LifeItself

The Arctic is burning across Alaska, Greenland and Siberia. The satellite image below shows smoke enveloping millions of square kilometers in Russia. You are witnessing a giant positive feedback to global warming. All hell is breaking loose, while most Americans are either asleep or in active denial. Four more years of Trump, and this hell will be decades closer to your bedrooms, my dear fellow Americans. Wildfires are burning across 11 regions of Russia amid a hot, dry summer. Even regions free from fire are feeling its effects, as air masses have spread the smoke plumes across a wide area. (Four million square kilometers as of July 28, 2019.) The Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS) on the Suomi NPP satellite acquired this natural-color image on July 21, 2019. Source: NASA Earth Observatory , accessed 28 July, 2019. Let me be clear.  The future is in solar energy, as in solar PV modules, passive solar heaters and wind turbines. The sun will last a lot longer t...

Recently, I gave in Polish an opening lecture, “Can we salvage our global civilization?”, at a one-day conference of the Polish Academy of Arts and Sciences (PAU). The conference took place in the Isabela Lanckoronska Auditorium at the historic PAU building on Slawkowska 17 Street in Kraków. This conference, “Civic organizations and local communities faced with climate change disasters,” was organized by the Committee on Threats to Civilization of PAU. The last lecture was given by a young activist from a well-known non-profit, who manifestly misled the audience with his proposed implementation of the Green New Deal that would immediately shut down all coal-fired electric power plants in Poland, and replace them with wind turbines, PV arrays and geothermal wells. I pointed out to the nice young man that his radical solution would cause immediate power blackouts in Poland, and asked if he shouldn't have mentioned some of the problems with the transition? His answer was that the or...