In October 2007, James E. Hansen testified with regard to an application to build a new coal-burning plant in Iowa.  Hanson is the Director of the Goddard Institute for Space Studies and senior scientist in the Columbia University Earth Institute.  He said some harsh things about our substantial dependence on coal:

Global warming from continued burning of more and more fossil fuels poses clear dangers for the planet and for the planet’s present and future inhabitants. Coal is the largest contributor to the human-made increase of CO2 in the air. Saving the planet and creation surely requires phase-out of coal use except where the CO2 is captured and sequestered (stored in one of several possible ways).

Hundreds of millions of people live less than 20 feet above sea level. Thus the number of people affected would be 1000 times greater than in the New Orleans Katrina disaster. Although Iowa would not be directly affected by sea level rise, repercussions would be worldwide. Ice sheet tipping points and disintegration necessarily unfold more slowly than tipping points for sea ice, on time scales of decades to centuries, because of the greater inertia of thick ice sheets. But that inertia is not our friend, as it also makes ice sheet disintegration more difficult to halt once it gets rolling. Moreover, unlike sea ice cover, ice sheet disintegration is practically irreversible . . .

The biologist E.O. Wilson (2006) explains that the 21st century is a “bottleneck” for species, because of extreme stresses they will experience, most of all because of climate change. He foresees a brighter future beyond the fossil fuel era, beyond the human population peak that will occur if developing countries follow the path of developed countries and China to lower fertility rates. Air and water can be clean and we can learn to live with other species of creation in a sustainable way, using renewable energy. . .

Coal will determine whether we continue to increase climate change or slow the human impact. Increased fossil fuel CO2 in the air today, compared to the pre-industrial atmosphere, is due 50% to coal, 35% to oil and 15% to gas. As oil resources peak, coal will determine future CO2 levels. Recently, after giving a high school commencement talk in my hometown, Denison, Iowa, I drove from Denison to Dunlap, where my parents are buried. For most of 20 miles there were trains parked, engine to caboose, half of the cars being filled with coal. If we cannot stop the building of more coal-fired power plants, those coal trains will be death trains – no less gruesome than if they were boxcars headed to crematoria, loaded with uncountable irreplaceable species.

[Emphasis added]. Hansen’s comments led to these comments by David Roberts of Grist:  (more…)

How can we save up to 6% of our total electricity usage? Dry our clothes outside–hang them on clothes lines.  Unless the neighbors try to interfere, as described by this article from Time Magazine. 

Yes, there are people who want to do their part to lower their carbon footprint.

But on the other side are people who oppose air-drying laundry outside on aesthetic grounds. Increasingly, they have persuaded community and homeowners associations (HOAs) across the U.S. to ban outdoor clotheslines, which they say not only look unsightly but also lower surrounding property values. Those actions, in turn, have sparked a right-to-dry movement that is pressing for legislation to protect the choice to use clotheslines.

The article notes that 3 states limit the ability of Homeowner Associations to ban clothelines (Florida, Hawaii and Utah).  North Carolina is working to be a fourth state, but the effort is drawing opposition from HOA’s and the real estate industry.

Imagine the excitement if scientists suddenly announced that there was a new as-yet-undiscovered energy source that would provide six percent of all the electricity in the United State without any environmental drawback.   It would be the front page of every newspaper.  Here’s an equivalent idea that, unfortunately, meeting with derision by short-sighted people who obsess about a stilted idea of appearances.   So , is a clothes line ugly?

Project Laundry List’s [Alexander Lee] dismisses the notion that clotheslines depreciate property values, calling that idea a “prissy sentiment” that needs to change in light of global warming. “I understand the need for communities to legislate taste, but people always find a way around it,” he says. “The clothesline is beautiful–gorgeous, sentimental and nostalgic for many.

The quote featured on the homepage of Project Laundry List?  It’s by Benjamin Franklin:

We must all hang together, or most assuredly we will all hang separately.

The environmental analysis is surprisingly complicated, according to an article in Slate, “Public bathroom dilemma: Paper or air?”

What is one or two paper towels or 30 seconds of hot air compared to the emissions belched from cars stacked on I-84? But consider the following: So far this year Americans have used 1.8 million tons of paper towels and tissue, according to the American Forest & Paper Association, an industry group. There are approximately 3 million hand dryers installed in the country and most run for 30 seconds around 100 times a day, according to World Dryer Corp., one of the country’s leading manufacturers. That’s 690 billion watts of electricity every day — enough power to run an estimated 280,000 homes for an entire year.

