writeaboutwarming

December 10, 2012 - There are, apparently, 16 national intelligence agencies in the U.S., and they have issued a report today about "major trends" the world faces in the 21st century.  Laughably, the "crisis-prone" global economy tops the list.  As for climate change ... the consensus amongst these 16 agencies, and the "academics, research institutions, political leaders, and corporations in 14 countries and the EU" with whom they collaborated, is that climate change will complicate resource management.  (Now would be a good time to take a deep breath.)  In addition,  they appear to express mild concern about the fact that it is happening faster than predicted. Alright, alright - so the CIA is not the EPA.  They have vastly different missions.  I get that.  The intelligence and business communities do not take climate disruption into account because it's someone else's job, and besides, everyone knows that terrorism and the economy win the Impor...

May 17, 2010 – I have to say I’m amazed the oil spill is still getting as much media coverage as it is. It began to slink off in the direction of No News is Good News, but has come back strong. The most worrisome part of the continuing coverage is the insistence, on the part of analysts outside the oil industry, that far more than 5,000 barrels of oil a day is leaking from the exploded well. See the New York Times of May 14 for further information. That, and Anita Burke’s contention that there is only a 40% chance that the well will ever be shut down. Listen to the Radio Ecoshock program of May 6 (“From the Deepwater Horizon”) to learn more. Speaking of which, Alex Smith’s latest program featured a discussion of the idea of Degrowth, i.e., negative economic and population growth. Be sure to catch this latest edition of the Radio Ecoshock Show. For a stellar introduction to the subject, read Wikipedia’s article. Being a librarian, I’m not always a Wikipedia fan, because students use ...

December 31, 2009 – Time to take your brave pill. Why? Because today it’s time to talk taboo’s. Don’t kid yourself; that’s a hard thing to do. We’ll try to approach this taboo openly and honestly (which is what I always try to do). It’s time to talk about Overpopulation. The first question is, why talk about it? What does too many people living in the world today have to do with global warming? There are, by the way, 6.7 billion people living in the world, right now. All the forecasts I’ve read predict a global population of 9 billion by 2050. We aren’t spread across the globe evenly, of course. Some countries are very densely populated (think China, India, and some other countries in Asia - and Africa), while others could support more people (think Russia and Canada). The simple-minded approach would be to insist that, by moving people from one place to another, the imbalance could be corrected. Problems arise, however, when you tell people they must leave all that is familiar to th...