Problems, Predicaments, and Technology

  The New River Gorge at Grandview, West Virginia Today, I have a new movie titled  Down To Earth   to discuss. One of my primary goals with forming this blog has to do with educating people not just about the predicaments we face as a species, but also how to reduce the collective harm these predicaments are causing and the grief which often comes with the knowledge of these predicaments.   This film is about a family who decides to go on a journey to discover a new perspective on life not based upon many of today's cultural values surrounding consumption, jobs, and economics but more on nature, spirituality, and the true meaning of life. During this five-year journey, they meet many different indigenous tribes who they call "Earth Keepers" across six continents. One of the many bits of wisdom comes with a quote from the father/husband, while they are exploring the rainforest: "The kids love the rainforest. Today they caught me off guard, asking about its destr...

Happy Earth Day!! The above picture looking into Glacier National Park was taken last year and is among some of my favorite pictures of the trip.  I've mentioned the book Bright Green Lies several times and now that the movie documentary is out (today!), here is a discussion from filmmaker Julia Barnes on her new documentary. I really like how she points out the obvious hypocrisies within the environmental movement here, quote:  "If people are genuinely interested in protecting the natural world in the environmental movement, a film that points out the harmful industries of things like 'renewables' shouldn't be considered divisive. It should just be something that is information that they're going to take in and that's going to affect the way that they look at these issues, and if someone, if their allegiance is to these technologies above life on the planet, then they were never really an environmentalist to begin with and their allegiance is NOT with t...

A new book is now available from Springer by author Alice Friedemann titled Life After Fossil Fuels - A Reality Check on Alternative Energy. The really great thing about this book is the fact that it explains so much about not only how society is powered today, what products are made from this energy, and what the future will look like, but also precisely WHY alternative energy from technological devices will fall way short of the mark with regard to powering society once fossil fuels become impossible to extract because the net energy they provide is equal to the amount of energy required to extract them (making them an energy sink rather than an energy source). Alice J. Friedemann is the creator of energyskeptic.com . Ms. Friedemann is perhaps best known for her book When Trucks Stop Running – Energy and the Future of Transportation published by Springer, and Peak Soil , which was edited by David Pimentel at Cornell, Tad Patzek at U.C. Berkeley, and Walter Youngquist (author of G...

With as much focus on extinction now that most of society realizes that this is AT LEAST a possibility, many people have come up with the idea of moving different species around the planet in order to insure that they will survive into the future. Some species have been brought to zoos or other places to help them reproduce and raise offspring to add to the number of those species living today. There are a number of seed banks  designed exclusively with saving specific genetics, breeds, and types of plants from being lost to extinction. But is it a good idea for us to interfere with nature, with wild animals who can become habituated to humans, and can we actually "save" other species from extinction or some other awful destiny, the overall reason we are constantly interfering with nature in the first place in this matter? I hate to say it, as this is a repeating theme on my blog, but do we really have agency?  Of course, this is too easy of an answer, and one that leaves out...

What is hydrogen sulfide and what does it have to do with extinction events? In my last entry where I discussed James G. Anderson, I pointed out how the current behavior of the climate system will be interrupted and inherently changed by the loss of Arctic ice and the cryosphere in general. This loss of ice in sea ice, permafrost, glaciers, and frozen lakes and rivers will dramatically speed up the process of warming not only in the Arctic, but the entire Northern Hemisphere and beyond. As it does this, eventually, the temperature difference between the poles and the tropics will disappear. Without the large temperature difference, winds will be diminished, causing the world's oceans to mix less. This will cause hypoxic conditions due to less circulation and less circulation will lead to stagnation, and general anaerobic conditions will lead to the production of hydrogen sulfide leading to sulfidic oceans, also known as the Canfield Ocean .  Understanding that the cryosphere ...

  Recently, I had an opportunity to repost a video which I viewed several years ago from Harvard Professor James G. Anderson regarding climate change. I have actually watched the video two or three times in the past, but there are certain parts that have now become more interesting as time has moved forward.  In the video, Anderson reveals why the term "global warming" is very inappropriate and doesn't accurately describe what is really happening. Then he describes what will happen as times moves forward with warmth and moisture entering the stratosphere as a result of climate change - as ice continues being removed from both poles, eventually the temperature difference between the tropics and the poles will disappear. This is a hugely important distinction, as the global climate system today utterly depends on those temperature differences for the way it behaves. I will go into more detail regarding this phenomenon in my next article and how it will affect the planet...