Climate
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Sprung
Tossing their pollen into the air… Scott Pruitt, the oil and gas industry operative given the hammer to destroy our environmental protections, claims that physics and chemistry are bunk. (Such a good lesson for students, but, then, the person put in charge of education doesn’t even know what education is; she thinks it’s a fundamentalist-infected…
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Hot February
Yesterday, in Green-Wood, some Cherries and a Red Maple were blooming already.Record-breaking temperatures raise the bar to the new normal. A nice review of climate change now. People, from the rotting orange head of the regime on down, can say it doesn’t exist; they can suppress research; intimidate scientists; but they can’t change the radical,…
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We Are Petroleum Junkies
Hydrocarbons are a dog-damned miracle. The things we get out of crude oil, from fuel to explosives, from fertilizers to clothing, from pharmaceuticals to candle wax, from pesticides to plastics, from asphalt to inks… it’s just mind-boggling. Mostly we think of gasoline, but that’s not the half of it. The stuff both powers and rules…
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Crime of the Century
“Models predict that the present trend of fossil fuel use will lead to dramatic climatic changes within the next 75 years…. Should it be deemed necessary to maintain atmospheric CO2 levels to prevent significant climatic changes, dramatic changes in patterns of energy use would be required.” A 1979 Exxon memo, one of many revealing finds…
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The Nature of the Beast
Last Sunday, I discussed the enemy. Shall we call it capitalism? In his short book Extinction: A Radical History, Ashley Dawson certainly does. “Our economic system is destroying the planetary life support system upon which we depend.” Is this a controversial idea? I don’t think so, but I suppose it will be met with resistance…
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The Real War
The great Bill McKibben is urging us to declare war on climate change, mobilizing like Americans did in the Second World War against the enemy. But is his enemy the right one? We know how stunningly disruptive climate change is, and how much faster it is all happening, and how quickly the bad news piles up. But…
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I Dream of Winter
Winter this year consisted of two brief cold snaps and a couple of snowfalls. One storm was substantial, but it had no follow-through, and was preceded by spoiling absurdities of municipal and media hype. Yesterday, when I took this photo on Union Street, we’d had a little bit of snow, but it was mostly gone…
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Sweet Spot Soured
Neither too close nor too far from the sun, Earth has been described as a “Goldilocks planet” because it’s just right. The term is also used for similar planets, those of the over 2000 exoplanets now discovered that are situated just right, too. More formally, planets in sweet spot orbits are in the “circumstellar habitable…
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Last Ocean
The Last Ocean by John Weller, published by Rizzoli. This year, I’m going to try to be systematic with my natural history reviews. I begin with a remarkable book of photography. Darwin knows, there’s a lot of nature photography out there on-line, in print, and on TV (and DVD etc.). A lot of it is…
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Foggy Old Town
Nothing quite says “harbor” like a foghorn. This freakishly warm December has been producing intense fogs in the archipelago of New York City. Up here on the Harbor Hill Moraine, visibility has often been reduced to less than an avenue block away. It’s just about an avenue now as I write; a large antenna on the…
Backyard and Beyond 