Shame on the Obama Justice Department

For prosecuting Tim DeCristopher.

Gasland

I'm rooting for Gasland tonight, a chilling documentary by Josh Fox about hydrofracking for natural gas.

It didn't win. I guess money trumps Benzene in drinking water but they are both related.

Global Warming Mapped

NASA Observatory Red means fever.

The Difficulty of a Global Warming Script

The Difficulty of a Global Warming Script

No matter the complexity of the plot, there is no story people want to see. In the harsh reality of what is to come, they really don't want to look. They should.

Arctic Shift

Conditions have been warmer this year in Greenland's capital, Nuuk, than at any other time since record-keeping began there in 1873.

Mr. McKibben goes to Washington

The Middlebury College professor  and activist went with three students from Unity College, which is located out in the "sticks" near my hometown in Maine. The little school, housed on a former commercial chicken farm, is known for its natural resource focus, as opposed to the business and liberal arts colleges that populate the area. Idealism is hard to juxtapose on the reality of dealing with the human animal. The mission was symbolic: to have the Obama administration reinstall a solar panel that once graced the roof of The White House under the Carter administration. Reagan remo ved them upon taking office, another symbolic gesture. Here we are, faced with pending peril at the hands of our own ineptitude to deal with scientific reality. And now fear of Fox News. But remember, Mr. President. There's a wind generator at the Bush Manse on Walker's Point in Maine. Of course that's a facade, but they know how to play the game. Our side clearly does not. 

"We've run out of spare decades to deal with climate change — the summer's events in the Arctic, in Russia, in Pakistan proved that with great clarity. We know what we need to do, and we must do it. Enthusiastically."

Extreme Weather Events Linked to Global Warming

As Dr. Schmidt says, here, the odds go up with higher global mean temperature. It's a no brainer, really.

Record Heat

warmest first half of year on record 2010 tops 1998 temps; question now is whether 12 months will break 2005 record for warmest year

So I guess global warming didn't end in 1998. Whoops there goes another zombie lie.

LA Times Festival of Books

Another good day of author panels at UCLA topped off by a new story written and performed by T.C. Boyle, one of the best entertainers in literature. I was pleased and honored to finally meet Bill McKibben. I'm a 350.org member and feature the number, which represents the safest level in parts per million of CO2 we can have in the atmosphere, in both of my novels. We stand at 391 and climbing. Without a price on carbon it will only get worse. We see the effects now and they are not good.

Earth Day 2010

I attended an mini eco festival out in Ventura yesterday. More of a street fair than a clearing house for solutions of environmental problems, but it's the idea of Earth restoration and preservation that's important. Once the concept is in the collective consciousness the entrepreneurial solutions come forth. Use less, spend less, live more.

Individual and collective action will drown the noise of the denialists and all they'll have is the penalty for overuse.

"Everyone pays to play." Mark Knopfler

Sea Level Rise

Is happening now* of course and many solid papers and direct measurements by satellite confirm it. In the wingnutosphere, though, finding out that one set of scientists found flaws in another group's paper is a sign of all AGW climate change theory is a hoax. This is laughable. Nothing rides or falls on one paper.

As usual, it's old news too, but on the contrary, this is an example of how science is self-correcting. This is a concept that wingnut sceptics and their madcap followers running on venom and blind faith will never get.

*Global sea level rose about 17 centimeters (6.7 inches) in the last century. The rate in the last decade, however, is nearly double that of the last century.

Hansen's Warning

Every rock of coal and every ton of carbon we use makes it more likely we will cross the tipping point. Every ton we get instead from low-carbon sources makes it less likely.This is only one of a dozen effects of global warming that are just as terrifying. If we burn all the world's remaining fossil fuels, there is only one precedent in the climate record for the warming that will occur. It happened at the end of the Permian period 251 million years ago, when the world warmed by 6 degrees. The result? Almost everything on Earth died. A solitary pig-sized creature, the Lystrosaurus, had the land to itself for another 30 million years. Hansen's is the only nonfiction book to ever give me nightmares.

Jim Hansen is a great American hero and as such faces an unthankful populace. People rarely ever want to hear the truth. Hansen's book is a must read.

Hansen knows what all those attuned to nature know--that pumping fossil fuel carbon into the earth's atmosphere is like feeding a dump bear: Sooner or later it will come back and trash the place.

The March of the Loons

As I wrote at the Washington Post-- The ratio of denier loons to those trying to inform them [on the comment thread] seems to be growing. That's a good sign. So is the Copenhagen Accord. The other treaties didn't work because we didn't join in, nor did China. Imagine if we compete to see who will contribute the least CO2 and to lose is to lose face? This is the future. It will happen so we can all have one.

