Worldwide Drought

Lori Earley - "The Drought"

We Face Worldwide Drought with No Contingency Plan
By Tom Engelhardt, The Nation
Posted on November 25, 2007

http://www.alternet.org/story/68498

Everything's Cool

Everything's Cool is a toxic comedy about the most dangerous chasm ever to emerge between scientific understanding and political action global warming. While industry-funded naysayers sing their 'swan song' of scientific doubt and deception, a group of self-appointed global warming messengers are on a life-or-death quest to help the public understand the urgency of the problem and create the 'political will' necessary to push for a new energy economy.

Everything's Cool features a renowned cast of scientists, journalists and activists including Step It Up's Bill McKibben, Pulitzer Prize winner Ross Gelbspan, The Weather Channel's Dr. Heidi Cullen and White House Whistle-Blower Rick Piltz.

Working Films has made a two-year commitment to an energetic audience and community engagement campaign for Everything's Cool, with support from the Oak Foundation and the Park Foundation.

Contact them to join Everything's Cool push for clean energy:
ec@workingfilms.orgor
910 342-9000

PRESS CONTACT:
Liz Wight liz@pfcomm.com
Raymond L. Forsythe RLForsythe@pfcomm.com

P & F Communications
180 West 80th Street - Suite 201
New York, New York 10024
(212) 861-2100 Fax: (212) 787-1332

You're invited to join Green Drinks for a screening of "Everything's Cool"The incredible story of a handful of global warming messengers speaking out in a time of disinformation.

Sunday Nov. 25th 7:00pm
Cinema Village Theater
22 East 12th Street, New York City
212-924-3633

If you can't make it to this screening please try to attend another showing. Everything's Cool runs from Nov 23rd to Nov. 29th. The following are daily showtimes. 1:30 PM 3:20 PM 5:10 PM 7:00 PM 9:10 PM

Water: H2O = Life

November 3, 2007 ~ May 26, 2007

Water: H2O = Life is organized by the American Museum of Natural History, New York, and the Science Museum of Minnesota, St. Paul, in collaboration with Great Lakes Science Center, Cleveland; The Field Museum, Chicago; Instituto Sangari, São Paulo, Brazil; National Museum of Australia, Canberra; Royal Ontario Museum, Toronto, Canada; San Diego Natural History Museum; and Singapore Science Centre with PUB Singapore.

American Museum of Natural History
Central Park West at 79th Street
New York, NY

When All Hell Breaks Loose

I wrote ELLE on Earth... still looking for a publisher... nobody has the balls to print it... So I'm happy to see other writers mention hell in their title... Cody Lundin should have called it When All ELLE Breaks Loose!

Lots of goofy cartoons by Russell Miller in this book, which is why I like it so much... survivalism with a sense of humor... run for the hills, but giggle all the way.

The technologies and the tools we need to develop to survive in cases of emergency, like rapidly rising sea levels, are the same as the ones we need to green this planet... they go hand in hand, they are not mutually exclusive as some would like us to beleive.

Cody Lundin has consulted for National Geographic which is gearing up a big green campaign. The old lady finally woke up, that this precious jewel they've been chronicling for a century needs to be cared for, not just touristed to death.

Soon, at the rate we're going, with people running right and left wondering how they're going to survive, feed themselves, find shelter, books like this one, if the knowledge it contains gets absorbed by enough young people, may end up saving your bacon.

Waterworld, the METAL cut!!!

Kevin Costner got something right! Yeah! The track is Debonaire by Dope.

Cool comments for the YouTube page:

iceburgeruk
The world is flooded because the ice caps melted. It doesn't make a lick of sense I know. lol

TwiztidWraith
Actually the ice caps melted cuz of the damn greenhouse effect or that's what the movie pretty much says.

iceburgeruk
Yeah but there isn't enough water in the ice caps to flood the entire world. Most of the continents would still be there, just a little smaller.

The Maltese Falcon "electronic" clipper ship!

(The modern computer technology used on board this sail ship would remove the need for an all nuclear Navy if we weren't such a despicable warring species... we wouldn't be war mongers if we solved our problems man to man... rather than run away from them, rather than keep them all bottled up in stupid religions created by pent up emotions, then launching armies to conquer nations! Thanks to Tom Perkins for being another billionaire spending his money on the green revolution! RemyC.)

Excerpt from:
Yachting Magazine, 60 Minutes and other sources.

It is a push-button boat in a very literal sense. "I can teach anyone to sail this boat in thirty minutes," Tom Perkins claims as he shows a diagram of the control panel with touch-sensitive displays of the 15 sails, each with three buttons: furl, unfurl and stop. "It takes only minutes for the boat to tack—just think, you don't have all those lines and rigging to run around."

"Computer estimates put her surfing at up to 30 knots off the wind and reaching 15 to 18 knots upwind, in 25 knots of true—with an apparent wind angle of 25 to 28 degrees."

