In the Guardian newspaper, on the 27th of December 2008, Nick Laird talks about the struggle of creating beautiful poetry when the world seems to be ending in a number of different ways.
In Ireland last week I heard on RTE that back in October the world was only two hours from economic meltdown - money would have stopped coming out of ATMs, credit cards would have stopped working and society would rapidly break down. We sidestepped that - though economies have collapsed. All that, however, is as nothing compared to the ecological collapse. There's a kind of constant free-floating global anxiety at this time. Anything I try to write turns elegiac, as if elegy is the only appropriate tone. So much bad news. The earth is, to put it mildly, f***ed. Climate change. Rising seas. Mass extinctions. The destruction of fish stocks, rainforests. The Gulf Stream stopping. The earth is turning against us. I spent hours online last night reading how the bees are dying out. And what happened to bird flu?
Art is waist-deep in the spirit of the times and the French artist Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, given the turbine hall at Tate Modern, has aimed to present "a postapocalyptic world 50 years in the future". She has filled the space with recreations of sculptures by Louise Bourgeois, Henry Moore, Bruce Nauman and others, and placed them among a grid of mattress-less metal bunk beds, where books such as The War of the Worlds and Fahrenheit 451 have been left. It's common enough to play Chicken Licken, to claim that the end of the world is nigh, but I've read my Stern report, my Lovelock, my Rachel Carson and John Gray, and I can't help feeling it too. What does poetry do in these circumstances? There is satire, but that seems such a hollow posture. In modern nature poetry - perhaps in modern poetry itself - the elegiac tone has come to be the dominant mode, the pervasive mood. Didn't Martin Amis once claim that the modern world meant the only appropriate fiction was comic? It seems in poetry the only tone left is elegiac.
Saturday, 27 December 2008
Friday, 19 December 2008
Did Early Global Warming Divert a New Glacial Age?
The Science Daily website, on the 18th of December 2008, has an article about how climate change began thousands of years ago, not recently and has stop the next ice age from starting.
The common wisdom is that the invention of the steam engine and the advent of the coal-fueled industrial age marked the beginning of human influence on global climate.
But gathering physical evidence, backed by powerful simulations on the world's most advanced computer climate models, is reshaping that view and lending strong support to the radical idea that human-induced climate change began not 200 years ago, but thousands of years ago with the onset of large-scale agriculture in Asia and extensive deforestation in Europe.
What's more, according to the same computer simulations, the cumulative effect of thousands of years of human influence on climate is preventing the world from entering a new glacial age, altering a clockwork rhythm of periodic cooling of the planet that extends back more than a million years.
"Between 5,000 and 8,000 years ago, both methane and carbon dioxide started an upward trend, unlike during previous interglacial periods," explains Kutzbach. Thus, the accumulation of greenhouse gases over the past few thousands of years, the Wisconsin-Virginia team argue, is very likely forestalling the onset of a new glacial cycle, such as have occurred at regular 100,000-year intervals during the last million years.
The common wisdom is that the invention of the steam engine and the advent of the coal-fueled industrial age marked the beginning of human influence on global climate.
But gathering physical evidence, backed by powerful simulations on the world's most advanced computer climate models, is reshaping that view and lending strong support to the radical idea that human-induced climate change began not 200 years ago, but thousands of years ago with the onset of large-scale agriculture in Asia and extensive deforestation in Europe.
What's more, according to the same computer simulations, the cumulative effect of thousands of years of human influence on climate is preventing the world from entering a new glacial age, altering a clockwork rhythm of periodic cooling of the planet that extends back more than a million years.
"Between 5,000 and 8,000 years ago, both methane and carbon dioxide started an upward trend, unlike during previous interglacial periods," explains Kutzbach. Thus, the accumulation of greenhouse gases over the past few thousands of years, the Wisconsin-Virginia team argue, is very likely forestalling the onset of a new glacial cycle, such as have occurred at regular 100,000-year intervals during the last million years.
2008 will be coolest year since 1997
Reuters’ website, and other news papers, on and after the 16th of December 2008, report on this year’s average temperature continuing to drop lower and give excuses for why we are not seeing them rise like Global Warming doomsayers had predicted.
This year will be the coolest since 1997 but still the tenth hottest in a temperature record dating back 150 years, the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) said on Tuesday.
The global mean temperature for 2008 was 14.3 degrees Celsius (57.7 degrees Fahrenheit), climate scientists at the UK's Met Office Hadley Center and Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, who compiled data for the WMO, said.
"Human influence, particularly emission of greenhouse gases, has greatly increased the chance of having such warm years," the Met Office's Peter Stott said in a statement."
Chillier weather this year is partly because of a global weather pattern called La Nina that follows a periodic warming effect called El Nino.
