writeaboutwarming

September 12, 2011 - Of all of the things that distress me about Republicans and their deliberate misuse of the English Language and of the truth, it is their lies of omission and their half-truths that upset me the most. After ten years, first of George W. Bush, and now of Eric Cantor and his ilk (aka the Tea Party), hearing the truth spoken by persons of influence is like filling my lungs with fresh, unpolluted air - I'd nearly forgotten how good it feels. That's why I'm looking forward to Wednesday night, October 15. Al Gore's latest contribution to the climate change discussion, called 24 Hours of Reality , will air, beginning at 7:00 pm EST. I will be watching (don't tell my boss), and I hope you will, too. In order to bring about this landmark event, Gore founded and chairs the Climate Reality Project. The project, no doubt in large part because of its founder's celebrity, is sponsored by a large number of organizations, among them Georgia Climate Change C...

September 7, 2011 - Texas has been on fire since November of last year. Over 3 1/2 million acres have burned. The Texas Forest Service now gives daily updates regarding the status of various fires occurring within the state. Let's talk, first of all, about why this is happening. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) issued a report in 2007 which said, among other things, that the arid regions directly north and south of the U.S./Mexican border would become even drier in the future, as a result of climate change. Mother Nature must have read the report, because those chickens have already come home to roost. While the report predicts that these regions will become 10-20% drier by the end of the century, the weather forecast for west Texas tomorrow predicts humidity of anywhere from 5 to 20 percent, i.e., very, very low (desert humidity is 25%). How much lower than 5% can the humidity go? The answer is not much. It's an old story by now: climate disruption is happe...

February 14, 2011 – I’m continually fascinated by the invisible barrier that has, seemingly, been erected between peak oil and climate change. Peak oilers give c.c. a barely discernible nod from time to time, but no more. They apparently pride themselves upon declining to “unnecessarily” (!) complicate matters by attempting to take all the known facts into consideration. This purity of intent apparently sets the facts they are willing to acknowledge on a VERY high plane, indeed. However, as uniquely suited as the human brain is to examining complicated issues in all their subtlety, and as simultaneously pressing as matters have become, the failure to take both crises into account amounts to moral culpability. Of course humans will allow bias to enter into their evaluation! While we wait for that attribute to correct itself, glaciers are melting, methane is entering the atmosphere, and the Amazon is dying. Time is of the essence, ladies and gentlemen! Marshall your spreadsheets ...