Climate
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On Denialism
Did you see Trump’s Coal Ambassador to the UN, Kelly Craft, say she believes “both sides” of the science on climate change? She and her husband, the Kentucky coal king, are major contributors to Trump’s campaign and inauguration. They also funnel money into his hotels, one of the major conduits of corruption flowing to the…
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Colonial Sea Birds Feeling the Heat
Warmer oceans=fewer fish=starving birds. This is a report from Alaska, where it’s been a bad year for North Pacific pelagics. Nine years ago when I was Iceland, we went to a famed Atlantic Puffin nesting site. But it had been abandoned since the last time this tour group was there. Some locals we ran into…
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The Corporate Killers
Over and over again, industry has attacked science to further the profitability of… killing. The paradigm is Big Tobacco: cover up your own evidence and fund obfuscation and denial. The oil and gas oligarchy has followed that playbook: they knew about global warming decades ago; they knew pumping carbon into the atmosphere would heat the…
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Is This It?
I intended this to be a humorous send-off to summer. The Turkey Vultures were cleaning up the day after some jumped-up apes — reader, you know the species intimately — partied on the beach at Croton Point. Species that eat our garbage may be doing ok, but others not so much. God-damn, we are doing…
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Climate Strike Prep
This Friday is the beginning of a week of the Global Climate Strike. Some resources: Fridays for Future youth activism training program. NYC student organizing guide. Climate Strike educator toolkit. Climate Strike Arts Kit, from whence this David Solnit fire-extinguisher logo comes. People’s Climate Movement NYC. Petition for teachers, educators, & faculty. Here’s some history…
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Underland
The Old English word unweder means bad, bad weather, a storm or tempest “so extreme that it seems to have come from another climate or time altogether” writes Robert MacFarlane in Underland. Exploring the rapidly shrinking ice of Greenland near the end of his new “deep time journey,” he’s in the thick of this uncanny…
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Wind At The Back
Just next month, a new edition of Lyall Watson’s Heaven’s Breath: A Natural History of the Wind. The title is iffy and I question its dependence on the Gaia hypothesis for its overarching theme. This seems par for course of Watson, who was a prolific popularizer of science who verged into the paranormal and New…
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Two Degrees
“What happens if one changes a systems’s parameters — the temperature, the weather, the climate? What will collapse and what will endure? Who will live and who will die?” A two-degree rise in global mean temperature, which now sounds optimistically low for the results of global warming this century, may be compared with effects of…
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“As you know, this is not a new issue.”
Recently, I cited this April 1979 report, The Long Term Impact of Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide on Climate, from the Jasons to the DOE. That same year saw the publication of Carbon Dioxide and Climate: A Scientific Assessment, by the Ad Hoc Study Group on Carbon Dioxide and Climate. It’s conclusion: “It appears that the warming…
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Sinister Snails
Little freshwater mollusks in the Physa genus, according to the iNaturalist community. The aperture is on the left side, hence sinistral. In the Sylvan Water. How did they get here? Did they arrive via muddy duck feet, a noted transportation system for plants and animals?Less than a centimeter long, with some smaller. To the nearly…
Backyard and Beyond 