National Geographic explored the ways that an extremely crowded country copes with rising sea levels in the May, 2011 issue. Stunning story about Bangladesh loaded with daunting statistics, including incredible photography.
Thirty years ago, give or take, I read Lucifer's Hammer (by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle) for the first time. Published in 1977, it has a few dated elements, but apart from those, it holds its own in my mind. The novel describes a near future after a comet hits the Earth. I enjoyed it, but one very small reference stcuk in my head.
One of the characters has a library (that he preserves from the anarchy) and the one book he takes as currency to the outpost central to the novel is "Volume Two of The Way Things Work." Google "The Way Things Work" now, and you'll likely find mostly hits on David Macaulay's illustrated book. Nice...and informative, but not the one Niven and Pournelle were talking about.
I searched for years, pre-internet, before finding my copy. It's an eighth edition of the one originally published in 1963 by Simon and Schuster; subtitled "An Illustrated Encyclopedia of Technology." It's a single volume, not two, and although also dated (vacuum tubes), it is still an enormous, condensed wealth of knowledge. I'm not an end-of-the-world type person, but I have several survival books of this nature (Back to Basics, The American Boys' Handybook, etc.) for my children and descendants...just in case. Not in case of the end of the world, but in case they get stranded or what have you.
Driving around to look in on various construction projects today, I listened to a few TED videos and one, very short by TED 18 minute standards, conveyed in four minutes one of the more amazing ideas I've seen at TED, host of hundreds of amazing ideas.
Marcin Jakubowski, a Polish American with a PhD in fusion physics, founded Open Source Ecology, "home of the Global Village Construction Set, developing community-based solutions for re-inventing local production" after starting a farm. I'll let him describe what he's done:
I'm adding this to my various "Way Things Work" works. It's free, brilliant, full of maker ideals, and can deliver affordable technology to the world. Maybe I'll even be able to contribute.
Sheep are taking over some of Carlisle Area School District groundskeeping chores.
They are saving the district up to $15,000 a year and cutting local air pollution . . . .Instead of workers spending six hours a week mowing and trimming near solar panels, sheep have moved in for the summer.
Rick Santorum exudes an unbelievable hypocrisy over abortion. You can read the article here.
Basically, Mr. Santorum has it in mind to use the law to prohibit a medical procedure his wife had to go through in order to save her life. As the piece makes clear, in October of 1996, Karen Santorum underwent an abortion in the 19th week of pregnancy in order to save her life from an infected fetus. She had a 105 degree temperature. She would have died without the procedue.
Santorum would make that option illegal. Basically, his position seems to be that sacrificing his wife for the fetus would be his choice now. This overlooks the fact that had they not done the procedure, the fetus would not have survived, either. He would have lost both. Sacrifices to his conscience, which seems incapable of the kind of triage humans must make all the time.
Well and good, some people just can’t go there. But this man is running for president. He intends that his personal inability to cope be made a national policy of denying anyone the choice of coping.
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It's easier for most of us to think of our extreme droughts, floods and tornadoes as isolated unusual events, and to deny any connection to global warming. That denial makes good sense. It allows us the freedom to not consider that our daily actions are destroying people's property and lives. Hence, this denial is the tactic of the mainstream media, which sees its job as keeping its audience in a good mood so that it can sell products for its advertisers.
Bill McKibben says we really do need to start connecting the dots, however. It's not that we can say that any particular drought, flood or tornado is necessarily a result of human-caused carbon dioxide, but McKibben insists that it is time to invoke the phrase "climate change" to describe the current level of occurrences of extreme weather. And it's time to force the Obama Administration to take this issue much more seriously at a time when many members of Congress refuse to consider the issue at all.
At Democracy Now, Amy Goodman interviews McKibben, founder of the grassroots climate campaign 350.org.
According to McKibben, who outlines numerous recent cataclysmic weather-related disasters worldwide, there's a lot of room for improvement for the Obama Administration:
Now, to President Obama, look, the guy has done a better job on climate change than George Bush. That’s not an enormous claim to make, but, you know, happily, he’s doing something. He’s also doing a lot of things that are very, very damaging. He has opened this vast swath of the Powder River Basin in Montana and Wyoming to coal mining. The early estimate is there’s enough coal there to be at the equivalent of having 3,000 coal-fired power plants running for a year. His administration is currently considering allowing a permit for a huge pipeline across the center of the country that will run from Canada from the tar sands in Alberta down to refineries in Texas. That’s the equivalent of lighting a fuse on the biggest carbon bomb on the planet.
Three-fifty is the most important number in the world. The NASA scientists told us three years ago that any value for carbon in the atmosphere greater than 350 parts per million was not compatible with the planet on which civilization developed and to which life on earth is adapted. That is strong language. It’s stronger still when you know that everywhere, outside your studios, up on top of Mount Everest, in the Antarctic, right now we’re at about 390 parts per million CO2 and gaining fast. That’s why this is not some future problem. It is the most pressing present crisis that we have.
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