The 10 warmest years measured since records began in 1850 have occurred since 1997, with global temperatures for 2000-2008 standing at almost 0.2 degrees Celsius above the average for the decade 1990-1999, the Met Office said.
I said this “La Nina” theory would be used to disregard the plain fact that global temperatures were going down and that Global Warming is looking like it is walking on thin ice.
Instead of telling us the planet is now cooling and not continuing to heat up like they predicted, they talk about now the last 10 years are the hottest on record. They seem to spin the bad news into something they can use or at least reshape it so they do not look foolish.
This year will be the coolest since 1997 but still the tenth hottest in a temperature record dating back 150 years, the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) said on Tuesday.
The global mean temperature for 2008 was 14.3 degrees Celsius (57.7 degrees Fahrenheit), climate scientists at the UK's Met Office Hadley Center and Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, who compiled data for the WMO, said.
"Human influence, particularly emission of greenhouse gases, has greatly increased the chance of having such warm years," the Met Office's Peter Stott said in a statement."
Chillier weather this year is partly because of a global weather pattern called La Nina that follows a periodic warming effect called El Nino.
The 10 warmest years measured since records began in 1850 have occurred since 1997, with global temperatures for 2000-2008 standing at almost 0.2 degrees Celsius above the average for the decade 1990-1999, the Met Office said.
I said this “La Nina” theory would be used to disregard the plain fact that global temperatures were going down and that Global Warming is looking like it is walking on thin ice.
Instead of telling us the planet is now cooling and not continuing to heat up like they predicted, they talk about now the last 10 years are the hottest on record. They seem to spin the bad news into something they can use or at least reshape it so they do not look foolish.
Wednesday, 17 December 2008
Holes in Earth's magnetic cloak let the sun in
Reuters’ web site, on the 16th of December 2008, has an article about new findings that show that the Earth has holes in its magnetic field.
The Earth's protective magnetosphere has two large holes that are letting in disruptive solar winds, scientists said on Tuesday.
Understanding how these holes form will help them better predict the electrical storms that cause power grid blackouts and the aurora, activity that will peak in 2012 as sunspots hit their maximum level.
Scientists at the American Geophysical Union meeting in San Francisco said they had been entirely wrong about how solar particles that cause the storms were entering the Earth's magnetosphere.
The magnetosphere is a bubble of magnetism that surrounds Earth and protects us from solar wind.
"What we observed was the breach in the levee," said Jimmy Raeder, a physicist at the University of New Hampshire. "This has taken us completely by surprise."
"The opening was huge -- four times wider than Earth itself," said Raeder. "This kind of influx is an order of magnitude greater than what we thought was possible."
The Earth's protective magnetosphere has two large holes that are letting in disruptive solar winds, scientists said on Tuesday.
Understanding how these holes form will help them better predict the electrical storms that cause power grid blackouts and the aurora, activity that will peak in 2012 as sunspots hit their maximum level.
Scientists at the American Geophysical Union meeting in San Francisco said they had been entirely wrong about how solar particles that cause the storms were entering the Earth's magnetosphere.
The magnetosphere is a bubble of magnetism that surrounds Earth and protects us from solar wind.
"What we observed was the breach in the levee," said Jimmy Raeder, a physicist at the University of New Hampshire. "This has taken us completely by surprise."
"The opening was huge -- four times wider than Earth itself," said Raeder. "This kind of influx is an order of magnitude greater than what we thought was possible."
Sea level could rise by 150cm
The Guardian newspaper, on the 16th of December 2008, has article about how sea levels rises are going to be higher than first predicted.
Sea level rise due to global warming will "substantially exceed" official UN projections and could top 150cm by the end of the century, according to a report from the US Geological Survey on the risks of abrupt climate change. Such a rise would be catastrophic, seeing hundreds of millions of people affected by flooding.
Many scientists now fear the warming world is on the verge of "tipping points", in which climate change and its effects accelerate rapidly.
On sea level, the report found models used by the IPCC in 2007 do not take into account recent information on how fast glaciers slide into the oceans, particularly from Greenland and the West Antarctic ice sheets.
But the risk of the ocean circulation in the Altantic shutting down – freezing the coasts of America and Europe, as in the film The Day After Tomorrow – is rated as low by the report. It predicts a slowdown of around 25% to 30%. The chance of a catastrophic release of methane from frozen sub-sea stores at high latitudes is also rated low.
Sea level rise due to global warming will "substantially exceed" official UN projections and could top 150cm by the end of the century, according to a report from the US Geological Survey on the risks of abrupt climate change. Such a rise would be catastrophic, seeing hundreds of millions of people affected by flooding.
Many scientists now fear the warming world is on the verge of "tipping points", in which climate change and its effects accelerate rapidly.
On sea level, the report found models used by the IPCC in 2007 do not take into account recent information on how fast glaciers slide into the oceans, particularly from Greenland and the West Antarctic ice sheets.
