Are frequent fliers to blame for extreme weather delays?

The dull factual scientific answer to Alissa Walker's provocative question is: Probably not. 

Or: Not yet. 

After all, even climatologists who spend a great deal of time discussing global warming in the media, such as Gavin Schmidt of Real Climate, are not ready to attribute the cold couple of weeks we had recently to ripple effects of climate change, as he told Warren Olney on Reporter's Notebook recently. 

But the irony in Walker's question is real, and will likely become all the more painful in years to come. 

As I sat at the gate, finally on my way out of Newark, I stared out the window. The air was swirling with deicing fluid that made the tarmac blur into a dreamy mist and permeated the cabin with that familiar acrid smell. I felt the engines start to shudder beneath me, spewing super-heated jet fuel into a cushion of exhaust below. I looked up into the blue sky crisscrossed with puffy contrails and that's when saw them: My frequent flier miles, evaporating into the atmosphere, soon to fall back to Earth as the latest weirded-up, whacked-out weather system. I realized right then and there that I simply couldn't fly like this anymore.

It's not a prescription — a nagging — to others if it comes as a realization to one's own self. 

2010: three or four things not to forget

We can't remember everything. Blessedly. But some things from 2010 are too good to forget: 

Why telling the truth about climate change is good politics, from David Roberts: 

No matter what derangements currently hold sway over American politics, eventually, reality will out. The crazy weather will get worse, ice fields will melt, agriculture will suffer, food shortages will get more severe. Sooner or later, American politics will have to deal with climate change — that is a certainty.

When that day comes, the party that has spoken honestly about climate change, speaking the truth throughout the waxing and waning of public opinion, will a) look prescient and morally courageous, and b) be trusted by the American people to develop solutions.

Yes. And speaking of devastation, Wall Street deserves every lump it got last year, and more, wrote John Cassidy in The New Yorker, in a devastatingly solid piece that might actually have an effect, called What Good is Wall Street? 

Think of all the profits produced by businesses operating in the U.S. as a cake. Twenty-five years ago, the slice taken by financial firms was about a seventh of the whole. Last year, it was more than a quarter. (In 2006, at the peak of the boom, it was about a third.) In other words, during a period in which American companies have created iPhones, Home Depot, and Lipitor, the best place to work has been in an industry that doesn’t design, build, or sell a single tangible thing.

A poet wrote probably the best book of last year — and it's a love story! 

We said farewell and I left his room. But something drew me back. He had fallen into a light sleep. I stood there and looked at him. So peaceful, like an ancient child. He opened his eyes and smiled. "Back so soon?" And then again to sleep.

So my last image was as the first. A sleeping youth cloaked in light, who opened his eyes with a smile of recognition for someone who had never been a stranger. 

And, speaking of rock and roll, it's a form still capable of greatness, as we heard from The National: 

 

http://player.soundcloud.com/player.swf?url=http%3A%2F%2Fapi.soundcloud.com%2Ftracks%2F5837648&show_comments=false&auto_play=false&color=0031ff The National – High Violet – 02 – Sorrow by yovizna

Seeing the stars in the 21st century…or not

Yesterday the Los Angeles Times ran a superb story called A Desert Plea: Let there be darkness about light pollution spreading from the city out into the desert, many many miles away.

This is something we noticed when we moved from the city out to the sticks ourselves — in ourselves.

Put simply, country people are comfortable with dark nights; city people are not.

As we grew accustomed to life outside of town, we eventually found ourselves taking comfort in the darkness, just as years before we took comfort in the lights of others, even people we didn't know. 

(How we feel about darkness is an interesting psychological phenomenon that Hemingway wrote about fairly directly in his justly famous short story A Clean Well-Lighted Place.)

But closer to home, reporter Rong-Gong Lin II closes with a wonderful anecdote: 

So foreign are the real night skies to Los Angeles that in 1994, after the Northridge earthquake jostled Angelenos awake at 4:31 a.m., the observatory received many calls asking about "the strange sky they had seen after the earthquake."

"We finally realized what we were dealing with," [Ed] Krupp, [director of the observatory] said. "The quake had knocked out most of the power, and people ran outside and they saw the stars. The stars were in fact so unfamiliar; they called us wondering what happened."

