climate

Freezing Our Asses Off at the Feet of Al Gore

~ davidbiddle ~ Leave a comment

An essay first posted at GetUnderground.com and BlueOlives back in 2006 that is still highly relevant here in 2022.

Still from An Inconvenient Truth (2006) (Handout)

Dateline: August 2006 –The last time my wife Marion and I went on a date was back in 1990–before $3.00 gallons of gasoline; before the Prius; before the iPod; before the World Wide Web; before frickin’ Harry Potter. We saw the movie Darkman. Marion was so disgusted by the opening scene where the super bad guy, Robert Durant, cuts off a small-time hood’s finger with a cigar trimmer, that she walked out of the packed theater (I got her to come back, and there were no more problems, but it was a boring movie–very dark, but that’s about it). We were just past the age of 30 back then and it felt like we had the world by the tail. Nothing was dark to us except movies, novels, and closets. 

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That Warm Gooey Feeling: The New View of Climate Change

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Source: NASA Apollo 8
Source: NASA Earthrise from the moon – Apollo 8

Over at Mashable they just posted an interesting article on social media’s perception of the climate change issue. According to the article, “Internet has revelation that climate change action won’t kill the economy after all,” during the last year or so there has been a tremendously positive shift that “reflects the increasing realization in the business and policy-making communities that the transition away from fossil fuels and toward renewable energy sources such as wind, solar and other emerging technologies constitutes an economic opportunity rather than an economic obstacle.”

Even though they present wonderful graphs and data to prove their case, Mashable rightly points out the biases of the researchers. They also note that studies about social media are often fraught with Continue reading →

When I Noticed We Stopped Thinking: Over Sangria and Marinated Meat

~ David Biddle ~ Leave a comment

2300 Jackson Street

It was a warm weekend evening in September of 1985. We sat in our small urban backyard, pink clouds over-head, starting on a second pitcher of Sangria after a shish-ka-bob and salad dinner. I was more or less happy. I’d become aware of the need to marinate meat the week before and the beef and lamb skewered between red onion, green peppers, and fresh cut pineapple was as tasty as anything you’d get at the Shiska-Wu truck downtown. It was a beautiful evening. Our friends, I’ll call them Gary and Monica, were happy, too. We were all happy — satiated, a bit tipsy, present in the beautiful evening together, young, fit, beautiful, on our way. Gary and Monica were just hitting 30. We — my wife at the time, and I — were just edging that way at 27.

And then I brought up the earthquake that had just happened in Mexico. Michoacan Continue reading →