Saturday, December 17, 2005

Arctic summer warmer, less ice(here) in Greenland. AP photo. Posted by Picasa
Lag Time Is Over

from AP report:

In the high Arctic, deep in the Atlantic, on Africa's sunbaked plains, climate scientists are seeing change unfold before their eyes. In the global councils of power, however, change in climate policy is coming only slowly.

In New York, NASA' s Goddard Institute projected that 2005 will surpass 1998 to end as the hottest year globally in the 125 years since reliable records have been kept. It said warming has accelerated and is now boosting the mercury every decade by more than 0.3 degrees Fahrenheit.

"The observed rapid warming thus gives urgency to discussions about how to slow greenhouse gas emissions," the NASA researchers said.

Five days earlier in Montreal, however, the annual 189-nation U.N. climate conference ended two weeks of such discussions by failing once again to win U.S. commitments to reduce greenhouse emissions — as almost all other industrialized nations are committed to do by 2012 under the Kyoto Protocol.

The atmosphere now holds more than one-third more carbon dioxide than it did before the Industrial Revolution. In fact, European scientists reported last month that analysis of ice cores from Antarctica shows that today's level is 27 percent higher than any previous peak looking back 650,000 years.

A U.N.-organized network of scientists warns of shifting climate zones, ocean levels rising via heat expansion and glacial melting, and more extreme weather events if emissions are not reined in and average temperatures continue to rise.

Among fresh reports of warming's impact:

_The WMO said Thursday that in the Arctic Sea, where average winter temperatures have risen as much as 7 degrees Fahrenheit over 50 years, the ice cap this summer was 20 percent smaller than the 1979-2004 average.

_British oceanographers reported this month that Atlantic currents carrying warm water toward northern Europe have slowed. Freshwater from melting northern ice caps and glaciers is believed interfering with saltwater currents. Ultimately such a change could cool the European climate.

_In southern Africa, beset by four years of drought, average temperatures during the 12-month period ending last July were the warmest on record, British scientists said. The mercury stood more than 2 degrees Fahrenheit above a recent 40-year average.

_In Vanuatu and Papua New Guinea in the southwest Pacific, rising seas are forcing hundreds of islanders to abandon vulnerable coastal homes for higher ground, according to U.N. and news reports.

A small, vocal minority of climate skeptics, who long theorized manmade emissions weren't influencing the climate, has grown quieter as evidence of global warming and its effects has mounted.

"In a sense, the burden of proof has shifted from the people who are saying there's a risk, to the skeptics now," Michel Jarraud, WMO secretary-general, said in an interview.

In Montreal, Bush administration envoys, who once cited scientific uncertainty in rejecting the Kyoto pact, focused instead on the argument that emissions controls would damage the U.S. economy.

Largely isolated, the Americans agreed only to joining a nonbinding, exploratory global "dialogue" on future steps to combat warming.

Those who ratified Kyoto, meanwhile, decided a working group should develop proposals for emissions reductions by 35 industrialized nations after the current pact expires in 2012. They didn't agree on a deadline for that work, however, and made little headway on how to draw China, India and other newly industrializing countries into the emissions-control regime.

Friday, December 16, 2005

Hong Zhengyong, Tibet. c Nature Conservancy. Posted by Picasa

The Dreaming Up Daily Quote

"My father was concerned about the time length of my melancholy state and while we fished I was asking him about the odors in the air from the flora along the shore where clouds of redwing blackbirds were noisily floating over the cattails. He had an uncanny ability to identify weeds, flowers, bushes by smell, and he suddenly said that curiosity will get you through hard times when nothing else will."

Jim Harrison
Gaming the Unpatriot Act

In a week in which more evidence was revealed that the Bush administration has violated civil liberties and encouraged secret spying on thousands of Americans, Republicans tried to push through an extension of the Patriot Act which extended or made permanent anti-privacy and anti-First Amendment provisions, by threatening to let the entire act run out unless Democrats and others opposed to some provisions ceased trying to change it. Their bluff was called, and so far they've lost.

(Reuters) - A group of U.S. senators, demanding increased protection of civil liberties, defied President Bush on Friday by blocking renewal of the USA Patriot Act, a centerpiece of his war on terrorism.

