Hours of drama without a TV

Thanks to Kurt's Weblog for the image.

We don't have a television, we get far more done without it and they are an unnecessary expense. Besides we can find most anything we want to watch online on the rare occasion that we feel it necessary. Even without a TV we still get drama. You may recall from a recent post that we have a cardinal nest just off our front porch. We have been carefully avoiding disturbing the little family by not using the nearby door and never turning on the tap beneath it.

Episode 1 of "The Cardinals" brought to you by Mother Nature Enterprises. "Mother Nature, since day one, always there when you need her."
  I've dragged another hosepipe around the house from a different tap in order to irrigate as needed and yesterday afternoon I was watering our seedlings when I noticed the male and female cardinals frantically dashing back and forth from the ground beneath the nest to a nearby maple tree. I slowly approached and when about 10 feet away saw the baby on the ground. He saw me at the same time and took off lickitysplit towards the parents who were calling from the maple tree. Running like a little drunken chicken and flapping his (we've decided it must be a little boy for being so naughty as to fall out of the nest) proto-wings and chirping all the while. I immediately walked the other direction in order to minimize stress in an already frantic family crisis and went to fetch Jacqui, but she was deep into her afternoon nap. I settled onto the porch to watch the drama unfold.

Episode 2 - of the "The Cardinals" brought to you by Mother Nature Enterprises, commercial free from the same vantage point, 30 minutes later. "Mother Nature, clean, reliable, and comforting"
 I watched from the porch for abit and it was evident that the parents were trying to entice the youngster out of the open into some cover. I eventually spotted the little creature below the maple and watched as he made his way along the row of holly bushes toward the magnolia tree. He rested up in the last holly bush for a while before jumping down and, following his parents lead, scurried into the magnolia leaf litter. Here he stayed, the parents spent the next hour aggressively chasing off blue jays twice their size with the assistance of another male cardinal, last years chick perhaps, and stopping to catch their breath on the power lines above. I fancied them saying ;

Mum "Your son is driving me around the bend!"
Dad "OH, now he's my son is he, who taught him that he could go anywhere in life, be anything he wanted to be?"
Mum "Well I certainly didn't encourage him to stand on the edge of the nest and show off."
Dad "Well....well....be that as it may, what are we gonna do now? It'll be dark soon and that cat will be prowling round and that'll be the end of your little 'be all you can be' toddler."
Mum "While you are sitting here yakking that damn Jay is back"
Dad "I'm on it"

Jacqui arose and I left her in charge of keeping track of their actions while I showered and made a cuppa.

Episode 3 -"The Cardinals"  brought to you by Mother Nature Enterprises, "Mother Nature, yuck what's all this black stuff on my dress!"
We began to worry that the little chap wouldn't make it through the night on the ground and considered putting him back in his nest. Consulting with a neighbor, who grabbed a net, we decided to capture the chick and return it home. As I walked under the magnolia, Jacq and the neighbor poised to catch the little blighter if he ran towards the road, I heard him chirp and located him on a very low branch.

The concluding episode of "The Cardinals" brought to you by Mother Nature Enterprises, will return in a moment, right after your local news and weather. "Mother Nature, How much longer will she be there for you?"

The noise from the road a few blocks away is noticeable now as rush hour is getting under way, the tea has gone cold in the mug, the ambient temperature is about 78ºF, no rain is expected for the next 12 hours. We now return you to the concluding episode of "The Cardinals" brought to you by Mother Nature Enterprises with no commercial interruptions.


Episode 4 - "The Cardinals" brought to you by Mother Nature Enterprises. "Mother Nature, too busy trying to survive to provide for you right now."
He must have been exhausted, junior just sat there looking at me as I gently scooped him up. We walked him across the yard, after a brief gaze at his bug eyed naughty little self, and placed him back on the nest. The parents were still looking around in the magnolia, then he chirped. Mum immediately returned to the nest to check out who was chirping from her nest. Dad kept looking in the magnolia. We were worried that they would reject him as he must now smell of me. Mum checked him out and eventually decided he wasn't an imposter, Dad kept looking in the  magnolia. Mum started feeding the little one, Dad kept looking in the magnolia. Eventually Dad decided junior really wasn't there any longer and took Mum's lead, the happy family reunited.

So after about 4 hours of family drama, no cable bill required, we toddled off to bed.

Is Peak Oil going mainstream?

This morning as the alarm switched the radio on I was surprised to hear on the BBC that a new report from the UK Energy Research Centre found a signifcant risk from Global Peak Oil and questioning why governments never talk about it. Tuning my television to BBC World I found mention of the report again, if only on the scrolling banner at the bottom of the screen. "This is encouraging" I thought.