But the risk of the ocean circulation in the Altantic shutting down – freezing the coasts of America and Europe, as in the film The Day After Tomorrow – is rated as low by the report. It predicts a slowdown of around 25% to 30%. The chance of a catastrophic release of methane from frozen sub-sea stores at high latitudes is also rated low.
Wednesday, 10 December 2008
Ten Ways the World Could End
CBC Radio, on December the 6th 2008, had a show looking into 10 possible ways the world could end.
Despite what you may think, the universe is not necessarily a friendly place. Sure, things here on Earth have been pretty stable over the past few millennia, allowing human civilization to gain a foothold. But that could change at any time.
1. Dr. Ray Jayawardhana explains what will happen when the expanding sun engulfs the earth and roasts the planet.
2. Dr. Vicki Kaspi explores the irradiating effects of a giant gamma ray burst.
3. Dr. Laura Ferrarese suggests that a rogue black hole may set its voracious appetite on Earth.
4. Dr. Peter Brown tells us what will happen if a giant asteroid plunges into Earth and pulverizes us.
5. Dr. Richard Peltier has a chilling scenario: the earth becomes a Popsicle planet and puts a freeze on photosynthesis.
6. Dr. Jo-Anne Brown explains what would happen if the galactic magnetic cloud were to collapse.
7. Dr. Sabine Stanley says the reversal of Earth's magnetic field may cause us some trouble.
8. Dr. Peter Sutherland explores what would happen if a nearby star were to go supernova.
9. Dr. Sarah Barnes talks about the possibility of a gigantic super-volcano blowing us to smithereens.
10. Robert J. Sawyer imagines an Earth under alien invasion.
Despite what you may think, the universe is not necessarily a friendly place. Sure, things here on Earth have been pretty stable over the past few millennia, allowing human civilization to gain a foothold. But that could change at any time.
1. Dr. Ray Jayawardhana explains what will happen when the expanding sun engulfs the earth and roasts the planet.
2. Dr. Vicki Kaspi explores the irradiating effects of a giant gamma ray burst.
3. Dr. Laura Ferrarese suggests that a rogue black hole may set its voracious appetite on Earth.
4. Dr. Peter Brown tells us what will happen if a giant asteroid plunges into Earth and pulverizes us.
5. Dr. Richard Peltier has a chilling scenario: the earth becomes a Popsicle planet and puts a freeze on photosynthesis.
6. Dr. Jo-Anne Brown explains what would happen if the galactic magnetic cloud were to collapse.
7. Dr. Sabine Stanley says the reversal of Earth's magnetic field may cause us some trouble.
8. Dr. Peter Sutherland explores what would happen if a nearby star were to go supernova.
9. Dr. Sarah Barnes talks about the possibility of a gigantic super-volcano blowing us to smithereens.
10. Robert J. Sawyer imagines an Earth under alien invasion.
Monday, 8 December 2008
UN is told that Earth needs an asteroid shield
The Observer newspaper, on Sunday the 7th of December 2008, reports on a group of world scientists who are asking the UN to create a system to stop asteroids from hitting Earth.
A group of the world's leading scientists has urged the United Nations to establish an international network to search the skies for asteroids on a collision course with Earth. The spaceguard system would also be responsible for deploying spacecraft that could destroy or deflect incoming objects.
The group - which includes the Royal Society president Lord Rees and environmentalist Crispin Tickell - said that the UN needed to act as a matter of urgency. Although an asteroid collision with the planet is a relatively remote risk, the consequences of a strike would be devastating.
'The international community must begin work now on forging three impact prevention elements - warning, deflection technology and a decision-making process - into an effective defence against a future collision,' said the International Panel on Asteroid Threat Mitigation.
The risk of a significantly sized asteroid - defined by the panel as being more than 45 metres in diameter - striking the Earth has been calculated at two or three such events every 1,000 years, a rare occurrence, though such a collision would dwarf all other natural disasters in recent history.
A group of the world's leading scientists has urged the United Nations to establish an international network to search the skies for asteroids on a collision course with Earth. The spaceguard system would also be responsible for deploying spacecraft that could destroy or deflect incoming objects.
The group - which includes the Royal Society president Lord Rees and environmentalist Crispin Tickell - said that the UN needed to act as a matter of urgency. Although an asteroid collision with the planet is a relatively remote risk, the consequences of a strike would be devastating.
'The international community must begin work now on forging three impact prevention elements - warning, deflection technology and a decision-making process - into an effective defence against a future collision,' said the International Panel on Asteroid Threat Mitigation.
The risk of a significantly sized asteroid - defined by the panel as being more than 45 metres in diameter - striking the Earth has been calculated at two or three such events every 1,000 years, a rare occurrence, though such a collision would dwarf all other natural disasters in recent history.
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