SeniorJunior

Everything is Relative July, 2006 In a four year drought, and rains came. August, 2018 and the rains have come again. Just not so much. I was ecstatic. This is what I wrote in 2006... with a few follow up comments from 2018. White text = 2006 Yellow text = 2018 The Great New Mexico Drought [What did I know about "great" re droughts?] is cracked.   Not broken, mind you, just cracked. [So I guess this year the current drought is just bent.] Here in this marvelous little microclimate called “The East Mountains”  - the east side of the mountains  east  of Albuquerque; actually the Sandias, Manzanitas and Manzanos - and especially in this valley where I live, in the Manzanitas close to the north boundary of the Isleta Reservation, we have caught a break.  The rains have come and come and come [2018: They come just once at a time mostly this year, short, intense thundershowers. Not much of that closely packed storms stuff.]     ]  In the last three weeks

The World is Having an Extinction Event But We Live too Fast to See It. Permian Extinction - A quarter billion years ago.  75% of all Animal, 95% of all sea creatures and plants wiped out.  Took perhaps a two to three million years to happen.  The "big finish," the eruption of the Siberian Flats. [source] Even this  humongous catastrophe took maybe a million years to finish the kill off. Dinosaur Extinction - 66 million years ago.  All the dinos plus about half of plant life and sea creatures wiped out .  Took perhaps half a million years to happen.  The monster rock that hit Earth (Chicxulub Crater in the Gulf of Mexico), and some others, plus the Deccan Flats eruptions in India were the villains.                                                     [source]       [source] We Probably Wouldn't Have Noticed.  If there happened to be humans around (there weren't) in the middle of either of those giant extinctions, things would be chang

BIGGER Than BIG Things that happen in slo -mo are invisible to most of us. Life is short, and events that take several lifetimes just disappear in the noise of day-to-day living. The BIG slo -mo elephant on the beach is climate change. BIG REPORT So what could be bigger? How about another MASS EXTINCTION as a result of climate change? There is yet another huge, fully credible, completely frightening report just out (on 20 June) warning of this looming nightmare, already underway, in our precious oceans and seas. Here are just the headlines of this report : Human actions have resulted in warming and acidification of the oceans and are now causing increased hypoxia. The speeds of many negative changes to the ocean are near to or are tracking the worst-case scenarios from IPCC and other predictions. Some are as predicted, but many are faster than anticipated, and many are still accelerating.

...About Climate Change If you are casting a dragnet for clarifying info on the (apparently to some) confusing facts about the REALLY BIG MESS we are heading into with our dosing the atmosphere with our carbon refuse, try this site . Like weekly. It's on my new favorite web site, Architecture 2030 . Give it a shot. pix credit

Why Do We Make Dangerous Decisions? (Like deciding climate change "isn't real") Fiddling while the Arctic Melts It amazes me that whole swaths of humanity ignore facts, refute the irrefutable and get all conspiracy-ish when issues arise that they don't like or that make them uncomfortable. Two unrelated (except they were both in the NY Times) columns offered nice, tight nuggets of insight into why some of us human beans lock our mental steering wheels and drive ourselves into major crashes. Here's an excerpt from an Op-Ed on our dismal climate fate, the author Thomas Homer-Dixon, a professor of global systems at the Balsillie School of International Affairs in Waterloo, Canada. Climate policy is gridlocked, and there’s virtually no chance of a breakthrough. Many factors have conspired to produce this situation. Human beings are notoriously poor at responding to problems that develop incrementally. And most of us aren’t eager to change our lifestyles by sharpl

... That Would Be 2009 Woe is us. The predictions keep getting worse, while the denialists keep getting louder. Something completely human about that, no? In case you missed the latest blast from the future from the National Academy of Sciences, here is the L.A. Times piece on it (from a month ago - thanks, Digg, for reviving it). Always check your sources, boys and girls. Know what the N.A.S. is? The National Academy of Sciences (NAS) is an honorific society of distinguished scholars engaged in scientific and engineering research, dedicated to the furtherance of science and technology and to their use for the general welfare. The NAS was signed into being by President Abraham Lincoln on March 3, 1863, at the height of the Civil War. Do you believe the NAS or the latest Climate Denialist/Birther/Creationist whackjob? Up to you, of course. In short, the big, Congressional-mandated study by all those distinguished scholars says things are URGENT, we should get on the stick an

THE SECOND SCARIEST STUFF ABOUT CLIMATE CHANGE The FIRST scariest is the incessant bleating of the "deniers," egged on by the hydrocarbon industry. I read in the Washington Post a Heritage Foundation denialist called climate change "the greatest non-crisis facing mankind." That's high level denying. That's scary . That SECOND scariest part is the truth itself. Here's an excerpt from a report in Science Daily: "A new study by researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the University of Wyoming predicts that by the year 2100, many of today's familiar climates will be replaced by climates unknown in today's world, if current rates of carbon dioxide (CO 2 ) and other greenhouse gas emissions continue. The new global climate models for the next century forecast the complete disappearance of several existing climates currently found in tropical highlands and regions near the poles, while large swaths of the tropics and sub