too many, too much

There's too many men, too many people
Making too many problems
And not much love to go round
Can't you see this is a land of confusion?

-- Genesis, "Land of Confusion"

My personal view is that climate change is occurring. But the primary driver is population and consumption. When my grandfather was born, the world population was about 1.3 billion. When I was born it was 2.2 billion, and today it is 7.5 billion. The UN predicts a population of about 10 billion by 2055. In my opinion this is the primary driver of everything relating to our worsening environment.

-- Ken Croasdale, 82, researcher and engineer at Imperial Oil from 1968 to 1992, as quoted in the article "The scientists hired by big oil who predicted the climate crisis long ago"

a hot and dry future

The writing's on the wall. Article: The drought in US south-west is the worst in 1,200 years. It might be here to stay by Kim Heacox.

Heacox writes:

John Wesley Powell, the one-armed US army civil war veteran who led the first white expedition down the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon – a daring boat run in 1869 – later became an ethnographer who wrote a prescient 1878 government paper titled: Report on the Lands of the Arid Regions of the United States. In it, he unflinchingly described the scarcity of water, and summarized that much of the American south-west, if it must be settled, should be settled lightly and modestly. Overpopulate it, and it will be unforgiving.

People came anyway:

Decades later, the US Bureau of Reclamation oversaw the construction of two massive arch-gravity concrete dams on the river: Hoover Dam in the 1930s that impounded Lake Mead; and Glen Canyon Dam in the 1960s, that impounded Lake Powell.

And:

When the Bureau of Reclamation planned and designed the dams, they were warned that their data sets were too small; that the desert has moods, that rivers fluctuate, water comes and goes, and the bones of previous civilizations are everywhere.

let's get real

An article over at The New Yorker: "What If We Stopped Pretending?"

"The climate apocalypse is coming. To prepare for it, we need to admit that we can’t prevent it." Hello.

overwhelmed by plastic

June 5 is marked by the United Nations as World Environment Day, a day set aside since 1974 to promote “worldwide awareness and action for the protection of our environment.” This year’s theme is “beat plastic pollution.”

-- from: World Environment Day 2018: ‘Beat Plastic Pollution’
   The Atlantic, June 5, 2018

Stunning photos. What are we doing to our world??

smh

Atlantic article:

What Kind of Monuments Does President Trump Value?

"He’s spoken in support of Confederate statues while threatening to undo as many as 40 conservation parks."

"...the excitement with which the president defends one kind of monument, while undermining another, does raise the question: What kind of history does the president value? What does it look like when history is destroyed? And what kinds of beauty and culture can be truly lost—what treasures of the United States can, once removed, never by human hands be comparably replaced?"

Ugh.

pie chart

James Lawrence Powell writes:

I searched the Web of Science for peer-reviewed scientific articles published between 1 January 1991 and 9 November 2012 that have the keyword phrases "global warming" or "global climate change." The search produced 13,950 articles ("Why Climate Deniers Have No Scientific Credibility - In One Pie Chart").

the heat

NOAA image of the United States from July 3rd to July 7th. Dull orange is 100 degree heat; the brightest orange is 109:

Folks will argue about whether the current heat wave is a sign of global warming, but here's one cartoonist's take:

trees

I'm reading a very interesting book: The Wild Trees, by Richard Preston. It's about the redwood trees on the West Coast, and the folks who climb them. Those trees are said to be the oldest living things on the planet.

The folks who climb them are driven by wanting to find the tallest one (they're difficult to measure), by studying the life in the canopies in the redwood forests, and by their love for these majestic trees.

Turns out there's a lot of stuff living up there, like in the canopies of rain forests. Plants, trees, etc., growing right out of the redwood trees' branches, way up high. Bizarre. There are areas up there between trunks growing out of the trees where soil has somehow collected, and stuff grows up there. The trees growing up there in those redwoods are mostly bonzai-type trees -- stunted, but living. At the time the book was written (it was published in 2007), it was like an unexplored world. Also, there are creatures up there that spend their entire lifetimes up there.

Some parts of the book are sad, because climbing big trees is dangerous, and folks fall. Talking about a fall of over 300 feet.

There used to be redwood forests throughout of the world, but most of 'em are gone; the remnants in California and Oregon are all that's left, and even those were hit hard by the logging industry.

The oldest ones are over two thousand years old. Before the time of Jesus Christ. The oldest Sequoia Redwood tree is said to be 3500 years old. In other words, as old as recorded human history; apparently, the earliest significant writing by humans dates from around that time.

I saw something saying that the tallest tree is "Hyperion," in California, at about 379 feet. But trees, of course, grow, and I'm not sure that people know which is the tallest at any given time. And it seems that climate change may be accelerating the growth, but hopefully pollution won't kill them.

This book is an example of how much we really don't know about the natural world. It's only been a short number of years since the ecosystems in those redwood canopies were discovered, and much of them is still not understood. And even though over 90% of the redwood forest are gone, some parts of the tiny remnants left along the West Coast are so vast and hard to reach that large portions remained undiscovered and not studied as recently as the date this book was published.

Another great book found at the thrift store. :)

great, if it works

"The mammoth 800-plus meter (2625 ft) tall tower will instantly become one of the world's tallest buildings [...] The Arizona tower will be a staggering 800 metres or so tall - just 30 meters shorter than the colossal Burj Khalifa in Dubai, the world's tallest man-made structure. To put that in context - it will stand more than double the height of the Empire State building in New York City, and it'll be as much as 130 meters in diameter at the top."

Sounds good! Let's hope it works out.

EnviroMission plans massive solar tower for Arizona

"The sun beats down on a large covered greenhouse area at the bottom, warming the air underneath it. Hot air wants to rise, so there's a central point for it to rush towards and escape; the tower in the middle. And there's a bunch of turbines at the base of the tower that generate electricity from that natural updraft."

More from the article:

The advantages of this kind of power source are clear:
• Because it works on temperature differential, not absolute temperature, it works in any weather;
• Because the heat of the day warms the ground up so much, it continues working at night;
• Because you want large tracts of hot, dry land for best results, you can build it on more or less useless land in the desert;
• It requires virtually no maintenance - apart from a bit of turbine servicing now and then, the tower "just works" once it's going, and lasts as long as its structure stays standing;
• It uses no 'feed stock' - no coal, no uranium, nothing but air and sunlight;
• It emits absolutely no pollution - the only emission is warm air at the top of the tower. In fact, because you're creating a greenhouse underneath, it actually turns out to be remarkably good for growing vegetation under there.