A procedural move to cut off debate and call a vote on the issue fell eight votes short of the 60 votes needed, with a handful of Republicans joining most Democrats to oppose it. The vote was 52-47.

Fifty Republicans and two Democrats voted to end debate on the renewal legislation; five Republicans, one independent and 41 Democrats blocked it with a procedural hurdle.
Approved earlier this week by the House of Representatives, the legislation would make permanent 14 anti-terrorism provisions set to expire on December 31, and extend for four years three others.

But with complaints by some conservatives as well as liberals, House and Senate negotiators agreed in a recent conference report to increase the protection of the civil liberties of law-abiding Americans.

Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, a Nevada Democrat, said, "In my view, and in the view of many of my colleagues on both sides of the aisle, the conference report still does not contain enough checks on the expanded powers."

Picnic in the 1930s Posted by Picasa
Holiday Gift Books from 2005: Social Studies

Brother, Can You Spare Me Some Time

THE MARCH OF SPARE TIME: The Problem and Promise
of Leisure in the Great Depression
by Susan Currell
University of Pennsylvania Press

I highly recommend this absorbing and revelatory book. Though her subject seems narrow, Currell traces the relationships of prevailing thought that shaped a wide range of policies affecting all of us to this day.

It also seems an odd if not frivolous subject—leisure in the Great Depression? We are used to a different emphasis in books on the 1930s, as in Malcolm Cowley’s sharp and steady memoir, The Dream of the Golden Mountains, which I’ve recently read. The spectre of vast unemployment, drought, malnutrition, incipient revolution and half a million men a year riding boxcars, would seem to make the issue of leisure irrelevant, or even perverse.

But beginning in the late 1920s it was a concern, and not applied to the rich or leisure classes, but to the working class.


You can search for new and used books with the Powells box on this page. If you order anything after linking from here, this site gets a cut. Thanks.

click to enlarge, or see it full size at San Francisco Chronicle Posted by Picasa

Thursday, December 15, 2005

Captain Future's Log

Couch Politicos

I was thinking about what Harold Pinter said in his Nobel speech about Bush being clever in refusing to sign international treaties that could hold Americans accountable for war crimes. It was pretty much an announcement that Americans fully intended to commit war crimes, and they have, though whether they would fulfill the definitions of those treaties is unknown and (since they did not sign them) irrelevant. The rising child malnuitrition in Iraq is evidence enough. You don't even have to reference Guantanamo and other torture.

The defining moment for the current political regime was the fall of the Soviet Union. Then the neocons and remnants of the militarist establishment decided they could do damn well what they wanted in the world and nobody could stop them. And nobody has.

Still, they needed an enemy in order to control the American electorate and they're busy creating a really good one. Not being very bright, they've done it way too well.

But when we get around to their reaction to Clinton, the Impeachment and the rest, or even this weird bonding of the neocons and the fanatical religious right, the rubrics of politics, historical analysis and economic analysis all fail to give a complete picture. We need psychology, and we don't have any.

While the right runs rampant with their projections and other raging emenations from their unconscious out there in broad daylight, the "reality based" left can't agree on how to approach the reality of the psyche, especially as it gets expressed in political behavior. Apparently, what psychology means to the reality based is a mechanistic dependence on drugs to manipulate behavior.

I keep coming back to Carl Jung's statement in an interview in the 50s, that humanity hangs by a thin thread, that thread is the psyche, but we know nothing about it. And in nodes of political discussion on the Internet, we don't want to know. We actually seem to think it's irrelevant.

Right now, with no American elections to obsess over, the left blogosphere is considering its own future influence. These days there's a lot of dialogue that is unconscious stuff masquerading as rational argument, but that's fairly normal. Not recognizing that possibility is perhaps normal, but dangerous.

For one thing, it means missing the point and going off on wild sidetracks. Someone should do a statistical study of posts on these community blogs, to calculate the number of comments that actually focus on the topic. Maybe that kid on Numbers can come up with a formula.

