Signs From Earth

Like PBS Frontline: Leveling Appalachia: Legacy of Mountaintop Removal Mining (via @yaleE360 and @mediastorm)

Samples Mine, Mountaintop Removal Mine, West Virginia. Panorama Photo: Dennis Dimick /flickr 

http://www.e360.yale.edu/content/feature.msp?id=2198

Video Report at Yale Environment 360 Produced by Chad Stevens at MediaStorm:

"During the last two decades, mountaintop removal mining in Appalachia has destroyed or severely damaged more than a million acres of forest and buried nearly 2,000 miles of streams. Leveling Appalachia: The Legacy of Mountaintop Removal Mining, a video report produced by Yale Environment 360 in collaboration withMediaStorm, focuses on the environmental and social impacts of this practice and examines the long-term effects on the region's forests and waterways..."

Journey to Aldo Leopold Shack, Baraboo, WI

Society of Environmental Journalists sunset journey to "The Shack," the farm close to the Wisconsin River near Baraboo, Wisconsin where conservationist Aldo Leopold was inspired to write his book "A Sand County Almanac." Saturday October 10, 2009. --Dennis Dimick

The Aldo Leopold shack at dusk.

Interior and kerosene lamps preserved as during the time Leopold lived there until his death in 1948.

Sandhill cranes at dusk over Aldo Leopold shack.

Wisconsin River Near Aldo Leopold shack, early evening.

Aldo Leopold Shack early evening.

The Aldo Leopold Shack, Baraboo, Wisconsin. Leopold's book "A Sand County Almanac" took form here.

Tallgrass prairie south of road from the Shack to Leopold Center. It was along this route that Leopold last traveled when he went to fight a fire on an adjacent farm. It was on this neighboring farm that Leopold died of a heart attack, and is where the Leopold Center now stands.

Posted via email from Signs From Earth Notes

Telling Stories Visually @MPW61 #MPW61 PDF of Dimick Lecture Now Online

Telling Stories Visually: 

Lecture at 61st Missouri Photo Workshop 2009, Festus/Crystal City Missouri, by Dennis Dimick, PDF: Download MPW_ 2009b_dimick

Website for Missouri Photo Workshop 

Climate and Fire: The Blaze Last Time, and Next

Fires over southern California have burned before and will burn again. This wafting smoke over the Pacific Ocean came from 12 large fires burning in late October, 2007.  Photo: NASA Earth Observatory

Recent news reports about fires, whether in Greece or Los Angeles, have not explained their relationship to long-term climatic shifts underway. Why? Maybe the remaining reporters and editors aren't well-versed in the underlying science of climate change, or the science and environment writers have all been laid off to save money.

News stories reporting these disasters as isolated events, or caused by cigarette or lawnmowers, miss the point and do a disservice by failing to put them in context. Temperatures have been increasing in these regions, and rainfall has been declining long-term. Just as a lawnmower may be the flint, these underlying conditions provide the tinder, and explain the likelihood that as these fires have burned before, they will burn again.

These contextual links have been made for some time by scientists, but traditional news outlets apparently haven't been reading. When fires hit Athens a week or so ago, the only outlet that explicitly explained the link between fires and climate change was the new global trends reporting website GlobalPost. 

Climate Change vs. National Security

 A coal fired power plant in Germany. Action against causes of climate change is tied to significant reduction in world use of fossil fuels. Photo: davipt/flickr

Slowly the idea seeps into major media mindset that climate change presents challenges far beyond polar bears and melting ice, that political stability and security of nations also are at risk. As has been discussed here and elsewhere, carbon emissions affect how the atmosphere works, and this in turn impacts stability and security of food and water supplies, and eventually survivability of societies.

The question remains whether these concerns linking continued use of fossil fuels and their impact on global climate will make a meaningful difference in the views and actions of policymakers and the public. 

John Broder reports in an August 9 New York Times article, "Climate Change Seen as Threat to U.S. Security,"  that climate change impacts in other nations, particularly sub-Saharan Africa, the Middle East, and South and Southeast Asia, could demand an American humanitarian or military response.

“The changing global climate will pose profound strategic challenges to the United States in coming decades, raising the prospect of military intervention to deal with the effects of violent storms, drought, mass migration and pandemics, military and intelligence analysts say.

Numbers Alone Show Vote Rigging

Figuring out whether election results from Iran are fraudulent is simple, according to New York University political scientists Bernd Beber and Alexandra Scacco. In their June 20 Washington Post op-ed The Devil is in the Digits, they discuss the lack of randomness in the last digit of polling results from each province:

"...Last digits in a fair election don't tell us anything about the candidates, the make-up of the electorate or the context of the election. They are random noise in the sense that a fair vote count is as likely to end in 1 as it is to end in 2, 3, 4, or any other numeral. But that's exactly why they can serve as a litmus test for election fraud. For example, an election in which a majority of provincial vote counts ended in 5 would surely raise red flags...."

