A Change in the Wind

Snow disappearing from Southern California mountains

Don't expect to see pictures below much in the future. From the LA Times: 

A UCLA study released Friday projects a significant decline in snowfall on the ranges that provide a dramatic backdrop to urban Southern California.

By mid-century, the amount of snow draping the mountains could decrease 30% to 40%, researchers say. If greenhouse gas emissions continue unabated, the ranges could lose two-thirds of their snow by century’s end.

That means fewer and fewer days in coming decades will reflect the classic images of sun and snow that have idealized life in Southern California since 1920s citrus-crate labels beckoned to Easterners.

“It kind of cuts to our identity,” said Jonathan Parfrey, a commissioner with the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power who is also executive director of Climate Resolve, a local nonprofit concerned with climate change.

This has been my experience, walking up to the snow in our local mountains (the Topa Topas) every winter. Even at 6000+ feet, it snows less frequently, and when it does snow, it snows less. 

It's impossible to remove the natural variability, thank God, but still -- much less snow. 

 

How to stop global warming: Ken Caldeira

From a (typically excellent) NPR science story, this one about Ken Caldeira, the Stanford researcher into ocean acidification:

"Decades ago, everybody was smoking cigarettes — and it was acceptable to smoke cigarettes indoors," [Caldeira] says. "And there was a phase change in social acceptability, where it is no longer acceptable to dump your cigarette smoke in air that somebody else is going to breathe. And I think we can achieve the same thing with carbon dioxide emissions, where it just becomes socially unacceptable to dump your industrial waste into the atmosphere."

The Chumash cure for poison oak: USC Scientist

From my story in the Ojai Valley News:

One of the most common shade plants in Southern California is mugwort, a rangy grey-green perennial with serrated leaves, which also turns out to be one of the plants most useful for healing in the Chumash tradition. That’s according to Jim Adams, a professor in pharmacology at the University of Southern California, who has published hundreds of articles in the scientific press, but on his own spent years learning about Southern California plants from a Chumash mentor named Cecilia Garcia.

“Mugwort is such a useful plant,” he said. “Cecilia was constantly working with it – it was her favorite plant.”

Adams said the Chumash used mugwort for many conditions related to the womb, and he suggests making a tea with it to relieve menopausal symptoms.

But the plant is best known as an antidote for poison oak.

“Basically, you get a handful of leaves, 10 or 15, and pee on them,” he said. “Then you rub the leaves on your skin where you were touched by the poison oak. We know this works, and there have been scientific papers written on it, but we still don’t know exactly how.”

Don't like the latest science? Kochify the News!

As has been much discussed, the Tribune chain of newspapers -- including the Los Angeles Times -- is up for sale, and the billionaire Koch Brothers say they want to buy it, according to reliable sournces, including the Wall Street Journal. A HuffPo summary:

Tribune emerged from bankruptcy in 2012, and began preparations to sell off its newspapers earlier this year. New York Times' Amy Chozick reported that the Koch brothers were the frontrunners to buy the papers, ahead of other potential buyers including Rupert Murdoch. The reports have prompted some Los Angeles Times staffers to say that they would quit if the sale went through, and a grassroots fundraising campaign to buy the Tribune papers.interested in buying it.

Now, back on the Internet, a clever new website called Kochify the News allows readers to take real news items and "Kochify" them with the click of a mouse.

Here's an example. A front-page story on climate change and drought begins with a classic 21st-century headline:

Climate Change May Bring Drought to Temperate Areas, Study Says

Wet areas will get wetter and dry areas will get drier, says a scientist, describing the findings of a NASA-led study on rainfall trends. Drought-prone areas include the Southwestern United States. 

And, now, in the Kochified version: 

Climate Change to Add More of What We Love to All Our Favorite Areas

Thanks to the wonders of Earth's naturally-changing climate, our favorite sunny travel destinations are getting drier, warmer, and just better. But don't worry rain-lovers, wet climates are going to be flooded with more watery goodness too. 

It's astonishingly good -- and intended to be a start on the way to building an on-line constituency. 

h/t: Jack Shafer

The lull in the rise of global temperatures: NYTimes

Justin Gillis for the NYTimes writes definitively on "the lull" in the rate of increase of global temperatures. It's confident writing that coolly savors the ironies of the crisis, even as it depicts the news with jaw-dropping facts. Speaking of the leveling out of global mean temperatures in the last fifteen years, he writes: 

What to make of it all?

We certainly cannot conclude, as some people want to, that carbon dioxide is not actually a greenhouse gas. More than a century of research thoroughly disproves that claim.