After finally drinking my morning cuppa and checking on the days weather forecast, while wading through reams of twaddle on US news channels with no mention of the report or Peak Oil, I sat down to my computer and what do I see? A report over at Climate Progress about the statements from Deutsche Bank that they expect oil to hit $175/bbl by 2016 and the effects resulting from such a price. In his analysis Joe Romm also mentions a statement from Merrill Lynch,

"Steep falls in oil production means the world now needed to replace an amount of oil output equivalent to Saudi Arabia’s production every two years, Merrill Lynch said in a research report."

As the chart above shows this ain't gonna happen!

What interests me the most about this Peak Oil focused start to my day is that it is suddenly so visible, on some reputable mainstream media. Will it make a difference? Is Peak Oil going mainstream? Probably Not. Here's the closing statement for the BBC website about the UK report,

"This report does not contain new research, but is a review of data already available.

But the authors say the risk presented by global oil depletion deserves much more serious attention by the research and policy communities.

"Much existing research focuses upon the economic and political threats to oil supply security and fails to either assess or to effectively integrate the risks presented by physical depletion," they argue.

"This has meant that the probability and consequences of different outcomes has not been adequately assessed."

Despite the evidence, the report notes with some surprise that the UK government rarely mentions the issue in official publications."

Monsanto and Fox News

Progress in Washington on Climate Change

The mainstream US media may be refusing to cover climate change science but that hasn't stopped the Obama administration from making real progress to address the problems presented by our carbon intensive lifestyles. Reversing 8 years of criminal neglect as the EPA worked for the polluters rather than the environment under the Bush administration, as reported by the Washington Post;

"The Environmental Protection Agency’s new leadership, in a step toward confronting global warming, submitted a finding that will force the White House to decide whether to limit greenhouse gas emissions under the nearly 40-year-old Clean Air Act.

Under that law, EPA’s conclusion — that such emissions are pollutants that endanger the public’s health and welfare — could trigger a broad regulatory process affecting much of the U.S. economy as well as the nation’s future environmental trajectory. The agency’s finding, which was sent to the White House Office of Management and Budget without fanfare on Friday, also reversed one of the Bush administration’s landmark decisions on climate change, and it indicated anew that President Obama’s appointees will push to address the issue of warming despite the potential political costs."

It will be interesting to see if the US media covers the signing of the endangerment finding on April 16th.

read more at Climate Progress.

The dangers of the blinkered US media

I've requested on several occasions recently that readers of this blog let me know if they had seen reporting of various environmental or climate change stories on the mainstream media. Of course, with recent news about Anna Nicole Smith to cover, the major purveyors of news in the US just didn't have time to cover threats to human civilization as we know it!

Joe Romm has written an interesting piece about it over on Climate Progress.
Here is an excerpt;

"Energy Daily (subs. req’d) notes of the U.S. media non-coverage of Copenhagen:

Ironically–given the Gallup finding that two in five Americans think the press is exaggerating climate change concerns–only a few of the major U.S. news outlets published accounts of the Copenhagen gathering, which received heavy coverage by news outlets in Europe and Asia.

Great point — though “ironically” isn’t the right word. There is nothing ironic about this. It is cause and effect. The right word is “tragically. ...

West Coast Climate Equity notes:

Last time mean global temperatures reached 2 to 3 degrees Celsius above present levels, in the mid-Pliocene (3 million years ago), an event associated with CO2 levels of about 400 parts per million, polar regions were heated by near-8 degrees C and sea levels have risen by 25+/-12 meters relative to the present. This represents near-total melting of Greenland and west Antarctica ice sheets (Robinson et al., 2008: “Pliocene role in assessing future climate impacts” (http://pubs.giss.nasa.gov/ abstracts/ 2008/ Robinson_etal.html).

A rise of mean global temperatures above 4 or 5 degrees Celsius would shift the atmosphere to pre-glacial/interglacial conditions, which dominated the Earth from about 34 million years ago (end-Eocene) (Zachos et al., 2008) http://www.nature.com/ nature/ journal/ v451/ n7176/ full/ nature06588.html

That means ultimate sea level rise of 250 feet, with the best current projection being 5 feet by 2100 (see “Startling new sea level rise research: “Most likely” 0.8 to 2.0 meters by 2100“), rising thereafter 10 to 20 inches a decade (or more) for centuries. Good luck adapting to that, next 50 generations."