
via The Smart Way to Play God with Earths Limited Land: Scientific American.
See also: The Environmentalism Problem | Patos Papa.
This reductive approach to the human-environmental challenge leads to an obvious conclusion: if carbon is the problem, then “zero-carbon” is the solution. Society needs to go about its business without spewing the stuff out. …To do this will require the large-scale harvesting of the planet’s ambient energy: …And so the deserts, perhaps the landscape always most resistant to permanent human conquest, are to be colonized by vast “solar arrays,” glass and steel and aluminum, the size of small countries. The mountains and moors, the wild uplands, are to be staked out like vampires in the sun, their chests pierced with rows of five-hundred-foot wind turbines and associated access roads, masts, pylons, and wires. The open oceans, already swimming in our plastic refuse and emptying of marine life, will be home to enormous offshore turbine ranges and hundreds of wave machines strung around the coastlines like Victorian necklaces.
…What this adds up to should be clear enough, yet many people who should know better choose not to see it. This is business-as-usual: the expansive, colonizing, progressive human narrative, shorn only of the carbon. It is the latest phase of our careless, self-absorbed, ambition-addled destruction of the wild, the unpolluted, and the nonhuman. It is the mass destruction of the world’s remaining wild places in order to feed the human economy. And without any sense of irony, people are calling this “environmentalism.”
The energy problem is not just about clean energy; it is about using less energy. And how does a growing global population, most of which is just entering development stages characterized by (among other things) the ownership of cars, do that?
