Kit Stolz

China attacks U.S. in climate negotiations

From Tiajin, an inside look at climate talks being hosted by Chinese. Reporting is from Angel Hsu, of Yale University, in the Atlantic:

[Chinese negotiator] Su's comments in the corridors of the Tianjin Meijiang Convention Center reflect his obvious frustration with what he feels is hypocrisy on the part of the U.S. in the climate negotiations. During a press conference, Su criticized the United States for failing to meet its UNFCCC commitments, particularly in terms of pledges to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and to provide financial assistance to developing countries. He said it was unfair for the United States to criticize China and make them the scapegoat in the climate debates when the United States itself "isn't doing anything,"

The differences…culminated with the Chinese lead negotiator Su Wei calling the US a "pig preening itself in a mirror." In the classical Chinese idiom where Su derived the comparison, Zhubajie zhao jinzi, li wai bu shi ren – meaning "pig in mirror, not human inside or outside" – the half-man, half-pig character Zhubajie is portrayed as lazy, gluttonous, and idiotic. Needless to say, in Chinese culture, this less-than-desirable comparison is considered an undiplomatic slight.

The Chinese called the United States "a half-man, half-pig" in a press conference? Jeez.

What next — will the lead negotiator throw down a gauntlet, demand a duel at dawn? Holy cow.

No coverage in the papers in the U.S. of course…

Did Jerry Brown endorse a peripheral canal yesterday?

Or did the AP botch the story?

A University of the Pacific professor who blogs at Valley Economy wants to know.

It's a great question. Here's the sentence from the Brown website that the AP read as an endorsement of the "alternative conveyance," also known in the past as the peripheral canal.

Support conveyance and storage investments, such as a peripheral canal or tunnel, that provide a net benefit in ecosystem and water quality conditions and where the beneficiaries pay for the benefits they receive

Further, Brown's website makes amply clear that any such conveyance should be paid for by those who will most benefit, and any such conveyance must benefit the state and environment as a whole:

The beneficiaries – or users – of water infrastructure projects should pay their share of the costs of those projects. The state should invest in infrastructure improvements providing benefits to the general public or the environment.

In the minds of water experts such as Peter Gleick, the peripheral canal would fail both tests. And, as a spokesperson for Meg Whitman pointed out, Brown did not back the water bond that was pulled off the ballot last summer by supporters such as Gov. Schwarzenegger, who saw it was facing defeat this year.

So why is the AP so certain Brown wants to build the canal?

Well, although it's not stated clearly in the story, it turns out Brown did say he supported such a canal in the September 28 debate with Whitman:

"Brown said he supports the idea of a peripheral canal to ship more water to Southern California but supports more water conservation. He implied Southern Californians should pay for the new delivery system."

"The beneficiary has to pay, not the general taxpayer," Brown said.

His support for the proposal is nuanced, but sounds pretty clear.

Also noteworthy: the environmentally-minded chairman of the vast SoCal water wholesaler known as Metropolitan Water District was replaced this week, apparently voted out because he opposed the same water bond. Voted in as chairman is an engineer and former Army Colonel named John V. Foley.

Hmmmm….

the people a hundred years from now

OPTIMISM

I write poems
they don't get published
but they will

I'm waiting for a letter with good news
maybe it will arrive the day I die
but it will come for sure.

the world's not ruled by governments or money
but by the people
a hundred years from now
maybe
but it will be for sure.

Nazim Hikmet
2 September l957
Leipzig

Tennessee Williams: the playwright at age two

Turns out Tennessee Williams' mother Edwina Williams published her memoirs, called Remember Me to Tom, back in l963. It's a very good thing she did, for she tells a slew of great stories.

Reading her "as told to" book, it's easy to hear her speak, and easy to guess where Williams got the model for Amanda, the desperate mother character in his first great play, The Glass Menagerie.

Here's the story with which Amanda, er, Edwina, opens the book:

I recall a day when he was about two years old and we were living with my parents in Columbus, Mississippi…it was a hot summer day and I looked out of the window to make sure Tom [Tennessee] was all right as he played in a yard dotted with rocks. There he was, with his little spade, digging madly away amidst the rocks. Perspiration dripped own his chubby face and his little golden curls clung damp to his head.

"What are you doing, Tom?" I called out, wondering why all this great labor under the hot sun.

"I'm digging to de debbil," he explained as he doggedly shoveled out another spadeful of dirt.

