Art by Elaine Meinel Supkis
By Elaine Meinel Supkis
For some time, we arrogantly thought no one had to pay attention to Mother Nature. When the environmental movement was born, and I was part of it from day one, we used to say, "No one fucks with Mother Nature and lives." Well, many people thought they could fuck with Her and now She is moving literally Heaven and Earth. For She IS Heaven and Earth!
There was this commercial for margarine in the seventies where Mother Nature is sitting on a rock, reading to her woodland friends, the advertiser fools her into thinking margarine is butter and suddenly the sky darkens and there is thunder and she growls, "It's not nice to fool Mother Nature." This is one commercial I really enjoyed only because of the ending.
The new is very bad today, all over the place so let's start with Mother Nature's business: the earth itself. From IRIS, earthquake maps
Yesterday, the entire planet gave a slight but significant shudder. Virtually every faultline creaked and groaned. Perhaps this is part and parcel with the churning of the somewhat irregular dense material in the center, it is moving faster than the next layer, the Mantle, so there is churning going on.The magnetic poles are near reversing and this will be an interesting experience for us, to say the least. We depend very much on which way the poles are set, you know.
Today, there was another heave of the Australian plate. 7.9-8.1 on the Richter scale. A significant earthquake. It occured in the zone where several similar quakes shoot just before Boxing Day. Already, a 6+ earthquake in the last fifteen minutes shook Chile. The Pacific Plate is being forcibly shoved by Australia. We all know what is going to happen eventually in the not far but really close future: California will have a blow out earthquake(s). It is not probable but inevitable. Everyone is sitting there, studiously trying to ignore this but yesterday, an alarmed scientist yelled about this, really to little avail. California will strengthen their building codes yet again, they announced.
Quite a number of victims of the hurricane are being located in California. Frying pan/fire.
Hurricane Katrina may serve as a wake-up call on climate change for developing nations, many of which are vulnerable to devastation from global warming, the World Bank's top environmental official said on Thursday.The oceans are dying. The Gulf in particular, is dying rapidly. This summer has been a catastrophe for it. The cleansing hurricanes are helping but not enough for paradoxically, the flood waters, ripe with human waste and chemicals, are flooding into that basin where it will fester since the waters go in a counter-clockwise flow, the Gulf is a cul-de-sac. Even where powerful ocean floods flow like the mighty Gulf Stream, are deteriorating due to human pollution and waste and global warming.Ian Johnson, the World Bank's vice president for environmentally and socially sustainable development, told Reuters the storm's heavy damage in the southern United States would have important implications for poorer countries.
"Just think of the catastrophic impact it's had in a country that's pretty well organized, pretty rich. Transfer that to a country that isn't and may not have the same level of capacity to deal with these sorts of things," Johnson said in an interview.
"Katrina is a terrible tragedy, but maybe it is a wake-up call to all of us to begin understanding what catastrophic events, what damage can occur," he added.
In addition to fostering talks on emissions and promoting clean energy products, Johnson said the World Bank is working with private industry to find ways to protect poor nations from the expected environmental shifts linked to global warming.
"There is a real sense that the train has left the station, and that there is going to be a pretty significant impact of climate change," Johnson said, adding the devastation in New Orleans had increased public sensitivity to these risks.
"Certainly in the press, it seems to have raised questions of the extent to which this is part of a global warming world," he said. "I do think that public opinion is thinking a lot about these issues."
Typhoon Khanun, the No. 15 strong tropical storm of this year, is expected to hit the central-northern parts of Fujian Province Sunday afternoon, according to weather forecasts.You won't see a thing about this in any American news format. At all. I have noted that this year, Asia has been positively ravaged by typhoons. We want sympathy and aid from the world and we are supposedly the richest, most powerful country.Typhoon Khanun is approaching the province at a speed of 15 km per hour from the eastern sea region off Taiwan, and the provincial flood control and drought relief headquarters has urgedall-out efforts to make preparations.
Typhoon Khanun has so far reached force 12 which is likely to further strengthen and will bring along heavy precipitation to the province, said the provincial weather station.
Liang Qiping, deputy governor of the province, urged officials in the province to work hard to mobilize the local people in making preparations to fight the upcoming typhoon.
The provincial flood control and drought relief headquarters has asked all the ships and vessels operating on the sea nearby toreturn or take shelters in ports before 18:00 Saturday and all the personnel working at the offshore breading fields to get onshore.
