The first evening we arrived, exhausted, dragging suitcases behind us, morale a little bit bruised, the Kurdish family sent over their representative – a 9 year old boy missing two front teeth, holding a lopsided cake, “We’re Abu Mohammed’s house- across from you- mama says if you need anything, just ask- this is our number. Abu Dalia’s family live upstairs, this is their number. We’re all Iraqi too… Welcome to the building.”

I cried that night because for the first time in a long time, so far away from home, I felt the unity that had been stolen from us in 2003.

No Comments »

That’s a photo of our backyard on Andrew Sullivan’s regular feature, “The View From Your Window” today!

No Comments »

“I live in Santiago Canyon. One minute last night the stars were out and the winds calm. The next minute there was fire literally jumping over the ridge. We had five minutes to evacuate.” - featured comment, front page LA Times homepage.

These fires are way worse than usual. There’s a good reason the hot, dry, fierce Santa Ana winds are called the “devil’s wind.” These fires can move much faster than you can run, and quite possibly faster than you can drive in a car. Seriously. Think precipitously steep mountain sides with masses of tinder-dry chaparral six feet high. Then think what happens when they catch fire when 60 mph winds are blowing.

And the fires are everywhere now.

Should there be regulations against building homes in high-risk areas, as protecting the homes during fires draws resources that could be better used to put the fire out? Southern California has been having that debate for decades. Mike Davis famously (or notoriously, depending on your viewpoint) said in “Let Malibu Burn.”

Botanists and fire geographers have calculated that half-century-old chaparral, heavily laden with dead mass, burns with 50 times more intensity than 20-year-old chaparral. Put another way, an acre of old chaparral is the fuel equivalent of 75 barrels of crude oil. A great Malibu firestorm, therefore, may generate the heat of three million barrels of burning oil at a temperature of 2,000 degrees.

“Total fire suppression” — the official policy in the Southern California mountains since 1919 — is a futile, indeed disastrous, strategy that makes doomsdaylike firestorms and subsequent floods virtually inevitable by preventing the recycling of dead chaparral by more frequent small fires.

This is not to bash Malibu (hey, I have friends who live there) but as Davis points out, Malibu frequently has had nasty fires, starting from when the Spanish came and prohibited the Indians from doing their annual burnings. Plus, the natural geography there lends itself to fire because the canyons line up uncannily with the direction of the Santa Anas and is made worse by the San Fernando Valley acting as a giant bellows.

Let’s hope no more lives or homes are lost during the current inferno season in southern California.

11 Comments »

Citing concerns about global warming, Kansas’ top regulator today denied a long-awaited permit to build a controversial coal plant in western Kansas.

This is further proof, if any still be needed, that concern about global warming is a mainstream issue now.

1 Comment »

Wherein it is explained how an unemployment man sitting on a stoop morphs into a Structured Investment Vehicle worth $100 million. Oh wait, it was worth $100 million, then it wasn’t, now no one has a clue what actually it’s worth. Truly, our modern-day financial alchemy is wondrous indeed.

Watch the video. 8 minutes of humor that explains what’s happening better than many a lengthy article.

Tip: Calculated Risk

No Comments »

Reduced snowpack due to global warming may prove a bigger problem than rising oceans. But if we get past the Yuck Factor, then water can be reprocessed, saving enormous amounts of money and water as well. Perhaps we will have little choice in the matter.

California and Atlanta are now simultaneously in severe drought while apparently doing their best to do nothing. California has competing ballot propositions that appear to be headed towards a fine train wreck indeed while Atlanta has mad schemes to divert water from other states or maybe build desalinization plants. Um, they do know the clock is ticking on this, right?

Georgia is now threatening to sue the Army Corps of Engineers for diverting water from Lake Lanier to Florida to save endangered species like mussels. All of which is a swell issue for their governor to hyperventiliate about - why is the government saving mussels not people. Except it’s not really true. That downstream water in Florida is also used by a coal plant, nuclear plant, and businesses as well. Nor can Georgia sue the Army Corps, as it’s a federal agency and thus immune from lawsuit, something the governor has to know. The Corps has been responding with bland reassurances that all will be fine and comes across as more than a little patronizing, something which certainly (and rightfully) would honk off the locals. So, this is the beginnings of what could be ongoing water wars in the South; states against states, states against the federal government, juggling business interests with environmental causes.

Also, and this is certainly true in California, saving a species may also mean saving the water. A judge in California recently ordered that less water be diverted to southern California because of an endangered fish in the Sacramento Delta. The reasoning here, and it seems to have been accepted by all, is if that species of fish dies off, then the water itself will have become degraded. Perhaps that’s also true with the Florida mussels.

Here in Connecticut, we have a moderate drought going on. It’s the middle of October, and it was freaking 77 degrees yesterday. This is not normal. The weather is changing. And yes, the State of Connecticut is equally slow about getting proactive about water. Sure, we’re blessed with an abundance of water here, but the drought shows it’s best not to take such things for granted. Maybe that’s the problem, everyone is thinking this drought is a blip that will go away soon, then we get back to normal. But maybe “normal” as it relates to water will need to be redefined - and soon.

No Comments »

Near Heublein Tower, Talcott Mountain State Park, Simsbury CT. On the way down the trail, I heard multiple languages; German, Japanese, etc., which probably means they were “leaf peepers” from across the globe.

No Comments »