A Change in the Wind
Chris Hayes throws a fit over climate denial and inaction tonight on his MSNBC show:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/32545640
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Extensively quotes from a speech of true outrage and conviction on climate conservation, seventeen minutes long, delivered on the Senate floor by Senator Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island.
Includes this:
There is only one leg on which climate change denial stands: Money.
Ever heard of a soundtrack to a book? Me neither, but that's what we have here with blackprairie (including members of the Decembrists) and their lovely, moving collection of songs to a forthcoming book about efforts to save three endangered species, called Wild Ones. The author got to know Chris Funke and friends before they hit it big, and he sent them chapters, and they traded him songs.
Speaking of which…author Jon Moonallem writes in Slate and tells the story of "A Tranquilized Polar Bear Rising Thru an Autumn Sky":
The town of Churchill, Manitoba is a shivering little settlement on the edge of Hudson Bay that, every fall, gets overrun with about 900 polar bears and 10,000 polar bear tourists. Polar bears routinely wander into town—they especially love hanging out by the elementary school. When they do, folks call 675-BEAR and a squad of bear patrol officers tries to herd the animals back onto the tundra, firing off pyrotechnics and noise-makers. Bears that won’t budge are tranquilized and transferred to a Quonset hut near the airport, a facility sometimes referred to as the “Polar Bear Jail.” Each bear serves a month sentence—enough to dissuade it (hopefully) from entering town again—then it’s drugged again, packed in a net, and airlifted under a helicopter to a safer area north of town while crowds of tourists gather to watch. It’s a breathtaking thing to see: a polar bear lifting off the ground and flying away.
Really lovely. Really.
A couple of weeks ago I published a long story about climate change in Ventura County today but didn't mention shifts in the timng of Santa Ana winds. This despite the fact that from talking to Alex Hall of UCLA, a couple of years ago, I knew that evidence suggests that Santa Ana winds now can come later in the year than the fall. (Which was when we most experienced these notorious winds in the past.) And even though this shift had been confirmed by talks with representatives from the Ventura County Fire Department. Today a spokesperson for the VCFD commented on the winds and the major wildfire — the Camarillo Springs fire — we had this week:
"We're seeing fires burning like we usually see in late summer, at the height of the fire season, and it's only May," said Tom Kruschke.
It's a good example of the complexity of climate change, or a goof on my part, but in either case raises the question — what is going on with these winds? When I talked to Hall, he suggested that we may see fewer Santa Anas in September and October, and more later in the year. (Though he certainly didn't mention May!) He told KQED's Climate Watch in 2011:
“When you have a changing climate, the land surface is warming up a
lot more rapidly than the ocean, and that tends to weaken this
mechanism,” Hall told me. That could mean fewer of these seaward blasts,
at least during the winter months, as a kind of consolation.“In trying to understand how fire will behave in the future, we have
to look at the effect of precipitation on the fuel loads and we have to
be looking at the effect of Santa Anas on fire behavior,” said Hall. “So
I think there are some really interesting questions to look at.”
Hall pointed out to me to another of Santa Ana virtues: Offshore winds tend to blow grit and dust into the ocean, adding nutrients, and cleaning the air. Change need not be disaster, in other words.
Another example of this was mentioned in the Los Angeles Times this morning. Despite consuming 28,000 acres of vegetation and forcing the evacuation of 5000 people, this fire hasn't hurt any person, and hasn't destroyed a single house. Given the scale of the blaze, that's darn impressive.
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From Edmund White's gloriously thoughtful The Flâneur::
The flâneur [city walker/wanderer] is by definition endowed with enormous leisure, someone who can take off a morning or afternoon for undirected ambling, since a specific goal or a close rationing of tme is antithetical to the true spirit of the flâneur. An excess of the work ethic (or a driving desire to see everything and meet everyone of recognized value) inhibits the browsing, cruising ambition to "wed the crowd."
Americans are particularly ill-suited to be flâneurs. They're good at following books outlining tours of Montparnasse or at visiting scenic spots outside Paris…but they're always driven by the urge towards self-improvement.
A couple of assumptions are embedded in this concept: that the wandering should take place in the city (as described in Walter Benjamin's epochal Arcades project) and that the drifter, if you will, shall be alone. But is either necessarily the case? Perhaps for Benjamin, an urban philosopher.
It's interesting to posit the counter-example of Jack Kerouac, who certainly made a life and great work out of his wandering, but does have that "driven" aspect that White describes, and even made a bit of sport of his inability to wander idly in his great and underappreciated Dharma Bums.
A pic of Kerouac typing from the Orange County Regional History Center.
He wrote in that book:
“I felt like lying down by the side of the trail and remembering it all. The woods do that to you, they always look familiar, long lost, like the face of a long-dead relative, like an old dream, like a piece of forgotten song drifting across the water, most of all like golden eternities of past childhood or past manhood and all the living and the dying and the heartbreak that went on a million years ago and the clouds as they pass overhead seem to testify (by their own lonesome familiarity) to this feeling.”