The headquarters also urged the people in mountainous areas to prepare against possible mountain torrents, mud-rock flows and geological disasters. Enditem
We are not anymore.
Today, Beijing firmly announced the North Korean talks they sponsored that we recklessly walked out on, are resuming with the American team firmly in hand to sign the documents the Chinese have prepared for us. They desperately want to fix things with North Korea so they can secure this border. Now they can do it to their specifications because Americans can't drag their feet anymore. We are over the barrel, beggars at their gates.
Like me, they know that all Americans have to do to fix this is to tax themselves. But Bush won't and half the country won't and so we are being sold down the Yangtze River and toodle-loo, Uncle Sam.
Humans were influencing the climate long before the Industrial Revolution, new research suggests.As the grazing herds of ice age beasts ran from raging fires set by humans, these fires literally drove them into extinction and humans had to scavange the last of the big creatures and domesticate them and fight to protect them from other humans, thus the herding societies were born. The dog, pig, sheep, cows and horses all were protected so they could remultiply. But in North America, there was domestication of only the dog and many animals were wiped out. The bison were able to survive and multiply only because humans deserted the open plains when the earlier herds were killed off and only reentered them around 5,000 years ago or less.Levels of methane rose steadily in the atmosphere in the first millennium, according to an analysis of gases trapped in ice beneath Antarctica.
Much of the greenhouse gas came from huge fires lit by humans as they cleared land for settlements and farming, researchers report in Science.
But natural climate change would have contributed to the emissions, they say.
Greenhouse gas emissions have risen to record levels over recent centuries but little is known about the atmosphere in pre-industrial times.
You know, in the Carboniferous Age, a lot of carbon was manipulated by the earth. The oxygen levels soared as plants took over and insects finally evolved to eat them, huge insects, dragon flies 1000 times bigger than today, for example. The oxygen was so rich, so much carbon was "breathing" through the dense understory/soil which wasn't broken down by insects because they were still evolving to fill this new niche...A vast swampland. This is where our coal and oil comes from! This time.
Higher UK temperatures are causing soils to "exhale" large quantities of carbon dioxide, probably accelerating global warming, scientists report.They base their assessment on a huge analysis of soil samples gathered from across England and Wales over 25 years.
The team says its findings, if extended to the whole of the UK, suggest some 13 million tonnes of carbon are being lost from British soils each year.
The Cranfield University group reports its work in the journal Nature.
The scientists say computer models used to forecast future climate trends will now have to be revised because the calculations on which they are based will be wide of the mark.
"Our findings suggest the soil part of the equation is scarier than we had thought," Professor Guy Kirk, of Cranfield University, told journalists at the British Association's Festival of Science in Dublin, Ireland.
"The consequence is that there is more urgency about doing something - global warming will accelerate."
Scientists are only now starting to recognise the astonishing size reached by pterosaurs, the flying reptiles that lived at the time of the dinosaurs.From another period of hyper-global warming/high oxygen/high carbon era. Gigantisim coupled with flying=rich atmosphere.New discoveries in the Americas suggest some had wingspans of 18m (60ft).
But there was nothing ugly about the way they moved through the air, according to expert Dr David Martill, of the University of Portsmouth.
Their ability to utilise air currents, thermals and ground effects would astonish aeroplane designers, he said.
"Pterosaurs were beautifully engineered," he told BBC News.
"Their skeletons were exceedingly light: their bones were very thin and hollow, and those hollows were filled with an air-sack system. They'd also got rid of their reptilian scales and their wing membrane was very, very thin.
We know very little about the climate in the far past. We are only just beginning to understand from ice core samples what it was like only 100,000 years ago! Studies! We need more information. Alas, guess what Bush keeps cutting! Recently in the news was this story about how the born again boobies who worship Bush are now asserting dinosaurs existed with humans. They fight science tooth and nail, not understanding that understanding nature is a life and death issue. They imagine if they imagine a universe fit for a nursery school, it will magically do what they desire.
Money for atmospheric/planetary research! Ha. The Space Shuttle is being set back even further in time, the hurricanes ruining all sorts of things down there in Florida. Duh. We can't build space ports where Mother Nature plans to scour clean. And with global warming, all of Florida and the Gulf lowlands are history. Uninhabitable. People will live there, of course, but they are living on borrowed time, the lease on the land held by Mother Nature, running out rapidly.
In this war with Mother Nature, there will be only one winner. And She always wins. This is inevitable. This is why working with Her beats fighting Her.
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