"...The numbers look suspicious. We find too many 7s and not enough 5s in the last digit. We expect each digit (0, 1, 2, and so on) to appear at the end of 10 percent of the vote counts. But in Iran's provincial results, the digit 7 appears 17 percent of the time, and only 4 percent of the results end in the number 5. Two such departures from the average -- a spike of 17 percent or more in one digit and a drop to 4 percent or less in another -- are extremely unlikely. Fewer than four in a hundred non-fraudulent elections would produce such numbers...."

From Bernd Beber website: Annotated Version of The Devil is in The Digits

From Alexandra Scacco website: Election Results Data Used in Analysis

New Look for Environmental Journalists Website

If you are interested in the latest news about the planet, you can't do much better than to regularly visit the brand-new website for The Society of Environmental Journalists. The redesigned website offers many improvements and new features over the old model.

Filled with headlines of the latest environmental news, tools, and tips for reporting about the earth, the new SEJ website is a must-stop if you are on the planet beat. 

Better yet, if you are not a member, join the organization. 

It's a non-profit organization whose dedicated members, I am one, envision an informed society through excellence in environmental journalism.

Recycling the Suburbs

10 Ideas Changing the World Right Now: Emerging trends highlighted this week in TIME as the world economy evolves to something new. Besides suburban recycling, others include rent-a-country and ecological intelligence.

Rising Odds for a Hotter World

 

MIT Greenhouse Gamble: No-Policy Case (left) where emissions are not limited, and Policy Case (right) where carbon emissions are limited, indicate likelihood of future temperature increases. The size of a pie slice indicates likelihood.

Scientists at the MIT Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Climate Change have updated their odds for future temperature increases. 

Called The Greenhouse Gamble, the project calculates the odds of temperature increases by 2100 based on what we do, or don't do, to limit carbon emissions. The project began in 2003, and updated projections released this year see significantly warmer temperatures for earth in the absence of stringent emissions reductions.

If we do nothing, odds are 1 in 11 (9 percent) that average temperatures will rise by 7 degrees C. by 2100. (That's 12.6 degrees F.) So far, we are doing less than nothing as global carbon emissions keep rising at record rates beyond any previous expectation. As we keep on this path the chance is less than 1 in 100 (1 percent) that temperatures will rise less than 3 degrees C. (5.4 degrees F.) Is it getting warm in here?

The longer we wait to cut back carbon emissions the higher future temperatures are likely to get. The 2002 gamble showed that 5 degrees C. was the previous ceiling if emissions continued unabated. 

So now the 2009 gamble tells us the future is going to be warmer than we thought it might be.

Climatologist Stephen Schneider of Stanford uses a fire insurance analogy to help people understand the risk from rising temperatures: Most people have fire insurance on their homes even though few have ever had fires. Reduced carbon emissions would be the equivalent of fire insurance for the earth.

We are looking at odds of 1 in 11 (nine percent) that earth (our house) is going to heat up more than 12 degrees F. by 2100. Essentially the earth we know is going to burn down, we're doing nothing to insure ourselves against this, and at the rate carbon emissions are rising we are in effect throwing gasoline on the fire.

Extreme Climate Change Journalism

Editorial page editors at the Washington Post might read recent articles on climate change in their own news pages. After publishing an ill-informed and poorly researched op-ed column by George Will a week ago called "Dark Green Doomsayers," the newspaper now fronts an article on human migration driven by climate change.

"Climate Fears Are Driving 'Ecomigration' Across Globe" discusses migration trends unfolding as individuals and nations move or prepare to move to avoid climate change impacts.  A family from Montgomery County, MD moves to New Zealand to avoid America's systemic fragility, the nation of Kiritbati seeks new ground to move its whole population to avoid sea level rise, Floridians who can no longer get insurance on their homes (because of rising risk from hurricane damage) ponder a return to colder climes. It's insightful reporting on a trend little highlighted by mainstream media.

This story follows another published the same day as the lamentable Will bloviation called "Scientists: Pace of Climate Change Exceeds Estimates." This article by Kari Lyderson details accumulating effects of changing climate discussed at the AAAS science meeting by Christopher Field of the Carnegie Institution of Washington, and a lead author for the upcoming 5th global climate assessment from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. 

Field explained the increasing urgency of "climate feedbacks" and why scientists underestimate future impacts from planetary heating. This because we emit more heat-trapping carbon dioxide now than ever imagined, that the southern ocean and forests counted on to absorb it are failing, and that permafrost is beginning to melt, producing more heat-trapping methane. In its 2007 report, the IPCC did not even ponder effects of permafrost melting because too little data existed.