Alice Waters, famous for Chez Panisse, the restaurant, and for her many cookbooks, brought her own wise self to a celebration of the tenth year of Food for Thought, friends Dave White and Jim Churchill's effort to bring gardens, fresh food, and more to the schoolchildren of Ojai. Wonderful produce (produced in the schoolyards) along with inexpensive and great picnic food, some heartfelt words, music, kids, festivity. And a lovely picture of Jim, Dave, and Alice, courtesy of photographer and nice guy Rich Reid:
Visited with Alice briefly to rave about her great cookbook The Art of Simple Food, from which I have learned so much. (It's also a fav of Michael Pollan's.) She said a new edition will be out this fall.
This week George Jones, by consensus one of the greatest of country singers, passed away. Have to admire his ability to tell a story (as in the wonderfully rich Southern California, a duet with Tammy Wynette) but also his ability to make a story:
…make no mistake, he could be menacing, a word that came to be
associated with Jones for much of his life. To sugarcoat his worst
impulses is to ignore the truth: When Jones was drunk, coked up or
otherwise out of his mind, he turned bad. In "I Lived to Tell It All,"
Jones' astonishingly honest 1996 autobiography, he tells of being drunk
on his tour bus and shooting five bullets from a .38 near a teetotaling
manager who wouldn't join him in finishing a bottle of vodka.Jones once drove a lawn mower to a liquor store after his wife hid
his car keys, and then sang about it in a ditty called "Honky Tonk
Song": "I saw those blue lights flashing over my left shoulder / He
walked right up and said 'Get off that riding mower.'" Jones was one of a
kind — in both the best and worst use of the term.
The same could be said of Paul Westerberg and the Replacements. Westerberg was just as witty, and just as wild, if not more so. From Aquarium Drunkard:
"Toward the end of their touring behind Pleased to Meet Me, the
Replacements gigged in Portland, Oregon with the Young Fresh Fellows
opening. And in the history of notorious Replacements shows, this one
ranks high. Though it’s difficult to nail down the exact story behind
the fabled night, the following anecdotes show up repeatedly: the ‘Mats
pelting the Young Fresh Fellows with various objects during their set;
the band breaking into a room (the show was held at the now-defunct Pine
Street Theatre) purloining costumes (of which they then wore ontstage);
the band being far too drunk to play effectively; clothes being taken
off and thrown into the audience — and the audience, in some cases,
returning the favor. This last part is my personal favorite as
apparently Tommy Stinson remembered, after throwing his clothes into the
crowd, that he had left ten dollars in his pocket. After raging at the
crowd to throw his pants back, he instead rifled through the clothes
thrown on stage, located twenty dollars in a pocket, and danced around
the stage in victory. Another account just reported that they stumbled
through a set of less than 45 minutes, played a cover of Bryan Adams’
“Summer of ’69″ and then split. Either way, a typical ‘Mats show."
Is it possible that the desire to tell a story is part of a desire to be dramatic? To be a diva, an acter-out, a drama queen? And that genre is less important than that desire to live in drama?
Regardless, you have to love the Replacements for writing a song about the city they dissed — and at the end apologizing for their antics. "Portland, I'm sorry." To apologize to an entire city! Reckless charm.
Like the lyrics:
Shared a cigarette for breakfast
Shared an airplane ride for lunch
Sitting in between a ghost
And a walking bowl of punch
Can you play a little hunch?
Predicting a delay on landing
Well I predict we'll have a drink
Lost my money on the first hand
Got burned on a big fat king
And your ears are gonna ring
And your eyes just wanna close
Nothing changing I suppose
A fav Mats' song…check it out.
http://webplayer.yahooapis.com/player.js
Climate change skeptics often scoff at the idea that climate change could lead to extremes of both drought and flooding. It is counter-intuitive, but all too real a phenomenon.
Dr. Jeff Masters gives it a name — "weather whiplash" — and explains how it happens:
I'm often asked about the
seemingly contradictory predictions from climate models that the world
will see both worse floods and worse droughts due to global warming.
Well, we have seen a classic example in the Midwest U.S. over the past
two years of just how this kind of weather whiplash is possible. A
warmer atmosphere is capable of bringing heavier downpours, since warmer
air can hold more water vapor. We saw an example of this on Thursday
morning, when an upper air balloon sounding over Lincoln, Illinois
revealed near-record amounts of moisture for this time of year. The
precipitable water–how much rain could fall if one condensed all the
water vapor in a column above the ground into rain–was 1.62", just
barely short of the Illinois April record for precipitable water of
1.64" set on April 20, 2000 (upper air records go back to 1948.)
