climate, photos, miscellany
Toronto350.org visited the Toronto Zoo to raise public awareness about the threat climate change poses to pandas and other endangered species. We also circulated a petition to the Chinese Ambassador to Canada and Canada’s Prime Minister, calling on both countries to do more to combat climate change and protect endangered species. Text of our petition [...]
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Here’s the actual abstract from “Acceleration of snow melt in an Antarctic Peninsula ice core during the twentieth century“, published in Nature Geoscience: “Over the past 50 years, warming of the Antarctic Peninsula has been accompanied by accelerating glacier mass loss and the retreat and collapse of ice shelves. A key driver of ice loss [...]
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Bonus: a demonstration of why I can’t just hand my camera to passers-by to take a picture After 32 years as the head of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, climatologist James Hansen is retiring (New York Times, Nature). He now intends to devote more of his time and energy to pushing for action on [...]
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“The human solution to the problem of sampling is motivation. We are always engaged with the environment – are always “being-in-the-world” – and are never dispassionate observers. We are always pursuing the limited goals we construe as valuable, from our particular idiosyncratic perspectives. We pay attention to, and remember, those events we construe as relevant, [...]
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Humanity today is like a waking dreamer, caught between the fantasies of sleep and the chaos of the real world. The mind seeks but cannot find the precise place and hour. We have created a Star Wars civilization, with Stone Age emotions, medieval institutions, and god-like technology. We thrash about. We are terribly confused by [...]
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I have finished my final assignment for the term, the essay for my Global Environmental Politics course. It is about climate change and democratic legitimacy: Microsoft Word file (205 kilobytes) PDF (381 kb) Many of these ideas are likely to find their way into my PhD thesis, so I would definitely appreciate feedback.
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I saw “Chasing Ice” with some Toronto350.org people tonight. The film has a lot of visual appeal and contains some useful information. It’s definitely worth seeing. One interesting thing about it for me is what is suggests about human reasoning. From a scientific standpoint, all this photographic and videographic documentation of melting glaciers is probably [...]
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One interesting bit of research described in Sam Harris’ The Moral Landscape concerns the ability of psychiatric hospitals to distinguish the sane from the insane: Of course, there are many other other ways in which we can be misled by context. Few studies illustrate this more powerfully than one conducted by the psychologist David L. [...]
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The International Energy Agency is now mirroring the claim made by Bill McKibben, James Hansen, and others: we cannot burn all the world’s fossil fuels. In their World Energy Outlook 2012, they claim: “No more than one-third of proven reserves of fossil fuels can be consumed prior to 2050 if the world is to achieve [...]
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Content copyright Milan Ilnyckyj (2003-2013). May be used non-commercially with attribution. For more details see this page.