Climate
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Arctic Longing
What an amazing and awe-inspiring book. I’ve long heard about Barry Lopez‘s Arctic Dreams but have only just got around to reading it. I was nudged by a fellow conspirator, Erin of the Familiar Wilderness on the other end of the Long Island. And now I want to read it again. Combining human and natural…
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Ending The Endless War
Last year was the the hottest year since modern record keeping began in 1880, capping all the other recent record-breakers. And it’s NOT going to get better. If you were born in 1985 or after, you’ve never experienced a year in which the global temperature has been below the 20th-century average. And then there’s methane.…
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People’s Climate March
The march is tomorrow, Sunday, starting at Columbus Circle at 11:30. I’m posting this today because tonight at midnight I will be going on an fossil fuel fast, attempting to use the least amount of power as possible, including everything connected to the internet. Trying to shrink my small urban footprint even smaller; this is…
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Stung!
Is it too early for a couple of quick ones? Non-Russian vodka, with Bloody Mary camouflage, if you please. This book is unrelievedly depressing and despairing. It makes you want to jump in the ocean and drown… but you’ll probably be stung dead by jellies before that happens. Should your grandchildren ever get ahold of…
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The Earth Abides
At the end of Emile Zola’s 1890 novel, La Bête Humaine, a train full of soldiers hurls along the rails into Paris. There’s no one is control of the thing, for, after much madness and jealousy, the engineer and the fireman have killed each other. The doomed train is Zola’s vision of technology going berserk.…
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It’s the heat, stupid
People, politely called “climate change deniers,” who reject the basic rules of physics and chemistry parade their stupidity with a militance. In their willful ignorance, they like to parrot the line that the planet can’t be warming because we still have winter — even though winters are measurably warmer than they were just half a…
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Feedback is Hell
“The undiscovered polar regions are the home of men.” Henry David Thoreau, December 16, 1850. One day in the not-so-distant future, the imaginative hold of the Polar regions will be largely history, melted away into dreams. Zones of purity and terror, the once mysterious Poles obsessed peoples for centuries. Emily Dickinson, for one. She called…
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Where have all the Megafauna gone?
Long time passing. Sharon Levy’s Once and Future Giants: What Ice Age Extinctions Tell Us About The Fate of Earth’s Largest Animals is hard to put down. It’s sort of a Pleistocene CSI: 13,000 years later, scientists are trying to put together the pieces of what happened to the large animals of North America. These…
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Stormy thoughts
“Climate change is almost always abrupt, shifting rapidly within decades, even years,” writes Brian Fagin in his book about the Little Ice Age. That period, which interrupted the interglacial warming phase that has seen the rise of human beings to overwhelm the planet, lasted roughly from 1300-1850, and saw massive demographic crises throughout the world;…
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The Volcano
Remember my “bad acid trip” of nearly a year ago? I dropped an egg in some vinegar to show how acid breaks down calcium carbonate. Something like this is happening right now as some of the excess carbon dioxide we are pumping into the atmosphere gets absorbed by the ocean and acidifies the water. This…
Backyard and Beyond 