For those interested in seeing the stars, JPL has all sorts of wonderful resources…or, of course, you can go out to the unlit desert some cold night and just look up into the starry skies.

Here's a composite photo of the night sky over Death Valley, featuring the Milky Way, taken by a National Park Service ranger. 

Deathvalleysky_nps

Where the word “gay” came from

A poorly-named but still charming photo blog focuses on people of the same sex enjoying each other's close company in times gone by, despite the massive taboo against homosexuality back in the day. It's heart-warming, or should be, for everyone who believes in love and friendship. 

Included is an old pulp novel cover, which makes us wonder: Could this be where the word "gay" began? 

Gaystreet

Well, not exactly. But it does have a long history: "Gay as an adjective meaning “homosexual” goes back at least to the early 1900s," reports Dictionary.com.

Should have guessed that the language, in its sly way, would be about a century ahead of our politics.

What the heck is going on with this La Niña?

Isn't it supposed to be cold and dry in SoCal during a La Niña, not wet and warm?

Craig Miller of KQED asks questions, and gets answers from the helpful Kevin Trenberth of NCAR:

"In La Niña conditions, which is what we have now, the main storms that come into North America come barreling into Washington, Oregon and British Columbia more," Trenberth told [Miller] in a phone interview.

But lately a persistent region of high pressure in the north Pacific is diverting storms south, into California. Trenberth says: "There’s a crapshoot or a random component to it, if you like, in the more northern latitudes, that’s adding some extra flavor to what’s going on, I think."

Speaking of crapshoots, in a recent interview Bill Patzert pointed out that in eighteen of the last twenty-two La Niñas, SoCal did experience drier, colder winters than normal. And Trenberth, for one, still expects us to regress to the mean.

He says this is considered a “strong” La Niña and is still likely to wield influence over the winter as a whole. One clue is ocean temperatures in the central-to-eastern Pacific, which are running 2 degrees C (3.5 F) below normal. "That only occurs—probably less than 10% of the time, so it’s a relatively rare event and certainly stronger than anything we’ve seen in recent years," said Trenberth.

Piece also included a great image of the Pinepple Express, in unexpected full bloom:

Pineapple3_crop

How to remember: A poet’s theory

In Patti Smith's wonderful memoir, Just Kids, she is forever referring to the constellation of objects she and her dearest friend, photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, found and gathered and treasured together. She writes of a day early in their relationship:

One Indian summer day we dressed in our favorite things, me in my beatnik sandals and ragged scarves, and Robert with his love beads and sheepskin vest. We took the subway to West Fourth Street and spent the afternoon in Washington Square. We shared coffee from a thermos, watching the stream of tourists, stoners, and folksingers. Agitated revolutionaries distributed antiwar leaflets. Chess players drew a crowd of their own. Everyone coexisted within the continuous drone of verbal diatribes, bongos, and barking dogs. 

We were walking towards the fountain, the epicenter of activity, when an older couple stopped and openly observed us. Robert enjoyed being noticed, and he affectionately squeezed my hand. 

"Oh, take their picture," said the woman to her bemused husband. "I think they're artists."

"Oh, go on," he shrugged. "They're just kids." 

Well, they did turn out to be artists, and reading the book you can't help but wonder if Smith remembers her stories so clearly because she poured herself into her treasured artifacts…as poet Giacomo Leopardi eloquently argues: 

To function, memory requires a fixed, stable object. It can remember indeterminate things only with great difficulty, or piecemeal, or in relation to other fixed objects. Whoever wants to remember something has to fix an object in mind; we do this all day without being aware of it. Words stabilize. Lines of poetry stabilize: the material has an inherent, sharp, recognizable definition, every line marking limits and boundaries. The whole secret to enabling memory comes down to giving the sharpest possible physical shape to things or ideas. The more you can do this, the better your memory will recollect things. The more you train the memory faculty, the easier it becomes to remember things even more vaporous than those you could remember as a baby or child.

Sounds like a testable, verifiable theory… 

Poetry: the difference between objective and verifiable

Verifiable — which is also popularly characterized, imprecisely, as "objective" –doesn't necessarily mean numerical, as Belle Randall reminds us in a great letter to Poetry. 

