The Coonridge Digest: The snooze button

Greetings from the Ridge.
Guari Nanda was a lifelong oversleeper who was nearly always late for his classes at the Massachusetts Institute for Technology Lab. It was just too easy to hit the snooze button. Even though poor Guari was a bit tardy in his waking, the guy apparently made up for it in ingenuity. The result was his “Clocky.”
Clocky is a big, fluffy alarm clock on wheels that goes off then takes off. Put it on your bedside table and at the appointed hour of rising it’ll scream into action, roll off the table and then hide somewhere, making you go find it.
The early reports of this product say that by the time most folks find the offending beeper they’re plenty awake to face the day.
I was wondering if Gauri could come up with a larger version… say, for the entire country or maybe the world.
Jim Hansen, director of the Goddard Institute for Space Studies and long-time leader of climate change research had trouble with his reports on global warming when they got to the White House. Hansen has been sounding the alarm for over a decade but recently he’s been haunted by a corps of oil-fed administration proofreaders. He’d described our future in very specific terms using such words as “dangerous” and “deadly,” but by the time his reports worked their way through the filter of political affiliations and good-old-boy politics, the words were mysteriously missing. Sort of like the polar bears.
One hundred forty one nations ratified the Kyoto treaty to reduce emissions. The U.S. with 5% of the earth’s population and 25% of the world’s carbon dioxide production did not. Sure, the treaty had its problems, but the bigger problem was with the dent it would make in political contributions of U.S. politicians.
You don’t need Jim Hansen’s scientific degrees to figure out what’s happening. The polar ice caps are melting at a rate that is surprising even to those who’ve been tracking them for twenty years. The North Pole may be seasonally ice free by 2050.
Ice reflects most of the sun’s light. When the ice is gone, it doesn’t and the earth absorbs the additional heat… thus, more warming.
When floating ice melts, it displaces the same amount of water, but when the massive ice sheets over Antarctica and Greenland melt, things change. Say perhaps as much as a 220 foot worldwide increase in the sea level.
Deforestation equals increased fires all over the world equals even more C02 released into the atmosphere. The debate over whether the Earth is warming up is over. Our clock is ticking and we keep slapping the snooze button.
The increase in ocean temperature is a time bomb for typhoons and hurricanes. In the past 35 years the number of Category 4 and 5 hurricanes has doubled while the wind speed and duration of all hurricanes has increased 50%.
The permafrost is melting in high altitude regions such as Alaska, Siberia, and Canada. The soil warms, decomposes, and releases even more C02 and methane into the atmosphere and then… more warming.
The chemistry of the Gulf Stream begins to change and northern climates become colder. England is on the same latitude as Alaska, and the difference is the Gulf Stream. When this disruption occurred at the end of the last ice age, the temperature fell enough to lock the continent in glaciers.
President Bush mentioned in his State of the Union address that we should look for energy alternatives. What’s been done? It’s been mentioned in the State of the Union address. Even the steps he’s mention involve only research and voluntary controls. Snooze button.
Any hope? The jury is still out. Senators John McCain and Joe Lieberman have twice failed to get even mild carbon-limiting measures through Congress.
Senators Pete Domenici and Jeff Bingaman of New Mexico are taking another run at it. The mayors of more than 200 cities have signed the U.S. Mayors Climate Protection Agreement, pledging to meet the Kyoto standards. Nine eastern states have established the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative that would set ceilings on emissions, and California recently passed the nation’s toughest auto emissions law.
But any real hope coming out of Washington? We keep pushing the snooze button.
Our Clocky may be running out.
You ever in Coonridge, stop by. We may not answer the door but you’ll enjoy the trip.