All Time High Temps in Moscow
The Eastern Sierra Speaks
All Time High Temps in Moscow
Categories: Global Warming, 31 wordsSend feedback •Yesterday the temperature hit +100 in Moscow, an all time high. When system parameters break out of their old bounds, it is often evidence that the state of the system has changed.
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Calling All Future-Eaters
Categories: Environment, Global Warming, 1623 words2 feedbacks •By Chris Hedges
from TruthDig.orgThe human species during its brief time on Earth has exhibited a remarkable capacity to kill itself off. The Cro-Magnons dispatched the gentler Neanderthals. The conquistadors, with the help of smallpox, decimated the native populations in the Americas. Modern industrial warfare in the 20th century took at least 100 million lives, most of them civilians. And now we sit passive and dumb as corporations and the leaders of industrialized nations ensure that climate change will accelerate to levels that could mean the extinction of our species. Homo sapiens, as the biologist Tim Flannery points out, are the “future-eaters.”
From the Shadows: The Art of Censoring Climate Scientists
Categories: Environment, Global Warming, Peak Oil, 2556 words2 feedbacks •from the Canyon Country Zephyr
…the first line of the NASA mission is "to understand and protect our home planet." Maybe that can be changed to "…protect special interests' backside."
James Hansen, March 2007
When people have no identification with the wildness of the land – do not experience it as sacred – a tiny seed of evil possibility lies dormant in their minds. The seed sprouts when there is a dire threat to what they do hold sacred.
Jeremy Rifkin: The third industrial revolution
Categories: Global Warming, Economy, Peak Oil, 2967 wordsSend feedback •Some may know that I have compared the twin spectres of peak oil and global warming to a kind of final exam for humans, which we are so far doing poorly on. This is an interview with Jeremy Rifkin discussing his new book, EMPATHIC CIVILIZATION. He argues that the solutions will go far the purely technological
What is the premise of The Empathic Civilization?
My sense is that we're nearing an endgame for the modern age. I think we had two singular events in the last 18 months that signal the end. First, in July 2008 the price of oil hit $147/barrel. Food riots broke out in 30 countries, the price of basic items shot up and purchasing power plummeted. That was the earthquake; the market crash 60 days later was the aftershock. It signaled the beginning of the endgame of a great industrial era based on fossil fuels. The second event, in December 2009, was the breakdown in Copenhagen, when world leaders tried to deal with our entropy problem and failed.That's the context of the book. Why couldn't our world leaders anticipate or respond to the global meltdown of the industrial revolution? And why can't they deal with climate change when scientists have been telling us that it may be the greatest threat our species has ever faced?
Politicians are fiddling while the planet burns. What's a voter to do?
Categories: Global Warming, 1149 words4 feedbacks •From 14 Dec Newsweek. James Hansen is the world's preeminent authority on global warming. At the end he suggests that civil disobedience may be necessary.
Planet Earth is in imminent peril. We now have clear evidence of the crisis, provided by increasingly detailed information about how Earth responded to perturbing forces during its history and by observations of changes that are beginning to occur around the globe. The startling conclusion is that continued exploitation of all fossil fuels on Earth threatens not only the other millions of species on the planet but also the survival of humanity itself—and the timetable is shorter than we thought.