In fact, scientists can calculate how much extra heat should be accumulating from the human-caused increases in greenhouse gases, and the energies involved are staggering. By a conservative estimate, current concentrations are trapping an extra amount of energy equivalent to 400,000 Hiroshima bombs exploding across the face of the earth every day.

So the real question is where all that heat is going, if not to warm the surface. And a prime suspect is the deep ocean. 

Another suspect is medium-sized volcanoes (and this story mentions Asian air pollution). Many climatologists, such as Bill Patzert, would point to the recent shift of the Pacific Decadal Oscillation as a factor that tends to result in dryness and cold, and tends to hold down the rise in the global mean.

Surely the final result will be a mix of these factors. 

But what a terrific story by Gillis.

The dark side of science: The control of nature

As mentioned in a post not so long ago, Rachel Carson believed in "Silent Spring" that DDT represented an attempt to control nature. Which she abhored. A book about a fascinating friendship between a genius physicist, Nobel laureate Wolfgang Pauli, and Carl Jung, reveals that the physicst thought physics also represented an attempt at control. Pauli in a letter wrote:

Why [do] we in physics explore nature? Alchemy says, "in order to redeem ourselves," as expressed through the production of the Lapis Philosophorum [the philosopher's stone]. Formulated in Jungian terms, this would be the production of a "consciousness of the self"...Now this is not only light, but also dark, and must as a totality also contain "the will to power over nature," which I interpret as a kind of evil backside of the natural sciences, which cannot be eliminated.*

Is this obvious? I persist in seeing the idealism in science, perhaps unreasonably. 

[*from Pauli and Jung: The Meeting of Two Great Minds, by David Lindorff]

John Luther Adams at Ojai Music Fest (outdoors)

Thanks to a video maven from Bart's Books, here's what the final movement of composer John Luther Adams' Strange and Silent Music looked like this morning at Besant Hill in Upper Ojai.

During the entrancing performance, which began on the drums, moved to the east for a soft thudding playing of the gongs, to the south, to the west for xylophones, and then back to the drums, the composer Adams walked around and listened from various spots on the low hill where the performers, from a percussion group based at UC San Diego called red fish blue fish. 

According to the program notes, this piece grows out of "the overwhelming violence of nature...a violence at once both terrifying and comforting, transpersonal and purifying." That description evokes cacophony and danger, which the piece itself only hinted at, with soft drums rolls set against sharp snare banging, and the sounds flowing out into the fog as the sun came up.  

After the performance I told Adams I thought the piece was wonderful. 

"I'm not sure I like it," he said. "But this piece doesn't care if I like it or not." 

I asked him about the gongs, and he said he didn't have a good word for that sound a gong makes as it is hit softly, and brassily expands without pealing, but he said the piece was about resonance. Resonate it did, throughout the upper valley. 

Changing -- and being changed by -- the sea around us

Brian Fagan, whose The Great Warming is the single best history of climactic change over the course of history, writes this week in The New York Times of the unseen dangers of rising sea levels:

Fifty thousand drowned, steamships aground with their bows among trees, cattle rolled head over heels by gigantic waves — stories of great sea surges from past centuries abound. Many of them cascaded ashore when coastlines were relatively stable, killing everyone in their path. Today, we live in a warming world of rising sea levels, where tens of millions of us live a few meters above the ocean. The potential for sudden cataclysm is greater than ever.

The record of history is sobering. On Jan. 16, 1362, a severe southwesterly storm swept across the British Isles. The wooden spire of Norwich cathedral in eastern England collapsed.

Hours later, the Grote Mandrenke, “The Great Killing of Men,” descended on the Low Countries at high tide. Huge waves carried everything before them. “An infinity of people perished,” fishing fleets became matchwood, entire herds of cattle and sheep perished in the raging waters. Three centuries later, in 1634, another cataclysmic storm surge brought sea levels four meters above normal to the Strand Islands off northern Germany. As many as 15,000 people and 50,000 livestock drowned.

The point is that we fool ourselves if we suppose that the seemingly modest annual rise in sea level has no consequences in our lives today. Witness Katrina, witness Sandy (the risks for damage from both were accurately projected by scientists. by the way). 

But lets open our eyes to a less scientific and more thoughtful analysis of the changing sea, by the great editor Lewis Lapham, formerly of Harper's, writing this one for Tom Dispatch. He points out that Rachel Carson, among many other great writers, thought of the vast ever-changing sea as somehow beyond the reach of our powers, and found great reassurance there. But it's no longer true: 

Rachel Carson, the perceptive and far-seeing naturalist, in 1951 assured the readers of The Sea Around Us that mankind "cannot control or change the ocean as, in his brief tenancy on earth, he has subdued and plundered the continents." She subsequently revised the opinion, remarking in one of her later notebooks, "Even in the vast and mysterious reaches of the sea we are brought back to the fundamental truth that nothing lives to itself." [...]

