The USGCRP released the National Climate Assessment Five on Wednesday 15 November. I recorded a few initial impressions for my upper division course in Climate Change Biology, BSC3307C. You can view the recording here. Be advised that I use terms and concepts that are drawn from previous lectures in my courses on climate change. The first fews slides are a review of recent papers on … Continue reading First pass review of the NCA5
Insanity fact #3,787. Fossil fuel expansion is projected to be gobsmackingly mindboggling enormous in the coming years. The U.S., Brazil, and Saudi Arabia plan major increases in oil production. Russia, India, and Indonesia will increase coal production. The U.N. reports that the planned production worldwide is almost 70% more than would be consistent with 2˚C global average heating. According to the IMF, fossil fuel subsidies … Continue reading Updates from the news #12; 13 November
Bill McKibben points out that U.S. development of Liquified Natural Gas (LNG) will be a major carbon bomb. More than two dozen new or expansion LNG projects are under construction or consideration. This build-out would be a sick joke if the consequences were not so profound. Our political system is truly broken when these projects can move forward even as we experience increasingly devastating consequences … Continue reading Updates from the news #10; 23 October 2023
Updates from the news #8 – 9 October 2023 Second to the stunning analysis of global September heat is the powerful Apostolic Exhortation from Pope Francis on the urgency of addressing climate change. Addressing the Bishops and the 1.3 billion-member Catholic Church, the pontiff bluntly calls out the U.S. for “irresponsible” Western consumption and pushing the world to “the breaking point” on climate. This is … Continue reading Updates from the news #8
Our understanding of climate change and the polar vortex must be refined, but the relationships are clear. Continue reading Climate change messes with Texas
There are several reasons why the changes underway represent a false summit leaving an extremely steep climate landscape yet to be scaled. It is important to realize that most of these changes are promises, rather than anything close to becoming reality. In the US, we can count on GOP elected officials at the state and federal level to oppose most of the proposed changes to energy policy and climate change mitigation. The GOP will protect the fossil fuel industry in myriad ways that will leave the average voter at a loss to say exactly what is happening.
Continue reading The false summit of climate change progress
An Australian NGO has been following the anthropogenic decimation of our planet for the past few years. The group, known as The Commission For The Future of Humanity, notes that there are ten existential issues that could spell the demise of civilization during this century. No single one of these is unfolding in isolation because they are potentially mutually reinforcing calamities on a global scale. … Continue reading On the survival of civilization – Earth Day 2020
Golfing while the mountains burn. Photo from Beacon Rock Golf Course.Personally, I would rate the likelihood of staying under two degrees of warming as under 10 percent. – Michael Oppenheimer 2017
Do not depend on the hope of results. You may have to face the fact that your work will be apparently worthless and even achieve no result at all, if not perhaps results opposite to what you expect. As you get used to this idea, you start more and more to concentrate not on the results, but on the value, the rightness, the truth of the work itself. – Thomas Merton
Under a concrete sky on 5 November 2014, Michele and I awoke to realize that Paul LePage had been re-elected as governor of Maine. Once again, Mainers had split their votes three ways and LePage was elected by a minority of the voters to another four-year term. We were deeply disappointed because during his first term LePage had made clear his disdain for environmental concerns. Little did we know that the next few years would make LePage’s first term look like the good old days. Continue reading “The Long Game: Facing Reality in the Environmental Century”
Amazonia burning. NASA Earth Observatory 2014“I don’t think of all the misery, but of all the beauty that remains.”
–Anne Frank
On Sunday, 30 April 2017, the New York Times reported that global marine fisheries are being pushed to the brink. This and countless other imminent losses prompt me to once again point out that management of the global biosphere is necessary if we are to have any hope of controlling climate change and feeding ourselves. Human impacts on ecosystems are pushing the living planet into a new regime characterized by disrupted ecological relationships and accelerating extinctions on local, regional, and global scales. Ecological disruption causes ongoing positive feedbacks from widely-distributed natural sources of emissions, thus further disrupting the climate system. Globally, we are approaching a state of unmanageability on many fronts. Continue reading “Ecology, Loss, and Triage”
The Hellisheiði Power Station in Iceland. WikipediaLast week the mainstream media and many of the social media outlets hailed the experiment in Iceland that has demonstrated the ability to capture CO2 from the air and turn it into rock. The Guardian proclaimed “CO2 turned into stone in Iceland in climate change breakthrough” and the journal Science headlined “Inject baby, inject!”. A similar, highly engineered coal-fired power plant operating in Canada has struggled to show cost effectiveness. Science saluted the technology in Iceland as a breakthrough that if scaled up could rapidly sequester large quantities of climate-warming CO2.
Oh, really now? Continue reading “Carbon capture and sequestration the old fashioned way”
The Environmental Century 
You must be logged in to post a comment.