Seven Generational Ruminations

There are twin crises looming in our immediate future .. ones which threaten our society with its very survival. Our society has reached a great and beautiful place, in many ways, but the core foundation our society rests on is cheap oil. We are coming to the end of the age of cheap oil and it seems almost nobody knows about the problem. Further complicating the problem is one more people know about, climate change, where the environmental conditions we humans have enjoyed for eons are spiraling into an extremely hot period.

Amory Lovins has a very intriguing proposal... Increase of Nuclear Power use would cause an increase in Global Warming. That's kind of a puzzler but it turns out he has an interesting analysis. And, to be real, Officialdom is presenting increased nuclear power as a method to solve some of the 'energy' problems the U.S. is facing. Not just Washington Officialdom but some head scratchers like Stewart Brand and other environmentalists have been suggesting nuclear power because it doesn't emit carbon.

"If temperatures rise rapidly in California this century, up to two-thirds of the state's native plants might lose large swaths of suitable habitat, according to a new study. " ... this estimation comes from researchers at many universities who released maps showing effects on plant species from climate change. As the environment warms up it changes the conditions, and both plants and animals tend to have narrow ranges of environment conditions in which they will live.

"How it all Ends" is an astonishingly great video series studying the climate change debate. It was put together by a high school science teacher, a truly excellent high school science teacher, using the props he had available in his classroom. He comes to a very interesting proposition that sidesteps most of the climate change debate. It's an logicians method, actually Pascal's Wager, that sets of a decision grid to help answer really tough problems.

The Hype About Hydrogen: Fact And Fiction In The Race To Save The Climate author: Joseph J. Romm asin: 155963703X

For the last 20 years the fuel cell vehicle has been 5-10 years in the future. I think and so do many others that the car industry is holding fuel cell vehicles out as this beautiful goal (look, the exhaust is just water) which is also highly unattainable. By being unattainable the car industry is able to put off the transition away from the gasoline burning technology currently being used.

The question then, is the hype around fuel cells and the hydrogen economy all investment to preserving the fossil fuel duopoly arrangement?

The report says many apes, monkeys and other primates are being driven from the forests where they live or killed to make food and medicines.

...Of particular concern are the Hainan gibbon from China and Miss Waldron's red colobus monkey from Ivory Coast, both of which have only a few surviving creatures left in the wild.

The report says the threat to primates is worst in Asia where tropical forests are being destroyed and many monkeys are being hunted or traded as pets.

Using radar images acquired by European ERS-1 and -2 satellites, scientists from British Antarctic Survey (BAS) tracked the flow rate of more than 300 previously unstudied glaciers. They found a 12% increase in glacier speed from 1993 to 2003. These observations, echoing recent findings from coastal Greenland, indicate that the cause is the melting of the lower glaciers, which flow directly into the sea.

Melting glacier uncovers island contains a series of pictures showing one effect of melting glaciers in Greenland. There are beginning to be islands freed from the ice who have been buried by ice for millennia.

I've now flown over Greenland four times (on two trips) and from 35,000 feet in the airplane all I can say is there is a massive amount of ice covering that continent.

The threats posed by climate change to natural and cultural sites on UNESCO's World Heritage List are outlined in a new UNESCO publication, "Case Studies on Climate Change and World Heritage"*. The report features 26 examples - including the Tower of London, Kilimanjaro National Park and the Great Barrier Reef - case studies that are representative of the dangers faced by the 830 sites inscribed on the World Heritage List.

U.N. climate panel says warming is man-made is about the most dire of all possible climate change and global warming warnings. ..."The world's top climate scientists said on Friday global warming was man-made, spurring calls for urgent government action to prevent severe and irreversible damage from rising temperatures."...

The report comes from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). They publish a series of assessments on various subjects. Their 2001 estimate of global warming deemed it 66 percent likely to be human-caused (hey, Mr. Bush, isn't that a pretty strong indicator?) and the current study deems it 90 percent likely.