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Living within a living, loving planet
Archive for June, 2013
Connecting with the Earth
Jun 17th
How We Connect with the Earth
http://www.medialit.org/reading-room/how-we-connect-earth
Center for Media Literacy
This article originally appeared in Issue# 51
By Tyrone Cashman
“It takes only one summer for a child of the right age to bond with the natural world, to know in her bones that the world is alive, and wild and kin to her. There is a kind of imprinting that either takes place, or doesn’t, in a girl or boy before the age of 10 or 11.”
“When, for the first time, a nine-year-old barefoot boy and a wild crawfish encounter each other by surprise in a cold spring creek, there is nothing like it in the world. The boy’s life is changed. And if he explores this watery world and the woods that surround it for the length of a long summer, he will have taken the whole ancient biosphere into his soul, never to be forgotten. The imprint is for a lifetime.”
This happened to me when I was 10 years old and lived on the farm for 3 months with my grandparents. Small farms then were truly mixed, not the definition of mixed today. Now it means a mixture of pasture grasses or grain. Then it meant: cows, pigs, horses, chickens and ducks all supported by corn, oats to feed the stock. Grandfather didn’t even grow soybeans in 1950. There were daily jobs such as milking, cleaning the cowbarn and pumping the water trough by hand, egg collecting and wiping, not to mention the heavy tractor work of ploughing, disking, tilling and cultivating for weed removal. Grandfather and Grandmother made a good living then from only 65 acres in Indiana west of Indianapolis. Summer nights were warm and filled with fireflys [called lightening bugs] and a chorus of insects with a strong cricket and katydid section. Of course the mossies carved you up like a Sunday roast but sitting on the front porch in the twilight watching the spiders spin, bats swoop and listening to the nightjars was magical. Who nowadays has learned just the right pressure to ease a night crawler out from its hole as it lies innocently with a mating invitation? As James Whitcomb Riley said: “O the days gone by! O the days gone by!”
Here are a few lines from the dearly beloved poet of Indiana:
The Days Gone By
BY JAMES WHITCOMB RILEY
O the days gone by! O the days gone by!
The apples in the orchard, and the pathway through the rye;
The chirrup of the robin, and the whistle of the quail
As he piped across the meadows sweet as any nightingale;
When the bloom was on the clover, and the blue was in the sky,
And my happy heart brimmed over in the days gone by.
In the days gone by, when my naked feet were tripped
By the honey-suckle’s tangles where the water-lilies dipped,
And the ripples of the river lipped the moss along the brink
Where the placid-eyed and lazy-footed cattle came to drink,
And the tilting snipe stood fearless of the truant’s wayward cry
And the splashing of the swimmer, in the days gone by.
O the days gone by! O the days gone by!
The music of the laughing lip, the luster of the eye;
The childish faith in fairies, and Aladdin’s magic ring—
The simple, soul-reposing, glad belief in everything,—
When life was like a story, holding neither sob nor sigh,
In the golden olden glory of the days gone by.
Source: American Poetry: The Nineteenth Century (The Library of America, 1993)
Obfuscation for hire
Jun 13th
The Phony ‘Debate’ Over Climate Change
For the past 21 years there’s been broad consensus among climate scientists that humans are significantly changing global temperatures.
http://www.takepart.com/article/2013/06/07/op-ed-climate-change-consensus
June 11, 2013 John Cook
“This misperception has persisted for several decades and hasn’t happened by accident. There has been a deliberate, focused attempt to confuse the public about the level of agreement between scientists for over 20 years.
In 1991, Western Fuels Association spent half a million dollars on a campaign attacking the scientific consensus. Political pollster Frank Luntz advised Republicans to focus on casting doubt on consensus in a memo leaked in 2002. A 2012 analysis of conservative syndicated columns found that the number one climate myth promoted by conservative columnists was “there is no scientific consensus.”
Why such a focus on attacking the consensus? Studies in 2011 and2013 found that when the public correctly understands that scientists agree on climate change, it is more likely to support policy to do something about it.
Social scientists are coming to realize what opponents of climate action have known for decades. If you confuse the public about scientific consensus, you can delay meaningful climate action.”
Ignorance is a terrible thing but hiding the truth is even worse.
Failed Sellafield plant
Jun 10th
“The internal review, disclosed under freedom of information laws, reveals that instead of producing the predicted 120 tons of fuel a year to sell to foreign power companies, the Sellafield MOX plant (SMP) managed to yield a total of less than 14 tons in 10 years. When the plant was shut down in 2011 it had cost £1.4bn, compared to the £280m estimated when the plant was approved in 1993.”
Revealed: £2bn cost of failed Sellafield plant
Internal review deals blow to the Government’s hope of commissioning new mixed-oxide facility
BRIAN BRADY SUNDAY 09 JUNE 2013
Reflections on John Michael Greer’s latest blog post
Jun 9th
“The difficulty with a morphological approach to history is precisely that a sample size of more than one turns up patterns that next to nobody in the modern industrial world wants to think about.” [Pertaining to the study of an organized system or form.]
“By placing past civilizations side by side with that of the modern industrial West, Spengler found that all the great historical changes that our society sees as uniquely its own have exact equivalents in older societies.”