We needn't call upon an angry god to make the sea an object of no small terror. Every year we withdraw from it 160 million tons of fish, deposit in it 7 million tons of garbage. Poisonous chemicals in the Gulf of Mexico have formed a pool of dead water equivalent in size to the state of New Jersey; among the several hundred dead zones elsewhere in the world, one encircles the Chinese coastline.

If the sea levels continue to rise at their current rate, the day is not far off when Miami and Atlantic City become beds for oysters. The fishing in the sea that was once near the surface now is done by trawls the length of locomotives dropped to the depth of a mile and dragged across the bottom, reducing many thousands of square miles of the ocean floor to barren deserts no longer giving birth to the tiny organisms from which emerge the great chains of being that sustain the life of the planet.

Nothing in the sea lives by itself, nothing either on the earth or in the air or in the minds of men. To know the sea is mortal is to know that we are not apart from it. Man is nature creatively refashioning itself. The abyss is human, not divine, a work in progress, whether made with a poet's metaphor or with a vast prodigious bulk of Styrofoam.

"The abyss is human" = we have remade the sea.

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Can hipsters take a joke?

Guess we'll find out. Here's Ted Rall on the subject (along with a long rant on the subject of Time and their piece on Millenials vs. Gen X'rs):

 And here's a joke to match, courtesy of Dr. Dave White: 

How many hipsters does it take to screw in a light bulb?

It's a really cool number, but you probably haven't heard of it. 

Climate Myths: The Campaign against Climate Science

Energy analyst Dr. John Berger's Climate Myths: The Campaign against Climate Science expertly separates climate fact from misinformation, and is especially good at reminding us of past deceptions put out by fossil fuel companies. Who can forget, for instance, The Greening Earth Society?

"A creation of the Western Fuels Association," writes Berger, "...this benevolent-sounding "green organization" served as a gateway to coal, oil, and mining-industry-funded think tanks and institutes as well as to publications rife with misinformation. Some of the materials circulated by the "Just Say "No" to Climate Change" folks even tareted elementary school children through their teachers." 

Berger's slim and inexpensive book serves as a good introduction to climate misinformation. Yet being a book, it must contend with a couple of difficult realities.

One is simply the nature of climate change, which, not to put too fine a point on it, means change. How can any book keep up with the thousands of scientific papers published annually?

Not to mention the millions upon millions spent annual on disinformation by fossil fuel interests. Forests could fall for new editions of Berger's book, and still do little more than point the finger at the legions of skeptics (which, as SF Mike pointed out years ago, resemble the villain of the Harry Potter series, in that they cannot be named without being strengthened).

That's why when it comes to battling misinformation, this book is helpful, but so is Australian John Cook's deeply informed questioning of the "skeptics" on his site Skeptical Science. (Which, oddly enough, has a title that similarly is a little confusing. Cook's title sounds a little like a "skeptics" site, and Berger's book title sounds a little like a denier's.) 

To add to the similarity, this week in Skeptical Science, to give an example, Cook features a piece by climate scientist Kevin Trenberth -- who coincidentally wrote the introduction to Berger's "Climate Myths!" 

What it comes down to is topicality and preference: If you would like a well-focused introduction to the topic in book form, read Climate Myths, where in the introduction Trenberth notes:

In science, being skeptical comes with the territory, but to deny basic facts makes no sense at all. 

Or, if you prefer the topicality, and don't mind being overwhelmed (or reading off a screen), one can keep up with the science and learn as well from the likes of Skeptical Science, Jeff Masters, RealClimate, or countless others.

In his piece on Skeptical Science, for instance, Trenberth notes: 

Focusing on the wiggles [noise in the rise of the global average temperature] and ignoring the bigger picture of unabated warming is foolhardy, but an approach promoted by climate change deniers. 

Berger's aim is true. The only catch is, he's after a moving target. 

Greatest nature drawing ever? by Albrecht Durer

Christopher Knight suggests such is the case for Albrecht Durer's "Great Piece of Turf":

The drawing's technical mastery is astounding. Watercolor can be an unforgiving medium, allowing for few mistakes. Yet even in the face of this complicated, seemingly chaotic tangle of plants, the 32-year-old artist made no evident missteps.

The viewpoint is head-on, seen from down in the weeds, where a small animal might burrow. We hug the ground. Since it's doubtful that Dürer executed it while lying in a field, he may well have dug up a clod and placed it on a pedestal or table for close observation.