The responsible choice seems to be the third option at the very end of the article . . .

Clever packaging here.   The site, sponsored by Sustainability, asks how many Earths it would take were everyone to adopt your lifestyle.  

I didn’t do well (more than 4 Earths), despite my bicycle commuting and my reliance on public transportation.  Hmmm . . .

Yes, you could continue on your merry way, spending money on the wrong types of things for all the wrong reasons.  We’ve all done this.  But we don’t have to keep doing things this way.  To give you an assist, you can get some ideas and inspiration from New American Dream.

It is important to consider the long-term consequences of your purchases.  For example, what does it really mean to workers and the environment to buy bananas?   Here’s what (the site requires a simple and free registration). 

And what about bottled water?  It really is a big deal in the aggregate. 

Making bottles to meet Americans’ demand for bottled water requires more than 1.5 million barrels of oil annually, enough to fuel some 100,000 U.S. cars for a year. Worldwide, some 2.7 million tons of plastic are used to bottle water each year.

Why should we strive to eat local food?

Estimates on how long the average food travels from pasture to plate range from 1200 to 2500 miles. A lot of energy is expended freezing, refrigerating, and trucking that food around. Eating locally grown food means less fossil fuel burned in preparation and transport. Local food is often safer, too.

How else could you benefit by spending wisely and consciously?  Maybe you can avoid some of the insanity of the Christmas season. 

We offer tips on how to simplify the holidays by focusing less on stuff and more on connections with family, friends, fun, peace, and even a little rest and relaxation.

There are a lot of tips at this site, some seemingly more worthy than others–but truly lots of ideas for turning you into a responsible consumer.  And you do want to be a responsible consumer, right?

The story was published by the Washington Post:

Testimony that the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention planned to give yesterday to a Senate committee about the impact of climate change on health was significantly edited by the White House, according to two sources familiar with the documents.

For commentary see this post from Huffpo.

It’s the concept of greenroofing, and it’s explained in great detail at Greenroofs.com.

Basically, greenroofs are vegetated roof covers, with growing media and plants taking the place of bare membrane, gravel ballast, shingles or tiles. The number of layers and the layer placement vary from system to system and greenroof type, but at the very least all greenroofs include a single to multi-ply waterproofing layer, drainage, growing media and the plants, covering the entire roof deck surface.

What are the advantages of greenroofing?  There are ecological, economic, aesthetic & psychological advantages.
 
Here are some of the economic advantages:

Overall building energy costs can be reduced due to the greenroofs’ natural thermal insulation properties – structures are cooler in summer and warmer in winter.  The urban “heat island” effect can also be greatly reduced since vegetative roofs reduce ambient air temperatures.  Therefore, less electricity costs are expected from lower a/c and heat usage.

According to an article from the Environmental News Network, “a 3- to 7-degree temperature drop translates to a 10%  reduction in air conditioning requirements. For a one-story structure with a green rooftop, cooling costs can be cut by 20 to 30%.” The Weston Design Consultants recently conducted an energy study for the city of Chicago which estimated that it would be possible to save $100,000,000 in saved energy annually with the greening of all of the city’s rooftops.   The bottom line is that “Peak demand would be cut by 720 megawatts - the equivalent energy consumption of several coal-fired generating stations or one small nuclear power plant.”  

This issue of eating meat is gaining more momentum, as people start realizing the toll that meat-eating is putting on the environment.  Raising farm animals contributes more greenhouse gases to the environment than all transportation (cars, trains, airplanes and anything else) combined.

This excerpt is from an article on Common Dreams, entitled “Nuggets and Hummers and Fish Sticks, Oh My! Why Vegetarianism Is the Best Way to Help the Environment”:

The vast majority of the calories consumed by a chicken, a pig, a cow, or another animal goes into keeping that animal alive, and once you add to that the calories required to create the parts of the animal that we don’t eat (e.g., bones, feathers, and blood), you find that it takes more than 10 times as many calories of feed given to an animal to get one calorie back in the form of edible fat or muscle. In other words, it’s exponentially more efficient to eat grains, soy, or oats directly rather than feed them to farmed animals so that humans can eat those animals. It’s like tossing more than 10 plates of spaghetti into the trash for every one plate you eat.

