LifeItself

The Amazon forest is burning. If you look at the satellite map in Figure 1, you will see that Brazil's tropical forest is being methodically plundered and destroyed by people who mean business. That Brazilian   "friend" of our own destroyer of the world is doing his best to encourage the burning and empower his criminal supporters. But on the multiple aerial photos of the forest, I also see drought. Parts of the rain forest are dry and ready to be burned. Global climate change is likely a contributing factor. In summary,  a brutal liquidation of the priceless rain forest by the criminal farmers and ranchers running amok + climate change and drying of the forest = a global-scale calamity. From Mike Haywood's collection of course. And so that you have a clearer concept of what is happening here, president Trump is directly and personally implicated in the big Amazon burn. By blocking the Midwestern farmers from selling soybeans to China and US ranchers from sellin...

Greenland's ice is melting 5-6 times faster than recently thought and Siberia's permafrost is belching giant quantities of methane into the atmosphere, see Figure 1. Perhaps then, it is time to consider seriously how we can alleviate the crushing impacts of the uncontrollable geologic forces we have unleashed by sheer greed and lack of imagination. For fun, please read my Paris OECD dinner speech I gave twelve years ago to the distinguished EU ministers of environment and transportation. This speech was (a) ignored despite presenting the most popular paper of the conference, and (b) got me blacklisted by OECD ever since. Myopia is our middle name. From Mike Haywood, 08/21/2019. Figure 1 . The Yamal crater after belching lots of methane from melting permafrost.  It is difficult to say, but you may think of this crater as of one million cows farting methane 24/7 for one year. Oops! This aerial photo was taken by the people at the Engineering and Technical Center of ...

My Dear Western Friends, As one of the old classics said, and I paraphrase, "Where you look, defines your outlook."  By email, you asked me several questions. Below are some of my answers. As links in green, I picked two of my old blogs and kept on adding several articles from the New York Times that were published in the last few days.  I am not the only person who is morally troubled. On the fracking revolution It used to be that massive environmental destruction happened in the God forsaken foreign countries or the poor empty parts of our motherlands.  Not anymore.  Now heavy industrial activities come to where we live and work, and environmental damage happens in the ecosystems we actually care about.  That's the reality of resource exhaustion paired with the ever-growing appetite for these resources from us, the Bubble People. Take "shale revolution" as an example: 10,000 tons of clean, round, well-sorted fracking sand per well, or one hundred 100 t...

Finally I am in Saudi Arabia.  So many new impressions and new thoughts. I customarily watch here Al Jazeera International and the French News 24 Channel, and I never watch American TV.  I am simply tired of American navel gazing and the low quality of U.S.-based programming available here. Today, on Al Jazeera I saw a program about a group of Iranian and French women and men, who wanted to have a public concert in Iran.  After a long struggle, the authorities relented and the group sang.  And what a concert it was! This was the introduction by an Iranian female singer: We are the free men, who are not scared We are secrets that never die We are voices of who resist We are free and our world is free. At the end, another Iranian woman sang in the most beautiful voice: Of the just and the unjust They only spoke and did nothing Oh, God! Oh, God! See the chasm between their words and their actions. In-between they sang the "Bird of Dawn," a metaphor for h...

You and I use a lot of energy. Every second of each day and night we devour 100 times more energy than we need to live.  If I were to eat that much energy as food, I would be a 50-foot long bull sperm whale, weighing 40 tons.  There are 300,000 sperm whales worldwide, half of them bulls (females are much smaller), and 300,000,000 Americans (females are about the same in size).  Our Earth cannot feed and protect 300,000,000 male sperm whales.  She is simply too small. Our voracious appetite for energy must be either extinguished or quenched with local sources of energy (and, no, wind turbines and PV cells are too small to provide even single ample energy meal per day). So here are some of the choices we have:  We can drill and hydrofracture deep gas wells, and produce natural gas closer to where we live, or we can go after coal leftovers. We can also opt not to use fossil fuels and live differently, more Amish-like. For example, we can opt to live in the well-i...