Perkins designed the software himself for the computers that make sailing on the Falcon as easy as playing a computer game. A knob turns the masts, so that the wind blows into the sails at the perfect angle. To unfurl the boat's 15 sails, all 26,000 square feet of them, a job that would take about 80 deckhands an hour on a traditional sailboat, on the Falcon all it takes is five minutes, at the touch of a screen.

The DynaRig concept was developed in Germany in the 1960s, as a propulsion alternative for commercial ships in the face of a looming energy crisis. When the crisis actually materialized in the early 1970s, further refinement and some testing followed, but no DynaShips were built and the idea eventually went into the archives.

Gerard Dijkstra brought the DynaRig concept out again as one of several alternative sail plans for Perkins' consideration. Extensive experimentation and testing followed, with towing models, wind tunnel tests, larger self-propelled models and full-scale sail and rigging tests.

At a cool $100 million US the state of the art Maltese Falcon, designed by Perini Navi is the biggest privately owned sail boat ever built.

Once upon a time...

... three friends drove up the Hudson and swore to shut down Indian Point... What happened? One sold out to the Utilities... the other ran for the Hollywood hills... while this one is left holding an empty bag. Nice going guys!

Oak Ridge Implicated in Global Warming Disaster

(Poster from Health Physics Historical Instrumentation Collection)

From:
DOEwatch

By Jim Phelps

Oak Ridge discovered that global warming was controlled by the UV equations effects on the health of plankton in the ocean. These plankton determine the CO-2 levels in the atmosphere because they are the dominant CO-2 sink and they determine the cloud coverage of the planet by releases of dimethylsulfide (CH3SCH3, DMS). DMS comes from the plankton and is part of the global sulfur cycle that supplies sulfur into the food chain. When the DMS levels are impaired the cloud seeding effects are reduced and the planet heats up because of lack of reflection of heat. The DMS levels also determine the health of the entire planet due to the sulfur needs of the immune system glutathione enzyme.

1000's of nuclear powered boats into the sea!!!

There's depressing news this afternoon on Green Nuclear Butterfly, all your Congressmen and Senators have voted for an ALL NUCLEAR NAVY, including Congressman John Hall, supporter of NUKE FREE. This means that as these ship get old, sink, accidentally or in the heat of battle, the seven seas are going to become a nuclear waste dump.

You know the old saying, "I love humanity, it's people I can't stand!" or was that the other way around? Either way folks, we're royally screwed. I was a foolish, idealistic young man, who turned into an old environmentalist fool, who thought he could wake up humanity, to realize the insanity, the billions wasted on these calamities... and now this, our anti-nuclear Congressman, who Bonnie Raitt helped get elected... supports an all nuclear Navy.

Below is a taste of the dozens of new nuclear powered models the $440 Billion Dollars (plus) Pentagon budget will afford us, not counting the radioactive clean-up bill the 7th Generation will be paying.

Green is the new Black? Black as in funeral... We need Black Sabbath folks, they're the only ones, the only popular culture working class heroes who can save the day... War Pigs remember? Well, where are they? The agging hippies at MUSE-redux NUKE FREE don't have the balls to stand up to the military... Bono and his RED campaign is great, but it's not making a dent! If Bono really wants to save the planet, we needs OZZY!

Without metal... we're lost... Metal brought down the Berlin Wall... Blowback shut down the Headbanger's Ball! We need metal again to tear down this culture of death that's driving our planet to oblivion... Screw the conservatives, screw the Fundamentalist Right Wing... you want to survive? You want a blade of grass under your feet to grow old? You will have to fight for that right... because the bio-droids are in control, and we allowed them there... America has the leadership it deserves.

The Gerald R. Ford-class aircraft carriers (or Ford-class) will be the next generation supercarrier for the United States Navy. Before its redesignation as the Ford-class (CVN-78), this new class of carriers was known as the CVNX carrier program and then as the CVN-21 carrier program.

Carriers of the Ford class will incorporate many new design features including a new nuclear reactor design (the A1B reactor), stealthier features to help reduce radar profile, electromagnetic catapults, advanced arresting gear, and reduced crewing requirements.

The U.S. Navy believes that with the addition of the most modern equipment and extensive use of automation they will be able to reduce the total cost of future aircraft carriers. If the Navy can reduce the cost of constructing and maintaining an aircraft carrier, they will overcome the biggest complaint received in the U.S. Congress — that of funding.

The first hull of the CVN-21 line will be Gerald R. Ford. The CVN-21 uses the basic hull design of the preceding Nimitz-class.

Construction began on components of CVN-21 in the spring of 2007, and is planned to finish in 2015. It will be constructed at Northrop Grumman Newport News (formerly Newport News Shipbuilding), the only shipyard in the country capable of building and refueling nuclear powered aircraft carriers. It is estimated to cost at least $13 billion including the $5 billion spent on R&D and is not representative of the cost of future members of the class.

A total of three carriers have been authorized for construction, but if the Nimitz class and Enterprise were to be replaced on a one-for-one basis, eleven carriers would be required over the life of the program.