Which means to me that the big political blogs will provide certain services: rallying money and participation in campaigns, exposing information available on the Internet pertaining to a lie or policy or whatever; and with a few noble exceptions, it will be less effective in honing a message or focusing on an agenda. Thats not to say these wide-ranging discussions arent valid and valuable. Just that I don't seem them fulfilling that function. I could be wrong.
Pope Ahnold?

I don't pretend to know for certain what the exact criteria should be for a governor contemplating clemency to save the life of a man facing the death penalty, but in refusing to grant this reprieve to Stanley Tookie Williams, Governor Schwarzenegger used language I would have thought more appropriate for the man's confessor.

The sticking point was Williams' insistence that he was not guilty of the murders he had been convicted of committing. "Without an apology and atonement for these senseless and brutal killings, " Ahnold wrote, " there can be no redemption. In this case the one thing that would be the clearest indication of complete remorse and full redemption is the one thing Williams will not do."

Atonement? It could be argued that Williams did that with his life in prison. He obviously had remorse for the life he'd led. But he kept insisting he was innocent, infuriating the police and prosecutors. But what baits my hook is all the repeated use of the word redemption.

I thought the governor was being asked to commute a death sentence to life in prison. What does that have to do with redemption? Don't Christians believe that's God's role? Even the Catholics delegate the forgiveness of sin to ordained priests, not politicians. And even they aren't normally presumptuous enough to state who does and doesn't get redeemed.

Ahnold is taking his Terminator role a little too seriously. Hey, Caesar. Stick to the state. Or are you looking for higher office where they don't require American citizenship?

The intense lobbying to kill convicted murderers, whatever the evidence, on the part of police, FBI (when they're involved) and prosecutors, can perhaps be better understood by the headline of a story that appeared the same day as Ahnold's statement in the San Francisco Chronicle: No arrests made in 80% of homicides. That's just San Francisco, but the figures are probably nearly as shocking elsewhere. When they actually arrest someone and successfully make a case, they sure need it to stick.

Tuesday, December 13, 2005

Cheetah, the fastest animal, on the verge of extinction Posted by Picasa

The Dreaming Up Daily Quote

"Everything in the mind is in rat's country. It doesn't die. They are merely carried, these disparate memories, back and forth in the desert of a billion neurons, set down, picked up and dropped again...You will only find the bits and cry out because they were yourself."

Loren Eiseley

An Anna's Hummingbird photo: E.J. Perker Posted by Picasa

Monday, December 12, 2005

Captain Future's Log

Aliens Among Us

Another day's news of humans killing and torturing each other, with the usual elaborate justifications. Another day of their big confused brains and bigger metal hands destroying their own planet heedlessly.

I'd rather write about birds.

While we expend great energy and interest in trying to discover whether there is alien life elsewhere, we not only ignore the alien life all around us that helped make us human, we are busily destroying it, and the basis for all life on the only planet where we know for sure there is any.

What little we did learn over thousands of years of contact, we are rapidly forgetting. We make up all kinds of rules that tell us what animals can and cannot do, and then we ignore evidence that violates those supposed rules.

We don't have a clue why birds can do all they can do---fly and navigate over huge distances, bury food in hundreds of locations and remember where it is even when the landscape is covered with snow---with such little brains and little bodies.

The Guardian reviewed a book on why birds sing (the apparent conclusion is: because they can) which began with the following passage:

Starlings are great mimics, which is mainly why Meredith West and Andrew King spent a decade studying nine of them at the University of Indiana. They kept four birds in isolation, while the other five lived "in close proximity to their human caretakers, with extensive and friendly bird- human interaction". Not surprisingly, only these five learned to copy human sounds, which they reproduced "in odd ways". "'Basic research' one said. 'Basic research, it's true, I guess that's right.' One bird, which needed to have its claws treated for an infection, squirmed while held, screaming, 'I have a question!'."

I'm sure they have lots of questions.

I grew up on a hill in western Pennsylvania, with stands of trees across the road, and in a hilly lot nearby, and woods not far away. We looked out on a town of roofs parsed with rounded trees. There were rabbits and squirrels around, and when I was quite young, lots of different kinds of butterflies in the wildflowers and "weeds" nearby. And there were birds.

