climate change
pgleick | August 19, 2013
Dropping water levels in Lake Mead, behind Hoover Dam. (Source: Peter Gleick 2013)
It is no surprise, of course, that the western United States is dry. The entire history of the West can be told (and has been, in great books like Cadillac Desert [Reisner] and Rivers of Empire [Worster] and The Great Thirst [Hundley]) in large part through the story of the hydrology of the West, the role of the federal and state governments in developing water infrastructure, the evidence of droughts and floods on the land, and the politics of water allocations and use.
But the story of water in the West…
illconsidered | August 16, 2013The Bottleneck Years
by H.E. Taylor
Chapter 52
Table of Contents
Chapter 54
Chapter 53
Carillon, March 8, 2057
When I got home that afternoon I discovered that one of my new students had surreptitiously video logged me. Edie met me at the door with, "I watched your whole lecture today."
"What?"
"It's true. You're all over the forums. There have been thousands of downloads."
I shook my head a little dismayed.
"People want to know what's really going on and nobody believes the official reports."
Anna heard my voice and came running into the kitchen. I was hot and tired, so I dropped down on one…
lborkowski | August 15, 2013A few of the recent pieces I've liked:
Osha Gray Davidson in Rolling Stone: The Great Burning: How Wildfires Are Threatening the West
Courtney Subramanian at TIME's Healthland blog: Rebranding Climate Change as a Public Health Issue
Harold Pollack at Washington Post's Wonkblog: 85 million Americans lack dental coverage. Fixing that requires more than just money.
Abraham Lustgarten at ProPublica: Unfair Share: How Oil and Gas Drillers Avoid Paying Royalties
Heather Rousseau at NPR's Shots blog: In Rural Uganda, Homemade Bikes Make the Best Ambulances
milhayser | August 14, 2013Life has been growing on Earth for about 4 billion years, and during that time there have been a handful of mass extinctions that have wiped out a large percentage of complex lifeforms. Asteroid impact, volcanic eruption, climate change, anoxia, and poison have dispatched untold numbers of once-successful species to total oblivion or a few lucky fossils. Species also die off regularly for much less spectacular reasons, and altogether about 98% of documented species no longer exist.
Cry me a river, you say, without all that death there would have been no gap for vertebrates, for mammals, for…
illconsidered | August 12, 2013This weekly posting is brought to you courtesy of H. E. Taylor. Happy reading, I hope you enjoy this week's Global Warming news roundup
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Another Week of Climate Instability News
Sipping from the Internet Firehose...
August 11, 2013
Chuckles, COP19+, AGU, NOAA, Potash, Bottom Line, Coal Financing, Cook
Fukushima: Note, News, Policies
Melting Arctic, Polar Bears, Harp Seals, Methane, Antarctica
Food: Crisis, Fisheries, Prices, Food vs. Biofuel, GMOs, GMO Labelling, Production
Hurricanes, Monsoon, Weather Machine, Notable Weather, Extreme Weather, New…
illconsidered | August 9, 2013(the featured image above is of the once aptly named Rio Grande, now referred to by locals as the "Rio Sand")
The LA Times has a very chilling piece on New Mexico's not so chilling climate change. Here are a few quotes to pique your interest:
"All of New Mexico is officially in a drought, and three-quarters of it is categorized as severe or exceptional."
"The last three years have been the driest and warmest since record-keeping began here in 1895."
"With water supplies at the breaking point and no relief in sight, a domino-effect water war has broken out, which might be a harbinger of the…
illconsidered | August 8, 2013The Bottleneck Years
by H.E. Taylor
Chapter 51
Table of Contents
Chapter 53
Chapter 52
Ecology 550 - Group 5 Overview, March 8, 2057
Notes on a lecture.
Spring term was near the half way point and Ecology 550 was ahead of schedule. I had been fielding a lot of questions about Group 5, so I decided to do an overview lecture on the UNGETF groups and wind up with some details on Group 5.
I made a list to structure the class. I opened a screen with my padd and projected the list.
Group 1 - Reforestation, ongoing, effectiveness minimal.
Group 2 - Stratospheric sulphates, effective but politicized…
illconsidered | August 6, 2013This weekly posting is brought to you courtesy of H. E. Taylor. Happy reading, I hope you enjoy this week's Global Warming news roundup
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Logging the Onset of The Bottleneck Years
August 4, 2013
Chuckles, COP19+, Violence, Hallowich, Rebuilding, Potash, Bottom Line, Cook
Fukushima: Note, News, Policies
Melting Arctic, Methane, Geopolitics, Antarctica
Food: Crisis, Fisheries, GMOs, Production, N-Fix
Hurricanes, Extremes, New Weather GHGs, Temperatures, Feedbacks, Aerosols
Paleoclimate, Oceans, Biosphere, Extinctions, Bees & CCD, Volcanoes,…
illconsidered | August 2, 2013Watch the video below and see if you can see where the warming stops:
(seen at the wonderful APOD site)
illconsidered | August 1, 2013The Bottleneck Years
by H.E. Taylor
Chapter 50
Table of Contents
Chapter 52
Chapter 51
Soap, February 20, 2057
Anna came down the hall complaining. "Mommy, my tummy hurts." There were bubbles coming out of her mouth.
Edie took one look and yelled, "Luc, call an ambulance!"
I came out of the kitchen and saw Anna down on her hands and knees vomitting on the front room floor. There was a trail of liquid down the hall to the bathroom. Following the trail back, I found a shampoo bottle on the bathroom floor. It was about half full.