Ozzie, his colored nurse, had probably been telling him stories in which the devil starred, and Tom, no doubt, had asked where the devil lived. Ozzie, thereupon, told him in the middle of the earth where it was dark and deep and Tom set out, the first chance he had, to find the devil's lair.

You might say Tom went on "digging to de debbil" the rest of his life, trying to discover where the devil lives inside all of us. Through his searching words, he turned the tragedy in his life to art.

[Thanks to Betsy Randle, who performed spectacularly in the version of The Glass Menagerie that played in Los Angeles this month, understudy to the great Judith Ivey, for recommending the book. And here's a family picture from the book of Tennessee, aka Tom, with Ozzie.]

The future won’t be futuristic, says Douglas Coupland

Or it won't feel futuristic, according to Douglas Coupland, one of our most visionary novelists (inventor of the great phrase McJob, which today seems more apt than ever). Of the future, he says:

It's simply going to feel weird and out-of-control-ish, the way it does now, because too many things are changing too quickly. The reason the future feels odd is because of its unpredictability. If the future didn't feel weirdly unexpected, then something would be wrong.

In his radical pessimists guide to the next ten years, Coupland has a number of other intriguing thoughts, including the suggestion to move to Liverpool, Shannon, or Vancouver. The weather will still be "freaky," he says, but at least it won't be "broiling hot or cryogenically cold."

He has a point…as this "world revs its heat engine" image from NASA shows.

As sun warms slightly, earth cools slightly — wha?

The always helpful MIT/Knight Science Journalism Tracker points to a slew of stories about a counterintuitive, to say the least, study in Nature that finds that during a three-year period from 2004-2007, when solar radiation rose a little, global temperatures slightly declined.

In the measured words of The Independent:

The sun's role in climate change may have been overplayed, according to a study indicating that the Earth could actually get slightly cooler, rather than warmer, as the activity of the 11-year solar cycle increases.

The researchers stress this does not mean that global warming is not real. Nor does it suggest that the sun has no influence on earth's atmospheric temperature.

"We cannot jump to conclusions based on what we have found during this comparatively short period," Dr [Joanna] Haugh, [of the Imperial College of London] said."However, if further studies find the same pattern over a longer period of time, this could suggest that we may have overestimated the Sun's role in warming the planet."

But publishing a study like that in Nature is in an invitation to reach a conclusion, isn't it?

If this is damnation, I don’t want to be saved

Damnation Creek Trail, Redwood NP, originally uploaded by lindsay_kaun.

A ridiculously good tree picture, via the mind-blowing Treeporn site.

Happy 70th Birthday, John Lennon

Thirty-three years ago, long before John Lennon was shot and killed, the late great David Levine imagined what he would look at when he was sixty-four, or, today, when he would have been seventy.

Something tells me that Lennon, quite a line artist himself, would have been a little tickled to see himself in the future this way.

For more on Lennon, Fresh Air offers a typically great listen, including snippets of interviews with McCartney, Starr, Cynthia Lennon, and Jon Weiner, the historian who wrote about his battle with the FBI, and, in fact, forced the agency to give up the papers chronicling its harrassment of this great man.

The biggest and fastest thing nature has ever done

Reporting on the behavior of ice sheets is difficult, even for science journalists, because the terrain is so difficult, and so much is still unknown about Antarctica. But a couple of weeks ago in Rolling Stone, Ben Wallace-Wells published the single best story about this subject I have ever seen. It's long, but great.

Here's the nut graph, from well into the story:

In the past few years, scientists have begun to worry that the world's glaciers have entered what they call a "runaway feedback mode," in which the dramatic changes to the water and wind and ice caused by global warming have not only accelerated but have themselves begun to alter the climate, creating a dynamic that could be irreversible. Both Antarctica and Greenland are now losing ice at twice the rate they were in 2002 — as much as 400 billion tons each year. In July, after the planet's six warmest months on record, a giant crack opened up overnight in the Jakobshavn Glacier; for the first time ever, scientists monitoring satellite data were able to observe in real time as an iceberg covering 2.7 square miles broke off and floated into the sea. Three weeks later, an even larger iceberg — four times the size of Manhattan — cleaved away from another glacier to the north of Jakobshavn, stunning scientists who study the ice sheets. "What is going on in the Arctic now," says Richard Alley, the geoscientist at Penn State, "is the biggest and fastest thing that nature has ever done."

The story covers not only the scientific questions, but the ingenuity the scientists displayed in finding answers to questions that appeared insolvable, and it touches on their emotions as well. Remarkable.

[to see a NASA/GISS short film of the Pine Island Glacier calving mentioned in the story, go here]