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An area of Alaska larger than Chicago is in flames, 1000s of people are evacuated, with 100s of homes threatened. What are we to make of this fire? After all, fires occur in nature and Alaska has had its share in the past. As Larry Lazar put it in an email to me, While the […]

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Searching for the silver lining … perhaps Global Warming will boost drug company stock prices. Searching for the silver lining … perhaps Global Warming will boost drug company stock prices.  That is one reasonable conclusion from the National Climate Assessment released earlier today. In short, the NCA lays out that climate is creating worsened conditions […]

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At this time, US television screens are graced with several blockbuster science programs.  Showtime’s The Years of Living Dangerously provides serious and substantive looks at climate change. With Cosmos, hosted by Neil deGrasse Tyson, NewsCorp is giving thinking people a substantive reason to tune in every Sunday evening. “Cosmos aims to be a primer on the […]

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Around the planet, difficult cultural norms exist for writing.  Avoidance of direct discussion and attribution seem to be the norm for many nations.  Over recent decades, the U.S. business world has adopted an emphasis on using more direct language with the active voice.  When it comes to passive voices, a standard recommendation: Use the passive […]

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Drastic shifts in weather (from beautiful sunny skies to dark menacing ones, from t-shirt frisbee temperatures to parka-wearing cold, from …) are natural. Humanity, however, has been putting its figures on the scales of “natural”. As Bill McKibben so eloquently discussed 25 years ago in The End of Nature, due to fossil fuel emissions, humanity’s […]

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Monday night, the Democratic Party Senate leadership will take to the floor with speeches on climate change. Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.) has pledged in recent weeks to continue allowing time for anyone who wants to discuss the issue during the weekly Democratic caucus lunch or on the Senate floor. The format planned for […]

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Today is the last day to provide comments to the Department of State as to the KeystoneXL pipeline national interest determination. The reviewers of public comments — if they take their work seriously and responsibly — have a lot of work ahead of them.  While there are some 54,897 comments, already registered as of the […]

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Monday evening, the PBS’ Newshour hosted a segment on climate change issues building on Secretary of State John Kerry’s strong comments over the weekend equating climate change with weapons of mass destruction. The science of climate change is leaping out at us like a scene from a 3-D movie. … Terrorism, epidemics, poverty, the proliferation […]

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This video — transcript after the fold — calmly reviews with both data visualization and a rather disconcerting calm narration how “humanity is altering Earth’s life support system”. The clock is ticking … Note:  For an interesting approach to visualization, see the Carbon Atlas.

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Erratic, with this guest post, made me think … Perhaps you will find it interesting as well.  And, well, perhaps you agree with me in hoping that “people” do / that humanity does “survive this bottleneck”. In Ondaatje’s Running in the Family, the father describes a persistent delusion where his family is surrounded by a cloud […]

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