Showing posts with label Environment. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Environment. Show all posts

Friday, August 26, 2011

This Is About Global Warming

Mean surface temperature change for the period...Image via Wikipedia
Popular Mechanics: What Happens When a Super Storm Strikes New York?: Canton, Mo., a town of 2500 on the upper Mississippi River, has been at the center of an increasingly high-stakes environmental wager for years now. In the summer of 1993, a high-pressure system stalled over the southeastern U.S., forcing the jet stream, laden with moist air from the Gulf of Mexico, to the north, where it collided with cold air from Canada. As a result, rainstorms drenched the upper Midwest. Many towns received two to six times the normal amount of rainfall for June and July. ...... The Mississippi River crested at 13.8 feet above official flood levels in Canton, overtopping several local levees. That year, more than 1000 levees ruptured or overflowed along the Mississippi and Missouri rivers. Seventy towns, including Canton, flooded. The water stayed high for six months. ...... According to government statistics, the flood that Canton experienced in 1993 was a freak, one-in-500-year event—not something that would happen again soon. That estimate came from analyzing the 140-year historical record—calculating the frequency of floods of various magnitudes and extrapolating the curve out to events at a scale never seen before. If only it were that simple. Canton suffered another 500-year flood in 2008, a 70-year flood in 2001, and 10-year floods in 1996, 1998 and again in early 2011. Plenty of towns across the region have suffered similar events. ....... "We're witnessing higher and higher floods over time," says Robert Criss, a hydrogeologist at Washington University in St. Louis. "We are seeing higher and far more frequent floods than government estimators say we should."
A few years back there were unexplained fires across Greece. And law enforcement grabbed known arsonists and threw them into prison. Those were not acts of arson. That was global warming. People who study and predict weather look for patterns in historical records. That is misleading. Global warming is a recent phenomenon. New weather patterns are emerging. More frequent severe weather conditions are being experienced.

Global warming is happening, and it is happening now, and there are to be catastrophic consequences. How do you shout that from the rooftops? How do you drain a hole in the Tea Party brain and pour that wisdom down it? Mother Nature is doing it for us. Severe weather conditions are but a start.

Hurricane Irene Eats Up My Santogold Saturday
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Tuesday, June 15, 2010

9/11, Great Recession, Gulf Oil Spill: Paradigm Shifts

A beach after an oil spill.Image via Wikipedia
To the three items I just listed - 9/11, the Great Recession, and the Gulf Oil Spill - I should perhaps add a fourth, while the three are of the negative kind, Obama's election to the White House has been a positive kind of paradigm shift, race being America's original sin.

9/11 is accepted as having been a paradigm shift event. It hijacked the Bush presidency. Obama's presidency has similarly been taken over by major events that he could not have foreseen. Reminds one of the famous Lincoln line, that he does not control events, it is the other way round.

This has been a strange recession. Now there is talk it might end up being a double dip recession. The recovery sure is not full. The jobs that were lost, not enough new jobs have been created. And if that were not headache enough, the oil spill happened. The ocean remains less explored than outer space in many ways.

The private and the public sectors have not even begun to measure the size of the damage, they sure have not managed to bring the spill to an end. The damage will last at least a decade, maybe more. And it might not be just the gulf that stays affected. It is one scary scenario no matter which way you look at it.

The term superpower is a term in the human realm. The pressures one mile deep in the ocean do not care for that term, apparently. Human technology can do only so much stretching when basic human values and a way of life themselves are in question.

The Gulf Oil Spill is a wake up call that the planet is surely on an unsustainable path, environmentally speaking.

All three - 9/11, the Great Recession, and the Gulf Oil Spill - challenge the notion that the nation state is the be all and end all. All three force us to face the fact that globalization can not be stopped, but it can be shaped. We are all global players now. We have been a while.

Obama did not ask for the recession, he sure did not ask for the spill, but he gets to rally the nation to lessons learned from both.

