Catch me on the air...

In about 45 minutes (2 p.m. today), I'll be a guest on the Thom Hartmann show on Air America. A representative from PETA will join us for the conversation, which I'm led to believe will be about PETA's campaign to tie vegetarianism to global warming.

Mushroom walkabout

As I get older, I derive greater pleasure from the simple act of walking. It is an great privilege, I think, to be able to place one foot and then the other successively in front of each other and move along. In this way, I can move miles per day, which seems about as rapid a rate of travel as I ever really need to go.

It strikes me as exceedingly strange that ambulation would provide so much basic joy. It is as natural and human as breathing. It speaks to the limits of technology that it is sometimes necessary to return to something so primitive, instinctual for basic pleasure.

I find myself today walking through a mixed hemlock and oak forest called Hartwick Pines. I am here in lieu of canoeing down the Au Sable River, and as a late birthday present from my mother. Given my attitudes towards walking, it is as suitable a gift for me as anything (better certainly than a bottle of cologne, which will forever go unsprayed).

This particular trail is not a difficult one, three miles in length from beginning to end. Because, as a people, we have some kind of prejudice against walking over the same real estate twice, it is essentially a loop. (How many miles, species wide, have been spent recreating in a circle? I don’t wish to guess, but I assume it’s better than 100,000.)

We have now come down to the bottom of the one hill, a glacial moraine. A sign at the beginning of this particular section warned us of the dangers of going forward, and a less-exerting alternative was offered. We chose the more difficult path, because these things are almost universally supposed to come with some kind of reward. In this case, an overlook of some kind was promised. So, we climbed.

I am on the hunt today. Normally, on a walk like this, my eyes scan the trees and skies looking for things of interest. Either an interesting grouping of plants, a rock outcropping that catches the eye, or animals of some kind. Today, the oaks, hemlocks, maples and pines are alive with the sounds of birds. So far, my eyes have scored two kinds of prey – a small toad the boy found in the forest floor of pine needles, and a hair woodpecker.

Today, my eyes have been pulled earthward, and my gaze scans the ground for mushrooms. I have been intrigued by a couple of inverted white caps that have obviously very recently pushed their way up through the dirt, which is piled loosely around their sides. There is evidence that rain and wind came through last night, and it appears that the mushrooms have come up since then.

Not long ago, I began to read about mushrooms, wondering about the potential for domestic cultivation and harvest. It turns out that my impressions of them were hopelessly naïve and egocentric. To me, the mushroom itself was the entire plant, perhaps with some anchoring tendrils spread underground like the root system of a tree.

The mushrooms, however, are merely the potentially edible component, and to build your perception of an individual is like looking at an apple tree through the eyes of one piece of fruit. It is filled with hubris, hopelessly incomplete, and naïve.

Much of the underground world in which the fungus lives remains a great mystery to us, as are how the denizens interact with each other. It’s only been recently since we’ve realized that there is an entirely different world that exists under the soil, one that exists not to support those of us who live between the dirt and the sun, but that exists in its own right. It demands looking at things as they are, rather than how they exist in relationship to us. We could as easily exist to support the underground world, constantly providing it with nutrients in the form of our rotting carcasses.

Thanks to this, the fungus itself remains a mystery. We understand little about it with any great surety other than to know that certain of them are delicious, and that certain of them are lethal. They are the largest of the world’s living organisms. One found earlier this decade covers 2,200 acres in Eastern Oregon, weighs as much as a blue whale, and is believed to be thousands of years old. One found near Michigan’s border with Wisconsin, by comparison, covers a mere 48 acres and was large enough at the time of its discovery – 1992 – that is prompted attention from night-time television talk shows.

Mushrooms are common along the path. I stop to look at them, prod them with a short, straight stick I’ve picked up. Some of them are no doubt edible, others poisonous to various degrees. I can identify few mushrooms with any certainty, and I see only two that look remotely familiar – small red-caps that look like members of the highly toxic galerina family, and a young puffball.

The rest are as much a mystery to me as the world from which they come, ambassadors from the underground. I look at them, and wonder if several in a row are from the same organism. I think the same thing when I see a field of mushrooms spread over 20 square feet. Are there multiple fungi there, or is it just one living thing? I could, if I had the inclination to destroy the fungus, dig into the ground and see if I could trace the tendrils. The might be like chopping down a tree to count the rings. This would tell me space, but nothing else. Age, what provides it subsistence, how it interacts with its environment, how it interacts with other fungi – these things would remain a mystery to me, and probably will anyway.