And that’s just the pure “calories in, calories out” equation. When you factor in everything else, the situation gets much worse. Think about the extra stages of production that are required to get dead chickens, pigs, or other animals from the farm to the table:

1. Grow more than 10 times as much corn, grain, and soy (with all the required tilling, irrigation, crop dusters, and so on), as would be required if we ate the plants directly.
2. Transport — in gas-guzzling, pollution-spewing 18-wheelers — all that grain and soy to feed manufacturers.
3. Operate the feed mill (again, using massive amounts of resources).
4. Truck the feed to the factory farms.
5. Operate the factory farms.
6. Truck the animals many miles to slaughterhouses.
7. Operate the slaughterhouses.
8. Truck the meat to processing plants.
9. Operate the meat processing plants.
10. Truck the meat to grocery stores (in refrigerated trucks).
11. Keep the meat in refrigerators or freezers at the stores.

With every stage comes massive amounts of extra energy usage — and with that comes heavy pollution and massive amounts of greenhouse gases, of course. Obviously, vegan foods require some of these stages, too, but vegan foods cut out the factory farms, the slaughterhouses, and multiple stages of heavily polluting tractor-trailer trucks, as well as all the resources (and pollution) involved in each of those stages. And as was already noted, vegan foods require less than one-tenth as many calories from crops, since they are turned directly into food rather than funneled through animals first.

A friend of mine impressed me long ago with his claim that morality begins with what we are willing to put into our mouths.   When we are willing put meat into our mouths we are affecting far more than our own bodies–we are affecting large swaths of the rest of the world.  I’m not only referring to land animals. This article makes it clear that eating fish comes with a similar set of environmental concerns.  

I still eat meat, though I’ve minimized my meat-eating over the years.  Articles like make me wonder whether even eating a little bit of meat is too much.

Every time we sit down to eat, we can choose to eat a product that is, according to U.N. scientists, “one of the … most significant contributors to the most serious environmental problems, at every scale from local to global,” or we can choose vegan — and preferably organic — foods. It’s bad for the environment to eat animals.

One more thing - - the health benefits of giving up meat are spectacular.  In short, if you’re not motivated to give up meat for “the environment,” there’s good reason to give it up for your own health and safety.

Here’s yet another incarnation of Brownie: Secretary of Transportation Mary Peters. As indicated in this Salon.com article writer Katharine Mieszkowski wrote that Peters recently complained that the Minnesota bridge collapsed because frivolous things like bike paths are siphoning too much of the transportation budget.  On PBS’s NewsHour, Peter’s argued that projects like bike paths and trails “are really not transportation.”   Mieszkowski argues otherwise: 

In fact, only about 1.5 percent of federal transportation dollars go to fund bike paths and walking trails. In the meantime, 10 percent of all U.S. trips to work, school and the store occur on bike or foot, and bicyclists and pedestrians account for about 12 percent of annual traffic fatalities, according to the Federal Highway Administration. “We represent a disproportionate share of the injuries, and we get a minuscule share of the funds,” says Robert Raburn, executive director of the East Bay Bike Coalition in the San Francisco Bay Area, who calls the Peters’ comments “outrageous.” Plus, he notes, with problems like global warming, the obesity epidemic and energy independence, shouldn’t the U.S. secretary of transportation be praising biking, not complaining about it?

What really drives cyclists around the bend is that while they’re doing their part to burn less fossil fuel — cue slogan: “No Iraqis Died to Fuel This Bike” — they’re getting grief for being expensive from a profligate administration. “War spending, tax cuts for the rich, and gas taxes are all big sources of funding. Bike spending is not,” fumes Michael Bluejay, an Austin, Texas, bike activist, in an e-mail. “The few pennies we toss toward bike projects is not enough to fix our nation’s bridges, not by a freaking long shot.”

This post is from Press Esc:  

The Pope’s calls to save the environment [were] met with dismay by critics who have repeatedly pointed out that the Vatican’s ban on contraception will effectively negate all attempts at protecting the environment and tacking climate change.

“Care of water resources and attention to climate change are matters of grave importance for the entire human family,” Benedict XVI said today, on th eve of an international symposium on the defense of the Arctic. “Encouraged by the growing recognition of the need to preserve the environment, I invite all of you to join me in praying and working for greater respect for the wonders of God’s creation.”

But William Lawrence argues in New Scientist that Catholic church is responsible for denying women access to condoms that could halt the population explosion, which is the main cause of Planet Earth’s environmental ills.