Thursday's powerful low pressure system was able to lift that copious
moisture, cool it, and condense it into record rains. So how can you
have worse droughts with more moisture in the air? Well, you still need a
low pressure system to come along and wring that moisture out of the
air to get rain. When natural fluctuations in jet stream patterns take
storms away from a region, creating a drought, the extra water vapor in
the air won't do you any good. There will be no mechanism to lift the
moisture, condense it, and generate drought-busting rains. The drought
that ensues will be more intense, since temperatures will be hotter and
the soil will dry out more.The new normal in the coming decades
is going to be more and more extreme flood-drought-flood cycles like we
are seeing now in the Midwest, and this sort of weather whiplash is
going to be an increasingly severe pain in the neck for society. We'd
better prepare for it, by building a more flood-resistant infrastructure
and developing more drought-resistant grains,
for example. And if we continue to allow heat-trapping gases like
carbon dioxide continue to build up in the atmosphere at the current
near-record pace, no amount of adaptation can prevent increasingly more
violent cases of weather whiplash from being a serious threat to the
global economy and the well-being of billions of people.
It's hard to comprehend the scale of the threat, as is so often the case with climate change. Here's a NASA image, from the Precipitation Measurement Mission, to try to help:
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In 1962, in his second novel, The Drowned World, J.G. Ballard told a story of steadily rising global temperatures, of ice caps melting and rising seas, of humidity and rains and lizards moving into skyscrapers. It's an extraordinary book, for its imagination and artistry and language, but also for its vison of global warming.
Might a reader want an example? Here's the first paragraph:
Soon it would be too hot. Looking out from the hotel balcony shortly after eight o'clock, Kerans watched the sun rise behind the dense groves of giant gymnosperms crowding over the roofs of the abandoned department stores four hundred yards away on the east side of the lagoon. even through the massive olive-green fronds the relentless power of the sun was plainly tangible. The blunt refracted rays drummed against his bare chest and shoulders, drawing out the first sweat, and he put on a pair of heavy sunglasses to protect his eyes. The solar disc was no longer a well-defined sphere, but a wide expanding ellipse that fanned out acros the eastern horizon like a colossal fire-ball, its reflection turning the dead leaded surface of the lagoon into a brilliant copper shield. By noon, less than four hours away, the water would seem to burn.
On SFSite, Victoria Strauss discusses the book insightfully:
The Drowned World posits (presciently, as it turns out) that the world has been overwhelmed by a catastrophic greenhouse effect. It differs from our own impending disaster in that it's natural rather than man-made. In Ballard's scenario, violent solar storms have depleted the outer layers of Earth's ionosphere; as these vanish, temperature and solar radiation begin to climb, melting the polar ice-caps. This enormous outflow of water carries with it tons of topsoil, damming up the oceans and entirely changing the contours of the continents, drowning some parts of the world and landlocking others. At the same time, the increased radiation produces freak mutations in Earth's flora and fauna, initiating a new biological era reminiscent of the Triassic period, in which reptiles and giant tropical plants were the dominant forms of life.
Strauss gives us a sense of how the book develops, which is more about a compelling idea than a plot. At one point, dreams overtake the narrative:
…some of the expedition members begun having strange dreams, of a primeval swamp dominated by a huge burning sun that pulses to the rhythm of their own heartbeat.
These dreams, it turns out, aren't random occurences or signs of stress, but the first warming of a much deeper process. Human beings, responding to stimuli embedded in their genetic makeup billions of years earlier, are beginning to devolve. The dreams aren't dreams at all, but memories…
And the book offers much, much more.
The writing blends the surreal and the futuristic. The characters surprise us with their actions; for example, not wanting to leave the flooded city, though life there is unsustainable. The book flies by. But even if the book werenot brilliantly written, it almost wouldn't matter. Ballard's idea alone would be enough to carry us into the future, and to the end.
Evidence?
On the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of the book,Warner Brothers just optioned the rights for producer David Heyman, best known for his production of the Harry Potter series.
Allegedly. Lousy pay, poor benefits and retirement, if any, little security, high pressure, demanding hours. From the Poynter Institute, which tasks itself with developing and promoting the press and reporters, this news:
Newspaper reporters can add CareerCast.com to the list of sources telling them to flee journalism.
The group took 200 jobs and ranked them in order from most to least desirable, based on factors such as environment, income, outcome and stress. Add all that together and newspaper reporter rings in at a dismal 200 out of 200 – the worst job on CareerCast’s list, below lumberjack, janitor, garbage collector and bus driver.
“We look at a wide range of criteria, as analytical as we can be,” said Tony Lee, CareerCast’s publisher. “There are some subjective pieces but, frankly, it’s really driven by the data.”
The data come from sources such as the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the Occupational Safety & Health Administration and trade associations.
Newspaper reporter ranks below bricklayer, security guard, artist, author, painter, dishwasher, and janitor. Hmmmm.
Economist Justin Wolfers points out a flaw in this ranking. He tweets:
Simple observation: If newspaper reporter really were the worst occupation in America, it would be easy to find a jobonline.wsj.com/article/SB1000…
Bogart would say he has a point. From the classic Deadline USA, l952.
Kit Stolz