My legs have stretched themselves well, as has the mind. As promised, the trail has (circuitously) looped back on itself and brought me close to the beginning point. I come back to the rows where I first saw the hairy woodpecker. It is now gone, replaced by the groan and creaks of trees rubbing against each other in the wind high in the wind, which itself completes a different kind of cycle – drawing my attention away from what pokes up from the underground world, and back skyward.

Government shutdown

There's no escaping, these days in Michigan, the potential for a shutdown of state government come Oct. 1 if the Legislature can't come up with a way to balance the budget. The actual date by which they need a deal is actually about a week earlier to pay some of the bills on time, but that doesn't matter -- there's a great deal of pessimism that a deal will get done.

Ultimately, the blame for this can be traced to two equally-to-blame kinds of politicians, spineless Democrats and most of the Republican Party. There is almost universal agreement that part of the deal will involve a tax increase, but an anti-government activist has been floating around Lansing with an out-of-state foam pig, threatening lawmakers with recall. In fact, that near-universal agreement on a tax increase has been around for about four or five months now. Thanks to those two groups of people, however, even at a time when the need to get the job done is most dire the thing can't get pushed through.

I come from what used to be a Republican family. This was back in the 80s, when the takeover of the party machinery was just under way by conservative Christians and anti-government extremists. Slowly, surely, they expelled moderates and turned their back on real principle for the sake of expediency of a different sort. Today, they're kind of blended into a super-confused super conservative who is spectacularly ill informed along several fronts. They believe in both cutting taxes to drown government in a bathtub, and also in The Rapture. They believe that global warming is a myth propagated by bureaucrats hoping to sign on for a lifetime of job security pushing papers in support of a global cap-and-trade system, but that Jesus will clean things up when he shows back up for a little Old Testament wrath and judgment. It will be a rebirth of Eden -- streams will flow, trees will grow, and no one will ask for a share of your capital gains.

Despite that, I've got to admit that I nearly prefer these people to the Democratic Party. They might say things that cause you to scratch your head, but at least they have the courage of their convictions. There is nothing worse than knowing that a politician understands and endorses a position, and then caves in and sells it out at the easiest opportunity. I dislike the one, distrust the other. Pick and choose, but I have to admit to a bias in favor of someone who I can get comfortable around, and that ain't someone who prompts me to be on constant watch for a knife headed towards my back.

These kinds of things, unfortunately, have very real world consequences. The inability to get a proper budget done -- and this is a problem that's been going on for seems like three or four years -- has led to statewide cuts in services and higher tuition. This mega-crisis, coming as it is at the end of time (End Times?), is only what happens when someone who is a chronic poor credit risk is faced with either paying up now or going through a court-ordered wage garnishment. You can put off the day of reckoning only so long before the re-po man shows up and hauls off your couch.

The entire episode has further eroded my already low opinion of Libertarians. Here, in Michigan, we have a strong streak of Libertarianism. Libertarianism chiefly manifests itself in beliefs in the purity of free markets and that everything government touches turns to ask. Here, about 15 years ago, it helped established term limits that have provided cover for the spineless Democrats and also extremist Republicans.

By dint of having only a handful of years in office, lawmakers escape facing the consequences of their actions. This has turned the state budget into the hot potato it is today, being passed from session to session until the music stops ... which will happen on Oct. 1. What you see today are for-the-most-part panicked legislators looking for someone else to hand the thing off to, only now realizing that when the music stops it'll be their hands that get singed.

Libertarians, in a constant dudgeon over any kind of government spending (especially when they don't understand it), haven't exactly given up on government. There is still work to be done -- important work, to them -- destroying it. They've encouraged poor lawmaking through pushing term limits, but there is still a need to haul around foam pigs and -- from balcony seats -- issue denunciations of gummint men stealing money from the wallets of taxpayers. That said theft occurs to support things like education, public safety, environmental protection, and health care for the poor appears to be of little or no importance (there is always the ready-made answer that such functions should be turned over to private hands, no matter how unwieldy, unworkable, or stupid it happens to be).

Alas, for their work, they're getting precisely the kind of government they were prejudiced to believe existed. Negotiations, heated at times, that always produced a solution now end in squabbling and failure; undermanned and understaffed government agencies can't fulfill their charges. This is failed government, precisely the kind of thing they've been warning about for years, and it took about a decade before their prophecies became self-fulfilling.