There are lots of reasons for you to be commuting by bicycle, but many of you who could cycle to work are still burning expensive gasoline to get there.  What’s it going to take to get you out of that expensive car and onto a high-precision, environment-friendly, health-enhancing bicycle?  How about some money?  Not just gas money, either. Read on.  This post might change your life in a dozen healthy and bank-account enhancing ways. 

More than half of Americans live less than 5 miles from the place where they work. That’s easy striking range for a bicycle.  Studies have shown that trips of less than 3 miles are often quicker by bike, and urban trips of 5 to 7 miles usually take about the same time.  Here are more statistics to consider:

According to the Nationwide Personal Transportation Survey, 25 percent of all trips are made within a mile of the home, 40 percent of all trips are within two miles of the home, and 50 percent of the working population commutes five miles or less to work. Yet more than 82 percent of trips five miles or less are made by personal motor vehicle.

I’m one of the many people who live about five-miles from my place of employment.  Traveling five miles to work takes me only about 25 minutes.  This is only about 10 minutes more than it would take to drive to work in good traffic. 

I have commuted to work by bicycle since 1998.  Making the change from car to bike seemed so difficult and intimidating, until I made the change.  Looking back, I wonder why it seemed like such a difficult decision. 

[My trusty Trek 7900.  I purchased it 5 years ago for $500] 

I admit that cycling to work is not for everyone. Many people live long distances from their place of work.  Many people need to transport several children or heavy equipment every morning and evening.  Some people really do have physical limitations that make bicycle commuting impossible.  But chances are that many of you who are reading this don’t fall into any of these categories.

Many millions of Americans are terrific candidates for bicycle commuting.  Some of you can even combine use of a bicycle with public transportation, stretching your transportation access across your city.  Where I live, for example (in St. Louis, Missouri), you can roll your bicycle onto a light rail train or place it on a rack in the front of a public bus.  This has allowed me to quickly “bicycle commute” to places 10 or 15-miles away from my home. 

I’ve tried to anticipate many excuses for not cycling to work.  People who having tried bicycle commuting yet will resist the thought.   Many of you just don’t want to consider this healthy and cost-saving change.  Why?  Because it’s a change . . .  Check out these lists of responses to the most common excuses for not commuting by bicycle, here and here As you can see, they’ve anticipated your main concerns.  BTW, there are TONS of good bicycle websites out there.  You have no excuse for lacking information on how to buy a bike, how to repair it and how to enjoy it.

I started commuting by bicycle because I was compelled to work especially long stressful hours for several months straight.  After several weeks of this crushing work, it became apparent that I was not getting enough exercise and that I was feeling over-anxious while sitting at my desk.  I decided to run an experiment one morning: I hopped on my bicycle and rode to work for the first time. It felt a little strange and I felt out of place rolling up to my office building on a bicycle—it even felt a bit embarrassing.  After all, this is not how most people who work in office buildings get to work. Not in a conservative city of the American Mid-West, anyway.  I quickly got used to this change, though. I have been commuting by bicycle ever since.  In fact, when I die, they will have trouble prying my handlebars from my cold dead fingers.

Statistics show that only 2% of Americans take the opportunity to commute by bicycle.  Here’s another interesting bicycle statistic: Nineteen percent of those who rode their bicycles to work reported that their commute was the most pleasant activity of their day. In contrast, only two percent of workers who drove to work liked that part of their day. The advantages to commuting by bicycle are numerous.  The exercise of cycling to work lowers your stress level at work.  You will find that you no longer need to make time to exercise, because you will be building your exercise into your day, making exercise a natural and sustainable part of your life. 

Oh, yes. I promised to tell you how to make money by commuting on a bicycle . . . (more…)

This is a must see for those concerned about the state of the Media:  Bill Moyers’ interview with “The Yes Men,”  These two innovative men, Andy Bichlbaum and Mike Bonanno, use “satirical humor laced with lunacy to call the media’s attention to serious issues.”

Here’s an excerpt:

BILL MOYERS: Are you concerned about the ethical implications of what you are doing, of fooling people or making fools of people?

MIKE BONANNO: We’re much more concerned with the ethical implications of not doing it.

BILL MOYERS: What do you mean?

MIKE BONANNO: What I mean is that it seems like it’s incumbent upon us to try to do something about the really grave ethics issues in the world, the real problems, companies that will go and exploit resources that we know are going to, in the long run, kill us or many people around the world. These kinds of wrongdoings are at such a scale, they’re so vast compared to our white lies, let’s say, that we think it’s ethical. Our path is actually ethical one.

