War, Politics, and Life by Bruce Maulden
The title quite a mash-up, huh? A mouthful of alliterated sounds beckoning forth a bat-shit-crazy. However, if according to the US Supreme Court and corporations are indeed people — “…citizens, or associations of citizens…” — then somewhere out there is some giant, asshole of a guy with a name synonymous with hideously-cruel, insane and arrogant incompetence:…
A new study from the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) describes a gosh-awful state of affairs for the planet in just a few short years. From ClimateProgress and the NCAR’s report author, Aiguo Dai: “We are facing the possibility of widespread drought in the coming decades, but this has yet to be fully recognized…
Global warming (oops, sorry, “global climate disruption”) is indeed cancer, an illness as hypothesized by a recent report most-likely a man-made disease and like the earth’s hurting environment, a product of the industrial age. A new Yale University survey shows only 10 percent of US peoples polled say they are “very well informed” on the issue. Which…
A view of the future as the now: Hungarian sludge worker. (Illustration found here). A dam holding back acres of toxic red sludge from a metals plant in Ajka, located 100 miles southwest of Budapest, Hungary, broke on Monday and swept across miles and miles of countryside, killing at least six people and painting everything…
We all remember what’s-his ass, Tony Hayward, whining last spring about this inconvenient oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico: “The first thing to say is I’m sorry,†he told reporters, when asked what he would like to tell locals whose livelihoods have been affected. “We’re sorry for the massive disruption it’s caused their lives.…
Beyond peak oil, climate change, the financial meltdown, peak soil, the GOP’s “Pledge to America,” the death of Eddie Fisher, the population bomb, etc., etc. — what else could possibly disrupt my golden years? From NASA: “The sun is waking up from a deep slumber, and in the next few years we expect to see…
Everybody everywhere always tries to put a little positive spin on nasty, unsettling or just plain dangerous shit, especially in connection with the two biggest influence-disasters facing mankind — peak oil and global warming (excuse me, “global climate disruption“). Do these spin doctors and nurses have any regard for their children or grandchildren? Can they…
One of those extremely-dramatic moments, though, executed in easy, slow steps: Scientists studying an Indonesian tropical glacier witnessed first hand life with climate change: The glacier was literally melting under their feet. From NPR (including the highlighted sentence above), a piece on a research team’s two-week outing earlier this summer on Puncak Jaya Glacier in…
Ocean water all over is apparently getting warmer. Above the Bering Strait, in the Chukchi Sea, northwest of Alaska, the water there is nearly pool worthy as recorded in this captain’s blog: “The water temperature is 7.5 degrees. If we weren’t sailing, it would be a great temperature for a swim!” (via ClimateProgress). And in…
The future cooks while humanity cries through the looking glass: As the climate warms, we expect heat waves to become more frequent (Ganguly et al., 2009). Now there is still considerable uncertainty on where the heat waves will occur, that seems to depend on the climate model used. However, the physics of heat waves do…