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Updates from the news #04 – 6 May 2024 Over the summer my updates will be only as frequent as my time permits. Grades for my two courses have been turned in, and on Wednesday 8 May I will travel with Michele to SFO for Sachi’s graduation from Berkeley. I will continue to post some of her writing from her job as a Grist 2024 … Continue reading Updates from the news #4 spring 2024
Updates from the news #03 – 15 March 2024 US spring phenology. The National Phenology Network spring leaf index anomaly for 12 March 2024 shows that the West Coast west of the Sierras and Cascades, and Midwest and South all show significantly earlier leaf flush relative to a long term average for 1991-2020. Note that Florida is out-of-synch with the pattern for the South, and … Continue reading Updates from the news #3 – 15 March 2024
The UN Emissions Gap Report 2023 was formally released on 20 November 2023. Advanced press emphasized that fully implementing the revised Nationally Determined Contributions made under the Paris Agreement in December 2015 would limit global heating to 2.9˚C. As pointed out in The Guardian, this best-case scenario is probably 3˚C and there is little doubt that for much of the planet this would be horrific. … Continue reading Updates from the news #13; 27 November 2023
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
The Intercept provides a thorough analysis of how an oil boss was put in charge of a climate summit. Reporting by Ben Stockton and Amy Westervelt describes how leading figures in government such as John Kerry chose to support Sultan Al Jaber, who is the CEO of the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company, known as Adnoc. This is the first time that any CEO, let … Continue reading Updates from the news #11; 30 October 2023
Climate interventions are of two forms: those based on natural processes and those based on technology. Nature-based interventions involve the management of forests, agriculture, and wetlands. Technological solutions involve reducing global temperature through interception of solar radiation or direct removal of CO2 through chemical means or with biofuels and carbon capture. In this module we will review the risks and possible advantages of the most likely … Continue reading Geoengineering
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Use of woody biomass for power production and inappropriate forest offsets result in major disparities between country’s reported emissions and their actual emissions. Continue reading Lies, Damned Lies, and Omissions of Emissions
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 
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