BILL MOYERS: I mean, you would not get away with this in Putin’s Russia or in Mugabe’s Zimbabwe or in China today.

MIKE BONANNO: Or maybe even in France. I’m not entirely kidding. I mean, we do have really good free speech laws here. Unfortunately, there– you know, they’re kind of circumvented by other kind of loopholes. You know, we can speak at the volume of however much money you have. But, you know, we are lucky to actually be able to do these sorts of things here, although we’ve also done it in Europe. Because we do engage in this as a form of protected speech. It is satire. It is parody. It’s a way for us to speak sort of beyond the volume that we normally would be able to.

Television is part of the American political problem, but not only for the obvious reasons.  See Ebonmuse’s review of Al Gore’s new book, The Assault on Reason.  Here’s an excerpt:

[T]elevision is a time- and space-limited medium with high barriers to entry, making it in its essence a medium of the rich and powerful. It is not a place where people can have a two-way conversation; rather, it turns people into passive receivers of information, unable to respond as they see fit. Worse, television is not a meritocracy. One’s ability to participate in the medium is not based on the merit of one’s ideas, but rather on how much money one can afford to spend to purchase airtime for them . . . Unlike print, television can present vivid, visceral images that bypass the faculties of reasoning and trigger emotional responses - especially fearful responses - far more directly, overwhelming the faculties of deliberation.

I was checking on the latest news about the Creationist Museum, and found myself browsing a conservative blog site, Townhall.com. The hot issue of the day is debunking the whole Al Gore Global Warming issue. Try this post, for a taste.

What truly bugged me is that, among the innumerate and sometimes marginally literate responses, there was a kernel of actually reasonable doubt. Those who follow the actual science (a minority on that site) know that there is no doubt about the present warming trend, nor about the unprecedented rise in fossil CO₂ in the last century. However, there is no certain model for the causality leading to or spawning from these facts.

Doomsayers love the fantastic, sudden, apocalyptic models of global warming that Hollywood likes to portray. It’s quite dramatic, and cannot be ruled out. However, most models show that the big and civilization-altering changes that are likely to occur will take generations to notice. The present conservative movement is more interested in the next fiscal quarter than the next generation. Therefore, this is not a “real” problem.

The real problem with the Gore campaign is that it is covered as a binary issue. Either Global Warming is a big and serious and immediate problem that requires drastic solutions, or it an imaginary scare tactic. The truth is somewhere in between. Fossil atmospheric carbon dumping is (and will be) a tiny blip in history. Maybe three centuries total out of the almost hundred centuries (so far) of human civilization (or 46,000,000 centuries of geological record).

What scares me is the total ignorance expressed of what Global Warming really is. Everything I read talks about the average temperature rising. Most people hear this and assume that a degree of temperature rise means adding a degree to every reading we now have. In practice, it means adding energy to the weather system, which means wider spreads from highs to lows. Sharper warm and cool fronts. Bigger low and high pressure systems. Faster transitions from one to the next. Bigger winds. Bigger storms.  Heavier winters and harder summers. (more…)

According to this article from Salem-News.com, it makes much more sense to filter your own water and reuse your bottle. What is the downside to buying bottles of water?

Around the world, factories are using more than 18 million barrels of oil and up to 130 billion gallons of fresh water a year to create something that, by and large, most people don’t need. But the product is so amazingly popular that sales are going up 10 percent a year, just like clockwork.

The big success story? Bottled water. And the resources mentioned above are just to make the plastic containers.

Another 41 billion gallons of water is then used to fill them – water that is often just tap water, and other times has less frequent monitoring for safety or purity than if it had come out of a tap.

“Bottled water has become an incredibly big business, up to $100 billion per year,” said Todd Jarvis, an assistant professor in the Water Resources Graduate Program at Oregon State University, and a research hydrogeologist with the OSU Institute for Water and Watersheds. “There are enormous amounts of money to be made here. Some of the profits make our business majors blush, and everyone wants in. It’s just astonishing.”

Pollution is so bad in this part of China that this lake water looks like ooblick.   Here’s the photos of the lake.

There’s a lesson to be learned regarding exercise and transportation here:

The British Medical Association found that every hour spent walking or biking adds more than an hour to one’s healthy lifetime.

In the Netherlands, 27 percent of all trips are made by bicycle, compared with 1 percent in the United States.

In 1974, 60 percent of children in the United States walked or biked to school, whereas in 2001, only 13 percent did.

