A Change in the Wind
That's according to the Pew Center for Excellence in Journalism:
Global warming gets most of the press that goes to the environment. (When was the last time you saw a headline that mentioned habitat?) But all the environmental news put together adds up to only about 1.5% of the total news in 2009.
To put this number in context, Tiger Woods all by himself has been generating about four times the news coverage given to the entire planet.
Science fans and Internet junkies no doubt have been caught glimpses of the latest set of images from NASA's astonishingly far-sighted WISE (Wide Infrared Survey Explorer) mission.
Here's my personal fave: our closest galactic neighbor, Andromeda. Although about 2.5 million light years from our sun, this galaxy is actually bigger than the Milky Way, experts say. This is a reconstruction for our eyes from infrared data, with mature stars in blue, and young stars in red and yellow.
NASA was so smart — is so smart — to put its chips on unmanned missions and high technology. Sending men into orbit around the earth or even to the moon to show we can do it is all but pointless these days.
According to a just-released study by UC Berkeley researchers, based primarily on airport cloudbank measurements, fog in summer is less prevalent in Northern California over the last hundred years, down by about a third, which could threaten the beautiful, iconic redwoods of the northern California Coast.
A couple of qualifications; first, as the new study by James Johnstone and Todd Dawson notes, this does not match results from all the previous research. Work by Robert Bornstein's team at San Jose State found more wind and fog in the summer along the California coast in the last thirty years. Their argument is that more anthropogenic heat in the hotter interior regions of the state leads to a bigger thermal low, thus pulling more ocean air and more wind and fog across the coastal mountains.
Johnstone and Dawson. by contrast, link the decline in fog to the Pacific Decadal Oscillation.
Second, the trend looks alarming over the last century, but over the last fifty years it's not so evident, and (unlike, for instance, the decline in arctic ice). Interestingly, the fog levels look today not so different from those of the l950's, when the PDO was also negative, as it is now.
Nonetheless, for those of us who love redwoods, this is troubling news.
Redwoods are to fog as fish are to the sea…
From a nice (if much too short) interview with the great new poet Vera [corrected] Pavlova:
There’s a line in Zora Neale Hurston’s novel Their Eyes Were Watching God
that reads: “She didn’t realize she was the world and the heavens
boiled down to a drop.” Your poems feel that way to me—tiny verses with
the glint of whole galaxies in them. How does this relate to the
purpose you find in poetry?I thank you for a nice quotation and for your subtle understanding
of my poems. Indeed, this is how I understand the purpose of poetry: to
boil the universe down to the size of a poem, a novel down to eight
lines. An ideal poem, just as the DNA, contains all the information
about its author.
I love this woman/poet. Is that wrong?
Here's another of her tiny masterpieces:
I broke your heart
now barefoot I tread
on shards
The most dominating dramatist of the last twenty or so years in this country is surely David Mamet, whose most seen work is probably The Untouchables, but whose outpourings fill shelves and theaters around the country and the English-speaking world.
This domination may or may not be good news who care more about character than plot, because Mamet's characters, although powerfully driven and mysteriously real, tend to blur in the memory.
They do not have the touch of the divine that some writers — such as Shakespeare and Williams — can mysteriously achieve.
But, maybe that's unfair. Maybe it's me. Maybe I just don't like many of Mamet's characters, in plays such as Glengarry Glen Ross or American Buffalo, and perhaps that's my flaw, not his. When I do like his characters, as in my personal fave, Sexual Perversity in Chicago, I like Mamet very much.
Since it came out thirty years ago, I think it's fair to reveal the irony of the title. The perversity is that young people, young couples, can fall in love, and not want to admit it to each other.
Bring that to life and you will have a hit, and yes, this is the play that made Mamet a star.
In that light, I wish he would put his mind to work dramatizing this great anonymous postcard from Postsecret:
When PostSecret is good, it is very very good, and this Valentine's Day it was good.
Almost two years ago, the tenacious Lloyd Carter — a former reporter turned water law expert — wrote a public letter to Senate Dianne Feinstein, calling her out for her work on behalf of cotton and almond growers of the so-called Westlands water district of the Central Valley.
As he commented on his site, in April 2008:
California environmental groups have grown increasingly concerned that
U.S. Senator Dianne Feinstein is secretly negotiating a "sweetheart"
deal with the Westlands Water District that will harm the Delta and
will allow continued irrigation of high selenium soils.
Environmentalists remain deeply suspicious of Westlands' claim that it
has a viable solution for the drainage crisis affecting the western San
Joaquin Valley. Westlands, which only has a few hundred growers, is
seeking enough water annual to meet the needs of a city of 10 million
people.
Last September, Feinstein called for the spending of $750,000 on a National Academy of Sciences study of the exhaustive science on the Delta fisheries (but, interestingly, on her site claimed she was backing an Obama administration request…that in fact she spearheaded).