And you think I'm crazy...

So, the air is escaping from the balloon that is the housing market, there is chaos in the credit market, and the state's economy is in the dumpers. What do you do with your last piece of undeveloped land?

Well, if you're shortsighted, you build housing on it.

The entire south end of Mount Pleasant is already overdeveloped, and not just within the city limits. Just outside the city is the charter township of Union, which in the last few years has encouraged rapid fire growth in both student housing and also retail. What was originally touted as the city's mall has turned into several acres of parking lot (deserted, the last time I was there), a Menards, a Sam's Club, and a Super Wal-Mart -- in a feat of deep corporate stupidity, a regular old Wal-Mart will soon be built 15 miles up U.S. 27, to complement the Wal-Mart 15 miles down U.S. 27, to compete with what was originally pushed as a regional shopping destination), and lot upon lot of cookie cutter luxury student townhomes. It all sprang up like dandelions after a spring storm.

This overdevelopment on the south side of town promptly drained a healthy chunk of the student population from of the area between campus and downtown. The new pressboard dives offer free Internet access, health clubs, and laundry facilities for basically the same cost as living in the older houses in the city. The apartments are crappy and were falling apart two years after occupancy commences, but you can't beat the price or amenities. Now, near downtown, "For Sale" and "For Rent" signs are common sights, property values and rents have dropped, and the place is regularly covered in garbage (when the winter snows melted, I found a ripped bra in my front yard -- a months-later gift from Santa, no doubt) and falling into disrepair.

Like other cities, this has also contributed to the city's growing traffic problem. When I attended the university here, I lived just south of downtown, and I could reasonably walk anywhere I needed to get in 15 minutes. Now, it might take you an hour to walk from the cookie cutters on the south side to downtown (this, in addition to the fact that most students these days have their own cars anyway).

The community itself, thanks to a nearby casino and the strength of the university, is growing, but this new complex is supposed to provide homes for another 2,000 people. There is no need for that kind of housing, and mostly what this will end up doing is shuffling around students and young families like deck chairs on the Titanic. Anyway, who is going to buy one of these new houses with the market in continued decline, and the number of potential customers drying up because credit for mortgages has returned to the gentle constraints of reality? Meanwhile, the downtown will continue to decay, and the yards will continue to be decorated with "For Sale" and "For Rent" signs.

Vegetarianism and global warming

What to make of vegetarianism, and it’s associated movement for animal rights? Earlier this month, the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals announced that it had contacted Al Gore and asked him to forego meat to combat global warming. They cited a U.N. report concluding that livestock worldwide have contributed more to global warming than has all of the world’s cars and industry (previously, the report had gone largely unnoticed except by skeptics).

The ethical treatment of animals is not itself an environmental issue, having greater kinship to human rights than it does to our relationship to the land, air, and water all around us. There are reasons that the both attract the same kind of people, however. People who mistreat animals often move on to mistreating other people, and it’s not at all difficult to find a link between a willingness to mistreat life and a willingness to mistreat the things that sustain it.

A PETA spokesman said that environmentalism and vegetarianism go hand in hand.

Matt Prescott, a spokesperson for People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, asserted last month that "you just cannot be a meat-eating environmentalist."

And, so PETA attempts to do what the gun owners' rights movement has done to sporting issues -- hijacked them to drive their own agenda. There are very good, very serious environmental reasons to oppose agribusiness and factory farms.

There are very good, very serious environmental reasons to also support the right of red-blooded Americans to every fall go out and kill deer for the express purpose of eating them (in fact, I have a package of backstrap in my freezer right now). Here, at least, where no natural predators of deer remain, overpopulation is an ever-present problem, fueled in part by declining numbers of people who hunt (attrition of the deer's last remaining predators by sloth) and also increasingly shrinking access to hunting land. There is also hunting and fishing that does the species no special harm, but that helps feed people.

This brings us to an important point. The goal of environmentalism is not to totally eliminate our carbon footprint, but to make it manageable; and not to eliminate our impact, but to reduce it in such a way that we can live well while we also live responsibly. That doesn't mean privation, or condemning ourselves to a lifetime of eating lentils and tofu. It means being smart about how you eat meat, and where it comes from.