Gulf Oil Spill
A Dirty Bomb Just Went Off In The Gulf

Obama's Gulf Oil Speech
Because there has never been a leak of this size at this depth, stopping it has tested the limits of human technology. ..... We now have nearly 30,000 personnel who are working across four states to contain and cleanup the oil. Thousands of ships and other vessels are responding in the Gulf. And I have authorized the deployment of over 17,000 National Guard members along the coast....... millions of gallons of oil have already been removed from the water through burning, skimming, and other collection methods. Over five and a half million feet of boom has been laid across the water to block and absorb the approaching oil. We have approved the construction of new barrier islands in Louisiana to try and stop the oil before it reaches the shore ....... oil has already caused damage to our coastline and its wildlife. ..... no matter how effective our response becomes, there will be more oil and more damage before this siege is done ....... a wrenching anxiety that their way of life may be lost. ....... BP will pay for the impact this spill has had on the region. ...... Oil companies showered regulators with gifts and favors, and were essentially allowed to conduct their own safety inspections and write their own regulations. ....... we need better regulations better safety standards, and better enforcement when it comes to offshore drilling ........ oil companies are drilling a mile beneath the surface of the ocean - because we're running out of places to drill on land and in shallow water. ...... The tragedy unfolding on our coast is the most painful and powerful reminder yet that the time to embrace a clean energy future is now. ..... The oil spill is not the last crisis America will face. This nation has known hard times before and we will surely know them again.

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Saturday, May 01, 2010

A Dirty Bomb Just Went Off In The Gulf


FoxNews.com: Massive Gulf Oil Spill From Space

Bill Clinton on his way out told Bush the Al Qaeda was the number one security threat he needed to worry about as president. Bush did not pay attention. 9/11 changed that. 9/11 has gone on to define an era, or at least a decade; it sure hijacked the Bush presidency.

By now many of the smart people in the relevant government agencies are on the lookout for the dirty bomb. The terrorist threats persist and are real, but the environmental threats are much bigger. It is like a dirty bomb just went off in the Gulf Of Mexico.

This spill - the word does not quite capture it - just might destroy the fishing and tourism industries in a few different states. That alone is tens of billions of dollars.

The scale of this thing is mind boggling.

Gulf Coast oil spill could eclipse Exxon Valdez - Yahoo! News
Louisiana Oil Spill 2010 PHOTOSOil Spill Gulf Oil Spill Photos...
Oil Leak from Damaged Well in Gulf of Mexico : Natural Hazards
Gulf Oil Spill Containment Efforts Photos- CBS News
Gulf oil spill: latest NASA satellite photo| Greenspace | Los...
Oil spill approaches Louisiana coast - The Big Picture - Boston.com


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Thursday, November 05, 2009

Yes, Obama

The geographic distribution of surface warming...Image via Wikipedia
(1) Obama did not run for president to fix the biggest economic crisis in 70 years. But he responded well to it. And now we have an economic recovery.
(2) He could easily have used the crisis as an excuse to postpone work on health care. He did not. He is the reason we are talking health care right now. Health care is the domestic version of Mideast peace. Mind you, presidents have been trying to do this for the past half century, this dude just might deliver. This is a highly emotionally charged issue. Chances are that one thing you want is not what everyone else wants and, in a democracy, everyone counts.
(3) His first call as president was to Abbas. This dude is serious about Mideast peace. And he might even deliver. That is like handling the toughest domestic issue, and the toughest global issue. I would give him an A for trying and an A+ for achievement, once we have the fruits.
(4) He won the Nobel Peace Prize for work already done. He has done the political equivalent of curing global warming. The dude has fundamentally changed the global political climate. Yo Americanos, your standing is up in the world, thanks to Obama.
(5) He is on schedule to tackle immigration reform, another emotionally charged issue.

This guy symbolizes a new kind of politics. Governing is different from campaigning, in many ways harder. Can you support the guy in office? You supported him when he ran.

http://twitter.com/paramendra/status/5432702333
http://twitter.com/paramendra/status/5439605426
http://twitter.com/paramendra/status/5440461727
http://twitter.com/paramendra/status/5440646175
http://twitter.com/paramendra/status/5440769381
http://twitter.com/paramendra/status/5440890257
http://twitter.com/paramendra/status/5440919661
http://twitter.com/paramendra/status/5441035900
http://twitter.com/paramendra/status/5441177658
http://twitter.com/paramendra/status/5441401062
http://twitter.com/paramendra/status/5441927659
http://twitter.com/paramendra/status/5442005101
http://twitter.com/paramendra/status/5442082065

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