Two-thirds of all school-aged children who live within a mile of their school still travel by car.

What’s wrong with this picture?  We hear people rationalize that we drive our children to school for reasons of “safety.”  But what if most children started walking to their neighborhood schools?  There’s great safety in numbers.  And what’s “safe” about driving children to school, thereby depriving them of several hours of healthy lifetime each week?

If you Google “Paris Hilton Jail” you’ll get 15 million hits. If you Google “Downing Street Memo” you’ll get only 800,000 hits. A terrifying real-world topic, “Greenland ice sheet,” will only return 900,000 hits. I suppose it’s because there are no videos of memos or glaciers having sex.

What brought me to the topic of Paris Hilton (other than my world salad mood) might be my fascination with how folks use Google. It astounds me whenever I notice the sexually graphic search strings that bring some people to this site. I don’t know who you are (the feds know who you are, but I don’t). Website traffic software, however, allows me to view your search queries if you click on a Google result that brings you to this site. Lots of kinky stuff. I hope those of you who stumble onto this site in that manner won’t be disappointed, even though you really won’t find the kinds of things for which you are apparently looking. I’m not trying to be preachy, but maybe you can afford to take a break from all that stuff, at least once in a while, and come to this website on purpose.

I really don’t know anything about Paris Hilton, other than that she is famous because of a sex video and that she is otherwise famous because she is famous. Those millions of Google hits (the jail episode involves merely one small slice of her life) really speak to the power of vapid celebrity. But this is a word salad post, so I am at liberty to move on to discuss the next thing that comes to my mind.

After work, I commute home past a stadium where the St. Louis Cardinal Baseball team plays. I often do wonder whether baseball fans are more out of shape than football fans or basketball fans. Here’s a thought experiment I’ve never run because I don’t want a broken jaw: Try greeting every single fan who comes through the baseball stadium turnstiles by saying, “You need to lose 25 pounds. You would be correct 60%of the time. If anyone want to run this experiment, I’ll be happy to watch.

People often excel at what they do most often. If people sit, eat and watch athletes that mostly stand and spit, that has real-life consequences. Fans who engage in this activity much of the time really get good at sitting, eating and watching. Ironically, in my experience, most fans don’t actually pay attention to the baseball game even after paying lots of money for a ticket to get into the stadium. It must be all of those distracting advertising posters and videos, I assume.

Now don’t get all bent out of shape. Professional baseball athletes are capable of doing many things I will never be able to do. They are exquisitely skilled. But here’s the irony: most professional baseball players don’t exercise much during the competition. Only when it’s “time out” do they get busy taking practice swings, taking ground balls, stretching, running sprints and coming in and out of the dugout. When it’s time in, however, there really aren’t many calories burned on the field. Just stare at the outfields and all of those guys sitting in the dugout and you’ll see that I’m correct.

There can’t be much debate on this lack of exercise issue. But now, answer this: Playing what sport will burn the fewest calories? Baseball loses hands down. No question. Therefore, we sign up our kids to play soccer and basketball over tee-ball, right? Not in this town. We can’t wait to take our kids out to a baseball diamond to get very little exercise, well before their little muscles can even function well enough to make a match meaningful. That doesn’t matter to the parents, who come to cheer the kids on. Human beings are great creators of meaning.

Uh-oh. Another transition. Damn that National Geographic! The June 2007 issue features “The Big Thaw.” There are too many dramatic photos of water flushing down and out of Greenland at an incredible rate. The message is clear: If we don’t do something drastic, “the ice will likely disappear.” The only polar bears will live in zoos, just like it already is for tigers and many other endangered animals. The photos and statistics are numbing (see pp. 56 – 71). Go look, if you dare. As I was reading this depressing news about global warming, at least for a few seconds, I felt like a Republican. I was irritated that all of those uppity scientists and writers were telling me devastating things that won’t stop unless all of us dramatically change our lifestyles. That must be what Republicans feel when they decide that it’s easier to deny than to do something meaningful about a problem. All of this environmental damage is going on under the watch the most powerful man in the world, yet he doesn’t give a crap. Well, actually, he does care enough to allow his minions to falsify scientific reports to assure us that everything is OK. Lots of people voted for him, because they like that approach.