Kenny Ausubel of Bioneers on Regime Change

Excerpt from:
http://www.alternet.org/story/66725

What It Will Take to Build a Sustainable U.S.
By Kenny Ausubel, AlterNet

Google Earth will leave you google-eyed. An overrun resource base is visibly shrinking at the same time our population keeps growing. Honey, we shrunk the planet.

The bottom line, of course, is we're living beyond our means. Nearly two thirds of the life-support services provided to us by nature are in decline worldwide and the pace is quickening. We can't count on the ability of the planet's ecosystems to sustain future generations. This is new territory.

The big wheels of ecological governance are turning. Regime change is the actual technical term some ecologists use -- for instance, when the climate flips from one state to another. It can be irreversible, at least on a human time frame. These evolutionary exclamation points unleash powerful forces of destruction and creation, collapse and renewal.

We do have a compass of sorts during these cycles of creative destruction. As Charles Darwin observed, "It is not the strongest of the species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the ones most responsive to change."

Change is not linear, and sudden shifts sometimes remake the world in the blink of an eye. We know we're approaching mysterious thresholds that mark the tipping points of ecological regime change, and we may have already crossed some. The closer we get to each threshold, the less it takes to push the system over the edge, where the degree of damage will be exponentially greater. Societies slide into crisis when slammed by multiple shocks or stressors at the same time. Climate change is propelling both natural and human systems everywhere toward their tipping points.

When huge shocks transform the landscape, structures and institutions crumble, releasing tremendous amounts of bound-up energy and resources for renewal and reorganization. Novelty emerges. These times belong to those who learn, innovate and adapt. Small changes can have big influences. It's a period of creative ferment, freedom and transformation.

Ecological regime change means a radical realignment of the human enterprise with nature's governance. We stand at the threshold of a singular opportunity in the human experiment: to re-imagine how to live on Earth in a good way that lasts.

The name of the game is resilience. It means the capacity of both human and ecological systems to absorb disturbance and still retain their basic function and structure. Resilience does not mean just bouncing back to business-as-usual. It means assuring the very ability to get back. But if regime change happens, resilience means having sufficient capacity to transform to meet the new management.

A network of ecologists and social scientists called the Resilience Alliance outlined some of the rules of the road in their book "Resilience Thinking." The first principle of resilience thinking is systems thinking: It's all connected, from the web of life to human systems. "You can only solve the whole problem," says Huey Johnson of the Resource Renewal Institute.

Manage environmental and human systems as one system. Taking care of nature means taking care of people, and taking care of people means taking care of nature. Look for systemic solutions that address multiple problems at once. Watch for seeds of new solutions that emerge with changing conditions.

Resilience thinking means abandoning command-and-control approaches. We're not remotely in control of the big wheels of ecological governance or complex human systems. Greater decentralization can provide backup against the inevitable failure of centralized command-and-control structures. Think decentralized power grids, more localized food systems, and the Internet. Always have a backup. Redundancies are good failsafe mechanisms, not the waste portrayed by industrial efficiency-think.

To read full article go to:
http://www.alternet.org/story/66725

Thousands Await Rescue in Mexico Floods

VILLAHERMOSA, Mexico - Thousands of people clung to rooftops, huddled inside waterlogged homes or hunkered down in shelters Thursday in an attempt to survive the worst flooding the low-lying Gulf state of Tabasco has seen in 50 years.

A week of heavy rains caused rivers to overflow, leaving at least 70 percent of the state - and 80 percent of the capital - under water. At least one death was reported. Nearly all services, including drinking water and public transportation, were shut down in Villahermosa.

Of the estimated 700,000 people whose homes were flooded, damaged or cut off, 300,000 still had not been rescued Thursday, Tabasco Gov. Andres Granier said. Police, soldiers and military workers were still trying to reach them.

AP ~ Photos

Iceberg Light Art by Gerry Hofstetter

(Excerpted from Tripping The Light Fantastic)

The 44-year-old illusionist from Zurich is a master of transformation. After 12 years working his way up through the ranks of an investment bank, he felt in need of a career change and left to become a helicopter pilot.

Hofstetter loves the idea of being able to reinvent well-known monuments, buildings and landscapes in people's minds, using his huge 6,000-watt projectors and slides to transform them into temporary art sculptures.

In 2003 he travelled to Antarctica as part of the United Nations International Year of Freshwater to throw light on the issue of icebergs and global warming. His images of polar bears on melting ice caps subsequently circled the globe.

"My major expedition next year is to Greenland to project some penguins in a place with the highest number of collapsing icebergs in the world."

Gerry Hofstetter, Lichtkünstler
c/o Hofstetter Marketing,
Schwäntenmos 9
8126 Zumikon-Switzerland
Tel +41 (0)44 918 72 27
Fax +41 (0)44 918 72 28
g.hofstetter@hofstetter-marketing.com
www.hofstetter-marketing.com

Read about Gerry's nuclear power plant projections on Green Nuclear Butterly.