In addition to eating meat that comes from wild animals, you can also get meat from livestock that are raised away from the factory farms. Livestock, at one point, helped create a closed agricultural system, by providing fertilizer that would be used to grow crops that helped feed a family and also the livestock. This also points us to a counterpoint. Is locally raised meat really worse for the environment than buying lettuce that is shipped in from California, or eating tofu processed from soybeans raised on Brazilian farms that were once rainforest? Certainly, when compared local-to-local or between national distribution networks, you have a big disparity; but that benefit can be greatly mitigated. This is especially true if you think global warming is a symptom of a deeper problem that can be greatly addressed by a refocus on things local and regional, including food distribution networks.

But, finally, we arrive at the question of what benefit we would accrue. Certainly, we would cut down on methane emissions, which is certainly a more potent greenhouse gas than is carbon dioxide and the one associated with livestock. Late last year, however, atmospheric methane concentrations had stabilized and what remains on the rise are the carbon dioxide emissions from cars and industry. This was a big deal among environmentalists when it was announced -- coincidentally, right around the same time the U.N. report on livestock. It's meaning is that while methane is more potent that bringing under control our rising carbon dioxide emissions remains more important.

The value of individual decision making aside, the number of people who identify themselves as environmentalists are vanishingly small. Even smaller are the number of people who identify themselves as environmentalists and who might be reasonably expected to care how they are judged by an animal rights group. Even if all of these people changed their diets immediately to cut out meat, it would still not impact the looming problem of global warming in any measurable way. But, this isn't about doing something to stop global warming. It's conversation hijacking, and an attempt to insert an agenda into an issue where it otherwise has no place being.

Fall slips in

The mercury has already slipped down to 53 degrees, and if it's like last night it'll head towards early frost range before the morning sun rises. It's like we've headed into the twilight hours of a summer evening, when everything is sort of bathed in an orange glow and you're squeezing the last few moments of sunshine out of the day. From here on out, until maybe sometime in February or March, we can't expect any reliable upward trend in temperatures.

In some respects, I welcome it. It doesn't just mean football season (...gooooo Steelers!), the joys of hot coffee, or breaking my sweaters from Ireland out from storage, but if pressed, I would have to admit that cold, still, sunny days are my favorite. The sensation of breathing makes me feel more alive than any other time of the year, and the crispness in the air sharpens the mind and offers clarity to thinking ('round here, if you're lucky, you get maybe nine or 10 a winter).

Speaking of clarity, I lift this paragraph from Kunstler:

To me, there seems to be an obvious correlation between the current failures in the financial markets -- in particular the credit sector -- and the gross failure of leadership across the board in American life. Ultimately, credit depends on legitimacy, and so does authority. They are tied together. For years, both have been immersed in fantasy rather than reality.

Much of Kunstler is lost in doomsaying. This is extraordinarily clear and lucid. All of credit is based on the fantasy that there is a free lunch. How many people have leveraged their futures on what they think they can have today? Who knows, but eventually we'll figure it out, because every bill eventually comes due and every creditor eventually gets tired of promises and excuses.

Credit has its own price, up and down the line. It helps promote the excess consumption that has caused declining environmental quality, and it is something that ultimately causes pain at the lowest end of our economic scale. One of the truest things I've ever read in a newspaper was an article that covered a speech by one of Martin Luther King Jr.'s daughters in which she said that the debt that has become a part of the American landscape is itself a form of slavery to the impoverished.

Again, clarity and lucidity. God Bless the truth speakers, because everyone else finds them annoying.

Wheatland wrap

After my second Wheatland Music Festival, I was headed down the road wondering how long the afterglow would last. The answer was right about until the next morning, after I'd had a chance to get a decent night's sleep.

I was particularly tired coming home yesterday. Early on, I'd awakened to a need to break camp and get to an interview (after being up late into the night). It'd been three days since my last shower, and I didn't manage to do that until after working a shift at a job last night after returning into town.

Because of that, the afterglow is mostly gone, which is a shame because some of it was worth sharing. Now, I'm back to being mostly crusty, mostly cynical, mostly of a thought that perhaps the entire production is headed swirling, swirling down the tubes mostly out of apathy.

A couple of notable things happened this weekend:

*--I sat down at a picnic table on Saturday in the performers' area at the Wheatland Music Festival next to a guy identified as a local guy to me by our photographer (you can see footage here).

Guy looked at me and said, "This is Ron Paul country ... now we've got politics out of the way."

Sure thing, I thought. Then he told me about the one thing I've written about that he agreed with -- something about the state's campground closure, a controversy I thought was pretty silly (why not just chain the toilets shut and let people use the campgrounds as though they were in the backwoods, where no one pays to camp anyway?).

