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May 24th, 2010Glaciers Dropping By Hundreds of Feet
July 18th, 2010Nick Kristoff departs his usual beat to remind us once again (not yet enough it appears) of the effects of climate change — high mountain glacier melt.
[David] Breashears first reached the top of Everest in 1983, and in many subsequent trips to the region he noticed the topography changing, the glaciers shrinking. So he dug out archive photos from early Himalayan expeditions, and then journeyed across ridges and crevasses to photograph from the exact same spots.
The pairs of matched photographs, old and new, are staggering. Time and again, the same glaciers have shrunk drastically in every direction, often losing hundreds of feet in height.
“I was just incredulous,” he told me. “We took measurements with laser rangefinders to measure the loss of height of the glaciers. The drop was often the equivalent of a 35- or 40-story building.”
See particularly the comparison photos of the Kyetrak glacier in Tibet. As Kristoff says:
We Americans have been galvanized by the oil spill on our gulf coast, because we see tar balls and dead sea birds as visceral reminders of our hubris in deep sea drilling. The melting glaciers should be a similar warning of our hubris — and of the consequences that the earth will face for centuries unless we address carbon emissions today.
See the Asia Society show he refers to.
The Secret In Their Eyes: A Film
July 9th, 2010
For a good middle of summer thriller, lower yourself into a comfortable seat, ignore the inevitable advertisements, turn off your cell phone, flex your fingers for some desperate hand-holding and wait for the lights to go down. The Secret in Their Eyes, the 2010 Academy Award winner for foreign films is a nifty, urban multiple mystery story with just a minimum of gore to fix the seriousness of the case in your mind.
A frustrated writer beginning to write and then tearing up pages in a dark room is not too promising a beginning but as the camera takes over, showing the scenes he is trying to conjure, the hook is set. Slowly, with a tug here and some slack there we will be reeled in. A double exposed, out of focus, almost watery scene of a woman chasing a train in a cavernous railroad terminal tells us filmic imagination is at work. We soon learn that Benjamin Esposito (Ricardo Darin) is a retired Argentine criminal investigator returning to a crime of some 25 years earlier and to the mysteries of his own life at the time.
Scenes of his younger years in the early 1970s, darkly bearded and emotionally involved in solving a murder, against the corruption and growing threat of return to Peronist power, contrast with the present, gray hair and beard, facially lined and slower of movement and speech.
As he tries to solve the mystery of writing a novel he is re-immersed in the mystery of the earlier years and the crime itself, a horrific murder of a young woman, for whose husband Esposito felt particularly sorry. In the corruption of the times, a rival investigator throws up two working class stiffs as the murderers. Esposito and his colleagues through investigations astute and comical find and entrap in a clever police interrogation a man we take to be the actual murderer. He is released from prison within a year, however. Bright and vicious, he is just the type needed for the oncoming dictatorship. His release and the subsequent murder of Esposito’s partner followed by an unsubtle threat to Esposito himself sends Esposito out of Buenos Aires, into hiding. It is from the years away in this internal exile he has only recently returned, to take up his life and try to write the book.
The frustration of the pages begun and pages torn up make him turn to his boss at the time, Irene Menendez Hastings (Soledad Villamil). Hastings (pronounced in the American way, not the Spanish, as she insists) was then a recent Harvard graduate — and of the high upper professional classes in Argentina. Esposito barely made it through high school. One of the sub themes, nicely brought out, is the implications of the class divide in the society at large, and between them — a tough, visible barrier, that keeps their mutual attraction from fully working, and the mystery of which is the third of the many we are given to sort through.
Irene refuses to help him when he comes to ask for help but with a first draft in hand she enters into the pursuit of the old memories, of the crime, the long unseen killer and the husband of the murdered woman. Most of all into the mystery of the two of them. The film draws to an end with a shocking and to some, improbable, scene. Justice, in a crazy Argentine way, seems to be served.
Though the last word, as a door closes is that love too has finally found its way.
Good stuff. You may want to go twice, once as a detective, once with your best squeeze. And you’ll get to test your Spanish, too!