There were robins, cardinals, goldfinches, sparrows and crows in the spring and summer, and occasionally bluejays and bluebirds. Pheasants and even hawks. Once I was looking out during a snowstorm and saw the top of a fir tree become a huge bird with black wings. It might have been an eagle.

Later I lived in an apartment building built into a hill in Pittsburgh. I was on the second floor, and in the front it was a long way down to the sloping street, lots of trees and birds on the wires. One bird, I believe a song sparrow, came back every year, with a distinctive song. I called him Beethoven because he sang the first four notes of the 5th and ended them with a tweet and a trill.

But the back porch was nearly even with a glade of trees where many different kinds of birds came. A visitor remarked she hadn't seen so many different kinds of birds anywhere else in the city (excluding the Aviary, I'm sure.)

When we moved to far northern California, among the many adjustments was the absense of songbirds. We lived in a apartment not far from the community forest. It was patrolled by hawks flying high above us. Crows and gulls were common, and some robins. I saw birds I couldn't identify, but I missed the songs.

Now we live in a house a bit farther away from the forest, and Margaret has gardens in front and back, and she has selected flowers and other plants that attract songbirds. There aren't as many as in PA but there are enough to be a comforting presence.

There are many more species and kinds of birds hereabouts, with our mild coastal climate, open and wooded spaces, and our place on the migration routes. No cardinals or goldfinches, though.

Right now the birds that demands our attention are hummingbirds. This is one of the few places in America where hummingbirds are still coming to feeders in mid December. All summer they use ours to supplement the nectar from the flowers, but now with fewer of their favorites flowering, they are draining the feeder quickly. At a certain point, perhaps soon, the feeder will be untouched, and we'll know they're gone. The sun will bleach the red liquid to a transparent pink.

Migration is also partly why they consume so much now. Migrating species bulk up to perhaps twice their usual weight. There are so many species and subspecies, and so little is really know about their migrations, that its impossible to say where they go. Some fly routes from Alaska to Mexico. Some dip 500 miles or so south. Some don't leave at all.

The species most likely to be ours here are Anna's, Allen's and rufous, but there are apparently hybrids as well. I think we have two species coming to our feeder, though I can't be sure. The other day I watched one perching next to the feeder for an unusually long time. There wasn't much left in the feeder, and I refilled it. He (or she) came back, ate and flew away. Maybe that was the point.

It was either younger or a different, smaller species from the two that seem to be coming around in a pair, though they fly at each other furiously as they approach, and only one feeds at a time. Although I have seen two feeding simulaneously other years.

I read somewhere recently that hummingbirds would probably be on the endangered species list except for backyard feeders. But the reprieve is probably temporary. Humans are destroying habitat too fast for feeders to keep up.

All reprieves are temporary, but some more temporary than others. Between the time I started writing this dumb little piece and the time that I began this sentence, the state of California by official government action ended the life of a man. He may or may not have murdered people. Since then he has contributed to his fellow man. Though such contributions are hard to quantify, it's more than possible he did more good than some of the people insisting that he had to be killed.

So they killed him. I'm not going into any ethical discussions about this. I'm opposed to capital punishment. Humans should be smarter and better than that. But apparently we aren't. If we destroy ourselves, it will be too bad. If we destroy the birds and the other life beyond some bugs and microbes, it will be well beyond too bad.

We seem determined to be the loneliest species conceivable, even if we succeed in surviving. But it would only mean that we would be only one of the last species to die out. Many large animals are well on their way to extinction--the great apes, the great cats. Some birds may make it, though. The evidence grows that they are descendants of the dinosaurs. They survived the last catastrophe, somehow they may survive the one we're making.

Mountain lions are occasionally seen in the community forest. A cougar was seen this summer on this side of the freeway, not a quarter mile away.

Sunday, December 11, 2005

Earth, as seen by the Rosetta spacecraft on its way to Venus. Posted by Picasa

The Dreaming Up Daily Quote



Harold Pinter Posted by Picasa


Nobel Literature Prize Speech: The Search For Truth Can Never Stop

from Nobel Prize Speech by Harold Pinter






I always start a play by calling the characters A, B and C. It's a strange moment, the moment of creating characters who up to that moment have had no existence. What follows is fitful, uncertain, even hallucinatory, although sometimes it can be an unstoppable avalanche.





