So as the planet ramps up its extreme behavior, we get extreme journalism, both good and bad.  The planet will respond as it must to our excesses, and we need smart journalism like the Post offers in its news pages to explain those changes. But the least my local newspaper can do can do is not further confuse the issue by publishing clueless commentary. We deserve better from those who decide what to print, and Will should stick with what he knows: baseball.

The Whole Earth is Now Online

The Whole Earth Catalog and its spawn CoEvolution Quarterly and Whole Earth Review were among my favorite reads and inspirations in the decades when they were in print.

Long gone from the dead tree publishing landscape, my fading collection of several Catalogs and an almost complete set of Co-Evolution Quarterly/Whole Earth Review still graces my shelves.

The Whole Earth Catalog is now online. 

Transformed from paper to electrons, this wonderous archive marks a period in our recent history when the contemporary environmental movement was beginning to take shape.

Carrying motto "Access to Tools," Whole Earth was handbook and manual for those seeking instructions and tools to create a better world and self-sufficient life with their own initative, passion, and energy.

Edited by Stewart Brand and a host of smart people like Kevin Kelly, Whole Earth is where I first saw the work of agrarian poet and essayist Wendell Berry and ecological agriculturalist Wes Jackson, who started The Land Institute in Kansas.

Whole Earth led me to Berry's influential book The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture, and to Jackson's New Roots for Agriculture.

I discovered the work of Donella Meadows here, a MacArthur Fellow and one of the authors of the 1970's book The Limits to Growth.

Meadows' essay Places to Intervene in a System is significant, along with her sequel essay Dancing With Systems.

"Places" is mandatory guide to understanding any type of system: an organization, economy, living body, ecosystem, or a city, and explains why a small shift in one thing can create a big shift in most everything. She explains why most change is misguided, misapplied, and mistimed because of a failure to recognize "leverage points."

The Catalog's influence was documented in a 2007 book by Andrew Kirk, Counterculture Green: The Whole Earth Catalog and American Environmentalism.

The Whole Earth family of publications was the internet before there was an internet, blogs before blogs. The arrival of a new edition or issue was an event, everything else was set aside until a full perusal of the copy that had just shown up in the mailbox.

--DD

Links:

Caribou Barbie, Photobombing, et al

NYT: Buzzwords of 2008

"Politics without buzzwords is like sports without clichés, math without numbers or Blago without bleeps. Tough to imagine, in other words, especially in such a game-changer of a campaign year in which buzzwords were flying like shoes. Buzzwords are what political wiseguys use to sound all important and knowing in a profession whose prime currency is the illusion of being both. They are like secret passwords for the chattering class, the verbal equivalent of a terrorist fist jab.

"Picking out political buzzwords from 2008 is like shooting moose in a pigpen..."

2008 Prized Climate Change Reporting

The Yale Forum on Climate Change and the Media has posted a list of award-winning climate change reporting for 2008. 

Familiar names include Andrew Revkin of the New York Times, Seth Borenstein of the Associated Press, radio producer Dan Grossman, NPR's "Climate Connections" staff, and a host of friends and colleagues at National Geographic:

SEJ Awards:...A team from National Geographic won first place for outstanding explanatory print reporting for stories, maps, and interactive Web features in June and October 2007, collectively known as “Changing Planet: Where Energy and Climate Collide.” Winners were editors, writers, and photographers: Dennis Dimick, Tim Appenzeller, James Balog, Paul Nicklen, Bill McKibben, Joel Bourne, Robert Clark, Jamie Shreeve, Glenn Oeland, Lynn Addison, Kathy Moran, Laura Lakeway, Neil Shea, Karen Lange, Bill Marr, Elaine Bradley, Abby Tipton, Alice Jones, Mary Jennings, Emily Krieger, and Juan Velasco. The judges especially praised the writing as “clear, tight, flowing and authoritative - demonstrates an elegant power rarely reached in explanatory journalism.” See also links to “The Big Thaw,” “Vanishing Sea Ice,” “Biofuels,” and “Confronting Carbon.” 

Are Environmental Journalists an Endangered Species?

Joel Makower asks this question over at his blog Two Steps Forward:

"For all the media reports about a surge in "green jobs," one place we won't likely be seeing them is in the media itself.

"The past few weeks and months have been devastating for environmental journalism. Just after Thanksgiving, Fortune magazine gave layoff notices to Marc Gunther, one of the leading business writers on corporate environmental practices (whose blogs also appear on GreenBiz.com), along with Todd Woody, whose coverage of clean technology has led the pack. Over at CNN —...

Krugman Nobel Talk Slides Posted

Paul Krugman, the Princeton economist and New York Times columnist, presented his Nobel Prize lecture today in Sweden. He has posted the slides from his talk at his NYT blog: The Conscience of a Liberal.

Discussion of Krugman's award on the Nobel Prize site.