"Do you know how much was in this?"
"Oh my god!" exclaimed Edie. "…
illconsidered | July 29, 2013This weekly posting is brought to you courtesy of H. E. Taylor. Happy reading, I hope you enjoy this week's Global Warming news roundup
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Information is not Knowledge...Knowledge is not Wisdom
July 28, 2013
Chuckles, COP19+, MEF, Whiteman, Warnings
Bottom Line, Subsidies, EIB, Pricing Nature, Cook
Fukushima: Note, News, Related Papers
Melting Arctic, Harp Seals, Methane, Geopolitics, Antarctica
Food: Crisis, Fisheries, Land Grabs, GMOs, Production
Hurricanes, New Weather, GHGs, Carbon Cycle, CO2 Fertilization
Temperatures, Aerosols, Paleoclimate,…
illconsidered | July 26, 2013The Bottleneck Years
by H.E. Taylor
Chapter 49
Table of Contents
Chapter 51
Chapter 50
Eco 110 - Carrying Capacity, January 15, 2057
Notes on a lecture
It was the first class of the term. I was purposefully late, because I wanted everyone to be present and impatient. I walked in, dropped my case on the wide black presentation desk and turned to face the old theatre style hall.
"Okay, here is the question: Are we collectively smarter than a vat of yeast?"
I let that sink in for a few seconds, then continued with:
"The topic for today is carrying capacity.
"Intuitively, the idea is how many…
illconsidered | July 26, 2013The Bottleneck Years
by H.E. Taylor
Chapter 48
Table of Contents
Chapter 50
Chapter 49
Solstice, December 27, 2056
I have not been writing much, because I have been busy with the lichen. Annoyingly, the symbiotic signalling continues to elude me. A colleague at CCU collaborated with me on a paper. "An examination of the laboratory growth rates of the lichen eFontaine1" by Luc C. Fontaine and George R. Collins. eFontaine1 was the proper name, but we all called it eF1.
Last year by unspoken assent, Edie and I both more or less ignored xmas. This year Anna was old enough that she would realize…
gregladen | July 23, 2013James Hansen, the famous climate scientist and author of Storms of my Grandchildren, talks about the possible role of nuclear power in addressing climate change, and in particular, reducing the release of fossil carbon into the atmosphere.
I think he is far to pessimistic on the use of solar and wind energy than he needs to be and notice that he, and no one else ever, seems to mention geothermal, which could reduce our release of carbon by double digit percentages using existing technology in a few years. Having said that, there is probably no way to solve our energy problem without…
illconsidered | July 22, 2013This weekly posting is brought to you courtesy of H. E. Taylor. Happy reading, I hope you enjoy this week's Global Warming news roundup
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Information Overloadis Pattern Recognition
July 21, 2013
Chuckles, COP19+, International Tax, Antarctic Reserve, Pollution Mortality
Bottom Line, Finance, Cook
Fukushima: Note, News
Melting Arctic, Methane, Geopolitics, Antarctica
Food: Crisis, Fisheries, Land Grabs, GMOs, Production
Hurricanes, Monsoon, Notable Weather, Extreme Weather, New Weather
Temperatures, Feedbacks, Aerosols, Paleoclimate
Oceans, Extinctions…
illconsidered | July 20, 2013The Bottleneck Years
by H.E. Taylor
Chapter 47
Table of Contents
Chapter 49
Chapter 48
Edie's Questions , October 4, 2056
Since our talk about Neurolin last spring, Edie had applied herself to her distance courses and done well. She had stopped taking it when she finished the courses. Judging by the steady stream of customers who dropped around for fab created items, her basement business was thriving.
I mentioned it to her once. "I noticed you set up another fab," I said.
She nodded with a funny little smile. "Yeah, I've been busy," but no more was said.
Several times Edie ambushed me with…
illconsidered | July 18, 2013The Bottleneck Years
by H.E. Taylor
Chapter 46
Table of Contents
Chapter 48
Chapter 47
Symbiosis, September 27, 2056
The next time I got into the lab, I started pulling apart lichen just to get a feel for the territory. Lichen is a symbiosis of an algae and a fungus. The fungus in the north is usually an ascomycetes. The algal component is usually a simple green algae, although occasionally a blue-green algae is found. A lot of work had been done on green algae earlier in the century while investigating their suitability for biofuel. It was the fungal component, the ascomycetes, which had not…
illconsidered | July 16, 2013This weekly posting is brought to you courtesy of H. E. Taylor. Happy reading, I hope you enjoy this week's Global Warming news roundupskip to bottom Sipping from the Internet Firehose...July 14, 2013 Chuckles, China-USA, Pollution Deaths, Injection Earthquakes Sumatran Smog, Warnings, Rentiers, Bottom Line, Banks, CookFukushima: Note, News, Policies Melting Arctic, Methane, AntarcticaFood: Crisis, Fisheries, Food vs. Biofuel, Land Grabs, GMOs, Production Hurricanes, Monsoon, Notable Weather, Extreme Weather, New Weather Carbon Cycle, Temperatures, Feedbacks, Aerosols…
pgleick | July 16, 2013
The evidence from real-world observations, sophisticated computer models, and research in hundreds of different fields continues to pile up: human-caused climate change is already occurring and will continue to get worse and worse as greenhouse-gas concentrations continue to rise.
Because the climate is connected to every major geophysical, chemical, and biological system on the planet, it should not be surprising that we are learning more and more about the potential implications of these changes for a remarkably wide range of things. And while it is certainly possible – even likely – that…