350 Awareness Day

I attended a great presentation ay NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory this afternoon promoted by 350.org. Sea level rise was the most disturbing discovery. The displacement of water from the melting of ice sheets in both hemispheres congregate around the US coastline. Sea level rise is not uniform. Talk about your chickens coming home to roost.

Yet whack job deniers still persist. Like the Superfreakowingnuts and their hose to heaven pie-in-the-sky "solution" from the people who brought you the incompetent Windows OS, and commenters on major newspapers who claim this sort of wisdom.

"To respond to the carbon dioxide claim, true scientific data show that we had higher concentrations of carbon dioxide in 1820 and 1940 than we do now."

Why does this sort of ignorant garbage litter a major newspaper's web site? I mean really, many of us know we are riding on a ship with fools but are a long way from being a ship comprised of fools. One won't get that impression reading a comment thread at an environmental article on The Washington Post. What sad times for media.

CO2 is now at 388 ppm and climbing. 350 is the safest level of carbon dioxide we can have without drastic climate repercussions.

Political forecast:Increasing cloudiness for many among us.

Greenhouse Reduction Incentives

Since no major industry is likely to reduce emissions out of their own volition and concern for the world, the first incentive is a swift kick in the ass. Kudos to the Obama administration for implementing my plan. Rebates and tax reductions for doing so to follow. Time for the coal power plants of the rust belt states, the south, and any other holdouts, to be pulled kicking and screaming into the 21st Century and face the consequences for the rapidly warming world. "O.H.I.O. Ohio," as Joan Armatrading sang. Selling scrubbers is good not only for the environment, but for those businesses. This is a win win. I should point out that most western states use natural gas, a much cleaner fuel, to generate electricity.

The Towering Inferno in the Warming World

"Fire officials worried the eastern flank could approach the upper edge of Sierra Madre by today and that a finger of flames on the west could hit Sunland. But officials said they were "fairly confident" they could keep the fire out of Acton."

Great. I'm glad for Acton, which is the size of a postage stamp. I live in Sunland. Happily I'm not there. I'm fishing in the Eastern Sierra's. It's no coincidence. Good luck and goodnight. Little fire scarecrow?

Global Warming's First Victims

Are the animals of course. Here, grizzly expert Doug Peacock makes the case for the Yellowstone grizzlies, whose food source, the whitebark pine has succumbed to beetle kill in a vast way, due to warm winters for just seven years. It's a typical house of cards, with one piece falling and others in a textbook domino event.

I had lunch with Doug and his wife Andrea last October in Livingston, a month before I was run out of town by the Evil Editor. Peacock was a good friend of Ed Abbey and the prototype for Abbey's protagonist, George Washington Hayduke in The Monkey Wrench Gang. For me it was meeting a legend, an introduction arranged thanks to ousted Park County Commissioner and chair, Dr. Larry Lahren, the man who also introduced me to Tom McGuane in Missoula at the Montana Book Festival, as "The man who ruined my political career,'Bless him!'" It's a tribute to my journalistic skills and Lahren's great character, that he didn't consider me an enemy. I'll always remember what he did for me.

The bears need to be protected again under the ESA. There aren't that many of them left and the curious matter of most native Montanans being afraid of the bears and wolves and bison be damned. The sad fact is outside of the liberal enclave of Hollywood insiders clustered at Deep Creek in the spectacular Paradise Valley south of Livingston, where the Peacocks live, most regular rancher folks hate wildlife, especially if they can't kill it, eat it, or sell it to tourists. It's a real problem in rural America. Saving wildlife isn't a priority with heartland types.

Critical Birds of a Feather: Kookaburras

Reached by telephone, Hansen [Dr. James Hansen, NASA Climatologist] sounds annoyed as he says, “There are bigger fish to fry than Freeman Dyson,” who “doesn’t know what he’s talking about.” In an e-mail message, he adds that his own concern about global warming is not based only on models, and that while he respects the “open-mindedness” of Dyson, “if he is going to wander into something with major consequences for humanity and other life on the planet, then he should first do his homework — which he obviously has not done on global warming.”

Global warming is a Rorschach test on the foibles of human reason and of projection. The handful of kooks aren't right. The consensus is. This the outsider is right business is the stuff of novels but rarely is in real life. Dyson and the whackjobs on FOX play the victim when the truth is they're just flat wrong. See Occam's Razor. ex parsimoniae. End of story.

Willfull Ignorance Part ....?

There's been so many it's hard to know, but George Will continues to spout lies about global warming. Are conservatives just blind on this or inherently stupid? It has to be deliberate. Then again opinion is opinion and some are worth less. His is one of the latter.

Losing Winter

Winter easing its grip on Northeast
Temperatures rising 0.8 degrees a decade


The comments from idiots at the end of the article resort to the same failed logic as always. It's a shame reasoned people don't comment more, but the right wing nutcases run roughshod at newspapers Web sites, which they claim to hate.