It’s Effin’ Hot
July 8th, 2010
Plot of the difference between maximum temperature (the high for the day) and average maximum temperature in degrees F for July 6
China’s Green Goo
July 8th, 2010The United States has its oil gusher. China, not to be outdone, counters with a massive spread of green goo, and a flotilla to try to clean it up. Canny readers will notice the reference to unprecedented heat waves ….
…a massive tide of algae that is approaching the coast of Qingdao.
The outbreak is thought to be caused by high ocean temperatures and excess nitrogen runoff from agriculture and fish farms.
Scientists involved in the operation say the seaweed known as enteromorpha needs to be cleaned up before it decomposes on beaches and releases noxious gases.
…And more is on the way. Northern China has been experiencing the hottest week of the year – in some areas, such as Beijing, temperatures have reached highs not seen in decades – which was accelerating the growth of the algae.
Green and red tides have become increasingly common across the world since the 1970s. Usually they occur in coastal water near densely populated areas or where there is large-scale runoff of agricultural chemicals from farmland.
China has been particularly affected in recent years. An even bigger outbreak off Qingdao, estimated at 170,000 tonnes, in 2008 threatened to ruin the sailing events for the Olympics, prompting the authorities to call on hundreds of local fishermen to help them in the cleanup operation.
…”At a fundamental level, the way to deal with this should be to combat climate change and control pollution,” said Mao Yunxiang, a professor at the College of Marine Life, Ocean University of China, who is a consultant on the operation.
“We should also consider the possibility that the green tide are inevitable so we should make use of them. The algae can clean water, and be harvested for animal feed and biofertiliser.”
Now, if we could only get climate change to stink a little bit in Oklahoma and other denier states!
Anti-Relativity Theory ditto Anti Global Warming
July 7th, 2010Morons will always be with us… [but they must not defeat us]
“This world is a strange madhouse. Currently, every coachman and every waiter is debating whether relativity theory is correct. Belief in this matter depends on political party affiliation.”
So wrote Albert Einstein in a letter to his one time collaborator, the mathematician Marcel Grossmann in 1920.
Jeroen van Dongen of the Institute for History and Foundations of Science at Utrecht University in Holland, writing in a recent edition of the journal, ‘Studies in History and Philosophy of Modern Physics,’ describes the effectiveness of the movement that grew up to oppose Einstein’s theory. There are some striking parallels with today’s climate debate.
“Anti-relativists… built up networks to act against Einstein’s theory in concert. This led to some success. For instance, the clamor about the theory in Germany contributed to the Nobel Committee’s delay in awarding its 1921 prize to Einstein and to the particular choice of subject for which he finally did receive it: his account of the photo-electric effect, instead of the controversial theory of relativity.”
He continues:
“Anti-relativists were convinced that their opinions were being suppressed. Indeed, many believed that conspiracies were at work that thwarted the promotion of their ideas. The fact that for them relativity was obviously wrong, yet still so very successful, strengthened the contention that a plot was at play.”
Nitrogen Runoff Creates Dead Zone: Add Oil – More Dead
July 6th, 2010
“While the BP oil spill has been labeled the worst environmental catastrophe in recent U.S. history, a biofuel is contributing to a Gulf of Mexico “dead zone” the size of New Jersey that scientists say could be every bit as harmful to the gulf.
Each year, nitrogen used to fertilize corn, about a third of which is made into ethanol, leaches from Midwest croplands into the Mississippi River and out into the gulf, where the fertilizer feeds giant algae blooms. As the algae dies, it settles to the ocean floor and decays, consuming oxygen and suffocating marine life.
Known as hypoxia, the oxygen depletion kills shrimp, crabs, worms and anything else that cannot escape. The dead zone has doubled since the 1980s and is expected this year to grow as large as 8,500 square miles and hug the Gulf Coast from Alabama to Texas.
As to which is worse, the oil spill or the hypoxia, “it’s a really tough call,” said Nathaniel Ostrom, a zoologist at Michigan State University. “There’s no real answer to that question.”
Some scientists fear the oil spill will worsen the dead zone, because when oil decomposes, it also consumes oxygen. New government estimates on Thursday indicated that the BP oil spill had gushed as much as 141 million gallons since an oil-rig explosion and well blowout on April 20 that killed 11 workers.