WEDNESDAY, JUNE 05, 2013
The Scheduled Death of God
John Michael Greer
http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.co.uk/
In my not so humble opinion, John Michael again brings us essential insights into, as I like to put it, “how to make sense of our reality, or what’s really going on here” This latest post shines a light on one of my early ideas – one that I could never develop clarity enough to feel that I understood it.
I am a history major because I found in history courses license to study several aspects of whatever I found interesting. Most probably, I favoured a morphological approach without having any idea at all what that meant. The first quote reminds me of my poorly understood opinion as to why people subscribe and hold on so tightly to structures that are illogical and moreover do not serve them. My vague understanding here emerges as a feeling that people tend to jump onto ideas that support their prejudices and views that justify how they want to be rather than how they actually are. Correspondingly, people also tend to hold firmly to ideas and concepts that support the lifestyle and morality that has brought them emotional and financial gains. As John Michael seems to me to be saying in the first quote above, many people refuse to go where the result of their reasoning might reveal gaping holes in the justifications necessary for their continued comfort achieved in behaving as they do. I’ve often said “Lies I can deal with but the truth hurts.”
Methane leaks
Jun 7th
Methane leaks could negate climate benefits of US natural gas boom: report
Suzanne Goldenberg, US environment correspondent
guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 4 June 2013 16.38 BST
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2013/jun/04/methane-leaks-negate-climate-benefits-gas
Reduction in carbon emissions triggered by America’s shift from coal to gas is being offset by a sharp rise in methane.
“Some 29% of America’s electricity came from natural gas last year – compared to just 14% a decade ago, the report said. But it comes at a high cost to the local environment, because of the risks to air and water quality posed by hydraulic fracturing.
There is also a growing body of evidence that the release of methane gas from well sites and pipelines is far higher than previously thought.
Methane is a far more powerful gas than carbon dioxide, even though it does not persist in the atmosphere for a shorter period.”
Sky: Most media articles emphasize that methane does not persist very long in the atmosphere. But what they don’t follow up with is the fact that methane breaks down in to components that contain CO2. Please note the references and quotes below. Although methane only persists in the troposphere around 8.5 years and in the atmosphere around 12 years, it is 20 to 25 times more effective as a greenhouse gas than CO2. CO2 persists between 100 and 500 years. As I have mentioned above, methane breaks down both in the troposphere and in the atmosphere into CO2 and water vapour; these are the two major greenhouse gases. Unfortunately, the hydroxyl radical that facilitates the breakdown is depleted gradually. As it depletes, then obviously, methane will gradually become more prominent as a greenhouse gas yet still breakdown into CO2 and water vapour. This is what may be seen as a “double whammy” in the greenhouse effect on global warming. To be more precise one must include that although water vapour is a positive factor for warming, if it increases cloud cover, then the greenhouse gas effect is diminished because clouds serve as a reflective component and thus consist of a negative factor.
“There is a bit of hope in all of this information. An equal amount of methane as compared to an equal amount of CO2 has an effect on global warming of 20 times greater than CO2. Carbon Dioxide (CO2) will stay in our atmosphere for around 100 years. With a half life of 7 years Methane last around 10 years in our atmosphere. It is estimated that 60% of global methane emissions are related to human activities. Some scientists believe that these green house gases are as significant as or greater than CO2 emissions from cars.” http://www.dulabab.com/climate-change/methane/
The atmospheric concentration of methane is thought to have increased by a factor of 2.5 since
pre-industrial times, reaching 1745 ppb in 1998.1 This rate of increase far exceeds that of carbon
dioxide, concentrations of which are only 30% higher than in pre-industrial times. In fact,
information is sufficient for the IPCC to assert that the current methane concentration has not
been exceeded in the last 420,000 years.1 http://www.eci.ox.ac.uk/research/energy/downloads/methaneuk/chapter02.pdf
“The most effective sink of atmospheric methane is the hydroxyl radical in the troposphere, or the lowest portion of Earth’s atmosphere. As methane rises into the air, it reacts with the hydroxyl radical to create water vapor and carbon dioxide. The lifespan of methane in the atmosphere was estimated at 9.6 years as of 2001; however, increasing emissions of methane over time reduce the concentration of the hydroxyl radical in the atmosphere. With less OH˚ to react with, the lifespan of methane could also increase, resulting in greater concentrations of atmospheric methane.
Even if it is not destroyed in the troposphere, methane can usually only last 12 years before it is eventually destroyed in Earth’s next atmospheric layer: the stratosphere. Destruction in the stratosphere occurs the same way that it does in the troposphere: methane is oxidized to produce carbon dioxide and water vapor.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmospheric_methane
“The duration period for carbon dioxide molecules in the atmosphere is somewhere between 100 and 500 years. Obviously, not all carbon dioxide molecules will stay in the atmosphere that long, but on average the duration may be around 200-300 years. Some scientists believe that it could be longer than that, others believe that the duration is shorter. Presently, there is some uncertainty in those figures.” http://www.newton.dep.anl.gov/askasci/wea00/wea00296.htm