Voting? That topic reminds me of a haunting letter to the New York Times Magazine (June 10, 2007): “Today’s manipulation of the uninformed and illogical voting public by puerile ‘sound bites’ and bumper stickers has gotten us into lots of trouble.” What do we do about our big problems? We elect people who make us feel good about not doing anything at all. Nonetheless, many people still claim that that our voting system is a system that has proven its worth. It’s better than any other voting system in the world. There’s no need to actually make a factual comparison. We just know it.

But let me bring this full circle, in a word salad sort of way. Yes, all of us do like to watch videos. We especially love underdogs. Would you like to watch the opposite of Paris Hilton? If you’ve seen this video of Paul Potts before, you’ll thank me. If you’ve never before seen this video, you’ll really thank me. May this be a complete antidote to my frustration and cynicism . . .

This is Colbert at his best: “These agencies need to quit getting Shanghaied by their stated goals.”

Many of us spend a lot of energy wondering whether there is life on Mars, on the moons of Jupiter or elsewhere in the galaxy.   If we found life out there, it would make huge headlines.

The June 2007 edition of Science has a beautiful photo of an orangutan and her baby on the front cover.   They are perched in a huge tree in Sumatra, Indonesia.   Orangutans are desperate animals because humans are wrecking their habitat.  Some scientists fear that they could go extinct in the wild within the next ten years. They are incredibly smart animals, much smarter than anything we can hope to find elsewhere in our solar system.  

Really, will we ever encounter anything out in space that emotes so much like humans, has the ability to explore, communicates proficiently with conspecifics and carefully nurtures its young?  If we found the equivalent of orangutans on another planet, we’d all be doing cartwheels that we had discovered that such amazing creatures.  If we could somehow bring back one of those [Martian] orangutans, it would be an instant celebrity.  People would do anything to see such an incredibly sentient being “from outer space.”

Well guess what?  Earth is a planet in “outer space,” and the orangutans are, indeed, incredibly sentient animals.  The above photo is an orang mom and baby I photographed at the St. Louis zoo this April.  See here for a photo of a contemplative orang I photographed on that same day.  You don’t need to go 30 million miles away to find incredible life forms.

Here’s the irony.  While we continue to search for simple life “out there,” we continue the wholesale devastation of the limited fragile environment of an incredible animal species. 

I realize that it’s not the same people who are doing this searching and this destruction, yet this combination remains a sad irony to me.

[In no way am I suggesting that our scientists should stop searching for life forms on other planets.  This is a worthy and exciting endeavor that, when it finally succeeds, should be humbling to the noisy anti-science pro-Bible literalist throngs that keep striving to take over the science curricula at our schools].

Today’s meditation is brought to you by Gary Snyder, poet, Buddhist, environmentalist and former dharma bum. I hope you enjoy it!

Once in the Jurassic about 150 million years ago, the Great Sun Buddha in this corner of the Infinite Void gave a discourse to all the assembled elements and energies: to the standing beings, the walking beings, the flying beings, and the sitting beings–even the grasses, to the number of thirteen billion, each one born from a seed, assembled there: a Discourse concerning Enlightenment on the planet Earth.

“In some future time, there will be a continent called America. It will have great centers of power called such as Pyramid Lake, Walden Pond, Mt. Rainier, Big Sur, Everglades, and so forth; and powerful nerves and channels such as Columbia River, Mississippi River, and Grand Canyon. The human race in that era will get into troubles all over its head, and practically wreck everything in spite of its own strong intelligent Buddha-nature.”

“The twisting strata of the great mountains and the pulsings of volcanoes are my love burning deep in the earth. My obstinate compassion is schist and basalt and granite, to be mountains, to bring down the rain. In that future American Era I shall enter a new form; to cure the world of loveless knowledge that seeks with blind hunger: and mindless rage eating food that will not fill it.”

And he showed himself in his true form of

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I was drilling titanium in my basement when my wife called me up to see what the grackles in our sycamore were complaining about. I barely had time to grab my camera and get a snapshot before he gave up on his latest kill, a pigeon lying in the street. After he flew the proverbial coop, I bagged and disposed of the abandoned meal. Hopefully the hawk (my snapshot below) has learned not to drop his kills in the street.

Since the hawk population down here in the city has risen, I see fewer pigeons, and more doves and gold-finches.

I’m a big believer in benign environmental management. Our lily pond is clear because I leave it alone to reach a balance, not because I use a dozen products to try to match some particular theoretical water quality profile. My way, we have dragonflies. Their ravenous larvae greatly reduce our mosquito population, before they take wing. The bats help with the adult mosquitoes, and are fun to watch at night.

