Category Archives: Global Warming

The Weeks of Winter

2/2/2012 – 3:15 pm

Happy Groundhog’s Day.  The news reports that the various prognosticating groundhogs cannot agree on whether winter has or has not ended.  Maybe they can’t agree on whether it’s started.  I’m not sure human-groundhog communication is all that sophisticated.
Yesterday was the Imbolc, the Celtic feast of pregnant ewes, a harbinger of spring soon to come.  There [...]

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Duty Now for the Future

11/10/2011 – 6:41 pm

My neighbors seemed to hit on a 21st century harvest ritual last Sunday.  It was the first dusk of standard time and was getting dark around 4:40.  It had been a beautiful days and we’d all been closing our gardens for the season, when I noticed fires burning in a few backyards.  It seemed a [...]

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What the Left Hand is Doing

9/29/2011 – 2:55 pm

Cognitive dissonance is name given to the discomfort caused by trying to simultaneously hold two conflicting ideas.  Policy dissonance might be the name applied when two conflicting ideas are the basis for government action.
An example: Texas is still in the worst single-year drought in its history and the hottest summer in Texas history just ended [...]

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Orwell was an Optimist

9/8/2011 – 4:18 pm

Quick quiz, two questions: 1 – What percentage of scientists think global warming is occurring?  2 – What percentage of scientists think global warming is caused by human activities?  Read those again carefully; it’s not the same question twice.
The answers (I won’t make you wait) are 100 and 98.  No statistically significant number of scientists [...]

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Race to the Bottom: Homestretch

9/1/2011 – 1:25 pm

In this space the first week of January 2004, I predicted it would be the year that would determine whether or not American democracy would survive.  In the last month of that same year, I was forced to conclude, with sorrow, that American democracy is doomed.  Although I’ve been allowed brief moments of hope since [...]

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HD5

7/21/2011 – 12:33 pm

Last Wednesday, 13 July 2011, was HD5 or Hansen Day Five.  It marked the fifth anniversary of James Hansen’s 2006 essay in the New York Review of Books, in which he wrote: “…we have at most ten years—not ten years to decide upon action, but ten years to alter fundamentally the trajectory of global greenhouse [...]

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Burned by Water

4/7/2011 – 1:57 pm

The northeast coast of Japan was shaken by another earthquake today – 7.4 on the Richter scale this time. In Washington, Congressman Ed Markey (D-MA) is arguing with bureaucrats at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) about whether fuel in one of Fukushima’s reactors has breached the containment vessel. Just another day in the [...]

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