Pic Of The Moment: North-Eastern U.S. Hunkers Down For Historic Winter Storm

[wial]

34. I appreciate your taking the time to post those links

but here's a question:

consider a lily pond that fills with lilies after 30 days, and every day the lilies double in number.

On what day is the pond half full of lilies?

The 29th day.

Don't get me wrong, personally I'm very hopeful with the spread of women's rights and access to contraception E.O. Wilson is right to predict the human population will peak and start to drop again after reaching 9 billion or so, even without other factors in play. The population explosion has always been a symptom of industrialization, and there just aren't that many countries left to industrialize.

Yes, also, peak oil or peak-oil-affordable-for-agriculture could cause a famine too, although with the rape of Canada that seems to have been postponed.

What I'm saying is what happens when the jet stream stops moving, the rains don't stop or never come, or it just totally reorganizes itself in a given year, as models suggest might occur? Don't we at least need to try to be ready to minimize the damage?

What if the northern hemisphere just turns into a giant one way wind storm? (OK that was a bit shrill, even for me, because I haven't actually seen the predictions on what happens *after* the atmospheric bands dissolve. Hopefully we never have to find out).

I'm also very hopeful if we can just get through this, we could be at the dawn of a golden solar age -- solar grid parity is already upon us in many sectors and places, and only the sluggish ignorance of the American body politic has prevented us from preparing for the event as Germany so brilliantly has. When that comes, and energy production becomes much more decentralized, that will break the death grip of the Kochs and their ilk on our government and cultural discourse. We will see massive positive changes at every level, hopefully including a final recognition energy was never the solution to begin with, nor gluttonous consumption of material goods, and without the centralized advertising culture telling us how to behave we'll start to act a bit like humans again, at long last.

But we can't get there unless we make sure we have oxygen to breathe first, is all I'm saying.

Well, let's see what happens to the sea ice the next few years (new PIOMAS ice volume numbers are out today by the way), and meanwhile, I'll keep trying to find ways to help save this poor old planet, whatever anyone else thinks.