And one morning all that was burning,
one morning the bonfires
leapt out of the earth
devouring human beings
and from then on fire,
gunpowder from then on,
and from then on blood.
Bandits with planes and Moors,
bandits with finger-rings and duchesses,
bandits with black friars spattering blessings
came through the sky to kill children
and the blood of children ran through the streets
without fuss, like children's blood.
Jackals that the jackals would despise
stones that the dry thistle would bite on and spit out,
vipers that the vipers would abominate.




another denial Posted by Picasa
Nobel Peace Prize Address: Nukes Should Be As Repugnant As Slavery

From: Reuters By John Acher and James Kilner

The world should work to make nuclear weapons as universally condemned as slavery or genocide, UN nuclear watchdog chief Mohamed ElBaradei said on Saturday after receiving the 2005 Nobel Peace Prize.

ElBaradei, head of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), said the world had 27,000 nuclear warheads and "to me, that is 27,000 warheads too many."

"The hard part is how do we create an environment in which nuclear weapons -- like slavery or genocide -- are regarded as a taboo and a historical anomaly?" ElBaradei, an Egyptian, said in his acceptance speech.

Announced as laureates in October, ElBaradei and the IAEA shared the Peace Prize for their work to prevent the spread of nuclear arms and promote the safe use of atomic power in a year marking the 60th anniversary of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan.
ElBaradei and IAEA Board of Governors Chairman Yukiya Amano of Japan received gold medals and Nobel diplomas at a ceremony at Oslo City Hall to applause from about 1,000 guests.

ElBaradei urged a halt to proliferation of nuclear arms and disarmament by the "eight or nine" states that now have them. "We must ensure -- absolutely that no more countries acquire nuclear weapons," he said, adding: "We must see to it that nuclear weapon states take concrete steps toward nuclear disarmament."

Where the march of the penuins ends Posted by Picasa
The Deadliest Denial

From: The Psychology of Global Warming:
By Bill Blakemore ABC News

One expert warns temperatures could climb to highest level in 500,000 years.

Journalism has no precedent for a story of the scale or seriousness of global warming. The vast majority of credible climate scientists - well over 95 percent, according to specialists in assessing scientists' opinions - agree that the average temperatures of the oceans, the land surface of the planet and the lower atmosphere (anything lower than the tip of Mount Everest) have been climbing at an accelerating rate.

The same specialists say that nearly as many scientists agree that manmade greenhouse gas emissions are a significant factor - and a good many say the only significant factor - in the dangerous global warming now under way.

If 95 of the world's best, most experienced experts in child well-being were to tell you that your child was under lethal attack - and with dramatic signs already visible if you only look - would you say, "I think I'll wait until the other five experts are convinced before I do anything about it?"

It would be the other way around, and yet that is how a lot of people - and some parts of what's called "the mainstream media" - often seem to be reacting to what the vast majority of scientists are telling us.


Civilization is less than 10,000 years old.

At the worldwide global warming talks in Montreal, scientists elaborated on surprising new reports that the Atlantic currents' "conveyor belt" system has already slowed down - one of the predicted effects of global warming, possibly spurred by fresh water pouring in from the melting Greenland ice cap.


Alarming news from scientists has accelerated in the past few months:



This year now holds several extreme heat records. Half of all plant and animal species are showing impacts of the warming - in some cases by going extinct.


Alarmist or Alarming?


And for journalists, there is a natural and initially worthy desire not to risk seeming grandiose or alarmist. "Alarmist" is defined in my American Heritage Dictionary as "One who needlessly alarms others."

Two decades ago, many people without questionable motives - and some with - called NASA's James Hansen an "alarmist" when he stood before Congress and said his calculations showed that global warming had begun and was "changing the climate now."

Then his alarm-ing descriptions - and predictions - panned out. Now, with a new set of calculations, Hansen - no longer so alone, joined now by thousands of concerned scientists - is again challenging our psychological capacities to deal with hard news.