The power of the "little bits interaction aggregated" that is so representative of web 2.0 and put to good use in Flickr with its sea of professional and avocational photojournalists.

Enjoy!

Errol Louis (columnist from NY Daily News) asked me to come to Bushwick Houses in Brooklyn and help him interview Mr. Gonzalez. His wife had died in his arms 10 days before our meeting. She was a chronic sufferer of asthma who depended on her oxygen tank. She died of an asthma attack triggered by having to walk 10 stories up to their apartment after waiting in the lobby of her building for over 5 hours for anybody from the New York City Housing Authority to come in and repair the elevator.

My wife, as I have often mentioned, is a climate scientist. And sometimes she hears some great stuff at seminars, hearing the facts straight from the horse's mouth. A couple of times she passed on stuff I REALLY wanted to blog but was a little confidential. You should have heard what the NASA administrators were trying to tell the scientists during the whole censorship scandal. Pretty scary stuff. But not something I can pass on.

Something she passed on to me recently, though, really got me thinking and doesn't involve any inside secrets as far as I know.

Some scientists have been advocating some pretty radical ideas to deal with Global Warming. One such idea is to lace our atmosphere with sulphate particles to increase the albedo of the atmosphere. This idea seems pretty crazy: possibly acidifying our atmosphere at who knows what cost to take a chance that it will reflect back enough solar energy to reduce warming. Apparently another such idea is even more crazy: increase the albedo of the ocean by covering large areas with white styrofoam. Hmmmm...

But back to sulfate particles. Apparently, one problem here is that no one actually, until recently, actually did the calculations to see if it would work or if it would cause massive acid rain. Well, according to data submitted for publication, calculations show that it COULD work and that the amount necessary to make a difference shouldn't have a large effect on acid rain. So, that actually is kind of promising. But...and here is where things get sticky when dealing with such ideas: the cost would be in the trillions (on a ROUGH calculation) AND no one knows what the dynamics would be. In other words, how long the sulfate particles would stay in place and how they would be distributed globally are completely unknown. I suspect that lack of understanding of the dynamics would include not being sure that LOCALIZED acid rain problems might not happen if concentrations became unusually high in spcific locations. A similar situation arose with the chemicals that caused the ozone holes: they reached exceptionally high concentrations at the polar regions and the specific dynamics of those locations made them particularly potent. We don't know what would happen with the sulfates in terms of the dynamics of the situation.  read more »

As I blogged on CultureKitchen recently, the Republic is having a Rome moment; now, The New Yorker sums up the feeling on this week's cover.

I knew it would be bad, back during the 2000 campaign and after the Supreme Court coup; how bad, nobody could have foreseen.

The global warming "debate" is not what the right wing portrays it as. Long ago a solid, overwhelming consensus was reached among scientists that a.) global warming is happening, b.) that humans are contributing to warming, and c.) warming will seriously impact our civilization in the near future...maybe already is.

The debate among scientists has shifted to details. Will there be localized cooling in the North Atlantic? Where will there be droughts and where flooding? How rapidly and how bumpy will the changes be? But the main question for all of society is whether it is too late to do anything. THAT is the new global warming debate. I have two answers to this: we sure had BETTER be able to do something about it and YES, WE CAN!

I have been aware of global warming science for at least 25 years. The science goes back even further, to the 1960's when measuring carbon dioxide levels and the observation that carbon dioxide was increasing were first done by Roger Revelle. Way back then, Revelle noticed changes and predicted that temperatures would rise as a result. When I became aware of global warming some 25 years ago, many predictions were made: increased storminess, Northward migration of tropical diseases, increased variability of temperature extremes, etc. What has astonished me as I read about current global warming science is just how many of the predictions of 25 years ago are coming true. In science the value of a theory is in its predictive value. From what I can tell as an informed, though not professional, observer is that the predictive value of the global warming models has been good. Details may be inacurate, but the general predictions have come true.  read more »