The healing tree that revived photographer Mark Hirsch

Mark Hirsch was a professional photographer and editor who suffered a couple of crippling blows in life; first, being laid off from a job he loved editing photos for an Iowa newspaper, and then being literally hit by a truck. For CBS News, he wrote: 

After the crash, I was unable to work. I had trouble sleeping . . .
memory issues. I lost my drive and ambition. I was irritable and short
with the family I love.

Then I got an iPhone — not to take pictures with, of course. What
self-respecting photographer would do that? Well, a friend and
photographer I respected had, and suggested I give it a try.

My first picture: A 160-year-old Bur Oak tree sitting in a cornfield
near my Wisconsin home. I had driven past that tree every day for 19
years, but I had never really looked at it.

That would change!

I decided to make a photo of that tree every day for a year — before
sunrise, after sunset, anytime, really. I was there, waiting and
watching, taking note of the simple beauty I had missed for so long.

A darting blackbird . . . a nest of eggs . . . the full moon setting.

The valley of that tree became for me a foreign land full of strange
and wonderful discoveries: a katydid, backlit by the sun; a moth
camouflaged against the tree's bark; a firefly painting a yellow
brushstroke as it flew past my lens.

I'm a sucker for "a tree saved me," having experienced that myself (less dramatically). Thank you, Mark Hirsch, for noticing…and thanks to "That Tree." 

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J.J. Cale (Gotta Get Back to You, Magnolia)

Last week the great J.J. Cale, beloved by talents ranging from Eric Clapton to Neil Young to Widespread Panic, left our realm. But he'll never be forgotten, for "Around Midnight" and "Cocaine" and many other great songs. 

As a thoughtful obit in the Daily Beast pointed out, J.J. Cale songs don't seem to have been written — they seem always to have been there, like the blues themselves. 

Here's my personal fav J.J. Cale song:

And a really warm obit in the Los Angeles Times over the weekend, written by former columnist Steve Chawkins, concluded with this anecdote about the notoriously shy Cale:

In 2008, [Cale] and Clapton won a Grammy for their album "The Road to Escondido."

Escondido city fathers tried to contact him, but in a 2009 Times interview Cale said he put them off as long as he could.
"They wanted me to talk to the chamber of commerce," he recalled. "And I said, you know, I'm not a chamber-of-commerce kind of guy."

Gotta love him — J.J. Cale. 

Prominent Republicans call for climate action now

Here's some news you won't see on FOX News: Four former EPA chiefs, all Republicans, back President Obama's climate action plan, and call for even stronger action, immediately:

Each of us took turns over the past 43 years running the Environmental Protection Agency. We served Republican presidents, but we have a message that transcends political affiliation: the United States must move now on substantive steps to curb climate change, at home and internationally.

There is no longer any credible scientific debate about the basic facts: our world continues to warm, with the last decade the hottest in modern records, and the deep ocean warming faster than the earth’s atmosphere. Sea level is rising. Arctic Sea ice is melting years faster than projected.

The costs of inaction are undeniable. The lines of scientific evidence grow only stronger and more numerous. And the window of time remaining to act is growing smaller: delay could mean that warming becomes “locked in.”

The last phrase is a reference to an absolutely jaw-dropping study, brilliant laid out on Climate Central, on sea level rise.

(The phrase "locked in" has been used instead of the usual "commitment" to climate change, which is one of those hideously counter-intuitive scientific phrases — like "positive feedback loop — which expresses the exact opposite emotion evoked by the reality of climate change. "Locked in" is a vast improvement.)

Here's a look at that study by Ben Strauss, which predicts in our children's life time — or ours — well-known cities like Boston, Miami, Ft. Lauderdale, and Sacramento, will be at least a foot underwater. 

Global weirding 2013: same temp in Ojai as in Greenland

In Greenland this week, temperatures reached an all-time high: 80F. 

The temperature in Ojai (in Southern California) today: 80F.

WTF? 

In Greenland, the Danish Meteorological Institute (DMI) gently suggested that climate change might have something to do with the high temperatures.

As reported by Jason Samenow for the Washington Post: 

The DMI says the warmth was not “unnatural”, but explains it fits into a long-term pattern of climate warming.

“[T]here is an indisputable gradual increase in temperature in Greenland,”DMI writes. “Along the way, any ‘warm event’ thus have a higher probability of being slightly warmer than the previous one.”

Out here in Ojai, in warm Southern California, one notable meteorologist/forecaster, Bob Bornstein of San Jose State, has published studies that show that global warming has already led to local cooling along the coast. It's too soon to disentangle this possibility from oceanic phenomena like the Pacific Decadal Oscillation, but talk to Ventura County residents and they will tell you, yes, with the exception of a heat wave earlier this month, this has been a cool summer.  

So! Greenland and Southern California — meterological summer twins.

Who wouldn've thunk?