Now, long before the study has been completed, Feinstein has drafted legislation lifting pumping restrictions in the Delta, for the sake of Westlands. (Her office is continuing to avoid responsibility, but according to the excellent enviro reporter Bettina Boxall of the LA Times, who has seen the language of the bill, it "would effectively weaken new pumping restrictions designed to protect
the imperiled delta smelt and crashing stocks of migrating salmon.")
The move surprised other Democrats in the California legislature:
"This came as a bit of a shock that she did this," said Rep. Mike Thompson (D-St. Helena).
He represents the North Coast, which has been hurt by two years of bans
on commercial salmon fishing stemming from collapsing salmon stocks."If this were to go through, it would have a devastating impact on
Northern California and other jobs and other economies in the state,"
Thompson said.
This move raises huge questions — legal, political, scientific, legislative — but for now, one can only think back on Carter's prescient warning and recall the old line: Just because you're paranoid, doesn't mean they're not out to get you.
According to this graph from well-regarded public policy and polling outfit, PPIC, from a poll taken last summer, most Californians and most Americans believe that global warming has already begun:
But it's different among Republicans: one-third believe global warming "will never happen."
How do you compromise those two views?
France's most famous intellectual revealed to be inept Googler. From the Times of London:
When France’s most dashing philosopher took aim at Immanuel Kant in
his latest book, calling him “raving mad” and a “fake”, his
observations were greeted with the usual adulation. To support his
attack, Bernard-Henri Lévy — a showman-penseur known simply by his
initials, BHL — cited the little-known 20th-century thinker
Jean-Baptiste Botul.There was one problem: Botul was invented by a journalist in 1999 as
an elaborate joke, and BHL has become the laughing stock of the Left
Bank.There were clues. One supposed work by Botul — from which BHL quoted — was entitled The Sex Life of Immanuel Kant.
The philosopher’s school is known as Botulism and subscribes to his
theory of “La Metaphysique du Mou” — the Metaphysics of the Flabby.
Botul even has a Wikipedia entry that explains that he is a “fictional
French philosopher”.But Mr Lévy, a leader among the nouveaux philosophes school of the 1970s, was unaware…
Thinking in the 21st century: It's tougher than it looks on the Internet…
A changing climate has hurt butterfly species in the Sierra Nevada, reducing species richness by about fifty percent in the last 35 years. so reports a team at UCDAvis led by Arthur Shapiro, and reported in the PNAS: Compounded effects of climate change and habitat alteration shift patterns of butterfly diversity — PNAS
Here we present 35 years of data on 159 species of
butterflies from 10 sites along an elevational gradient spanning 0–
2,775 m in a biodiversity hotspot, the Sierra Nevada Mountains of Northern California. Species richness has declined at half of the sites, with the most severe reductions at the lowest elevations, where habitat destruction is greatest. At higher elevations, we observed clear upward shifts in the elevational ranges of species, consistent with the influence of global warming.
Or, in the blunter tones of a story from that wild-eyed lefty journal USA Today:
The unprecedented, 35-year analysis of butterfly populations in the Sierra Nevada details how several species are fleeing to higher elevations to escape warming temperatures.
Those butterflies that already live on mountaintops and can't adjust to the heat have "nowhere else to go but heaven," says Arthur Shapiro, a biologist at University of California-Davis who collected the data.
Climate is clearly one factor degrading populations and pushing species up the mountains, but another agent at work is habitat destruction:
This suggests that some factor in
addition to climatic change has affected butterfly species richness
…We suggest habitat alteration at low elevations,
which has likely destroyed habitat directly (potentially
affecting both larval hosts and adult nectar resources) and
reduced connectivity among habitats.
Next question: How to save these and related species? The authors suggest preservation not just of habitat and species, but of "fauna." Hmmmm….
From Timothy Egan in his Grifters Tale in The New York Times:
If Palin truly believed in the Tea Partiers and their discontent,
she would not be charging $100,000 to stoke their fears [at an upcoming convention]. She can do
that for free, on Fox. And what policy solutions does she offer the
troubled middle class? Tax cuts, like the ones that caused this massive
deficit to begin with? Preventing new regulation of the banks that got
us into this horrid economic collapse, under the guise of “less
government”?She has nothing to offer but honeyed words, the syrup for suckers.
Say what you will about Tea Partiers, but many of them can see
through this scheme in Nashville. “Smells scammy,” wrote Red State
Blogger Erick Erickson, no friend of the media elite. Others are
boycotting it, citing the $549 price for the convention, or the single
night tab of $349 to hear Palin.You could even see a bit of suspicion creep into Glenn Beck, Palin’s
enabler on Fox, during the strangest of interviews a few weeks ago.Beck to Palin: “Who’s your favorite founder?”
Palin: “You know, well, all of them.”
Beck was skeptical.
Yes, women can be grifters too.
Guess Beck's not a complete nut, even if he is mad as a hatter.
Brodner brilliantly illustrates this idea, along with the heavy promotion of gold that Beck and other right-wingers encourage, in the Gold Standard, and throws in Sarah as well. It's astonishingly good, I think.
Kit Stolz 