.JPG "Earthen Spirituality")
Living within a living, loving planet
Archive for December, 2013
Put your money where your mouth is
Dec 23rd
By Douglas Fischer
The Daily Climate
http://wwwp.dailyclimate.org/tdc-newsroom/2013/12/climate-denial-secret-funding
The largest, most-consistent money fueling the climate denial movement are a number of well-funded conservative foundations built with so-called “dark money,” or concealed donations, according to an analysis released Friday afternoon.
The study, by Drexel University environmental sociologist Robert Brulle, is the first academic effort to probe the organizational underpinnings and funding behind the climate denial movement.
It found that the amount of money flowing through third-party, pass-through foundations like Donors Trust and Donors Capital, whose funding cannot be traced, has risen dramatically over the past five years.
In all, 140 foundations funneled $558 million to almost 100 climate denial organizations from 2003 to 2010.
Meanwhile the traceable cash flow from more traditional sources, such as Koch Industries and ExxonMobil, has disappeared.
The study was published Friday in the journal Climatic Change.
_________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
July 25, 2014
Groups who sell their services to companies who wish to sow doubt
“The Heartland Institute has become more visible, and the George Marshall Institute a bit less, but the overall picture continues: these groups continue to dismiss or disparage the science, attack scientists, and sow doubt.
They continue to try to block action by confusing us about the facts. And the arguments, the tactics, and the overall strategy has remained the same. And, they’ve been extremely successful. CO2 has reached 400 ppm, meaningful action is still not in sight, and people who really understand the science—understand what is at stake—are getting very worried.”
The way we are in the world
Dec 20th
Essay The way we are in the world, changes the world
http://wwwp.dailyclimate.org/tdc-newsroom/2013/10/native-american-climate-approach
Oct. 23, 2013
Here’s something Native elders understand: Without respect for natural laws, no amount of technology will get us out of this mess. Why can’t we hear that message?
By Alan S. Kesselheim
The Daily Climate
“An elder I spoke to shared an experience that captures the disconnect. He is from Greenland. He conducts ceremonies around the world. People know him as “Uncle,” a man of unquestioned poise and power. His given name is Angaangaq. He told me about being in New York City, performing a ceremony.
“It was very hot,” he said. “It was the end of a long day. The Hudson River was nearby, and I suggested going for a swim. I started running toward the river to dive in. People got all upset and called for me to stop. ‘You can’t swim there,’ they said. ‘It’s polluted.’
“I turned to them, perplexed. I just read a story in the morning paper today,” he said he told them. “It boasted that New York City has the highest percentage of college graduates of any major city on Earth. You are the most educated population in the world, and you’re telling me that you can’t swim in your river? I don’t understand.”
This says it all
Dec 20th
Population Facts from COUNTDOWN by Alan Weisman
http://littlebrown.com/countdown.html
This says it all.
“The human population has quadrupled over the past hundred years, while our consumption of resources (as measured by combined gross domestic products worldwide) has increased by a factor of seventeen.”
A Climate Story
Dec 18th
By Cheryl Katz
The Daily Climate
“What’s more, Iceland’s glaciers have advanced and retreated several times in the 11 centuries that A Climate at Your Doorstep story.
humans have lived there, leading many to see the current retreat as part of a temporary, natural cycle.
“The glaciers have always been going up and down,” said Hallgrimsson, who noted that early settlers faced considerably less ice than do residents today. “It looks like we are getting a period similar to around 900 (A.D.)”
‘Of course nobody knows.’”
http://wwwp.dailyclimate.org/tdc-newsroom/2013/12/iceland-ice-climate
“It looks like we are getting a period similar to around 900 (A.D.)”
I’ve read a lot of statements similar to the one above. I find them sad because they reveal a serious misunderstanding of how it is to be a planet like Earth and have varieties of weather and climates. For one thing, the main drivers for climate change are known as the Milankovitch Cycles.
http://www.sciencecourseware.org/eec/GlobalWarming/Tutorials/Milankovitch/
http://www.indiana.edu/~geol105/images/gaia_chapter_4/milankovitch.htm
It is the coincidence of how these three cycles affect insolation [The incident radiant energy emitted by the sun which reaches a unit area over a period of time] that has the greatest effect on climate. Since the exact duration of these cycles is not constant, throughout the past and in the future, the coincident value of the three never repeat. Thus the resultant climate at any particular place on the planet will never exactly repeat. Not only that, but the last major extinction of life on earth was some 65 million years ago. For around 2.6 million years now we have had a cyclical glaciation/warming environment. Conditions prior to each positive and negative temperature swing were similar in that two are sometimes all three of the cycles favoured a change.
