“I Used to Have a Really Cool Job”

An interesting thing about the on-coming economic crash is that this is old news for lots of people, some of them impressively articulate, in both the music biz and the music criticism biz.

Last year a wonderful magazine about what is now known as Americana music called No Depression gave up its print run. They've gone on-line, but if you happened to hear the editors talk about it on NPR, you heard them say they have no illusions that the web version will be as good as what they had in print, for the simple reason that almost no one wants to read essays on computer monitors.

I was really touched by this essay about the demise of No Depression and life as a music critic by a Northwesterner not previously know to me named Grant Alden. Once he was a critic, watching Nirvana and hanging out with Radiohead, now he's a barista. But he still has a really cool job. Take a look:

Nothing on the web is permanent, including the music now housed there. Someday, somebody might find a copy of No Depression
and wonder what the hell that was and who we all were, and why none of
the artists we wrote about so lavishly ever amounted to much. I’m not
sure how they’ll find the music of the new downloadable age…not in
thrift shops, in any event!

In an hour, I will turn off this computer and walk down the street
to a coffee shop. There I will try not to botch a vanilla frappé for
one of my neighbors (they’ve gotten over occasionally seeing me on
national TV), and to keep the dishes clean. Later, if I’m lucky, I will
drive to my father-in-law’s place and try to spend an hour or two
cleaning up the garden and feeding the chickens.

I used to have a really cool job. Someday I’ll have to explain it
to my daughter. Right now, she’s all too happy listening over and over
and over again to the first song on Lucinda Williams’s new album, and
she doesn’t believe me for a minute when I tell her Buddy Miller is
just as good.

The truth is, I have a really cool job now: I get to feed my
family. We’re about to double the size of the garden, the orchard we
began a couple years back is coming along nicely, there’s nothing
better than farm eggs, and we put up at least 125 quarts of greasy
beans for the winter. And now I have time to listen to all that music.

Hansen predicts temps to set record in Obama’s first term

At his presentation after his lecture to the scientific masses at the American Geophysical Union, Jim Hansen was asked this week if, given that 2008 was cooler than a couple of recent years, if he would hazard a prediction for the near future of global temps. He jumped at the opportunity to go on the  record. He said:

During Barack Obama's first term, global temperatures will exceed prior records, and that will help get people to pay attention to the issue, but I hope we don't have to wait for significantly higher temperatures before we act to reduce the risk.

Here's the slide Hansen likes to show of the global temperature average….showing peaks in l998 and 2005, and a slight downturn since…but a clearly upward trend. 

Global Temps since 1880

Methane Time Bomb — Ticking Louder

At a press conference Tuesday at the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco, a Russian scientist who has spent the last fifteen years tracking the release of methane from Siberia was asked if a huge surge he and his team detected this summer constituted "a global emergency."

Igor Similetov did not say no, and did not challenge the premise of the question. He first spoke of the vastness of this little-known area, an undersea shelf totaling in the range of 2 million kilometers, easily visible on photos from space, larger than Spain, France, and Germany combined. He added that he and his team, who sailed the northern coast of Siberia this summer collecting data, had taken only 5000 measurements over the last five years. In a paper he estimated that fifty percent of this shallow shelf is now emitting methane in the summer, with "large clouds of methane bubbles observed in the water column over hundreds of square kilometers."

Yet his struggle with the question was evident. I tracked him down later, and asked if he felt he was the wrong person to be answering such a huge question. He admitted his discomfort, but said he thought it was the best question he was asked, and insisted:

"I am the person responsible for this research, and I think we have to tell people that something is happening now with the subsea permafrost."

Semiletov points out that geologists estimate that the amount of methane stored beneath the Siberian shelf to be on the order of 2000 gigatons. (Keep in mind that methane is a greenhouse gas twenty times more potent than CO2, and that total emissions of CO2 today are in the range of 8 gigatons a year.) Semiletov thinks that if just 1% of the ESAS methane is released, it will push total atmospheric methane up to 6 parts per million, and cites researchers such as David Archer in arguing that this would push us past the point of no return, towards runaway global warming.

Leading climatologist James Hansen also gave a talk at the conference, to his usual throng of thousands, about the threat of runaway global warming, and the need to phase out coal plants. He happened to mention that the global atmospheric record showed a slight fall-off in methane for 2008, so I asked him if he was less concerned about this particular threat to a stable climate. Hansen said that on the contrary, the paleontological record probably isn't a good guide to global methane release, because "even though evidence of releases might look like spikes on a plot, they still happened over thousands of years. Human forcings are happening so fast they don't allow for negative feedbacks."

Hansen added that most researchers were confident that methane hydrates would remain stable because "they assume that the heat perturbation would not penetrate the frozen layers, but last summer we saw methane coming up through chimneys in the permafrost, so maybe it doesn't take actually melting the surface to release the gas."

This is a precise description of what the data assembled by Similetov's team shows, along with evidence from isotope analysis that this methane is coming from deep reservoirs.

Similetov added:

"We are aware that our results showing that the permafrost is no longer an
impermeable barrier to methane release have not been duplicated by
other researchers at this time. But it is high time to warn people."

He stopped for an instant and then smiled, before adding:

' We can do nothing about it, of course."

.

Rosemarie Dewitt Will Break Your Heart

And that's a promise. Take a look at her and tell me if it isn't true.