We also have a yard cat that largely keeps the squirrels away from our produce, and teaches the birds caution. He generally eats what he kills. There is some collateral damage. Sometimes he gets a koi snack. But the surviving fish are that much harder to catch.

I just hope that the bird flu doesn’t preferentially decimate the raptors, when (not if) it sweeps this way. Hawks and eagles are nice to have around.

Just wanted to pass along this link to an article by one of favorite columnists.  He goes over the edge some days, but most of the time he is spot on in his rantings!

Enjoy -

A friend from Kentucky recently sent me this local newspaper column about the soon-to-be-opened Creation Museum in Covington, Kentucky (just across the river from Cincinnati, Ohio). This museum aims to counteract the secular lies about how old the Earth really is, and to show that only the Bible has a reasonable description of how we came to be.

The article is critical of the museum, as one might expect from the elitist liberal media. Science museums have been trying for decades to make science interesting through flashy displays and the ever-popular dinosaurs. This new museum is just doing the same thing. Its founder even claims that they use “real science” to bolster their claims.

I’ve been watching this story with interest for a few years. I visit Covington every March for a folk dance, so I plan to visit this edifice of alternative illumination next year. I’ve perused the founder’s web site AnswersInGenesis several times. One of their tricks is to use long-superseded scientific theories and methods in two distinct and convincing ways: First to show how wrong scientists are, and second to support their own conclusions through “real science”.

As to the reliability of scientists: Faith is based on the principle of authority. If an authority changes his tunes, he loses credibility. The unspoken assumption in these circles is that scientific theories are good because of the credentials of the authority, not because of the evidence and reproducibility of the tests. They show how evolutionists change their story, depending on what evidence is discovered. They even show scientists contradicting their own conclusions (generally from different ends of their careers). They are very fond of showing contradictory quotes from Darwin, often neglecting to distinguish between Erasmus and his grandson, Charles.

The second misuse is exemplified by the way they show how unreliable dating techniques are. They use known-bad procedures to show how dates can vary in a single sample (like whole-rock potassium analysis).
My favorite repudiation of carbon dating is where they demonstrate how an uncorrected carbon-14 date from a modern sample comes out to be thousands of years old. This happens because fossil-fuel carbon is depleted of carbon-14, so carbon-dating anything that grew since the mid-19th century needs to be corrected by the known percentage of fossil fuel carbon in the environment. This ties to global warming apologists, but I won’t wander that far from the mark.

Anyway, this museum is a threat to science because it uses the same techniques that have been used to popularize science to claim that anti-science is merely a different and equally valid view. Science is too often taught as a list of conclusions made by a list of authorities. As such, this museum is citing the noblest conclusions (Biblical verses) made by the best authority (God the Creator). I suspect that this museum will be a marvelous anchor for the whole Young Earth Creationism movement.

What needs to happen (and probably won’t) is to change the teaching of science from the easily tested list-of-conclusions format to teaching that science is a methodology, a filter for determining which explanations are correct. Until this happens, pseudo-science and faith-based alternatives will always find fertile ground, and ample funding.

The first years of living in a new home are filled with surprises. Our new home in the burbs (I had to go, the family went first!) has a large wooden deck in the backyard. Large wooden decks are fun for outdoor dining, entertaining, repairs, power washing, staining, sealing, AND carpenter bees. The bees are big and sound like low flying helicopters.

Carpenter bees bore into the wood, create tunnels where they make more carpenter bees and then more tunnels and more bees, you get my drift? Carpenter bees are the size of golf balls and very aggressive in posture (although none of us has been stung by one yet).  The bees buzz at you about a foot or less away and follow you as you flee until some as yet undetermined distance is traveled away from where they first confronted you.

Needless to say, the kids are afraid of the bees and won’t play in the backyard. I sprayed the bees with water from my high powered nozzle on my hose. Unlike honeybees which die from too much exposure to water, carpenter bees drink the stuff up and zip by the spray to let you know they are still around.

Next, I put out lots more birdseed to draw more birds to my deck area. I hoped birds were natural predators of the bees and would decimate their population. I looked up what might eat a carpenter bee and seeded the deck according to the directions on the back of the birdseed bags. Many bags of birdseed later, and after many choruses of “The bees are still there, daddy!” it was clear I had to be more proactive.

Let it bee noted that the cats enjoyed their videos of larger bird populations outside and still do, they’re inside cats and may only dream of avian carnage. I, however, took a more aggressive, outdoor stance against the bees.  (more…)