The turf recedes diagonally in his composition, accentuating the spatial expanse. Watery dirt at the bottom partially reflects the stems rising above, further opening up a surprising illusion of open space.

Before now, I hadn't noticed something that suddenly seems crucial: Dürer carves a subtle envelope of interior space within the plants, framed within their natural tracery. Many stems are separated at the bottom but lean toward one another at the top. The grasses rise to a long, asymmetrical peak toward the far end and then briefly descend.

Overall, in other words, the shape suggests a Gothic cathedral. A cathedral made of weeds.

How unmetaphorical our times seem in comparison. 

A home in the wild, under the wind

Three nights ago I slept tentless in the desert. I slept despite a breeze, moving over my pad and bag, over my face exposed to the night. The moon came up bright, woke me at midnight, but the air had gone still and quiet, and I found my way back to my dreams. 

A day later, after a twelve-hour walk up the sandy ridge, everything changed. In the morning the trail wound through sandstone borders, spotted with wan desert shrubs, blasted by the glaring heat. By seven we were walking on a granitic ridge eight thousand feet above Palm Springs (the San Jacinto mountains) shoved and pushed this way and that by the fierce winds roaring up from the desert and meeting the winds from the Pacific. My buddy was feeling ill, and couldn't focus on finding a campsite. I led as we stumbled five minutes down the hillocky slope into a flatter calmer meadow. Young trees clumped into shelters. Pale green grass, a foot or more tall, hardly moved despite the blustering air, though the trunks of the young trees shook as the canopy of leaves above caught the wind. 

Here we pitched our little tents. I flattened a patch of sweet young meadowgrass under the orange plastic floor, guiltlessly. I cozied the high-tech pup-tent up to a clump of young trees. skipped the stakes, knotted the guy-lines to the trunks. The wind blew fiercely up on the ridge, but under the shelter of the trees, in the hollows, I could almost forget it.  

Inside my tent the branches and trunks threw crazy patterns on my walls. Outside the branches rustled and waved, but the tent rode with them, like a boat on a wave, and inside I slept, soundly for once. I had found my place. The buffeting was only the rough caresses of this wild world. 

[from inside the tent, the branches in the wind] 

Mad Men of climate change denial: Steve Brodner

The right has its ways and means, but the left -- as usually seems to be the case -- has the artists, including Steve Brodner. No else depicts the banality of climate change deniers (er, "skeptics") with quite the same verve (and this is just the sketch -- for the color/adman version, see this):

For a story in The American Prospect (upcoming, apparently). Brodner also recommends a recent This American Life show on the topic. 

Experts: Smartphones and sugarsaltfat are changing us

It's a little shocking to see experts turn aganst modern society, but it happens: 

Regarding smartphones, a NYTimes op-ed -- Your Phone vs. Your Heart -- argued that smartphones can alter our lives on a genetic level, for cryin' out loud. 

The human body — and thereby our human potential — is far more plastic or amenable to change than most of us realize. The new field of social genomics, made possible by the sequencing of the human genome, tells us that the ways our and our children’s genes are expressed at the cellular level is plastic, too, responsive to habitual experiences and actions.

Work in social genomics reveals that our personal histories of social connection or loneliness, for instance, alter how our genes are expressed within the cells of our immune system. New parents may need to worry less about genetic testing and more about how their own actions — like texting while breast-feeding or otherwise paying more attention to their phone than their child — leave life-limiting fingerprints on their and their children’s gene expression.

When you share a smile or laugh with someone face to face, a discernible synchrony emerges between you, as your gestures and biochemistries, even your respective neural firings, come to mirror each other. It’s micro-moments like these, in which a wave of good feeling rolls through two brains and bodies at once, that build your capacity to empathize as well as to improve your health.

That's the good news. But the writer hints at the bad news: that we are being manipulated by corporations exploiting our desire to connect. Blunter is an op-ed in the Washington Post about how food giants such as Kellog's and Oscar Mayer manipulated our pleasure centes for their profits -- ruthlessly. 

In one of the most egregious examples of company misbehavior, Moss describes a 2008 Kellogg’s commercial for Frosted Mini-Wheats in which a voice-over claimed, “A clinical study showed kids who had a filling breakfast of Frosted Mini-Wheats cereal improved their attentiveness by nearly 20 percent.” In fact, half the children who ate the cereal showed no improvement in attentiveness. But by the time the Federal Trade Commission got around to barring Kellogg’s from making this claim, the commercial had already run for six months.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Full of what, is the question.