Rosemarie Dewitt in Mad Men

This is from the show Mad Men, about which way too much has already been said.

It's a good show, but if you want to fall in love again, if just for an hour or two, with a woman of overwhelming smarts and impossible beauty, run don't walk to see her, Rosemarie Dewitt, in Rachel Getting Married.

The movie is at times a battle between the movie stars (including Anne Hathaway, playing the troubled addict sister, and Debra Winger, playing the estranged mother) and the virtual unknowns, such as the extrardinarily compelling Rosemarie Dewitt as the sister upon whom all in the story depend.

Dewitt's the real star of the picture, and they say she has a chance at a Supporting Actress nod from Oscar. That would be wonderful to see, but she will be long remembered for this performance, with or without the little statuette. 

In the picture below, she is the pretty woman, the real one with the earring, not the movie star.

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No Need to Panic over Methane Hydrates: CO2 is Worry Enough…Some Say

Such is the message from an excellent story in Salon by Kristen Weir, organized around an upcoming panel at the American Geophysical Union on methane hydrates in permafrost and deep ocean sites.

Weir writes: 

Methane hydrates aren't unusual, astronomically speaking. They exist on
Mars, inside comets, and on at least a couple of Saturn's frosty moons.
Here on Earth, they form deep below permafrost and under seafloor
sediments, where temperature and pressure conspire to keep the
structures stable. It's not certain how much methane is locked up in
hydrates, but some estimates put the total as high as 10,000 gigatons,
says Gerald Dickens, a professor of earth sciences at Rice University.
To put it in perspective, he says,  "the estimates for all of the oil,
Russian polar scientists have strong evidence that the first stages of
melting are underway. They've studied largest shelf sea in the world,
off the coast of Siberia, where the Asian continental shelf stretches
across an underwater area six times the size of Germany, before falling
off gently into the Arctic Ocean. The scientists are presenting their
data from this remote, thinly-investigated region at the annual
conference of the European Geosciences Union this week in Vienna.gas, and coal [on Earth] is about 5,000 gigatons."

Could they be shaking loose? Another story, more alarming, from Siberia via Der Spiegel suggests so..

Russian polar scientists have strong evidence that the first stages of
melting are underway. They've studied largest shelf sea in the world,
off the coast of Siberia, where the Asian continental shelf stretches
across an underwater area six times the size of Germany, before falling
off gently into the Arctic Ocean. The scientists are presenting their
data from this remote, thinly-investigated region at the annual
conference of the European Geosciences Union this week in Vienna.

That story dated from April, but the scientists Weir talked to on this side of the Atlantic seemed unimpressed…perhaps that methane has been bubbling up since time humanity first began picking up rocks. Will attend AGU meeting and report further…

Quote of the Day: the Gubernator

"Of course, there are some people who say that we can't afford the
fight against global warming while our economies are down," California Governor Arnold Schwarzenneger said to delegates to a climate change United Nations meeting in Poland. "But the exact opposite is true. The green rules and regulations that will help save our planet will also revive our economies." 

[Ed. note –Because of its popularity and topography, California has had for decades some of the worst air pollution in the country. But unlike many other regions which have simply allowed pollution to happen, California has fought back. It's actually reduced pollution hugely in Los Angeles over the last twenty-five years. It's thrilling to see a Republican take pride in the Golden State's readiness to regulate for the sake of health and sustainability, and to extend that tradition to carbon emissions.]

The Deep Spirituality of Basketball

It's the weekend; lightness is in order. Here's a spectacular lede to what is essentially a review of a book published by a website, the brainy and pretentious Free Darko.

Frankly, the review is better than the product. A lot better. Happens sometimes, especially on the web. Here's Sam Anderson, for New York magazine.

I believe, fervently, fundamentally, irrationally—like a big-tent
revivalist speaking in tongues—in the deep spirituality of basketball.
The game belongs in the same experiential category as space
exploration, planting gardens, raising children, watching sunrises from
12,000-foot peaks, solving impossible math problems, and making
emotional connections with lost animals. It is the ancient primal
language in which the universe speaks human truth most plainly. My
first sustained exposure to basketball was literally religious. As an
adolescent I would skip church services along with the pastor’s son,
sneak off to a nearby Sunday-school room, fire up the big TV on its
rolling metal cart, and (primed by NBC’s theme music, the now-legendary
John Tesh hymn “Roundball Rock”) sit down to earnestly study the
feverish catechism of the early-nineties NBA—the heroism, villainy,
violence, sacrifice, treachery, faith, and wisdom of Barkley, Stockton,
Wilkins, Jordan, Pippen, Ewing, Rodman, Moncrief. After several pious
months, this secret worship led to a spiritual transfer in which
basketball supplanted Lutheranism as the official mythology of my
youth. It succored me in times of hardship. When I got bullied in high
school, I shot hundreds of free throws like someone reciting rosaries.
I came to believe that the health of your jumper’s arc, the purity of
your ball rotation, was a precise measure of your spiritual worth. When
I tried out for my high-school team, it seemed that so much was at
stake about my soul and its place in the universe that, before we’d
even had a chance to run the first drill, I projectile-vomited all over
the gym floor. (I didn’t make the team.)

After that, who cares what the anonobloggers for this site think about Scott Brooks? (Among other even more trivial topics.) I mean, really.