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Thoughts and prayers for the people of Asheville, North Carolina and  Valencia, Spain due to severe flooding. Gavin Schmidt, Director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) in New York, was interviewed by Elizabeth Kolbert October 10, 2024, in Yale Environment 360, “What’s Causing the Recent Spike in Global Temperatures?”: “We started to…

Ian James’ September 19, 2024 Los Angeles Times article “‘It’s really sad’: River dries up abruptly in Bakersfield, leaving thousands of dead fish” noted Kern River was diverted for crops and storage by the City of Bakersfield, California resulting in “more than 3,000 dead fish.” James added, “California wildlife officials are now investigating whether the…

Johan Rockström said in an Aug 15, 2024 YouTube with 90,789 views in the first day, “The Tipping Points of Climate Change — and Where We Stand | Johan Rockström | TED,” “We are seriously running out of time [before exceeding our ‘remaining carbon budget’ that will trigger more catastrophic effects]. [ . . .…

[This essay first appeared in Dark Mountain: Issue 5, and is used with the author’s permission.] I remember the rocket. The house where I lived in 1972 was about nine line-of-sight miles from Cape Canaveral. On December 7th of that year, in the heart of the night, my family gathered with friends and neighbours to…

Max Bearak’s August 2, 2024 New York Times‘ article with photographs by Nanna Heitmann “Inside the Petrostate [Azerbaijan] Hosting This Year’s Global Climate Negotiations [COP29]” was informative, and many of the 123 comments were interesting, funny, or revealing, but nowhere did I see the main issue now which is “Rate of Change. Rate of Change.…

A professor at one of the colleges where I taught mistook her CD ROM Drive for a cup holder, unaware of the common joke at the time. Her ridiculous move then is like watching global leaders now respond to climate reality. The June 19, 2024 YouTube (published July 31, 2024) “Exceeding Earth’s Safe Limits with…

When I taught in San Diego 23 years, I surfed with my students. I recall an evening a bold one stole my wave, and I said, “If you take my wave again, you will lose 50 points on your next essay!” It worked. It was about using creative nonviolence. Now, thinking how relatively few greedy…

Recently, climate writer Tad DeLay, in the CGTN YouTube “The Heat: Extreme Weather,” said at 13:29 on the timeline, “Carbon dioxide is the temperature knob, and it is also the mass extinction knob. And we need to ask ourselves why we are not able to stop the progress of this storm, and in my book…

Recently, I saw a man with a bright yellow raincoat fishing a clear river. On rivers where I regularly catch low-water steelhead trout, he could go daily for 50 years, and never hook one. The reason is that bright yellow raincoat tells fish, “BEWARE! I AM HERE TO EAT YOU!” If the angler is not…

I know a guy who put more care into choosing a fly rod than a wife. For others, skiing or snowboarding are the main attractions in this world. If collective humanity fails to rise up nonviolently against relatively few greedy and/or stubborn men destroying so much with fossil fuels, then fly fishing, skiing, snowboarding and…