More Signs of Change

Elizabeth Kolbert's Talk of the Town piece in the July 23rd New Yorker really woke me up. She is responding in" The Big Heat" to the record breaking droughts, floods, wildfires and thunderstorms which scientists say global warming looks like on a personal and national level.  Kolbert states, to my utter amazement, that the green house gases we are living with this summer were created decades ago. Today's emissions will not be felt until the summer of 2048.  Her words speak to our experiencing its obvious effects and the insanity of not doing anything about it.

In a NY Times op-ed piece on July 23rd Michael Webber writes about the worst drought in 60 years here in the US, not only affecting the availability of water to drink and higher food prices (the highest price of corn ever), but affecting our power plants which are cooled by water, and the oil and gas fields which use millions of gallons of water to keep production up in the aging power plants, not to mention all the water that is used in the fracking process.  In fact we take up more water to feed our power grid than we use in agriculture. Water shortages easily become energy crises. Adding to this the complete unknown factor of the Sun and its coronal mass ejections affecting our power grids and you have some serious climate change staring us in the face.  


Beth Gardiner in her piece" We're All Climate-Change Idiots" in the July 22nd NY Times Sunday Review, makes the point that our brains are not wired to be able to cope easily with the more abstract global issues of climate change, but rather work more easily solving the practical day-to-day matters.  There are scientists studying the behavioral and mental barriers to taking the actions to combat climate change.  These behavioral scientists are working to improve the communication in how to frame the issues that need to be solved.


In the same Sunday Review, David Leonhardt says "There's Still Hope for the Planet". Even as we in the US are experiencing the warmest year on record, and since 1998 have had the 13 warmest years worldwide since the recording began taking in 1880- with no conversation about it even among the presidential candidates;  Leonhardt says there are things happening behind the scenes.  


The governments of Europe, China and the US are spending hundreds of billions of dollars on clean energy research.  The price of solar and wind energy has fallen.  Natural gas production (far less carbon producing than oil) has risen 25% with prices falling by 80%. When you recall that it was Washington-financed research that made semiconductors, radar, the Internet, the radio, the jet engine and many medical advances such as penicillin possible, then hopefully we can conceive of "some kind of disruptive technology that takes off on it own, the way the Internet and the fax took off."


Furthering on I read a piece in Aug/Sept Mountain Astrologer magazine by Ray Grasse speaking to the scientific breakthroughs that occurred in the 60's which time frame we are partially cycling back to with the opening 90 degree square of Uranus and Pluto (1st of 7 exact squares this past June 24th).  These 2 planets not only coincide with huge social, cultural and political changes in power, (true in the 60's too), but the real possibility of some breakthrough technological and scientific inventions.  (We have just had the announcement of the confirmation of the discovery of the "God particle" or Higgs Boson particle)


The development of the String Theory, Chaos Theory, Big Bang Cosomology, Mandelbrot's work on fractals, Bell's Theorem (the idea of underlying interconnectedness of everything), the discovery of quasars, the coining of the term "back hole", Gaia hypothesis, Rachael Carson's Silent Spring, major advances in lasar and computer technology and the American and Russian space programs climaxing with the Apollo 11 Moon landing in 1969, are all from the 60's period, the last time Uranus and Pluto were in a close relationship.   (For further reading and the scientific advances of previous Uranus/ Pluto cycles see Richard Tarnas's" Cosmos and Psyche").


Friday's NY Times had a front page piece announcing scientific evidence, for the first time, linking climate change with ozone layer loss. The strong summer storms are pumping water high into the atmosphere posing a threat to the protective ozone layer over populated areas.  Ozone loss and climate change are coinciding says the Harvard scientists, who published their findings in the journal Science.  


We can only hope that our seeing the effects of the extreme weather patterns on all life on the planet, behavioral scientists coming up with better ways to communicate the problem, successful breakthroughs in governmental clean energy research and Uranus and Pluto with their close relationship will converge to bring an end to our use of fossil fuels and our turning towards a more sustainable energy source in the next few years.