Posts tagged as Global Warming
Sixteen Songs About Seabirds
Huh.Thanks to global warming, and the resultant increase in oceanic wind speeds, seabirds are flying faster than they've ever flown before. They're healthier—gaining weight and wingspan and everything—because of it. Man, if this had happened 40 years ago, Jonathan Livingston Seagull would never even have had to be written! But it was. And they made a movie, and Neil Diamond made the soundtrack. Lots of other songs have been written about seabirds, though. There's something about them that makes us feel lonely and wistful, I think, the way they soar for so long on the wind over the empty expanse of the sea. So out of reach. Oh, and the whole wearing an albatross on your neck thing, too. Anyway, lots of the songs are pretty great. Here are sixteen of them (well, fourteen, and two cover versions) to listen to on a Friday afternoon. READ MORE
How Many Poor American Cities Will Be Underwater in 190 Years?
Isn't it great how no one really talks about the coming rise in sea levels? It was such a hot topic a few years ago and then we basically had to pull the conversation way back because people in America mostly wanted to argue about whether we are really related to monkeys. Fortunately, we are intentionally raising our children to be stupider, by means of intentionally cutting funds to schools, so as to serve American students ever less-well, so that we can make a large disposable servant-worker class and a smaller educated class. Also it serves someone's interests, clearly, if we can convince a majority of America that evolution is false and there is no such thing as global warming. (Also keeping them unsure which country we declared independence from on July 4.) That way, when they consolidate many of the poor uneducated people in giant poor uneducated metropolises, everyone who lives there will all be surprised in 90 years when they are all homeless or dead because Oakland and New Orleans and Miami are gone. But just remember: "A lot of Oakland is really low ground and the entire San Jose region is hugely threatened. You can kiss Miami and Galveston goodbye, and those low-lying areas around Houston. All the Gulf cities. New Orleans, of course, is among the most endangered. I think by 2200 each of those will be in the throes of being abandoned, if not already abandoned." At least they'll still have Baltimore and Detroit and Gary for a fresh population of workers!
Meteorologists: Our Nation's Newest Victim Class
"There is a little bit of elitist-versus-populist tensions. There are meteorologists who feel, 'Just because I have a bachelor's degree doesn't mean I don't know what's going on.'" READ MORE
Weathermen In America Free To Believe That Global Warming Is A Scam
This is a very nice story about a fun renegade weatherman who is free to oppose global warming! This weatherman is in good company with other weatherpeople, it turns out. "Twenty-nine percent of the 121 meteorologists who replied [to an Emory University study] agreed with [KUSI's John] Coleman-not that global warming was unproven, or unlikely, but that it was a scam. Just 24 percent of them believed that humans were responsible for most of the change in climate over the past half century-half were sure this wasn't true, and another quarter were 'neutral" on the issue. "
International Work On Your Novel Weekend Approaches
What are you going to do this weekend? Catch up on your CSI? Some light cleaning? Or maybe you could polish off two chapters in your dusty old novel! Maybe it's your first novel, the one that you would rather die before showing anyone? Or, as Michael Berger puts it today, "The one people will say, provided it ever gets published: oh that was just his first novel. That's why it was so childish and so preoccupied with sex and werewolves and time travel." (Um, yes please.) Anyway, that is what he is going to do this weekend and why don't you join him? He is still hacking out the beginning of his, "which features a fire in an apartment complex, a food fight, a congregation of greaser bikers, fishnet stockings and a long walk to a haunted park." Sure!
Trees Get Into Global Warming Act
Great. Now even the trees are going to destroy the planet. A major bummer of an article in Nature explains that, due to global warming, trees are growing farther north than they have before. And how, because tree-tops are darker than barren land, they have less "albedo" (that's a cool word!) or "reflectiveness," and so the earth with absorb more heat from the sun. "When the vegetation moves in, there will be an amplification of the warming," says Inez Fung, an atmospheric physicist at the University of California, Berkeley. If you're now wondering whether we're supposed to do with trees-chop them down or not-it doesn't matter, apparently. The article goes on to say that the Arctic is changing faster and more dramatically than scientists thought it would, and, that, basically, we're fucked. "Asked what her team's findings might mean for the international climate negotiations going on in Copenhagen, Fung says she is impatient to see progress. But she also sounds somewhat fatalistic. 'Whatever they agree to," she says, "is not fast enough to stop the changes that we are seeing.'"
Global Warming Deadheads' Fault After All
"Nitrous oxide (N2O) has become the greatest threat to the ozone layer, a new analysis suggests. The ozone-destroying abilities of the gas have been largely ignored by policy-makers and atmospheric scientists alike, who have focused on the more potent chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs)-historically the dominant ozone-depleting substances in the atmosphere." So says Nature magazine, reporting on the work of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in Boulder, Colorado (figures.) READ MORE
Formerly fat man now less fat
Connecting the dots: Actor Russell Crowe is doing his part to fight global warming.
EPA To Declare Global Warming Slightly Real!
Our Kennedy-dog-having fascist-socialist tea-hating President Barack Obama is going to force the EPA to assert that "greenhouse gas emissions like carbon dioxide endanger human health and welfare," according to Reuters. Do you not think we should take some time to study this crazy idea? Particularly in relation to God's plan. I don't see no seas rising, unless you look at the lies on the Wikipedia.