To put it another way, judging poetry (or writing, or human beings, for that matter) is not purely a matter of opinion. Not if the points can be proven. Mathematics is not the only form of logic. 

To get every nuance of Randall's brilliance, you will have to go back to Michael Robbins explosive review of the book in question, a collection by former poet laureate Robert Haas, and the outrage that the review provoked. But it's not necessary! Randall brilliantly sums up both the review, and the book in question. Please see below.

Dear Editor,

Regarding Michael Robbins’s criticism of Robert Hass [September 2010] and the letters that followed [November 2010]: those on both sides of the debate seem to have difficulty keeping their focus on the language of the poems. “This isn’t poetry, it’s a list of stuff in Hass’s kitchen,” Robbins declares. “The Haiku masters . . . are behind simple but elegant passages like this,” John Matthias replies. One feels caught between two small boys arguing is too, is not. The danger is that both positions—perhaps all strong opinions about poetry—begin to seem arbitrary and subjective. Yet verifiable observations about poetry can be made:

        On the oak table
   filets of sole
stewing in the juice of tangerines,
slices of green pepper
        on a bone-white dish.
              —From Song

Of this, one may say: it begins with a capital and ends with a period but is not a sentence. Lacking a predicate (the implied “are”), it isn’t a complete thought. Instead, as Robbins observes, it is a list. In a list, every item has equal weight. Because of this, a list lacks the focus of Haiku.

The passage is fairly representative of the “period style” of the seventies, with the omitted verb showing the influence of Gary Snyder, who often omits verbs and articles for the sake of compression (“Across rocks and meadows / Swarms of new flies”). Yet the fragment by Hass, compared to Snyder’s, is notably adjectival, while introducing the unwelcome but inevitable association “stewing in one’s own juices.” A peculiar weight falls on the final three syllables—“bone-white dish.” Thud, thud, thud. This sounds profound, like a gavel falling, but is it? If I were to tell you that the fragment was lifted from a restaurant review in Sunset magazine, could you believe it? Isn’t this an accurate description of the language? When Robbins says, “This isn’t poetry,” maybe he means: This is journalistic rather than poetic, descriptive rather than evocative. It’s not bad writing, but, like professional “food writing,” it ain’t poetry.

Amen. Food writing is to poetry as lyrics are to a song.  

After a week at a science conference, it's refreshing to experience precision…in articulate English. 

Ocean acidification and coral reefs

A concluding remark from a talk this morning by Ken Caldeira on ocean acidification: 

My personal opinion is that without emissions mitigation coral reefs on this planet will not be sustainable by mid-century. 

For the gloomer, a look at the science from the NRDC. Jeez. This may be harder to face than global warming. 

The Future of Polar Bears

At the AGU, the world's largest annual physical science conference, a diverse quartet of scientists set out this morning to launch a discussion about the future of polar bears, and the possibility of a refuge for them in northern Canada and Greenland, where ice experts think sea ice, which is crucial to the balance between polar bears and ringed seals, will last into the next century. 

The team, which includes a marine biologist, a climatologist, and an ice expert, stressed that this was only a first step towards preserving the polar bear. 

"This is a conversation that has to include native peoples…our intent is to begin tthat conversation," said Robert Newton, an oceanographer. 

The team of scientists added that a recent USGS study by Steven Amstrup, predicting that ice would remain in the summer in the Arctic until at least 2040, if greenhouse gas emissions were reduced in the next twenty years, meant that the best way to save the polar bear was to begin emissions reductions now.

"Our research offers a very promising, hopeful message, but it's also an incentive for mitigating greenhouse emissions," Cecilia Bitz told ScienceDaily.

At the press conference, New York Times writer Andrew Revkin asked a hard-headed question: Why should we care about the polar bear? 

Newton pointed out that as a scientist, large attention-catching species such as the polar bear were arguably less important to the environment as a whole than the tiny benthic organisms in the water — but that's not the point. 

Polar cubs

"As a citizen when you see these bears, which in fundamental ways are not that different from us, all of us have an emotional response and even for some people a spiritual response, so it’s an important question and raises issues for people that wouldn’t other wise be raised," Newton said.

Sometimes the hardest questions provoke the best answers.