Left Behind by Snowmageddon

There was recently a big winter storm across the Central and North Eastern U.S. In my local town, it had the potential of exceeding the record one-day snowfall set 29 years ago. All the local news stations talked about the major storm approaching. Thunder snow, a rare occurrence here, was predicted. Stores were stripped of snow shovels, salt, water softener (salt), milk and bread.The governor called in the National Guard, and all the utility and road crews were on high alert. When the freezing rain started on Monday, the media warned people to stay home for the next day or two as the storm passed over. I grew excited. The little kid in me was hoping for a big snow. But our town was right on the freezing line. Just south of us, there is rain. North of us, snow. The band from rain through freezing rain, sleet, snow, up to full blizzard is only a hundred miles wide. As Tuesday dawned, we had a glaze of ice, and sleet was falling. I woke early and spent a couple of hours learning how to hack my new super-zoom camera to force it to take a time lapse picture series. I hoped to make a nice video of the yard disappearing under a foot or more of snow. So I set up my camera and started it early in the morning, when there was still just a glaze of ice on the path and plants. The day wore on. At noon I it was still just sleeting. I changed the batteries in the camera. By sunset, there was just a couple of inches of sleet. It was fun to walk on top of what looks like snow. But the yard is still visible. Had the freeze line been a couple of dozen miles farther south, that thin layer of sleet would have been about a foot of snow. What a gyp! So I let the camera run overnight, in hopes that we'd get some snow on the few inches of ice. But as Wednesday dawned, Groundhog Day, there was only a little more snow. Sure, the roads are all iced over, and icicles hang from everything. But this is a far cry from what the hue and cry of the media had us expecting. Granted, the next county over (and half the state) is snowed in. Interstate 70 is closed between the Saint Louis metro area and Kansas. And the temperature will drop below zero (-18°C) tonight. But how did we get Left Behind from the transcendental fairyland, a heaven of deep snow? Obviously we hadn't prayed hard enough to the God of the clean white snowy world above to deliver us from mundane weather. Or we didn't believe sincerely enough in the snowy salvation offered by his half-breed son, Jack Frost. Maybe some around us are heretical worshipers of the Daily Commute, and counteracted our prayers. So we beseech those who were called up to the snowy realm to share with us their good fortune. Show us unworthy shovelers of sleet what the True Light of real snow is like. Maybe it's not too late.

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Hottest year on record

From IPS:

The year 2010 was the hottest ever measured since the beginning of the recordings, 130 years ago," Anders Levermann, professor of climate system dynamics at the Physics Institute of the Potsdam University told IPS.
Over at Common Dreams, Sandy LeonVest despairs that this monumental finding doesn't even make a blip in the national news. Nor is there any national concern about this:
The Energy Information Administration (EIA), in its annual projections for 2011, announced that it still expects fossil fuels to supply over three quarters of US energy consumption in 2035. The share of fossil fuels is expected to decline by only 5 percentage points -- from 83 percent in 2009 to 78 percent in 2035.
I can't get rid of that thought in my head - - that we will get what we deserve. It's just the natural order of things.

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Addicted to Risk without a backup plan

The BP oil spill was one of the more recent examples of overconfidence, according to Naomi Klein. Also consider the financial collapse and overconfidence that was rampant prior to our military adventures in Afghanistan and Iraq. Klein states that we are addicted to risk. Instead of asking how how to proceed prudently, we ask bizarre questions such as these: - What is the latest possible moment we can act to remedy a major problem? - How much hotter can we let the planet get? These questions are being driven by economists rather than scientists. Greed and hubris are factors in this mindset, and fear of failure seems to be lacking. Klein gives the illustration of a 35-year old banker who is taking home more than 100 times as much salary as a brain surgeon. That banker seeks a narrative other than thinking that he is a good scammer who gamed the system. He will likely start believing that he is a genius and that he is somehow contributing to society, or at least not hurting others. But he does absorb the narrative that he is a genius, and being told that you are a genius who is born to rule is a "peril of privilege." People in these positions adopt traditional narratives that enhance their feelings of superiority over others. These archetypal narratives include the following "fairy tales": - Newly discovered frontier and conquering pioneer; - Manifest destiny; - Endless growth; - We don't need to change our lifestyles; - Apocalypse and salvation. We will be "saved" in the end with technology. They also embrace deep narratives that Mother Nature is there to be conquered and yet she is always forgiving and resilient; there will always be a frontier. Klein argues that these are lies, and we are running up against severe physical limits. We have already exhausted easy energy and we are now into the era of "extreme energy." This means we ravaging the earth to get to dramatically diminishing returns. Exhibit A is the tar sand region of Canada which, to produce oil, requires ripping away the trees and contaminating huge amounts of water. Vast landscapes are being decimated (see the video for some of these dramatic images). It takes three times as much energy to produce a barrel of oil this was as it takes to produce conventional oil. In terms of greenhouse gases, this is "insanity." This is how civilizations "commit suicide." Klein states that we need new heroes with new kinds of stories that will replace the current linear narrative of endless growth with circular narratives of what goes around comes around.

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Getting Science Under Control

After the election of 2008, we fans of the rational and provable had high hopes that government may give as much credence to the scientific process and conclusions as to the disproved aspects of philosophies promulgated by churches and industry shills. We watched with waning hope as a series of attempts to honor that ideal got watered down. But at least it was an improvement. But the 2010 election quickly reveals a backlash. Those whose cherished misunderstandings had been disrespected for the last couple of years now will have their day. As Phil Plait says, Energy and science in America are in big, big trouble. He begins,

"With the elections last week, the Republicans took over the House once again. The list of things this means is long and troubling, but the most troubling to me come in the forms of two Texas far-right Republicans: Congressmen Ralph Hall and Joe Barton."

He goes on to explain why. It comes down to them being proven representatives for Young Earth and fossil fuel interests, doing whatever they can to scuttle actual science by any means necessary. Especially where the science contradicts their pet ideas. Barton has published articles supporting climate change denialism. His main contributors are the extraction industries. Hall has used parliamentary tricks to attempt to scuttle funding for basic research. The Democrats offered to compromised by cutting funding, and he refused in hopes that the whole bill would fail. It passed. Then Hall publicly called Democrats on the carpet for using tricks to fatten the bill by the amount that they offered to cut. The Proxmire spirit lives on.

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Neoclassical economists have no clothes

According to Wikipedia, "Neoclassical economics dominates microeconomics, and together with Keynesian economics forms the neoclassical synthesis, which dominates mainstream economics today." At Scientific American, Robert Nadeau argues that neoclassical economists have no clothes.

[[Neoclassical economics] can no longer be regarded as useful even in pragmatic or utilitarian terms because it fails to meet what must now be viewed as a fundamental requirement of any economic theory—the extent to which this theory allows economic activities to be coordinated in environmentally responsible ways on a worldwide scale. Because neoclassical economics does not even acknowledge the costs of environmental problems and the limits to economic growth, it constitutes one of the greatest barriers to combating climate change and other threats to the planet.

What are the false assumptions of this still widely cherished model? Nadeau lists them:
* The market system is a closed circular flow between production and consumption, with no inlets or outlets. * Natural resources exist in a domain that is separate and distinct from a closed market system, and the economic value of these resources can be determined only by the dynamics that operate within this system. * The costs of damage to the external natural environment by economic activities must be treated as costs that lie outside the closed market system or as costs that cannot be included in the pricing mechanisms that operate within the system. * The external resources of nature are largely inexhaustible, and those that are not can be replaced by other resources or by technologies that minimize the use of the exhaustible resources or that rely on other resources. * There are no biophysical limits to the growth of market systems.

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