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28 July 2006
Fri, 28 Jul 2006 20:32:00 GMTSelf inflation
So I’m apparently popular with the arctic explorers these days! I’m just awestruck. The other day Tony Haile stopped by and left me a comment, coincidentally on a book that I’d seen over at his site a month or two ago and decided looked good enough for a read.
Now I see that Ben Saunders (Tony’s partner in SOUTH, they’re leaving for a few months expedition to the south pole this fall(!!), an all around cool looking guy, who’s blog I’d also been following) links to me in his Elsewhere section, and as they apparently say over there in england, I’m chuffed.
I’m thinking that I’ll undertake adding in some sort of sidebar to return the favor, but for now here’s the good old linkage. And a good excuse for some bragging, I all to often take the I’m just some dumbshit kid approach to life.
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27 February 2006
Mon, 27 Feb 2006 22:00:00 GMTWill Steger on the arctic and global warming
Things are getting bad. Will Steger is an arctic explorer who’s been around for quite awhile. He’s seen the arctic decline before his eyes, he kayaked the Yukon river when he was 17. I haven’t found a posted age, but he got his bachelors in 1966, which gives an idea. He’s been around a good long time.
He gave a talk at tonight along with a scientist for Minnesotans for an Energy Efficient Economy about how bad things have gotten, and how they’re only going to get worse without some massive change on out part.
The thing that gets me is just the scale of how fucked up things are. Greenland is melting. Ice shelves the size of Minnesota are breaking off from Antarctica. Polar Ice that Alaskan polar bears try and swim out to to hunt seal and walrus has receded from 40 to 240 miles (and polar bears in the north of alaska are drowning in record numbers because of it). Global temperatures are at an unheard of level.
Steger had some great slides showing the rise in temperature, and fall ice coverage. 90% of the worlds freshwater is frozen in the form of antarctica, from which large shelves of ice are beginning to splinter. 500 Billion tons of ice broke off within a period of 1 month in 2002.
So things are bad? yessir. The talk on what we’re going to have to do to go about fixing things was less then impressive. There’s a bill in the MN house to implement a Renewable Energy Standard, that would mandate that 20% of MN’s power is generated from renewables by 2020. The presenter admitted that that will hardly make a difference, but we’ve got to start somewhere. Ouch.
I guess all I can say is that I’m personally looking forward to burning to death thanks to solar radiation.
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10 February 2006
Fri, 10 Feb 2006 22:43:56 GMTPolar Bear
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Also somewhat recently
