Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Climate destabilization eclipses all other security threats to human civilization except for a major nuclear war. But the current global economy gives no signals to investors and consumers about the profound implications of climate destabilization on water cycles, agriculture, and humanity’s ability to grow food for seven billion people.
•Superstorm Sandy—a People’s Shock? •Building a new environmentalism •Reasons why climate change disasters might not increase concern about climate change
We called it Sandy, and it came to tell us we should have listened harder when the first, second, and third disasters showed up.
Can big cities like New York or Washington protect against storm surge and rising seas?
Many indigenous territories have tremendous wind, solar, biomass and geothermal resources, and there are varying opinions as to whether energy-related climate change mitigation activities are having a positive or negative impact on local and indigenous communities.
It’s a future about sufficiency more than it is about greed and wants…
So to say "we must adapt to some climate change" is not at all to imply "so we might as well give up the struggle".
This post describes Sandy as a catastrophic pulse in relation to the problems of dense urban living, complexity, and digitization.
Somewhere in the midst of watching the Weather Channel’s reporting on the approach of Superstorm Sandy, I was struck by the lack of meteorologists saying anything about what was behind the highly unusual phenomenon that was unfolding.
Storms in the Emergency Room – Hurricane Sandy, coal and nukes – it’s not pretty. From D.C. as storm hits, Earthbeat’s Daphne Wysham on the climate connection. From Australia, Greenpeace’s Georgina Woods on huge coal expansion. Then a Canadian plan to dump nuclear waste right next to Lake Huron and world’s biggest running reactor.
Forecasters say Hurricane Sandy is a rare hybrid superstorm created by an Arctic jet stream from the north wrapping itself around a tropical storm from the south. Jeff Masters, director of meteorology at the Weather Underground, warns that such a "Frankenstorm," as it is called, is an outgrowth of the extreme weather changes caused by global warming.
In ancient China, the arrival of a new dynasty was accompanied by “the rectification of names,” a ceremony in which the sloppiness and erosion of meaning that had taken place under the previous dynasty were cleared up and language and its subjects correlated again. It was like a debt jubilee, only for meaning rather than money.