Anthropogenic air, sea and land pollution, greenhouse gas emissions, and the massive destruction of forests have never preceded a cyclic swing within this period. My meaning is that we have no precedents to help us understand just how a swing to a cooler environment and subsequent negative temperature swing might come about. No-one other than [An Exceptionally Long Interglacial ahead? A. Berger and M. F. Loutre] appears willing to make a statement about the analysis of the present state of the cycles, greenhouse gasses and temperature as to what the chances are for a downward trend in temperature. My unprofessional analysis comes up with a notion that the Earth shall skip a complete glacial/interglacial cycle. How Earth will cope with the continued rise of greenhouse gasses and temperature leaves me frightened.
Population Explosion
Dec 18th
“Over the course of the past one hundred years, we humans have grown in population at a rate rarely seen outside of a petri dish.”
I have wondered for some time why there is so little support in our western culture for cutting population growth. I think I have finally figured it out.
It is not in the interest of business that their market decreases. An expanding market is good for business in so many ways. Think of them. Housing starts are diminished, pressure for food diminishes so prices will fall, in fact pressures that drive prices up will all fall and the excuse for raising prices disappears. Well, actually, there is no excuse right now for prices to keep rising as they are. My guess is that prices rise because they can. People have gotten used to rising prices and will not protest. I would advise my grandchildren to go into business so they can maintain their standard of living by pushing the cost of production down onto the consumer. This is happening all up and down the supply chain until it stops with the consumer. My pension has gone up this year just over 1% whilst the food I buy has risen around 30% over the last three years.
Crowded Planet 2nd Intervue page 11
A CONVERSATION WITH ALAN WEISMAN
Published in the September/October 2013 issue of Orionmagazine
http://littlebrown.com/countdown.html
http://www.orionmagazine.org/index.php/articles/article/7694
Promissory Materialism
Dec 14th
Promissory Materialism
http://www.integralworld.net/sheldrake.html
“chains of parallel and successive operations that build complexity” will eventually explain the diversity of forms (Carroll, S.B. 2005. Endless Forms Most Beautiful, Quercus Books, London, p. 105)
Just what are chains of operations that build complexity? I can detect the vague promise and recognise the materiality context; the kind of materiality that describes what happens with the presumed hope that this mysteriously satisfies our desire to “know” something substantial about the phenomenon. I am not kind and considerate like Rupert. This is just the same old blabber materialists have been dishing out since they began pulling stuff to pieces in order to gain useful knowledge.
For years, I taught field engineers how to isolate problems with first main frames, then minicomputers and finally micros. I assure you that the only useful knowledge that pulling any of the above to pieces in order to find out how it works will give you is just the number of pieces on the bench. You will never, ever find out “how it works” this way.
Newly discovered greenhouse gas ‘7,000 times more powerful than CO2’
Dec 12th
Perfluorotributylamine is an unregulated, long-living industrial chemical that breaks all records for potential climate impacts
“PFTBA is just one example of an industrial chemical that is produced but there are no policies that control its production, use or emission,” Hong said. “It is not being regulated by any type of climate policy.”
Suzanne Goldenberg, US environment correspondent
theguardian.com, Tuesday 10 December 2013 16.17 GMT
We need to be told just why and how this has escaped the news and investigation before.
Apathy
Dec 11th
Thanks for killing the planet, boomers!
The world as we know it is ending, and the indifference by Americans, politicians and mainstream press is maddening
TIM DONOVAN
http://www.salon.com/2013/12/02/thanks_for_killing_the_planet_boomers/
“Elsewhere, apathy runs rampant. According to an oft-cited research paper by Anthony Leiserowitz,
a Gallup poll recently found that “the environment” was the 16th most important issue to Americans today. Even more troubling, among environmental issues, global warming ranked 12 out of 13 — just lower than “urban sprawl.” This apathy exists in spite of poll numbers that show a vast majority of Americans believe in man-made climate change and the requisite dangers that it poses. According to Leiserowitz, since the year 2000 polls have consistently shown that 60-70 percent of people in the U.S. ‘believe that global warming is real and already underway (74 percent), believe that there is a scientific consensus on the reality of climate change (61 percent), and already view climate change as a somewhat to very serious problem (76 percent).’”
Sky: I must read up on how Sociologists and Eco-Psychologists account for why there is such a lot of apathy around climate change. I’ll continue this later.
Dirty Veggies?
Dec 8th
This is great support for what most people who grow and eat wholesome food already know.
You don’t have to pay £400 to grow your own –even if it is in tubs on your front/back porch – or find vegetables grown in healthy soil. Healthy animals eat healthy grass and that means weed infested variety.
The Surprising Healing Qualities … of Dirt
A doctor discovers exposure to healthy farm soil holds keys to healthy bodies.
by Daphne Miller