Hailstones like lemon drops: Strange summer on the PCT

Mostly it's been dry, dry, dry this year in Southern California, but a week ago Monday, as I was on the Pacific Crest Trail in the Big Bear section, big old clouds came in and hung over the moon:

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Then Tuesday afternoon, heading over a ridge near Doble Springs, down came the hail. 

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Biggest hail I've ever seen! In July in Southern California! Who would've thunk?

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Occasioned this one:

hailstones like lemon drops
crunching under my boot heels
summer storm at Big Bear 

Discussed the question of monsoonal flow briefly with a couple of experts at Scripps. As I mentioned previously, some scenarios call for an increased monsoonal flow in a climate change scenario, but to date they haven't seen such a trend in our time — just natural variability. 

Dionysionism: A forgotten religion turned big business?

From a really penetrating book review by David Ulin in, yes, the Los Angeles Times, a fascinating historical idea/fact:

"No one remembers," [author Lawrence Osbourne] tells us, "that Dionysianism was the most popular religion of the late [Roman] empire before the arrival of Christianity. It was Christianity's principal rival…We have even forgotten that Dionysianism was a religion at all."

Book is The Wet and the Dry, by Lawrence Osbourne. Makes one wonder if this "religion" has simply morphed into the wine and spirits culture of today.  

The-wet-and-the-dry-20130725

Saving John Muir’s favorite tree: Maria La Ganga

Everyone has good days and bad days, but especially so he Los Angeles Times in recent years, which has been absolutely devastated by cutbacks, subscription falloffs, print declines, and local editions cut. The tale of at times seems endless. Yet good people at the paper have kept on doing good work. It's worth celebrating a good day, and yesterday, Sunday July 28th 2013, the Los Angeles Times had a pretty great journalistic day. I'm going to post links to a couple of examples, beginning with Maria La Ganga's marvelous story about John Muir, and a tree he planted. 

MARTINEZ, Calif. — It would be hard to equal John Muir's love for the giant sequoia, a majestic California native that can live 3,000 years and soar 250 feet high.

"The King tree & me have sworn eternal love," he wrote to a friend in the fall of 1870, "sworn it without swearing and Ive taken the sacrament with Douglass Squirrels drank Sequoia wine, Sequoia blood, & with its rosy purple drips I am writing this woody gospel letter."

A decade or so later, the besotted conservationist returned from a Sierra Nevada jaunt with a seedling wrapped in a damp handkerchief. He planted the slender specimen in a place of honor on his family's fruit ranch.

Today, Muir's homestead 35 miles northeast of San Francisco is a national historic site. And the sequoia, 70 feet tall, is dying of an airborne fungus.

Keith Park loves this particular tree almost as much as Muir loved them all — which is why the young National Park Service horticulturist is trying to keep at least a remnant of the ailing conifer alive by cloning it.

Great to see Muir's "woody gospel" on the front page of the largest paper on the West Coast. Here's Mr. Park, ascending the tree he wants to immortalize. 

Kevinpark

Thank you, Maria. (By the way, the story is good to the last word.) 

Fun is a disaster that couldn’t really happen: Sharknado

So says the director of the instantly notorious Sharknado:

Anthony C. Ferrante, the director of "Sharknado," studied the raining-animal phenomenon after he came up with the title "Sharknado," but kept hard science at bay, referencing one blood-soaked scene where a character uses a chainsaw to cut himself out of a shark that swallows him whole after falling from the sky.

"If we tried to go into how realistic it is, it wouldn't be fun," Ferrante said. "If you go into the science of it, the whole movie falls apart."

"Sharknado" has become an Internet sensation since its debut, when it became the top-trending word on Twitter for hours after its July 11 premiere, with tongue-in-cheek tweets from actors, directors and even Red Cross Oklahoma.

And Ferrante is in on the joke.

"This movie is the most improbable thing," he said. "One of the reasons why people embraced the movie is it's a disaster that couldn't happen, necessarily."

 


Something to think about: the disasters we like to watch are the ones that couldn't really happen. Kind of makes sense, doesn't it…

NASA: Stellar womb gives birth to monster star

Monsterstar

From an ALMA (ESO/NRAJ/NRAO)/NASA press release:
Observations of the dark cloud SDC 335.579-0.292 using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter array (ALMA) have given astronomers the best view yet of a monster star in the process of forming. A stellar womb with over 500 times the mass than the Sun has been found and appears as the yellow blob near the centre of this picture. This is the largest ever seen in the Milky Way — and it is still growing. The embryonic star within is hungrily feeding on the material that is racing inwards. It is expected to give birth to a very brilliant star with up to 100 times the mass of the Sun. This image combines data from ALMA and NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope.
ALMA is a radio telescope put together by an international consortium and installed on a high plain in Chile. Do I understand how it rendered this image? Not really. But it's worth it for "stellar womb."