Choosing a way forward

The great tragedy of man-made global warming is that we knew it was coming, and we could have avoided it. Our changing climate is bringing with it a whole suite of other predictable problems that we should probably be preparing for, if we don’t want to screw them up as badly as we screwed up the climate. In particular, we need to be thinking about the second-layer problems – the ones caused by the immediate and obvious changes like sea level rise. [Read more…]

Climate teach-in videos from 350.org

350.org has released a couple good videos on climate science, and climate solutions. If you haven’t seen them yet, you should take a few minutes to watch them. I’ve requested transcripts for people who prefer not to watch videos, or who are unable to see or hear them, and I’ll update with those when I get them.

 

A Business-Friendly Government Is One That Invests In Research

Research grants issued by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) contribute to a significant number of private-sector patents in biomedicine, according to a new study co-authored by an MIT professor.

The so-called “small government” politicians of the last few decades have a strong record of undermining or directly attacking science, research, and science education, often as part of their whole “shrink government to help everybody” mantra. It’s a line that seems to appeal to millions of Americans, whether conservative, moderate, or liberal, because on the surface of it, it seems to make sense. The government is discussed as a monolithic entity that takes our hard-earned money and wastes it on all sorts of bullshit, and like all the best lies, this one has a kernel of truth. Pretty much anyone can point to some example of government waste that pisses them off, so it’s easy to hear a bit of rhetoric about how bad the government is, match it to your own views, and agree. As usual, however, if we don’t look a little deeper, we can end up supporting policies that hurt everybody, including ourselves.

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Catastrophic convergence: drug resistance, climate change, and overpopulation

The 20th century saw a  number of failures that were potentially avoidable, and that all seem to be converging on the mid-late 21st century.

Image shows a petri dish with white lines of yeast growing in it.

From Washington Post – A strain of Candida auris in a petri dish

Aside from the many, many failures in the realms of war and economics, there are three big ones that worry me right now, and that I think will feed into each other in a horrific manner. The first, obviously, is climate change. The other two are overpopulation and drug resistance in diseases.

 

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Potentially electrifying development in battery technology

These days I’m a bit wary about new developments in renewable energy that have shown up in a lab. There are a lot of these that come out on a regular basis, and a vast majority of them have yet to actually be put to any practical use. They’re fun to check out, and it can be encouraging to see the things we could do, if we had a national effort to change our energy infrastructure, but it’s also frustrating, because it seems like most of these developments don’t really go anywhere, or if they are going somewhere, it’s not fast enough.

Another problem I have is that I don’t know enough about electronics, physics, and chemistry to make a concrete assessment of the practicality of any given technology, so I’ve gotten caught up in pipe dreams in the past. I don’t know which this is, but if it pans out, it’s a seriously big deal.

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Dancing on thin ice

In case you missed it, the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) announced last week that Arctic sea ice had reached its annual winter maximum, and that was the lowest on record for the third year in a row. This is bad news, but we knew it was coming.

Over the years, I’ve found it necessary to remind people that the theory of human-caused climate change was a predictive one. We knew the temperature would rise decades before the rise was statistically significant. We knew that sea levels would rise too, and that ice would melt. We also knew that melting arctic ice would increase the amount of heat that the ocean absorbed, and lead to faster warming, and faster melting.

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Action alert: Save climate data!

Trump has told the EPA to lose their climate change page.

“If the website goes dark, years of work we have done on climate change will disappear,” one of the EPA staffers told Reuters, who added some employees were scrambling to save some of the information housed on the website, or convince the Trump administration to preserve parts of it.

Please consider downloading materials from this site to save them. I’ll need this stuff for my work, but the more people have it, the lower the chances something will be missed. I’ll start posting stuff for download on my blog soon, but for now I’m going to try to make sure I’ve got everything I can. Also – get stuff from NOAA:

https://www.epa.gov/climatechange
https://www.climate.gov

I’ll also post other sites that might be covered by this.

 

What do we do now? Disease in the 21st century

The question of what to do about global warming has always been a difficult one to answer. It’s a problem caused by a myriad of factors, many of which lie beyond the power of the average citizen to affect. Deliberate and accidental inaction to avoid destabilizing our climate have led us to the point where “What can we do?” is a simpler question to answer than it used to be.

When it comes to changing the chemical composition of the atmosphere, our options as individuals are still pretty limited, but we’re no longer facing a question of if the climate will warm. The climate is warming, and the evidence indicates that it will continue to do so for the rest of our lives. What, then, can we do about it?

When the warnings about global warming first came out, we had time to work to change our energy infrastructure, and to avoid destabilizing our climate. The same is true now, at a smaller level. For most of us, the worst effects of climate change aren’t here yet. They’re coming, and they’re coming soon, but we’ve got just a little breathing space. We can use that for preparation to reduce the harm to ourselves and to others when the shit really hits the fan.

2016, as an El Niño year, gave us a glimpse of one of the dangers waiting over the horizon. As temperatures rise, ecosystems all over the planet are creeping into new territories, and that includes changes in location and behavior of diseases. PNAS has just published a study from the University of Liverpool that concluded that the El Niño conditions of this past year played a key role in the Zika Virus outbreak:

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