The exchange was notable for a couple of reasons. The first is that I generally don't much care for politics. They bore me, and I usually get the sense from politicians that they're less interested in what you have to say than in how what you have to say can be turned to their advantage. I don't suppose there's anything actually wrong with that, but I'm not very good at playing all bend-y and malleable on queue.

Aside from that, the music the guy played almost made tear up, mostly because the one thing that never fails to take me by surprise is that something so incredibly simple can be so beautiful. The quartet consisted of a mandolin, two guitars, and a banjo, which also made the music keenly American in flavor, which means that despite my immigrant great grandfathers I have a deep connection to it through time and space (it has been the music of the land for a couple hundred years).

(If this blog ever found proper focus, it would be in this general direction ... re-establishing connections to the land and its human history.)

*--There is inevitably one set of music that leaves my jaw on the floor. This year, I didn't get to see much actual music because I was busy lugging around stuff associated with covering the festival, but I did catch a Saturday afternoon show by the Tarbox Ramblers that was a tribute to Leadbelly. I was actually there to meet a couple of folks for various reasons, but crossed signals meant I got to watch music instead.

*--The festival gets knocked a lot by people as a three-day party. So what?, is my typical response. What kind of mad society do we live in where it's wrong to spend three days having fun in a field?

Here's a glimpse of what kind of people go to the thing, though. The woman who directs volunteers told me on Saturday that one year, she fired a contractor who hadn't delivered on a job she hired him to do on her home. In the small town she lives in, this gets you blackballed with every contractor.

So, with winter approaching and her house still unfinished, a bunch of Wheatland regulars who do contract work showed up at her house one Saturday and finished the job free of charge (well, she fed them). Periodically over the winter, a few showed back up and put on the finishing touches. So, she was done better by a bunch of (presumably) pot smoking, beer swilling hippies than by the respectable members of her hometown, many of whom are no doubt members of the local Chamber of Commerce and who were more than happy to let someone go through a cold winter with an unfinished house.

Draw your conclusions about community spirit thusly.

*--Finally, the festival is all about personal ritual and tradition. The last couple of years, in talking to people who've been there for years and years, I've started to hear more and more about second generation Wheatland attendees. The first year of the festival was more than 30 years ago, and all of those folks are now in their 50s. Their kids are today gradually becoming more prominent parts of the festival, and a few tasks have been handed off to younger hands (the potatoes in the Happy Farmer Coop).

Someone this year handed me a book about Wheatland history. Keeping in the flavor of the place, it's a loosely produced affair, and the most interesting portion of it is following one guy's story through various festivals. You get snapshots of his life through the years, following the births of children, love and loss, and his progressing development as a musician.

This year, I added my own line to this ongoing story. It was the boy's first Wheatland, and on Sunday he told a joke. Here is video.

Off line for Wheatland

This is my fourth year of covering Wheatland. The first year, 2003, was a big photo-story package extravaganza, and in it, I quoted Patrick Holt, of Richmond, as extemporaneously saying this:

"Breakfast and a show, you just can't beat it. Damned if it ain't Wheatland."

At the time, he was eating breakfast in the little cafeteria for the Citizens for Alternatives to Chemical Contamination side of the big vendors hall. He sat down, quite unaware that I was a journalist covering the festival and blurted it out. Obviously, I jotted it down and got his name.

The band playing at the time ... it had no time. Some of the best music at Wheatland isn't found on the stages, but in the little nooks and hidey-holes around the festival grounds. In this case, it was a stage erected in the cafeteria that allowed musicians to filter in and out and play as long as they liked. None of them were professionals, they were all just novices who bought tickets to the festival and brought their instruments to spend some time playing with fellow music aficionados.

This year, if you're looking at updated coverage, you can find multimedia here and stories (written by me) here. Alas, hippies fear technology, and there is no way to directly update from the festival grounds. So, I myself will be offline until such time as I return from the festival on Sunday.

(Nothing but) Flowers

James Howard Kunstler is always an eye-opening read first thing in the week. There's nothing like starting things off with a healthy dose of doom and gloom, just something to harsh the mellow a touch (I don't care how dated that phrase is ... I like it, and I'm using it).

As depressing as it is, the message is familiar. Every time I tune into Kunstler, I wonder where I'd heard the message before. The other day, while cruising through YouTube, it struck me:



"And as things fell apart, nobody paid much attention." You wonder if Kunstler had "Naked" on endless loop while putting together "Geography of Nowhere."

The two have related, but themes of subtle difference -- Kunstler on our detachment from reality that prompts by or results in the loss of real value versus the alienation from Nature that ends an unfortunate reunion with a life among the trees. The results are the same, a great crash and painful readjustment.

So, too, is the basic lesson -- you keep a racket (and what else can you call our unprecedented freedom from worry) going by being smart, not by running up huge tabs on the credit card and ignoring the bills. Someone's going to show up and expect payment, and depending on who you're into, you're either going to run afoul a loan shark, the re-po man, or the hard cold limitations of a little thing we call reality.

Sequestration a load of hoo-hah?

Last week, a citizens group in northern Michigan asked the state's Department of Environmental Quality to write rules governing carbon dioxide emissions. The DEQ, in a reply to me, said that it was consulting with the Environmental Protection Agency on how the U.S. Supreme Court's this year affects Michigan, but added that they'll ultimately do what they think is in the state's best interests.

The proposed coal plant that sparked the letter is supposedly to sequester the carbon released under the ground, in a limestone formation riddled with caverns and chambers left behind after low-concentration acid dissolves rock.

The Norwegians are already doing carbon sequestration out in the ocean, but questions about whether it's practical or affordable on a large scale have dogged these kinds of schemes. Today, we see a glimpse into what the coal industry, which has been pushing clean coal, really thinks about it.

Myron Ebel, Director of Energy & Global Warming Policy at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, is bitching about carbon sequestration. It's expensive, it doesn't work that well, and etc. etc. However, Richard S. Courtney, Senior Material Scientist for British Coal (actually he's a PR guy) steps in and sets old Myron straight. It doesn't have to work; it just has to be, so the skeptical community can say they're for something:

The post goes on to quote the exchange from the Yahoo bulletin board.

If it's true that the coal industry doesn't think underground sequestration is workable, then it takes a position that is different than the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which says that a well managed, well sited, well designed sequestration project would successfully capture 99 percent of carbon dioxide for a long time.

Still, it's worth noting this, especially as Michigan gets its sea legs, so to speak, for alternative energy and as its existing fleet of power plants continues to age. So, far, most of the proposed plants rely in some way on carbon sequestration, like this project up in Gaylord. Locally, an energy park planned for neighboring Gratiot County is supposed to capture carbon dioxide and inject it into oil wells to force out deposits that can't be extracted under current technology.

I personally have always regarded carbon sequestration underground to be simply sweeping the problem under the carpet, even though the problem -- global warming -- is really caused by our rapid release of carbon dioxide previously locked up in petroleum (it goes from the ground to the air, and sequestration means returning it from whence it came), so I've been skeptical of carbon sequestration from the get-go. But, now, at least, I know I'm not alone -- it seems that even the folks who stand to benefit the most might have their own doubts.

Wheatland Music Festival

This weekend, on cue, I'll be wandering out Remus-way to the Wheatland Music Festival. This year, as in years past, I'll be covering it for the local paper. I hope to put together some multimedia, perhaps even for this here Web log. We'll see.

Most people see the festival as a three-day-long party. And, indeed for many of them, it is. For me, however, it's a cultural event. I have to confess to a growing bias in favor of simple music on simple instruments. In my advancing years, I find myself less impressed by loud noises and electronic gadgets and more impressed by musicianship and songs that tell real stories. I find it no coincidence that a festival dedicated to preserving traditional forms of music would, a couple of years ago, kick off with a band featuring the grandson of Pete Seeger.

Hurricanes

While the sun shines and the temperatures on this Labor Day hit 82 degrees, the eyes go southward to the Caribbean and the second Category 5 hurricane in two weeks. We also look to Chris Mooney's The Intersection for some perspective. His last four or five posts are fairly interesting.

Even if it weren't for global warming, the story of Felix is an interesting one (and not just because my lifelong personal ties to south Florida have made hurricane season an object of real interest), with the most interesting detail the weather aircraft that had to abort its mission because of the buffeting it took in the storm.

What does it mean? The ties between global warming and hurricane intensity is relatively new, but the scientific debate has settled over details like this, rather than quibbling over global warming itself. This should send a significant message to the few, remaining holdouts who are inclined -- mostly for political reasons -- to doubt global warming. You can still find these dimwits here and there, mostly digging through press releases and reading things written by other dimwits to find ammunition. So I doubt that the shift in this debate would at all convince them.